This week I’m quite busy so I’m taking a break from landscape-bashing. Instead I’ll just quote someone else; it’s up to you to guess who.<\/p>\n
“Suddenly it’s not too important whether a theory teaches us something new about the real world – either predicts new unknown phenomena or previously unknown links between the known phenomena and objects. It’s more important that such an unpredictive scenario might be true and we should all work hard to show that the scenario is plausible because we should like this scenario, for some reasons that are not clear to me.”<\/p>\n
“The anthropic strategy is to pick as complicated Calabi-Yau manifolds as possible, to guarantee that there will be a lot of mess, confusion, and possibilities, and that no predictions will ever be obtained as long as all the physicists and their computers fit the observed Universe… This means that you don’t want to start with Calabi-Yaus whose Betti numbers are of order 3. You want to start, if one follows the 2004 paper, with something like F_{18}, a toric Fano three-fold. That’s a 3-complex-dimensional manifold that is analogous to the two-complex-dimensional del Pezzo surfaces, in a sense. But you don’t want just this simple F_{18}. You take a quadric Z in a projective space constructed from this F_{18} and its canonical bundle. OK, finally the Euler character of the four-fold X is 13,248. Great number and one can probably estimate the probability that such a construction has something to do with the real world.”<\/p>\n
“Do we really believe that by studying the orientifold of the weighted projective space CP^{4}_{[1,1,1,6,9]}, we will find something that will assure us (and others – and maybe even Shelly Glashow) that string theory is on the right track? … If we deliberately try to paint the string-theoretical image of the real world as the most ambiguous and uncalculable one, I kind of feel that it’s not quite honest.”<\/p>\n
“Some people used to blame string theorists that they were only looking for the keys (to the correct full theory) under the lamppost. It’s unfortunately not the case anymore: most of the search for the keys is now being done somewhere in the middle of the ocean (on the surface). Maybe, someone will eventually show that the keys can’t stay on the surface of the ocean, and we will return to the search for the keys in less insane contexts.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This week I’m quite busy so I’m taking a break from landscape-bashing. Instead I’ll just quote someone else; it’s up to you to guess who. “Suddenly it’s not too important whether a theory teaches us something new about the real … Continue reading