About to head out on vacation tonight, back in a couple weeks. On the hot topics in fundamental physics, two items are:
- Concerning the “no dS string vacua” conjecture, a new preprint begins by explaining why the existence or non-existence of such vacua is a question that has not been resolved (and, it seems likely to me, can’t be resolved):
classical no-go theorems such as [12] indicate that realizing de Sitter vacua in string theory requires quantum and/or stringy ingredients. The fact that corrections to classical 10d low energy supergravity are qualitatively important implies that dS compactifications, in contrast to AdS or Minkowski compactifictions, must live in a regime in which these corrections cannot be made arbitrarily small [13], hence perturbation theory cannot be made arbitrarily accurate. Moreover the absence of supersymmetry in dS, and perhaps more fundamentally the lack of a complete, nonperturbative formulation of string theory, make it hard to obtain exact results beyond perturbation theory. Thus a completely rigorous, parametrically controlled construction of individual de Sitter vacua in string theory has remained out of reach.
The paper also explains why if you try and get known physics with a quintessence field rather than a CC, you immediately run into serious problems with coupling to the Standard Model.
- Slides and video of the talks at this year’s PiTP summer school on “From Qubits to Spacetime” have started to appear. Once I get back from vacation I’ll try and watch some of the talks and hope to figure out how one is supposed to get our spacetime and its physics out of qubits.
Recently people have contacted me suggesting I blog about two physics-related topics likely to lead to vigorous debate. I’d begged off in both cases, since engaging in such a debate or moderating it would be on a short list of things I’d most like to avoid doing. This afternoon though, it struck me that there is an excellent, if cowardly, way to deal with this. I’ll mention the two topics briefly here, then shut off comments on the blog and leave town. So, some may find interesting and want to argue elsewhere about:
- One of the PiTP lecturers, Aron Wall, has a blog on physics and theology, called Undivided Looking. Wall’s theological views include thinking he has a pretty good idea about how God wants people to behave, in particular he’s pretty sure that God doesn’t want them having homosexual relations. He wrote extensively about this in a blog entry (now deleted) back in 2015. He’ll be soon taking up a faculty position at Cambridge University, and some people are not happy about this, see for example this statement from the Cambridge University Student’s Union.
- If you’d like to attend an early universe conference this September, one place you could do so is in the Israeli-occupied West Bank settlement of Ariel, where Ariel University is hosting a workshop on Inflation, Alternatives and Gravitational Waves.
