What’s going on is that calculational tools from string theory are being used to perform computations that are otherwise very hard to do. This isn’t the first, and won’t be the last, time this has happened – string theory is a very powerful set of ideas with deep connections to almost all of theoretical particle physics.

True. OTOH theoretical physics tools aren’t exactly axiomatized math either (as some commenters seems to say), so a successful application here reveals that it is indeed physics and not merely a math model.

But at a guess these researchers are simply excited because it means that string theory, such as it is, is correct, and useful – and that they have opportunity to improve it.

But then again, this has been a constant theme for string theorists. It was created to help with understanding Nuclear forces, failed there, then it was branded as a tool for QG, resolving divergence issues, failed there too, then it was re-branded as a theory of every thing, that unifies all other fields, spectacularly failed there. now it is being re-branded as a computational tool to calculate stuff in nuclear physics. Here is my question, how many times a formalism must fail for it to be abandoned? Isn’t 40 years enough and devotion of the best minds of physics, creating some of the most intractable body of intellectual work to-date enough ?

So let’s propose a theory such as: ‘We can talk to dead relatives in the afterlife’.

And now we attempt to contact these dead people by using a cell phone. The attempt results in undefined static which is undergoing further analysis.

However, the cell phone tool has been 99.9% successful in contacting living people. So can we say that we have shown “new results that point to the existence of an afterlife”??

All math depends upon agreed upon deductive axiomatic systems, including an axiomatic set of ‘logical’ rules, to test conjectures to try to establish which are true theorems; it does NOT require EMPIRICAL testing of its true theorems.

As Peter Woit (above) notes, successfully using a mathematical tool, developed in the context of elaborating string theory, to predict the behavior of a physical system, need have no relevance to the physicality of 11-dimensional string theory, where the tool was ‘discovered’.

Science uses deduction (including all kinds of mathematics) and abduction to create testable models (theories, hypotheses, conjectures, speculations, ideas) that MUST then be checked with (empirical) observations of ‘reality’, in order to distinguish which of them are science, rather than “just so stories”.

This interesting use of ’string theory TOOLS’, doesn’t yet contribute to distinguishing string theories from just so stories!