[colechristensen]

This line of talk is way overplayed. Like people who have an enthusiast amount of knowledge follow a few people who have professional knowledge who are just unreasonably fixated on what other physicists pursue.

Doubt and questioning are a part of science but this "religion" meme about string theory et al is silly. If you're really upset that somebody is pursuing something is a blind alley, go ahead and do some physics that shows results, otherwise I really wish people would tone the unhelpful criticisms down.

[senttoschool]

I agree. If every physicist quit string theory because we haven’t thought of a way to test it, like what @ravenstein might want, then that would be a sad day.

I don’t see the problem with physicists working on or even promoting string theory.

[kagakuninja]

I am not a physicist, but what I have read from critics (badly paraphrased):

During the hype phase of string theory, every major university wanted to get in on the game, and devoted large amounts of funding towards hiring researchers with a background in string theory. If you weren't one of those people, you were at a severe disadvantage, and might not get hired at all.

String theory hovered up tons of cash in university budgets, and majorly fucked over a lot of careers. The result of all this money has been no actual scientifically proven results despite decades of research.

[consilient]

> devoted large amounts of funding towards hiring researchers with a background in string theory. If you weren't one of those people, you were at a severe disadvantage, and might not get hired at all.

> String theory hovered up tons of cash in university budgets, and majorly fucked over a lot of careers.

This is pretty misleading. An argument could be made - though I'm not necessarily endorsing it - that string theory has crowded out other quantum gravity research programs in the last few decades. But quantum gravity is a small and poorly funded subfield: we're talking about no more than a few hundred people total in the US, fighting over one medium-sized experiment worth of grant money. None of it makes any difference to the overwhelming majority of physicists.

[senttoschool]

If there was a more promising theory to investigate in, we would have done that, right?

Even today, we don't really have anything much better than string theory.

[ravenstine]

No one is saying that string theory shouldn't be investigated.

[senttoschool]

Apologies. It was unclear what your desired goal from your original post.