Category Archives: This Week’s Hype

Are Physical Laws Inevitable?

Posted on December 11, 2019 by woit

The last couple days have seen various discussions online generated by a piece at Quanta Magazine with the dubious headline Why the Laws of Physics Are Inevitable and an even worse sub-headline claiming “physicists working on the ‘bootstrap’ have rederived … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 47 Comments

Today’s Hype

Posted on October 29, 2019 by woit

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

This Week’s Hype

Posted on March 31, 2019 by woit

This week’s hype comes to us courtesy of Scientific American, which, based on this preprint, tells us: Found: A Quadrillion Ways for String Theory to Make Our Universe. As usual in these things, the only physicists quoted are the authors … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 8 Comments

This Month’s Hype

Posted on March 14, 2019 by woit

Physics Today seems to have decided to deal with Sabine Hossenfelder’s criticism of a future collider by publishing the least credible possible response: a column by Gordon Kane arguing that string theory predicts new particles of just the right mass … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 31 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Posted on March 5, 2019 by woit

In recent years string theorists have been having trouble getting taken seriously by the media, a problem they’ve been trying to deal with by enlisting the PR departments of their universities to help. Following Princeton and Stanford, today’s the turn … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 9 Comments

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

Posted on December 28, 2018 by woit

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

This Week’s Hype

Posted on December 19, 2018 by woit

A few months ago string theorists at Stanford had their university press office put out hype-filled promotional material about their research field, this was discussed here. One odd thing about this was that normally such PR efforts are made in … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 3 Comments

Last Night’s Hype

Posted on October 18, 2018 by woit

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

Posted on October 15, 2018 by woit

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

This Week’s Hype

Posted on September 10, 2018 by woit

The Stanford string theory group is not taking the attack by Harvard’s Cumrun Vafa lying down. After an arXiv barrage of papers defending KKLT (see here), they’ve now enlisted the Stanford press office, which has produced a five part promotional … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania, This Week's Hype | 19 Comments