I quite enjoyed this, it's a nice piece of "inside baseball" for high energy theoretical physics. For those who don't have time to read 20 pages of jargon from another specialty, here's an excerpt from the end of the paper that I think communicates the key point:
"I think that string theory is a wonderful theory. I have a tremendous admiration for the people
that have been able to build it. Still, a theory can be awesome, and physically wrong. The
history of science is full of beautiful ideas that turned out to be wrong. The awe for the math
should not blind us. In spite of the tremendous mental power of the people working in it, in
spite of the string revolutions and the excitement and the hype, years go by and the theory
isn’t delivering physics. All the key problems remain wide open. The connection with reality
becomes more and more remote. All physical predictions derived from the theory have been
contradicted by the experiments. I don’t think that the old claim that string theory is such
a successful quantum theory of gravity holds anymore. Today, if too many theoreticians do
strings, there is the very concrete risk that all this tremendous mental power, the intelligence
of a generation, is wasted following a beautiful but empty fantasy."
I spent a few years during my undergrad working in a high energy experiment lab, and this was a frequently debated subject. If the LHC does find supersymmetry, it will be interesting to see the impact on the current theoretical landscape.
"I think that string theory is a wonderful theory. I have a tremendous admiration for the people that have been able to build it. Still, a theory can be awesome, and physically wrong. The history of science is full of beautiful ideas that turned out to be wrong. The awe for the math should not blind us. In spite of the tremendous mental power of the people working in it, in spite of the string revolutions and the excitement and the hype, years go by and the theory isn’t delivering physics. All the key problems remain wide open. The connection with reality becomes more and more remote. All physical predictions derived from the theory have been contradicted by the experiments. I don’t think that the old claim that string theory is such a successful quantum theory of gravity holds anymore. Today, if too many theoreticians do strings, there is the very concrete risk that all this tremendous mental power, the intelligence of a generation, is wasted following a beautiful but empty fantasy."
I spent a few years during my undergrad working in a high energy experiment lab, and this was a frequently debated subject. If the LHC does find supersymmetry, it will be interesting to see the impact on the current theoretical landscape.