Category Archives: This Week’s Hype

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 →

The high point of my expertise in condensed matter physics was about thirty years ago, when I studied the subject in order to pass one of the general exams at Princeton. At the party after the test was graded, Phil … Continue reading →

Claims made recently in the CERN Courier that string theory can be applied to Quantum Information Theory (see here) are being followed up with a new paper entitled Four-qubit entanglement from string theory which appears to claim that, despite what … Continue reading →

There’s a remarkable article by Mike Duff in this month’s CERN Courier, arguing the case that string theory does too have important applications: in Quantum Information Theory. The claim seems to be that since the same algebraic structures appear in … Continue reading →

The Times of London recently sent one of its reporters out to a pub to learn about string theory from Michael Green, with results available on-line here.  Green does a good job of trying to explain some physics over a … Continue reading →