The String Theory Landscape

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Stephen Weinberg in the 1980s had pointed out that the cosmological constant was a right target for this kind of reasoning. With inflationary cosmology plus string theory landscape, you can very easily make a multiverse with different values from place to place. Even if string theory isn't true, I personally think are extremely likely to ultimately find a place in our theory of quantum gravity. These include ideas of holography, black hole complementarity and how to get information out of black holes as they evaporate away.

Physics is in crisis, what else is new? That's what we hear in certain corners, anyway, usually pointed at "fundamental" physics of particles and fields. (Condensed matter and biophysics etc. are just fine.) In this solo podcast I ruminate on the unusual situation fundamental physics finds itself in, where we have a theoretical understanding that fits almost all the data, but which nobody believes to be the final answer. I talk about how we got here, and argue that it's not really a "crisis" in any real sense. But there are ways I think the academic community could handle the problem better, especially by making more space for respectable but minority approaches to deep puzzles.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/31/245-solo-the-crisis-in-physics/

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