More Trouble

Bert Schroer has posted a new ten-point critique of string theory (hep-th/0611132). It is more detailed and technical than some of the other critiques we have seen lately. I'm not prepared (or qualified) to address those issues in detail, but at the risk of gross oversimplification I will guess that his points can be reduced to "string theorists are ignoring the centrality of new insights into quantum field theory revealed by AQFT and other developments." I'm not sure how much weight to give such arguments.

Couldn't ST rejoin that "Non stringy physicists are ignoring the centrality of the emergence of a graviton in a term by term finite perturbation series." LQG, on the hand, just says: "those others ignore the centrality of manifest background independence."

I'm a bit uncomfortable with all these kinds of arguments. It's certainly reasonable to pick some fundamental idea or fact as a heuristic guide, but historically physics has needed more. I will borrow the Philip Anderson quote Bert used as an epigraph for a motto here:
...The history concludes with an unexpected and glorious success: the so-called standard model. The way in which this structural classification fell into place, and the great leaps of imagination involved, justifies a degree of hubris among the few dozens truly extraordinary individuals who discovered it. However both this hubris, and the complexity of the result, fed the temptation to go on leaping, and to forget that this earlier leaps, without exception, had taken off from some feature of the solid experimental facts laboriously gathered over the years....

Phil Anderson, in ”Loose ends and Gordian knots of the string cult”

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