A few things that may be of interest:<\/p>\n
Myers says there are many opportunities in theoretical physics, mostly thanks to the vast amounts of data that are being collected by various experiments such as CHIME, EHT and the LIGO gravitational-wave detectors in the US. Yet Myers doesn\u2019t believe that theoretical physics is in \u201ca deep crisis\u201d as Turok once admitted. \u201cParticle physics is somewhat at a crossroads,\u201d he says. \u201cDescribing it as a crisis is slightly dramatic, but I would agree that people have been relying on the status quo for too long and relaying on certain models from decades ago.\u201d<\/p>\n
Indeed, Myers now challenges researchers to think in new ways. \u201cYoung people are the future and we want to instill in them to question the status quo,\u201d he adds. \u201cAfter all, it is the people here that make the PI such a special place.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n
- Speaking of challenges to the status quo, it seems that Sabine Hossenfelder now has a contract for her second book<\/a>, topic not yet revealed.<\/li>\n
- For the latest news from the Swampland<\/a>, see this twitter thread from Will Kinney<\/a>. He explains how the “Swampland conjecture” was meant to kill off the string theory multiverse, but this conjecture got in trouble:
\nSo by getting rid of the multiverse, we have also gotten rid of known physics like the Higgs boson. Merde!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It was replaced by a fix, the “refined Swampland conjecture”, but Kinney has a new paper in PRL (arXiv link here<\/a>) showing this fix doesn’t solve the multiverse problem for string theory:<\/p>\n
This means that, as soon as we fix up the Swampland Conjecture so it doesn’t trivially rule out known physics like the Higgs, we inevitably get an unwelcome passenger: the string multiverse! <\/p>\n
This is important because it looked like the Swampland Conjecture was likely to free us from the multiverse and associated awful stuff like the Anthropic Principle. Not so, we’re still stuck with it. Sorry.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n
- John Baez has a popular article at Nautilus<\/a> about his new-found love for algebraic geometry, as an explanation of the relation of classical and quantum. The more technical version is a series of posts here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Update<\/strong>: Arnold Neumaier has posted at the arXiv a series of three papers discussing his “thermal interpretation” of quantum mechanics (see here<\/a>, here<\/a> and here<\/a>). While I find many of the points he seems to be making compelling, I haven’t had time to think seriously about what the problems of his approach might be (and there’s a long history of online discussions between him and others which would be a good place to start). Neumaier in the papers explicitly asks for discussion of them at physicsoverflow.org, and there are now posts there for this purpose (here<\/a>, here<\/a> and here<\/a>). I look forward to following any discussion with him over there. He also has a website devoted to this topic here<\/a>, which has some links to earlier discussions.<\/p>\n
Update<\/strong>: There’s a new issue of Inference<\/a> out. As usual, some interesting pieces from people not usually heard from in a non-technical venue. No sign of the pro-intelligent design\/climate denialism agenda that they’ve been accused of having (see here<\/a>). Pieces specifically relevant to some of the obsessions of this blog are a review by Glashow of Lost in Math<\/a>, and a piece by David Roberts on the Mochizuki\/Scholze\/Stix story<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A few things that may be of interest: The Perimeter Institute has a new director, Rob Myers, succeeding Neil Turok. Myers is very much a mainstream theorist, and Perimeter over the years has been converging with the mainstream, from a … Continue reading