Rejected by Best Fit School - Reapply, Transfer? Seeking Advice

[radium]

I mean I think it's pretty overconfident to much such a blanket statement about a field that you admit you do not know much about. There are some of the most accomplished physicists in the world (at schools like Harvard, MIT, and Stanford for example) who are currently working in holography. Even many people in CMT who may be more skeptical about it have told me its a valid thing but it may be hard to find a realistic system it can be used for. They say the field is in it's infancy, so a lot of then are just watching on the sidelines to see where it goes even if they are not actively participating now.

 

[Arsenic&Lace]

I could care less how accomplished they are or where they work; if even the most basic tenets of empirical science, i.e. that there is nothing that can safely be said about a theory until it is at least partially verified empirically, elude them, how good at theoretical physics can they truly be? Some individuals hail this stuff as quite plausible when they have essentially no idea, which is what I find dubious. Even more worryingly there's a huge gulf between phenomenology and theory where there appears to be less interest in phenomenology; even a disregard for it's importance (a friend of mine had a long conversation with Kitaev, as an example, where Kitaev more or less bluntly implied that he cared not even slightly for experiments). The cold truth is that the human mind is woefully limited and is capable of hardly anything without observational insight.

Sometimes we are lucky and the next portion of the world of ideas we are exploring looks like the previous portion in some way; the jump from QED to QCD is sort of like this, where one gets a great result by building something which is made in the image of the last great result. But then that landscape fundamentally changes and it's all guess work, and nobody knows anything at all about what could work; speculating that many miles ahead of where you're actually at is effectively pointless unless you're very lucky and the next part is quite familiar to the current part.

I suppose AdS/CFT has a better shot than some pet theory about unicorns and ghosts, but not by much. It's just a feature of nature, where the history of science does not repeat itself save only in very general details.

 

[berkeman]

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