{"id":649,"date":"2008-02-06T14:30:24","date_gmt":"2008-02-06T19:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=649"},"modified":"2008-06-17T10:45:36","modified_gmt":"2008-06-17T15:45:36","slug":"this-weeks-hype-10","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=649","title":{"rendered":"This Week&#8217;s Hype"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This week&#8217;s media hype promoting a new observational test of extra dimensions is based on the recent arXiv preprint <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/0801.4023\">Transient Pulses from Exploding Primordial Black Holes as a Signature of an Extra Dimension<\/a>.  Stories about it have appeared already in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/news\/2008\/080201\/full\/news.2008.549.html\">Nature<\/a> and in <a href=\"http:\/\/space.newscientist.com\/article\/dn13279-exploding-black-holes-could-expose-hidden-dimensions.html\">New Scientist<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Some of the authors are part of a group at Virginia Tech that is working with a radio-telescope array they call the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ece.vt.edu\/swe\/eta\/\">Eight-meter-wavelength Transient Array <\/a>(ETA).  The possible astrophysical sources they are looking for include primordial black holes.  The press articles however, aren&#8217;t about this, but about the new preprint, which makes claims not about conventional primordial black holes, but about ones involving extra dimensions:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nFor a toroidally compactified extra dimension, transient radio-pulse searches probe the electroweak energy scale (&sim;0.1 TeV), enabling comparison with the Large Hadron Collider. The enormous challenges of detecting quantum gravitational effects, and exploring electroweak-scale physics, make this a particularly attractive possibility.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In the New Scientist piece, astrophysicist Avi Loeb makes the comment:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>There are a lot of layers here of nonstandard assumptions&#8230; If nothing could be observed in this context, then it would not surprise me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>According to the ETA web-site and the New Scientist article, as far as the extra-dimensional business is concerned, the project is led not by the faculty members involved, but by first author Mike Kavic, a graduate student in the department.  Unlike most recent examples of such hype, which appeared in conjunction with the acceptance or publication of a paper in PRL, this one is based solely upon the submission of a paper to PRL.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week&#8217;s media hype promoting a new observational test of extra dimensions is based on the recent arXiv preprint Transient Pulses from Exploding Primordial Black Holes as a Signature of an Extra Dimension. Stories about it have appeared already in &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=649\">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-649","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\/649","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=649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}