Some physicists hope to see string theory win hearts and minds by default, by being the only microscopic description of gravity thatвЂ™s logically consistent. The article does get right the motivations behind these claims: If the authors of this paper had found that the string theory bound was different than their bound, they could have written a paper arguing that they had finally found a way to falsify string theory (measure the coefficient, if it was found to be in the region allowed by general principles but not by string theory, string theory would be falsified). ItвЂ™s more accurately evidence for the usual problem with string theory: itвЂ™s consistent with anything. This is taken as evidence for the вЂњinevitabilityвЂќ of string theory, but I donвЂ™t see this at all. Much is made of the fact that in string theory one can get any value of the coefficient consistent with the bound. The only relation to string theory is that a string theory calculation of this correction coefficient satisfies the bound (as expected, since string theory is supposed to satisfy the assumed basic principles). The topic is graviton scattering in maximally supersymmetric theories in ten flat space-time dimensions, and the argument is that the basic principles of supersymmetry, Lorentz invariance, analyticity and unitarity imply a bound on the coefficient of the lowest order correction term. ItвЂ™s not about string theory or about conventional quantum gravity in four space-time dimensions. The paper at issue is this one which appeared on the arXiv nearly a year ago. вЂњThis goes along the lines that string theory is unique.вЂќ вЂњOne of the questions is if string theory is the unique theory of quantum gravity or not,вЂќ she said. Irene Valenzuela, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Autonomous University of Madrid, agreed. вЂњAnd I think this is a great first step towards that. The hope is that you could prove the inevitability of string theory using these methods,вЂќ said David Simmons-Duffin, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. The article starts off with quotes such as: The result matches string theory perfectly. In a quest to map out a quantum theory of gravity, researchers have used logical rules to calculate how much EinsteinвЂ™s theory must change. Today Quanta magazine has more of this sort of thing, with an article whose title shows up on the web as A Correction to Einstein Hints At Evidence for String Theory. There the authors write:ДЄ crowning achievement for the celestial holography program would be for it to determine concretely whether string theories are the only consistent theories of (asymptotically flat) quantum gravity. One place I noticed this is in this recent white paper about the interesting topic of celestial holography, which has little to do with string theory. The arguments of this kind IвЂ™ve seen make no sense to me, but they are gaining in influence. This situation has lead to a recent trend in string theory research: instead of looking for positive evidence for string theory, try to find an argument that resistance is hopeless, string theory is the only theory possible. In recent years though, after decades of no progress towards a consistent M-theory, string theorists have essentially given up on this hope. This final theory would be untestable, but it would self-consistently explain why one could not hope to test it. For many decades the hope was that a consistent answer to the unknown question of what string theory really is (often called вЂњM-theoryвЂќ) would be found, and that would provide a final end to the subject of fundamental physics. With particle physics abandoned, theorists have focused on quantum gravity as the only legitimate issue to study. Taken together, the consensus of leading particle theorists has become that thereвЂ™s no point to trying to do any better than the Standard Model, with the only answer available to anyone who asks questions about higher energies is вЂњstring theory, whatever that isвЂќ. In addition, Weinberg is also credited with the anthropic CC argument, taken as evidence for the otherwise unobservable string theory landscape. One can watch the recent talks here on Steven Weinberg and his legacy to get a good idea of what this current consensus looks like: you canвЂ™t test string theory since string effects occur at much too high an energy scale, and Weinberg showed that such things will just look like the Standard Model sort of QFT at observable energies. Recently there have been many fewer such claims, with consensus in the string theory community that there is now no hope to get a prediction from string theory about observable physics at accessible energies. For many years, editions here of This WeekвЂ™s Hype were mainly devoted to bogus claims that someone had found a way to get a testable prediction out of string theory or other вЂњevidence for string theoryвЂќ.

Woit not even wrong