Jon Cartwright over at the Physics World blog:
“So what would you do if string theory is wrong?” asks string theorist Moataz Emam of Clark University, US, in a paper posted on arXiv yesterday. It’s obvious, you might think. String theorists would briefly mourn the 40 years of misspent speculation and leave furtively through the back door, while anti-string theorists would celebrate in light of their vindication.
Not so, says Emam — string theory will continue to prosper, and might even become its own discipline independent of physics and mathematics.
Oddly, the reason Emam gives for this prediction is precisely the same reason why many physicists despise string theory. For example, in reducing the 10 dimensions of string theory to our familiar four, string theorists have to fashion a “landscape” of at least 10500 solutions. Emam says that such a huge number of solutions — of which only one exists for our universe — may make string theory unattractive, but in studying them physicists are gaining “deep insights into how a physical theory generally works”: