{"id":486,"date":"2006-10-30T18:25:01","date_gmt":"2006-10-30T22:25:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=486"},"modified":"2007-02-20T13:51:20","modified_gmt":"2007-02-20T18:51:20","slug":"some-early-criticism-of-string-theory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=486","title":{"rendered":"Some Early Criticism of String Theory"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From the &#8220;First Superstring Revolution&#8221; on, there have always been skeptics, even though they often were not very vocal. Perhaps the most well-known piece of such criticism was Paul Ginsparg and Sheldon Glashow&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/physics\/9403001\">Desperately Seeking Superstrings<\/a>, which appeared in the May 1986 issue of Physics Today.  I recently became aware of some other similarly critical articles by Noboru Nakanishi, and copies of them have been made available to me.  They are:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/nakanishi1.pdf\">Comments on the Superstring Syndrome<\/a>  (also from May 1986)<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/nakanishi2.pdf\">&#8220;Superstring Theory&#8221; Syndrome<\/a> (published in the popular magazine &#8220;Parity&#8221;, September 1986)<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/nakanishi3.pdf\">Can the superstring theory become physics?<\/a> (January 1993)<\/p>\n<p>This last paper claims that &#8220;the bubble of superstring theory has &#8230; bursted&#8221;, which, in 1993, was rather premature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From the &#8220;First Superstring Revolution&#8221; on, there have always been skeptics, even though they often were not very vocal. Perhaps the most well-known piece of such criticism was Paul Ginsparg and Sheldon Glashow&#8217;s Desperately Seeking Superstrings, which appeared in the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=486\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}