Some Outrages:
Convincing high school
teachers to teach their students about string theory:
Listen to the proceedings of this conference to hear a high school
teacher
who is now under the impression that due to string theory "we may have
to come
up with new standards of what it means to say we know something in
science".
A course
at MIT on "String Theory for Undergraduates":
As far as I can tell from the course materials, the fact that the
theory doesn't work
is one of many things not taught in this course.
A summer
program to train graduate students in string theory:
This is the third year of this program, which last year concentrated
more on cosmology.
It now seems that this program to indoctrinate graduate students in
string theory will be
an
annual event at the Institute in Princeton.
A list of
the "Big" questions in M-theory:
Here's a bigger one: if you don't know the fundamental degrees of
freedom of your
theory, the dynamical laws governing them, or what the observables of
the theory are,
shouldn't you at least put the term "theory" in quotes?
Title of a talk by David Gross at a 2001 AAAS meeting: "The
Power and the Glory of String Theory"
"For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever.
Amen."
And some people call string theory a cult. Can't imagine why.
Actually, maybe I can
.
The New York Times tells us that "Physicists Finally Find a Way
to Test
Superstring Theory":
Just one
of the sillier articles by science reporters about string theory.
The "Bogdanov
Affair":
Two brothers manage to publish several papers of complete gibberish
about quantum gravity/
beginning of universe/string theory in five refereed journals, a couple
of them very well
known. Three of the papers are essentially identical. The
response of the theoretical physics
community: "What, me worry?"
The "Discretuum" and anthropic
arguments:
During the past couple years many string theorists have completely given
up on the idea that string theory can ever predict anything.
While not
abandoning string theory, they now pursue "anthropic" explanations of
physics.
For an example, see this recent video
of a talk by Susskind. The first question
after his talk is something like "doesn't this just show that string
theory is a failure
and we should look for a different theory?". He responds by
first hyperventilating,
then trying to explain why a theory that predicts nothing is a good
thing.