Cosmologic philosophy:string theory die! (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, June 11, 2015, 02:53 (3454 days ago) @ David Turell

From a string theorist who is doing something else. Why? 30 years and going nowhere:-http://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/271apx/a_view_from_an_exstring_theorist/-"The main problem within String Theory at the moment is a publish or perish simplification problem. This has arisen because of the lack of String Theory jobs in academia, and the huge amount of PhD String Theorists. I believe that you could fill all faculty positions in String Theory in the USA with just the String Theory PhD graduates from Princeton. It makes competition intense right from the beginning, and means that a vanishingly small number of students will ever get to study String Theory professionally. When you're doing a post-doc or trying to achieve tenure things are even worse. Every result you publish must be verging on Earth-shattering, and you've got to publish a lot of them. This has lead to massive simplifications in the problems being tackled, with a lot of hyperbole heaped on top of them so that they'll appear important. It's made it very important to work with well known people in the field, not because they'll make your work better, but because then at least, your work will be read, and hopefully cited. The really thorny problems in String Theory and Quantum Gravity are not worked on very much, it's suicide at any point in your career unless you're a tenured professor. So we have many people spending the most productive years of their careers doing as much String Theory laundry as possible which strikes the balance between ease and potential importance. It is very very tough. -"Anyone interested in String Theory needs to think very very hard on what they want to do with themselves. They need to get a String Theory textbook and work through it, every problem, however long it takes. They need to make sure they really like it, because, once they start grad school, all they've got to look forward to is eighty hour weeks on very long calculations, with the only payout being the occasional bit of pride when you produce something you're proud of. That doesn't happen very often. Nima Arkani-Hamed once told me that he thinks you're very lucky if you get a good idea once every three years and he's one of the most productive and smartest theorists in the world"