{"id":10634,"date":"2018-10-18T14:21:44","date_gmt":"2018-10-18T18:21:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=10634"},"modified":"2018-10-22T11:44:51","modified_gmt":"2018-10-22T15:44:51","slug":"last-nights-hype","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=10634","title":{"rendered":"Last Night&#8217;s Hype"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;re a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ias.edu\/support\/friends\">Friend of the IAS<\/a> ($1750\/year and up), you were invited to a talk last night, at which IAS member Thomas Rudelius promised to explain to you <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ias.edu\/events\/friends-dessert-rudelius\">How to Test String Theory<\/a>.  The video of the talk is now available <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=3wDys4TIlf4\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>After a long introduction involving large amounts of misleading hype, Rudelius in the last couple minutes finally gets to the promised explanation of &#8220;How to Test String Theory&#8221;.  What is it?  It&#8217;s his discovery that some versions of axion cosmology are incompatible with the Weak Gravity Conjecture, and thus conjecturally incompatible with string theory.<\/p>\n<p>I assume that the IAS Friends in attendance, besides being financially well off, are also not so dim-witted that they wouldn&#8217;t notice that they&#8217;d been had (there&#8217;s no evidence for axion cosmology, so conjectures about whether or not various axion cosmology models are consistent or not with string theory are completely irrelevant to &#8220;testing string theory&#8221;).  Any questions asked after the talk didn&#8217;t make it to the video, so it&#8217;s unclear if anyone bothered to complain about what had just been done to them.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>:  For a sensible, informative video about string theory (as opposed to the IAS one), see <a href=\"http:\/\/backreaction.blogspot.com\/2018\/10\/string-theory-pros-and-cons-video-no.html\">this from Sabine Hossenfelder<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;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 &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=10634\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_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":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[27,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-swampland","category-this-weeks-hype"],"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\/10634","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=10634"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10642,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10634\/revisions\/10642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}