Category Archives: Favorite Old Posts

Regarding Papers about Fundamental Theories

Discussion in the comment section of the previous blog entry led me to do a little bit of historical research this morning, and I thought I’d write up the results here. First of all, for some interesting comments from people … Continue reading

Posted in Favorite Old Posts, Quantum Mechanics | 26 Comments

Should the Europeans Give Up?

The European HEP community is now engaged in a “Strategy Update” process, the next step of which will be an open symposium this May in Granada. Submissions to the process were due last month, and I assume that what was … Continue reading

Posted in Experimental HEP News, Favorite Old Posts | 78 Comments

Beyond Falsifiability

Sean Carroll has a new paper out defending the Multiverse and attacking the naive Popperazi, entitled Beyond Falsifiability: Normal Science in a Multiverse. He also has a Beyond Falsifiability blog post here. Much of the problem with the paper and … Continue reading

Posted in Favorite Old Posts, Multiverse Mania | 40 Comments

Latest on abc

I’ve seen reports today (see here and here) that indicate that Mochizui’s IUT papers, which are supposed to contain a proof of the abc conjecture, have been accepted by the journal Publications of the RIMS. Some of the sources for … Continue reading

Posted in abc Conjecture, Favorite Old Posts | 62 Comments

Theorists Without a Theory

I had been intending to write something here on the blog about this essay by George Ellis, so when I was contacted by someone at Inference about writing a letter in response, I did so for publication there. It has … Continue reading

Posted in Favorite Old Posts, Multiverse Mania | 10 Comments

A Cosmic Controversy

A couple months ago Scientific American published an article by Ijjas, Steinhardt and Loeb (also available here), which I discussed a bit here. One aspect of the article was its strong challenge to multiverse mania, calling it the “multimess” and … Continue reading

Posted in Favorite Old Posts, Multiverse Mania | 53 Comments

Two Pet Peeves

I was reminded of two of my pet peeves while taking a look at the appendix A of this paper. As a public service to physicists I thought I’d go on about them here, and provide some advice to the … Continue reading

Posted in Favorite Old Posts, Uncategorized | 28 Comments

Fake Physics

2016 so far wins my lifetime award for most depressing and disturbing year ever (on the front of the larger world one reads about in the newspaper and elsewhere, personally things are fine, thanks). Perhaps the most disturbing thing has … Continue reading

Posted in Fake Physics, Favorite Old Posts, Multiverse Mania | 61 Comments

The Day After

The last few months have not been helpful for my sanity (and I think for that of a large number of other Americans). My three-point program to return to better mental health is to: Write one last blog post about … Continue reading

Posted in Favorite Old Posts, Uncategorized | Comments Off on The Day After

Next Week’s Hype

Next week there will be a workshop in Munich with the title Why Trust a Theory? Reconsidering Scientific Methodology in Light of Modern Physics. It’s organized by Richard Dawid, to discuss his ideas about “non-empirical theory confirmation”, developed to defend … Continue reading

Posted in Favorite Old Posts, This Week's Hype, Uncategorized | 54 Comments