Old Enough for Kindergarten

Today is the fifth anniversary of the start of this blog, something that has caused me to go back and take a look at some of the early postings, and meditate a bit on what has happened during the past five years.

The first posting was content-free, just an experiment to see if the software worked. The inspiration for starting the blog included the examples of Jacques Distler’s Musings, which had been around for a while, and Sean Carroll’s Preposterous Universe, which he had just started. At the time I had finished writing the book Not Even Wrong, and was in the process of getting it published. The initial idea behind the blog was that it would be a place to comment on and share information with others about topics in math and physics that interested me, including following the on-going story of string theory, which plays a crucial role in the intersection of the two subjects.

A few days later, the first substantive posting was a discussion of a talk by David Gross at CUNY on The Coming Revolutions in Fundamental Physics. Gross had been giving similar talks for several years (you can see a version from 2001 here), and continues to do so to this day (in a few weeks, he’ll be at UC Davis, see here). I don’t see anything I’d want to change in my posting from five years ago, and find this in itself somewhat remarkable. One thing that I’m sure has changed in the more recent versions of the talk is that they don’t include the prediction that 2007-8 will see a headline in the New York Times about the discovery of supersymmetry at the LHC. One feature of many theorist’s talks in recent years has been consistently overly optimistic predictions about when results from the LHC will arrive.

The next posting was an attempt to balance the previous one with something positive and uncontroversial, a discussion of the importance of understanding electroweak symmetry breaking, along with speculation that this might end up having something to do with our still imperfect understanding of chiral gauge symmetry at a non-perturbative level. I found the reaction to this posting truly bizarre, and it gave an inkling of some of the strange chapters to come in what some started to refer to as the “string wars”. Over the years I’d heard from some people that quite a few string theory enthusiasts were convinced that the only possible explanation for skepticism was the ignorance of skeptics. String theory is certainly a remarkably complex and difficult subject, and many skeptics will freely admit to not understanding the subject well, but my own personal experience talking to string theorists was that they were well-aware that there were good reasons for skepticism. Over the years, even many experts who had worked on the subject had come to the conclusion that string theory unification was not as promising as initially hoped, and had moved on to work on different things.

A few months later, Harvard’s recently promoted faculty member Lubos Motl started up his blog, The Reference Frame, which kicked the pathological nature of the discussion of string theory up to a whole new level. By the way, it seems that the main character of one of the most popular shows on US television is based on Lubos, and there’s a campaign to get an Emmy for the actor portraying this character. You really couldn’t make stuff like this up.

Five years later, some things have definitely changed. String theory remains a very powerful political force in the theoretical physics community, but the very public debate over the problems of the subject has taken a huge toll. Perhaps the most accurate indicator of how an academic field is doing in the marketplace of ideas is how many universities are investing in tenure-track appointments in the field. At least in the US, the situation here for string theory is dire. I may be missing someone, but taking a look at the latest information about particle theory tenure-track positions in the US available here, I don’t see any string theorist even making it to the short lists. At least in the US these days, if you want a permanent position in particle theory, you need to be doing something in phenomenology or cosmology. From what I hear, a common situation in physics departments is that the argument for string theory that “let’s wait for the LHC results for vindication” has been taken to heart, with departments figuring that now is not the time to hire in string theory, deciding instead to wait a few years and see if it collapses completely or gets revived by whatever comes out of the LHC.

One sad aspect of all this is that it includes a generalized backlash against the use of sophisticated mathematical ideas in particle theory. Many physicists have drawn the conclusion from the failure of string theory that the problem was too much mathematics, rather than a wrong idea (even string theorists are moving away from mathematics: unlike many years, I see no mathematicians listed as speaking at Strings 2009). Maybe LHC results will point the way forward, but if not, and progress instead requires a deeper mathematical understanding of quantum field theory, the only place for people to get hired working on this will be mathematics, not physics departments, and this is a less than ideal situation for many reasons.

The devolution of string theory unification into pseudo-scientific argumentation about the multiverse is another cause for physics departments to shy away from the subject. This has also been deadly for the public perception of the subject. For this week’s example, see a story in the Boston Globe which compares the scientific status of string theory with that of alchemy:

And at the cutting edge of modern physics, string theory purports to offer a complete but possibly unprovable explanation of the universe based on 11 dimensions and imperceptibly tiny strings.

Alchemists wouldn’t recognize the mathematics behind the theory. But in its grandeur, in its claim to total authority, in its unprovability, they would surely recognize its spirit.

Searching the NSF physics awards database for the strings “multiverse” or “anthropic” turns up nothing, and I suspect that even the proponents of this research are well aware that their colleagues want nothing to do with it. For funding they may have to turn to other sources, including the Templeton Foundation, which recently financed a meeting at a resort in the Cayman Islands which brought together people from the world of business and philanthropy with an array of physicists, including the multiverse crowd. A report on the meeting, with some slides of presentations, is available here.

A somewhat related piece of news is that yesterday the Templeton Foundation announced that Bernard d’Espagnat is the latest winner of its $1.4 million Templeton Prize. d’Espagnat has a long career of serious work on the philosophy and interpretation of quantum mechanics, but what makes him eligible for the prize is having indulged in a certain amount of obscurantism concerning quantum mechanics, coupled with an indulgent attitude towards religion:

Classical physics developed by Isaac Newton believes it can describe the world through laws of nature that it knows or will discover. But quantum physics shows that tiny particles defy this logic and can act in indeterminate ways.

D’Espagnat says this points toward a reality beyond the reach of empirical science. The human intuitions in art, music and spirituality can bring us closer to this ultimate reality, but it is so mysterious we cannot know or even imagine it.

“Mystery is not something negative that has to be eliminated,” he said. “On the contrary, it is one of the constitutive elements of being.”

“I believe we ultimately come from a superior entity to which awe and respect is due and which we shouldn’t try to approach by trying to conceptualize too much,” he said. “It’s more a question of feeling.”

I’m looking forward to seeing what happens over the next five years. Surely we’ll finally start seeing results from the LHC and maybe they’ll re-invigorate particle physics. The wide variety of work on mathematics inspired by quantum field theory may also lead to progress of one sort or another. As ever, obscurantism and pseudo-science will find proponents, but I don’t think they’ll make much headway in the scientific community, even with funding from the wealthy. Undoubtedly things will happen that I can’t possibly imagine at this point. I hope that they’re positive things for mathematics and physics, or, at least, entertaining.

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52 Responses to Old Enough for Kindergarten

  1. Revlin says:

    “We’re in the middle of a world-historical disaster caused by the experts who run large financial institutions, including those most expert at the technicalities of how they work.”

    Experts who made, are making, and (if the trend continues) will continue to make a lot of money. The disaster is not a result of the experts failing in their understanding and capability to manipulate market systems. Perversely, the failure is a result of their success in diverting as much capital from the general public (including their own share-holders) to their pockets as possible. They are so good at this that they’re still doing it, and being highly compensated for doing it well. So, what’s the problem? The Big Picture.
    “Experts” who have no interest and no incentive to consider the Big Picture will act with no heed or care for the needs of others. I see this happening in engineering consistently. If global change is the supposed big issue of our times, why is so much money being poured into developing tech for telecoms, popular entertainment, and non-renewable resource harvesting and so little going towards alternative resource management? Lack of incentive. Lack of public insight. Why is Watchmen backed by a $120 million budget while public universities across the country are struggling to keep their doors open?
    The public gives a damn about inane, big-budget action movies. They do not give a damn about particle physics. You don’t think this is a problem?

  2. D R Lunsford says:

    More should be written on the relation of the failure of fundamental science to that of financial practice, which I am calling “the hyperverdant castastrophe” because so many ex-physicists and mathematicians (“quants”) were involved. Of main interest is the role of the appropriate press in both cases, both internally (journals and whitepapers) and externally (OMNI and the Wall St. Journal).

    -drl

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