re: #77 EPR-radar

Some recent popularizations have been skeptical on the subject.

E.g., The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin

Not Even Wrong by Peter Woit

More seriously, the possibility of a link to experiment appears to be getting increasingly remote. Experimental evidence of physics beyond the standard model just isn’t being seen, as far as I know (counting the Higgs as part of the standard model). This is a problem for all theorists, of course, not just for string theory.

While I agree that there is no clear experimental approach to it yet, the hypothesis, to the best of my knowledge, can not be discounted either.

The issues with string theory are well known and the string folks will be the first to tell you them. One of the biggest is that there are so far, six string theories (as in mathematical formulations, well 5 and one is a type of SUSY) that fit everything else we know. We do not know which of those universes is the actual one.

However, those formulations all shed a lot of very compelling light on other things we do know or at least give a consistent mechanism to other things we were pretty certain had to be true. A discussion of black hole entropy is not for here - but a number of Hawking’s calculations are supported by a string framework.

All that said, the universe is a tricky place. No one responsible is willing to say that the hierarchy problem won’t raise its head (i.e. no surprises between here and the string scale). No one is claiming that the formulations we have now are the formulation.

But, there is a very good chance that either the string theories or something mathematically equivalent to them in the appropriate limit will turn out to be a good piece of the picture.