The Cosmic Landscape: A Review by Patrick

[Io_18]

Hello all.

I haven't posted much here but I plan to change that.

Recently I finished The Cosmic Landscape by Susskind.
What drove my nuts more than anything while reading the book were the constant appeals to authority. Susskind crows that folks like Weinberg and Reese agree with the AP and the Landscape, as if that means anything. I see the AP crowd do this a lot and they should know better. It's not as if they have achieved a scientific consensus(though Susskind never suggested this).

,Patrick

 

[turbo]

If you haven't watched Penrose's talk of Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy, you should. I think you'd appreciate his viewpoint.

http://www.rps.psu.edu/oncampus/rogerpenrose/

 

[Naty1]

Well, is the Cosmic Landscape worthwhile reading??

Scientific consensus, whatever that means, is widely overrated and has been repeatedly overturned in all of history. Once the heavens were deemed to be dots on a glass like dome; the Earth was the center of the universe; in the early 1920's the universe was believed to consists of our galaxy,Newton and his successors for two hundred years thought space and time were fixed and absolute, black holes were deemed "impossible" even by Einstein, the universe was thought to be fixed until Hubble proved otherwise, we thought we understood galaxy rotation until Vera Rubin, and everybody thought the expansion ofthe universe was slowing down or constant...surprise...and it looks like man made global warming will be next, not that a genuine consensus ever existed.

The Penrose speech is interesting and humorous on several levels.

 

[edpell]

What is AP? What is landscape?

 

[sbrothy]

A question I can answer!

I think AP refers to the anthropic principle:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle


and the "landscape" is the possible false number of vacua in the theory:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory_landscape

Regards,
Søren