{"id":11915,"date":"2020-08-21T16:16:10","date_gmt":"2020-08-21T20:16:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=11915"},"modified":"2020-08-21T23:15:30","modified_gmt":"2020-08-22T03:15:30","slug":"straight-old-white-guys-and-their-theories-of-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=11915","title":{"rendered":"Guys and Their Theories of Everything"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m a big fan of Sabine Hossenfelder’s music videos, the latest of which, Theories of Everything<\/a>, has recently appeared. I also agree with much of the discussion of this at her latest blog posting<\/a> where Steven Evans writes<\/p>\n

nobody wants to see Peter Woit sing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and Terry Bollinger chimes in:<\/p>\n

Please, under no circumstances and in no situations, should folks like Peter Woit, Lee Smolin, Garrett Lisi, Sean Carroll, or even John Baez try to spice up their blogs or tweets by adding clips of themselves singing self-composed physics songs.<\/p>\n

Trust me, fellow males of the species: However tempted you may be by Sabine’s spectacular success in this arena, it just ain’t gonna work for you!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The chorus of Sabine’s song goes:<\/p>\n

\nAll you guys with theories of everything
\nWho follow me wherever I am traveling
\nYour theories are neat
\nI hope they will succeed
\nBut please, don’t send them to me\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One reason for her bursting into song like this was probably her recent participation in this discussion<\/a>. I’d like to think (for no good reason) that it had nothing to do with my recently sending her a copy of this<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Today brought a new discussion of theories of everything<\/a>, by Brian Greene and Cumrun Vafa. When asked by Greene to give a grade to string theory, Vafa said that he would give it a grade of A+, although its grade was less than A on the experimental verification front.<\/p>\n

While I’m enthusiastic about new ideas involving twistors and happily continuing to work on them, it’s pretty clear that this is not a good time to be bringing them to market. The elite academic world of Harvard and Princeton theorists that I was trained in has been doing an excellent job of convincing everyone that even the smartest people in the world could not make any progress towards a TOE, and that all claims for such progress from the most respected experts around are not very credible. Best to ignore not just the cranks who fill up your inbox with such claims, but all of them, judging the whole concept to be doomed until the point in the far distant future when an experiment finally provides the clue to the correct way forward. <\/p>\n

Be warned though, if people don’t pay some more attention, I’m going to start writing songs and singing them here.<\/p>\n

Update<\/strong>: Note, an ill-advised attempt at humor referring to identity politics was obviously a mistake and has been deleted (along with some references to it in the comments). The threat to start singing is also a joke.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m a big fan of Sabine Hossenfelder’s music videos, the latest of which, Theories of Everything, has recently appeared. I also agree with much of the discussion of this at her latest blog posting where Steven Evans writes nobody wants … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_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":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"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\/11915","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=11915"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11960,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11915\/revisions\/11960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}