I’ll write soon about the conference I spoke at today in Lisbon. A few hours ago I participated in an interesting discussion about some of the issues around string theory with two string theorists. One of them was quite vehement that a big part of the problem is things being hyped to the media, and that this is an American disease, something that doesn’t happen to the same degree in Europe.<\/p>\n
I think he may be right, since I certainly haven’t noticed as much media hype (either pro or anti-string) from European sources, although I follow US ones more closely. When I got back to the hotel this evening, I noticed that SLAC is promoting on its web-site a news story about String Theory’s Next Top Model<\/a>. The story appears to be about this paper<\/a> that was just published in Physical Review D. In it, the authors consider three toy models of inflation in string theory and find that they don’t work. Their conclusion:<\/p>\n This may be an artifact of the simplicity of the models that we study. Instead, more complicated string theory models appear to be required, suggesting that explicitly identifying the inflating subset of the string landscape will be challenging.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So, the gist seems to be that they went looking for toy models of string inflation, didn’t find a workable one, but decided that this was worth a SLAC press release, presumably because “string theory is currently the most popular candidate for a unified theory of the fundamental forces”, so one should go to the press with any result one gets, even if negative. I think the Europeans may be right that this sort of thing doesn’t happen here….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ll write soon about the conference I spoke at today in Lisbon. A few hours ago I participated in an interesting discussion about some of the issues around string theory with two string theorists. One of them was quite vehement … Continue reading