{"id":644,"date":"2008-01-30T15:54:18","date_gmt":"2008-01-30T20:54:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=644"},"modified":"2008-06-17T10:43:25","modified_gmt":"2008-06-17T15:43:25","slug":"last-weeks-hype","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=644","title":{"rendered":"Last Week&#8217;s Hype"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was concerned that my &#8220;this week&#8217;s hype&#8221; headlines might be less than accurate, counting only 3 separate over-hyped string theory stories during the past month rather than four.  Turns out that I missed one (although a commenter here <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=643#comment-34175\">didn&#8217;t<\/a>), involving yet another university <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sussex.ac.uk\/press_office\/media\/media662.shtml\">press release<\/a> based on a PRL-published <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/astro-ph\/0702223\">paper<\/a> about cosmic strings.  To be fair to the authors, the press release and paper don&#8217;t contain that much hype, nothing about how they are &#8220;testing string theory&#8221;.  What they do is fit the CMB data using an additional parameter they call f<sub>10<\/sub>, which has to do with the fractional contribution of cosmic strings to the temperature power spectrum at multipole l=10.  They claim to get a slightly better fit to the data with a non-zero version of this parameter and power-law tilt n<sub>s<\/sub>=1, versus the usual fit with gives a n<sub>s<\/sub> less than one.   When they also take into account non-CMB data, the effect goes away.<\/p>\n<p>This isn&#8217;t really convincing of anything, so it&#8217;s unclear why it deserves a press release.  According to the <a href=\"http:\/\/space.newscientist.com\/article\/dn13204-cosmic-strings-observed-in-background-radiation.html\">New Scientist story<\/a> on this, which is pretty reasonable and hype-free, the chief scientist for WMAP, Charles Bennett thinks it&#8217;s a statistical fluke:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Calling it a detection is odd&#8230; I&#8217;d be very surprised if cosmologists were excited about this at this stage.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>For other press stories about this, featuring misleading headlines, see <a href=\"http:\/\/www.physorg.com\/news120823753.html\">String Theory Gets A Boost<\/a> at physorg.com, and <a href=\"http:\/\/canadafreepress.com\/index.php\/article\/1619\">String Theory slightly preferred\u2026 or at least, not disfavored!<\/a> at Canada Free Press, where the author does note:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nTo listen to people speak about string theory is a lesson in ambiguity. No one is willing to commit to a solid opinion, on either side of the coin, and they dance upon the fence as if they were auditioning for a Garfield strip.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was concerned that my &#8220;this week&#8217;s hype&#8221; headlines might be less than accurate, counting only 3 separate over-hyped string theory stories during the past month rather than four. Turns out that I missed one (although a commenter here didn&#8217;t), &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=644\">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":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-hype"],"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\/644","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=644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}