That's arguably what String Theory is good for, producing interesting, entertaining, and possibly even useful math. What it seems to fail at is making realistically testable predictions about nature that can't be matched or exceeded by simpler competing theories.
Hey do you want to hear about this cool new result in maths? Let's just speedrun a graduate course in all the prerequisites!
(I more or less do have the background to read these things, but it's super off-putting to start the article about a crazy new proof from a Fields medallist with an introduction to manifolds.)
Score one more for CAM (computer assisted math) and automated proving tools.
In a world where your academic colleagues will only pay attention to your paper if it comes with a Lean or Coq proof (or at least an MM sketch), we would not be in a "it will take years just to understand the paper" type situation.
The title of the paper would then be: "Birational Invariants from Hodge Structures and Quantum Multiplication: the source code".
Other major offender in that space is Mochizuki's [1] "Inter-universal Teichmüller theory".
The very name of the work uses words that make no sense in common English.
It's 2025, if you want to publish grand claims, and you're initially the only one who understands your own proof, publish a machine readable proof in say MetaMath's .mm format.
String theory inspires a brilliant, baffling new math proof
(quantamagazine.org)185 points by ArmageddonIt 12 December 2025 | 169 comments
Comments
(I more or less do have the background to read these things, but it's super off-putting to start the article about a crazy new proof from a Fields medallist with an introduction to manifolds.)
In a world where your academic colleagues will only pay attention to your paper if it comes with a Lean or Coq proof (or at least an MM sketch), we would not be in a "it will take years just to understand the paper" type situation.
The title of the paper would then be: "Birational Invariants from Hodge Structures and Quantum Multiplication: the source code".
Other major offender in that space is Mochizuki's [1] "Inter-universal Teichmüller theory".
The very name of the work uses words that make no sense in common English.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinichi_Mochizuki