{"id":146,"date":"2005-01-31T14:29:57","date_gmt":"2005-01-31T18:29:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=146"},"modified":"2005-01-31T14:29:57","modified_gmt":"2005-01-31T18:29:57","slug":"string-theory-article-slanted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=146","title":{"rendered":"String Theory Article Slanted"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ken Lane has written a letter to the editor<\/A> of the Boston University student newspaper to complain about its article about string theory and the BU physics department discussed in a previous posting<\/A>. Lane is annoyed about not having been given a chance to respond to Vafa’s ad hominen attacks characterizing him and the BU physics department as “foolish” and “childish”. He also complains that the author didn’t seek other opinions about Vafa’s claim that string theory is what the “youngest, most brilliant physicists” are all doing.<\/p>\n

I don’t remember whether they had shop classes at Harvard, but if they do now, maybe they should be talking to Vafa. According to the blurb for a recent talk<\/A> by Jim Gates at Brookhaven, string\/M-theory is “a 21st century lathe ? a machine capable of remarkable precision and versatility, but requiring a skilled and experienced operator for its success.” Funny, back in the last millennium I remember when string theorists were claiming that string theory was a 21st century “supercomputer” or “spaceship” that had fallen into the 20th century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ken Lane has written a letter to the editor of the Boston University student newspaper to complain about its article about string theory and the BU physics department discussed in a previous posting. Lane is annoyed about not having been … 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_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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-146","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\/146","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=146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}