Frequently Asked Questions

▶ Are you going to write a second book?

No plans to do so right now, and if I ever do, it would be a very different kind of book than the first. In that book I put pretty much all I have to say to a general audience, and not much has changed over the past decade since it was written. A book that doesn't seem to exist that I'd like to work on would be something along the lines an advanced undergraduate to graduate level textbook on topics in mathematics and quantum theory. Maybe someday I'll find time and opportunity to start that project, but not this semester...

▶ Why did you delete my comment?

I delete a lot of the comments submitted here. For some postings, the majority of submitted comments get deleted. I don't delete comments because the commenter disagrees with me, actually comments agreeing with me are deleted far more often than ones that disagree with me. The overall goal is to try and maintain a comment section worth reading, so comments should ideally be well-informed and tell us something true that we didn't already know. The most common reason for deleting a comment is that it's off-topic. Often people are inspired by something in a posting to start discussing something else that interests them and that they feel is likely to interest others here. Unfortunately I have neither the time nor inclination to take on the thankless job of running a general discussion forum here.

▶ Why are you criticizing string theory for not making predictions? Lots of ideas need more work until they can do this.

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▶ Who are you to criticize string theory? Aren’t you just an embittered failure?

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▶ Don’t you agree that the problem with modern physics is too much mathematics?

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▶ Why aren’t you writing about X?

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▶ What do you think about question X in quantum gravity?

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▶ Why don’t trackbacks to your postings appear at the arXiv?

If you can find out the answer to this question, please let me know. On rare occasions a trackback to one of my postings will appear there, but in general it seems to be arXiv policy to not allow such trackbacks. Way back when during the string wars Jacques Distler did publicly announce a policy designed to exclude links to bloggers that he decided were not "active researchers", but for years now trackbacks to all sorts of news sources having nothing to do with "active researchers" have been appearing, while NEW is still banned for some reason no one will tell me.

▶ Isn’t string theory just as predictive as quantum field theory?

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▶ Why do you describe the Multiverse as “pseudo-science”?

Circularity problem: Since you can’t observe anything about it directly, the multiverse must be justified in terms of another theory that can be tested and this is string theory. But if you talk to string theorists these days about how they’re going to test the unified theory that string theory is supposed to provide, their answer is that, alas, there is no way to do this, because of the multiverse. You see, the multiverse implies that all the things you would think that string theory might be able to predict turn out to be unpredictable local environmental accidents. So, the multiverse can’t be tested, but we should believe in it since it’s an implication of string theory, but string theory can’t be tested because of the multiverse.

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