Category Archives: This Week’s Hype

The Higgs suggests that there could be more dimensions of space-time than we previously thought. From a New Yorker piece this week (subscription required) about Joe Incandela of CMS and the Higgs discovery. Even the famed New Yorker fact-checkers are … Continue reading →

The media frenzy surrounding the Higgs discovery announcement has on the whole consisted of stories that reasonably accurately deal with the scientific implications. Journalists have for instance by now learned that “string theory predictions” are a good thing to ignore. … Continue reading →

The implications of the failure to find SUSY at the LHC are beginning to sink into the particle physics community: the paradigm that dominated the subject for the past 30 years has collapsed in the face of experimental (non)-evidence, threatening … Continue reading →

From the latest Science News: String theory weighs in on Higgs ATLANTA – Physicists working on big experiments at particle colliders aren’t the only ones who have something to say about the mass of the elusive Higgs boson. A theorist … Continue reading →

Since every blogger seems to feel it necessary to have a year-in-review posting, I thought it appropriate to point out that 2011 has been a banner year for string theory and related hype, with about twice as many editions of … Continue reading →

The Japanese are getting in on the string theory hype business, with KEK issuing a press release today with the title: The mechanism that explains why our universe was born with 3 dimensions: a 40-year-old puzzle of superstring theory solved … Continue reading →

The announcement at CERN tomorrow of a likely-looking signal for a 125 GeV mass Standard Model Higgs will probably unleash a flood of hype from theorists claiming this as evidence for their favorite Beyond the Standard Model scenario. One obvious … Continue reading →

Mike Duff has a new preprint out, a contribution to the forthcoming Foundations of Physics special issue on “Forty Years of String Theory” entitled String and M-theory: answering the critics. Much of it is the usual case string theorists are … Continue reading →

The headline story at the APS Physics site is Still Waiting for Supersymmetry, by Sven Heinemeyer, which reports on a PRL article from CMS reporting no evidence for supersymmetry. According to Heinemeyer: It’s important to realize that CMS’s results do … Continue reading →

A couple people have pointed me to an article at New Scientist that requires another edition of This Week’s Hype. According to Nuclear clock could steal atomic clock’s crown: Such clocks could shed light on string theory. The frequency of … Continue reading →