{"id":278,"date":"2005-10-11T16:03:07","date_gmt":"2005-10-11T20:03:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=278"},"modified":"2005-11-28T17:19:40","modified_gmt":"2005-11-28T22:19:40","slug":"physics-strings-us-along","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=278","title":{"rendered":"Physics Strings Us Along"},"content":{"rendered":"

A commenter here wrote in to point out that Margaret Wertheim, a science columnist for the Los Angeles Times, has a new piece entitled Physics strings us along<\/a>. She discusses Lisa Randall’s new book<\/a> as an example of physics that has become completely unmoored from empirical evidence and instead “has become in effect a form of speculative literature” (much like John Horgan’s characterization of this sort of thing as “science fiction in mathematical form”). Wertheim notes that it is becoming hard to distinguish theoretical physics from religion and magic, supposedly less rational practices, claiming that “in recent years science itself has been showing increasingly magical tendencies”, concerning itself with “entire landscapes of universes for which there is no empirical evidence whatever. ”<\/p>\n

She is writing a book about “the role of imagination in theoretical physics”, and she seems overly enthusiastic about how “Unchained by the fetters of verification, string theorists are free to dream, articulating through their equations vast imagined domains in which almost anything that is mathematically possible is deemed to be happening ‘somewhere.'”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A commenter here wrote in to point out that Margaret Wertheim, a science columnist for the Los Angeles Times, has a new piece entitled Physics strings us along. She discusses Lisa Randall’s new book as an example of physics that … 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_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-278","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\/278","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=278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}