A Thought

The modern stringers' megalith stands proud amongst the gargantuan forests of modern mathematics. How could they possibly be wrong? Clearly it is not enough to reformulate the Standard Model using other methods, to predict quantitative results in agreement with experiment, or to show that string theory predictions are false. This leaves only one alternative: to derive the string theories as a relatively uninteresting subset of the true M Theory. How far are we from this goal? Almost everything we know about classical spaces is lurking, somewhere in the stringers' toolbox. But this is not an obstacle to be ignored, since in order to derive General Relativity, any decent new theory must reconsider our understanding of manifolds. No attempt that relies blithely on a priori classical number fields has any chance of success ... oh, wait: that covers just about everything the stringers have done! Oh, well, too bad. Everyone can make mistakes.