Is String Theory Even Wrong?
by Peter Woit
American Scientist
March-April 2002
...The reigning Standard Model of particle physics, which string theory attempts to encompass, involves at its core certain geometrical concepts, namely the Dirac operator and gauge fields, which are among the deepest and most powerful ideas in modern mathematics. In string theory, the Dirac operator and gauge fields are not fundamental: They are artifacts of taking a low-energy limit. String theorists ask mathematicians to believe in the existence of some wonderful new sort of geometry that will eventually provide an explanation for M-theory. But without a serious proposal for the underlying new geometry, this argument is unconvincing.
The experimental situation is similarly bleak. It is best described by Wolfgang Pauli’s famous phrase, “It’s not even wrong.” String theory not only makes no predictions about physical phenomena at experimentally accessible energies, it makes no precise predictions whatsoever.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/1686282/posts?page=4#4
https://www.google.com/search?q=not+even+wrong+peter+woit
String theory is the physics analogy to Climate Change.
No physicist is permitted to mock string theory! It must be accepted without question, even though there is zero experimental evidence for it. I don’t know if it’s true now, but for a time anyway only string theory physicists were offered tenure at major universities.
I taught freshman college physics for awhile. One of my colleagues nicknamed me “the experimentalist”. That was not meant as a compliment.
You can’t even experimentally verify the basic requirement for string theory to be possible: the existence of extra dimensions.
Einstein could get away with treating time as a “4th dimension”, since he was just representing it that way mathematically, not proposing that it actually was an additional spatial dimension. And he only got away with that because we can experience time, even if we have trouble explaining it, and because the math worked.
String theory can possibly claim their math works, but since we have no experience of 5th, 6th, 7th, etc, dimensions, and there is no way to verify them, it’s a dead end. At least until we mutate and develop organs that can “see” those dimensions.