We show that, under very general hypotheses, topological quantum field theories (TQFTs) cannot detect homotopy spheres bounding parallelisable manifolds, such as Milnor's exotic 7-dimensional sphere. The result holds for a wide variety of target categories (or $(\infty,n)$-categories) and arbitrary tangential structures. An appendix contains results on the mapping class groups of (stably-) framed manifolds that may be of independent interest.
Categories: math.AT hep-th math-ph math.MP