{"id":156,"date":"2005-02-18T12:53:28","date_gmt":"2005-02-18T16:53:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=156"},"modified":"2005-02-18T12:53:28","modified_gmt":"2005-02-18T16:53:28","slug":"depression-and-desperation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=156","title":{"rendered":"Depression and Desperation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In a Stanford University <A href=\"http:\/\/www.eurekalert.org\/pub_releases\/2005-02\/su-ste021505.php\">press release<\/A> today, Susskind promotes the &#8220;Landscape&#8221;, calling each different vacuum state a &#8220;pocket universe&#8221;.  Referring to people like David Gross who oppose the idea, Susskind says: &#8220;More and more as time goes on, the opponents of the idea admit that they are simply in a state of depression and desperation&#8221;. <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m wondering exactly which string theorists have admitted to him their depression and desperation.<\/p>\n<p>It seems that Susskind&#8217;s <A href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/blog\/archives\/000109.html\">new book<\/A> coming out in a couple months isn&#8217;t about the Landscape, but rather black holes and holography.  He&#8217;s writing another one now, to be called &#8220;The Cosmic Landscape&#8221;. <\/p>\n<p>In other news, Witten will be giving a <A href=\"http:\/\/www.fields.utoronto.ca\/programs\/scientific\/04-05\/string-theory\/dls\/witten.html\">Distinguished Lecture Series<\/A> in April at the Fields Institute in Toronto as part of their year-long program on the geometry of string theory.  Witten seems to have decided that there&#8217;s not much to say about string theory these days, since the topics of his talks are listed as &#8220;Relativistic Scattering Theory&#8221;, &#8220;Gauge Symmetry Breaking&#8221;, and &#8220;The Quantum Hall Effect&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a Stanford University press release today, Susskind promotes the &#8220;Landscape&#8221;, calling each different vacuum state a &#8220;pocket universe&#8221;. Referring to people like David Gross who oppose the idea, Susskind says: &#8220;More and more as time goes on, the opponents &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=156\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/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-156","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\/156","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=156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}