Sorry but I really can't afford to share readers with that particular person who produces so many untrue statements and who parasites on the work of scientists. I've had huge problems with the people who were being sent from that website to my weblog. I apologize if you're not one of these aggressive and extremely ignorant problem-makers but there's no way to distinguish.
The most interesting thing to me is that his ostensible basis for rejecting Woit is purely authoritarian: Woit's publication record is weak and the leading physicist Susskind doesn't like him, therefore he must be a crackpot. Seems likely that the real reason for the rejection is that he finds Woit's skepticism regarding contemporary theoretical physics personally threatening.
I'm somewhat "conflicted" with regards to Susskind. I'm a physicist, but I don't know much about string theory or LQG. As a bystander to the "Not Even Wrong" debate, I agree with Smolin's points about falsification and predictions being an essential feature of a physical theory, thus, on a personal level, I took Smolin's side (').
Then, couple of months ago I found the Susskind lectures on iTunes, watched and enjoyed many of them. (They're aimed at a general engineering audience, but I still found portions such as General Relativity illuminating.) Susskind is clearly a physicist of the highest caliber, the last time I heard such first-class lectures was when I listened to the Feynman MP3s during my freshman year. So on one hand, if Susskind says these ideas have merit, they're probably worth taking a look at. On the other hand, there are so many other interesting areas (in physics and elsewhere) where I feel something tangible could come out of that I am still ignoring string theory for the most part. I should note that I'm not very representative in this regard, as Smolin notes, most theoretical physicists at top U.S. universities are string theorists. It's interesting that here in Hungary, while the graduate school offers some courses on string theory, I don't know anybody pursuing related research. Most theoretical/particle people are doing SM/QCD related stuff, which is clearly a cultural thing here.
(') In reality, falsifications and predictions are a tricky business in physics with people making implicit assumptions, circular logic, estimated error bars, etc. --- I think that non-physicists' view of this is similar to my view about police work based on CSI:NY.
Sorry but I really can't afford to share readers with that particular person who produces so many untrue statements and who parasites on the work of scientists. I've had huge problems with the people who were being sent from that website to my weblog. I apologize if you're not one of these aggressive and extremely ignorant problem-makers but there's no way to distinguish.