Another article on Smolin and Woit

Scientific American joined the fray...

[Critics claim] string theory is not just untested but untestable, incapable of ever making predictions that can be experimentally checked. [...] There are, in fact, some 10^500 perfectly good M theories, each describing a different physics. The theory of everything, as Smolin puts it, has become a theory of anything.

I have no idea which side of this debate is correct. However, I would prefer to see reasonable debate on the questions as befits proper science. Instead I see the following (to be fair, these comments are all from Motl, but I do not see anything to the contrary from his string theory colleagues) ...

• Sean Carroll has essentially joined Peter Woit and others in their irrational attack against existing high-energy theoretical physics (Carroll actually wrote that he did not agree with Woit, but apparently in Motl's world even allowing that Woit's book has a right to exist is an attack not on him personally but on the entire enterprise of theoretical physics)
  
• semi-official unholy alliance between Cosmic Variance and the anti-science activists (another reference to Carroll)
  
• They're orders of magnitude and decades of education from being able to do something like [presenting an alternative to superstrings]. The only thing that Woit and others offer and share is their hatred against science and a very poor knowledge of the actual problems that are being discussed.
• [Greene's victory in the debate was] because of Brian Greene's virtues, based not only on his superior communication skills and psychological balance but also on his active knowledge of the topics and clean conscience of a real contributor to science. (So anyone with whom Motl disagrees is not only not "a real contributor to science" but is psychologically unbalanced? It is also worth noting that Motl's description of the debate bears VERY little resemblance to the audio.)
• a scientific microbe (referring to Woit)
• the attack is led by people with poor quantitative skills who dislike a careful and detailed technical analysis of the scientific issues [...] This description is primarily about Peter Woit
• Another postmodern diatribe against modern physics and scientific method (about Smolin's book) and bitter emotions and obsolete understanding of high-energy physics (about Woit)
  

I find this unseemly. It's as if Bohr and Einstein had tried to settle their differences on the meaning of quantum physics by brawling in a bar.