Robin B., I can’t speak for Eliezer’s characters, but I believe the fashionability of skepticism about string theory has come from the lack of falsifiable predictions, after so many years. No-one has been able to say “this is the ground state”. Instead string theorists have studied a large number of possible ground states (distinguished by background geometry), most of them looking nothing like what we see, as they try to get a grip on the theory. The hope used to be that all but one would prove on further study to be unstable. Now there’s an interest in anthropic predictions, though that’s just one school of thought.
I have read that no-one has ever exhibited a string-theory ground state exactly reproducing the Standard Model, though you can get close. That has to be significant. If such a place can be found in the space of ground states (“moduli space”), you could then try to reason out why it was dynamically favored. And we’ll get more information within a few years from the Large Hadron Collider, which will establish whether there’s a Higgs boson or something else (I bet on something else; the Higgs was just the simplest way to make a tractable theory and lingers by default).
In string theory’s favor is that it generically has spin-1/2 particles (fermions), spin-1 particles (gauge bosons), and spin-2 particles (gravitons). That’s a neat trick. So I tend to think either that it is the answer, or that it is just a beast of so many parts that anything you might look for is in there somewhere. In the latter case, it could be compared to the Monster group, the “largest sporadic simple finite group”. There are infinitely many finite simple groups, just as there are infinitely many possible field theories, and most of those groups resemble some subgroup of the Monster, just as string theory has spin-1/2, spin-1, and spin-2 fields, just like the real world. It could be that string theory is just the “maximally complicated field theory” (and in fact, mathematically, it has a relationship to the Monster) and that it derives this generic pseudo-predictiveness solely from that. It has a little bit of everything, so anything looks a little bit like it. It would certainly be a mistake to take some real object, like Rubik’s cube, discover a few facts about its symmetry group, and then announce that its symmetry group must be the Monster, just because the Monster has subgroups with those properties. It could be that string theorists are making a mistake like that.
On the other hand, what’s the alternative? The phenomenological approach to particle physics is just to postulate enough fields with enough properties to explain what you see. You can treat gravity as just another field, contingently present, but then your theory becomes mathematically intractable. Part of string theory’s appeal is that you can calculate graviton-graviton scattering, etc., unlike any previous theory of quantum gravity. But the price is that you buy into the unification philosophy. Recently, there have been claims that “contingent” theories of quantum gravity—according to which reality is just a bunch of fields plus gravity, and there’s no deeper reason as to why it’s that combination of fields—can be made to work; this is the “loop quantum gravity” research program. It’s my judgement that string theory is mathematically much more solid. The loop quantum gravity researchers have had to backtrack several times, after making ambitious claims about the construction of consistent “gravity-plus-anything” quantum theories. Right now the evidence (in my semi-lay opinion) points in the other direction, that gravity needs to be part of a larger ensemble of fields with special properties if it is to be quantizable. Which suggests string theory.
Robin B., I can’t speak for Eliezer’s characters, but I believe the fashionability of skepticism about string theory has come from the lack of falsifiable predictions, after so many years. No-one has been able to say “this is the ground state”. Instead string theorists have studied a large number of possible ground states (distinguished by background geometry), most of them looking nothing like what we see, as they try to get a grip on the theory. The hope used to be that all but one would prove on further study to be unstable. Now there’s an interest in anthropic predictions, though that’s just one school of thought.
I have read that no-one has ever exhibited a string-theory ground state exactly reproducing the Standard Model, though you can get close. That has to be significant. If such a place can be found in the space of ground states (“moduli space”), you could then try to reason out why it was dynamically favored. And we’ll get more information within a few years from the Large Hadron Collider, which will establish whether there’s a Higgs boson or something else (I bet on something else; the Higgs was just the simplest way to make a tractable theory and lingers by default).
In string theory’s favor is that it generically has spin-1/2 particles (fermions), spin-1 particles (gauge bosons), and spin-2 particles (gravitons). That’s a neat trick. So I tend to think either that it is the answer, or that it is just a beast of so many parts that anything you might look for is in there somewhere. In the latter case, it could be compared to the Monster group, the “largest sporadic simple finite group”. There are infinitely many finite simple groups, just as there are infinitely many possible field theories, and most of those groups resemble some subgroup of the Monster, just as string theory has spin-1/2, spin-1, and spin-2 fields, just like the real world. It could be that string theory is just the “maximally complicated field theory” (and in fact, mathematically, it has a relationship to the Monster) and that it derives this generic pseudo-predictiveness solely from that. It has a little bit of everything, so anything looks a little bit like it. It would certainly be a mistake to take some real object, like Rubik’s cube, discover a few facts about its symmetry group, and then announce that its symmetry group must be the Monster, just because the Monster has subgroups with those properties. It could be that string theorists are making a mistake like that.
On the other hand, what’s the alternative? The phenomenological approach to particle physics is just to postulate enough fields with enough properties to explain what you see. You can treat gravity as just another field, contingently present, but then your theory becomes mathematically intractable. Part of string theory’s appeal is that you can calculate graviton-graviton scattering, etc., unlike any previous theory of quantum gravity. But the price is that you buy into the unification philosophy. Recently, there have been claims that “contingent” theories of quantum gravity—according to which reality is just a bunch of fields plus gravity, and there’s no deeper reason as to why it’s that combination of fields—can be made to work; this is the “loop quantum gravity” research program. It’s my judgement that string theory is mathematically much more solid. The loop quantum gravity researchers have had to backtrack several times, after making ambitious claims about the construction of consistent “gravity-plus-anything” quantum theories. Right now the evidence (in my semi-lay opinion) points in the other direction, that gravity needs to be part of a larger ensemble of fields with special properties if it is to be quantizable. Which suggests string theory.