{"id":11690,"date":"2020-03-25T11:18:41","date_gmt":"2020-03-25T15:18:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=11690"},"modified":"2020-03-25T19:53:11","modified_gmt":"2020-03-25T23:53:11","slug":"this-weeks-hype-60","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=11690","title":{"rendered":"This Week’s Hype"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maybe it’s because people are at home with nothing else to do, but somehow the COVID-19 pandemic seems to be having the side-effect of generating new infections of “test of string theory” hype, a disease common many years back that seemed to more recently be under control. The example of a few days ago<\/a> has now spread widely (see for instance Popular Mechanics<\/a>), sometimes mutating into tests of “sting theory”<\/a>. Today there’s a new example out, on the middle of the front page at Scientific American: Will String Theory Finally Be Put to the Experimental Test?<\/a><\/p>\n

Of course the answer is “No”, this is just one more in the Swampland strain of string theory hype<\/a>. This latest example is based on a paper by Bedroya and Vafa<\/a>, where they make a “Transplanckian Censorship Conjecture”. The weird aspect of this kind of string theory hype is that it’s not a “test of string theory”, because it really has nothing to do with string theory. The authors of this paper are making a conjecture about “any consistent theory of quantum gravity”. If their conjecture is true we shouldn’t see the kind of B-modes in the CMB that were mistakenly claimed in the BICEP2 fiasco of 2014. So, the “test” here is a claim of falsification if experiments do for real see these B-modes. But what is being tested is a conjecture about any consistent theory of quantum gravity (one with very weak evidence). If B-modes are seen by a future experiment, the two possible conclusions to be drawn will be:<\/p>\n