Dyson Strands 9k Strings and Dices Loose Canons

{link » Freeman Dyson Debunks Dire Forecasts on Global Warming and Other Tenets}

“In the absence of audience interruptions, Mr. Dyson had an argument anyway with the scores of people (like Al Gore) who weren’t present to defend their belief in the dire consequences of global warming. (‘There’s no accounting for human folly,’ Mr. Dyson said when asked about Mr. Gore’s Nobel Prize.) Saying that on a recent trip he and his wife found Greenlanders to be delighted with their warmer climate and increased tourism, Mr. Dyson suggested that representing ‘local warming by a global average is misleading.’ In his comments at both the Nassau Club and Labyrinth, he decried the use of computer modeling to make ‘tremendously dogmatic’ predictions about worldwide trends, without acknowledging the ‘messy, muddy real world’ and the non-climatic effects of increased carbon dioxide. ‘There is no substitute for widely-conducted field operations over a long time,’ he told the Nassau Club audience, citing the ‘enormous gaps in knowledge and sparseness of observation’ that characterize the work of global warming experts.

Mr. Dyson’s fearless commentary continued later at Labyrinth, where, standing for over an hour and without a microphone, he delighted a full house by declaring the existence of 10,000 string theorists to be ‘sociologically dangerous’ (‘one thousand would be enough’), and balked at an audience member’s query about what he would do with a $700 billion grant. ‘When science gets rich it becomes political,’ he observed. As an example of the most expensive efforts not necessarily being the most worthwhile, he pointed to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, the subject of much recent attention, noting that it was designed to identify only certain particles, losing much potentially interesting information in the process. ‘The important things are the ones you don’t expect,’ he noted.” [emphasis added]

Dyson's "dicing" of Gore’s Nobel Prize is a bit harsher than my own take, namely: Everyone's entitled to their own bad taste. As for Dyson's "stranding" nine thousand or so string theorists, I am reminded that Lee Smolin in The Trouble with Physics suggests both that there appear to be serious deficiencies in string theory and that string theory has an unhealthy near-monopoly in US fundamental physics, and that a diversity of approaches is needed.