in the case of string theory, the fact that it predicts
Hmm, my outsider impression is that there’s in fact a myriad “string theories”, all of them predicting everything we observe, but with no way to experimentally discern the correct one among them for the foreseeable future, which I have understood to be the main criticism. Is this broad-strokes picture fundamentally mistaken?
There are a large number of “string vacua” which contain particles and interactions with the quantum numbers and symmetries we call the standard model, but (1) they typically contain a lot of other stuff that we haven’t seen (2) the real test is whether the constants (e.g. masses and couplings) are the same as observed, and these are hard to calculate (but it’s improving).
Hmm, my outsider impression is that there’s in fact a myriad “string theories”, all of them predicting everything we observe, but with no way to experimentally discern the correct one among them for the foreseeable future, which I have understood to be the main criticism. Is this broad-strokes picture fundamentally mistaken?
There are a large number of “string vacua” which contain particles and interactions with the quantum numbers and symmetries we call the standard model, but (1) they typically contain a lot of other stuff that we haven’t seen (2) the real test is whether the constants (e.g. masses and couplings) are the same as observed, and these are hard to calculate (but it’s improving).