{"id":597,"date":"2007-09-11T11:24:49","date_gmt":"2007-09-11T16:24:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=597"},"modified":"2007-10-30T07:41:43","modified_gmt":"2007-10-30T12:41:43","slug":"la-faillite-de-la-theorie-des-cordes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=597","title":{"rendered":"La Faillite de la Theorie des Cordes?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It appears that the release of the French edition of Lee Smolin&#8217;s book (entitled <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.fr\/Rien-va-plus-physique-th%C3%A9orie\/dp\/2100507028\">Rien ne va plus en physique ! : L&#8217;\u00e9chec de la th\u00e9orie des cordes<\/a>) has stirred up quite a lot of attention to the string theory controversy over there.  A correspondant wrote to tell me that this month&#8217;s edition of the French popular science magazine <a href=\"http:\/\/www.larecherche.fr\/\">La Recherche<\/a> has the controversy over string theory on the cover (<em>La theorie des cordes dit-elle le vrai?<\/em>) and four articles on the subject inside.  Unfortunately I don&#8217;t have a copy of the magazine or on-line access to the articles, but just to an English language <a href=\"http:\/\/www.larecherche.fr\/special\/english\/contents411.html\">summary<\/a>.  It&#8217;s hard to tell from this exactly what&#8217;s in the articles.  One of them is an interview with the historian of science Peter Galison, who seems to describe string theory as having &#8220;initiated a new way of seeing, crucial for the future of physics.&#8221;  No idea what that is about, but I hope it&#8217;s not about the string theory landscape&#8230;.<\/p>\n<p>The string theorists of the Paris region have a <a href=\"http:\/\/string.lpthe.jussieu.fr\/\">web-page<\/a>, which recently has acquired a defensive section about <em>La faillite de la theorie des cordes?<\/em>  It encourages people to read Polchinski&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.americanscientist.org\/template\/BookReviewTypeDetail\/assetid\/54416\">review<\/a> of my book and Smolin&#8217;s (my response to this is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=498\">here<\/a>), as well as papers critical of LQG.  The same web-page also has links to other information sources about string theory, including to two blogs.  Personally I don&#8217;t think Jacques Distler&#8217;s blog is much of an advertisement for the subject, but sending people to Lubos Motl&#8217;s is a pretty funny thing to do&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It appears that the release of the French edition of Lee Smolin&#8217;s book (entitled Rien ne va plus en physique ! : L&#8217;\u00e9chec de la th\u00e9orie des cordes) has stirred up quite a lot of attention to the string theory &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=597\">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_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-597","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\/597","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=597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}