TWP II: Enter the Dragon

Act II, Scene I
[String Theory, an alluring young woman clad in slightly revealing rags, enters stage right, and starts to walk toward center stage. A short, red-haired man, front row center, stands and loudly interrupts:]
MAN: No! No! No! NO! Too trite, too NO! This is supposed to be a book review, not a high school skit. Start over!

[Lights go down. Muffled sounds of movement on stage. Light comes up slowly, a single red spot illuminating a large and peculiarly marked egg, downstage center. Spot spreads to reveal a ring of kneeling men, clad in loin cloths, surrounding. Each man in turn leans forward, touches his head to the egg, returns to his position, and tosses a handful of powder on the egg, which flares up in smoke and crackling flame. Then the egg speaks.]

EGG:
By the wiggling of my strings,
I do promise you all things.

EGG: Particles! By the wiggling of my strings!

EGG: Gauge Fields! By the wiggling of my open strings!

EGG: Quantum Gravity! By the wiggling of my closed strings!

EGG:
Particles and Forces!
Forcinos and Sparticles!
By the super, duper,
Symmetry of my strings!

[Egg cracks. Tiny dragon head emerges in a burst of flame.]

Chapters 7 through 12 are devoted to string theory, and once again I really admire Smolin's exposition. He manages to compress the historical and conceptual development of String Theory into three rather short chapters, including the travails of the founding fathers:

Pierre Ramond was denied tenure at Yale in 1976, a few years after having solved several of string theory's central problems...

John Schwarz, meanwhile, had been denied tenure at Princeton in spite of his fundamental contributions to string theory...

There is no doubt that the original inventors of string theory paid heavily for their pioneering discoveries.

Smolin emphasizes these points because he wants to show how the academic deck is and has been stacked against the truly original thinkers, rewarding instead skilled technicians. Once Green and Schwarz consigned some nasty quantum anomalies to the dust bin, the damn burst, and everyone became a string theorist.

One sentence in his discussion of the first superstring revolution caught my eye:

For example, they [Candelas, Horowitz, Strominger, and Witten] showed explicitly how you could trade constants in the standard model, such as those that determine the masses of the different particles, for constants describing the geometry of a Calabi-Yau space.

Wait! Whoa! Why isn't this game over? Just plug in the measured constants and do the trade. There must be some reason it ain't this simple.

Smolin sounds what will be one of his primary themes: lack of predictivity. Just as with Einstein's unified field theories, we have an embarassment of theoretical possibilities. He quotes from a 1986 paper of Strominger's:

...All predictive power seems to have been lost.

All this points to an overwhelming need to find a dynamical principle for determining [which theory describes nature], which now appears more imperative than ever.

Going on to the second revolution and beyond, Smolin points up a few items that aren't usually mentioned in the usual string theology: That M theory doesn't actually exist, that strong-weak duality is probably only approximate, that the strong form of the Maldacena conjecture is unproven, that the highly trumpeted finiteness of the string perturbation theory terms is only proven for the first three.

I've talked about the Smolin and the Landscape before here, so I won't say any more about this particular elephant in the bedroom, except:

[Lights up to a scene of disarray. String Theory, now grown to monstrous size, tramples the stage, tearing up the landscape. Some string theorists flee before it, while other bow down to worship it. As ST appears about to trample a group of worshippers, lights go dark.]