{"id":1021,"date":"2008-10-15T17:49:58","date_gmt":"2008-10-15T22:49:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=1021"},"modified":"2009-04-15T09:10:49","modified_gmt":"2009-04-15T14:10:49","slug":"the-landscape-at-princeton-and-harvard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=1021","title":{"rendered":"The Landscape at Princeton and Harvard"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>String theory in general seems to have gone very quiet recently, but attempts to intensively promote the string theory landscape view of fundamental physics show no signs of slowing down at all.  The Princeton Center for Theoretical Science is running a year-long program <a href=\"http:\/\/pcts.princeton.edu\/pcts\/bigbang\/bigbang.html\">Big Bang and Beyond<\/a>, partially funded by the D.E. Shaw hedge fund.  Next month there will be a program on &#8220;String Landscape: Examining how the string landscape alters approaches to fundamental physics and cosmology&#8221;, featuring a public lecture by Leonard Susskind.<\/p>\n<p>A couple weeks ago at Harvard, Frederik Denef gave a <a href=\"http:\/\/media.physics.harvard.edu\/video\/index.php?id=COLLOQ_DENEF_092908.flv\">colloquium<\/a> promoting Landscape research.  The talk concentrated on making an analogy between the string theory landscape and condensed matter phenomena, relating this to recent attempts to use duality to study 3d CFTs of interest in condensed matter physics.  Frederik also described a web-site (2ndcheek.com) which explains how string theory proves the Bible is right. Unfortunately this web-site no longer seems to be in operation.<\/p>\n<p>Also at Harvard, or at least across the street, landscapeologists and other string phenomenologists have taken over the Clay Mathematics Institute this week for a workshop on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.claymath.org\/workshops\/lhc\/\">Stringy Reflections on LHC<\/a>, yet another attempt to make the case that string theory has something to say about the LHC, despite strong evidence against this (see for instance David Gross&#8217;s talk at Strings 2008).  Some of the slides from the talks have begun to appear on-line, and Michael Dine&#8217;s landscape talk is <a href=\"http:\/\/scipp.ucsc.edu\/~dine\/harvard_lhc.pdf\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>:  David Berenstein has a report from the conference in Cambridge <a href=\"http:\/\/diracseashore.wordpress.com\/2008\/10\/17\/if-i-only-had-a-brane\/\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>String theory in general seems to have gone very quiet recently, but attempts to intensively promote the string theory landscape view of fundamental physics show no signs of slowing down at all. The Princeton Center for Theoretical Science is running &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=1021\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1021"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1021\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1836,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1021\/revisions\/1836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}