Strings 2025

Enjoying a vacation on a Caribbean porch, and just had a couple hours to kill with good internet access. For some reason I spent part of them listening to the summary panel discussions at Strings 2025, which just ended today.

Honestly, this was just completely pathetic. The whole thing was run by David Gross, who at 83 is entering his fifth decade of hyping string theory. Besides the usual claims that the field is doing great, he had to announce that they’ve been unable to find anyone willing to organize Strings 2026, so there is some chance this would the last of the lot.

There were three panel discussions, involving nineteen people in addition to Gross. No one had any significant progress to report, or anything optimistic to say about future progress. It was mostly just an endless rehash of discussing the same basic problems the field has been obsessed with and made no progress on for 25 years (e.g. how do we do dS/CFT instead of adS/CFT?).

The suggestions for the only ways to make progress were often naive ideas about giving up fundamental principles of quantum mechanics (“maybe we should give up on having a Hamiltonian”) or getting something from nothing (“maybe making it a principle that the state space is finite dimensional will work”).

I honestly don’t understand why people continue to participate in this and expect anyone to take them seriously.

Author Of article : woit

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