Could String theory / CFT be classified as pseudoscience in its current form?

Question

Richard Feynman was saying that those theories were dishonest. Those were selling sweet story of unique compactification, supersymmetry which never breaks, that they can predict parameters of Standart Model (did not happen). And so on.

As I see it, String/CFT is effectively became huge chunk of pseudoscience. It is not pure astrology (which makes false things), but it does not make anything useful either, so there is no truth out of those theories.

In terms of thermodynamics, String/CFT is only increasing entropy and heating the economy by burning dollars.

The reason behind that is that String/CFT does not have any real task, so it is the process purely because of the process itself. This was made possible only because of Computer Algebra Systems (CAS), which are used more widely now. As the numerous instagrams became the place of digital dust of images, the String/CFT became the place of CAS digital dust, graveyard of infinite formulas which by itselves have zero meaning because those are not even generated by people.

When I was in String theory research 20 years ago, it was different, better. People still had hope.

The phenomenon of String/CFT as I see it in last 15 years is purely sociological, as the CAS have today wider spread with more features, this features are also inherited by String/CFT.

Am I absolutely right, is there something to correct? I know many physicists saying in real life that String/CFT were alive in the past, but now is pure pseudoscience. Ofc they are not saying that in papers, to not spoil their reputation, because plenty of financial figures were spent on it.

PS. In other words, I am asking What if theory does not claim to be verified at all. Is it pseudoscience then? Some crazy "cold fission" pseudoscientists are not claiming that their ideas are wrong/right, they just claim that "we cannot yet understand this or that". Ofc we know that "cold fission" is pseudoscience because it violates the laws of energy and density of energy in nuclear physics.

PS2. My question is different from "is String Theory a joke" type of questions. I did not say anywhere that "there were no results at all". Ofc there were some results, but any application came from mathematical carcass and not from new physics. Also all results were made before year 2000, and only few results were made in 00-ies, and even less were made in 10-ies decade.

So with every decade making less results, but more papers and bloated state of this field, I think it's safe to say that it became pseudoscience. Or is that my criteria of pseudoscience is bad and requires to be corrected??? That is what I ask.

How many years of very poor production of theory is required to accept that theory is not working anymore? We knew this exactly with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment killing the Ether theory, but what if we don't have this one devastating blow, what is exactly our criteria, i.e. in this particular case of slow death of String/CFT.

PS3. I am concerned about physics. Not how good mathematical results it had, and not what philosophy of science is. I have very clear understanding of what physics is. Is there something what makes new results by explaining experiments or not? I don't see the single definitive prediction by String/CFT posed today, which means that it does not pretend to be a physics theory. If there is no definitive prediction which could be verified, that means that theory is not verifiable, and it's not a theory actually. So I think I got my answer in a form of absence of answer, which means that there is no worth of String/CFT as a physics theory today.

Let me reformulate a question: Is there any worth of String/CFT as a physics theory today, i.e. an existence of single definitive prediction based on which we could definitely say that such theory could be approved or discarded and on which all physicists working in that field agree.

You state all the things already known to me. That String/CFT makes good math. I know it makes. That String/CFT had some results in the past. I know it also. Ether theory has also some results in the past, in times when Maxwell wrote his equations and physicists were trying to explain the electromagnetic wave.

Answer 1

In my opinion you have a very basic misunderstanding of what theories in physics are, and what relationship physics theories have with science.

Physics is a science that studies nature using measurements and observations and mathematical models to fit these measurements and observations and predict what new data would be expected. The theories impose new axioms in addition to the mathematical axioms, called laws, postulates, principles, and choose from the mathematical solutions those that fit the data and are predictive. When predictions are validated one says the theory is validated. This means that theories of physics are a tool in this study of physics as a science. A tool cannot be called a science, whether pseudo or not.

Since it is a mathematical tool one can check for various consistencies within the theory, but if it stands , the same as with pure mathematics, it cannot be called pseudo anything .

Afaik nobody has found a contradiction in string theory that would invalidate it as a model. Your chip on the shoulder seems to be that the progress is slow and, I suppose it is not predictive.

The reason particle physicists take string theory seriously is because it has not been falsified, it allows to mathematical embed the standard model of physics in the excitation of the string and membranes, and it includes quantization of gravity, sought after by cosmologists. Phenoenologists have made predictions sought after at the LHC, unsuccessfully uo to now, but hope springs eternal for experimental physicists. For example if supersymmetric particles are found, it would be on the road to validation of string theory, in addition that it can embed the standard model.

How many years of very poor production of theory is required to accept that theory is not working anymore?

It is an open market, as long as there are people interested to work on string theories.

Regge theory was the fashion when I was doing my thesis. It fitted data well, and it has a come back with string theories. Those fits may be added up to a validation of string theory together with the embedding of the standard model. Regge poles were not a pseudo whatnot when nobody was interested any longer on them, and the same will happen to string theory if it is not progressing in its goals. That there are many people working on string theory means that there is still hope of a theory of everything emerging from it. Otherwise the majority of theorists working on it would go a different direction, and it will peter out.

Lets hope they manage to propose a specific theory or two ( out of the thousands) to test at the data of future colliders.