{"id":10857,"date":"2019-03-05T20:30:35","date_gmt":"2019-03-06T01:30:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=10857"},"modified":"2019-03-06T14:50:43","modified_gmt":"2019-03-06T19:50:43","slug":"this-weeks-hype-56","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=10857","title":{"rendered":"This Week&#8217;s Hype"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In recent years string theorists have been having trouble getting taken seriously by the media, a problem they&#8217;ve been trying to deal with by enlisting the PR departments of their universities to help.  Following <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=10722\">Princeton<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=10543\">Stanford<\/a>, today&#8217;s the turn of the string theorists at Northeastern, who had their press office put out a <a href=\"https:\/\/news.northeastern.edu\/2019\/03\/05\/northeastern-team-uses-string-theory-to-explain-the-fundamental-nature-of-the-universe\/\">press release<\/a> announcing &#8220;Northeastern team uses string theory to explain the fundamental nature of the universe.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>As usual, this is just pure, unadulterated hype.  It&#8217;s based on a <a href=\"https:\/\/journals.aps.org\/prl\/abstract\/10.1103\/PhysRevLett.121.101602\">PRL publication<\/a>, also available as <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1711.06685\">this preprint<\/a>.  I usually try to avoid this sort of editorializing, but I&#8217;m actually shocked to see that PRL is now publishing this sort of thing, which is infinitely far from having any connection to conventional science.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In recent years string theorists have been having trouble getting taken seriously by the media, a problem they&#8217;ve been trying to deal with by enlisting the PR departments of their universities to help. Following Princeton and Stanford, today&#8217;s the turn &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=10857\">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":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","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\/10857","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=10857"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10865,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10857\/revisions\/10865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}