{"id":86,"date":"2004-10-01T11:31:16","date_gmt":"2004-10-01T15:31:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=86"},"modified":"2004-10-01T11:31:16","modified_gmt":"2004-10-01T15:31:16","slug":"whatever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=86","title":{"rendered":"Whatever"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at sci.physics.strings<\/A> there’s the scary sight of Lubos Motl agreeing with me in a posting about “Stringy Naturalness”<\/A>. Well, maybe he isn’t directly saying he agrees with me, but “It would be too difficult for me to pretend that I disagree with these Woit’s remarks” is pretty close. Lubos is criticizing the new sort of “naturalness” critierion advocated by Miichael Douglas in a preprint<\/A> reviewing his recent work on the “Landscape”. By this criterion a low energy effective QFT is more “natural” when there are more supposed string theory vacua that have this low energy limit. As Lubos points out, the danger with this criterion is that it tends to lead you to the conclusion that the most “natural” effective field theory is the one that is least likely to be able to predict anything new.<\/p>\n

The posting<\/A> immediately before Lubos’s is from Michael Douglas himself, responding to an earlier thread. In it he explains the goal of his work as follows. He wants to estimate N_SM, the number of vacua consistent with the observed known Standard Model behavior, then <\/p>\n

“Based on this information, we can decide whether we should continue the search for the right vacuum directly (appropriate if N_SM <= a few), look for additional principles to cut down the number (if N_SM is large), or give up and start making anthropic arguments or whatever (if N_SM is ridiculously large).\"\n\nThe posting <\/A> immediately before Douglas’s asks for “what would cause string theory to become nonviable and abandoned”, but hasn’t gotten any responses. An obvious response would be that if it becomes clear that string theory has so many consistent vacua that it can’t ever predict anything, the theory would have to be abandoned. Neither Douglas nor others working on the Landscape seem willing to mention this possibility in public, the closest he gets is the line about having to “give up and start making anthropic arguments or whatever”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at sci.physics.strings there’s the scary sight of Lubos Motl agreeing with me in a posting about “Stringy Naturalness”. Well, maybe he isn’t directly saying he agrees with me, but “It would be too difficult for me to pretend that … Continue reading →<\/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_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86","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\/86","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=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=86"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=86"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}