{"id":7645,"date":"2015-04-08T18:56:40","date_gmt":"2015-04-08T22:56:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=7645"},"modified":"2015-04-08T19:40:11","modified_gmt":"2015-04-08T23:40:11","slug":"news-of-the-multiverse-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=7645","title":{"rendered":"News of the Multiverse"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just about ten years ago, my April 1 posting<\/a> here was a fantasy about the Stanford ITP getting major funding from the Templeton Foundation, using it to fund a program on the multiverse, and renaming themselves the Stanford Templeton Research Institute for Nature, God and Science. The last part hasn’t yet come true yet, but I just noticed the announcement last year of a $878K Inflation, the Multiverse, and Holography<\/a> grant from Templeton to the SITP, the third part of “A three component Templeton Initiative at the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics.” <\/p>\n

To get some idea of the scale of this funding, note that the entire NSF budget for theoretical HEP is about $12 million (the DOE spends about $50-60 million, but that supports groups at the labs, as well as computational hardware, and is decreasing). The Templeton Foundation has an endowment of over $3 billion (growing rapidly), and pays out over $100 million in grants\/year (also growing rapidly). I don’t think my skills as a fantasist are good enough to imagine what this means for ten years from now in the future.<\/p>\n

In other multiverse news, the Literary Review of Canada has published a review by David Orrell<\/a> of the recent Unger\/Smolin book, and an exchange of letters<\/a> between him and Matthew Kleban. I wrote something about the book here<\/a>, and I’m in many ways not very sympathetic to the point of view of Orrell and Unger\/Smolin, especially about the role of mathematics in physics. <\/p>\n

I’m more on Kleban’s side about mathematics, but the way he paints multiverse studies as the latest scientific descendant of the mathematics-driven successes of physics of the past is highly problematic. While this is a point of view favored at Stanford and at Templeton (Kleban has a $175,000 grant<\/a> from them), I don’t think it’s a defensible one. Kleban’s arguments are<\/p>\n