String Theory Does Not Win a Nobel, and I Win a Long Bet

FWIIW, Horgan is a well known science writer and author of a 1996 book called "the end of science" which pointed out that science in general and physics in particular has reached a point where there is no appreciable forward progress and is obsessed with non falsifiable woo like string theory. It's a provocative book; and people have raised the issue that Kelvin said something similar 120 years ago, but it's really worth reading.

He was 100% on the money that Noodle Theory was a lot of non-scientific mathematical baloney; a super unpopular position at the time (1996); pretty much the only prominent person in agreement with him was Nobel Prize Winner Phil Warren Anderson, who disagrees with him in many other respects. Ultimately many other writers came out in agreement on this issue at least; Woit and Smolin most notably, though others agreed. At this point I'm pretty sure even the physics establishment is a little nervous about hiring new noodle theorists. He's basically right about stuff like "complexity theory" as well.

I had a couple buddies who were prominent string theorists; some involved in its inception. One in particular retired a very disappointed man.

What’s wrong with complexity theory? I remember seeing a talk about it a long time ago and the concepts were super interesting, but I didn’t (I don’t) have the mathematical maturity to understand it in depth.

There are still a lot of prominent, respectable theoretical physicists who work on string theory. Leonard Susskind, for example. While no evidence of it has been found so far, is calling it "Noodle Theory" and a bunch of baloney really fair? There are plenty of big theories for which there's no evidence, but that doesn't necessarily mean we're certain yet that they're pseudoscience or unfalsifiable. Supersymmetry, Many Worlds, etc.

There seems to be lots of forward progress in physics, e.g. in condensed matter physics, quantum computing, etc. Grand unified theories are sort of irrelevant so long as there are not measurable phenomena that cannot be explained without them.

It's important to avoid conflating string theorists with all theoretical physicists. Plenty of people in particle physics either don't believe in string theory or don't think it can make useful predictions any time soon, even if it were assumed true. Furthermore, the vast majority of people called "string theorists" don't even work on traditional string theory day to day, but on more concrete ideas that have been partly inspired by it, such as holography and amplitudes.

This needs to be pointed out because there is a huge narrative bias out there. Science popularizers will endlessly frame things like "this whole field has no idea what they're doing, and only I, the brave contrarian outsider, can see through the fraud", even though they're only pointing out things that are already well known in the field. These narratives are completely wrong, but uncritically eaten up by people who think of themselves as contrarians.

Despite what the current top comment claims, you're not reading this article about Horgan because he was the first to think string theory would have trouble making predictions. Physicists have made this criticism since the beginning. Feynman pointed it out continually, and Glashow, one of the architects of the Standard Model, tried to bar string theorists from Harvard for the same reason.

You're reading Horgan's take, and not Feynman's or Glashow's, because Horgan is popular, and that's because he puts all his energy into expanding his popular reach. Only nonphysicists can do that, because physicists spend the majority of their time doing, well, physics.