It's at times like this that I really miss not having Richard Feynman around to explain it to the rest of us.
I miss his clarity also.
Last night I read an interview of Feynman in the book “Superstrings - A theory of everything” by P. C. W. Davies. In regard to his view on strings being a potential theory of everything, he said “I think all this superstring stuff is crazy and is in the wrong direction. I don’t like that [superstring advocates] are not calculating anything....I don’t like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment [they perform], they cook up an explanation - a fix-up to say ‘Well, it still might be true.’ “
Feynman explained complex topics in a decipherable manner, he was blunt with the truth as he saw it, and he was not the least bit reluctant to say he didn’t know the answer to a physics problem.
If any of you like Feynman (and I know a lot of Freepers do), I recommend, for fun not physics, the book “Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman.”