I’d been wondering why Lubos Motl seemed rather subdued in recent months, now one of his recent postings makes some reasons for this clear. Evidently since April he’s been the victim of someone who has been sending him grotesque anonymous death threats. Luckily the person responsible for this has now been identified by the police. In the comment section of the next entry in his blog, Eva Silverstein tells of also being the victim of similar threats, and again the police had to be called in.
Lubos’s participation in the controversy over the president of Harvard’s remarks about women in the sciences seems to have earned him both warnings from senior colleagues (I guess this is what his “leashing” was about), as well as harassment by some other anonymous figure. There’s no excuse for people trying to hide behind anonymity to engage in personal attacks. While Lubos is not known to completely refrain from personal attacks himself, at least he has always put his name to them.
In his latest posting he discusses in detail Silverstein and McGreevy’s claims that one can understand something about the initial singularity of the big bang in terms of tachyon condensation in string theory. Like Jacques Distler, he says that he doesn’t understand these claims, which to me seem to be a lot more coherent, but not of a significantly different nature than those of the Bogdanovs.
I still hope Witten will come around, start thinking about something else, and lead the field in a more promising direction.
The talks in the last year have been more of a general review of HEP than specific stringy work, so perhaps he is already starting thinking about something else.
I can not see yet the slides of his talk.
I don’t think I’m bullying Lubos, and actually have never personally attacked him in the ways he has attacked me. I even agree with him about a lot of things, for instance I think we see eye-to-eye about the landscape. At least when he’s talking about string theory he knows what he is talking about, which is not true of lots of other people.
I do have the deepest admiration for Witten. He’s extremely talented, works very hard, is a nice guy, has helped me in the past, and has accomplished truly amazing things. Some of the high points of my intellectual life have been reading his papers or listening to his talks. I happen to think that his deep belief in string theory is a mistake, just as Einstein was mistaken in his ideas about unification. Unlike Einstein, I still hope Witten will come around, start thinking about something else, and lead the field in a more promising direction.
Peter, why don’t you stop beating around the bush and take on Witten, instead of bullying Bad Boy Motl?
He’s the ring leader of the string circus yet Peter Voit has nothing but the deepest admiration for him.