Dear Magicians,

A survey just asked 1,675 physicists a simple question. Which theory best unites quantum mechanics and gravity? String theory won.

Sort of. It came in first at 18.9 percent, which means it lost to “no opinion” at 28.7. Forty years of work, no experiment, and the field’s favorite idea got beaten by a shrug.

I find this hilarious. Mostly because I’ve spent my career insisting that physics is the one discipline where you don’t get to just believe things. You measure them. Show me the experiment or get out of my telescope.

And then I read surveys like this one and remember that physicists are people. People believe in bundles.

Here’s the part that stopped me cold.

The authors found that physicists who prefer string theory also tend to believe black hole information escapes through Hawking radiation. The correlation was 7 sigma. For non-physicists, that’s the statistical equivalent of winning a typical lottery jackpot… twice.

Now, there’s an innocent explanation. The math that says information gets out mostly lives inside the string theory toolkit. So picking one nudges you toward the other. Fair enough.

But notice what’s happening. Your opinion on one untested idea predicts your opinion on a second untested idea. Not because the universe linked them. Because you did.

The authors, Zeus bless them, called it “patterns of coherence in respondent worldviews.” Which is the most polite way I’ve ever seen someone write the word “creed.”

This shows up everywhere once you look. For example, the physicists who explain dark matter with a multiverse also tend to pick the Many Worlds version of quantum mechanics, where reality splits into copies every time you measure something. Two flavors of “there are infinite unobservable universes.” Same people. Every time.

Or take the fine-tuning question. Asked why the constants of nature seem suspiciously perfect for life, 8.9 percent of professional physicists answered “an intelligent designer.” In a physics survey. I’m not mad. I’m taking notes. And it dovetails perfectly to this week’s conversation with the Discovery Institute’s (ID backwards, get it?) Dr. Stephen C. Meyer.

​Now, I can’t be sanctimonious. I have aesthetic preferences in physics that I dress up as rigorous judgments. I find certain theories beautiful and certain ones ugly, and I have absolutely caught myself believing the beautiful ones a little harder than the evidence allows. Beauty is a fantastic muse and a terrible witness.

The honest move isn’t pretending you have no creed. You do. We all do. The honest move is knowing which beliefs you’ve earned with data and which ones you’ve just grown fond of.

Supersymmetry was a beautiful idea. The Large Hadron Collider tested it and it lost, and support quietly drained away. That’s the system working. A wager placed, a wager lost.

String theory never placed the bet. So it can’t lose. It just sits at the top of the poll, undefeated and unconfirmed, like a champion who never entered the ring.

If we can’t tell the difference between our best theories and our favorite ones, what exactly have we been measuring all this time?

Until next time, have a M.A.G.I.C. Week,

Brian