Category Archives: This Week’s Hype

New Scientist had the good sense to pass on last week’s hype about string theory testability, but is responsible for this week’s hype on the subject, with an article entitled String theory may predict our universe after all. It’s unclear … Continue reading →

Over the past year or so, as public awareness has grown that string theory is a failed idea about unification due to its inherent untestability, I’ve been surprised by the way in which many in the string theory community have … Continue reading →

This past week has seen a veritable bumper crop of media hype, involving claims coming from both string theorists and critics of string theory. Besides the overhyped claims and Lisi-mania that has made it into all sorts of media outlets, … Continue reading →

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 →