Is there a good summary of the content? This sounds like a presenter who knows what they are talking about, and I'm preinclined to be interested in this since for a long time as an interested amateur I disliked how significant parts of string theory seemed untestable (and thus in my opinion unscientific), but hourlong videos are the least efficient way to communicate information out there.
I watched the video, and have been interested in this space as an amateur for a while. It's not worth the hour, would be great in a focused 10 min vid.
The crux of the video is that string theory isn't really a theory since it's untestable, and that string physicists/authors have overrepresented its utility for decades. She goes through a brief history, and the broken promises (each decade: a new revolution from string theory is just a decade away).
But the arguments around the public erosion of trust in physics involve a few cherry-picked examples that and ignore the wider context around academic research and issues communicating science to the public, especially scientific sensationalism from media outlets (eg God Particle). She argues that the string theorists have played into this and should have been more media savvy in the past, but is relatively unscathing of other non-string theory physicists.
It just gets ranty at the end, "the string theorists lied to us for 30 years" gets repeated a lot.
The tl;dr, as I've gleaned from what I've seen so far, is that string theory is a failed theory with a good PR department that has been saying "we're on a cusp of Einstein relativity-like revolution in physics" for about 40 years now. And the fact that the recipients of these PR have started to realize they've been duped is causing the general public to embark on an unwarranted backlash against other branches of physics.
It is not really failed. It is more like a mathematical tools being forced to be the physic law. Think of it like Newton law without knowing relativity. You probably keep modifying to match the relativistic result. Instead of finding Einstein GR, that modified Newtonian equations grew into incredibly complex to match reality. Then declared it is so because it looks so nice and symmetrical instead of having actual physical result supporting it. Currently ST is so complex nothing in it can be proven and yet supporters declare it can "explain" all other theories/result. And each time it cant, they just up the dimension to show the math now corrected to match the physical result. It is no longer science at this point...and it is pity so many bright minds wasted their lives enhancing this branch of physics (or at this point more correct to say mathematics).
She bounces around a bit between characterizing it as a not-a-theory versus a failed theory. It's a failed theory in the sense that the framework hasn't yielded any predictive theories nor has it provided a simpler way to understand existing theories.
It provides simpler calculations in some cases. That's why physicists today elect to use the standard model, string theory, or brane theory depending upon whichever yields the easiest calculation for the problem they're trying to solve. One thing of note is that there's never been a calculation that hasn't agreed with observation. We simply have three different models that all work equally well. I think it's dishonest to not point that out.
Newton law once explained everything human observation could see. It was perfect then and still is perfect today for subliminal speed. String theory never succeeded to explain any observation whatsoever. So this looks like an unfair comparison to me. Unfair for Newton.
I think I watched it at 2x speed, and it was only 30m.
I'm gonna say it's worth the hour, and I think you might be falling into the trap of media communication about science. If something is worth communicating to a lay-person, it's worth going into detail about to avoid the exact pitfalls that you might fall into if you were to digest a 10m version of it. If you don't want to watch the 60m version of it, I would say "stay out of the discussion on it."
I will always, 100% of the time, downvote a user who explicitly states they haven't read/watched the linked content. There is never a reason to comment on content you haven't seen. It's a waste of your time and ours.
I disagree; if you can’t fully consume something in ten minutes it’s not lazy to ask for a tldr - I have watched this video fully and while entertaining it could have been 15 min or less and not lost anything.
they didn't state that. more likely they watched part of it. how else would they get the impression that the presenter knows what she is talking about? i watched 10 minutes before giving up, but can make the same observation now.
