In 1968, Gabriele Veneziano discovered that the Euler beta function described certain features of the strong nuclear force. Within two years, Nambu, Nielsen, and Susskind recognised that Veneziano's formula described the dynamics of a relativistic string. String theory was born.
Fifty-eight years later, the programme has not produced a single confirmed experimental prediction.
The Record
- 1984: Green and Schwarz show anomaly cancellation in 10 dimensions — the "first superstring revolution." String theory captures the field.
- 1995: Witten proposes M-theory, unifying five string theories in 11 dimensions — the "second revolution."
- 1997: Maldacena's AdS/CFT correspondence — over 23,000 citations, the most influential result in theoretical physics in a generation.
- 2000: Bousso and Polchinski demonstrate the string landscape — approximately possible vacuum states.
- 2012-present: The LHC finds the Higgs boson but no supersymmetric partners, ruling out the simplest SUSY models that string theory predicted.
The sequence is instructive. String theory initially predicted a cosmological constant of zero. The universe accelerates (positive cosmological constant). The theory was modified to accommodate this via the landscape. vacua. Any observation is consistent. No observation can falsify.
The Lakatos Diagnosis
Imre Lakatos distinguished between progressive and degenerating research programmes. A progressive programme generates novel predictions that are subsequently confirmed. A degenerating programme accommodates anomalies after the fact, adjusting parameters to absorb each new surprise.
By this criterion, string theory is degenerating. It predicted SUSY at LHC energies — not found. It predicted zero cosmological constant — wrong. Each failure was absorbed by parameter adjustment, not by genuine prediction.
What Consumed the Resources
As Lee Smolin documented in The Trouble with Physics, string theory captured the hiring pipeline. Positions went to string theorists. Funding went to string theory. Alternatives — loop quantum gravity, causal set theory, emergent gravity approaches — were marginalised. The institutional machinery reproduced the programme through normal academic selection.
The ether framework, documented in the companion monograph, addresses the same fundamental question (quantum gravity) from the opposite direction: if gravity is emergent from a medium, quantising it is a category error. The "quantum gravity problem" dissolves.
The full analysis is in Chapter 13: The Dead End — free to read online.