The New York Times has a nice article about the recent string theory conference, Strings05, where a panel discussion on the next string theory revolution has held.
I especially like
Leonard Susskind, a Stanford theorist and one of the founders of string theory, replied, “There’s nothing to do but just hope the Bush administration will keep paying us.”
Amanda Peet of the University of Toronto suggested making string theory “a faith-based initiative,” to much nervous laughter.
Come on string theorists, even you have got to admit that this is funny!
A heartening part of the article is at the end
At the end Dr. Shenker invoked his executive privileges. He asked the audience members for a vote on whether, by the year 3000, say, the value of the cosmological constant would be explained by the anthropic principle or by fundamental physics.
The panel split 4 to 4, with abstentions, but the audience voted overwhelmingly for the latter possibility.
I don’t think my mother ever said “If you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything at all,” but in this spirit, I won’t say anything about the anthropic principle. Although I will say that the only thing which anoyed me more than Stephen Hawking’s musing on God in “A Brief History of Time” where his musings in “A Brief History of Time” on the anthropic principle.
YA GOT TROUBLE
 Well, ya got trouble, my friend.
Right here, I say trouble right here in Jersey City
Why, sure, I’m a stringy player
Certainly mighty proud to say,
I’m always mighty proud to say it
I consider the hours I spend pulling out all my hair are golden
Help you cultivate horse sense and a cool head and a keen eye
 Now, folks, let me show you what I mean
You’ve got one, two, infinitely many stringy vaccua
Vaccua that mark the difference between a gentleman and a bum
With a capital ‘B’ and that rhymes with ‘Stree’ and that stands for ‘String’
 And all week long, your Jersey City youth’ll be fritterin’ away
I say, your young men’ll be fritterin’
Fritterin’ away their noontime, suppertime, choretime, too
Ya got trouble, folks, right here in Jersey City
with a capital ‘T’ and that rhymes with ‘Stree’
and that stands for ‘String’
 May I have your attention, please? Attention, please
I can deal with this trouble, friends,
with the wave of my hand, this very hand
Please observe me, if you will I’m Professor Harold Hill
and I’m here to organize a quantum computer band
Oh think, my friends, how can any stringy guess
ever hope to compete with a gold Q comp
Rah, rah, rah-da-da-da-da, rah-rah
Remember, my friends, what a handful of Apple players
did to the famous, fabled walls of I B M
Oh, corporation walls come a-tumblin’ down
 Oh, a band’ll do it, my friends, oh yes
I said a Q C band, do you hear me?
I say Jersey City’s gotta have a Q C band
and I mean she needs it today
Well, Professor Harold Hill’s on hand
and Jersey City’s gonna have her Q C band
Just as sure as the Lord made little green apples
and that band’s gonna be in uniform
According to the NY Times article (and other NY Times articles before it), there are a mere 10500 possible universes shown by string theory. That’s not too bad. Of course, if they were able to print exponentials correctly (or at least replace the comma in 10,500 with a ^), it might make string theory look pretty silly.
Yeah, I saw that (10500) Doh.
Perhaps we just need a quantum computer to search this space. We could use Grover’s algorithm to reduce the search problem from 10^500 to sqrt(10^500)=10^250. A much more reasonable number? Um.
Perhaps you can glean some information from a QFT, but I’m not sure how. Still that would be much quicker, and you wouldn’t even need that many qubits.