Category Archives: Multiverse Mania

Linde on Inflation and the Multiverse

Posted on August 25, 2012 by woit

Andrei Linde is one of Yuri Milner’s $3 million dollar men, best known for his “chaotic inflation” version of inflationary theory, as well as being one of the main proponents of anthropic multiverse mania. There’s a long piece based on … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 38 Comments

Short Items

Posted on July 26, 2012 by woit

A few short items: To compare and contrast to the activities of the Simons Foundation, there’s the Templeton Foundation, which has a $1.7 billion or so endowment to spend: They have a new Big Questions Online site, which asks Does … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania, Uncategorized | 12 Comments

Welcome to the Multiverse

Posted on May 21, 2012 by woit

Multiverse Mania makes the big time this week, with a cover story Welcome to the Multiverse by Brian Greene in Newsweek. While the title indicates that the Multiverse is here and part of our scientific world-view, the subtitle is a … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 94 Comments

Much Ado About Nothing

Posted on April 27, 2012 by woit

I suppose I’m posting too much about this, but the ongoing fight over nothing between prominent physicists and philosophers strikes me as perhaps marking some kind of end-point in the multiverse-mania-driven decline of part of theoretical physics from a difficult, … Continue reading →

Posted in Favorite Old Posts, Multiverse Mania | 60 Comments

Something and Nothing

Posted on April 23, 2012 by woit

In the something of interest category, last week at Columbia there was a panel discussion held as part of the World Leader’s Forum, introduced by our president Lee Bollinger, on the topic What If We Find the Higgs Particle and … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania, Uncategorized | 34 Comments

Short Items

Posted on April 13, 2012 by woit

The LHC is back in business, with the experiments collecting data at 4 TeV/beam, marginally higher than last year’s 3.5 TeV/beam. They are ramping up the number of bunches in each beam, already this afternoon achieving a higher initial luminosity … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News, Multiverse Mania | 9 Comments

Nothingness in LA on April Fool’s Day

Posted on April 1, 2012 by woit

The media and blogosphere today are full of April Fool’s Day jokes of various degrees of funniness. Then there’s the Los Angeles Times, which used the date to publish a piece by Lawrence Krauss entitled A Universe Without Purpose. It … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 30 Comments

Templeton Millions

Posted on March 16, 2012 by woit

I’m still on vacation for a few days, but will take a quick break from sitting in a hot tub watching the Northern Lights here in Iceland for a short blog entry. The Templeton Foundation has just announced a plan … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 52 Comments

String Theory Skeptics and Multiverse Mania

Posted on February 21, 2012 by woit

My endless rants here about the hot field of multiverse studies are mainly motivated by concern about the effect this is having on particle theory. Multiverse scenarios all too often function as an excuse for not admitting that string theory/extra-dimensional … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 41 Comments

Short Items

Posted on December 21, 2011 by woit

A few short items: The Multiverse propaganda campaign continues this month, with a piece by Alan Lightman in Harpers entitled The Accidental Universe: Science’s Crisis of Faith. The content is pretty much the usual: string theory implies an untestable multiverse, … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews, Experimental HEP News, Multiverse Mania, Uncategorized | 37 Comments