Friday, July 30, 2021

String Theory Still Broken

String theorists continue to say absurd things in support of their theoretical program, most recently, two absurd statements noted below from leading sting theorists.

The Lex Fridman podcast has an interview with Cumrun Vafa. Going to the section (1:19:48) – Skepticism regarding string theory) where Vafa answers the skeptics, he has just one argument for string theory as a predictive theory: it predicts that the number of spacetime dimensions is between 1 and 11. 
A second edition of Gordon Kane’s String Theory and the Real World has just appeared. One learns there (page 1-19) that
There is good reason, based on theory, to think discovery of the superpartners of Standard Model particles should occur at the CERN LHC in the next few years.

From Not Even Wrong (emphasis mine).

The first "prediction" is, of course, profoundly unimpressive.

The second prediction is profoundly unlikely, given how far along in its planned experimental run the LHC is already, and given the complete absence of experimental hints of the existence of superpartners of Standard Model particles so far. The excluded parameter space for these particles can be found here (as of October 2020) and grows larger almost every month with new papers from the LHC. 

Gordon Kane has a long track record of making unsubstantiated predictions (see, e.g., this 2018 post at this blog).

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