[luc4sdreyer]

> He is critical of string theory on the grounds that it lacks testable predictions and is promoted with public money despite its failures so far,[1] and has authored both scientific papers and popular polemics on this topic. His writings claim that excessive media attention and funding of this one particular mainstream endeavour, which he considers speculative, risks undermining public faith in the freedom of scientific research. His moderated weblog on string theory and other topics is titled "Not Even Wrong", a derogatory term for scientifically useless arguments coined by Wolfgang Pauli.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Woit#Criticism_of_string...

[verisimi]

I'm sure he is expressing a valid principle. By funding one area excessively, you can soon build up reams of scientific literature and interest, but this area needs have nothing or little to do with genuine scientific interest. Funding determines the interest. It's all about money unfortunately, even science.

[logtempo]

I had the same feeling doing a phd two years ago. I think there is an unpopular opinion in science about the limits of what we can look at and what is required to achieve that. My conclusion was that the requirements are an economy of infinite growth and a society based on consumption. I did a parallel in my mind between the idea that "knowledge will always grow" and "economy will always grow". The limits are heavily related to social stability/agreement, and the tools we can have given the money(=social and environmental)/physical constraints.

I have the opinion that the FCC is the example of such bias: we don't really know what to look for, but we (the scientific community) have to survive so we'll build a political argument to keep getting funds.

I think the proposal was during a severe heatwave, and I also though "where is the social goal in that science? What does it will bring to society? Do we really need to know that far those things?". I think it's at this moment that I started loosing motivation too.

[tunesmith]

What is he in favor of? He seems to be criticizing both further experiments in string theory due to being not even wrong, and further experiments with the standard model, since it's either expensive or not getting anywhere. (I'm not a physicist and understand very little.)

[aleph_minus_one]

> What is he in favor of?

See the category "Euclidean Twistor Unification" in his blog:

> https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?cat=31

[perihelions]

- "...and is promoted with public money despite its failures..."

The amusing thing for me* is this is just coffee budgets for pen-and-paper theorists. What they say about academic disputes: the lower the stakes, the more intense the politics.

*(Observing from a safe distance!)

[benreesman]

Not a physicist, just a fan.

It’s not just coffee and blackboards and hoarded Japanese chalk: the goalpost slalom around supersymmetry drives discussions about what colliders to build and how to operate them [1]. Before scalar field excitation at 125 GeV it was predicted by many that the power and luminosity of that run would show weak bosonic superpartners in the first run. With Higgs at 125 GeV it gets really tortured as an argument.

This is also the subtext with the really aggressive public branding of “dark matter”, when it should really be called something like “large scale apparent gravitational anomaly” or some dry thing like that, it’s not an MCU franchise: positing a bunch of mass that has none of the other properties of matter is a perfectly fine line of inquiry, but the verbal capitalization of Matter is because weakly-interacting massive particles are another way to argue that maybe, just maybe maybe, this is indirect evidence for supersymmetry.

But most of all the damage is in attacking the definition of science: if you envelope-math metastable vacua consistent with compactified Calabai-Yau dimensions at (last I checked) order of 10^250 what you’re left with is “it’s strong anthropic, there’s no explanation”, which is exactly where Susskind and that lot have ended up.

It’s time for these people to retire.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.08642.pdf

[sn41]

There's also a hidden component in these budget calculations: it is hard for people doing more "traditional" physics to find tenured positions, since many faculty hires went to string theory. So the salary that went to string theorists at the expense of other subareas of physics is quite a large hidden component. Crushed academic ambition is as real-world as it gets, since it involves years of extremely hard toil, wasted.

[pbmonster]

> The amusing thing for me* is this is just coffee budgets for pen-and-paper theorists

Unfortunately not. From his website [0], the extent of the grant funding involved is much more than just coffee budget:

> The Black Hole Initiative that features this on its website: $16 million from the Templeton Foundation, $3.6 million from the Moore Foundation. > The Simons Collaboration on Celestial Holography: $8 million from the Simons Foundation. > NSF Grant: $400,000 from the NSF. > DOE Grant: $3.5 million from the DOE.

This kind of money could fund a whole lot of other theory. Hell, it even could fund a lot of experiments (albeit not in high energy physics).

[0] https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13770

[andrepd]

Sure, it's just coffee, pens, paper, and 50,000,000,000€ particle accelerators! :)

[sega_sai]

That is not correct IMO. When a faculty is hired specifically in a given field the cost of the salary line is a few tens of million dollars.