Did you see that the paper was dedicated to Giordano Bruno? And that he paraphrased a Pete Seeger/Peter Paul & Mary song?? And that there is not ONE equation in the entire paper?

The amazing thing to me – this guy was invited to MIT and CERN for 3 years each. Who makes these decisions? I wonder if these people know how to actually do any calculations?

-drl

I realize that it makes sense to spend for Witten to spend a year or two on the twistor string if he finds it promising. However, from what he writes (and that is my only source, I don’t know anything about the subject first-hand) I most definitely get the impression that he doubts the project’s viability. Now, I prefer to work on presumably correct projects rather than presumably incorrect ones, and I suspect that Witten thinks likewise. So that he works on the twistor string but doesn’t believe in it seems to indicate that he doesn’t have any attractive alternative.

Your link in the thread you reference is to the most bizarre paper I’ve seen yet on the ArXiv. It’s hard to imagine that Cumrun Vafa endorses the views in the paper, but who knows? Besides the passage you cite, the author of the paper also thanks Vafa in a footnote on page 3. In fact the paper is worth reading for the footnotes alone. My personal favorite is footnote 4 on page 4, which correctly conveys the flavor of the whole paper:

although they could send unwanted anti-prisoners, their arrival being known as gamma-ray bursts

By the way, R. V. Pound taught my advanced laboratory physics course, and was an extremely impressive scientist.

“Cumrun Vafa thinks that the fact that we do not see aliens around could be the first proof of the existence of brane worlds: all advanced aliens would have emigrated to better parallel universes (our Universe has zero measure).”  [-- Beatriz Gato-Rivera]

If he seriously expressed this opinion it really says something about his judgment.

This is a joke, right? In case you are serious, LHC will falsify most (perhaps all) these models. That is a good thing. If you want to do something unfalsifiable, there are other subjects like theology.

The string theorists also show such appalling ignorance about particle physics: like Lubos’ statement (in his blog entry) that phenomenology deals with issues like “adding new digits to the 3 x 3 neutrino mass matrix”. Have they heard about oblique precision electroweak observables S,T,U (hint: nothing to do with dualities)? Do they even care? Details, details, to be worked out later; everything is massless relative to Planck scale… There is a certain comfort in doing such work.

My comment about funding was just pointing out what more than one person has told me. They don’t dare criticize string theory in public because when powerful figures like Cumrun make it clear that they think anyone who criticizes string theory is a “fool” or a “child”, there’s the implicit threat that they will oppose funding grant proposals by fools and children.

The story about Cumrun’s reaction to the Nova program was told to me by a string theorist who heard him say this.

Thomas:
I don’t think it is irrational for Witten or others to keep working on twistor strings for a while even though they have run into problems. They do get very useful tree-level results, and it’s reasonable to see what else they can get out of this idea. If they keep doing it for twenty years though…

The real problem is that they don’t have any other new ideas about string theory to work on.

Quantoken:

Please stop trying to turn the discussion here to your pet ideas about GR. I’ll delete any further comments by you or anyone else about this.

Work in progress on a non-unitary theory like conformal supergravity? Not really. Sounds kind of LQGish.