[Southack]

"They all laughed 20 years ago. It was then that a physicist named John Schwarz jumped up on the stage during a cabaret at the physics center here and began babbling about having discovered a theory that could explain everything."

We're still laughing; here's why:

String Theory attempts to imagine a universe in which *both* Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity are valid.

The problem with such a fantasy, however, is that QM and GR are mututally exclusive theories. They fundamentally contradict each other on rather large areas such as universal Gravity, etc.

What has happened is that we have two theories, QM and GR, that our modern, effeminate, politically correct scientists can't choose between. One theory is correct, the other is not.

But no one wants to say that one of those theories is wrong.

So rather than make the hard choice, today's limp-wristed researchers are wasting enormous amounts of time and money pursuing a String Theory that somehow makes both QM and GR valid.

...And that's why we're laughing. Unifying GR with QM is not feasible. The two theories contradict each other. Yet on go the Strong Theory adherents, unwilling to say that one King (either GR or QM) has no clothes...even if it means publishing ridiculous nonsense about String Theories.

[jmc813]

Do you know of any web sites out there that presents string theroy in laymans' terms?

[snarks_when_bored]

Physicists who work at the fundamental level fully understand that General Relativity breaks down at the Planck scale and also that Quantum Field Theory isn't feeling so good at that scale, either. That's why they're searching for an over-arching theory that transcends (and subsumes) both GR and QFT. Superstring Theory, it was hoped, was such a theory. That hasn't proved to be the case...yet.