On functional freedom and Penrose's critiques of string theory
History and Philosophy of Physics
2025-09-29 v1 High Energy Physics - Theory
Abstract
In his The Road to Reality as well as in his Fashion, Faith and Fantasy, Roger Penrose criticises string theory and its practitioners from a variety of angles ranging from conceptual, technical, and methodological objections to sociological observations about the string theoretic scientific community. In this article, we assess Penrose's conceptual/technical objections to string theory, focussing in particular upon those which invoke the notion of `functional freedom'. In general, we do not find these arguments to be successful.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2509.21515,
title = {On functional freedom and Penrose's critiques of string theory},
author = {Matěj Krátký and James Read},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.21515},
year = {2025}
}
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35 pages