{"id":230,"date":"2005-08-02T12:16:23","date_gmt":"2005-08-02T16:16:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=230"},"modified":"2023-07-28T11:18:48","modified_gmt":"2023-07-28T15:18:48","slug":"new-york-times-on-toronto-panel-discussion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=230","title":{"rendered":"New York Times on Toronto Panel Discussion"},"content":{"rendered":"

I didn’t have much luck when I tried here<\/a> to find out exactly what had happened at the panel discussion<\/a> in Toronto at Strings 2005 last month. One graduate student (Florian Greimer) commented<\/a> on Jacques Distler’s weblog that he felt quite depressed after listening to it, earning a slap-down from Jacques, who evidently found it so upsetting that he got up and left halfway through it, and later wrote<\/a> about why such discussions were a waste of time.<\/p>\n

Today’s New York Times has a report on the panel discussion by Dennis Overbye entitled “Lacking Hard Data, Theorists Try Democracy”<\/a>, which makes it clear why many of the people in attendance were depressed and\/or upset. The title of the piece refers to the previously reported fact that the audience voted overwhelmingly against the idea that the anthropic principle was what explains the value of the cosmological constant. What I hadn’t heard before is that the panel itself, representing the leadership of the field, voted rather differently, splitting evenly (4 to 4, with abstentions) over the issue. It looks like Susskind’s point of view has gone from being a minority one among leading string theorists to one that half of them are willing to publicly sign on to. I can see why the audience was depressed. Overbye reports the reaction to the audience vote as “‘Wow’, exhaled one of the panel members, amid other exclamations too colorful to print here.”<\/p>\n

The article also includes some truly bizarre and delusional quotes, which it is hard to believe were not taken out of context. Michael Douglas is reported as saying that “We’ve done very well for the last 20 years without any experimental input”, which is just so weird I don’t know what to say about it. Andy Strominger deplored the increasing pessimism about string theory, trying to rally the faithful with the promise of glory in the after-life: “Sooner or later we will get there, and when we do we’ll all be heroes.”<\/p>\n

Susskind gave his vision of the immediate future of the field: “there’s nothing to do but just hope the Bush administration will keep paying us”, and Amanda Peet has stolen one of my favorite lines, saying that string theory should be trying to get government funding as a “faith-based initiative”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I didn’t have much luck when I tried here to find out exactly what had happened at the panel discussion in Toronto at Strings 2005 last month. One graduate student (Florian Greimer) commented on Jacques Distler’s weblog that he felt … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","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":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-strings-2xxx"],"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\/230","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=230"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13609,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230\/revisions\/13609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}