It is sometimes said that theory has strayed too far from experiment/observation. The list of references includes 53 items, only one critical of string theory, the Ellis/Silk Nature article. The article is structured as a defense of string theory, without explaining at all what the serious criticisms of string theory actually are. This of course is true, but the problem with string theory is that, in its landscape version, it has a hugely complicated and poorly understood high energy scale behavior, seemingly capable of producing a very wide range of possible observable effects, none of which have been seen. Silverstein begins her article explaining how physics at a very high energy scale can in principle have observable effects. I’m curious whether Dawid commissioned any contributions from string theory critics who weren’t at the meeting. Silverstein’s article says that it was commissioned by Dawid for the proceedings volume, even though she hadn’t been at the meeting. The only contribution from a physicist that I’ve seen that argued the case for the failure of string theory was that from Carlo Rovelli, see here. Polchinski explained a computation that shows that string theory is 98.5% likely to be correct, going on to claim that the probability is actually higher: “something over 3 sigma” (i.e. One aspect of the Munich conference was that it was heavily weighted towards string theorists, with contributions from Dawid, David Gross, Joe Polchinski, Fernando Quevedo, Dieter Lust and Gordon Kane all promoting the idea that string theory was a success. Much of the Munich conference was devoted to discussing that as an issue in philosophy of science. To oversimplify, it makes the case that the proper way to react to string theory unification’s failure according to the conventional understanding of the scientific method is to change our understanding of the scientific method. For a fuller discussion of that book, see the linked blog post.
The organizing committee for the Munich conference was chaired by Richard Dawid, a string theorist turned philosopher who has written a 2013 book, String Theory and the Scientific Method. In that article, Ellis and Silk explained the problems with string theory and with the multiverse/string theory landscape. The impetus behind that conference was a December 2014 article in Nature entitled Scientific method: Defend the integrity of physics. The article is intended to appear in the forthcoming Cambridge University Press volume of contributions to the Munich “Why Trust a Theory?” conference held back in December 2015. The title is I guess intended to be playful, not referring to its accurate description of the current state of string theory, but to the possibility of irrelevant operators having observable effects. Eva Silverstein has a new preprint out, entitled The Dangerous Irrelevance of String Theory.
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