Category Archives: This Week’s Hype

The Economist today reports that New theories and experiments should shine light on string theory. This is more of the promotional campaign for Cumrun Vafa’s “dark dimension”. We’re told that a torsion balance experiment in Austria will “according to Dr. … Continue reading →

The usual string theory hype machine in action: to celebrate a PRL publication, a university press office puts out a press release full of hype with a highly misleading title (“string theory is uniquely derived from basic assumptions about the … Continue reading →

Natalie Wolchover at Quanta has an article about a campaign by string theorists to argue that we have to accept string theory as our theory of fundamental physics even though there is no evidence for it because it is “unique”, … Continue reading →

The string theory hype machine will never die. This week we have Press releases from RPI and Northeastern tell us Scientists Use String Theory to Crack the Code of Natural Networks and How String Theory Helped Solve a Mystery of … Continue reading →

Brian Greene has a new video out today, of himself talking to Edward Witten, mainly about string theory. Pretty much the usual decades-old hype, with nothing even slightly different than what a similar conversation would have consisted of 20 years … Continue reading →

Gayoung Lee at Gizmodo today has responses to the question Whatever Happened to String Theory?. Carlo Rovelli and I give the obvious and accurate answer that it’s a failed idea, explaining why. The other answers exhibit the sad state of … Continue reading →

Absurd press releases from major universities hyping the idea that “string theorists have finally found a way to test string theory” have been a feature of theoretical physics for decades now. This nonsense is never going to stop. Latest example … Continue reading →

No. If you want to hear Cumrun Vafa’s latest “predictions of string theory”, there’s a podcast at Quanta magazine you could listen to. Over the years, Vafa has promoted various proposals for “predictions” of string theory. For instance, back in … Continue reading →