{"id":138,"date":"2005-01-20T09:51:58","date_gmt":"2005-01-20T13:51:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=138"},"modified":"2005-01-20T09:51:58","modified_gmt":"2005-01-20T13:51:58","slug":"string-fellows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=138","title":{"rendered":"String Fellows"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s Guardian has an article<\/A> by a writer who recently visited the Institute in Princeton to talk to Witten and others there about string theory. The author of the piece makes the obvious analogy between Witten and Einstein, and asks the string theorists about Einstein’s 20-year misguided and failed attempt to unify gravity and electromagnetism during his years at the IAS. String theory and Einstein’s failed program get further identified by the author’s claim that if Einstein were alive today he would be working on string theory, and by a quote from Seiberg that “Being in the place where Einstein was is clearly an inspiring idea.”<\/p>\n

Seiberg also has something very true to say:<\/p>\n

“Most string theorists are very arrogant,” says Seiberg with a smile. “If there is something [beyond string theory], we will call it string theory.”<\/p>\n

Witten’s attitude towards string theory seems to remain unchanged, he’s quoted as saying:<\/p>\n

“Critics of string theory say that it might be too big a step. Most physicists in other fields are simply agnostic and properly so,” says Witten. “It isn’t an established theory. My personal opinion is that there are circumstantial reasons to suspect that it’s on the right track. ”<\/p>\n

His recent work on twistor string theory is mentioned, including the fact that there was a workshop at Oxford<\/A> last week on the subject. About this, the writer reports<\/p>\n

“Witten is not convinced yet. ‘I think twistor string theory is something that only partly works,’ he says.”<\/p>\n

I wonder exactly what he meant by that. What’s the part of twistor string theory that he thinks doesn’t work?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s Guardian has an article by a writer who recently visited the Institute in Princeton to talk to Witten and others there about string theory. The author of the piece makes the obvious analogy between Witten and Einstein, and asks … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","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-138","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\/138","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=138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}