Category Archives: This Week’s Hype

Last week David Gross was in New Mexico, giving an “unclassified talk” at Los Alamos, and one on The State of String Theory at the Santa Fe Institute. There’s a report on the Los Alamos talk from the Los Alamos … Continue reading →

I’ll write soon about the conference I spoke at today in Lisbon. A few hours ago I participated in an interesting discussion about some of the issues around string theory with two string theorists. One of them was quite vehement … Continue reading →

More than three years ago Scientific American ran a feature article by Bousso and Polchinski promoting the then new idea of The String Theory Landscape. Now that this pseudo-science has become well-entrenched in the physics community, this month’s issue of … Continue reading →

The latest press release hyping a string theory paper in a misleading way comes from my alma mater Princeton, which I find quite depressing. According to yesterday’s press release, entitled Princeton physicists connect string theory with established physics: String theory, … Continue reading →

Press releases claiming that a “test for string theory” has been found appear with some regularity, notwithstanding the fact that no one actually knows how to test string theory. The latest one comes from the University of California at San … Continue reading →

This week’s string theory hype is embedded in a story by Michael Schirber about the possibility of variation of fundamental constants that has appeared on msnbc.com, foxnews.com, and Slashdot. According to Schirber: A popular alternative to relativity, which assumes that … Continue reading →

Several people have pointed out to me the latest press release hyping the supposed testability of an extremely speculative theoretical idea, which then gets promoted to a “scientists finally find way to test string theory” story, and spread throughout the … Continue reading →

Yet another example of the seemingly infinite supply of bogus “evidence for string theory” is a recent Slashdot posting about a claim to have measured a change in time of the proton/electron mass ratio. It is based on a New … Continue reading →

If you believe the headline of a press release issued today by Northeastern University, its researchers have found evidence of extra dimensions. The actual text of the press release tells a different story, that they haven’t found evidence of extra … Continue reading →