Via Not Even Wrong, comes an article from the San Francisco Chronicle which is pretty critical of string theory. Philip Anderson, as always, comes away with an interesting quote,
“…we from outside the (string) field are disturbed by our colleagues’ insistence that every new semi-adolescent who has done something in string theory is the greatest genius since Einstein and therefore must occupy yet another tenure track. … Our sciences are becoming increasingly infected with quasi-theology, a tendency which needs to be openly debated.”
but it’s Robert Laughlin who gets in perhaps the harshest one liner about string theory I’ve heard in quite a while
But skeptics suggest it’s the latest sign of how string theorists, sometimes called “superstringers,” try to colorfully camouflage the theory’s flaws, like “a 50-year-old woman wearing way too much lipstick,” jokes Robert B. Laughlin, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at Stanford. “People have been changing string theory in wild ways because it has never worked.”
Of course this is the same Robert Laughlin who once said (rumor mode on) that if the Stanford physics department hired anyone in quantum computing he would resign (rumor mode off).
String theory as the biggest comb-over ever. I like it.
Sorry to harp on the women’s issues, but GEEZ!!! Do old curmudgeons like that ALWAYS have to simultaneously insult women whenever they pick on their colleauges? Do they EVER choose male-oriented analogies like comb-overs and beerguts?