{"id":14034,"date":"2024-07-12T19:01:14","date_gmt":"2024-07-12T23:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=14034"},"modified":"2024-11-07T09:15:10","modified_gmt":"2024-11-07T14:15:10","slug":"the-harvard-swampland-initiative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=14034","title":{"rendered":"The Harvard Swampland Initiative"},"content":{"rendered":"

The past few years I’ve been noticing more and more claims like this one<\/a>, supposedly finding a way to “connect string theory to experiment”. When you look into such claims you don’t find anything at all like a conventional experiment\/theory connection of the usual scientific method, giving testable predictions and a way to move science forward. As for what you do find, for many years I tried writing about this in detail (see here<\/a> and here<\/a>), but that’s clearly a waste of time.<\/p>\n

One thing that mystifies me about such claims is that I find it very hard to believe that most theorists take them seriously, always assumed that the great majority was with Nima Arkani-Hamed, who recently<\/a> characterized the track record of this kind of thing as “really garbage”. But if most theorists think this is garbage, why am I seeing more and more of it? A hint of an answer comes from the paper with the supposed connection<\/a>, which describes the Harvard Swampland Initiative as the place the work initiated.<\/p>\n

I hadn’t been aware there was a Harvard Swampland Initiative<\/a>, but it is a Research Center at Harvard, running an “immersive program” in which “participants collectively navigate the Swampland”. More importantly, it has no less than ten associated postdoc positions. On the scale of different ways of having influence on a field, being able to hand out ten postdoc positions at Harvard is right up there. This goes a long way towards explaining to me what I’ve been seeing in recent years. It also makes me quite depressed: when I started my career in that department in the late seventies, the idea that fifty years later this is what it would come to is something beyond any one’s worst nightmare at the time.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/strong> In case anyone has any doubt about what the main goal of the Swampland program is, see here<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\nRecently, physicists have started a new program called Swampland to overcome the criticism of string theory that arose in the 2000s. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“Recently” seems to refer to 2005, when this started.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The past few years I’ve been noticing more and more claims like this one, supposedly finding a way to “connect string theory to experiment”. When you look into such claims you don’t find anything at all like a conventional experiment\/theory … 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_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":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-swampland"],"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\/14034","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=14034"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14034\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14039,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14034\/revisions\/14039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}