It's important to avoid conflating string theorists with all theoretical physicists. Plenty of people in particle physics either don't believe in string theory or don't think it can make useful predictions any time soon, even if it were assumed true. Furthermore, the vast majority of people called "string theorists" don't even work on traditional string theory day to day, but on more concrete ideas that have been partly inspired by it, such as holography and amplitudes.
This needs to be pointed out because there is a huge narrative bias out there. Science popularizers will endlessly frame things like "this whole field has no idea what they're doing, and only I, the brave contrarian outsider, can see through the fraud", even though they're only pointing out things that are already well known in the field. These narratives are completely wrong, but uncritically eaten up by people who think of themselves as contrarians.
Despite what the current top comment claims, you're not reading this article about Horgan because he was the first to think string theory would have trouble making predictions. Physicists have made this criticism since the beginning. Feynman pointed it out continually, and Glashow, one of the architects of the Standard Model, tried to bar string theorists from Harvard for the same reason.
You're reading Horgan's take, and not Feynman's or Glashow's, because Horgan is popular, and that's because he puts all his energy into expanding his popular reach. Only nonphysicists can do that, because physicists spend the majority of their time doing, well, physics.
This needs to be pointed out because there is a huge narrative bias out there. Science popularizers will endlessly frame things like "this whole field has no idea what they're doing, and only I, the brave contrarian outsider, can see through the fraud", even though they're only pointing out things that are already well known in the field. These narratives are completely wrong, but uncritically eaten up by people who think of themselves as contrarians.
Despite what the current top comment claims, you're not reading this article about Horgan because he was the first to think string theory would have trouble making predictions. Physicists have made this criticism since the beginning. Feynman pointed it out continually, and Glashow, one of the architects of the Standard Model, tried to bar string theorists from Harvard for the same reason.
You're reading Horgan's take, and not Feynman's or Glashow's, because Horgan is popular, and that's because he puts all his energy into expanding his popular reach. Only nonphysicists can do that, because physicists spend the majority of their time doing, well, physics.