The Crisis in String Theory is Worse Than You Think | Leonard Susskind

I watched a whole lot of these, trying to figure out the nature of this Crisis.

There seems to be broad agreement on two things.

1) String theory, the dominant model for 40 years, does a great job of describing a SpaceTime. But unfortunately, it’s not the SpaceTime we happen to exist in. And …

2) Describing this SpaceTime, ours, is not happening for the simple reason that young physicists don’t think they’ll be able to get an academic job if they try to do it, and in the main feel that they’d fail both theoretically and financially, if they did try.

In this one, kindly professor Susskind is telling them to man the eff up.

If I were a young physicist, I imagine I might be inclined to tell him something like:

Well that’s sure easy for you to say, Mr. 84-year-old Stanford Genius!

I’m old myself, so I agree with Susskind (even though he is a crotchety failure of a rhetorician). Fuck your career and your visions of a lovely husbandWife and a house in the Hamptons.

Do science. Man, or woman, up.

And yes, it is lusciously easy, now, for me to say.

In the meantime, as we abandon the ship built by eminent deans, crafty entrepreneurs, brutal masters, and other reptilian shapeshifters of every stripe, here’s another clue for you all

The Author Is Not “In” The Book

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I’m jumping the gun a little on where I need to take you next, but …

Try this on.

We are more ignorant about the nature of Consciousness than we are about distant galaxies, or about what goes on in the nucleus of an atom.

Why is that?

Some wise people would say its because although we pride ourselves mightily on observing keenly, almost nobody spends any time observing … the observer.

For many reasons.

Including the fact that breaking off and doing it for any length of time would be

Career suicide.