Quantum gravity physics based on facts, giving checkable predictions

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Assistant Professor Luboš Motl has sense in dismissing the string theory landscape of 10^350 unphysical solutions

String theorist Luboš Motl of Harvard:

Dear Custard soup,

I essentially agree with you. And indeed, there are plans that are remotely similar to your joke, to investigate properties of 10^{350} unphysical solutions of string theory in pretty big worldwide projects. I am equally unimpressed by these things because it is, much like this "climate modelling", just a method to shoot random numbers.

Best
Lubos

Lubos Motl Homepage 04.19.06 - 9:20 am #

For information about his research see this site. He has 22 papers listed by SPIRES, to date.

Interestingly, he co-authored a 6-page paper with 'landscape' originator Professor Leonard Susskind of Standford University back in 1997, albeit on a different topic than the landscape: Finite N heterotic matrix models and discrete light cone quantization, hep-th/9708083.

For comparison, another string researcher, Harvard physics Professor Lisa Randall, has 118 citations on SPIRES (which includes here book Warped Passages with its analogies to Alice in Wonderland's looking glass and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory's wonkavator).

She has quite a few papers in Physical Review Letters, the journal with the editor who unsurprisingly thinks real physics is merely an 'alternative' to string speculation:

Sent: 02/01/03 17:47
Subject: Your_manuscript LZ8276 Cook
Physical Review Letters does not, in general, publish papers on alternatives to currently accepted theories … Yours sincerely, Stanley G. Brown, Editor, Physical Review Letters

3 Comments:

At 6:01 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Nige,

At least Stanley Brown, editor pf PRL, didn't publish Nobel Laureate Brian Josephson's string theory based mind-matter unification paper:

http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0312012

String Theory, Universal Mind, and the Paranormal
Authors: Brian D. Josephson

"A model consistent with string theory is proposed for so-called paranormal phenomena such as extra-sensory perception (ESP). Our mathematical skills are assumed to derive from a special 'mental vacuum state', whose origin is explained on the basis of anthropic and biological arguments, taking into account the need for the informational processes associated with such a state to be of a life-supporting character. ESP is then explained in terms of shared 'thought bubbles' generated by the participants out of the mental vacuum state. The paper concludes with a critique of arguments sometimes made claiming to 'rule out' the possible existence of paranormal phenomena."

 
At 6:05 AM, Blogger nige said...

Anonymous,

Please stop it with the religious stuff from arXiv.org.

Everyone knows that website is not connected to science, but controlled by string theory fanatics. See http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=377

ArXiv.org at present is a club of crackpots.

Don't waste my time!

Thanks.

 
At 6:41 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Fast comment to http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/04/integrability-giant-magnons.html

http://www.haloscan.com/comments/lumidek/114553687695687206/?a=16571&manr=1#329379

"It has been established that various physical phenomena in field theories are equivalent to phenomena in string theory where extra dimensions are added. Because our intuition what happens in the field theory context is often limited, the geometrical picture emerging from string theory is very useful and tells us what should we really expect." - Lubos Motl

I recommend to you Brian Josephson's paper "String Theory, Universal Mind, and" at http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0312012

"Our mathematical skills are assumed to derive from a special 'mental vacuum state', whose origin is explained on the basis of anthropic and biological arguments, taking into account the need for the informational processes associated with such a state to be of a life-supporting character. ESP is then explained in terms of shared 'thought bubbles' generated by the participants out of the mental vacuum state."

Does this provide a way to test string theory, Lubos? If string theorists turn out to have a "vacuum mental state" will that validate it?
Custard soup | Homepage | 04.20.06 - 9:33 am | #

 

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