Maggie's Farm

Regarding the article, it is significant that all of the retracted and irreproducilble papers are experimental.

Re: The Crisis at the Edge of Physics.

A number of physicists claim there is no crisis, there are just confused physicists. See, eg, Lubos Motl:

http://motls.blogspot.com

Motl argues that most of the phoney crisis is due to people who in fact reject quantum mechanics and insist on a classical, nonquantum, view of reality, with particles that have real positions and momenta that are independent of observation.

They prattle on about the "mysterious collapse of the wave function," which on analysis seems to be a simple confusion about the meaning of probabilties.

They claim that quantum mechanics and relativity are incompatible. That's true enough if you mean Einstein's relativity, which is the last fruit of classical, 19th Century physics. Einstein himself was the last great 19th physicist. But, string theory although incomplete already shows signs that it provides a true quantum gravity, and not just a "quantized" version of General Relativity.

And string theory continues to integrate all sorts of things central to modern physics. It does predict undetected particles, and some may be more massive than the LHC can produce. However, some of it predictions may be found in the next year or so, as the LHC reaches full power.

String theory is almost certainly correct. We will see it more clearly as it continues to progress, and leave the 19th Century physicists behind.