Category Archives: This Week’s Hype

Philip Gibbs points to an impressive piece of string theory hype from British Channel 4 news. If you watch the clip, you get the latest news about string theory and the LHC: people were getting discouraged about string theory, but … Continue reading →

This week’s hype comes from an unusual source, John Baez and his ex-student John Huerta, who have a new article in Scientific American entitled The Strangest Numbers in String Theory. The expository article about octonions by John (Baez) that appeared … Continue reading →

This week’s string theory hype is brought to you by a press release headlined Dark Matter and String Theory? from the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, and another one from the Vienna University of Technology. These have led to a BBC … Continue reading →

LHC-related hype is coming fast and furious this week during my vacation, with Vanderbilt University yesterday issuing a press release headlined Large Hadron Collider could be world’s first time machine. It’s based on this paper, and the Vanderbilt press release … Continue reading →

A session on results from the LHC at last week’s AAAS meeting has generated some news reports about results from the heavy ion run, see here and here. Under the heading “String theory supported”, MSNBC reports: Previous experiments conducted at … Continue reading →

This week’s contribution to the long tradition of universities issuing press releases hyping non-existent “experimental tests of string theory” by their employees is from Duke University, which advertises “String Theory in a Lab“. This is based on a paper that … Continue reading →

Way back in 1997, string theorists were already getting rather touchy about people pointing out string theory’s testability problems. At that time, Gordon Kane published an article in Physics Today with the title String Theory is Testable, Even Supertestable in … Continue reading →

A couple people this morning pointed me to today’s press release from Imperial College, headlined Researchers Discover How to Conduct First Test of “Untestable” String Theory and subtitled “New study suggests researchers can now test the ‘theory of everything’”. In … Continue reading →

I’m rather busy these days with a move to a new apartment, but maybe there’s time for a quick edition of “This Week’s Hype”. A commenter on the previous posting points to Amanda Peet’s recent talk entitled String Theory for … Continue reading →