Not Even Wrong

There’s another article here about Michael Green succeeding Hawking as Lucasian chair. It emphasizes the idea that this is all about more funding for string theory:

MICHAEL Green, the 18th holder of Cambridge University’s Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics, is clearly a man with weighty issues on his mind.

He apologetically darts out of our meeting to speak to a colleague about how to submit the paperwork for a 1.5 million euros (£1.35 million) grant application he has just heard has been approved by the European Union.

“I suppose it sounds like a lot of money,” he explains, “but it’s not that much really compared to the billions spent on some research. Our work is theoretical – we’re very cheap.”

The money will go towards research on Michael’s specialist subject, string theory…

“I have been thinking about how I can make use of such a prominent position to benefit my colleagues. It is difficult to find funding at the moment, especially for subjects which don’t obviously have an immediate application for something that will make money.

“But the people who discovered magnetism and electricity had no idea what they could be used for. The MRI scanner wouldn’t exist without particle physics. There are so many spin-off industrial investments in things that are being researched, and we need more of this.”

Another blogger has the following comments about this:

There’s only so far that one can run away with this. People “…who discovered magnetism and electricity…” had, in their corner, empirical evidence to at least tell them if they are on the right path or not. This is where the analogy to pursuing String Theory breaks down and the similarity ends. I don’t believe that there has been, in the history of physics, a study in a field of physics that has gone for so long, and garnered THIS much attention, that has been totally devoid of any empirical evidence which indicates one way or the other that it is on a right path. For many of us who value physics as being guided by empirical evidence, this is the most troubling aspect of String theory.

To be fair, Green notes that it’s not all about cashing in for himself and his colleagues, that he would also like to finally have some success with the science:

But, ever the academic, Michael’s eyes twinkle as he admits his “pie in the sky” dream for his tenure of the Lucasian Professorship is not about money, but a breakthrough in the application of his beloved string theory.

“We need something which at the moment doesn’t seem to be a fundamental phenomenon,” he explains. “To find something we know already, but find an undetected explanation out of string theory. It is a radically new theory; what it needs is a radical new prediction.”

I’m not sure though that describing a nearly forty year old theory as “radically new” is really accurate. Any sort of prediction would be radically new.

Also in the business of defending string theory is Sean Carroll, who has a video and transcript up on the Edge web-site on the topic of “Why does the Universe look the way it does?”. It’s unclear to me what this has to do with the topic, but for some reason much of the talk is taken up with a defense of string theory. It’s the usual misleading hype, at great length, leading up to a peculiar defense of the idea that even once you have shown that a speculative theoretical idea is vacuous and can give you anything that you want, you should keep studying it anyway:

How do you show that a theory is not right if you can get anything from it? My answer to that is we just don’t know yet. But that does not imply that we will never know.

From here it’s on to the multiverse and his idea that it explains why you can’t unscramble an egg, and that one is doing observational cosmology over breakfast:

The reason we find a direction in time here in this room or in the kitchen when you scramble an egg or mix milk into coffee is not because we live in the physical vicinity of some important object, but because we live in the aftermath of some influential event, and that event is the Big Bang. The Big Bang set all of the clocks in the world. When we go down to how we evolve, why we are born and then die, and never in the opposite order, why we remember what happened yesterday and we don’t remember what is going to happen tomorrow, all of these manifestations of the difference between the past and the future are all coming from the same source. That source is the low entropy of the Big Bang…

I like to say that observational cosmology is the cheapest possible science to go into. Every time you put milk into your coffee and watch it mix and realize that you can’t unmix that milk from your coffee, you are learning something profound about the Big Bang, about conditions in the very, very early universe. This is just a giant clue that the real universe has given to us to how the fundamental laws of physics work. We don’t yet know how to put that clue to work. We don’t know the answer to the who done it, who is the guilty party, why the universe is like that. But taking this question seriously is a huge step forward in trying to understand how the universe that we see around us directly fits into a much bigger picture.

Update: Carroll this week will be on a lecture tour in Australia giving talks on the Big Bang/egg unscrambling business. The first will be in Sydney where the “internationally-renowned theoretical physicist” will give the 2009 Templeton Lecture.

According to the Harvard Gazette, it seems that string theory predicts a very distinctive experimental signature that should be easily observable at the LHC. The claim is that string theory predicts that the LHC should produce stau particles, with a lifetime of a minute or so. I’m no experimentalist, but I’d think a charged particle with no strong interactions, a mass of many hundreds of GeV, and long-lived enough to go all the way through the detector, should stick out like a sore thumb. This might be the kind of thing you only need one of to claim discovery of a new particle, and could even be expected to show up very early after the LHC is turned on.

So, at least if you believe the Harvard Gazette, we may be only a few weeks away from having an experimental result that will settle the string theory question once and for all. Either Vafa and collaborators will be getting the 2010 (or 2011 at the worst) Nobel prize, or string theory’s prediction will have been wrong and we can say goodbye to the theory for good. Next year should be exciting…

Update: Some commenters were pessimistic that the first year LHC would produce these supposed staus at an observable rate. If I read this presentation correctly (page 54), only 40 inverse pb are needed to produce 3 events of a 200Gev stau. Maybe this model will get verified or killed during 2010. From the same conference, see Michael Peskin’s summary talk for more about what the LHC might see in 2010.

From Softpedia this week, the news is of a Universal Theory of the Universe in the Works. According to the article,

The theory of quantum mechanics was devised around 1920, and explains all this, but without accounting for gravity. Therefore, uniting the two ideas has since been an effort taken on by a large number of physicists. Now, an international group believes it is closer than ever to finally managing a breakthrough.

Professors A.A. Coley, from the Dalhousie University, in Halifax, G.W. Gibbons at the University of Cambridge, in the UK, and C.N. Pope at the Texas A&M University, in the United States, led by young mathematician Sigbjørn Hervik, at the University of Stavanger, in Norway, believe that string theory is the best option physics has at bringing the two together.

It’s hard to tell what this is based on, but the only paper I see with those authors is this one, which doesn’t really have much of anything to do with string theory.

The source of the Softpedia article is one from Science Daily entitled A Grand Idea About the Universal Universe that tells us that:

A mathematician in Norway and international fellow scientists have now conceived a grand idea about the universal universe. They have developed a method that may provide answers to universal problems and characterize and describe the universe….

“The problem is that quantum mechanics does not include gravity and the theory of relativity does not include quantum mechanics”, Hervik says.

Many attempts have been made to find a unifying theory of both. String theory is the best candidate so far, according to Hervik.

Ultimately this all goes back to yet another university press release, this one about Hervik’s Universe.

A Leiden University press release headlined Physical Reality of String Theory Demonstrated is being picked up and used to generate news stories in the media.

It starts off:

String theory has come under fire in recent years. Promises have been made that have not been lived up to. Leiden theoretical physicists have now for the first time used string theory to describe a physical phenomenon.

which follows the usual dishonest and misleading template for attempts to deal with string theory’s failure as a unified theory. The idea is to put out a press release announcing that string theory has finally lived up to its promise and shown its critics to be wrong, because of evidence it may work as an approximation method for some strongly coupled condensed matter or nuclear physics model. The fact that this has nothing to do with string theory’s continuing utter failure as a fundamental theory is carefully not mentioned, ensuring that non-expert readers of the press release will be misled.

A common excuse for this is that it is being done by journalists, with the scientists involved having no responsibility for the misleading material. In a news media story, conceivably this could be the case, but a university press release is something different. University researchers have both the right and the responsibility to ask for the retraction of a university press release that mis-characterizes their work. When they don’t do this, they make themselves responsible for actively misleading the public about this subject.

To continue with the string theory/movie theme, a commenter just wrote in to tell about some new ideas for using M-theory to create a warp-drive. These are contained in some papers from the past year or two by string theorists Richard Obousy and Gerald Cleaver (see here, here and here). Today, as a tie-in to the release of the new Star Trek movie, Baylor University issued a press release with the title ‘Star Trek’ Warp Speed? Two Baylor Physicists Have a New Idea That Could Make it Happen, which states:

String theory suggests the universe is made up of multiple dimensions. Height, width and length are three dimensions, and time is the fourth dimension. Scientists believe that there are a total of 10 dimensions, with six other dimensions that we can not yet identify. A new theory, called M-theory, takes string theory one step farther and states that the “strings” actually vibrate in an 11-dimensional space. It is this 11th dimension that the Baylor researchers believe could help propel a ship faster than the speed of light.

Interesting to know that there’s a “new” theory called “M-theory”. Maybe it will replace the old one that has been around for 14 years or so. In any case, while the Woody Allen film is not out, the new Star Trek is, and when I go see it tomorrow night, the fact that it is based on solid science will be reassuring.

Update: Sadly, no explanation in the Star Trek movie of how M-theory was used in the design of the warp drives. However, according to EETimes, a Star Trek warp drive is already in the works.

There’s a nice article in Nature News about the solution to the Kervaire invariant problem mentioned here. It’s an excellent and accurate description of the result and its significance, except for the last paragraph, on “Brane science”, where the author can’t resist following the convention of appending some nonsensical hype about string theory:

Because the new approach involves looking at topological problems of a manifold from the perspective of a space that has one more dimension, it is analogous to the use of one-dimensional strings as the basis of zero-dimensional (point-like) fundamental particles. Similarly, it has become popular for cosmologists to study the behaviour of space-time from the perspective of higher-dimensional ‘branes’ that interact with one another. This is why studying the Kervaire invariant problem might offer useful mathematical techniques to fundamental physics.

Update: This news is now featured on the AMS web-site, together with the misleading hype about strings and branes:

Ball explains “although it looks at face value to be extremely abstruse, the mathematics involved in the solution might be relevant to quantum theory and string theory, not to mention brane theory, which has been invoked to explore some issues in Big Bang cosmology.”

Just made it to Edinburgh for the Atiyah conference. It seems that someone at a local newspaper really wants to get my goat. See the story headlined World’s Great Minds Gather to Celebrate Atiyah’s Birthday.

Update: Will try and write more about the conference soon. At least one string theorist argues for the new name for the index theorem, on the grounds that it is used in string theory. When I get back to Columbia I think I’ll tell my Calculus students about the Taylor string series….

The whole “finally, a way is found to test string theory” business is starting to become a complete joke. See the latest such nonsense:

Quantum tunnelling of a new, third kind could finally put string theory to the test

which is based on this preprint.

Note: I’ll be traveling this week, first to Edinburgh, where a celebration of Sir Michael Atiyah’s 80th birthday is going on, then stopping in Dublin on the way back to New York.

Update: As usual, Slashdot can be relied upon to promote the latest “predictions from string theory” hype.