{"id":7983,"date":"2015-09-03T21:28:00","date_gmt":"2015-09-04T01:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=7983"},"modified":"2015-09-04T14:17:46","modified_gmt":"2015-09-04T18:17:46","slug":"this-week-and-next-weeks-hype","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=7983","title":{"rendered":"This Week and Next Week&#8217;s Hype"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This week&#8217;s hype comes to us from Discover Magazine, which has <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/crux\/2015\/09\/03\/universe-many\">Is Our Universe One of Many? Here&#8217;s How We Can Find Out<\/a>.  Needless to say, the author doesn&#8217;t actually tell us how we can find out, just repeats the usual &#8220;maybe we&#8217;ll see bubble collisions&#8221; argument often discussed here.   We&#8217;re also told that<\/p>\n<blockquote><p> It is important to keep in mind that the multiverse view is not actually a theory, it is rather a consequence of our current understanding of theoretical physics. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It seems that our &#8220;current understanding of theoretical physics&#8221; is the string theory landscape. If you ask what the evidence is for string theory, you&#8217;ll be given the usual circular reasoning that we don&#8217;t have evidence because of the multiverse.<\/p>\n<p>For next week&#8217;s hype, there will be a promotional public talk in Paris next Tuesday entitled  <a href=\"http:\/\/semparis.lpthe.jussieu.fr\/list?action=view&#038;type=seminars&#038;key=10332\">String Theory: results, challenges and magic<\/a>.  Presumably this will be much the same as the speaker&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/cds.cern.ch\/record\/1702660\/files\/1402-4896_2013_T158_014026.pdf\">String theory: results, magic and doubts<\/a> from two years ago.  The argument for string theory seems to be that it is &#8220;magic&#8221;, and somehow in the past two years the &#8220;doubts&#8221; have turned into &#8220;challenges&#8221;.  The abstract describes string theory poetically as having<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>soured and captured the imagination of a generation of high energy physicists.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>which I would say is a deep truth, if probably not one the speaker intended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week&#8217;s hype comes to us from Discover Magazine, which has Is Our Universe One of Many? Here&#8217;s How We Can Find Out. Needless to say, the author doesn&#8217;t actually tell us how we can find out, just repeats the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=7983\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_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":""},"categories":[10,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-multiverse-mania","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\/7983","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=7983"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7983\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7986,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7983\/revisions\/7986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}