No, but I'm reading this - "The Elegant Universe": http://www.amazon.com/Elegant-Universe-Superstrings-Dimensions-Ultimate/dp/0375708111/sr=1-1/qid=1161364958/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-9630322-3993533?ie=UTF8&s=books
Wonder how much they agree?

Well, I think those are probably totally contradictory. I watched the PBS series on "The Elegant Universe" and it seems to be completely about string theory and why they see that as a path to discovering a comprehensive universal theory. This book seems to be about why string theory is a dead-end.

Interesting. Perhaps I will have to read this one next. Ow, I can feel my poor brain hurting already - it's enough just to wrap my brain around string theory and then to suddenly disprove it.... my head might well explode. We better go see the movie first. Could get messy.

It's not an issue of proving or disproving, it's a deeper issue of Baconian empricism (inductive reasoning) vs. Pythagorean thought (deductive reasoning). To actually understand string theory well enough to mean anything would require a reasonably deep understanding (PhD level?) of existing physical theories anyways. Intuition is nice for explaining concepts but terrible for proving things :)

Most of these popular-crossover books and theories remind me of Herman Hesse's nobel prize winning book "The Glass Bead Game", where he describes the Age of Feuilleton, "an intellectually superficial and decadent period, when middle brow journalism replaced serious reading and reflection" (to quote wikipedia)

Kutta, interesting points. I'm certainly not a PhD and cannot understand the deeper facets of the research that has been acheived in this area. What strikes me as intersting, however, is that human beings can model very sophisticated material - to a point. Relativity is useful - to a point. String theory is useful - to a point. I look at the universal theory of everything as a bit of a Quixotic quest to reconcile man-made abstractions that is doomed to fail. Others have believed they have solved the world's equations before, we always have a long ways to go.

While I am certain there is a lot of tripe out there trying to make people feel smarter than they actually are, I just want to read an opposing viewpoint to the elegant universe and get an idea of the high-level debates which are raging.

Many of these books depict the "debate" as something more than it really is, mostly to sell copies. I think these books also overestimate the concepts of "scientific consensus" and certainty.

I should start by saying that I'm not a physicist, and the most advanced form of physics I ever formally studied was Quantum Mechanics (with a *very* brief introduction to perturbation theory). As I understand it, string theory (particularly the "supersymmetric" part) was originally developed as a mathematical abstraction to help with certian higher-dimensional problems common in the standard model of physics. In terms of a formal abstract algebra definition, it originally defined a mathematical "group" of transforms.

However, many of the books (whether pro- or anti-stringtheory) seem to portray it as some elegant theory to solve all of the worlds problems, when it's really just a perturbative (e.g. approximating) mathematical model for problems at various energy levels. If it can match the standard model of physics perfectly and _then some_, then it's useful, and if not, then I guess it wasn't so useful after all. But in the end, it's just math, and it shouldn't be seriously romanticized in the way that wormholes, blackholes, and faster-than-light travel have been (otherwise we're just committing crimes of pseudo-science).

But yeah...the high-level debates are really more a matter of a bunch of details here and there. Last I checked, there was no real war in the scientific community over string theory to the extent that there is a war in the public mind about Creationism vs ID vs Evolution (which, might I add, has no corresponding disagreement amongst scientists whatsoever)