For a refreshingly straightforward point of view from a young person in the field who just wants to get on with doing some good physics with what seems like a promising approach, read Jonathan Shock’s description of his recent attendance of meetings (including the one to which I earlier referred) on heavy ion collisions and related physics. (See also an interesting comment by Xin-Nian Wang on the comment thread of my earlier post.) Jonathan gives some useful links to presentations on some of the attempts to model some of the new physics using string theory models.
The title? Oh, yes, he gets beaten up a bit by those around him for working on strings. Get used to it Jonathan. Some (fair) criticism is good though. Learn how to defend what you are interested in working on by appealing primarily to its merits. That’s all you need.
Just remember:- If it does not kill you, it will make you strong.
-cvj
Hi,
Thank you for the link. Of course it’s both healthy for the subject and myself to be answerable to questioning. If we all believed the same thing then research would be both tedious and slow. Practice will I’m sure make defending this type of reaction easier and I expect more of it in the future.
All the best,
J
If it does not kill you, it will make you strong
Or at least provide the “critique” immune system with something to work with in the future. I am curious though, is the apparent animus betwixt the specializations of cosmology physics due to professional jealousies about funding sources, or about core constructs and principles (or both)???? It would seem, from the perspective of the humanities side of campus, that these sorts of dysphemic relations do a disservice to an overall open and diverse inquiry?