Riding Gravity Away from Doomsday

by sachkris • 11 years ago

18 2 11 years ago

Apparently some people thought this was a sokal style hoax when it came out:

https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=7626

"There are rumors going around tonight that there’s been a hoax perpetrated on the arXiv, something like the Sokal hoax. This has to do with an hep-th posting entitled Riding Gravity Away from Doomsday, which has appeared under the name of a very prominent string theorist, Ashoke Sen, winner of the $3 million Milner Fundamental Physics Prize. What I’m hearing is that no one can believe that Sen could possibly have seriously written something this silly, so it must be some sort of hoax. Speculation is that the hoax could have been carried out to make the hep-th moderators look bad, by showing that they’ll agree to anything, no matter how absurd, if it invokes the Landscape and the multiverse. Some think that Sen’s account must have been hacked and then used to post the nonsense paper, others think that Sen himself is behind the hoax, having had enough of the Landscape business. I’ll update this as more information becomes available."

It's also a more boring version of the plot from Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan.

EDIT: Sen responds here: http://www.hri.res.in/~sen/

fmax30• 11 years ago

Am i the only one who thought of Interstellar after reading the abstract ?

Riding Gravity Away from Doomsday

Related Stories