INTRO (excerpts): Curt Jaimungal has a piece out, an interview with Lenny Susskind, with the title The Crisis in String Theory is Worse Than You Think…. Some of what Susskind has to say is the same as in his recent podcast with Lawrence Krauss (discussed here). These days, Susskind sometimes sounds like Peter Woit:
We live in the wrong kind of world to be described by string theory. No physicist has ever won a big prize for string theory. I can tell you with absolute certainty that it is not the real world that we live in. So we need to start over.
(interesting that Susskind seems to think the “Breakthrough Prize” is not a “big prize”, maybe because he’s one of the few well-known string theorists who hasn’t gotten one).Susskind says he himself is working on trying to extend string theory to something different which will work in dS space, not just AdS, but he agrees with my claim that this is something the field has essentially given up on:
I actually don’t know anybody who is working, striving to try to expand the theory into either de Sitter space, which is not supersymmetric, or just more generally into an expanded version of the theory. Older people worked on it in the past. They worked on something called spontaneous breaking of supersymmetry. Don’t worry about what it means. It just means the theory wouldn’t be supersymmetric, and they failed. Now, that’s not a criticism of them. I worked on it, and I failed. That’s not a criticism of anybody, but it’s a fact that there is no precise theory which is not supersymmetric.
That is intolerable, in a sense. It can’t stay that way. We have to describe our world. That’s our purpose, and as I said, I don’t know anybody who’s actually working on that. If you were to send out a message to all the world’s theoretical physicists, anybody working on a generalization of string theory, you’d probably find some yeses, probably mostly among older people, and somehow we have to change this.