Man, even *thinking* about that scum-sucking bottom-feeder makes my blood boil...

...But about String Theory. I'm in the skeptic's camp as well, and oddly enough it was Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe" which put me there. (Prior to that, I didn't know enough to form an opinion of it).

My feeling is that string theory -- at least in the beginning -- was on to *something*. I suspect that the characteristics of various particle groups being predicted by the Eular Beta Function isn't a coincidence. Nor do I think that the concept of additional dimensions is inherently too complex to be valid. While a valid Theory of Everything should be *elegant*, I don't think that it should necessarily appear *simple* to our very limited monkey-brains. It's an awfully complex universe out there, and a simple explaination for it shouldn't be presumed.

However, the huge and absurd and fatal flaw in String Theory is that in trying to explain the apparently arbitrary constants of the standard model as the result of resonant frequencies on alternate-dimensional strings, the theory requires a large number of dimensions WHOSE PROPERTIES ARE THEMSELVES ARBITRARY. In other words, the annoyingly arbitrary parts of the universe have simply been moved from the observable (the properties of fundamental particles) to the unobservable (other dimensions) -- which strikes me as a distastfully cheap trick with smoke and mirrors. Even if true, it's a solution which is so inelegant as to be thoroughly unsatisfying. If the properties of those invisible dimensions were not arbitrary, but the result of some elegant mathematical concordance, I might be able to buy it. But so far, every M-Theory that I've heard of has been the product of painfully arbitrary manipulations to get it to produce acceptable results.