{"id":73,"date":"2004-08-23T15:47:51","date_gmt":"2004-08-23T19:47:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=73"},"modified":"2004-08-23T15:47:51","modified_gmt":"2004-08-23T19:47:51","slug":"the-landscape-in-scientific-american","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=73","title":{"rendered":"The Landscape in Scientific American"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The latest issue of Scientific American is devoted to articles about Einstein and his legacy. One article in the magazine doesn&#8217;t really have much to do with Einstein and I believe would make him gag if he were still around.  The article, entitled <A href=\"http:\/\/www.sciam.com\/article.cfm?articleID=00001C83-84D1-111B-82BA83414B7F0000&#038;ref=sciam&#038;chanID=sa006\"> &#8220;The String Theory Landscape&#8221;<\/A>  is by Raphael Bousso and Joe Polchinski.  In it they claim credit for the pseudo-scientific idea of &#8220;explaining&#8221; the value of the cosmological constant by the existence of the &#8220;landscape&#8221; and the anthropic principle.  It&#8217;s sad to see this nonsense being purveyed by the most respected and well-known popular science publication in the US.<\/p>\n<p>For something more sensible about the anthropic principle, see a recent <A href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/news\/2004\/040802\/full\/040802-21.html\">column<\/A> from Nature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The latest issue of Scientific American is devoted to articles about Einstein and his legacy. One article in the magazine doesn&#8217;t really have much to do with Einstein and I believe would make him gag if he were still around. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=73\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","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-73","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\/73","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=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}