{"id":10746,"date":"2018-12-28T12:34:01","date_gmt":"2018-12-28T17:34:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=10746"},"modified":"2018-12-28T12:34:01","modified_gmt":"2018-12-28T17:34:01","slug":"this-weeks-hype-and-a-couple-other-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=10746","title":{"rendered":"This Week’s Hype (and a couple other things)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>. It’s the Swampland variant of string theory hype<\/a>, based on this preprint<\/a>, which is now this PRL<\/a>. Marketing to other press outlets as usual starts here<\/a> and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

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….<\/p>\n

The Uppsala scientists\u2019 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For some other things that may be of more interest:<\/p>\n