{"id":2035,"date":"2009-05-29T10:49:28","date_gmt":"2009-05-29T15:49:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=2035"},"modified":"2009-06-05T10:26:55","modified_gmt":"2009-06-05T15:26:55","slug":"role-reversal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=2035","title":{"rendered":"Role Reversal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It used to be that <em>New Scientist<\/em> had somewhat of a reputation for publishing misleading articles about speculative physics, and <em>Science News<\/em> was a more stodgy but reliable publication that stuck to serious physics.  Recently there has been a role reversal.  <em>New Scientist<\/em> is running a long, relatively sensible article about the use of AdS\/CFT methods in condensed matter physics, entitled <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/mg20227101.300-what-string-theory-is-really-good-for.html\">What string theory is really good for<\/a>.  It avoids the usual &#8220;String theory finally makes predictions!&#8221; hype that some string theorists have been trying to promote.   <em>Science News<\/em> on the other hand, is now being run by Tom Siegfried, who is quite a fan of string theory hype, the more speculative the better.  Last month was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=1817\">Strings Fight Back<\/a> at <em>Science News<\/em>, this week it&#8217;s multiverse madness, with a cover story on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/view\/feature\/id\/44008\/title\/Infinity\">Infinity<\/a>, which promotes the latest multiverse\/Boltzmann Brain pseudo-science. Towards the end of the article, David Gross is allowed a few words as skeptic, arguing that we don&#8217;t understand string theory, so can&#8217;t be sure it leads to this mess: maybe some missing insight will get string theorists out of it.  Siegfried responds with the thought that the &#8220;missing insight is merely realizing the need to master the inconveniences of infinity to resolve the cosmic conundrums.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>:  The New Scientist article makes it to <a href=\"http:\/\/science.slashdot.org\/story\/09\/06\/05\/1343226\/String-Theory-Predicts-Behavior-of-Superfluids\">Slashdot<\/a> where, as usual, it gets transformed into nonsense:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>His [Maldacena&#8217;s] theory states that the known universe is only a 2D construct in anti-de-Sitter space, projected into 3 dimensions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It used to be that New Scientist had somewhat of a reputation for publishing misleading articles about speculative physics, and Science News was a more stodgy but reliable publication that stuck to serious physics. Recently there has been a role &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=2035\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","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":[10,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-multiverse-mania","category-this-weeks-hype"],"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\/2035","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=2035"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2073,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2035\/revisions\/2073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}