Category Archives: Multiverse Mania

Anything Goes

Posted on March 26, 2009 by woit

Yesterday at the KITP Wati Taylor gave a talk entitled Freedom and Constraints in the Landscape of Intersecting/Magnetized Branes. During the talk he explained in detail the problem of lack of predictivity caused by the landscape. As far as anyone … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 26 Comments

The Nature of Truth

Posted on March 24, 2009 by woit

Seed Magazine has a video and transcript up of a discussion between cosmologist Paul Steinhardt and philosopher of science Peter Galison advertised as The physicist and the historian discuss the nature of truth as theoretical models of the universe become … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 25 Comments

The Landscape for Undergraduates

Posted on February 14, 2009 by woit

I was in a local Barnes and Noble today, and noticed that there’s a new, second edition out of Barton Zwiebach’s A First Course in String Theory, which is the textbook for MIT’s course 8.251 String Theory for Undergraduates. The … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 13 Comments

Status of Superstring and M-theory

Posted on December 11, 2008 by woit

A write-up by John Schwarz of his Erice lectures from this past summer has now appeared on the arXiv, with the title Status of Superstring and M-theory. In his second lecture, Schwarz provides a good review of the various attempts … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania, Uncategorized | 10 Comments

The Landscape at Princeton

Posted on November 24, 2008 by woit

The Princeton Center for Theoretical Science has been having a mini-symposium on the string theory Landscape, and as part of this today hosted a “panel discussion” on the topic. It turns out that there’s not a lot of support for … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 21 Comments

Shouldn’t Something Be Done?

Posted on November 19, 2008 by woit

The sheer awfulness of last night’s History Channel program on physics is hard to exaggerate. Here’s some of what Clifford Johnson (one of the participants in the program) wrote on his blog while watching it: Oh, right… I remember “there … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 39 Comments

Science and Science Fiction

Posted on November 18, 2008 by woit

I just set my DVR to record this evening’s broadcast on the History Channel of Parallel Universes, and noticed that the summary information about the show reads: Some of the world’s leading physicists believe they have found evidence proving the … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 5 Comments

Short Bits

Posted on November 11, 2008 by woit

More about BRST is on its way, but in the meantime a lot of things have accumulated that might be of interest, so I wanted to do a quick posting about these. One of them does have to do with … Continue reading →

Posted in BRST, Experimental HEP News, Multiverse Mania | 52 Comments

The Multiverse at Perimeter

Posted on September 2, 2008 by woit

This week, the Perimeter Institute is hosting a conference entitled A Debate in Cosmology – The Multiverse. Here’s the schedule, and talks have started to appear on-line here. Some of the speakers will be discussing the Many Worlds interpretation of … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 24 Comments

Boltzmann Brain Domination

Posted on August 30, 2008 by woit

A burning question in theoretical physics these days is that of whether Boltzmann Brains dominate the string theory anthropic landscape. It seems that to answer this question one must study the details of how BBs nucleate and how string vacua … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 17 Comments