Physics
<p class="default">09:24 AM, September 01, 2006 probably remarks of Lee Smolin: see Wired article.
 
<b>Yet you essentially accuse string theorists of being the jocks of theoretical physics.</b>
A lot of people are frustrated that this community that styles itself as dominant - and is dominant in many places in the US - is uninterested in other good work. Look, when we have quantum gravity meetings, we try to invite a representative from each of the major opposing theories, including string theory. It's not that we're so very moral; it's just what you do. But at the annual international string theory meeting, they've never done this.
 
<b>Why are they so antisocial? Territoriality?</b>
One metaphor that I like comes from complexity theory. Let's say you have a landscape with a bunch of hills, and you want to find the highest mountain. String theory is a hill, and loop quantum gravity is a hill, and so are spin foam models and twistor theory and causal sets and brane worlds.
 <u>So some scientists are good hill climbers</u> . You set them on a slope, and they incrementally advance the science upward.  <u>Other scientists are good explorers - valley crossers - who find new slopes.</u> The problem we have now is that science is dominated by hill climbers. They've found the tops of the hills, and they're just ?
<b>? defending the hill.</b>
Right. And meanwhile, the truth is somewhere over there.
 
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