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re: String Theory: The Emperor Has No Clothes?
Arthur Smith — (archived)

I'm just now reading Roger Penrose's "The Road to Reality" - it's extremely mathematically dense, and yet he seems to have targeted it for a general audience (at least the intro chapter was pretty gentle...) like some of these other books (Kaku and Krauss as mentioned in the article). Penrose's take is quite different from the "superstringers" and a perfect example of what Krauss is talking about - the superstring way assumes quantum mechanics is perfect and general relativity has to be fitted in somehow; Penrose comes from the opposite end and claims some changes are needed in quantum theory, based on gravitational effects. It's a very different approach, and the fact that both approaches seem to agree equally well with experiments indicates what we really need are far more experiments.

And space may be the ideal place to conduct such experiments - astronomical observations of cosmological parameters for one thing, but also use of the pure vacuum and evidence of particles from distance places without the interference from Earth's atmosphere. There are a lot of unanswered questions about the universe, and string theory doesn't seem to have been helping get many of them answered (although to give it credit, it does seem to explain one or two things about black holes).

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