Following Eric Weinstein’s interview on how String Theory culture has stifled innovation in theoretical physics, longstanding critic of String Theory, Peter Woit, takes aim at the theory itself. He argues that String Theory has become a degenerative research project, becoming increasingly complicated and, at the same time, removed from empirical reality. Even the remaining string theorists of the past have given up on the ontology of strings, as well as the original vision of the theory.

Your book Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Continuing challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics came out in 2006. Could you summarise the main argument against String Theory as put forward in that book?

The story of string theory is rather complicated, so the intent of the book was to fully examine some of those complexities. The main problem with the theory though has always been a simple one: it achieves unification by postulating six or seven unobserved extra dimensions, then tries to explain everything we see in terms of these. The initial hope of 1984-5 was that there would only be a few consistent ways of making those extra dimensions unobservably small, and one of these would give our universe. But all evidence now is that either: