{"id":480,"date":"2006-10-24T17:21:52","date_gmt":"2006-10-24T21:21:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=480"},"modified":"2007-02-20T13:52:20","modified_gmt":"2007-02-20T18:52:20","slug":"prospects-for-a-string-theory-phenomenology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=480","title":{"rendered":"Prospects For a String Theory Phenomenology"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday at the KITP Michael Dine gave a very good survey talk on Prospects for a String Theory Phenomenology<\/a>. It’s pretty much hype free, has a much more realistic point of view than most talks on string phenomenology that I’ve seen, and gives a good idea of the current state of the subject.<\/p>\n

Dine claims that almost all string theorists now accept the existence of flux vacua, although only some have adopted the anthropic landscape philosophy of Susskind et. al. He describes some string phenomenologists as closing their eyes to the problems represented by the large number of these vacua, and just working on some of the more tractable examples in the hope that something will turn up that will allow them to make some connection to the real world. He himself is convinced by the Denef-Douglas argument that even identifying a single vacuum state with sufficiently small cosmological constant is impossible, so that one has to make statistical arguments. He tries to have some optimism that perhaps this statistical study will allow one to make some kind of prediction, perhaps about whether the scale of supersymmetry breaking is low or high, although so far this has turned out to be impossible.<\/p>\n

The discussion at the end of the talk is very interesting, with Dine acknowledging that there are lots of reasons he may be barking up the wrong tree and saying that he would be happier if this turned out to be the case. He quotes Witten as telling him that what he is doing can’t work, that there isn’t much point in trying to do the calculations he is trying to do because:<\/p>\n

A.: “You are probably not going to succeed”, and<\/p>\n

B: “If that is all you can do it would be a great disappointment. We have this beautiful theory and we are going to get everything out of it” [i.e. it would be unpredictive].<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday at the KITP Michael Dine gave a very good survey talk on Prospects for a String Theory Phenomenology. It’s pretty much hype free, has a much more realistic point of view than most talks on string phenomenology that I’ve … 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-480","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\/480","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=480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}