
Originally Posted by
somfooleishfool
I actually did know this

. I watched on youtube an interview on the guy who had to give a speech after Witten had just announced this and he was real bummed because of how big of a shadow Witten had just made haha.
It was a pretty famous speech by Witten, a lot of physicists reckon it lead to the "2nd Superstring theory revolution". However, the speech itself was not groundbreaking- all Witten said was that "there is a way to unify the 5 fundamental theories within superstring theory" (or something along those lines), he didn't actually come up with any ideas to how this would happen- he just stated it, and everybody jumped on the bandwagon.
In my view, this whole string theory thing has been a bit of a mess within physics- stooping down to the level of imagining things and "creating" extra dimensions whilst fiddling with free constants to try to make the theory fit with any observations and current accepted theories (such as GR). That's not the way physics should work, there has to be some sort of experimental and observational basis to put the theories on- rather than the opposite way around, as has been in a lot of cases with string theory. String theory has had virtually no experimental testing/analysis and so is incredibly unreliable- yet the devout string theorists hold onto it claiming that it "must be right as it is so beautiful"; that's how pseudoscientists speak, not proper scientists, and this sort of attitude should never be had in the field of theoretical physics especially.
Anyway, who knows? String theory could end up being correct, but as far as I'm concerned the evidence points in the opposite direction. I'd even go as far to say that string theory has "prohibited" the revolution of theoretical physics- before the 1980s it was ablaze with new discoveries and had truly been a revolution for 200 years or so, now it is a slowly advancing field with little progress every decade. So, I think physicists (and I plan to become one) should be more careful in years to come as not to get "stuck" on a particular theory because it feels right for them; other possibilities must also be taken into consideration- for example, quantum technicolour theory or loop quantum gravity; however unlikely they may seem to be to start off with, work must be done on each of these contenders for "the theory of everything" in order to gain some more insight into what vital things, in these theories, that we're actually looking for.