Of course they don’t know whether they’re string theorists! Nobody knows whether theorists are made of strings or not! That’s the whole point of lacking experimental verification!
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Re:Black holes might be defects in spacetime
by runsWphotons on Monday May 22, 2023 @02:02PM
(#36034570)
I find this funny as well. A lot of complaints about all the funding for string theory, but it seems like just funding mathematicians, which is dirt cheap compared to anything else.
> “It’s hard to say really where you should draw the boundary around and say: This is string theory; this is not string theory,” said Douglas Stanford, a physicist at the IAS. “Nobody knows whether to say they’re a string theorist anymore,” said Chris Beem, a mathematical physicist at the University of Oxford. “It’s become very confusing.”
I knew some string people who easily transitioned into other fields (like condensed matter) because the work was similar. I don't personally see it as a huge waste of time, and it's like the least expensive thing to fund.