Comment by cauch

The argument that I'm making was not at all discussed in the video. Can you point to the exact time in the video this argument is made?

It looks like you just took a video with someone defending string theory and simply concluded that we have the same arguments.

My point is that you could build a similar panel (with some eminent physicists pro and con investing in the theory) about more or less all cutting-edge theories. This is just a normal situation to have. Some people don't think string theory is a good use of time, others think it is. The video you presented is just that. It does not demonstrate that having this situation is specific to string theory.

But on the core of the video, I don't find it very interesting. It's a shame because I personally find string theory overrated and I don't like it much, but it is sad to see that there is no good arguments against it.

In the video, Penrose's argument was just "I disagree on some aspect and I don't find it elegant". Big whoop, this happens all the time. He also admits that he does not know enough about it, and when he brings specifics, Greene reacts as if the objections were trivial things he and his colleagues also thought about but realised were not in fact a problem.

Not sure what to say about Weinstein. He basically ends up saying what I just said in my previous paragraph here: Penrose did not provide much argument, just "I don't find it beautiful". That being said, it's a bit strange to see him there as he has a bad reputation as a scientist (not sure I should go into details, but he claimed to have a terrific unified theory for years, TGU, and when he finally explained it publicly, the whole scientific community saw it was nonsense, which is not something you expect for someone who is reliable when talking about science). It does not mean that he may not have good points sometimes, but having pseudoscientists presented as scientists on the panel is not the best.

In fact, the situation is a bit like in open source free software: you have always people saying "you should not work on that, you should work on this instead". People working on KDE are "wasting everyone's time" for not working on Gnome and inversely. People working on a new software when alternatives exist are "bad for the community". And people using a given development paradigm are "fundamentally wrong" according to people who like the other paradigm.

So, in fact, another way of putting my argument: string theory is not particularly bad, what we see around it is in fact so common that you even see it around KDE vs Gnome.