Brian Greene is still chasing Einstein's Dream

Peter Woit trashes a Brian Greene Wash. Post op-ed. Woit emphasizes the failures of string theory, but I want to point out how much foolishness is based on chasing Einstein's dreams.

Decades later, string theory continues its march toward Einstein’s dream

Forty years ago this month, the physics community was electrified by a remarkable paper that hinted at the realization of Albert Einstein’s long-held dream: a unified theory of physical reality. The new approach, called string theory, captured the attention of researchers worldwide, as its elegant mathematics offered the potential to reconcile the two most successful yet conflicting frameworks in physics: Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which governs the vast structures of the cosmos where gravity rules, and quantum mechanics, which governs particles populating the subatomic world. ...

The application concerns two papers that Einstein wrote in the spring of 1935. One analyzed “entanglement,” an iconic quality of quantum physics in which the behavior of two distant particles can be so tightly choreographed, it’s as if they have a secret connection bridging the space between them. Einstein famously called this connection “spooky.” ...

Although Einstein published these papers in the span of two months, he considered them completely unrelated. ...

But the duality between Einstein’s two 1935 papers would suggest that quantum mechanics and general relativity are already deeply connected — no need for them to marry — so our challenge will be to fully grasp their intrinsic relationship.

Which would mean that Einstein, without realizing it, may have had the key to unification nearly a century ago. ...

Einstein’s math suggested the big bang, black holes, dark energy and gravitational waves — all consequences that Einstein, who was a cautious revolutionary (human nature, again) considered too exotic to be true.

String theory has produced some interesting math, but no physics. This essay is mostly about Einstein, but he did not even believe in a lot of it. He was not a mathematician, and probably would not have liked string theory.

I am all in favor of discovering new mathematics, but that was not Einstein's dream.

String theory, as Greene describes it, has nothing to do with science. It is disconnected with experiment or explaining natural phenomena.

I believe that Einstein has been a bad influence on Physics. He did some good work, but he seems to be mainly idolized for his supposed dreams about mathematizing a unified field theory. Nothing good has come out of chasing that dream.

Greene is smart enough to know that his essay is nonsense. He is just plugging his book. The new media have no interest in mathematical advances. The math coming out of string theory is hard to explain. To sell physics research, it has to be a new discovery, or it has to be an Einstein essay. He could not get this essay published, if he removed the Einstein nonsense.