Not Even Wrong

Hollywood theoretical physics week, focusing on quantum gravity and black holes, continues with the opening this weekend of The Theory of Everything, a Stephen Hawking biopic. It’s quite good, although a bit too heart-warming for my taste. The focus is on the relationship between Hawking and his wife Jane, and there’s quite a bit more emphasis on religion than can really be justified. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Eddie Redmayne gets an Oscar for his portrayal of Hawking. It’s very impressively well-done, and the sort of inspirational material the Academy Awards people love.

There are things you could complain about in the film’s portrayal of the science (and Dennis Overbye does so here), but this was handled better than I expected, with some reasonable relationship to reality, given the constraints of this kind of movie. In every way, a better film than Interstellar, the other Hollywood theoretical physics movie of the week.

Watching the film did remind me of days long past. When I was a graduate student in Princeton I remember Hawking coming there to give a talk (or talks?), this would have been around 1980. He was talking about Euclidean quantum gravity, and at the time was still able to speak, but his speech was so indistinct that someone who worked with him translated, repeating what he said so everyone could understand. At the time, the general feeling was something like “great physicist, too bad the guy only has a year or two to live” (he did come close to passing away in 1985). I’m absolutely sure that no one then would have believed it possible that he’d go on to become a huge celebrity, make it through two failed marriages, sell 10 million books about physics, and still be with us and active deep into retirement age. Personally I thought a lot of his last book was misguided (see here) but his is an amazing story and he’s got a lot better excuse than his able-bodied colleagues for giving up and going for the multiverse.

• On Monday there will be symposia at Stanford featuring the Breakthrough Prize winners, with streaming video available. For the morning program, with dignitaries and such, see here. The Mathematics symposium will run 11-5, the program is here, streaming video here. The Physics symposium is also 11-5, no program yet, but streaming video will be here. If you’re in Berkeley they have an event to watch the videos at International House, see here.
• Tomorrow in Paris will be the Seminaire Bourbaki, supposedly you can watch the talks online here.
• Latest news on the Journal of K-theory front (for background, see here) is that the Editorial Board has resigned and is starting up a new journal, to be called Annals of K-theory and published by MSP. The story seems to be that the Journal of K-theory was very profitable, but the profits were going personally to the managing editor, Anthony Bak. Evidently he refused to agree to demands to change this arrangement, so was removed from the K-theory Foundation set up to use funds from the journal, and the other editors (except one) resigned. They are encouraging university libraries to consider canceling subscriptions to the Journal of K-theory, but it’s not clear this is possible, since such subscriptions are now often part of bundles.
• If you’d like to see what the theory group at CERN is up to, take a look at presentations at their retreat, which ends today.

Update: The program for Monday’s Breakthrough Prize physics symposium is available. It reveals that there will be 3 joint winners of this year’s $3 million. I’m betting Polchinski and two others, most likely Strominger and Vafa. The physics speakers get 15 minutes to give a talk, 5 minutes for questions. Mathematicians get twice as long, a total of 40 minutes/talk.

Update: It looks like mathematicians too are getting in on the Hollywood thing. Next week, sandwiched in between Diane von Furstenberg and Jennifer Lawrence, Terry Tao will appear on the Colbert show.

Update: The Terry Tao Colbert show segment is here.

This evening’s Hollywood-style entertainment came from the Perimeter Institute, where they had a big public event, live-streamed to the world, featuring Nima Arkani-Hamed speaking on Quantum Mechanics and Spacetime in the 21st Century. You should be able to watch the thing soon from the Perimeter site, should be posted at some point here.

The talk was pretty much the same as many other such Arkani-Hamed talks, quite close to the one at the IAS nearly four years ago, discussed here. In this format he can’t go on forever, was cut off by around an hour and a half, so said he couldn’t get to the third part of the talk, which might have been the 21st century part (amplituhedron?). As in the IAS talk, what he did cover was first mostly the 1960s sort of arguments that Weinberg describes in the first volume of his textbook about the constraints on consistent relativistic QFTs. Then an advertisement for the Veneziano model and string theory. The last part of the talk was a long advertisement for SUSY, ending with an acknowledgement that it wasn’t showing up at the LHC. He’s now giving 2018 as the date for when we’ll know about LHC-scale SUSY, which is moved up from the 2020 of the IAS talk of 2011, but still very different than the “year or so after LHC startup” he was saying in 2005. The current plan is for maybe 10 inverse-fb next year, 50 in 2016. If nothing shows up then, I don’t see that the next 50-100 supposedly coming by 2018 have any real chance of finding SUSY.

One thing that struck me about the talk was its odd combination of over-the-top enthusiasm (“this is the greatest time ever!”) and intense defensiveness. He kept emphasizing the claim that theorists, even without experiment to keep them honest, were working with highly constrained rules, that it was very hard to do anything not obviously wrong. He denied sociology had to do with what unsuccessful ideas people decide to pursue. He didn’t address at all the “not even wrong” problem: what about the things like the landscape, baroque constructions that evade being wrong by being empty? I like a lot this picture and quote from Perimeter:

If you manage to find one idea that’s not obviously wrong, it’s a big accomplishment. Now, that’s not to say it’s right. But not obviously being wrong is already a huge accomplishment in this field.

I think the defensiveness here that’s coming through is very personal. He’s gotten a $3 million award and a reputation as a leader of the field for ideas that haven’t worked out, but which he can defend as “not obviously wrong” and thus a “huge accomplishment”.

All in all, the talk was very backward looking, recapitulating the SUSY/string theory ideology that has led us to where we are. It looks like he’s planning on hanging in until 2018 with the same story, only then maybe admitting failure (and possibly going for “the multiverse did it, we never had a chance” cop-out). He did end with an upbeat claim that the SUSY picture being all wrong would be very exciting, opening up the field by showing we need something completely new. The obvious question for him is “you pretty clearly wouldn’t now bet $10 on SUSY at the LHC, so why wait?” Why not stop giving promotional talks about SUSY? One thing he could have done that would have generated some excitement in the field would be to have pitched out the two-thirds of the talk he did give, publicly saying these ideas aren’t working, and talked about something from this century, amplitudes or whatever, the part of the talk he never got to.

Well, maybe in 2018…

Update: You can watch the talk here, along with some online commentary in a chat box that was rolling during the talk.

Update: There was also a more technical talk at Perimeter by Arkani-Hamed, earlier in the day, on Cosmological Collider Physics. The video doesn’t seem to be available yet though.

There’s a story in Variety this afternoon announcing that Seth MacFarlane will be the host this year for the ceremony in Silicon Valley announcing the 2015 Breakthrough Prizes. MacFarlane was the host of the 2013 Oscars. Other celebrities there to award prizes will include Kate Beckinsale, Benedict Cumberbatch, Cameron Diaz, Jon Hamm and Eddie Redmayne. The ceremony will be televised, not live, but November 15 at 6pm on the Discovery Channel.

The announcements that evening will include awards of up to 6 $3 million prizes in the life sciences. The physics prizes this year, funded by Yuri Milner, will include a $3 million prize and one or more $100,000 prizes for young researchers. The past practice of awarding $300,000 to semi-finalists for the $3 million seems to have been stopped, after Joe Polchinski collected a couple of these. Polchinski seems to be the odds-on favorite for the $3 million this year. Another possibility would be Strominger and Vafa, also semi-finalists last year. I suppose there’s an outside chance that the committee making the choice, which is dominated by string theorists, will decide that a non-string theorist is worth recognizing.

The Mathematics prize is funded by Milner and Mark Zuckerberg. The winners there are already known, see here.

The next day there is an announced symposium scheduled to be held at Stanford to honor the prize winners in the life sciences (see here). Last year there was a similar symposium in physics right after the ceremony, so one could guess that such things might be planned for physics and math as well.

Update: There will be separate math and physics symposia on Monday, and an evening lecture from the Physics winner. A little more detail here. The math symposium will be at Stanford, live-streamed to Berkeley, Stanford details and RSVP here.

• Charlie Munger, the billionaire business associate of Warren Buffett, has donated $65 million to the KITP at UCSB for the construction of a residence for visitors. For more on this, see a UCSB story, a New York Times article, and for some background, 90-year old Munger’s explanation that “I won’t need it where I’m going”.
• On the other coast, today and tomorrow at Princeton there will be a workshop on string cosmology and inflation. They have a list of questions to be addressed, including
  

  Are there any plausible alternatives to string/M-theory as a fundamental theory of physics?
  …
  Does string theory make any cosmological predictions? Does it exclude anything?

  As far as I can tell, there’s an odd consensus set of answers to these two questions among string theorists. No, string theory makes no predictions about cosmology, but also no, there are no alternatives.

• For an interesting discussion of the problems raised by this sort of “no possible predictions, but no alternatives” situation, see this debate involving John Horgan, David Tong and Tara Shears. Horgan does a good job of pointing out the problem. Tong’s defense of string theory relies heavily on claiming that it is highly mathematically rigid, so mathematical consistency is what can give us faith in it. One problem with this is that the whole string theory landscape picture is an extremely ill-defined conjectural framework, the opposite of mathematically rigid. Yes, there are parts of string theory that seem to be mathematically consistent and lead to interesting results. The problem is that those have nothing to do with what is observed about fundamental physics.
• Jim Gates has an article about Sticking with SUSY, despite no evidence from the LHC. He explains that the thing he finds most convincing about SUSY is the cancellation in divergent vacuum energies between fermions and bosons (or at least that’s how I interpret his comments). I’m actually somewhat in sympathy with this. One thing I’ve been writing about in my quantum mechanics notes is the beautiful parallelism between “bosonic” and “fermionic” quantization. A fundamental theory needs both, and likely has some super-algebra of symmetries acting on it. I just don’t though see a good argument for the realization of this general idea in terms of the standard kinds of extensions of the Poincaré algebra to a superalgebra. These don’t appear to tell us anything about physics we know about, and predict physics we don’t see.
• I was hoping to have time last Sunday to see a discussion at the French Embassy between John Nash and Cedric Villani, part of their Festival Albertine. Unfortunately I ran out of time to do this, but luckily for you and me, video is available here.

Various news about the usual topics:

• Natalie Wolchover at Quanta magazine keeps coming up with great, in-depth stories about interesting new topics in physics that are getting no attention elsewhere. Her latest is about the universality of the Tracy-Widom distribution.
• The LHC is cooling down, in preparation for a restart early next year. Nature has a good story about what is going on here. Latest status and plans are described here. The current plan is to start beam recommissioning next March, have 1 fb^-1 by mid-June, in time to perhaps have some results to report at EPS-HEP2015 at the end of July. Another 10 fb^-1 would be accumulated later on, before a heavy-ion run late in the year.

  In the long term, by 2023 there should be 300 fb^-1 and many components of the machine and the experiments will start to become unusable due to radiation damage. Planning is going ahead for “Phase-II”, or the HL-LHC, with Bertolucci’s comment that “It is inconceivable under any reasonable scenario to stop the LHC program at that point”.

• Nature has an editorial this week about What lessons can be learned from the presentation of the gravitational-waves story?, pointing to a planned discussion next week about Lessons in the communication of science from the BICEP2 story. I’ve already written extensively about this, but since the editorial refers to bloggers (and I know some people at Nature were unhappy with my blog entry about this, which was poorly worded), I’ll take another opportunity to do so.

  From the purely scientific point of view, this is a pretty straightforward situation. The BICEP2 people fooled themselves into thinking that they had something much more exciting (primordial gravitational waves + evidence for inflation) than what they really had (a good measurement of B-mode polarization at one frequency). They then wrote a paper with over-optimistic claims, which later blew up in their face. This is perfectly normal science.

  What’s not normal science is the behavior of a lot of theorists in response to the BICEP2 claims. The Stanford University Linde video and its 3 million downloads will live forever as an example of misguided PR for science. The comments from theorists about the significance of this for string theory that Nature quoted were an embarrassment for the field (why not just say that you could get any value of r out of string theory?), and even worse were the publicity campaigns from Linde, Guth and Carroll aiming to convince the public that this was evidence for the multiverse.

  What’s the lesson for science journalists? Take a hard look at the behavior of some prominent theorists in this story, and draw the obvious conclusions for your future coverage of developments in this field of science.

• Just noticed that Sean Carroll is now trying to raise research funding online with a website devoted to attracting private funding. Will be interesting to see if that works, maybe it will become a model for how to fund this kind of research.
• One of the few things I’d change about my book written ten years ago would be the discussion of the philosophy of science “demarcation problem”, that of deciding what is science and what isn’t. Only after writing the book did I learn about the distinction between a “progressive” and “degenerating” research program due to Lakatos, which is a very good way of addressing the question of how to evaluate string theory. I also missed a paper that came out a few years ago by Johannson and Matsubara on String theory and general methodology. At one point they write that the string theory landscape business shows that:
  

  String theory is a degenerative programme, according to Lakatos’ criterion.

  There’s a lot more in the paper, it’s a good example of what I’ve seen too little of, philosophers of science engaging with the real issues here.

• For the latest on the string landscape, there was a conference last week on Fine-tuning, Anthropics and the String Landscape. See if you can find anything there like a plausible idea for how to get any testable physics, I couldn’t. Alan Guth’s introductory talk mainly explains why the measure problem means you can’t predict anything, but then ends with a claim that physicists take the multiverse seriously anyway, quoting Weinberg from 2005 about Martin Rees’s dog.
  Back in 2004-5, the expectation was that the string theory landscape could be used to predict whether SUSY breaking would take place at a high or low scale (see for instance here). That idea is long dead, and no other proposal for a prediction has replaced it. So, the string landscape is itself a degenerating research program. What do philosophers of science call it when a research program degenerates into something else, and that research program in turn degenerates. A (degenerating)² research program?
• The standard defence of string theory these days acknowledges that it can’t explain particle physics, but claims it has had great success in quantum gravity. Next spring the KITP will have a program on quantum gravity foundations. The description of the program has a lot to say about “deep connections between quantum information theory and gravity”, no mention of string theory. There seems to be a move away from string theory and a convergence between the KITP and the sort of alternative research favored by the Perimeter Institute.
• Speaking next month on Quantum Mechanics and Spacetime in the 21st Century at Perimeter will be Nima Arkani-Hamed, one of the organizers of the KITP program. Not clear what he’ll be arguing for then, but he did just give a talk at an Oxford workshop on New geometric structures in scattering amplitudes, with the title “The Amplituhedron, Scattering Amplitudes, and the Wavefunction of the Universe”. I’m curious to see how he gets the Wavefunction of the Universe, although I suppose one should keep in mind his comments here.
• Not announced yet what the price of tickets to Arkani-Hamed will be. For a real rock star of physics though, I think you want Brian Cox, who is on tour in Australia. Premium tickets there are about $175 US.

Update: The latest on the Journal of K-theory situation, from algtop-l

Dear Colleagues,

The time has come to advise your librarians to cancel the subscription to the Journal of K-Theory. The precious money could be better spent elsewhere.

As you know the journal is going through a crisis. The most recent development is that the Bak family has written to Cambridge University Press informing them that they are under a contractual obligation to keep publishing the journal through the end of 2017, whether they like it or not. I haven’t seen the contract in question, not have I seen the letter from the Bak family to Cambridge University Press, hence I cannot comment on the legal merits of the case. The Baks evidently feel confident, Tony Bak has accepted at least one paper for the 2015 edition of the journal without clearing it with any of the other editors.

The Baks might be right, Cambridge University Press might have no choice but to continue publishing the journal. But the vast majority of the editors will be walking out and the scientific standards of the journal are bound to plummet. It would be a waste of money to continue subscribing.

Yours, Amnon