{"id":28,"date":"2004-05-27T21:16:19","date_gmt":"2004-05-28T01:16:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=28"},"modified":"2004-05-27T21:16:19","modified_gmt":"2004-05-28T01:16:19","slug":"other-peoples-stuff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=28","title":{"rendered":"Other People’s Stuff"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s always a little worrying when this happens, but sometimes I find myself very much agreeing with at least parts of what Lubos Motl has to say. For example see this recent posting <\/A> to sci.physics.strings<\/A>. In it Motl argues that <\/p>\n

“I think it is premature to try to construct this major framework that would explain the character of vacuum selection and very early cosmology in string theory”<\/p>\n

and<\/p>\n

“So my belief is that we will have to understand the nonperturbative structure of the stringy arena using some new universal definition of string theory – a definition that is both non-perturbative (reaches the strongly coupled regions) as well as background-universal (reaches the geometries and non-geometries that are different from the starting one), and only afterwards, we will be able to start answering the stringy cosmological questions in a better context. Without this new tool, everything is just vague guesswork.<\/p>\n

In my opinion, the research of string cosmology; stringy inflation; de Sitter space in string theory; scattering in backgrounds with non-standard causal diagrams; and all similar things that have essentially be started by the observation of accelerating Universe back in 1998 – has led to a very small number of intriguing results. There is almost nothing non-trivial and mathematically intriguing going on here; there is as much output as much input we insert. It remains a combination of phenomenology and speculations where conjectures can rarely be clearly ruled out.”<\/p>\n

I’ve never really understood why there are fields of “string phenomenology” and “string cosmology” when the theory is still in a state that it can’t reliably calculate anything. While I think it is wishful thinking to believe that if you understood string theory better it would reproduce the real world, at least Motl’s is a consistent scientific position.<\/p>\n

Motl is also a fierce opponent of the “anthropic” arguments that have become popular among string theorists. For the latest example of anthropic argumentation, see this posting<\/A> at Jacques Distler’s weblog.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s always a little worrying when this happens, but sometimes I find myself very much agreeing with at least parts of what Lubos Motl has to say. For example see this recent posting to sci.physics.strings. In it Motl argues that … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28","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\/28","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=28"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}