String Theory as a Religion

An exchange from the comments to a post on Luboš Motl's reference frame:
There are better ideas under study about the role of time in quantum cosmology, by people who have thought deeply about the problem for years and know just where naive ideas of the sort described fail and what needs to be done to transcend them. Why don't Nima and you invite some of them to visit and talk? Among those whose ideas about time in quantum cosmology are worthing thinking about are Julian Barbour, Louis Crane, Chris Isham, Fotini Markopoulou, Carlo Rovelli, Raphael Sorkin. They don't agree with each other, but they agree on the failure of naive, wavefunction of the universe w/out unitarity kinds of ideas.

One would expect that if one of them began speculating about beyond the standard model phenomenology the first 10 ideas they had would appear naive to Nima, why shouldn't the reverse be the case.


Thanks,

Lee
Lee | 04.08.06 - 5:56 pm | #

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Dear Lee,

thanks for your comment. I am not sure whether you have made the best advertisement for the group: they don't agree with each other, but they agree that physicists are misled.

Sorry, but that's a sufficient reason not to invite someone as a speaker. Our approach to physics is the opposite of yours. We think that ALL physicists should learn things that are canonical and have been tested - which implies that they must agree with each other on basic things, such as the rules of effective field theory, results of semiclassical gravity, and the reasons why string theory seems to be its only UV completion...

...
All the best
Lubos

I guess you can take the Marxist out of the ideologue but you can't take the ideologue out of the Marxist.

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