Updates on String Theory: Progress and Current Status

[Tom McCurdy]

Hello Again---What did I Miss

I haven't had very much free time lately and regret to say that my reading in the realm of physics has been very lacking lately. Anyway I was hoping to find out progress has been made in regards to String Theory. I have gotten the feeling (could be compeltly wrong) that string theory is having a very rough time lately and that it's starting to not be thought of as a very likely theory. If I could get some updates and maybe some papers or articles (something shorter) to read to get some updates, I would appreciate it.

_Tom

 

[Tom McCurdy]

Basically the last thing I had read was Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe, when i was preparing for my lecture on the subject for the student exchange. If anyone could give me any updates on how the quest for proof of string theory is going, i would really enjoy reading about it.

 

[selfAdjoint]

Basically the last thing I had read was Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe, when i was preparing for my lecture on the subject for the student exchange. If anyone could give me any updates on how the quest for proof of string theory is going, i would really enjoy reading about it.

Umm, that's a problem. The last thing that has happened with string theory is the Landscape Probllem, which has led to a lot of long time critices of string theory coming out of the closet. A Coulumbia University mathematician named Peter Woit established a http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/" to express his view, and significantly it's called Not Even Wrong.

The string theorists themselves, those that aren't just keeping at their work, are tied up in this Landscape business. It was shown a couple of years ago that it seems extremely likely that just about any string theory version will predict a huge number (like 10⁵⁰⁰) equivalent vacua with disfferent parameters and apparently we live in only one of them (although some people are exploring the idea that we live in a superposition), with string thory having no known decision rule for picking that one out. So some physicists are touting the strong Anthropic Principle for doing the selection, but that sounds mystical to the critics and to many string physicists too.