“Lawrence Krauss, a professor of physics and astronomy at Case Western Reserve University, has a reputation for shooting down pseudoscience,” and now he’s shooting down String Theory. From Theory of Anything? Physicist Lawrence Krauss turns on his own:
String theory, he explains, has a catch: Unlike relativity and quantum mechanics, it can’t be tested. That is, no one has been able to devise a feasible experiment for which string theory predicts measurable results any different from what the current wisdom already says would happen. Scientific Method 101 says that if you can’t run a test that might disprove your theory, you can’t claim it as fact. When I asked physicists like Nobel Prize-winner Frank Wilczek and string theory superstar Edward Witten for ideas about how to prove string theory, they typically began with scenarios like, ‘Let’s say we had a particle accelerator the size of the Milky Way …’ Wilczek said strings aren’t a theory, but rather a search for a theory. Witten bluntly added, ‘We don’t yet understand the core idea.’