String theory has never made a prediction that has come true and gets disproven each time we build a bigger particle accelerator and discover new particles. Like the theory can't even explain basic observations about particle physics and the universe. The String theorists just keep telling everyone that it will work out bro, trust us, give us more funding.
Like the only reason it hasen't been abandoned yet and is still weirdly popular is becuase of the perverse incentives in academics where it pays more to pursue this kind of groundbreaking nonsense than trying to advance the frontier of the established and boring Standard Model. And it's easy to be groundbreaking when you are just making shit up. Just think of the millions in research funding these charlatans have scammed from us. They have played us for absolute fools.
We need to round up all the String theorists and parade them through the streets with dunce caps, Cultural Revolution style. We need to do 70 hour struggle sessions against them until they pass out from exhaustion.
"Particles are actually tiny strings that wiggle" "There are 11 dimensions but you don't notice the extra ones cause their are too small" - Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.
Special Relativity (and by extension, General Relativity) is an example of a theory that was developed perfectly theoretically following Einstein's confusion over whether the speed of light was constant (as in Maxwell's Electromagnetism) or variable (as in Galilean Relativity). People had not systematically observed black holes and Lorentz transformations. So yes, a successful theoretical theory in physics can be developed mathematically. Deal with it.
Edit: other examples from mathematics are imaginary numbers and non-Euclidean geometry, which had no practical application for decades or centuries. Now they are used in engineering and relativistic physics respectively.
Defending string theory ain't it, Einstein's thought experiments were brilliant, but they were also based in a meaningful amount of engagement with the relevant physics that had already been discovered. String theory requires supersymmetry to not require 26 dimensions. 26 dimensional theory is not plausible for our universe. Supersymmetry is all but discredited in 2023. I certainly don't subscribe to it. You need supersymmetry to have a string theory in 10 dimensions that's possibly consistent with known physics, and you also need for it Witten's M-theory. You need to be living in a AntiDeSitter universe to have an AdS/CFT correspondence. Modern theoretical fundamental physics does not fucking work, period. Don't just say deal with it, like a child.
Also, not a great take here. Imaginary numbers were developed in Italy in application to solving the cubic equation in general in a very geometric manner. Important sure, but following from very tangible existing knowledge. Non-Euclidean geometry, similarly, was almost a natural development when you consider that Euclid's parallel postulate had been considering extremely suspect and out of place for centuries. These ideas came from the limitations of the pre-existing applied work. Don't mythicalize science just because no one actually teaches the history of physics and mathematics.
You don't understand the origins of String Theory as well as you think you do if you seriously believe that it was not based on a meaningful amount of engagement with the relevant physics that had already been discovered.
The origins of string theory were a relatively contemporary reexploration of the Kaluza-Klein combination of the relativistic metric with hidden dimensions and electromagnetic theory. But the basic jumping off point of string theory from a QFT can be described as specifically introducing an extra label parameter in addition to the proper time in the formulation that raises time to operator status (as opposed to the more common methods of QFT that lower spatial dimensions to the level of time). An extra dimension for the integrals in your Feynman diagrams that make the infinities a lot easier to tame that pop as divergences in the "1D" theory (Feynman diagram lines in QFT vs Feynman diagram pants in string theories). I don't think that's a particularly good motivating point to develop a theory, and I would go so far as to say it's crass to compare that to Einstein's thought experiments in such a misleading way. Consider that perhaps the landscape of valid string theories that don't describe our universe is so vast because as far as good ideas for guiding a new theory goes, it turns out that that's not such a usefully constraining one. String theory is stupid because there does not exist any meaningful amount of evidence in the known quantum gravity regime that we can access, and nothing that it predicts that turns out to be very useful. Are you going to try to argue to me that I should still think supersymmetry is plausible???