Not Even Wrong

Joao Magueijo has a new book out about Ettore Majorana, entitled A Brilliant Darkness. It’s a lot of fun to read, and could be described as an example of Gonzo history of science. While it contains a lot of factual information, much of which I was unaware of, it’s probably best to think of it like the works of Hunter S. Thompson. Not a good place to go for authoritatively accurate information about, e.g., Las Vegas or the 1972 US Presidential campaign, but a highly personal investigation that manages to get to the heart of the matter, finding emotional if not literal truth.

For some examples, here’s Magueijo on Majorana’s upbringing:

Jokes and pranks aside, one should not get the impression that Ettore’s youth was a happy one. It was dire. Between the priests and his parents, his basic humanity was destroyed. He was brought up by social outcasts and grew monstrously distorted, lacking social skills and independence, full of ineptitude. People like him — when they don’t become criminals, drug addicts or psychopaths — can’t help being intellectually superior. But they’re “Frankensteins,” artificially gifted, clever “against nature.” And like the literary monstor, behind the bestial genius lies a very different nature: tender in a way that can never be fully realized; longing for love, knowing full well that it will always be denied; a furnace of kind emotions that the ogre exterior will always screen.

and here’s his account of his own trip on the ferry where Majorana presumably killed himself in 1938 at the age of 31:

Back on deck, I realize what a gloomy figure I must cut: pensive and stark, staring at the sea. Maybe the insomniac brigade is worried I might be contemplating suicide. A girl comes out to smoke and waits to be chatted up. I move to the rear. What a sad bastard I must look, refusing to play the game of life, shouting and fucking, throwing up against the wind. I watch the wake for a long time, the cigarette butts flying past me into the night, like fireflies from Mars. In our world of the “normal”, anyone who thinks is likely to appear suicidal. And yet, suicide or not, we will all be there one day, not just Ettore. We are all the same, only in different seasons.

Majorana was born in 1906 in Sicily, went to Rome for his studies. His career as a physicist basically spanned just the years 1928-1933, much of which was spent working in Fermi’s famous group in Rome. For Magueijo, Fermi is one of the villains of the piece, with Majorana a genius much his superior. Unlike the rest of the group, Majorana wasn’t interested in experimental work, nor much interested in publishing his ideas, about which Magueijo claims:

That’s how he never got credit for Heisenberg’s theory of nuclear forces and the neutron, the Weisskopf-Pauli second quantization of the complex scalar field, or the parity-violating properties of the neutrino, which earned Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang the Nobel Prize some thirty years later. They could all have been named after Majorana. But because he never published his work, only the Majorana neutrino — his inseparable soul mate — carries Ettore’s name today.

In 1933 Majorana traveled to Leipzig to work with Heisenberg, then to Copenhagen to work with Bohr. When he returned to Rome, some combination of physical and mental health problems led him to become a recluse for several years. He emerged from this state in 1937 to take up a professorship in Naples, but a few months later disappeared after embarking on a ferry taking him from Palermo back to Naples.

Majorana’s most important scientific work appeared in a 1932 Nuovo Cimento paper motivated by the desire to find a replacement for the Dirac equation that would solve the problem of its negative energy states (a problem which disappeared in 1932 with the discovery of the positron). In this paper, Majorana investigated for the first time infinite dimensional representations of the Lorentz group, ones whose role in physics, if any, remains mysterious. As part of this work, he discovered the possibility of a real representation of the Clifford algebra and thus a version of the Dirac equation in which a particle is its own anti-particle. Whether this possibility is realized in the case of neutrinos is one of the big open questions of the subject. We know that there must be neutrino mass terms, but we don’t know if they’re of Majorana or Dirac form.

[Note added: There are actually two papers here, both of which appear to have been completed in 1932, but the second one was only published in 1937, when Majorana was applying for the professorship in Naples. The 1932 paper is concerned with his infinite component wave equation. It's only in the 1937 paper that the real representation of the gamma-matrices and what is now known as the "Majorana neutrino" make their appearance.]

Magueijo does a good job of describing this important physics at a popular level. He also gives a lot of space to the various myths that have grown up around the story of Majorana’s disappearance. There’s a whole subculture out there devoted to them. He wisely decides not to sign on to any of these or create his own, concluding:

And as with the neutrino, Ettore’s story is also elusive. Even if we found out for sure what actually happened to him, we’d never know why he did it — which is far more important. This absence of a final truth shouldn’t sadden us: At leas we don’t harbor delusions of omniscience. When I got on that plane to Sicily, I promised myself only this: I won’t raise my leg and urinate over my little territory in Ettoreland; I won’t invent a solution that is not needed.

The latest New York Review of Books (December 3 issue, not yet online) contains an article by Edward Witten entitled “The New J-Lobby for Peace”. It’s about J Street, an organization set up last year to lobby in Washington in favor of Middle East peace. Witten is on the organization’s advisory board. For more about his views on J Street from last year, see this article.

At the moment, he’s both hopeful that J Street will start to have an effect, and fearful that it might be too late, writing:

The rise of J Street gives strong promise that Jews with a more liberal outlook on the Israeli-Palestinian problem will now have a voice in the American political system.

The real question about J Street may be not whether it will grow but whether it is simply too late. Numerous trends, including the spread of Israeli settlements, the increase of the Palestinian population, the rise of Hamas, and growing Orthodox influence in Israel, may be putting a two-state solution out of reach.

Witten has been involved in this issue for a long time, on the board of Americans for Peace Now since 1991. It’s great to see such a prominent member of the physics/math community standing up on this issue, and encouraging that he sees something positive happening. I share his hopes for J Street, as well as his fears that it may be too late.

Sorry, but I’m not allowing comments on this posting. While I think this is a very important issue and wanted to make people aware of Witten’s article, I don’t want to host political discussions on this blog, especially on this topic.

Update: The Witten article is now available on-line here.

New Scientist has an article in the latest issue entitled In SUSY we trust: What the LHC is really looking for, which promotes the idea that the LHC is going to discover supersymmetry. Only supersymmetry enthusiasts are quoted. I’d be curious to see some data on what the distribution of views of particle theorists is on this issue (one piece of evidence that supersymmetry skepticism is in the majority is here). Among bloggers, at one end of the spectrum is Sean Carroll, who gives a probability of 60%, at the other is Resonaances, with 0.1%. Personally, I’m with Resonaances, at least as far as conventional supersymmetric models go. The main arguments against supersymmetry, ignored in New Scientist, are that supersymmetry breaking is both necessary and hideously ugly, and if this was going to solve the hierarchy problem, we’d have seen evidence already at the Tevatron.

The article does a good job of recounting the pro-supersymmetry arguments (hierarchy problem, unification of couplings, dark matter candidate), but then goes completely off the rails with an absurd claim that supersymmetry explains confinement:

Supersymmetry’s scope does not end there. As Seiberg and his Princeton colleague Edward Witten have shown, the theory can also explain why quarks are never seen on their own, but are always corralled together by the strong force into larger particles such as protons and neutrons. In the standard model, there is no mathematical indication why that should be; with supersymmetry, it drops out of the equations naturally.

At least we’ll know one way or another within a few years from now…

The Simons Foundation will be funding new postdoctoral positions at various institutions starting next fall. Details of one of these, at the University of Texas, have been announced, with more to follow in coming weeks. These are three-year postdocs, with a first-year salary of $70K/year.

A presentation at a recent SLAC Users Group meeting included some of the following data about NSF support for HEP theory:

Theory funding (including cosmology and astro-particle physics) for FY 2008: $11.68 million. For FY 2009, $11.31 million + $2.3 million from the stimulus legislation.

In FY 2008, these grants supported 128 senior personnel, 84 postdocs and 104 graduate students. For FY 2009 the numbers were 184 senior personnel, 50 postdocs and 70 graduate students.

During FY 2008, 24 out of 57 new submitted proposals were funded, 17 out 21 renewals were funded.

Group grants were categorized as 11 phenomenology, 11 strings, 2 cosmology, 1 general.

Individual grants were categorized as 17 cosmology, 12 strings, 9 phenomenology, 3 astrophysics, 2 lattice QCD, 3 general.

So, as far as NSF HEP grants go these days, if you’re not doing cosmology, string theory, or phenomenology, basically you’re out of luck…

NSF THY has a new program manager who started Oct. 1. It’s Keith Dienes of the University of Arizona, whose research in recent years has focused on the “string vacuum project”. He’ll be giving a colloquium at Fermilab next month on Probing the String Landscape, which is advertised with the abstract:

We are currently in the throes of a potentially huge paradigm shift in physics. Motivated by recent developments in string theory and the discovery of the so-called “string landscape”, physicists are beginning to question the uniqueness of fundamental theories of physics and the methods by which such theories might be understood and investigated.

Since the late eighties, the two institutions in the US most heavily invested in string theory have been Princeton and Rutgers. Recently they have been moving aggressively to try and diversify, especially in the direction of LHC phenomenology, with the hiring of Nima Arkani-Hamed at the IAS and Matt Strassler at Rutgers. Last year the two institutions collaborated on a proposal for a new Physics Frontier Center with a budget of $1 million or so per year. This would be called the PARTICLE Center (Princeton And Rutgers Theory Institute for Collaboration with LHC Experiments) and would aim to be the main US center for LHC phenomenology. The proposal promoted the possibility of experimental anomalies to be discovered by the LHC in fall 2009, quickly followed by PARTICLE physicists inventing a model that would explain the data and predict a subtle effect that would require a new triggering strategy to see. The result of this would be a surprising measurement that would explain supersymmetry breaking.

Anyway, that proposal doesn’t appear to have been funded, with reviewers rather dubious about the idea of retraining Princeton and Rutgers string theorists as LHC phenomenologists, as well as the idea of devoting significant new resources to funding the Princeton and Rutgers theory groups, centralizing LHC phenomenology efforts there. However, two new year-long grants for $130,000 each were awarded to Strassler and Arkani-Hamed, who promise to use them to “create the nucleus of an LHC center on the East Coast” at Princeton and Rutgers. One of the goals of these grants is listed as “to help in the process of … retraining postdocs from more formal areas of high-energy theory”, since the job market for young string theorists has more or less collapsed.

I just finished reading author Masha Gessen’s new book about Grigori Perelman, Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century. It’s a short but very well done account of the life of Grigori Perelman, how he came to prove the Poincare Conjecture, and what has transpired since.

The book is really not about mathematics, but about mathematicians and their culture, especially that of Russian mathematicians. Only one chapter deals with the mathematical content of the Poincare Conjecture, with the bulk of the book about Perelman and his career. Perelman’s talent’s were recognized early, and were nurtured in Leningrad by a system designed to train students for mathematical competitions. He won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1982. The institutionalized anti-Semitism of the Soviet mathematics establishment of this period is described in detail in the book, together with the intense efforts made by Perelman’s supporters (including Alexandrov) to overcome this. He did his graduate work at the most prestigious institution in Leningrad, and then went on to a research position there at the Steklov Institute.

Gessen never managed to interview Perelman himself, but did talk to many if not most of the mathematicians he interacted with. He was brought to Courant by the intervention of Gromov, and for a few years worked there, at Stony Brook and at Berkeley. By the end of this time, he had started to develop a significant reputation in the math community, but he chose to return to Steklov and pretty much dropped out of sight, communicating with very few people for several years. It was during this period that he developed his proof, finally posting what could be described as a detailed outline in a series of three papers submitted to the arXiv.

The story of what happened then is rather remarkable, but it’s a story I’m pretty familiar with since I got to watch much of it from up close (Perelman’s preprints and the question of whether he really had a proof were discussed intensively here at Columbia, where Richard Hamilton and John Morgan are among my colleagues, and quite a few other people work in this area). Gessen does a good job of telling this story, adding some details I was unaware of.

Perelman turned down the Fields medal awarded him for this work, and sadly, he seems in recent years to have cut himself off from even his closest friends in the math community. Indications are that he is no longer actively working on research mathematics. The book contains speculation from several mathematicians who know Perelman about his thought processes and the reasons for his behavior, but they remain somewhat of a mystery. Some amount of paranoia seems to be at work, together with an intense distaste for any sort of politics, even the most innocuous workings of the mathematical community and its institutions.

The last chapter of the book has some news I hadn’t heard. Last year, Jim Carlson, who runs the Clay Mathematics Institute and is responsible for the process that will determine the award of the million-dollar Millennium prize for the proof of Poincare, traveled to St. Petersburg. He talked to Perelman on the phone, but Perelman refused to meet with him. According to the book, Clay was planning on convening a committee to decide on the prize this past May, with a report planned for August. Presumably this all has already happened by now, and perhaps Carlson has already made another trip to St. Petersburg in a last attempt to see if Perelman can be convinced to accept the prize. Perhaps we will be finding out the results soon…

Update: Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article by Gessen about Russian mathematics that summarizes part of her book.

A couple days ago I got an odd phone call, from a reporter at the Guardian, asking me to comment on the appointment of Michael Green as Lucasian Professor at Cambridge. I told the reporter that I wasn’t a really appropriate person to be asking; for one thing I’ve never met him personally. I did say that from what I knew of his scientific career, he was a quite good choice. He and John Schwarz made great progress in understanding string theory, working on it at a time that this was a very unpopular thing to do. In my view much of the problem with particle theory the past 25 years has to do with the lack of sufficient talented people willing and able to work on the kind of unpopular research that Green and Schwarz took up.

Several people have now pointed out to me the new story in the Guardian, Michael Green: Master of the Universe, which makes clear the reason for that phone call (although none of my comments made it into the story). There’s the usual hype about string theory: “the subject’s thriving”, and the latest news is that it may lead to better understanding of high temperature superconductors and thus help solve the world’s energy problems. In a sidebar, the claim is made that:

The Large Hadron Collider, at Cern, could provide evidence for the theory by analysing the collisions of fundamental particles at high energies.

although Green admits:

…that really is wildly optimistic, and I suspect that’s not going to happen.

Green deals with criticism of string theory with a laugh and ad hominem attacks on Lee Smolin and me as “two particular people who don’t have any particular reason to be knowledgeable about the subject.” As for the idea that it might be a good idea for people to look for alternatives to string theory (much the way he and Schwarz worked in the early 80s), his comment is “But there is nothing else.”

Green seems to be not completely sure I have a Ph.D. For those interested in the question of my qualifications, there’s an old blog entry here. It should perhaps be updated to note that, while I’m still responsible for the Math department computer system, I no longer have the odd title of “Director of Instruction”, but was moved to a non-tenured faculty position as “Lecturer”. Recently I was promoted to the position of “Senior Lecturer”, still non-tenured, but with a long-term contract.

I wish Green the best with his promotion.

The Council for the Advancement of Science Writing is holding a New Horizons in Science conference right now in Austin. This morning Steven Weinberg gave a talk, now available online, with the title Higgs, dark matter and supersymmetry, what the Large Hadron Collider will tell us. He described the Higgs as something definitely expected, supersymmetry as a much more speculative possibility, but had nothing to say about string theory during the talk. In the question session, Tom Siegfried of Science News asked him about why he hadn’t mentioned string theory, and what its prospects now were, 25 years after first being heavily promoted to the press. Weinberg answered:

It’s developed mathematically, but not to the point where there is any one theory, or to the point that even if we had one theory we would know how to do calculations to predict things like the mass of the electron, or the masses of the quarks. So, I would say, although there has been theoretical progress it’s been, I find it disappointing. One of the hopes would be that the LHC would provide a clue to something we’re missing in superstring theory and I think there supersymmetry is the most likely place to look.

One of the troubles with superstring theory is that although in a sense the theorists think there is only one theory, there are an infinite number of approximate solutions of it and we don’t know which one corresponds to our world. But at least in a large variety of the solutions of superstring theory there is supersymmetry visible at low energies, and if we see supersymmetry at low energies, superstring theorists may be able to derive from it some kind of clue as to how to solve these theories. But I haven’t talked about it in this lecture because I don’t see how that would work, it would be.. I mean I couldn’t say that that was likely with any degree of sincerity, and certainly the LHC and any other accelerator that we can imagine being built will not get up to energies which are high enough so that we can directly see the structures that are described by superstring theory, the strings or the D-branes or whatever it is. Those will not be accessible at the LHC, so any clue we get will be very indirect.

I myself, well I was working on superstring theory in the 80s and gave it up because I… I moved into cosmology, which in the last couple of decades has had the excitement that elementary particle physics had in the 60s and 70s, a wonderful coming together of theory and observation. Cosmology now reminds me of the excitement that I felt when I was younger and doing particle physics.. and it’s a pity that superstring hasn’t developed better. I still think it’s the best hope we have, I don’t know of anything else. My own work very recently has been trying to develop an alternative to superstring theory as a way of making sense out of quantum gravity at very high energies. But even though I’m working on this I still find superstring theory more attractive, but not attractive enough…

Siegfried gives an account of the talk here. It includes a new remarkably convoluted and misleading way of referring to the fact that string theory predicts nothing at all about observable physics:

But despite a quarter century of intense effort, superstring theory has not produced a cohesive and clear guide to testing its fit with all the observable features of physical existence.