String theory as it is currently understood has a huge number of solutions, called string vacua,[31] and these vacua might be sufficiently diverse to accommodate almost any phenomena we might observe at lower energies.

Forty years, and they still haven’t succeeded in narrowing it down to the point where it says anything *useful*. General relativity and quantum mechanics were complete disciplines after forty years! I know it can sometimes take a while to formulate a scientific theory, but string theorists are taking the piss and every time I think of them I think of this:

“Yes,” declaimed Deep Thought, “I said I’d have to think about it, didn’t I? And it occurs to me that running a programme like this is bound to create an enormous amount of popular publicity for the whole area of philosophy in general. Everyone’s going to have their own theories about what answer I’m eventually to come up with, and who better to capitalize on that media market than you yourself? So long as you can keep disagreeing with each other violently enough and slagging each other off in the popular press, you can keep yourself on the gravy train for life. How does that sound?”

Now, perhaps in the future they will narrow it down some more. Perhaps in the future new experimental techniques will be developed that allow the hardening of some facets of string theory and turn it into something that is legitimately scientific. Right *now*, though, string theory is the mathematical equivalent of me stating “Everything exists”. Technically this describes the state of the universe. Scientifically it carries about as much weight as a noisy fart on a windy day.

One can run contortions to make nearly any idea match reality. At what point has ST’s contortions run beyond merely correcting itself to just being plain absurd.

In the end I think we changed channels to prevent me exploding.