I am a professor of theoretical physics and I would dispute the fact that there has been no breakthrough in theoretical physics since the 1970s. Google inflation, string theory, holography. Google Witten and Maldacena.
The paper was written by Lee Smolin. It was freely available on Baez's site.
String theory is hardly an example of a breakthrough: it has too many solutions and too little proof of its claims.
I don't consider Baez to be giving unbiased opinions, since he takes a non-mainstream, minority perspective and dislikes much contemporary theoretical physics research.
This is precisely my point about the problems in academia. We need room for minority perspectives (which string theory most definitely is
not).
