Today Quanta magazine has more of this sort of thing, with an article whose title shows up on the web as A Correction to Einstein Hints At Evidence for String Theory.
There the authors write:Ī crowning achievement for the celestial holography program would be for it to determine concretely whether string theories are the only consistent theories of (asymptotically flat) quantum gravity. One place I noticed this is in this recent white paper about the interesting topic of celestial holography, which has little to do with string theory. The arguments of this kind I’ve seen make no sense to me, but they are gaining in influence. This situation has lead to a recent trend in string theory research: instead of looking for positive evidence for string theory, try to find an argument that resistance is hopeless, string theory is the only theory possible. In recent years though, after decades of no progress towards a consistent M-theory, string theorists have essentially given up on this hope. This final theory would be untestable, but it would self-consistently explain why one could not hope to test it. For many decades the hope was that a consistent answer to the unknown question of what string theory really is (often called “M-theory”) would be found, and that would provide a final end to the subject of fundamental physics. With particle physics abandoned, theorists have focused on quantum gravity as the only legitimate issue to study. Taken together, the consensus of leading particle theorists has become that there’s no point to trying to do any better than the Standard Model, with the only answer available to anyone who asks questions about higher energies is “string theory, whatever that is”. In addition, Weinberg is also credited with the anthropic CC argument, taken as evidence for the otherwise unobservable string theory landscape. One can watch the recent talks here on Steven Weinberg and his legacy to get a good idea of what this current consensus looks like: you can’t test string theory since string effects occur at much too high an energy scale, and Weinberg showed that such things will just look like the Standard Model sort of QFT at observable energies.
Recently there have been many fewer such claims, with consensus in the string theory community that there is now no hope to get a prediction from string theory about observable physics at accessible energies.
For many years, editions here of This Week’s Hype were mainly devoted to bogus claims that someone had found a way to get a testable prediction out of string theory or other “evidence for string theory”.
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