String theory landscape

In string theory, the string theory landscape (or landscape of vacua) is the collection of possible false vacua, together comprising a collective "landscape" of choices of parameters governing compactifications. The term "landscape" comes from the notion of a fitness landscape in evolutionary biology. It was first applied to cosmology by Lee Smolin in his book The Life of the Cosmos (1997), and was first used in the context of string theory by Leonard Susskind. Compactification (physics) In string theory the number of flux vacua is commonly thought to be roughly , but could be or higher. The large number of possibilities arises from choices of Calabi–Yau manifolds and choices of generalized magnetic fluxes over various homology cycles, found in F-theory. If there is no structure in the space of vacua, the problem of finding one with a sufficiently small cosmological constant is NP complete. This is a version of the subset sum problem. A possible mechanism of string theory vacuum stabilization, now known as the KKLT mechanism, was proposed in 2003 by Shamit Kachru, Renata Kallosh, Andrei Linde, and Sandip Trivedi. Fine-tuning (physics) and Anthropic principle Fine-tuning of constants like the cosmological constant or the Higgs boson mass are usually assumed to occur for precise physical reasons as opposed to taking their particular values at random. That is, these values should be uniquely consistent with underlying physical laws. The number of theoretically allowed configurations has prompted suggestions that this is not the case, and that many different vacua are physically realized. The anthropic principle proposes that fundamental constants may have the values they have because such values are necessary for life (and therefore intelligent observers to measure the constants). The anthropic landscape thus refers to the collection of those portions of the landscape that are suitable for supporting intelligent life. In order to implement this idea in a concrete physical theory, it is necessary to postulate a multiverse in which fundamental physical parameters can take different values.

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Lee Smolin

Lee Smolin (ˈsmoʊlɪn; born June 6, 1955) is an American theoretical physicist, a faculty member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo and a member of the graduate faculty of the philosophy department at the University of Toronto. Smolin's 2006 book The Trouble with Physics criticized string theory as a viable scientific theory. He has made contributions to quantum gravity theory, in particular the approach known as loop quantum gravity.

Peter Woit

Peter Woit (ˈwɔɪt; born September 11, 1957) is an American theoretical physicist. He is a senior lecturer in the Mathematics department at Columbia University. Woit, a critic of string theory, has published a book Not Even Wrong (2006) and writes a blog of the same name. Woit graduated in 1979 from Harvard University with bachelor's and master's degrees in physics. He obtained his PhD in particle physics from Princeton University in 1985, followed by postdoctoral work in theoretical physics at State University of New York at Stony Brook and mathematics at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley.

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