I like Loop Quantum Gravity, if only because I really enjoy reading Carlo Rovelli's stuff and listening to his talks, but it's really not going any better than

I like Loop Quantum Gravity, if only because I really enjoy reading Carlo Rovelli's stuff and listening to his talks, but it's really not going any better than String Theory is. Smolin's not wrong in ST getting too many resources, but every indication we have is that the competitors seem to have all of the exact same issues. We have no idea how to test them, their predictions are often wrong and require bolting on revisions, etc. If anything, that grant money and brainpower should likely be redirected to totally different fields where we can actually make progress. Particle physics is in a really weird place. I'm a layperson, but it seems to me we're in a position where either our technology is extremely far off from being able to collect the data we need, or we've missed something very fundamental in our approach, and it's going to take a major rethinking to figure anything out. I am not optimistic that we're going to make any significant headway here in my lifetime. Though, as a layperson my opinion on all of this isn't worth the electricity used by my computer when writing it.