{"id":31,"date":"2004-05-31T20:40:40","date_gmt":"2004-06-01T00:40:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=31"},"modified":"2021-12-22T13:36:46","modified_gmt":"2021-12-22T18:36:46","slug":"more-landscape-stream-of-consciousness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=31","title":{"rendered":"More Landscape Stream of Consciousness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It looks like particle theory has now degenerated to the point where its leading figures can&#8217;t think of anything better to do than to write rambling articles with virtually no equations that reach no real conclusions.  Last week was Lenny Susskind, tonight there&#8217;s a new <a href=\"http:\/\/www.arxiv.org\/abs\/hep-th\/0405279\">article<\/a> by Michael Douglas.  <\/p>\n<p>His conclusion, such as it is, goes like this:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;If I had to bet at the moment, I would still bet that string theory favors the low scale, for the reasons outlined above, but it is not at all obvious that this is what will come out in the end&#8230;. We should keep in mind that &#8216;favoring&#8217; one type of vacuum or mechanism over another is not a strong result, if both types of vacuums exist&#8230;&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>So, maybe string theory &#8220;favors&#8221; a low supersymmetry-breaking scale, maybe not. As usual, not only can&#8217;t it predict anything, it can&#8217;t even predict the scale at which it can&#8217;t predict anything. I really cannot understand why anyone thinks this kind of thing is science.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It looks like particle theory has now degenerated to the point where its leading figures can&#8217;t think of anything better to do than to write rambling articles with virtually no equations that reach no real conclusions. Last week was Lenny &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=31\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/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":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-multiverse-mania"],"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\/31","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=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12609,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions\/12609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}