{"id":9405,"date":"2017-06-22T04:59:44","date_gmt":"2017-06-22T08:59:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=9405"},"modified":"2017-06-30T02:48:07","modified_gmt":"2017-06-30T06:48:07","slug":"this-weeks-hype-49","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=9405","title":{"rendered":"This Week&#8217;s Hype"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m on vacation in Europe, not in any mood to spend more time on this than just to point out that it&#8217;s the same usual tedious string theory promotional operation from the same people who have been at this for decades now.  We have<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A PRL publication that has nothing at all to do with string theory, preprint <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1702.05490\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>. This is about a purely classical pde calculation in coupled EM + gravity.<\/li>\n<li>The researcher&#8217;s university puts out a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cam.ac.uk\/research\/news\/saddle-shaped-universe-could-undermine-general-relativity\" target=\"_blank\">press release<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>A <a href=\"https:\/\/www.quantamagazine.org\/where-gravity-is-weak-and-naked-singularities-are-verboten-20170620\/\" target=\"_blank\">story then appears<\/a> where the usual suspects claim this is some sort of vindication for string theory and shows their loop quantum gravity opponents are wrong.  There&#8217;s a lot of quite good information in the story about the actual classical calculation involved, but no indication of why one might want to be skeptical about the effort to enlist this result in the string vs. loop war.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>While traveling I&#8217;ve seen a couple very good stories about physics online:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/06\/19\/science\/cern-large-hadron-collider-higgs-physics.html\" target=\"_blank\">summary from Dennis Overbye<\/a> about the the current status of energy frontier HEP.<\/li>\n<li>An <a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/essays\/the-quantum-view-of-reality-might-not-be-so-weird-after-all\" target=\"_blank\">excellent long article by Philip Ball<\/a> about quantum mechanics and the measurement problem.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m on vacation in Europe, not in any mood to spend more time on this than just to point out that it&#8217;s the same usual tedious string theory promotional operation from the same people who have been at this for &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=9405\">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":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","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\/9405","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=9405"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9406,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9405\/revisions\/9406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}