Huge is a subjective term, but go and count the number of participants at Strings 2025 [1]. Then realise that is just one of many conferences [2]. It's still a very big field.

[1] https://nyuad.shorthandstories.com/strings-conference-abu-dh...

[2] https://www.stringwiki.org/wiki/Conferences

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XorNot a day ago | parent [-]

A meaningless statement if you aren't going to introduce any points of comparison. But I would hardly call 735 conference participants a huge conference. Like, that's big but there are lot more then 735 theoretical physicists.

	▲	gnfargbl 20 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Claude tells me that there are about ~5000 theoretical high energy physicists actively publishing as tracked by INSPIRE-HEP (the de facto search engine in that field). If we estimate that about a third or half of string theorists take part in Strings in a given year -- because there are other big conferences like String Pheno that will be more relevant for many -- then we have something like 30-50% of high energy theorists working on string theory. I agree that people should be "moving on to other things," but I'm not seeing the evidence that they actually are.