Is string theory a failing model? | Eric Weinstein and Brian Greene go head to head again

foreign in fact if you run through the inventory of the most successful ideas of the last 50 years in physics almost all of them have a natural home within String Theory what Brian talks about is a string theory sort of self-invalidated in the early 2000s people will continue to work on any given subject so long as it continues to bear fruit and give interesting results that

Inspire yet other avenues of research and that's what's happened in string theory and that's why people have continued to work on it and when the theory and the ideas begin to dry up and they're no longer bearing fruit then individuals will move on and certainly some string theorists of the past have moved on to other ideas because they lost interest in this or that Avenue of

research the fact is is that string theorists will always tell you that if the better Theory came along that they would immediately move to it but when you ask them about whether they've looked at their colleagues theories if I ask Brian for example how in depth have you looked at Peter White's assertion that you should start from the Oddity of su3 go back to su4 and

look at a twister Theory which includes Wick rotation at a fundamental level I don't think Peter White's theory is correct but at least I've looked at it very often the string theorists will tell you that they have no time so what you start to understand is is that there is a very easy set of behaviors in in an Equanimity that the string theorists appear to have

that is not realized except in the breach so the problem that we usually confront is is that this Theory plays by sociological and and economically different rules um if you say for example that there's no experimental test of string theory yet many string theorists told us exactly where we would find relatively low energy supersymmetry at the LHC which failed to materialize and so you can play

infinitely the the energy the energy dog ate my energy homework the particles are never found if you push string theorists hard enough they will say well it's actually not a theory but a framework when I pushed Joe polczynski of blessed memory on this point he said Eric you treat String Theory as it's a as if it was a theory when I think we're just running subroutines

for Ed being Edwinton it's a very strange game and not at all how science is played so I believe that Brian is making a better Point than Roger no offense but I believe that the point is actually that you're playing keep away according to rules that always favor String Theory it's like why you don't win in Vegas it's because the house is always taking it's it's

Vig and you can't possibly win and so the problem here is that what sounds reasonable is reasonable at the first level but then you know I would ask Brian um you know what do you think about my explanation for why there are three generations of flavor chiroparticles I doubt you probably even know that I have an explanation and it might be wrong I'm not afraid of

being wrong but my feeling is I've studied your work I've studied your books your PBS specials and there is no reciprocal interest because this community secretly thinks that it is smarter than the other communities and in general this is in fact true I'm not arguing it what I am claiming is that that level of intelligence has been misspent and it has been directed by a tiny

number of individuals string theory is not in some sense dominant at the moment but the the pig went through the pythons in the 80s there were a huge uh number of jobs many of us were critical at the time I moved into mathematics to avoid this thing and in fact what happened is that that Pig is working its way through the python as an affirmative action

program for Boomers and Silent generation academicians who are exceedingly good at mathematics but seemingly not so good at physics and I do of course remember the period you're referring to Eric back in the 80s and I do feel bad that some wonderful mathematicians and physicists who were not working on string theory found it difficult to get jobs and to get post-docs I remember talking to Peter

white back in the 80s I gave a talk at Stony Brook and he was working on some very interesting stuff but the jobs weren't materializing in a way that perhaps he deserved and it wasn't happening and the problem is it's a finite resource I wish we would just take half of the budget from the defense departments around the world and turn those into academic jobs for

physicists mathematicians poets literature specialist language but I mean that's really where the culprit is a main brain but the problem is is that the the invective that was leveled from your community towards the other communities is the part that's ignored so that's the part Eric that that I'm I was there and again I wasn't in every room so I I certainly and can't claim to say

that that didn't happen if you were the recipient of that kind of invective I will apologize on on the part of the community because that's never anything always been you've always been the most decent of string theorists but no as you can see I have no problem agreeing with Brian when he's right and he's often right the problem is is that Brian is not representative of

a community that refers to others as morons as idiots as wasting their time as uh not really physicists etc etc ask any postdoc who passed through Stanford during its period of Maximum Euphoria for string theory people come out very broken and angry I remember David Kaplan giving an interview David E Kaplan because there are two of them where he said it took him a long time

to realize that he wasn't an idiot because he couldn't understand what was being done and was being told that he was somehow mentally deficient there was a real problem there continues to be a real problem Michio Kaku just said put up or shut up I'm not aware of Michio kako putting up much of anything I've put something up and the guy will not be quiet I

mean it's some level this is an extremely aggressive belligerent community and unfortunately we have the most kind and decent exponent of it so I'm I welcome any discussion with Brian Greene because it's fantastic obviously a large community of thousand researchers is going to have a big bell curve of those who are able to play well with others and those who don't uh I've been called by

some people in the field at various times it's an unpleasant thing to have happen and it isn't the way people should talk to each other so I'm glad that we totally agree on that getting back to sort of the um the physics side of things um I wish and and you know I'm gonna Echo have already made reference to but I'm saying it in a sincere

way I truly wish I had enough time to investigate the various ideas and theories that are mailed to me sent to me put in front of me and the problem is very hard to carve out the time to investigate Theory after Theory after Theory especially when I don't even have time to keep up with the rapid pace of development within String Theory proper itself so it's

not it's not let me just let me just finish one point it's really not that I have no interest in other ideas and other approaches and I would say that that's pretty much true of many of my colleagues as well the the problem is it takes so much effort and time to even understand the language sometimes in which other theories are described or to go through

manuscripts of dozens 50 60 pages of calculations it could take weeks and months to really get to the bottom of it and that's really what the problem is so what I would say is by no means am I going to Echo Michio kako's put up or shut up because that's as you said that's not sort of my frame but if another theory came along and did

say what String Theory did for understanding of general relativity and quantum mechanics which is where the interest came from it solved a problem that that nobody had any idea how to solve before and it did it in a in an understandable and manifest way that you didn't have to work very hard to understand the progress and you could jump in at the ground floor and run

with it if there's a way even of your theory being put forward in a way that says here's the problem that I've solved here's the way it's consistent with everything that's come before here's the advance it's going to give and all you need to do is understand these three ideas yeah I would be open to learning about it so absolutely okay so first of all appreciate

it uh I appreciate the sentiment uh what you're saying is that string theory solves a problem interior to quantum gravity which really originates around 1952-53 with Bryce DeWitt my feeling about this is if space-time is in fact doomed as is fashionable to say it's not clear that the way of harmonizing gravity and the standard model is to force gravity into submission into a Quantum regime it

may be that in a not in a post space-time construct harmonizing gravity rather than quantizing it is important and what happens with the string theorists is that they very frequently say we've come closer to a quantum theory of gravity when you get to that point please give us a ring and some of us are saying you actually haven't made the case for quantum gravity which has

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