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 is now this PRL. Marketing to other press outlets as usual starts here and here.

In the current Swampland hype, string theorists have “discovered” that string theory doesn’t really necessarily have that landscape of vacua making it untestable, and now we’re finally on our way to testing string theory. In this press release version:

For 15 years, there have been models in string theory that have been thought to give rise to dark energy. However, these have come in for increasingly harsh criticism, and several researchers are now asserting that none of the models proposed to date are workable….

The Uppsala scientists’ model provides a new, different picture of the creation and future fate of the Universe, while it may also pave the way for methods of testing string theory.

For some other things that may be of more interest:

Finally, I’m leaving tomorrow for a two-week or so vacation in France, blogging likely slim to non-existent.

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

  1. Roger says:

    That the Science Council of Japan (SCJ) does not support the ILC can’t be interpreted as anything other than very bad news for the project. To place the news in context, the SCJ comprises non-particle physicists and pp has traditionally had difficulty convincing other fields of the merit of their expensive experiments (eg the SSC). In other words, the SCJ report is a disappointment but its difficult to argue that it was entirely unexpected. However, it need not be the end of the story. The Japanese government will now take a decision based, in part, on the SCJ report together with other considerations, eg , the effect on the local economy of the area which would host the ILC. Its possible that the project will still go ahead though this admittedly looks unlikely right now. Had new physics shown up at the LHC which the ILC could probe, which was how the ILC was originally spun all those years ago, the motivation for the ILC would have unarguably stronger and the story could have been different. However, we don’t live in that part of the multiverse…

    If the ILC fails then the tectonic plates in the collider world start to shift. The FCC-ee (new ring at CERN with e+e- up to 400 GeV cm prior to hh at 100 TeV) gets something of a boost since the ILC won’t be around to do much of its physics program before the new tunnel is even built. CLIC at CERN (e+e- up to several TeV) should also get a boost but seems to be the forgotten child. It may be terribly unfair on the project but one hears far more about the FCC these days. It will be interesting to see how the ILC’s demise (if this happens) affects the attitude in China towards building its own e+e- machine (CEPC).

  2. Likely you are aware of this blog but I found this recent post interesting (as a mathematician in a totally different world, so purely an onlooker).

    https://lifeandphysics.com/2018/12/29/theory-experiment-and-supersymmetry/

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