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The hardcover first edition of "Trouble with Physics" came out September 2006 and sold pretty well spending substantial time at the top of the physics best sellers. The paperback edition was scheduled to go on sale 4 September 2007.
But the publisher seems to have pushed the printing schedule ahead by more than two months and brought out paperback version early.
The orange edition is in stock at Amazon and listed available on a next day basis.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/061891868X/?tag=pfamazon01-20
as of 31 July the paperback's salesrank is 14,154, so we'll see how it does
==============================
Other numbers to take stock of:
==quote Woit==
The HEPAP University Grants Program Subpanel has just issued a report, concerning the “University Grants Program” in US HEP, that part of the DOE and NSF high energy physics budget which supports research based mainly at universities (as opposed to government laboratories such as Fermilab). Obviously this is the part of the HEP budget that is of most direct concern to university researchers, especially theorists, who receive most of their government funding this way (a small number of theorists are supported by national labs, not universities).
...
The recommendations for theoretical particle physics mostly concern funding for graduate students, calling for increasing the number of graduate students in particle theory, especially students working on calculations directly relevant to LHC experiments:
One of the most interesting things in the report is the set of numbers from survey responses about how many grant-supported theory researcher are working in which areas, and what hiring plans by area are for the next 5 years. Figure 3 on page 43 divides theory researchers into six categories, and gives counts for how many are working in each category now, how many expected in 2012. The number of string theorists is supposed to drop from 103 to 84, “field theorists” from 91 to 77, “model builders” from 88 to 70, and “QCD/Lattice QCD” from 50 to 41. “Particle phenomenologists” are supposed to increase from 188 to 194, and “astrophysicists and cosmologists” from 136 to 176. Obviously boundaries of these fields are unclear, especially since string theory in recent years has to some extent moved away from formal theory, with more people describing themselves as “string cosmologists”, “string phenomenologists”, “string-inspired model-builders”, and much of the attention of the field devoted to trying to do QCD calculations with string theory.
If you take these numbers seriously, a grad student would be nuts to work on anything except cosmology or phenomenology, since all other subfields show about as many people leaving them as would be accounted for by retirements, so essentially no new hiring. My suspicion though is that these numbers reflect what departments say they would like to do, not what they will do. Most departments now say they want to hire in the areas of cosmology and phenomenology. But faced with the fact that competition for the best people in those areas is tough, and finding it much easier to get good people in other subfields, I suspect there will continue to be quite a lot of hiring in these other subfields, in string theory especially, which seems to be what looking at the latest data from the Rumor Mill shows.
===endquote===
what this says to me is that even though the university physics departments expressed their INTENTION to, for instance, hire fewer stringists and more cosmologists, there aren't enough real cosmologists to go around so the departments may find they must resort to hiring stringists who call themselves (string) cosmologists. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.
===========
Another number to watch is the Harvard search tool reading on peer-review PUBLICATION of articles with five basic keywords (superstring, brane, M-theory, heterotic, AdS/CFT)
We only have stable data for the first six months of the year. So comparing the first six months of each year we get
2002: 651
2006: 571
2007: 451
That is, a sharper decline in the past twelve months than the average decline over the previous four years.
For further links, see https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=1373573#post1373573
===========
Other numbers to watch relate to citations. In years prior to 2002 there were usually 12-20 recent ( within past five years) string papers which garnered 100+ citations in that year. This number is down to 2 or 3. A measure of how string researchers themselves rate the importance of recent (past five) research in their own field. Decline in number of papers considered significant by workers in the field.
===========
Probably a key number to watch would be some indicator, if we could find a good one, of the extent to which real cosmologists are becoming interested in (non-string) quantum cosmology
One indication is that the GRG11 conference invited TWO non-string quantum gravitists to give plenary talks, and zero stringists IIRC. Moreover the GRG organizers invited Bojowald to conduct a QC workshop. The GRG (gen rel and grav) is a big international conference held every 3 years. What's happened is that non-string QC has become more visible to this larger community, which includes conventional cosmologists.
this is of strategic importance because--if you are a theorist--cosmology is where the jobs and money seem to be. cosmology has to go in the direction of quantum cosmology because QC removes singularities. the question is how fast can people like Bojowald and Ashtekar produce new PhDs in QC to meet the demand resulting from this new visibility---the growing recognition of QC by the broader community.
But the publisher seems to have pushed the printing schedule ahead by more than two months and brought out paperback version early.
The orange edition is in stock at Amazon and listed available on a next day basis.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/061891868X/?tag=pfamazon01-20
as of 31 July the paperback's salesrank is 14,154, so we'll see how it does
==============================
Other numbers to take stock of:
==quote Woit==
The HEPAP University Grants Program Subpanel has just issued a report, concerning the “University Grants Program” in US HEP, that part of the DOE and NSF high energy physics budget which supports research based mainly at universities (as opposed to government laboratories such as Fermilab). Obviously this is the part of the HEP budget that is of most direct concern to university researchers, especially theorists, who receive most of their government funding this way (a small number of theorists are supported by national labs, not universities).
...
The recommendations for theoretical particle physics mostly concern funding for graduate students, calling for increasing the number of graduate students in particle theory, especially students working on calculations directly relevant to LHC experiments:
One of the most interesting things in the report is the set of numbers from survey responses about how many grant-supported theory researcher are working in which areas, and what hiring plans by area are for the next 5 years. Figure 3 on page 43 divides theory researchers into six categories, and gives counts for how many are working in each category now, how many expected in 2012. The number of string theorists is supposed to drop from 103 to 84, “field theorists” from 91 to 77, “model builders” from 88 to 70, and “QCD/Lattice QCD” from 50 to 41. “Particle phenomenologists” are supposed to increase from 188 to 194, and “astrophysicists and cosmologists” from 136 to 176. Obviously boundaries of these fields are unclear, especially since string theory in recent years has to some extent moved away from formal theory, with more people describing themselves as “string cosmologists”, “string phenomenologists”, “string-inspired model-builders”, and much of the attention of the field devoted to trying to do QCD calculations with string theory.
If you take these numbers seriously, a grad student would be nuts to work on anything except cosmology or phenomenology, since all other subfields show about as many people leaving them as would be accounted for by retirements, so essentially no new hiring. My suspicion though is that these numbers reflect what departments say they would like to do, not what they will do. Most departments now say they want to hire in the areas of cosmology and phenomenology. But faced with the fact that competition for the best people in those areas is tough, and finding it much easier to get good people in other subfields, I suspect there will continue to be quite a lot of hiring in these other subfields, in string theory especially, which seems to be what looking at the latest data from the Rumor Mill shows.
===endquote===
what this says to me is that even though the university physics departments expressed their INTENTION to, for instance, hire fewer stringists and more cosmologists, there aren't enough real cosmologists to go around so the departments may find they must resort to hiring stringists who call themselves (string) cosmologists. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.
===========
Another number to watch is the Harvard search tool reading on peer-review PUBLICATION of articles with five basic keywords (superstring, brane, M-theory, heterotic, AdS/CFT)
We only have stable data for the first six months of the year. So comparing the first six months of each year we get
2002: 651
2006: 571
2007: 451
That is, a sharper decline in the past twelve months than the average decline over the previous four years.
For further links, see https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=1373573#post1373573
===========
Other numbers to watch relate to citations. In years prior to 2002 there were usually 12-20 recent ( within past five years) string papers which garnered 100+ citations in that year. This number is down to 2 or 3. A measure of how string researchers themselves rate the importance of recent (past five) research in their own field. Decline in number of papers considered significant by workers in the field.
===========
Probably a key number to watch would be some indicator, if we could find a good one, of the extent to which real cosmologists are becoming interested in (non-string) quantum cosmology
One indication is that the GRG11 conference invited TWO non-string quantum gravitists to give plenary talks, and zero stringists IIRC. Moreover the GRG organizers invited Bojowald to conduct a QC workshop. The GRG (gen rel and grav) is a big international conference held every 3 years. What's happened is that non-string QC has become more visible to this larger community, which includes conventional cosmologists.
this is of strategic importance because--if you are a theorist--cosmology is where the jobs and money seem to be. cosmology has to go in the direction of quantum cosmology because QC removes singularities. the question is how fast can people like Bojowald and Ashtekar produce new PhDs in QC to meet the demand resulting from this new visibility---the growing recognition of QC by the broader community.
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