{"id":566,"date":"2007-06-07T14:45:39","date_gmt":"2007-06-07T19:45:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=566"},"modified":"2007-09-15T10:42:11","modified_gmt":"2007-09-15T15:42:11","slug":"dispute-chez-les-physiciens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=566","title":{"rendered":"Dispute Chez Les Physiciens"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday evening there was a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cite-sciences.fr\/francais\/ala_cite\/college\/v2\/html\/2006_2007\/cycles\/cycle_254.htm\">public debate<\/a> about string theory held in Paris, between Lee Smolin and Thibault Damour.   So far, accounts of the debate have appeared in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lemonde.fr\/web\/article\/0,1-0@2-3244,36-920183@51-916338,0.html\">Le Monde<\/a> and at Fabien Besnard&#8217;s blog <a href=\"http:\/\/math-et-physique.over-blog.com\/article-6756132.html\">Mathephysique<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The Le Monde article is not very informative, but indicates that Damour defended string theory against charges that it was not testable by claiming that it predicted &#8220;possible classes of experimentally testable phenomena&#8221; at the LHC.  Besnard gives a more detailed account, describing how Damour answered these charges of lack of testability with: &#8220;Lee, a subtle thinker, surely doesn&#8217;t believe himself the naive Popperian position he is defending&#8221;.  He also evidently claimed that string theory was testable because it would be confirmed if a violation of the equivalence principle was found (he really should talk to Lubos, see <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=559\">here<\/a>).  Remarkably, he also claimed that observation of the kind of DSR dispersion relations that Smolin thinks LQG leads to would not be a problem for string theory, since one could also get them out of string theory (here I think he needs to talk to both Lubos and <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/hep-ph\/0604255\">Jacques Distler<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>:  I hear that the event was recorded, and audio should be available by the end of the week at the web-site linked to above.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday evening there was a public debate about string theory held in Paris, between Lee Smolin and Thibault Damour. So far, accounts of the debate have appeared in Le Monde and at Fabien Besnard&#8217;s blog Mathephysique. The Le Monde article &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=566\">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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-566","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\/566","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=566"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}