The Dangerous Irrelevance of String Theory
I hate to do it but I have to do it, the &quot;String&quot; phenomenon is an out-growth of the academic (industrial?) complex. When you have a group of closely knit scientists from a handful of universities who have a steady stream of cheap labor and fed by a media that bedazzles their untestable hypotheses, when you&#x27;re propped up by that hype and prestige, the fumes that academics at the top feed off, then you can plunge further into the deep, while offsetting the externalities and opportunity costs onto governments and broken graduate students who eventually find themselves unemployable after about 5 to 6 years.<p>I smelled the stink early on when a project at the LHC I was joining found 6 (plus or minus 4!) possible supersymmetry events in the two years of PBs of LHC data(!) in their specific search. I made the bet against supersymmetry and went for a less hyped field, and now that their funding is drying up, I&#x27;m happily taking almost double (or more) the salary compared to other graduate students since I&#x27;m in another field. Haven&#x27;t regretted since.<p>The hype behind string theory and HEP in general needs to die. There are so many interesting problems worthy of investigation that are not High Energy or Quantum Gravity. Yes, few things beat the fun math of HEP and string theory (although there are close contenders in the condensed matter world), few things--except perhaps validation in experiment...you know, the entire point of science in the first place.