3 bloggers

Just a short post to highlight 3 blogs which are useful as a guide to what is going on in the world of physics today.

The first is run by Peter Woit

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/

Peter Woit first came to attention after writing his book Not Even Wrong debunking the pretensions of superstring theory.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Not-Even-Wrong-Continuing-Challenge/dp/0224076051

His blog amongst other things continues to fight the battle. Most recently attacking the move by some superstring theorists to remove the concept of falsifiability as a criteria for assessing physical theories especially by people such as Sean Carroll.

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=9938


This blog has been going for a while now

A more recent blog which shares the same aims is run by Sabine Hossenfelder

http://backreaction.blogspot.co.uk/

One of her key beliefs is that we may have to live with the apparent ugliness of the Standard model as it seems that at present we have no clues as to what lies beyond it


(Yippee I can focus on the standard model and cosmology) and ignore supersymmetry, grand unified theories and of course superstrings 😊 means  I might actually understand physics before I die)

She has a book coming out in the early summer

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lost-Math-Beauty-Physics-Astray/dp/0465094252/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1518383480&sr=1-1&refinements=p_27%3ASabine+Hossenfelder

Which I intend to buy

As an antidote (and quite amusing if you can get beyond the way in which he attacks his critics or anyone who disagrees with him)  is the blog by Lubos Motl

https://motls.blogspot.co.uk/

Unlike Peter Woit or Sabine Hossenfelder he defends quite vigorously those who work in superstring theory and regards the above two blogs of being antiscientific and science haters. An opinion which I do not shate. However once one gets beyond the name calling and ad hominen attacks he does put the case for research in superstring theory quite eloquently and so is worth reading an eloquent defence is here

https://motls.blogspot.co.uk/2004/10/beauty-of-string-theory.html

However the most interesting posts are where Lubos defends the orthodox interpretations of quantum mechanics and explains that all the foundations were developed by the founders especially by the Born Interpretation.

Here is Lubos debunking the idea that the violations of the Bell Inequalities involve superluminal communication

https://motls.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/why-vanishing-commutators-imply-theres.html

and there are plenty more where that came from 😊

So three blogs to keep in touch with developments in physics and I do find Lubos's attacks on his critics quite amusing