{"id":4611,"date":"2012-04-23T15:06:10","date_gmt":"2012-04-23T19:06:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=4611"},"modified":"2012-04-26T09:22:30","modified_gmt":"2012-04-26T13:22:30","slug":"something-and-nothing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=4611","title":{"rendered":"Something and Nothing"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>In the something of interest category, last week at Columbia there was a panel discussion held as part of the World Leader&#8217;s Forum, introduced by our president Lee Bollinger, on the topic <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.scientificamerican.com\/observations\/2012\/04\/20\/what-happens-if-we-find-the-higgs-particle-or-if-we-dont\/\">What If We Find the Higgs Particle and What if We Don&#8217;t<\/a>.\n<p>Columbia&#8217;s Michael Tuts and Brian Greene gave an excellent discussion of the topic, to a large and attentive audience.  Probably nothing new to readers of this blog, but I think they did a great job of it, and was interested to notice that Brian expressed skepticism about Kane&#8217;s claims to derive the Higgs mass from string theory.  Dennis Overbye of the New York Times seemed rather wary of hype about HEP, since he&#8217;s a veteran of seeing the Times burned by this sort of thing.  It&#8217;s now been quite a while since they&#8217;ve made the mistake of putting up LHC headlines like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2000\/04\/04\/science\/physicists-finally-find-a-way-to-test-superstring-theory.html?\">Physicists Finally Find a Way to Test Superstring Theory<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe there&#8217;s a better source for the video linked above, in the version I&#8217;m looking at, everyone is blue&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>In other &#8220;something&#8221; news, Brian&#8217;s World Science Festival has just announced its schedule, available <a href=\"http:\/\/worldsciencefestival.com\/events\">here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>On the Krauss\/Albert debate over nothingness front, yesterday there was a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/victor-stenger\/physics-outer-space_b_1443869.html\">piece on the Huffington Post<\/a> by Victor Stenger taking up the fight on Krauss&#8217;s side.   Over at Scientific American today, <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.scientificamerican.com\/cross-check\/2012\/04\/23\/science-will-never-explain-why-theres-something-rather-than-nothing\/\">John Horgan<\/a> comes into the ring on Albert&#8217;s side.\n<p>Like Horgan, I&#8217;ve recently got ahold of a copy of a pre-publication copy of a much more interesting take on the something\/nothing business, Jim Holt&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/books.wwnorton.com\/books\/978-0-87140-409-1\/\">Why Does the World Exist?<\/a>.  I look forward to writing something about it here soon.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>: Thanks to commenter Zathras for pointing to the latest punches returned by Krauss (see <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/technology\/archive\/2012\/04\/has-physics-made-philosophy-and-religion-obsolete\/256203\/\">here<\/a>):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Well, I read a moronic philosopher who did a review of my book in the New York Times who somehow said that having particles and no particles is the same thing, and it&#8217;s not.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>: When checking out John Horgan&#8217;s SciAm piece on this, don&#8217;t miss the comment section, where he and Krauss are going at it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>: Via commenter Billy Hudson, Krauss&#8217;s fighting words about philosophers and philosophy seem to have brought the philosophy community into the fight on Albert&#8217;s side, see <a href=\"http:\/\/rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com\/2012\/04\/lawrence-krauss-another-physicist-with.html\">Massimo Pigliucci&#8217;s latest<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the something of interest category, last week at Columbia there was a panel discussion held as part of the World Leader&#8217;s Forum, introduced by our president Lee Bollinger, on the topic What If We Find the Higgs Particle and &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=4611\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","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":[10,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-multiverse-mania","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\/4611","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=4611"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4622,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4611\/revisions\/4622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}