Check out this new absolutely must see talk by astronomer Christopher Stubbs: The Dark Energy Crisis, and the Prospect of Intellectual Stagnation. It is a courageous, highly entertaining, no holds barred critique of theorists, given in an Institute of Theoretical Physics. Of course, a number of theorists in the audience appear to have excused themselves from consideration, on the usual grounds that they are all OK because they are not doing String Theory (Stubbs left no doubt whatsoever as to what he thought of String Theory). In the question time two local theorists thanked him, and as usual took the PR opportunity to point out that good reductionist theorists did exist, in the PI building. Of course, there aren't any anywhere else.
When asked, Stubbs said he thought that varying constant ideas were well motivated, and he indicated a promising future for supernovae observations. One quantitative question that Stubbs put to theorists in the talk was the following. Since the cutoff scale needed to correctly estimate the apparent Dark Energy level with an integral is around the few meV mark, what other fundamental physics anomaly might we consider at that scale? Dear me, I've gone and linked to those pesky mirror neutrino masses again ...
14 years ago
To our dear readers from Princeton: if you would, at any point in the near future, like to somewhat disassociate yourself with the String Theory paradigm (perhaps because you don't like professional experimentalists throwing tomatoes at you) then might I suggest you employ a few theorists who (a) have alternative opinions about the physics (b) are not adverse to considering some stringer ideas. Like me?
ReplyDeleteThis really is getting very tiring. It is one thing being ignored by people who have read/listened to your criticisms in the past, decided to deny you a career on that basis, and then later forgotten that they didn't think of the ideas themselves ... but a Google search on the MINOS results simply doesn't indicate any interest at all! Do theorists seriously hope it will all just go away?
ReplyDelete