The string 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 the Brain’s Architecture. Scientific American asks Does String Theory Explain the Wiring of the Brain?. This is all about this paper (arXiv version). Sabine Hossenfelder likes this.
- Quanta today tells us that String Theory Can Now Describe a Universe That Has Dark Energy. This is about yet another of the sort of “string vacua” that people have been constructing for decades and that look nothing like the real world. This latest one is five-dimensional, but we’re told “the work is expected to launch a new era in matching the mathematical elegance of string theory to the actual world we live in.” The paper in question is here.
I’ve been documenting this sort of ridiculous hype for more than twenty years now. It has done a huge amount of damage to the public understanding of science and to the credibility of scientists. It also hasn’t helped the perception of string theory by other physicists, with string theorists now virtually unemployable unless they can figure out how to rebrand as machine learning experts. String theorist Manki Kim reports here that “string theory is in a very fast contracting phase, maybe I was dumb enough to hold on to a dead horse for too long. Should’ve given up long time ago.”
There’s no point in going into more detail about this kind of hype and its continued existence. The world is passing it by, moving on to fresh, new horrors.
