Category Archives: This Week’s Hype

The award for this week’s hype goes to the people at CERN, who normally are pretty good about this, but somehow thought it was a good idea to spin the AMS-02 results in a way that makes it sound as … Continue reading →

Space.com has a new story entitled Space Bursts Provide Insight to Theory of Everything, which has been picked up elsewhere as “evidence for string theory”. For instance Physicists Find New Evidence Of A ‘Theory Of Everything’ In The Wreckage Of … Continue reading →

BBC Horizon this week is running an episode How Small is the Universe? with a description that features the usual sort of hype about modern physics: It is a journey where things don’t just become smaller but also a whole … Continue reading →

The Higgs suggests that there could be more dimensions of space-time than we previously thought. From a New Yorker piece this week (subscription required) about Joe Incandela of CMS and the Higgs discovery. Even the famed New Yorker fact-checkers are … Continue reading →

The media frenzy surrounding the Higgs discovery announcement has on the whole consisted of stories that reasonably accurately deal with the scientific implications. Journalists have for instance by now learned that “string theory predictions” are a good thing to ignore. … Continue reading →

The implications of the failure to find SUSY at the LHC are beginning to sink into the particle physics community: the paradigm that dominated the subject for the past 30 years has collapsed in the face of experimental (non)-evidence, threatening … Continue reading →

From the latest Science News: String theory weighs in on Higgs ATLANTA – Physicists working on big experiments at particle colliders aren’t the only ones who have something to say about the mass of the elusive Higgs boson. A theorist … Continue reading →

Since every blogger seems to feel it necessary to have a year-in-review posting, I thought it appropriate to point out that 2011 has been a banner year for string theory and related hype, with about twice as many editions of … Continue reading →

The Japanese are getting in on the string theory hype business, with KEK issuing a press release today with the title: The mechanism that explains why our universe was born with 3 dimensions: a 40-year-old puzzle of superstring theory solved … Continue reading →