Believe it or not, scientists want to keep it simple. That’s why many scientists, including Albert Einstein, believe that in the end physics can evolve into a single, broken paradigm that explains the universe – the idea of everything.
Enter string theory. Of course Broadly speaking, string theory is a mathematical framework that replaces point-like particles with “dimensional” strings as the essential building blocks of matter. It was first proposed as an explanation of something different but it quickly attracted the attention of physicists working to combine quantum mechanics and general relativity – two very successful ideas, equally valid and unyielding.
After that he followed the “eternal evolution,” which marked an impressive effort in detailing how string theory can handle the complexities of our environment. Garbage of sorts naturally extends to the popular science-talk shows of the 1990s and 2000s, looking to produce popular documentaries such as PBS Good Atmosphere and a trove of popular and academic books.
However, by the turn of the century, the popularity of string as a concept seemed to have died out. Admittedly, public opinion is Fickle and Blasé, and that non-academics don’t care doesn’t mean the idea is dead. However, if Google’s GGRAM viewer is any guide, cout string theory has been laughed at for the last decade or so.
That’s the scientific question this giz asks. What happened to the thread concept? Obviously, medical doctors have never done it in the concept of it all. But is string theory the leading choice – if it ever was? Or are there better alternatives? Has it really diminished in popularity and importance? If so, why?
The following answers may have been slightly edited and clarified.
Daniel Whiteton
Particle Scientist, University of California, Irvine, and the Atlas collaboration at Cern.
String theory is not dead! The main objection is that its predictions are of things on a microscopic level that we cannot do, so it never gives a prediction of the unknown. But that doesn’t mean it won’t. The group’s idea was to do mathematics a century before we found out that it was important to explain the particle and quantum field theory. I’m not a fan of classifying things as “Science” or “not science,” because who knows how much curiosity will lead to discoveries?
John H. Schwarz
Theoretical physicist, California Institute of Technology; He discovered the Green-Schwarz Mechanism, which set the first high revolutions in 1984.
The article went [around 1984] and has been very active since then. The annual conferences are still going strong and typically have a few hundred participants. […] A large part of the theoretical Physics Community is now convinced that we are on the right track to find the right unified theory (and many of the Naysayers have been converted).
That said, we also recognize that there is still much to be understood, and it may take a long time to find experimental evidence to support this hypothesis.
Peter Woot
Mathematician and physicist, Columbia University; The author of It’s not bad and such a blog.
The concept of string theory as a new fundamental general idea has been dead for a long time. To make it a little easier, it needs a momentary dimension, but we only see four, so you have to remove six. The simple scenarios that do this don’t look like the real world; Sophisticates can give you anything, so part with nothing.
The last nail in the coffin was the negative results at the LHC regarding supersymmetry, which is an important part of many situations and the only thing that can be reliably seen through experiments. The term “string theory” has come to be used to refer to a large number of different theories that have grown up without trying to make a coherent work of it. “Most of the strings of leorists” will now work not on a unified concept but on very different topics.
This produced important new ideas in Mathematics but no new understanding of the fundamental physics of our world. In particular, when people study the survitit of multiple gravities, “these are the theories that can explain quantum gravity in our four-dimensional world.
Thomas van Riet
Theoretical naturalist, Leuven University in Belgium; Focusing on gravity, string theory, geography, and cosmology.
yes, [string theory has diminished in popularity]. The reason that 20 years ago scientists and writers promised the heavens. It never did anything. We also know 20 years ago that the nature of the wire has a state called the ground state and therefore there are no different predictions.
But the so-called alternatives cannot compete at all, and remain a powerful social puzzle in society as to how they were able to be as determined as the alternatives. Let me be clear, it’s good that people are reading about other options. But there is no reason they found a quantum mechanical explanation of gravity.
People say that without trying we cannot call one answer better than another. That is a mistake. There are many consistency checks, which are very difficult to pass. Can you create Black Hole Entropy? String Theorists managed to put it in the best conditions and reproduce the famous hawking formula of Black Hole Entropy!
This is where science can progress without experimental input and it’s a point misunderstood by philosophers: in physics we study all the time things that don’t make sense… but it means you create the right conditions to test the framework. In Quantum Gravity This is the very game of surpassing mathematical consistency so strongly that it makes the search for pseudo-beliefs almost as distinct from the strings.
Similarly, string theory can be just a toy model. But even that is good! I think for example, in this model, look at the space with the bang bang boburity and ask yourself, how does this idea deal with it? It should provide an answer because it is a mathematically complete view. So it should tell you how early this (toy) model is.
Carlo Rovelli
Theoretical Physist, Center de thy thérique thérique de luminy in France; Rovelli is the inventor of Loop Quantum Gravity, a rival account to the concept of strings.
Especially in the last 10 or 5 years, in the big physics community, the transmission of the wire resolution has been greatly reduced. For three reasons. The first is that the theory revealed that many physical predictions can be verified, such as the appearance of supersymmetric particles [LHC]the cosmological infinity, the production of small black holes in physics experiments, the modification of Newton’s law on a short scale, and so on. None of these predictions turned out to be correct.
This repeated failure does not completely kill the idea, which can always be “corrected” to take care of the negative result. But they have reduced confidence in the opinion of most scientists.
The second reason, perhaps more important, is that the theory attracted a lot of attention in the 1980s and 1990s because it promises to solve open questions in Particle Physics. For example, to make the parameters of the standard model from the first principles, to understand why there are three generations of particles, why it is. The idea was never successful in this regard. This failure also reduces the credibility of the string hypothesis.
The third reason is that after 50 years we still do not have a well-defined formulation of string theory. We have a patwork of related results but no clear-cut theory defined by a well-defined set of statistics.
Hiroshi Ooguri
Theoretical physicist, California Institute of Technology; A key contributor to the mathematical development of string theory.
Quatum integration with “ordinary” relationships is 25 times more difficult than integration with “special” relationships. […] It took 50 scientists to develop a concrete model based on quantum field theory to explain the properties of particles and particles (the standard model and 40 other results).
Therefore, one could argue that it would take 1,250 years to build a logical model of the universe from string text and another 1,000 years to verify it experimentally. Now, I don’t think it will really take that long, but this shows how serious the problem is. Therefore, I would expect to achieve such a unity to produce 25 fiery results and to have such a large impact on a wide range of physics and mathematics.
Currently, string theory is the only promising candidate for unification. No other proposals have comparable implications for the breadth of science or depth of mathematics. So, in a way, we theoretical experts develop a language to understand nature.
One thing I want to point out is, Yes, our ultimate goal is to combine general relativity and quantum mechanics and test that. I hope there will be a good test, but if it is rejected, that is progress in science, so I would accept it.
Cumrun Died
Theoretical naturalist, Harvard University; Vafa received the 2017 prize for excellence in physics for his work in applying string theory to the study of black holes and the universe.
Puzzles often come in pairs, each serving as a solution to the other! This is what seems to be happening in physics right now. Recent observations of two groups, desi and des, in their data 2024 and 2025 have found evidence that the standard model of cosmology, which assumes a dark field does not saturate time. Currently our thread inspired model is the best model suitable for their data!
In the same development there are ongoing experiments in Austria and the US that aim to find the dark dimension [hypothetical extra dimension in string theory]… these trials are within years of producing their first data.
So it seems that both observations of the highest cosmological absoal We can be on the CUSP of a major scientific discovery. We should have a clear picture within 5 to 10 years.
