marcus said:
Here are some highlights---the times will let you find the spot by dragging the button on your realplayer. the second half (from about 1:05 onwards) was open discussion guided by Steve Shenker. the first hour was mostly short talks by panel members.
1:08:45 - 1:12:25 Lee Smolin making the case for string theorists to work on a background independent reformulation
circa 1:23:00--1:23:28 Ketov (?, russian accent) discussing the general idea of revolution and revolutionary conditions, suddenly asks a surprise question: "Why string theory?" It is not so obvious now why one should pursue it, compared with 20 years ago, he says. Where are the results?
1:23:28 -- 1:24:28 Ketov (?) elaborates this question: why do string theory?
1:25:17 -- 1:25:45 Shenker: "Because it is the only consistent theory of quantum gravity." [I personally have difficulty with this bald statement of Shenker's, but anyway the panel demurred so he supplied this answer to Ketov's question.]
1:25:55 -- 1:26:05 Susskind's remark about hoping Bush administration continues paying us.
1:26:20 -- 1:28:50 Strominger excellent speech. we shouldn't try to sell string theory, just do it. let people fund it or not, as they please, and let
new people join in the research or not. can think of plenty of reasons to put your money on string theory and plenty of reasons NOT to. no reason for pessimism and no reason to hype the field. kind of mature and honest attitude, which stood out.
1:43:45 -- 1:44:10 Jan de Boer says when Jeho. Witn. come to his front door he always tells them that their message is horsefeathers (or equiv.) because it is not falsifiable. "Can you imagine any experiment that in the next 20 years could falsify string theory?" Shenker: "You're not supposed to be asking that!
"
1:44:30 -- 1:45:40 Smolin says AUGER and GLAST mission could falsify some non-string QG. AUGER is already collecting data and expected to report in a few months, GLAST (Smolin couldn't recall the name) flies next year. String does not predict modfied Lorentz invariance, he says. He claims some other QG do
footnote: Robert Helling says the russianaccent voice could be either Sergei Ketov or Djordje Minic.
edit, need somewhere to stash this:
<a href="http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0507012" rel="nofollow">hep-th/0507012</a>
----------------------
added later:
1:36:00 -- 1:37:10 unidentified questioner in audience pointed out that in the first hour no one on the panel mentioned M-theory, was it out of fashion? had focus of interest shifted elsewhere like to AdS/CFT?
Then someone on panel (Juan Maldacena?) replied that when people say "string theory" nowadays they mean "quantum gravity" [I did not understand how this answered the question.]
Then Nathan Berkowitz (?) in the audience replied to the question by saying that in particle physics it was customary that, if something was not solved within 5 years, you forget about it.
Ashok Sen on the panel then said that solving M-theory wouldn't solve everything in string theory [again, did not understand how it responded, they seemed mostly to just be minimizing the significance/interest of M-theory without providing specific reasons. the new watchword seems to be "string theory is quantum gravity"]
