{"id":594,"date":"2007-09-05T09:55:44","date_gmt":"2007-09-05T14:55:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=594"},"modified":"2007-09-05T09:55:44","modified_gmt":"2007-09-05T14:55:44","slug":"is-there-intelligent-life-on-hep-th","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=594","title":{"rendered":"Is There Intelligent Life On hep-th?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There are yet more hep-th articles on the anthropic principle this week, following recent ones devoted to the implications for fundamental physics of the <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/0708.0573\">heights of giraffes<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/0708.2367\">sizes of brontosaurus brains.<\/a>   The TASI summer school designed to train particle theory graduate students this year featured talks by Raphael Bousso expounding the anthropic landscape pseudo-science as a &#8220;solution&#8221; to the CC problem.  His lecture notes are now <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/0708.4231\">available<\/a>.  In them he does refer to one problem that plagues this subject, that of how to identify the intelligent observers whose probability of existence everything depends on:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nThe problem of characterizing observers, especially in vacua very different from ours, remains challenging.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Last night a <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/0709.0502\">new paper<\/a> on this subject appeared on the arXiv, by Maor, Krauss and Starkman, making the point about anthropic arguments that:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\narguments of these sort (see for example [3] [<em>reference is to papers by Bousso<\/em>]) strongly rely on the assertion that we must be typical observers, an assertion without sound fundamental scientific basis at the current time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The authors end with a conclusion about what you can learn from anthropic arguments:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nFinally, the correlations illuminated by anthropic reasoning imply that what we ultimately learn from anthropic arguments is that the existence of us and the existence of the observed value of Lambda do not contradict each other. That is nice, but hardly surprising.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In their acknowledgment section they thank Bousso for &#8220;lively discussions&#8221;.  He thanks lots of people in his acknowledgments section, but not them.   I don&#8217;t know about this question of intelligent life in other pocket universes, but the question of whether there&#8217;s intelligent life on hep-th these days seems to still be open.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are yet more hep-th articles on the anthropic principle this week, following recent ones devoted to the implications for fundamental physics of the heights of giraffes and sizes of brontosaurus brains. The TASI summer school designed to train particle &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=594\">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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-594","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\/594","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=594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}