- In a couple hours, at 1:15 pm New York time, there will be a press conference at the AAS meeting where LIGO and Virgo scientists will discuss “ongoing research” (webcast here). The general assumption is that there will be observations of new gravitational wave sources announced.
- At some other extreme in the space of science talks, the AAS meeting also featured a talk yesterday by Sean Carroll on “Normal Science in a Multiverse”. There’s some discussion of the talk here, and twitter has this. Some counterpoint from Joseph Silk here.
It seems that Carroll was arguing that the multiverse shows that we need to change our thinking about what science is, adopting his favored “abduction” and “Bayesian reasoning” framework, getting rid of falsifiability. Using this method he arrives at a probability of the multiverse as “about 50%” (funny, but that’s the same number I’d use, as for any binary option where you know nothing). So, from the Bayesians we now have the following for multiverse probability estimates:
- Carroll: “About 50%”
- Polchinski: “94%”
- Rees: “Kill my dog if it’s not true”
- Linde: “Kill me if it’s not true”
- Weinberg: “Kill Linde and Rees’s dog if it’s not true”
Not quite sure how one explains this when arguing with people convinced that science is just opinion.
- Among the many summer conferences one might want to take a look at, there’s last week’s Workshop on String Theory and Gender, and this week’s LHCP in Lund. Wilczek will be giving the “Theory Vision” talk at the end on Saturday.
- Today’s Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on the not so great job market for Ph.Ds (to avoid paywall, try Googling, e.g. “Job-Seeking Ph.D. Holders Look to Life Outside School”). I find the claim that the median income for Math/Physics mid-career Ph.Ds dropped 6% over the past 3 years highly remarkable (if true). Yes, US middle class incomes have been tanking, but I that number is pretty extreme, especially since this has been a period of modest economic expansion.
One other bit of news I learned from the article was what universities (including mine) are doing to help with the situation:
at Columbia University, Ph.D.s are taking classes in using Twitter to better communicate their work to nonacademic audiences.
Update: The LIGO news was a second black hole inspiral. I’m sure you can find good coverage of this elsewhere.
I hadn’t realized that the AAS is sponsoring a whole Multiverse Mania Fest, bringing in to promote a new definition of science not just Carroll, but Richard Dawid. Lenny Susskind this afternoon gave a talk (see here) that seems to argue that the Multiverse is a great idea, even though it won’t ever be testable. No news on what his Bayesian percentage is, or whether he’s willing to bet the lives of helpless pets. Sean Carroll made his usual straw man attack on the “Popperazi” (who, despite what he thinks, understand what indirect evidence is), see here.
Update: Another odd multiverse-related item. Laura Mersini-Houghton and collaborators have made well-publicized claims that they have testable predictions based on the string theory landscape. I’ve written about these several times here on the blog, see here, and this posting for one example that includes a response from Mersini-Houghton and Richard Holman.
Their claims are based on two 2006 papers, see here and here. Very recently Will Kinney posted this paper on the arXiv, which has in the abstract:
we compute limits on these entanglement effects from the Planck CMB data combined with the BICEP/Keck polarization measurement, and find no evidence for observable modulations to the power spectrum from landscape entanglement, and no sourcing of observable CMB anomalies. The originally proposed model with an exponential potential is ruled out to high significance.
See the conclusions section of the paper for the details.
This isn’t particularly surprising or odd, although one wonders if the Kinney paper will get a fraction of the attention that the original claims have gotten. What is odd is that I hear that Mersini-Houghton is asking to have the paper removed from the arXiv, on grounds that have something to do with the fact that she was originally collaborating on the project with Kinney, but is not listed as an author (although he offered to put her name on it). I can’t think of another example of this kind of thing ever happening before, perhaps others are aware of similar controversies.
Update: Much more detail at Backreaction, including comments from Will Kinney explaining the issue with the arXiv.