20 years of wasted time. Woit's alternative to string is to try to approach unification from looking at some of the open questions in the Standard Model, particularly why weak charge is only possessed by left-handed spinors.
But I just don't think he's serious enough about it, and there is the risk that - yes - superstring has dominated the scene for 40 years, yet the "chief defender of objectivity" for half that time has been Woit, who is too elitist to host any blue-skies open debates on short-cuts, anomalies and epicycles in the standard model (yes, its full of them), and how to simplify the mathematical framework to allow physical intuition to grasp new physical approaches. Instead, Woit seems - as a math instructor - to assume the standard model is 100% kosher (apart maybe from chiral electroweak symmetry breaking details). That's precisely where superstring goes wrong. If the correct theory is simply a logical superset which includes the standard model, then progress and unification would have been rapidly achieved 40 years ago. It's clearly more subtle than existing efforts have assumed. It's time to go back to basics and question everything.
But I just don't think he's serious enough about it, and there is the risk that - yes - superstring has dominated the scene for 40 years, yet the "chief defender of objectivity" for half that time has been Woit, who is too elitist to host any blue-skies open debates on short-cuts, anomalies and epicycles in the standard model (yes, its full of them), and how to simplify the mathematical framework to allow physical intuition to grasp new physical approaches. Instead, Woit seems - as a math instructor - to assume the standard model is 100% kosher (apart maybe from chiral electroweak symmetry breaking details). That's precisely where superstring goes wrong. If the correct theory is simply a logical superset which includes the standard model, then progress and unification would have been rapidly achieved 40 years ago. It's clearly more subtle than existing efforts have assumed. It's time to go back to basics and question everything.