"Gina Says": Adventures In The Blogosphere String War

by Gil Kalai

Overview

In the summer of 2006 two books attacking string theory, a prominent theory in physics, appeared: Peter Woit's 'Not Even Wrong' and Lee Smolin's 'The Trouble with Physics'. A fierce public debate, much of it on weblogs, ensued.Gina is very curious about science blogs. Can they be useful for learning about or discussing science? What happens in these blogs and who participates in them? Gina is eager to learn the issues and to form her own opinion about the string theory controversy. She is equipped with some academic background, including in mathematics, and has some familiarity with academic life. Her knowledge of physics is derived mainly from popular accounts. Gina likes to debate and to argue. She is fascinated by questions about rationality and philosophy, and was exposed to various other scientific controversies in the past.This book uses the blog debate on string theory to discuss blogs, science, and mathematics. Meandering over various topics from children's dyscalculia to Chomskian linguistics, the reader may get some sense of the chaotic and often confusing scientific experience. The book tries to show the immense difficulty involved in getting the factual matters right, and interpreting fragmented and partial information.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789813142060
Publisher:	World Scientific Publishing Company, Incorporated
Publication date:	01/05/2018
Pages:	236
Product dimensions:	6.69(w) x 9.61(h) x 0.56(d)

Table of Contents

Preface vii

Prologue: String Theory and the Debate Surrounding It xiii

[Supplement: A Small Dictionary] xv

Part I Not Even Wrong: The Blog of Peter Woit 1

Chapter 1 Extraordinary Claims 3

[Supplement: Who are the Bloggers?] 9

Chapter 2 Godel's Theorem and Logic 11

[Supplement: Gödel, Hilbert and Brouwer] 13

Chapter 3 Obviously I Disagree 15

[Supplement: Test your Intuition: What was Lord Kelvin's Main Mistake?] 21

Chapter 4 "It is Not in the Cards" 23

[Supplement: Thomas Bayes and Probabilities] 25

Chapter 5 Pre Review and Riskless Risks 29

[Supplement: Who is Gina?] 33

Chapter 6 Scientists are Paid to be Gullible 35

[Supplement: Drachmas (Taxi Story' No.1)] 36

Chapter 7 The Poincaré Conjecture and Christos Dimitriou Papakyriakopoulos 39

[Supplement: Three-Dimensional Manifolds and the Poincaré Conjecture] 43

Chapter 8 Useful Divergence 45

[Supplement: Convergent and Divergent Infinite Sums] 47

Chapter 9 Why Just Two-Dimensional Models? 51

[Supplement: HEX and Percolation] 53

Chapter 10 Can Philosophy of Science Help Doing Science? 55

[Supplement: Some Philosophy of Science] 56

Chapter 11 Referees and Ethics 61

[Supplement: Fundamental Impossibilities] 66

Chapter 12 It is All a Fantasy: Cole's Review 69

[Supplement: Many Dimensions] 74

Chapter 13 Expelled 77

[Supplement: Noise] 81

Chapter 14 H.S.M. Coxeter, Polytopes and Mirror Symmetry 83

Chapter 15 The Future of String Theory 87

[Supplement: Ulam and the "Future of Mathematics"] 91

Chapter 16 Interlude: Silly String Wars in Jerusalem 93

Part II The n-Category Café 95

Chapter 17 From Perception of Mathematics to Dyscalculia 97

[Supplement: Chomskian Linguistics] 102

Chapter 18 From Lehrer's Song On Continuous Functions, to Baez's Lyrics on Elliptic PDE 105

Chapter 19 Foundations 109

[Supplement: Can Category Theory Serve as the Foundation of Mathematics?] 110

Chapter 20 Computers, Categories, Analogies, and Greatness 115

Part III Asymptotic and Lee Smolin's "The Trouble with Physics" 119

Chapter 21 Can Strings be Fractals? and All Sorts of Other Things 121

[Supplement: Fractals] 123

Chapter 22 The Trouble with Physics: Gina's Sixteen Objections 127

[Supplement: Physics: Computations and Words] 129

Chapter 23 TTWP: Mandelstam; Optimism 131

[Supplement: Optimism: Beat This] 136

Chapter 24 How to Measure Progress? 139

Chapter 25 Maldacena 143

[Supplement: No Witches in Portugal, by Michal Linial (Taxi Story no. 2)] 146

Chapter 26 The Overall Evaluation of String Theory 149

[Supplement: Five Hard Pieces: Smolin's List of Five Great Theoretical Physics Problems] 151

[Supplement: Controversies] 151

Chapter 27 High Risk Endeavors for the Young 153

[Supplement: Röntgen and Feigenbaum] 156

Chapter 28 Scientists and Mountain Climbers 157

Chapter 29 How to Treat Fantastic Claims by Great People 159

[Supplement: Amazing Possibilities] 160

Chapter 30 Sociology of Universities 163

[Supplement: Power and Collective Decisions] 167

Chapter 31 The String Theory Community 169

Chapter 32 The Finiteness-of-String-Theory War 171

[Supplement: Debates] 173

Chapter 33 A Mathematician's Solution to the Proliferation Problem 175

Chapter 34 Shocking Revelations 181

Chapter 35 How to Debate Beauty? 187

Epilogue: The Real Border 191

Appendix: Puzzles on Trees, High Dimensions, Elections, Computation and Noise 193

Great Thinkers Praise "Gina Says" 209