[theobeers]

In context, those are not shockingly high sums. The real problem seems to be what Woit summarizes in this 2004 (!!) comment on his blog:

> It takes a non-trivial amount of time and effort to absorb new mathematical ideas and by so dominating the mathematical end of particle theory for twenty years, string theory has monopolized the time of the mathematically sophisticated members of the community. It has also quite literally driven out of the field a lot of people who were interested in other sorts of ideas about how to apply mathematics to questions in particle theory.

https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=119&cpage=2...

edit: How bonkers is it that another two decades have been pissed away on this?

[SiempreViernes]

Well, its not true that people only worked on string theory during these last 20 years: notably Woit himself didn't. That there's loads of people in Brazil, Russia (or frankly any place except Princeton and IAS) trying weird approaches sums up to nothing in his telling.

Honestly, I get the impression that what Woit is really upset about is that people like his idol Witten didn't switch to work on his ideas, because only the genius of "towering intellects" like Witten's could solve this very hard problem. 0