As a minimum, as it does not include gravity anymore, it is an argument for the restricted idea “Research on String Theory is Largely a Waste of Time for Quantum Gravity”.

What drives us to pursue TOE? I came onto this blog asking Google “benefits of knowing the theory of everything”. Behind this search are my questions such as: What specific physical elements or properties will be inter-related? How will they be related? That is, what form of theory-less equations and supporting statements will do this? Perhaps TOE will not be “completely” defined, but what would be sufficient to point us in the “correct?” assured direction?

My points would be:

1) Its not a theory – no equations, no way of proving true / false
2) Its not one theory, its 10^500 or more, if you subscribe to the landscape, with so many theories one is bound to describe our universe, you just need to plug in the right 500 numbers (as opposed to a factor of ten less constants in the SM)
3) Its not background independent, so can never describe a changing spacetime geometry as required by GR
4) It moved from a hadron theory to a quantum gravity theory because it described the graviton. But gravity is not a force in GR, it’s paths through a changing geometry to preserve minimal PE, why do we even need a graviton?

A large number of theoretical physicists have tried for a few decades now to understand what string theory implies about reality without success. This isn’t to say that we’ve learned nothing at all about string theory. But what we have learned hasn’t told us anything about any observations we might make, despite the very large number of man-hours employed in understanding it. So string theory is definitely “very hard”. But whether or not it’s too hard is clearly a judgment call.

I guess I haven’t heard of any more promising theory for quantum gravity, so I don’t see why theorists shouldn’t keep trying to understand string theory. From what I understand, we are essentially guaranteed to understand more about mathematics anyway just by pursuing string theory, mathematics that will be useful whether or not string theory turns out to be accurate.

What is too hard? I mean any problem you don’t know the algorithm to solve is hard. Beyond that, how do you differentiate the levels of hardness?

It is all in the realm of unknown and the main attribute of it is being unknown So we just do not know how hard it is. There is a chance someone tomorrow ( or next year) will show all of us how simple (OK, not that hard) it is.

I am just trying to be optimistic here.

Great blog. Just subscribed.

This would be equivalent to if for “God exists” argument he argued for an existance as an idea rather then as people think he exists as part of/the creator of reality. It is disengenous to pretend he is arguing about the same thing as Woit, Smolin and others.