A Capella Science - Bohemian Gravity!

Recommended by us: "The role of fashion in physical theory"

From the book "The road to Reality" by Roger Penrose: 

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[...] String theory is also a subject that is studied by a good many physicists, but does that make it physics? This raises the issue of fashion in fundamenta physical research. Let me begin by quoting a survey carried out by Carlo Rovelli, and reported in his address to the International Congress on General Relativity and Gravitation, held in Pune, India, in December 1997. Rovelli is one of the originators of the loop-variable approach to quantum gravity, and he claimed no professionalism in the conducting of his survey. Yet the results he found certainly reflect what my own (unsubstantiated) expectations would have been. He made a count of articles on the subject of quantum gravity published over the previous year, as recorded in the Los Angeles Archives. The rough average of papers per month, in the various approaches to the subject, came out as follows:

                      String theory: 69

                       Loop quantum gravity: 25

                    QFT in curved spaces: 8

                    Lattice approaches: 7

                    Euclidean quantum gravity: 3

                   Non-commutative geometry: 3

                                                                           Quantum cosmology: 1

                                                                           Twistors: 1

                                                                           Others: 6

Quote of the day: A lost Generation?

" It is easy to estimate the total number of active high-energy theorists. Every day hep-th and hep-ph bring us about thirty new papers. Assuming that on average an active theorist publishes 3-4 papers per year, we get 2500 to 3000 theorists. The majority of them are young theorists in their thirties or early forties. During their careers many of them never worked on any issues beyond supersymmetry-based phenomenology or string theory. Given the crises (or, at least, huge question marks) in these two areas we currently face, there seems to be a serious problem in the community. Usually such times of uncertainty as to the direction of future research offer wide opportunities to young people, in the prime of their careers. To grab these opportunities a certain reorientation and reeducation are apparently needed. Will this happen?" (M. Shifman).

From the paper arXiv:1211.0004v3:
"Reflections and Impressionistic Portrait at the Conference Frontiers Beyond the Standard Model", FTPI, Oct. 2012
M. Shifman, William I. Fine Theoretical Physics Institute, University of Minnesota.