Category Archives: Swampland

Lost in the Landscape

A commenter in the previous posting pointed to an interview with Lenny Susskind that just appeared at the CERN Courier, under the title Lost in the Landscape. Some things I found noteworthy: He deals with the lack of any current … Continue reading

Posted in Multiverse Mania, Swampland | 20 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Maybe it’s because people are at home with nothing else to do, but somehow the COVID-19 pandemic seems to be having the side-effect of generating new infections of “test of string theory” hype, a disease common many years back that … Continue reading

Posted in Swampland, This Week's Hype | 8 Comments

Why String Theory Is Both A Dream And A Nightmare (as well as a swamp…)

Ethan Siegel today has a new article at Starts With a Bang, entitled Why String Theory is Both a Dream and a Nightmare. For the nightmare part, he writes: its predictions are all over the map, untestable in practice, and … Continue reading

Posted in Swampland, Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Today’s Hype

Hype about string theory and fundamental physics seemed to have been dying down recently, with only three editions here so far in 2019 of This Week’s Hype. Today however brings a bumper crop of the highest quality, with new examples … Continue reading

Posted in Swampland, This Week's Hype | 13 Comments

Various and Sundry

A couple of mathematics items: Photographer Jessica Wynne has been taking photographs of mathematician’s blackboards, and there’s a story about this in the New York Times. Many of her photographs have been taken here at Columbia, where we happen to … Continue reading

Posted in Swampland, Uncategorized | 19 Comments

A Few Items

A few things that may be of interest: The Perimeter Institute has a new director, Rob Myers, succeeding Neil Turok. Myers is very much a mainstream theorist, and Perimeter over the years has been converging with the mainstream, from a … Continue reading

Posted in Swampland, Uncategorized | 3 Comments

This Week’s Hype (and a couple other things)

For today’s university press release designed to mislead the public with hype about string theory, Uppsala University has Our Universe: An expanding bubble in an extra dimension. It’s the Swampland variant of string theory hype, based on this preprint, which … Continue reading

Posted in Swampland, This Week's Hype, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Last Night’s Hype

If you’re a Friend of the IAS ($1750/year and up), you were invited to a talk last night, at which IAS member Thomas Rudelius promised to explain to you How to Test String Theory. The video of the talk is … Continue reading

Posted in Swampland, This Week's Hype | 3 Comments

This Week’s Hype

The story of string theory as a theory of everything has settled into a rather bizarre steady-state, with these three recent links providing a look at where we are now: At his podcast site, Sean Carroll has an interview with … Continue reading

Posted in Swampland, This Week's Hype | 14 Comments

On Status of KKLT

(Warning, this is just more about the topic of the last posting, which for most people will be a good reason to stop reading now. On the other hand, if you’re obsessed with the controversy over string theory, you might … Continue reading

Posted in Multiverse Mania, Swampland | 15 Comments