{"id":461,"date":"2006-09-19T11:44:16","date_gmt":"2006-09-19T15:44:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=461"},"modified":"2006-11-02T10:26:34","modified_gmt":"2006-11-02T14:26:34","slug":"some-links-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=461","title":{"rendered":"Some Links"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Baez is encouraging people to join in a campaign to “save New Scientist”<\/a> from itself, i.e. to get them to stop publishing so much scientific nonsense. This seems to me like a worthwhile goal; maybe if they stop writing articles about crackpots and their “electromagnetic drives”, they’ll also stop promoting bogus over-hyped claims from prominent theorists about cosmology, string theory, etc….<\/p>\n

Shing-Tung Yau is fighting back against the New Yorker article “Manifold Destiny”<\/a>, which was very critical of him, essentially claiming he was trying to steal credit for the proof of the Poincare Conjecture from Perelman. He has hired a lawyer and set-up a web-site<\/a>. The web-site includes a long letter from his lawyer to the New Yorker<\/a>, making his case that the article has many inaccuracies. There will be a webcast tomorrow at noon giving his side of this story. Many other blogs and newspapers are discussing this, see here<\/a>, here<\/a>, here<\/a>, here<\/a>, and here<\/a>. Unfortunately for Yau, he has strong support from Lubos Motl<\/a>, who seems a tad obsessed, ranting about how the quality of the New Yorker article:<\/p>\n

resembled the style and ethical standards of many jerks in the blogosphere, including a colleague of Sylvia Nasar at Columbia University.<\/em><\/p>\n

[Note: this has been edited by Lubos, now I’m not a “jerk”, but instead a “despicable writer”]<\/p>\n

People who want to engage in bashing of Yau or of his opponents are warned that they should do it elsewhere. Only comment on this here if you have something to say that is substantive and respectful of all parties involved.<\/p>\n

Besides Yau’s webcast, tomorrow you can also listen to me on the SETI Radio Network program, broadcast on Discovery Channel Radio. This will also be on their web-site, more info here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Harvard Crimson has an article<\/a> about Nima Arkani-Hamed, who evidently made Popular Science’s “Brilliant 10” list for<\/p>\n

his research on the idea that our universe may be only one of many \u201cmultiverses\u201d and that additional dimensions may exist.<\/em><\/p>\n

(many “multiverses”???) Arkani Hamed promotes the anthropic landscape and split supersymmetry as a test for it:<\/p>\n

He recently proposed a model for new physics, called split supersymmetry\u2014which theorizes that half of all particles in the universe have partner particles. He said that if the results of the LHC experiment reveal split supersymmetry, \u201cit would be a tremendous push in the direction of a multiverse.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cRight now a lot of people are on the fence,\u201d about the theory of a multiverse, Arkani-Hamed said. \u201cI think if the LHC sees split super symmetry it\u2019s over.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Also on the multiverse front, Gibbons and Turok have a new paper out on The Measure Problem in Cosmology<\/a>. They claim to have a way of determining a measure on the “multiverse”. Only problem is that with their measure, the probability of having inflation work out the way it is supposed to is about e-180<\/sup>.<\/p>\n

Update<\/strong>: Another radio appearance today, on the program This Week in Science<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Update<\/strong>: To view today’s webcast, go to www.premierewebcast.com, get your software working, and enter room 150144. I’ll be skipping this myself, partly because I’ll be in a faculty meeting.<\/p>\n

Update<\/strong>: If you want to read a lot of incredibly ill-informed and worthless comments on the Yau story, there’s always Slashdot<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Baez is encouraging people to join in a campaign to “save New Scientist” from itself, i.e. to get them to stop publishing so much scientific nonsense. This seems to me like a worthwhile goal; maybe if they stop writing … 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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-461","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\/461","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=461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}