Hmm. . . How did I do? Not very well? Well, guess what, it doesn't matter. Turns out, I don't have to understand string theory after all , because it's all wrong!
Well, at least according to a couple of new books. Both Peter Woit's ``Not Even Wrong" and Lee Smolin's ``The Trouble With Physics" argue passionately that string theory has played itself out. In the two and a half decades since it first captivated physicists, despite thousands of published papers and the expenditure of billions of dollars, there is no proof whatsoever that string theory is correct. Not one prediction of the theory has been experimentally testable.
`` Despite a number of tantalizing conjectures," says Smolin, a former string theorist himself, `` there is no evidence that string theory can solve several of the big problems in theoretical physics. "
Woit, a mathematician at Columbia, puts it like this: `` The problem is that superstring theory is not really a theory, but rather a set of hopes that a theory exists . "
The holy grail of physics is unification. Find a theory that unifies gravity, elementary particles, the laws of motion, and the laws that govern forces, and you may have found a Theory of Everything. Because string theory has the potential to explain both the behavior of the huge (general relativity) and the tiny (quantum mechanics), a lot of smart people continue to believe that it, or its slippery descendant, M-theory, will prove itself to be the model that unifies physical law.
But not Woit and Smolin. They argue that the physics community has over invested in string theory to the point where its single-mindedness is pulling science farther from a unified explanation of nature rather than closer to one. String theory may involve beautiful and complicated math, they say, but it should no longer be the dominant paradigm.
