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 universe”), it’s then picked up and distributed at sites like this, soon to make its way into news stories like this.
I’ve been writing for over twenty years about the endless examples of this campaign to promote a failed theory, warning about the danger of a significant negative effect on the credibility of scientific research with the general public. Those chickens have now come home to roost.
For specifics about this particular example of hype, see here.
