{"id":468,"date":"2006-10-01T22:25:59","date_gmt":"2006-10-02T02:25:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=468"},"modified":"2006-10-19T15:11:18","modified_gmt":"2006-10-19T19:11:18","slug":"falsifying-string-theory-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=468","title":{"rendered":"Falsifying String Theory: Not"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Back in April a paper appeared on the arXiv from string theorist Jacques Distler and collaborators that made a rather outrageously overhyped claim to have found a way to &#8220;falsify string theory&#8221;.  The paper was entitled <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/hep-ph\/0604255v1\">Falsifying String Theory Through WW Scattering<\/a>, and was discussed extensively <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=385\">here<\/a>.  After the Wall Street Journal <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=419\">published an article<\/a> in June about the problems of string theory, Distler wrote them to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=422\">complain<\/a> that the article was incorrect, because he and his collaborators had shown that string theory was falsifiable.<\/p>\n<p>I had heard that this paper was going to be refereed, and was wondering whether a referee would really let the authors get away with the outrageous claim of their title.  Well, it appears that the answer is no.  A new version of the paper is now on the arXiv, with a new title: <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/hep-ph\/0604255v4\">Falsifying Models of New Physics via WW Scattering<\/a>.  The abstract, which originally claimed that violations of the bounds they described &#8220;would falsify string theory&#8221; has now been modified to no longer make this claim; the new language is &#8220;would falsify generic models of string theory&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>The paper has acquired a new co-author and been extensively rewritten.  I&#8217;m assuming many of the changes were made to satisfy a referee.  Besides changing the misleading, overhyped title, criticisms of earlier work embedded in one reference have been removed, and nine new references to earlier work have been added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Back in April a paper appeared on the arXiv from string theorist Jacques Distler and collaborators that made a rather outrageously overhyped claim to have found a way to &#8220;falsify string theory&#8221;. The paper was entitled Falsifying String Theory Through &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=468\">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_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-468","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\/468","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=468"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}