First in a prospective series of my own versions of the best arguments for conclusions I don't personally share. I'm supposed to stick to statements that I believe are true, even if I don't think they warrant the conclusion. The idea is to probe presuppositions, put our ideas to the test, and of course to implicitly diss the less-good arguments for things we don't believe. And who knows, maybe we'll come up with arguments that are so great we'll change our minds! (By slipping into the royal "we" I'm encouraging others to play along.) So here we go: the best argument I can think of for why research on string theory is a waste of time.
Traditionally, the greatest progress in physics has come through an intense interaction between theory and experiment. We have learned new things when experiments were good enough to bring us data that didn't fit into ...
