{"id":8270,"date":"2016-01-28T13:19:48","date_gmt":"2016-01-28T18:19:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=8270"},"modified":"2022-05-30T16:42:33","modified_gmt":"2022-05-30T20:42:33","slug":"more-from-polchinski","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=8270","title":{"rendered":"More From Polchinski"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Joe Polchinski has a rather odd <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1601.06145\">preprint on hep-th<\/a>, more of a blog posting than a paper, summing up his views on string theory and the multiverse.  This is a revised version, wisely dropping a really unfortunate section.  The material previously here explaining the background to what was in that section has been moved <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?faq=ive-heard-that-you-described-weinberg-as-senile-is-that-true\">elsewhere<\/a>, and I&#8217;ve renamed the posting.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve never personally met Polchinski, and from those who know him I&#8217;ve heard that he&#8217;s a nice guy.  I&#8217;ve also recently heard that he&#8217;s ill, wish him the best.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>: It seems that I misunderstood why Polchinski removed the section about me from his arXiv article.  He&#8217;s now claiming that it was just because, since he&#8217;d gotten trackbacks to my blog banned, it would be unfair that there would be no trackback to his article (true enough&#8230;).  This whole situation is a level of bizarre beyond the heights reached way back when during the string wars.<\/p>\n<p>For those reading the version of Polchinski&#8217;s article on his website rather than the current one on the arXiv, to understand what this is about, please read the material <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?faq=ive-heard-that-you-described-weinberg-as-senile-is-that-true\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Joe Polchinski has a rather odd preprint on hep-th, more of a blog posting than a paper, summing up his views on string theory and the multiverse. This is a revised version, wisely dropping a really unfortunate section. The material &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=8270\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","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],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-multiverse-mania"],"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\/8270","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=8270"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12912,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8270\/revisions\/12912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}