Slate's Paul Boutin limns physicist Lawrence Krauss' complaints about string theory:
Unlike relativity and quantum mechanics, it can't be tested.... When I asked physicists like Nobel Prize-winner Frank Wilczek and string theory superstar Edward Witten for ideas about how to prove string theory, they typically began with scenarios like, "Let's say we had a particle accelerator the size of the Milky Way …" []
The string theorists blithely create mathematical models positing that the universe we observe is just one of an infinite number of possible universes that coexist in dimensions we can't perceive. And there's no way to prove them wrong in our lifetime. That's not a Theory of Everything, it's a Theory of Anything....
Or as Wolfgang Pauli once said (perhaps making a slightly different point), "That's not right; that's not even wrong."
In any case, interesting times for science. On the one hand, and if the string theorists are to be believed, the central ideas of physics have trudged so far ahead of the data that the new physics legitimately could be called metaphysics (not that there's anything wrong with that...), at least in that disputes turn more and more on "a priori" (given the background data, i.e.) arguments rather than new empirical discoveries.1 On the other hand, mathematics--the paradigm of a priori "science"--waxes "experimental" (using computer routines to generate data that probalize or deprobabilize this or that conjecture). Weird, wild, wacky stuff.
1 On this score I'm not sure Krauss and the string skeptics identify a serious problem for speculative cosmology: The "discovery" of new arguments even during what you might call the empirical era has been at least as important as the discovery of new data. At all events, the background data at this point constrain theory significantly, and if a new theory can significantly unify and explain heretofore disparate theories, well, that ain't chopped liver.
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