Kind of like the last posting, but this time you get two worthwhile items to make up for one that’s not.
- Dan Garisto has a very good article here examining the present state of high energy experimental particle physics and phenomenology. He also summarizes current thoughts about the future. The CERN FCC-ee proposal is still in feasibility study mode, with the big problem its high cost. Numbers like \$15 – \$20 billion have shown up in press reports, and Garisto has “tens of billions”. The feasibility study is supposed to be finished late next year, and presumably a big part of it is people at CERN crunching numbers trying to figure out some plausible way this could work financially.
- There’s a very good article at Quanta about efforts to put together version 3 of the very influential “Kirby List” of open problems in topology. For version 1, see here, version 2 here, and as far as I can tell, version 3 still not finished (but discussed here).
- Brian Keating has a video asking “What would It take for String Theory to move beyond the realm of pure math, Into verifiable territory”? The answer obviously is a conventional substantive scientific prediction of anything. By describing the problem with string theory as being that it is now in “the realm of pure math”, I think Keating is missing the point. The problem with “string theory” is not that it’s pure math, but that it’s not a theory. “String theory” is now a 50 year old set of failed hopes and dreams that a theory might exist, see for instance Theorists Without a Theory. Every so often I try to figure out what people still pursuing this are up to, most recently today taking a quick look at KITP talks by Liam McAllister here and here.
The problem shows up clearly at 10:23 of the first talk where he’s talking about his goal, which gives up on studying all or even representative string theory solutions and tries just to find any “valid solutions”. But what is a “valid solution”?
And by valid solutions, we should say what equations are we trying to solve? And, it’s not the case that we can currently think about finding cosmological solutions of the exact theory in any non-perturbative sense.
McAllister artfully avoids saying what everyone at the talk knows (after all, the talk is part of a program entitled “What is String Theory?”): you can’t look for solutions to the theory because there is no theory. More specifically, no “exact” theory, just a long list of possible theories that one hopes might be in some sense approximations to a real theory. He then goes on to specify the extremely complex approximate theory he wants to work in, chosen by the “look under the lamppost” method as something you could actually imagine calculating. Whenever I look at things of this kind I’m completely mystified why anyone thinks it make sense to embark on insanely complicated calculations like these with essentially zero credible scientific motivation. Somehow though, he has a whole group of people doing this. By the end of the second talk he’s giving his vision of the future, which features an old photo of a room of hundreds of men in suits and ties calculating with pencil, paper and slide rules.
I was mystified twenty years ago why anyone thought this was a good idea, and the whole thing has just gotten stranger and stranger…