Category Archives: This Week’s Hype

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 →

Now that the LHC has turned out to be dud, producing no black holes or extra dimensions, the latest news is that physicists are planning a new machine, “to follow in the footsteps of the Large Hadron Collider”. This one … Continue reading →

A couple people have written to tell me about the new BBC Faster Than the Speed of Light? documentary on superluminal neutrinos which evidently featured trademark hype from string theorist Mike Duff about how string theory could explain this. For … Continue reading →

It had to happen. New Scientist managed to find a physicist willing to describe the OPERA result as “evidence for string theory”: So if OPERA’s results hold up, they could provide support for the existence of sterile neutrinos, extra dimensions … Continue reading →

Today’s Wisconsin State Journal covers the String Phenomenology 2011 conference going on in Madison this week, where, according to the organizers, about 100 scientists are discussing how to “test string theory”: The Madison conference is something of a milestone in … Continue reading →

String theory hype is still coming fast and furious, so much so that the latest edition of This Week’s Hype needs to be a double issue. Today we learn that Black holes and pulsars could reveal extra dimensions, solving that … Continue reading →