> it doesn't have the same kind of predictive power that people want (i.e. too much freedom so it can be used to explain anything, not just everything). That's

> it doesn't have the same kind of predictive power that people want (i.e. too much freedom so it can be used to explain anything, not just everything). That's the popsci version that's been disseminated, yes. It's not exactly wrong, but it's misleading. First a bit of background. Quantum field theories like the standard model are effective theories, not fundamental ones. We know we don't know the real high-energy physics, so we treat it as a black box and loosely speaking "average it out" as a new free parameter. This is analogous to how an engineer designing a bridge can ignore the fact that iron has a crystal structure and treat it as a continuum with bulk properties like tensile strength. In reality this having a particular tensile strength is a state, not an intrinsic property, and you could end up with a different tensile strength if you melted the iron and let it resolidify (I'm not a metallurgist, substitute some other material if that's not true for iron), but we can build bridges without knowing that. In the same way, Standard Model is a particular form of "solidified" string theory. It's true that there are many, many, many others, but they're not free parameters in the same way. You can write down perfectly reasonable looking quantum field theories that string theory can't produce, and if our best effective theory was one of them then we would have good reason to reject string theory. But it's not. So the situation we're in is that we have some solid material, and we want to know what a single molecule of it looks like, but we can't see anything other than the bulk properties. What the "string theory is unfalsifiable" crowd is demanding is that whatever molecule we predict have only a few possible crystal structures. And maybe it does. That would be convenient. But sometimes nature inconveniences us: it might be some crazy carbon allotrope. It might be glass.