Yes, yes, Peter Woit of Not Even Wrong.
From Nautilus:
Woit’s major complaint about the theory, then and now, is that it fails to make testable predictions, so it can’t be checked for errors—in other words, that it’s “not even wrong.” Contrast this with general relativity, for example, which enabled Einstein to predict, among other things, the degree to which a star’s light is deflected as it passes the sun. Had measurements of this effect not agreed with Einstein’s prediction, general relativity would have been disproved. Such falsifiability is a widely cited criterion for what constitutes science, a perspective usually attributed to philosopher Karl Popper. Plus, general relativity took Einstein only 10 years. String theory has taken more than 30 so far.
Yes, but testability may soon be joining falsifiability and Occam’s Razor as outdated stuff string theorists and other multiverse proponents want to just get rid of.
The greatest vitriol was reserved for online interactions, as you might expect. His rivals would pounce on something he wrote, says Woit, “take it out of context, and then [say] ‘Oh now I can show that Peter Woit is a fool and doesn’t understand what he’s talking about.’ ” He marvels at this treatment from “some of the smartest people in the world.” The fighting reached into professional forums, too. Woit had sometimes posted links to his blog entries on the website arXiv.org (pronounced “archive”), a repository for physics papers awaiting peer review run by Cornell University. But during the string wars, Woit says, his ability to post links on arXiv was revoked. “That whole story is one of the most disgraceful, intellectually dishonest pieces of behavior I’ve seen,” he says.
He mustn’t live up our fork of the road. Happens to our folk all the time.
So his blog routinely condemns the theory as a “failure, ” and decries the “faddishness,” “mania,” and “arrogance” of physicists who promote its promise. He has publicly urged agencies like the National Science Foundation to cut string theory funding. The reaction from the community is plainly evident online, where he is called an “incompetent, power-thirsty … moron” and a “stuttering crackpot-in-chief” guilty of crimes as contemptible as those of Osama bin Laden. More.
Hey, that’s worse than calling him a “denialist.” Almost as bad as calling him a creationist. And about as well-sourced.
We like him because he is a genuine skeptic. He says: Show me. And of course they can’t. We’re familiar with that, from Darwin’s funded followers.
See also: Why the string theorists have every reason to be freaking out.
See also: Why is it now so cool to be a“creationist”?
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