math.columbia.edu | Last month I recorded a podcast with Curt Jaimungal for his Theories of Everything site, and it’s now available with audio here, on Youtube here. There are quite a few other programs on the site well worth watching.
Much of the discussion in this program is about the general ideas I’m trying to pursue about spinors, twistors and unification. For more about the details of these, see arXiv preprints here and here, as well as blog entries here.
About the state of string theory, that’s a topic I find more and more disturbing, with little new though to say about it. It’s been dead now for a long time and most of the scientific community and the public at large are now aware of this. The ongoing publicity campaign from some of the most respected figures in theoretical physics to deny reality and claim that all is well with string theory is what is disturbing. Just in the last week or so, you can watch Cumrun Vafa and Brian Greene promoting string theory on Brian Keating’s channel, with Vafa explaining how string theory computes the mass of the electron. At the World Science Festival site there’s Juan Maldacena, with an upcoming program featuring Greene, Strominger, Vafa and Witten.
On Twitter, there’s now stringking42069, who is producing a torrent of well-informed cutting invective about what is going on in the string theory research community, supposedly from a true believer. It’s unclear whether this is a parody account trying to discredit string theory, or an extreme example of how far gone some string theorists now are.
To all those celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow, may your travel problems be minimal and your get-togethers with friends and family a pleasure.
Update: If you don’t want to listen to the whole thing and don’t want to hear about spinors and twistors, Curt Jaimungal has put up a shorter clip where we discuss among other things the lack of any significant public technical debate between string theory skeptics and optimists. He offers his site as a venue. Is there anyone who continues to work on string theory and is optimistic about its prospects willing to participate?
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