{"id":82,"date":"2004-09-20T21:11:17","date_gmt":"2004-09-21T01:11:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=82"},"modified":"2004-09-20T21:11:17","modified_gmt":"2004-09-21T01:11:17","slug":"this-weeks-predictions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=82","title":{"rendered":"This Week&#8217;s Predictions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A new <A href=\"http:\/\/www.arxiv.org\/abs\/hep-th\/0409207\">preprint<\/A> by Michael Douglas indicates that, at least this week, the latest &#8220;predictions&#8221; from string theory are for:<\/p>\n<p>1. No large extra dimensions.<\/p>\n<p>2. No low scale supersymmetry.<\/p>\n<p>So it looks like the &#8220;prediction&#8221; of the string theory &#8220;Landscape&#8221; will be that no physics related to string theory beyond that of the standard model will ever be observable.  Thus the only &#8220;prediction&#8221; of string theory will be that you can never see any physics related to it.  This kind of &#8220;prediction&#8221; is great since it proves string theory must be true. Either you don&#8217;t ever see any effects of string theory in which case you have confirmed its predictions so it must be true, or you do see effects of string theory, in which case string theory is even more true.<\/p>\n<p>Nothing really new at Brian&#8217;s physics colloquium today. About 300 people showed up, which I think is probably a record for a physics colloquium.  Brian doesn&#8217;t like Susskind&#8217;s &#8220;anthropic&#8221; arguments, which shows good sense. He still hopes that some new form of non-perturbative string theory will explain the standard model by picking out the right Calabi-Yau, but admits there&#8217;s no known reason for this to happen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new preprint by Michael Douglas indicates that, at least this week, the latest &#8220;predictions&#8221; from string theory are for: 1. No large extra dimensions. 2. No low scale supersymmetry. So it looks like the &#8220;prediction&#8221; of the string theory &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=82\">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_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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82","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\/82","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=82"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=82"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=82"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=82"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}