This past week there has been a conference going on in Cambridge called Eurostrings 2006. It’s a bit like the annual “Strings XXXX” conferences, although about half the size and organized just by European institutions that are part of the European Superstring Theory Network, which since last year has been funded by a grant from the EU. Part of the conference consists of a celebration of Michael Green’s 60th birthday.
Most of the talks are already available online. There’s not much new being reported, but the talks include a nice review talk on topological strings by Robbert Dijkgraaf. There’s another talk on recent work on topological strings by Erik Verlinde, and a week earlier there was a conference in Munich devoted to the subject.
Nathan Berkovits talked about work in progress with Nikita Nekrasov on multi-loop amplitudes using his pure spinor formalism. This subject still seems remarkably confused, with Berkovits explaining that they have found a problem they still don’t know how to resolve: their regularization causes amplitudes with genus larger than 6 to vanish, violating unitarity. For commentary on yet another new suggested formalism for defining superstring amplitudes due to Warren Siegel and Kiyoung Lee, see this posting by Lubos Motl.
As part of the Green birthday celebration, John Schwarz gave a talk on String Theory Books. He reminisced about the writing of the two-volume book with Green and Witten (his outline refers to a “removed chapter”, and “broken vow”, what are those?). Evidently the book was written in 9 months back in 1986, a truly heroic effort given its size. Last Monday, Schwarz finally finished up a new textbook on string theory, written with Katrin and Melanie Becker and entitled “String Theory and M-theory: A Modern Introduction”. They started writing back in February 2005, planning a 350 page book to be completed by the end of September, but ended up just last week completing a 729 page book. From the table of contents it looks like GSW abbreviated and updated, containg more modern material on branes, dualities, black hole entropy, flux compactifications and gauge/string dualities. It seems rather peculiar that flux compactifications and the landscape get a whole chapter, whereas AdS/CFT is dealt with in one section of one chapter. All in all, comparing the new book to the old one, twenty years later the subject has become a lot more complicated, a lot uglier, and the prospects for using it to predict anything about the standard model have vanished.
The Schwarz talk also has a link to a video of a Berlitz commercial featuring a German radio operator misunderstanding someone radioing in a distress call that they were sinking (the German hears this as “thinking”). I can’t at all figure out what this has to do with Schwarz’s talk. Is string theory making a distress call as it is sinking, but no one understands this?
Victor Rivelles attended, and has blog entries here, here and here. He reports on a talk by my fellow Princeton student Costas Bachas about using string theory techniques to solve capillarity and wetting problems, then comments that “If LHC provides no proof to string theory string theorists will not lose their job, they can just change to applied string theory!”
Applied string theory? What does that mean? The only thing I can think of that fits this description is working for a postal/parcel delivery service. Someone should do a study to see if the postal workers who have “gone postal” in the past (wasting many fellow human beings, and most often themselves in the process) were in actual fact just frustrated Superstring theorists who were unable to cope with the absence of any extra dimensions.
If only I had know that these guys were staying right opposite the Cambridge University Library, where I often go to work. I could have sauntered along to the college bar afterwards to try to talk them out of making this career move, possibly saving many innocent lives in the process.
The talks were all videoed and may (?) appear online.
The `removed chapter’ was apparently one on light-cone gauge string field theory that never made it in to GSW. The broken vow was `never again!’ – the new book with Beckerx2 breaking this.
Despite your perhaps overly fond hopes Peter, John Schwarz’s talk did not anticipate the demise of string theory. The commercial you found puzzling was used to illustrate a point about ensuring the text of his new book was not like German gewritten.
vive les cordes
Thanks Algernon!
I did think it was probably too much to hope for that Schwarz was implying that string theory was sinking. For one thing, he probably wouldn’t have spent the last year writing a book on the subject…
The commercial “What are you sinking about?” was mentioned by John Schwarz as an example of sometimes difficult verbal communication between native English speakers and non-native English speakers. Such trivial difficulties can sometimes influence even teams that write books, despite the high intelligence of all the authors.
But it’s still a courtesy from the German speakers to speak English. John Schwarz has a German enough sounding name so that he could also learn German. 😉 In fact, Becker sisters’ grandfather was kind of Czech and his name was Jan (=John) Schwarz.
I don’t see any Llewellyn-Twittletons on the list of participants, and yet Algernon here seems pretty well informed about this conference. Could it be that he is posting under a pseudonym? If so, why? Is contributing to this blog a CLM* for String Theorists? But I notice that he stops short of saying “Long Live Strings” in English, even though I am sure that he must be aware that this the usual language of this forum.
—-
CLM = Career-limiting Move. Another example of an academic CLM is calling your PhD supervisor an “idiot” or “imbecile” before he/she has written your references.
Peter said: “… John Schwarz … reminisced about the writing of the two-volume book with Green and Witten … Evidently the book was written in 9 months back in 1986, a truly heroic effort given its size.
Last Monday, Schwarz finally finished up a new textbook on string theory, written with Katrin and Melanie Becker and entitled “String Theory and M-theory: A Modern Introduction”. … a 729 page book. From the table of contents it looks like GSW abbreviated and updated … All in all, comparing the new book to the old one, twenty years later the subject has become a lot more complicated, a lot uglier …”.
The haste with which 1986 GSW was written is evident.
For example:
Volume 1 contains Appendix 5.A “Properties of SO(2n) Groups” that discusses interesting things like SO(8) triality and the spinor representations of SO(2n),
while
Volume 2 (at page 388) says “… It is perhaps surprising* that one can define a second set of gamma matrices …”
with the * indicating a footnote saying
“To the reader who has read the construction of the spinor representation of SO(2n) in Appendix 5.A, this may not seem so surprising.”.
When I first read GSW, I found it to be very unevenly written,
with very clear beautiful sections on triality, SO(2n) spinors, the Elements of E8 (Appendix 6.A), etc,
and
with some less-mathematical sections seeming to me to be muddy and obtuse.
At a conference, I had the opportunity to ask Ed Witten why GSW was so unevenly written, and even with some sections apparently written by someone who was unaware of preceding sections.
He said that they (G,S,W) had divided the book into chapters and then each of the three authors had written their assigned chapters independently.
Guess who wrote the clear beautiful math stuff in GSW ? (Hint – his initials are EW).
Therefore, I am nor surprised when Peter says that Schwarz’s rewrite/update (without EW as coauthor) seems “a lot more complicated … a lot uglier”.
Tony Smith
http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/
Tony,
Witten has an incredible command of a lot of mathematics, and he is a wonderful expoeitor, so I’m sure his co-authors had trouble competing with that. But the additional levels of complexity and ugliness I was referring to are inherent to the subject, not due to the authors. All I’ve seen anyway is just the table of contents, and I was referring not to the exposition but to the properties of the topics chosen.
JHS’s also explained that the G, S and W individually drafted the chapters (and it is indeed quite obvious who wrote what) and only later send them around (using the by then still novel computer network joining Princeton, QMW and Caltech) for the others to edit. He also mentioned that they each worked like 100 hours/week to finish those books but W still managed to work out cubic string field theory simultaneously.
The “what are you thinking about” spot making fun of us Germans struggling with the English language became a running gag for the rest of the conference, not only Paul Townsent refered to it mentioning Michael Gutperle’s pronounciation of “Janus”.
So, remains one question: How many Germans does it take to change a light bulb?
Vee ask heer se kwestions!
Robert,
“Townsent”? Can’t see why anyone is making fun of you Germans with your accents….
There is some distintion between “sound” and “phoneme”. Basically if you understant it , it is still the same phoneme, just different accent or sound. On the other hand, I believe that an insult against scottish is “Yours is not an accent, it is just a different language that happens to have the same written form”.
Ahhhhh. Gotcha! At least I manage to call him Paul, not like the secretary at Strings ’99 who even produced a name tag with “Pete”.
Here is another one
question: Prof. Wigner do you spell your name with vee?
Wigner: 9W
Hi Peter et al –
Just wanted to let you know that my ThoughtCast interview with Lisa Randall is finally finished, and online in podcast form at http://www.thoughtcast.org. Thank you all for your input on potential questions for the interview. Feel free to leave a comment on the ThoughtCast website. And please remember that the intended audience for this interview is curious and intelligent, but mainsteam — far less informed than you guys. I think you might nonetheless enjoy listening to her thoughts on string theory.
Thanks again!
Jenny
“… Very soon now these [string theory] theories will be tested. …” – Jenny (introducing Lisa Randall).
“Is there any room in your theories for life on any extra dimensions or parallel universes?” – Jenny
Lisa Randall, laughing: “There absolutely is room … in particular if there are other branes … we really don’t know what’s there …”
🙂