Yesterday's quickie photo-blog post came during the short break between running around preparing for house guests, and the arrival of said house guests (about fifteen minutes after I posted, while I was in the shower). Other than that, I was way too busy to even read blogs, let alone post.
So, crawling out from under my turkey hangover, and surveying the Internets, what do I find?
- Sniping about whether string theory is good for anything.
- Doctrinal arguments about whether a lack of enthusiasm for calling religious people stupid is a mortal sin or only a venial one.
(I'm linking to Mike's post as a reasonable summary of the intra-ScienceBlogs kerfuffle, not because anything Mike says is particularly idiotic. He's got links to the dumb stuff.)
Right. I'm going back to bed.
- Log in to post comments
And here I was, drunk on turkey and pumpkin pie, stupid enough to jump into the "discussion" after one of said posts last night. ;-)
Religion gave us the Dark Ages, science gave us the iPod. Let's make it a fair contest, best two out of three:
1) Strike a match - that's a science win. Pray it lit a second time - that's a religion win.
2) Your 14-year old daughter announces she is pregnant by somebody on the basketball team. Are ya gonna go science or religion?
3) Dentistry.
Postmortem escrow is like flood insurance. Your house was destroyed by wind and mud not water.
Thanks for the link. I am kind of confused being referred to with
Sniping about whether string theory is good for anything.
It's not my opinion and I've never said that string theory is useless. Neither am I aware that any comment on my posts say this. The posts we wrote on AdS/CFT and RHIC physics hopefully communicate that this is a very exciting topic, just that one should stay realistic about what it means. I am very very sorry if I left a different impression, this was not my intention.
Best regards,
B.
I didn't mean you-- that was more in reference to the talk you summarized, with the "Pinocchio Award" and that sort of thing. That sounded very Woit-ish, particularly from the depths of a turkey hangover.
Your explanations of the relationship between RHIC and string theory are the only readable things on the topic that I've seen.
We are told by "Heavy Ion Guy" on Woit's blog that
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=494#comment-19493
"At quark matter this year Larry did make some strong statements about string theory. This was a response to one paragraph in Brian-Greenes Op-Ed piece in the New York Times.
The full paragraph which makes reference to the heavy ion work is here And in a recent, particularly intriguing development, data now emerging from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory appear to be more accurately described using string theory methods than with more traditional approaches.
This statement in the public press should be called for what it is a wild exaggeration of the state of the theory in the heavy ion community. Larrys main point was that if such claims are to be made in the public press they should be held to the same standards of scientific scrutiny as the more traditional approaches. Larry was correct to sharply criticize this remark.
That being said, a number of people (who normally think about heavy ion collisions) have recently been calculating transport coefficients with AdS which they really wanted to know in QCD. ......"
(please read the whole thing.)