The usual string theory hype machine in action: to celebrate a PRL publication, a university press office puts out a press release full of hype with a highly misleading title (“string theory is uniquely derived from basic assumptions about the universe”), it’s then picked up and distributed at sites like this, soon to make its way into news stories like this.
I’ve been writing for over twenty years about the endless examples of this campaign to promote a failed theory, warning about the danger of a significant negative effect on the credibility of scientific research with the general public. Those chickens have now come home to roost.
For specifics about this particular example of hype, see here.
fancy people become fancy by publishing in fancy journals, which is accomplished by writing about topics other fancy people like. It’s how the system works, nothing to see here.
My recent reflection on this is while you can’t leave the world to the idiots, you can’t leave it to the smart people either. You need smart people who are more honest than they are smart, smart people who are more critical than they are smart, smart people who are more principled than they are smart. If you have none of those but just have smart people, eventually they move forward and figure out how to game the system. You see a well lubricated machine churning out fancier and fancier people and prestige, but not really going anywhere.
“string theory is uniquely derived from basic assumptions about the universe”
Basic assumptions like “the universe is made of strings” (technically referred to as shoestringing, a version of bootstrapping)
Regarding the Langlands 2.0 post (now closed for comments), the two talks based on the near-simultaneous expository papers by Ben-Zvi and Scholze, papers linked in the post, have just appeared on video, respectively at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxauvlBZCAU (JMM/AMS)
https://www.carmin.tv/en/collections/bourbaki-mars-2026 (Bourbaki)
The Ben-Zvi talk is even introduced by the host saying that JMM survey talks are the American version of Bourbaki talks.
Both papers are excellent and complement each other. Ben-Zvi’s is “vivid” in Scholze’s words, and indeed has pictures by an artist. Scholze replaces upper-! / lower-*, with upper-* / lower-!, because he likes it better that way. He uses his new theory of Gestalten to replace two of the proofs.
Each paper near the end describes, seemingly in less detail than the preceding sections, the seemingly tricky ingredient of Kac-Moody algebras and “opers”, work from the 1990s, by Feigin, Frenkel, Beilinson, Drinfeld. Maybe Frenkel will release a talk too.
kitchin,
Thanks! I’ll add those links to the posting.