
Moving past the swampland: a first philosophical look at the trans-Planckian censorship conjecture
by Mike D. Schneider In the past several years in string theory, swampland arguments, first developed over a decade ago, have become prominent. This is the gist of the arguments: certain families of four-dimensional effective field theories (EFTs) may fail to reside in the string theoretic landscape, in which case they reside in the swampland. Plausibly, high confidence in the descriptive accuracy of an EFT that resides in the swampland is a knock against the viability of string theory as an adequate theory of quantum gravity. The reason swampland arguments have become prominent in the past several years is primarily due to a conjecture, widely circulated since 2017, that places many models of inflationary dynamics in the swampland. Provided that the conjecture is true, on the interpretation of the swampland…