Not Even Wrong

According to a story in the Stanford Daily, the recent arXiv preprint mentioned here and discussed many other places on the web has given us two new scientific celebrities:

Two of Stanford’s physicists, Professor Andrei Linde and postdoctoral researcher Vitaly Vanchurin, have garnered recent celebrity-status in the scientific community for their recent discovery of the maximum number of alternate universes.

Instead of consulting experts in this field and getting quotes about how significant this pseudo-science is, the writer asks Stanford students, who do a much better job than the experts:

“I personally find the concept intriguing, but I think we should be wary of scientists who can use it as a way to write things off and stop looking for deeper answers to physical phenomena,” Lauren Janas ’12 said…

Some Stanford students are not entirely convinced of Vanchurin and Linde‘s complicated methods.

“I’m quite skeptical,” Frank Liu ’13 said. “I think it’s hard to tell how many universes there exactly are.”

The story ends with the mystifying news that the authors hope “that in the future, they can work with modular observations to confirm their findings.”

For more media coverage of the multiverse, see here.

Update: Oops, last link was broken, now fixed.

Because of the New York Times article discussed here, four recent papers by Nielsen and Ninomiya have been getting a lot of attention in the blogosphere. Pretty much all of it has been unremittingly hostile, when not convinced that these papers must be some sort of joke (except for this from Sean Carroll). I just noticed that these papers have gotten some attention from administrators of the arXiv, who have decided to reclassify three of them, presumably since the appearance of the NYT article.

The first in the series, arXiv:0707.1919 was originally posted in hep-ph, with a cross-listing to hep-th (see the Google cache of Oct. 5), but has now been re-classified as gen-ph (cross-listed as hep-ph and hep-th). Similarly, arXiv:0711.3080 has been reclassified from hep-ph to gen-ph, cross-listed to hep-ph (see Google cache of Sept. 12). I’m not sure what arXiv:0802.2991 was originally classified as, but the Sept. 3 Google cache has it as the same as now, gen-ph, cross-listed to hep-th. Finally, the most recent one, arXiv:0910.0359, was originally classified as hep-ph (Google cache of Oct. 7), now it has been re-classified to gen-ph, cross-listed to hep-ph.

While the arXiv administrators seem to be indicating that they share the common opinion that these are crackpot papers, one thing there does remain constant: trackbacks appear there to various press stories and blog postings about these papers, but trackbacks to this blog seem to be censored.

Update: Trackbacks to blog postings here on this Nielsen-Ninomiya subject have now appeared. The ways of the arXiv remain mysterious to me. About all I can tell is that trackbacks to some sources appear more or less immediately, presumably automatically (for instance the trackbacks to the original NYT article). For other sources, e.g. this one, they only appear in batches, often several days later, presumably after someone has gotten around to considering the matter…

A while back I noticed that the arXiv had allowed the posting of the preprint Card game restriction in LHC can only be successful!, yet another in a sequence of crackpot articles about the LHC from Holger-Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya. That these authors have managed to get the previous articles in the series published in the International Journal of Modern Physics A presumably has something to do with the fact that Ninomiya is an editor of the journal. I didn’t post anything about this, on the grounds that embarrassing crackpottery from well-known physicists that no one except them takes seriously is best ignored.

Unfortunately, this particular piece of nonsense has been picked up by the New York Times, which tomorrow is running a story about it under the title The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate. The writer, Dennis Overbye, presumably contacted some physicists to find out what they thought of this. If any of them told him this was just nuts and an embarrassment, that didn’t make it into the story, instead there’s:

…craziness has a fine history in a physics that talks routinely about cats being dead and alive at the same time and about anti-gravity puffing out the universe.

As Niels Bohr, Dr. Nielsen’s late countryman and one of the founders of quantum theory, once told a colleague: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”

Dr. Nielsen is well-qualified in this tradition. He is known in physics as one of the founders of string theory and a deep and original thinker, “one of those extremely smart people that is willing to chase crazy ideas pretty far,” in the words of Sean Carroll, a Caltech physicist and author of a coming book about time, “From Eternity to Here.”

Perhaps it would be a good idea if physicists would remind journalists that often things that seem to be crazy really are crazy.

Update: See more here from Tommaso Dorigo. I should have mentioned that his posting from a couple years back Respectable physicists gone crackpotty was linked to in the article by Overbye, who had an accurate take on the subject from at least one source.

Update: Somehow I knew that Slashdot could not possibly resist this nonsense.

Update: Sean Carroll has a long defense of the Nielsen-Ninomiya papers as not crackpot at all, but crazy in a positive way:

There’s no real reason to believe in an imaginary component to the action with dramatic apparently-nonlocal effects, and even if there were, the specific choice of action contemplated by NN seems rather contrived. But I’m happy to argue that it’s the good kind of crazy. The authors start with a speculative but well-defined idea, and carry it through to its logical conclusions.

As for the argument that prominently-placed New York Times stories promoting crazy ideas about physics might be problematic, Sean is having none of it. He argues that the public is able to differentiate between speculative ideas and solidly tested science, so it’s not a problem that:

My own anecdotal observations are pretty unambiguous — the public loves far-out speculations like this, and happily eats them up.

The ongoing pseudo-scientific multiverse mania continues, with the recent publication in the UK of a new book by John Gribbin promoting this to the public: In Search of the Multiverse.

Gribbin expounds at length the usual string theory anthropic landscape/multiverse ideology, carefully avoiding introducing any mention of the fact that there might be quite a few scientists skeptical about it. On the crucial question of testability he invokes Raphael Bousso, who:

hopes, and expects, that there will be ways to extract such broad rules of the behaviour of matter at what are low energies compared to the Big Bang, but high by the standards of everyday life, from string theory.

There’s no indication given about what these broad rules implied by string theory might be, just a hint that whatever they are, we’re not going to be able to test them anytime soon:

even the the technology of the Large Hadron Collider may not be up to the task of testing such predictions.

Like many multiverse fans, Gribbin wants to mix together the many worlds interpretation of QM and the string theory anthropic multiverse in cosmology, attributing this insight to Susskind, and ending the next to last chapter of his book with:

This pulls together everything discussed in this book so far in such a pleasing way that it is tempting to end it here. The Cosmic Landscape of string theory is just the many worlds theory of David Deutsch writ large, and with inflation included within itself.

Unfortunately he doesn’t end the book there, but adds a final chapter promoting his own interpretation of the significance of the multiverse. His idea is that we are the product of a baby universe created by some race of superior beings:

The intelligence required to do the job may be superior to ours, but it is a finite intelligence reasonably similar to our own, not an infinite and incomprehensible God. The most likely reason for such an intelligence to make universes is the same as the reason why people do things like climbing mountains or studying the nature of subatomic particles using accelerators like the LHC – because they can. A civilization that has the technology to make baby universes might find the temptation irresistible, while at the higher levels of universe design, if the superior intelligences are anything at all like us there would be an overwhelming temptation to improve upon the design of their own universes.

This provides the best resolution yet to the puzzle Albert Einstein used to raise, that ‘the most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it is comprehensible.’ The Universe is comprehensible to the human mind because it was designed, at least to some extent, by intelligent beings with minds similar to our own. Fred Hoyle put it slightly differently. ‘The Universe,’ he used to say, ‘is a put-up job.’ I believe that he was right. But in order for that ‘put-up job’ to be understood, we need all the elements of this book.

Personally, I think there’s an air-tight argument against this: any race of superior beings that produced a universe in which science descended into this level of nonsense would immediately wipe out their creation and start over. Since we’re still here, there can’t be such a race operating out there.

Gribbin also has a Sci-Fi novel entitled Timeswitch coming out soon.

For two reviews of the book, see here and here.

In other multiverse news, FQXI has a story here promoting Andrei Linde, Renata Kallosh and their work on the string theory multiverse. Linde and a collaborator have a new paper How many universes are in the multiverse? on hep-th (by the way, why are these things not in qr-qc, since they’re “quantum cosmology” if anything is?). They come up with a number of 10 to the 10 to the 375 for the number of universes, and seem to argue that one needs to analyze all these to come up with predictions:

But when we study quantum cosmology, evaluate the total number of universes and eventually apply these results to anthropic considerations, one may need to take [the number of degrees of freedom of the observer] into account. Potentially, it may become very important that when we analyze the probability of existence of a universe of a given type, we should be talking about a consistent pair: the universe and an observer who makes the rest of the universe “alive” and the wave function of the rest of universe time-dependent.

This week the Templeton Foundation is funding yet another conference on the Multiverse, this one is entitled Philosophy of Cosmology 2009: Characterising Science and Beyond. The conference is also celebrating the 70th birthday of Templeton Prize winner George Ellis. The conference web-site includes a page showing the book covers of recent multiverse books, noting that:

The selection of books shown here (at both the popular and technical level) demonstrate the fact that the notion of the Mutliverse is becoming increasingly mainstream.

Ellis has expressed some skepticism about the question of whether the multiverse idea is testable, but, as usual with these Templeton conferences, there seem to be rather few skeptics invited. On the other hand, there do seem to be quite a few philosophers of science, and some philosophers of religion, (Alex Pruss of Baylor and Robin Collins of Messiah College), which I guess is appropriate.

Sean Carroll, who seems to have overcome his earlier qualms about Templeton funding, is live-blogging the conference (see here and here). He notes that Ellis is worried that the multiverse may be inherently untestable and thus not science, but doesn’t himself think this is worth worrying about. Presumably he’ll continue tomorrow, covering the rest of the conference.

Update: Sean Carroll’s live-blogging of the Templeton conference is the lead item of the front-page news on their web-site.

The Templeton Foundation has recently been sponsoring a series of Bloggingheads diavlogs, under the name Percontations. This week’s episode is Fiddling With the Knobs of the Universe, and it has cosmologist Anthony Aguirre and string theorist Clifford Johnson doing their best to hype string theory and the landscape. Critics are dismissed as people who believe obviously wrong things like “if it’s statistical it’s not science”.

Johnson argues that string theory landscape research is just like any other kind of science, capable of making testable statistical predictions, predictions based on generic properties of the theory (e.g. T-duality), and predictions of some parameters based upon fixing others by observation. He neglects to mention that decades of work by people trying to do such things have shown that there are very solid reasons why they don’t work. Not only have no predictions come out of this, but the reasons why have become clear.

While hyping the landscape, he acknowledges that string theory has had a problem with hype in the past. “We all bought into it to some extent” that string theory was going to give the Standard Model, and it was bad that this was promoted in the press as a polished, definitive story of how the world works. He claims to be happy that this has been backed away from in the last several years (although he never seems to have been happy about the existence of string theory critics who have raised the issue of the problems publicly).

In a recent posting, Johnson partially resolves a mystery I’d always wondered about, that of why he left Cosmic Variance. He explains that one reason was that Cosmic Variance was taking “the obnoxious route of calling someone an idiot or stupid for their religious beliefs at the outset.” Bloggingheads has recently featured Sean Carroll and Mark Trodden of Cosmic Variance also discussing cosmology and the multiverse (see here and here), but these episodes were not sponsored by Templeton.

Most physicists are rather dubious about whether “multiverse” research is deserving of any support since it’s not clear that it is even science. Because of this, such research has been finding financial support in recent years not from conventional sources like the NSF, but from the Templeton Foundation, a very wealthy organization devoted to the goal of bringing together science and religion. Some examples of this funding include the World Science Festival program mentioned in the last posting, and the Foundational Questions Institute, which provides grants, many of them for multiverse research.

I’d always wondered if there was some kind of organized effort by Templeton to push this kind of research, and and got a partial answer to this question recently when I took a look at some of their web-pages. Last year they organized two days of conferences at the Royal Society in London, associated with their choice of cosmologist and Catholic priest Michael Heller for their 2008 Templeton Prize of a million pounds. The preparatory readings page of the second day’s conference provides a link to a document entitled Towards the Establishment of the Philosophy of Cosmology at Oxford. There’s also a link to “Password Protected Papers” on the topic of Toward a New Philosophy of Cosmology, but these papers aren’t really password protected since the password (”multiverse”) as well as the user name (”universe”) are given right next to the link.

If you follow this link, you are taken to the web-site for “A Strategy and Planning Workshop of the John Templeton Foundation”, held in May 2007 at the Royal Society. The purpose of this workshop is described as:

To bring cosmologists and philosophers together to review the ‘state of the field’ of the philosophy of cosmology and to explore the most effective ways of developing and enriching the philosophy of cosmology. How might the John Templeton Foundation contribute to field development?

and here are some other extracts from that page:

The John Templeton Foundation would like to help develop this field. We are considering the creation of substantial research support opportunities in the philosophy of cosmology. In addition, our expectation is that there is some need for infrastructure, and the Foundation would be interested in helping to support development of a suitable context for a flourishing field….

…the afternoon session, a discussion of strategy for field development. The Foundation is serious about providing resources if we can find a strategically-effective plan to make a difference.

This afternoon session was described in the program as follows:

Goal: Finally, we explore what is needed to develop the field of philosophy of cosmology in a dramatic way over the next decade. Our initial thought is that the field needs some infrastructure development as well as basic research support. Because this work must bring together such disparate fields, it is not easy working through basic university structures. It may be that beyond core research projects, we need to support the creation of major long-term initiatives or centers, and help establish training for a new kind of scholar as well as faculty positions and perhaps other elements of infrastructure such as book series or a journal to take two common elements of the scholarly enterprise. Also needed, perhaps, are ways of making it more visible to the public in ways that improve on current popular presentations.

The afternoon talks were by Priyamvada Natarajan, a Yale astrophysicist described as “currently a member of the advisory panel for the Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and has an abiding intellectual interest in understanding issues in spirituality and science”, and 2004 Templeton Prize winner George Ellis who is described as “co-author of On the Moral Nature of the Universe: Theology, Cosmology, and Ethics” and “editor of the Far Future Universe: Eschatology from a Cosmic Perspective.” The respondent was the Reverend Keith Ward, described as “his main work is a four-volume comparative theology from OUP”, and “His most recent book, published in 2006, is Pascal’s Fire – religious understanding and scientific faith.” The evening program was devoted to a celebration of Bernard Carr and the book based on three Templeton-funded conferences that he edited, Universe or Multiverse?

In a whitepaper prepared for the strategy session, Carr argues not just for the anthropic principle, but for the necessity of a “new science”:

In one sense the current debate today about the scientific status of M-theory and the multiverse proposal is nothing new. We’ve seen that progress on the outer and inner fronts has always been controversial, so perhaps history is just repeating itself. However, there is another sense in which the current situation is very special. This is because today — for the first time — the boundaries at the largest and smallest scales have connected. They are unified through quantum gravity and so the two science/philosophy frontiers have merged.

One might argue that this merging represents the completion of the scientific process. This is why the symbol of cosmic uroborus is so powerful: it represents both the evolution of our knowledge of the universe and the triumph of physics in producing a unified view of the world. Have we therefore reached the endpoint of science just as the macroscopic and microscopic frontiers merge? I doubt it. Personally I believe this merely represents a transformation in the perceived nature of science.

He then explains why Templeton money is needed:

Whether one redefines science to include exotic new ideas is not just a semantic issue. It also has practical implications because research in topics deemed to be “unscientific” is unlikely to be funded through the usual channels. For example, even in my own field, I have sometimes found that I cannot obtain a grant for a research project because some funding council has changed the definition of what constitutes “astronomy”. There will always be research areas (especially cosmological ones) which straddle the border between science or philosophy and this is why JTF’s initiative to support such areas is so important. It can promote or nurture ideas which have not yet been accepted into the world of legitimate science.

Carr is a past president of the Society for Psychical Research, and in its proceedings recently published a paper entitled Can Psychical Research Bridge the Gulf Between Matter and Mind?. In the white paper he advocates the idea that Consciousness is somehow part of this new science:

Another feature of the new paradigm – and here I am definitely venturing beyond the boundaries of current science – is likely to be mind. One feature of the Universe which is noticeably absent in the current paradigm of physics is consciousness….

…even the mention of the C word was taboo until recently. On the other hand, one might be sceptical of physicists’ claim to be close to a “Theory of Everything”, when such a conspicuous aspect of the world is neglected.

Certainly physics in its classical form cannot incorporate consciousness….

But what has this to do with cosmology? At first sight, developments in cosmology and particle physics might appear to have diminished the status of mind. The more we understand the Universe, from the vast expanses of the cosmos to the tiny world of particle physics, the more irrelevant humans (and hence minds) seem to become. Curiously, however, in recent decades cosmology has brought about a reversal in this trend, suggesting that mind may be a fundamental rather than incidental feature of the Universe. I’m referring here primarily to the Anthropic Principle…

He ends with some comments on theology, beginning with:

Of course, most scientists are even more uncomfortable straying into the domain of theology than philosophy, so the G word (God) is usually regarded as even more taboo than the C word. However, since science seems to be coming to terms with the A and C words, perhaps the same will happen with the G word. Maybe there is a gradual process of desensitization in which the A, C and G words become successively accepted!

The whitepaper by Ellis deals with the crucial question of whether untestable speculation is science:

There is also a reverse flow, whereby the development of the philosophy of cosmology – pushing the philosophy of science to its limits – may well have useful influences in wider realms of philosophy. Indeed it must be so, as cosmology helps us understand the nature of being human by clarifying the overall physical context through which we come to have our existence. So a useful part of the whole enterprise may be to try to develop that link: the different ways in which our understanding of the universe helps shape our views of humanity, and the ways that the philosophy of cosmology may help shape the philosophy of science. This may be particularly useful in terms of those aspects of physics which also face problems of testability for fundamental reasons, and so where some physicists are proposing to lessen the degree of rigour usually demanded in a scientific proof, decrying usual scientific criteria of testability as they do so (string theory comes to mind).

The whitepaper of Simon Saunders is an earlier version of the proposal for a new Oxford program available on the 2008 conference site. It proposes a new masters level 2 year course in philosophy of cosmology, with Templeton funding 2 3-year postdocs, a 5-year research fellow, a visiting scholars program, buy out time for those teaching in or administering the program, and funding for fellowships for graduate students. He also proposes to spend about 20,000 pounds a year on an outreach program to promote “philosophy of cosmology” in schools.

I haven’t seen any evidence that this planning and strategy session led to anything. For one thing, there does not seem to yet be a “Philosophy of Cosmology” program at Oxford, although perhaps Templeton will at some point fund such a thing. But, this session does give a good idea of where some people would like to take theoretical physics, and indicates Templeton’s interest in the idea of heavily funding ventures to promote such a “new science”.

On a somewhat related note, see today’s PZ Myers posting entitled The name “Templeton Foundation” needs to become a mark of failure.

I gather that the World Science Festival here in New York a week or so ago was a great success, although I was out of town for most of it. The one part of the program I was dubious about (Infinite Worlds) seems to have come off even more one-sided than planned, since David Gross couldn’t be there.

There’s a report on this at Ars Technica from someone who was sitting near Cameron Diaz while watching the program. Philosopher of science Nick Bostrom did point out the obvious, that for the multiverse to be science it has to predict something. Someone seems to have convinced the author of the piece that there actually is such a prediction:

Early in our Universe’s history (before the mulitiverse’s inflation pulled things apart), it was possible that the Universe bumped into a neighboring one. If that’s the case, there should be remnants of that event buried in the cosmic microwave background. Less than a month from now, the ESA’s Planck mission should arrive at the L2 Lagrange point with instruments sensitive enough to pick up this signal.

So, I guess in a couple years from now, we’ll know if there is a multiverse or not…

For another report, see here.

Sean Carroll reports here on some other parts of the festival, including the panel on Time Since Einstein, where he explained to the audience that “the fact that an a splattered egg cannot turn back into a pristine unbroken egg is the best evidence we have that we live in a multiverse.”

I still haven’t figured out yet what the arXiv’s trackback policy is, since trackbacks to my blog entries sometimes appear there, sometimes not. One example in the “not” category is my recent posting about the Kumar-Taylor paper on “String Universality”, which now has trackbacks to postings by Jacques Distler (recently seen here) and Dmitry Podolsky. The ways of the arXiv remain mysterious, but I can’t help recalling that my original problems with them seemed to have to do with powerful people who did not like having their multiverse pseudo-science disrespected. Even without the trackback, I’m wondering if the authors of the paper somehow heard about my comments and felt they needed to be addressed, since a new version of the paper has just appeared.

The most extensive changes are to the section on “predictivity” discussed in my posting. Here’s some of the added text:

It may be that string universality holds for four-dimensional theories with supersymmetry, but that supersymmetry breaking mechanisms lead to a constrained subset of non-supersymmetric low-energy theories in 4D.

It is possible that the dynamics of string cosmology may define a natural measure on the space of string solutions, which would favor some solutions over others. Currently, however, we lack a mathematically complete or background-independent formulation of string theory. It is likely that significant progress in this direction will be needed to understand the cosmological measure on the string landscape. In this brief discussion, we describe the situation for predictivity in the absence of such a breakthrough.

Some other changes:

This may seem like a very awkward situation for string theory.

has been replaced by

If we were living in six dimensions, then this would seem like a very awkward situation for string theory.

and the assurance that string theory would explain anything seen at the LHC has been toned down a bit, with

any new and unexpected phenomena found in experiments at higher energies should be realizable in the string theory context

replaced by

any new and unexpected phenomena found in experiments at higher energies may be realizable in the string theory context