Peter Woit exposed the problems with string theory. Then Sabine Hossenfelder brought the news to a bigger audience. Now, in this hilarious video, Angela Collier is bringing it to the Gen Z gamer crowd:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kya_LXa_y1E
Yes, she shreds the repeated grandiose claims of string theorists while gaming!
I agree with her main points. Some pedants (like me) will notice mistakes. I think they arose because she has a PhD in astrophysics, not particle physics. Also, she said she didn't want to talk about the physics, just the sociology. None of these mistakes affect her actual point, but just to keep up my nerd cred:
1. The pion was not one of the particles whose existence was predicted by the Standard Model. Yukawa predicted it way back in 1935, and it was found in 1947.
2. The cost of the never-finished Superconducting Supercollider would have been $11 billion, not $200 billion. I think she was just being flip here. By the way, the US spent $2 billion building it before giving up.
3. There are 5 superstring theories, not 10.
4. Bosonic superstring works best in 26 dimensions, not the numbers she haphazardly guessed.
A bit more importantly, I think she said the Superconducting Supercollider was cancelled much later than it actually was: October 1993. So this gums up her chronology a bit.
Still, I enjoyed this a lot!
@johncarlosbaez Unfortunately, a theory detached from experiment tends to turn into religion. I really dislike click-bitey titles like Greene's "The Elegant Universe", which raise the stink of Platonism. The worst offender, in my mind, is Michio Kaku with his overt religious zeal. The hype around supersymmetry and string theory is doing disservice to those otherwise interesting concepts.
@BartoszMilewski @johncarlosbaez I tried to read “The Elegant Universe” but I gave up when I couldn’t detect any facts in it. 😂
@spradlig @BartoszMilewski - I don't mind Platonism; what I don't like is that someone let Brian Greene stick a preface lauding string theory into the latest edition of Einstein's "The Meaning of Relativity". This is like smearing lipstick on the Mona Lisa.