- #1
- 24,775
- 792
The US has an extreme string monopoly situation compared with other countries (as several posters including f-h and John Baez have mentioned elsewhere) in the sense that there is only one non-string QG research group in the whole country.
This contrasts with Europe, Canada, not to mention other places, where there are a dozen or so active non-string QG groups (two or more faculty, typically, with grad students and postdocs). In the US, grad students do not have a choice, except at one university, and new PhDs usually have to go abroad to continue non-string work.
To my knowledge, The Trouble with Physics...and What Comes Next is the only book which both criticizes this bizarre imbalance and also describes the various non-string QG approaches pursued abroad but mostly blocked in the US. What interests me about the book is it's making positive policy recommendations. It argues that, since we don't know where the key advances will be made, research bets should be spread among string and non-string approaches.
In the belief that books can sometimes bring about change, I and perhaps some others are tracking the impact of this book-- The wider the audience it reaches, the greater its impact, and the more hope I have that the string research monopoly will be broken at several other top US universities. If that happens, the balance will be more like it is in the outside world and US graduate students will be have the option of pursuing careers in non-string QG theory and related areas of cosmology and astrophysics.
So I'm tracking Smolin's Amazon sales rank as a ratio relative to a benchmark which indicates the size of the problem it addresses: the salesranks of the five most popular stringy books averaged. Just to have a regular time, I take a day's reading at noon pacific. Some relative rankings in the past:
1 October 6.5
1 November 5.2
1 December 2.4
...
1 February ?
I don't plan to be alert by noon on 1 January, so let's skip that one. But suppose we look ahead a month. What do you think this ratio will be at noon on 1st of February? I am going to register my guess---you can if you want, or you can keep it to yourself. Either way, we will see how closely we come to correctly assessing the situation.
To give an example, at noon on 8 December the Smolin book's salesrank was #2879
and the average rank of the top five string books was #7334.2
The ratio was 7334.2/2879 = 2.5
The Smolin book was doing somewhat better than twice the stringy average used for comparison, but not leading by as great a factor as we saw earlier this year, in September and October.
In case anyone is curious, when I took the reading, the five most popular string books and their respective salesranks were:
Randall warped 3507
Greene elegant 3637
Greene fabric 3823
Kaku hyperspace 11,798
Kaku parallel 13,906
Is the Smolin book's popularity likely to rebound over the next couple of months? Or will it gradually fade, as might happen if everyone potentially interested in the book eventually gets a copy and demand saturates?
And if that's what's in the cards, then how steep a decline do you foresee?
This contrasts with Europe, Canada, not to mention other places, where there are a dozen or so active non-string QG groups (two or more faculty, typically, with grad students and postdocs). In the US, grad students do not have a choice, except at one university, and new PhDs usually have to go abroad to continue non-string work.
To my knowledge, The Trouble with Physics...and What Comes Next is the only book which both criticizes this bizarre imbalance and also describes the various non-string QG approaches pursued abroad but mostly blocked in the US. What interests me about the book is it's making positive policy recommendations. It argues that, since we don't know where the key advances will be made, research bets should be spread among string and non-string approaches.
In the belief that books can sometimes bring about change, I and perhaps some others are tracking the impact of this book-- The wider the audience it reaches, the greater its impact, and the more hope I have that the string research monopoly will be broken at several other top US universities. If that happens, the balance will be more like it is in the outside world and US graduate students will be have the option of pursuing careers in non-string QG theory and related areas of cosmology and astrophysics.
So I'm tracking Smolin's Amazon sales rank as a ratio relative to a benchmark which indicates the size of the problem it addresses: the salesranks of the five most popular stringy books averaged. Just to have a regular time, I take a day's reading at noon pacific. Some relative rankings in the past:
1 October 6.5
1 November 5.2
1 December 2.4
...
1 February ?
I don't plan to be alert by noon on 1 January, so let's skip that one. But suppose we look ahead a month. What do you think this ratio will be at noon on 1st of February? I am going to register my guess---you can if you want, or you can keep it to yourself. Either way, we will see how closely we come to correctly assessing the situation.
To give an example, at noon on 8 December the Smolin book's salesrank was #2879
and the average rank of the top five string books was #7334.2
The ratio was 7334.2/2879 = 2.5
The Smolin book was doing somewhat better than twice the stringy average used for comparison, but not leading by as great a factor as we saw earlier this year, in September and October.
In case anyone is curious, when I took the reading, the five most popular string books and their respective salesranks were:
Randall warped 3507
Greene elegant 3637
Greene fabric 3823
Kaku hyperspace 11,798
Kaku parallel 13,906
Is the Smolin book's popularity likely to rebound over the next couple of months? Or will it gradually fade, as might happen if everyone potentially interested in the book eventually gets a copy and demand saturates?
And if that's what's in the cards, then how steep a decline do you foresee?
Last edited: