String Theory
drorzel | October 9, 2006So, I recently finished The Trouble With Physics (initial comment here, full review forthcoming) and I read Not Even Wrong a little while ago (review here). I suppose I could dig up Lawrence Krauss's book, and go for the String Theory Backlash trifecta, but I could also hit myself in the head with a brick...
My first inclination is to not read anything more about string theory for a good long while, but that seems a little unfair. Given that I've read a pair of anti-string books, the responsible thing to do would probably be to read something pro-string, to see how the other side views the…
drorzel | October 8, 2006I finished Lee Smolin's The Trouble With Physics last night, and will write up a full review in the next couple of days. On the whole, I thought it was a well-done book, and he makes some good points. It's not without its problems, though, chief among them being the fact that the title is missing some words.
The book is really The Trouble With [Theoretical Particle] Physics, but Smolin, like the string theorists he criticizes for arrogance and narrow-mindedness, consistently talks about string theory and quantum gravity as if they were the only areas of physics that matter, and about physics…
drorzel | October 4, 2006The discussion of Lee Smolin's book just keeps on rolling. One of these days, I'll actually finish it, and make my own informed comments. (It's been a busy couple of weeks hereabouts.)
For the moment, I'll have to settle for pointing you to two new reviews. One is by Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance, who has posted the full draft of the review he wrote for New Scientist. It's lengthy, and detailed, and I don't have anything more specific than that to say, because I've only just reached the section introducing string theory.
The other, quoted by his Holiness, is an Amazon review by Peter Shor,…
drorzel | September 29, 2006Over at Evolution Blog, Jason Rosenhouse looks at the String Theory argument through the New Yorker's article about Woit and Smolin, and draws a parallel with his own field:
As an outsider looking in, I would want to know how physicists respond to these charges. After all, creationists level precisely the same charges against university biology departments (that they are ruled by dogmatic Darwinists yada yada). And in that context I know the charge is bogus. I suspect the same is true here. Physicists are not receiving professorships at prestigious institutions merely for expressing their…
drorzel | September 17, 2006So, the good news is, Gregg Easterbrook is writing about football for ESPN again. His "Tuesday Morning Quarterback" columns are some of the most entertaining football writing around. Here's hoping he can make it through the whole season without saying something stupid to get himself fired.
The bad news is, Gregg Easterbrook is writing about science for Slate. Actually, Gregg Easterbrook writing about anything other than football is bad news, but science is particularly bad. His knowledge of the subject always seems to operate at the Star Trek sort of level-- like he's read the glossary of a…
drorzel | September 12, 2006The two most talked-about books in physics this year are probably a pair of anti-sting-theory books, Lee Smolin's The Trouble With Physics, and Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong, which shares a name with Jacques Distler's favorite weblog. I got review copies of both, but Not Even Wrong arrived first (thanks, Peter), and gets to be the first one reviewed.
Of course, I'm coming to the game kind of late, as lots of other high-profile physics bloggers have already posted their reviews, and various magazine reviews have been out for months. Peter has collected a bunch of links in various posts. I don't…
drorzel | September 8, 2006One of the perks of this corporate blogging gig is that it's put me on the radar of book publishers, who have started sending me free stuff. We like free stuff, here at Chateau Steelypips, and we like books, so that's a Good Thing.
It's becoming almost too much of a Good Thing, though-- In the past week or so, I've received:
Not Even Wrong by Peter Woit (thank you, Peter), which I finished last night (review forthcoming).
The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney, in the spiffy new paperback edition.
The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock (thrown in with tRWoS by the publisher).
The…
drorzel | September 7, 2006This is nearly a month old, now, because I keep saying "Oh, Idon't have time to do this justice-- I'll write about it tomorrow." I really need to stop doing that.
Anyway, Physics News Update has a story about a scheme to measure gravity using Bloch oscillations, based on a paper in Physical Review Letters. This is especially interesting to me, because the most important paper of my career made use of Bloch oscillations to get our experimental signal.
A quick explanation below the fold:
Bloch oscillations are a weird phenomenon you encounter in condensed matter physics. The easiest way to…
drorzel | August 4, 2006One of the perks of this semi-pro blogging gig is that people have started sending me free copies of books about physics. I'm halfway through a new book on quantum mechanics at the moment, and a copy of Lee Smolin's forthcoming The Trouble With Physics is on its way.
If you can't wait to hear what I have to say about the book (which might take a while, as I don't have much reading time any more), Bee at Backreaction has an advance review posted already. And if you can't get enough of Lee Smolin (Loop Quantum Gravity theorist and string theory opponent), she also has an interview with the man…
drorzel | July 12, 2006An off-hand comment in my RHIC post has provided a lot more traffic and entertainment than I would've thought possible, and has also accidentally re-confirmed what we used to call "Furr's Law" back in my Usenet days-- namely, that the fastest way to get information on the Internet is to say something wrong, and let people rush to correct you. (Please note, I'm not saying I deliberately slighted string theory in order to discover RHIC resources-- I deliberately slighted string theory for the sake of a (not terribly effective) joke.)
Anyway, the responses have provided a wealth of String Theory…
drorzel | July 6, 2006My Corporate Masters have finally posted the piece that ran in the most recent print edition of the magazine, in which prominent physicists comment on the LHC. They've got predictions and explanations of why the LHC is interesting from an impressive array of people.
Most of the answers are pretty predictable. Lisa Randall talks about extra dimensions, Leonard Susskind about the Anthropic Principle, etc. My favorite answer, though, is Steven Weinberg's:
What terrifies theorists is that the LHC may discover nothing beyond the single neutral "Higgs" particle that is required by the standard…
drorzel | June 26, 2006I've got a grant proposal to review, and a progress report to write for one of my own grants, so you're getting short, link-y physics blogging:
- The Strings 2006 conference has ended, with the participants apparently deciding to keep up with this "string theory" thing (maybe you've heard of it?) for a little while longer. Talk slides from many of the speakers are available here. Of course, if you can understand them, you probably already knew that, and if you didn't know that, you probably won't get much from the slides, but there you go.
- The Wall Street Journal piece talking about Peter…
drorzel | June 20, 2006For those interested in keeping abreast of the latest stuff on string theory and its discontents, some links:
Jonathan Shock is based in Beijing, and blogging about the Strings 2006 meeting. He's got a first-day recap including descriptions of several of the talks, and incident events.
Victor Rivelles is also blogging from Beijing, and has recaps of day one and day two.
The Paper of Record loves Stephen Hawking, and writes about his visit to China for the conference.
Christine Dantas has re-posted her top ten lists (which were taken down in part due to some unpleasant comment behavior). The…
drorzel | June 19, 2006The big event of the moment in physics, at least on the high energy/ theory side, is the Strings 2006 meeting in Beijing, which will feature the usual suspects talking about the usual topics in string theory. This comes on the heels of the SUSY06 meeting, which was extensively blogged by Clifford and others.
This would probably be a good time to post a long entry about how string theory is all a bunch of crap, as that's been a reliable way to generate traffic in the past, but I just don't really have the heart for it. From my outsider's perspective, the big issues seem to be exactly the same…
drorzel | April 17, 2006Are you unhappy with the way you look? Feel like you're carrying around some large extra dimensions? Want to compactify your manifold before the summer conference season gets here?
If you answered "Yes!" to any of those questions, then you're ready for the String Theory Diet!
Each rich, satisfying meals of eleven-dimensional noodles, and watch the pounds melt away! You'll lose weight so fast, your friends will think that gravity is leaking off your brane and affecting them more than you! You'll be your own walking hierarchy problem!
You can lose as much as one Planck mass per Planck time (…
drorzel | April 12, 2006Back when ScienceBlogs was all new and shiny, I did a couple of posts asking questions of the other bloggers. I got involved with other things after a while, and stopped posting those, so I'm not sure this will still work, but here's a question for other ScienceBloggers, or science bloggers in general, that I thought of when I was writing about science books:
What topic or phenomenon that's generally in your area do you really wish people would stop asking you about?
I don't mean a major political controversy that you have a strong opinion about, but might be tired of (so no "creationism"…
drorzel | April 7, 2006Mark Chu-Carroll has a very nice discussion of what "extra dimensions" actually mean in theories like string theory. It's not the same thing that hack SF authors mean when they talk about "dimensions" in which the Nazis won WWII (that's "multiverse theory" or possibly "landscapeology" or possibly "late-night stoner bullshit"):
A better way to explain, but a slightly less intuitive one is to not separate dimensions quite so much. The set of dimensions in a space is the number of pieces of information that you need to identify a unique location in that space.
On a plane, you can put down a…
drorzel | March 21, 2006Janet Stemwedel over at Adventures in Science and Ethics has a new post on experiment vs. theory:
Someone makes a comment about hot water making ice cubes faster than cold water. Someone else, familiar with thermodynamics, explains in detail why this cannot be the case. No actual ice cube trays risk harm, since none are ever deployed in resolving the dispute.
I loves me some thermodynamics. But, why not clear some space in the freezer to do a side-by-side comparison of the ice cube tray filled with hot water and that filled with cold water? Doing an experiment certainly doesn't preclude…
drorzel | March 6, 2006Over at Jacques Distler's blog, someone has posted what strikes me as an eminently sensible system for solving the Trackback problem with the ArXiv. I attempted to post a comment to that effect over there, and got the following message:
Your comment submission failed for the following reasons:
You are not allowed to post comments.
This is almost certainly a bug (maybe a browser conflict), not a deliberate act of malice, but it's kind of amusing. I'll reproduce the comment below the fold, and maybe somebody who is allowed to post comments can post it for me...
There are ways to reduce…
drorzel | March 6, 2006There's a kerfuffle in the physics blogosphere these days over the somewhat arcane issue of TrackBacks to posts on the ArXiV, the commual preprint server where researchers can post drafts of the papers that they have submitted to research journals (or, if they're working in high energy physics, post a paper and then call it a day, without bothering with print publication).
They've relatively recently begun accepting TrackBack links from certain blogs-- but only certain blogs. Raise your hand if you think that this is likely to cause a problem at some point... Now, take that hand, and pat…