News has a short attention span for juicy subjects, much shorter for complex, "boring" subjects. Especially ones that continue to be refined indefinitely. That's what happened to it. Doesn't have much to do with what is still happening to it in academia and research.
this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2025
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On a tangent, I appreciate this bit in Daniel Whiteson's answer:
"I’m not a fan of categorizing things as 'science' or 'not science,' because who knows what nerdy curiosity will lead to a discovery?"
And also in Thomas Van Riet's answer:
"People say that without experiment we cannot call one theory better than another. That is plain wrong. There are many consistency checks, which are ridiculously hard to pass. Can you compute black hole entropy? String theorists were able to compute it in very idealized circumstances and reproduced Hawking’s famous formula for black hole entropy!"
You'll sometimes see flat earthers, creationists, etc. taking a textbook definition of the Scientific Method, claim that anything that doesn't do that is "not science", and therefore wrong. Except that's not at all how it works. The important part is gathering data to support your claims. That data could be experimental, but it could also be observational.
string theory lied to us and now science communication is hard : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kya_LXa_y1E
TL;DW: it never was a good theory and the majority of physicists stopped caring about a long time ago because of that
“To distract me from going into science, I'm gonna play a game while recording [/talking].”
lol wut
Starts to talk physics/specifics anyway…
Collier is the bomb. I love her videos.
Interviewer: Physicists, why is string theory dead?
Physicists: It isn't
End of article
Eh, the responses are a bit more varied, ranging from "we have very low confidence, because it did not correctly predict several things" to "it's the best unifying theory we have, by quite a bit".
In my opinion, worth a read for folks interested in string theory...
And don’t forget the “we’re doing great but we don’t expect to have testable predictions for another 950 years or so” guy.
That was a disheartening read. Holy fuck.
Non-falsifiability and Brian Greene happened.