{"id":863,"date":"2005-03-14T09:13:38","date_gmt":"2005-03-14T16:13:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/?p=863"},"modified":"2005-03-14T09:13:38","modified_gmt":"2005-03-14T16:13:38","slug":"stringing-us-along-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2005\/03\/14\/stringing-us-along-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Stringing Us Along"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Via <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/\">Not Even Wrong<\/a>, comes an article from the San Francisco Chronicle which is pretty critical of string theory.  Philip Anderson, as always, comes away with an interesting quote,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n&#8220;&#8230;we from outside the (string) field are disturbed by our colleagues&#8217; insistence that every new semi-adolescent who has done something in string theory is the greatest genius since Einstein and therefore must occupy yet another tenure track. &#8230; Our sciences are becoming increasingly infected with quasi-theology, a tendency which needs to be openly debated.&#8221;\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>but it&#8217;s Robert Laughlin who gets in perhaps the harshest one liner about string theory I&#8217;ve heard in quite a while<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nBut skeptics suggest it&#8217;s the latest sign of how string theorists, sometimes called &#8220;superstringers,&#8221; try to colorfully camouflage the theory&#8217;s flaws, like &#8220;a 50-year-old woman wearing way too much lipstick,&#8221; jokes Robert B. Laughlin, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at Stanford. &#8220;People have been changing string theory in wild ways because it has never worked.&#8221;\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Of course this is the same Robert Laughlin who once said (rumor mode on) that if the Stanford physics department hired anyone in quantum computing he would resign (rumor mode off).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Via Not Even Wrong, comes an article from the San Francisco Chronicle which is pretty critical of string theory. Philip Anderson, as always, comes away with an interesting quote, &#8220;&#8230;we from outside the (string) field are disturbed by our colleagues&#8217; insistence that every new semi-adolescent who has done something in string theory is the greatest &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2005\/03\/14\/stringing-us-along-2\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Stringing Us Along&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","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":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}