Freaky Physics Proves Parallel Universes Exist

Posted on April 6, 2010 by woit

Fox News has decided that some recent experimental atomic physics work showing that quantum mechanics works as expected (for a sane discussion of the science, see here) proves that parallel universes exist and that time travel may be feasible. In an article entitled Freaky Physics Proves Parallel Universes Exist, Fox News writer John Brandon develops this idea with help from Sean Carroll and Fred Allan Wolf (aka Dr. Quantum):

The multi-verse theory says the entire universe “freezes” during observation, and we see only one reality. You see a soccer ball flying through the air, but maybe in a second universe the ball has dropped already. Or you were looking the other way. Or they don’t even play soccer over there.

Sean Carroll, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology and a popular author, accepts the scientific basis for the multi-verse — even if it cannot be proven.

“Unless you can imagine some super-advanced alien civilization that has figured this out, we aren’t affected by the possible existence of other universes,” Carroll said. But he does think “someone could devise a machine that lets one universe communicate with another.”

It all comes down to how we understand time.

Carroll suggests that we don’t exactly feel time — we perceive its passing. For example, time moves fast on a rollercoaster and very slowly during a dull college lecture. It races when you’re late for work . . . but the last few minutes before quitting time seem like hours.

Back to the Future

“Time seems to be a one-way street that runs from the past to the present,” says Fred Alan Wolf, a.k.a. Dr. Quantum, a physicist and author. “But take into consideration theories that look at the level of quantum fields … particles that travel both forward and backward in time. If we leave out the forward-and-backwards-in-time part, we miss out on some of the physics.”

Wolf says that time — at least in quantum mechanics — doesn’t move straight like an arrow. It zig-zags, and he thinks it may be possible to build a machine that lets you bend time.

Update: Matt Springer has a more detailed analysis of the Fox News article entitled The Worst Physics Article Ever. For some reason his critique skips over the multiverse part, implying that that’s the one part of the article that makes sense…

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 5 Comments

Solar

Posted on April 5, 2010 by woit

Ian McEwan’s new novel Solar is now out, with a plot featuring Michael Beard, an aging theoretical physicist. Beard won a Nobel prize early in his career for the “Beard-Einstein Conflation”, which supposedly involves some unexpected coherent behavior in QED, based on the discovery of a structure in Feynman diagrams that involves E8. An appendix of the novel reproduces the Nobel presentation speech, evidently it’s the work of physicist Graeme Mitchison (see here).

As the novel opens in 2000, Beard is in his fifties, having spent quite a while coasting on his Nobel Prize. He’s director of an alternative energy research center, and one of the activities there employs postdoc theorists to evaluate unconventional ideas that are sent in, largely by cranks:

Some of these men were truly clever but were required by their extravagant ambitions to reinvent the wheel, and then, one hundred and twenty years after Nikola Tesla, the induction motor, and then read inexpertly and far too hopefully into quantum field theory to find their esoteric fuel right under their noses, in the voids of the empty air of their sheds or spare bedrooms – zero-point energy.

Quantum Mechanics. What a repository, a dump, of human aspiration it was, the borderland where mathematical rigor defeated common sense, and reason and fantasy irrationally merged. Here the mystically inclined could find whatever they required and claim science as their proof.

The postdocs have little interest in the old history of Beard’s discovery about QED, but instead baffle him by making “elliptical references to BLG or some overwrought arcana in M-theory or Nambu-Lie 3 algebra.” McEwan seems to have gotten this from Mike Duff, who is thanked in the acknowledgments. There’s the obvious problem though that Bagger-Lambert-Gustavsson, a hot topic while the book was being written, dates from 2007, so is anachronistic as a topic of discussion in 2000. Beard’s reaction to what the postdocs work on is:

Some of the physics that they took for granted was unfamiliar to him. When he looked it up at home, he was irritated by the length and complexity of the calculations. He liked to think that he was an old hand and knew his way around string theory and its major variants. But these days there were simply too many add-ons and modifications. When Beard was a twelve-year-old schoolboy, his math teacher told the class that whenever they found an exam question coming out at eleven nineteenths or thirteen twenty-sevenths, they should know that they had the wrong answer. Too messy to be true. Frowning for two hours at a stretch, so that the following morning parallel pink lines were still visible across his forehead, he read up on the latest, on Bagger, Lambert and Gustavsson – of course! BLG was not a sandwich – and their Langrangian description of coincident M2-branes. God may or may not have played dice, but surely He was nowhere near this clever, or such a show-off. The material world simply could not be so complicated.

To some extent, Solar is an entertaining comic novel of physicists and the alternative energy research business. The dominant theme though is a topic not all will find interesting: Beard’s personal life, which involves five failed marriages over the years. At the end of the book, Beard is in his sixties, a fat, unpleasant slob, with two younger women fighting over the possibility of being number six on the list.

Posted in Book Reviews | 9 Comments

Short Items

Posted on April 2, 2010 by woit

Planning on getting back to writing some longer postings, but for today, here’s a collection of quick news and links:

  • I hear from number theorists that Princeton’s Manjul Bhargava has some breakthrough results on the ranks of elliptic curves. I was out of town and missed his colloquium talk here, reports were that it was quite impressive. Here’s the main result, from the talk abstract:

    There is a standard conjecture, originating in work of Goldfeld, that states that the average rank of all elliptic curves should be 1/2; however, it has not previously been known that the average rank is even finite!  In this lecture, we describe recent work that shows that the average rank is finite (in fact, we show that the average rank is bounded by 1.5).

  • There’s an intriguing new paper out from Frenkel, Langlands and Ngo, describing some tentative new ideas about how to prove functoriality using the trace formula. I gather that this combines ideas from Ngo’s proof of the fundamental lemma, ideas of Langlands about “Beyond Endoscopy”, and ideas originating in the geometric Langlands program. The paper is clearly largely written by Langlands (one hint is that it’s in French, be grateful it’s not in Turkish…).
  • Besides this new work, Ed Frenkel also has a new film coming out, entitled Rites d’Amour et de Maths. Here’s the plot summary from IMDB:

    Is there a mathematical formula for love without death? The film ‘Rites of Love and Math’ is a sprawling allegory about Truth and Beauty, Love and Death, Mathematics and Tattoo, set on the stage of Japanese Noh theater. About the directors: Edward Frenkel is Professor of Mathematics at University of California at Berkeley and one of the leading mathematical physicists in the world. Reine Graves is a talented French filmmaker who has directed a number of original and controversial films that have won prestigious awards. Having met in Paris, Frenkel and Graves decided to create a film showing the beauty of mathematics. But how to do this without getting bogged down in technical details of the subject that could scare away non-specialists? Looking for the right metaphor, they came across the idea of making the tattoo of a mathematical formula. What better way to show the beauty of the formula than by letting it merge – literally – with beautiful female body! They found the aesthetic language for expressing this allegory in the enigmatic film ‘Rites of Love and Death’ (a.k.a. ‘Patriotism’) by the great Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, which had a very unusual and mysterious history of its own (banned for over 40 years, it came out on DVD in the Criterion Collection in 2008). The exquisite imagery of Mishima’s film and the original idea of Frenkel and Graves have led to the creation of ‘Rites of Love and Math.’

  • Harvard finally has a female tenured math professor: Sophie Morel.
  • This week’s Science Magazine has an article about Sabine Hossenfelder’s work (also see her blog posting here) purporting to show that you can’t get linear terms in deformed Special Relativity, making deviations from standard Special Relativity unobservably small. Personally, this is the sort of thing I don’t know enough about to offer an informed judgment on, but I’m curious to hear what experts think.
  • Nature has an article about social scientists studying the LHC project.
  • The KITP is now running a program on Strings at the LHC and in the Early Universe, which is a bit odd, since string theory predicts nothing at all about either topic. They’ve had promotional Blackboard Lunch talks by Cvetic and Brandenberger claiming otherwise (Brandenberger’s title was “Testing String theory with Cosmological Observations”). Taking a look at them, I don’t see anything at all that corresponds to a “test of string theory”.

    • Update: One more. See here for Jester’s summary of what particle theory came up with during the noughties, which has to have been the most depressing decade for the subject in a very, very long time.

    Update: There are two new papers (see here and here) on the arXiv this evening that address Sabine Hossenfelder’s arguments about DSR (she also has a new paper summarizing her argument, here). In one of these, Lee Smolin argues that, at least in some cases, the paradoxes pointed out by Hossenfelder can be eliminated if one studies wave-packet propagation instead of classical propagation.

    Update: There’s another unusual paper on the arXiv this evening, by Longo and Witten, entitled An Algebraic Construction of Boundary Quantum Field Theory. It’s an algebraic QFT paper, written in a rigorous mathematical style, quite out of character with typical papers from Witten.

    Posted in Uncategorized | 25 Comments

    First High Energy Collisions at the LHC

    Posted on March 29, 2010 by woit

    Current schedule is for first 7 TeV center of mass collisions tomorrow (Tuesday) at 9:17 am Geneva time. Injection of the beams will take place after 2 am, ramp up to 3.5 TeV/beam from 3-4 am. For more details of what has been going on recently at the LHC, see here. The schedule for tomorrow is here, a link to the planned webcast is here.

    CMS e-commentary is here, ATLAS control room blog here.

    Update: I just woke up, a couple minutes after first collisions were observed, 12:57 Geneva time. Collisions are going on now.

    Posted in Experimental HEP News | 14 Comments

    More Prizes

    Posted on March 26, 2010 by woit

    As far as I can tell, it’s still unclear if Perelman will accept the $1 million Millennium prize awarded to him last week. This week brings news of two more million dollar prizes:

  • John Tate is this year’s winner of the Abel Prize, worth 6 million Norwegian Kroner, which is a bit more than $1 million. Tate is now 85, recently retired from UT Austin (he spent much of his career at Harvard). He is a major figure in the development of algebraic geometry and number theory during the second half of the last century. His Princeton Ph. D. thesis, which pioneered the use of Fourier analysis on the adele group in the study of number theory, could easily be the most widely read and used doctoral thesis in mathematics.
  • The 2010 Templeton Prize, worth 1 million British pounds, or about $1.5 million, was awarded to biologist Francisco Ayala. Remarkably, the Templeton Foundation describes the prize-winner as someone who has “vigorously opposed the entanglement of science and religion”. I had thought that the main goal of the Templeton Foundation WAS “the entanglement of science and religion”, so this is a bit surprising. Ayala has done admirable work over the years refuting creationism and intelligent design.

    There was a bit of a kerfuffle over the fact that the announcement was made at the National Academy of Science (Ayala is a member), with Sean Carroll quoted as:

    Templeton has a fairly overt agenda that some scientists are comfortable with, but very many are not. In my opinion, for a prestigious scientific organization to work with them sends the wrong message.

    Science magazine has an article here about the award and about what some scientists think of Templeton’s activities, including the following:

    Even those who are put off by Templeton’s mission agree that the foundation does not attempt to influence the outcomes of the research and discussions it sponsors. “I am not enthusiastic about the message they seem to be selling to the public—that science and religion are not incompatible; I think there is real tension between the two,” says Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist at the University of Texas, Austin, who has been an outspoken critic of religion. “But for an organization with a message, they are pretty good at not being intrusive in the activities they fund. I don’t wish them well, but I don’t think they are particularly insidious or dangerous.”

    • Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

    High Energy Beams at the LHC

    Posted on March 19, 2010 by woit

    At 5:23 am in Geneva this morning, for the first time the two LHC beams were ramped up to high energy, the 3.5 TeV/beam that they plan to run at for the next two years. These are the highest energy (per particle) beams ever created by human beings, significantly surpassing the value at which the Tevatron operates (.98 TeV/beam) as well as the record achieved last fall (1.18 TeV/beam) during the early stages of beam commissioning.

    From now on, work will continue on preparing the machine to operate at higher intensity (for now they are using low-intensity pilot beams). For the next week or two, one of the challenges will be to carefully avoid any interesting collisions between particles in the two beams, since a major media event is being organized around the first collisions, and the event is tentatively scheduled for March 30.

    Update: CERN press release is here.

    Update: CERN has confirmed in a press release that first collisions will be attempted on March 30.

    Posted in Experimental HEP News | 10 Comments

    Millennium Prize to Perelman

    Posted on March 18, 2010 by woit

    The Clay Mathematics Institute announced today the award of the Millennium Prize to Perelman for the proof of the Poincare Conjecture. The award was made based on the rules set up when the prize was created: a Special Advisory Board (Donaldson, Gabai, Gromov, Tao and Wiles) made a recommendation to the CMI Scientific Advisory Board (Carlson, Donaldson, Margulis, Melrose, Siu and Wiles) that was accepted.

    On June 8 and 9 Clay will host a conference to celebrate at the Institut Henri Poincare.

    The initial press release says nothing about the question many have been wondering about for years: who will get the million dollars? Does all of it go to Perelman? Did he accept it?

    Update: According to alexbellos on Twitter, Carlson says that Perelman has been informed of the award of the prize, but there has been no response yet from him about whether he will accept it.

    Posted in Uncategorized | 38 Comments

    HEPAP Meeting

    Posted on March 12, 2010 by woit

    HEPAP is now meeting in Washington, presentations available here. Like the rest of science, HEP has been doing very well in the federal budget, including a temporary increase due to the stimulus program. Excluding stimulus money, the president’s FY2011 request has total DOE HEP funding up 2.3% (theory is up 3.8%) over FY2010. This is about 10% over the FY2007 level. At the NSF, the proposal is for a 2.8% increase in physics research spending in FY2011, up 20% since FY 2007.

    The NSF will be funding several “Physics Frontier Centers”, with five-year renewable awards of 1-5.5 million $. Pre-proposals are due in August.

    The DOE has been emphasizing Early Career Programs, with 14 “Early Career Awards” to tenure-track physicists made in HEP in FY1010. Six of these went to HEP theorists, pretty much all in phenomenology, with funding for string theorists not popular these days it seems.

    With the particle theory job market a complete disaster, particle theorists somehow managed to convince the DOE that the answer to the problem is to produce more particle theory Ph.Ds. There is a new program of HEP Theory Fellowships funding (with two-year fellowships) an additional five students this year, five more each year in the future. So I guess, steady-state, the idea is to add 10 more theory Ph.D.s/year, into a job market where the total number of permanent jobs/year is about 10.

    Update: Science magazine has a story here about budgetary problems of the DUSEL project.

    Posted in Experimental HEP News | 15 Comments

    LHC Update

    Posted on March 12, 2010 by woit

    There’s now a tentative date set for first high energy (3.5 TeV/beam) collisions at the LHC: it’s March 30th.

    Posted in Experimental HEP News | 3 Comments

    Strings 2010

    Posted on March 11, 2010 by woit

    Strings 2010, this year’s version of the big annual string theory conference, will be held next week in College Station, Texas. There’s a university press release about this here. Normally the conference is held in the summer at places like Rome, Madrid, Paris, Kyoto, etc. and attracts about 4-500 string theorists. This year’s time and location may keep attendance down (although College Station is a lot cheaper place to stay than Rome…).

    Unlike most years, there have been no promotional public lectures arranged. It also appears that there is no summary talk scheduled. In recent years, these have often been given by David Gross (who won’t be talking this year) or by Robbert Dijkgraaf (who is busy with another project, video here, for which he might want to recruit help from fellow string theorist Lubos Motl). Many of the talk titles are now available. In the past, sometimes the hot topic was mathematical and mathematicians were in attendance, but this has no longer been true for a while now. This year the hot topic is condensed matter physics, with several talks scheduled on attempts to apply AdS/CFT techniques to superconductors.

    It turns out I’m going to be relatively nearby, but a week later, giving a talk for the public the evening of March 24th at Collin College in Plano.

    Starting up this week and continuing through May, the KITP is hosting a string phenomenology program entitled Strings at the LHC and in the Early Universe. The program blurb somehow neglects to mention that string theory doesn’t actually predict anything at all about LHC physics or cosmology. To get a good idea of the topics that researchers in this field are discussing, online talks are here, starting with two rather general discussion sessions, one led by Blumenhagen, the second by Ovrut. As far as connecting to real physics goes, the state of the art seems to be much like it was a quarter century ago, with people struggling to find ways to come up with string theory-motivated constructions that are not in obvious disagreement with experiment. To achieve this requires going to ever more complicated models, which often contain various particles not in the Standard Model. In terms of making LHC predictions, one has no idea if this is a good or bad thing.

    Update: The Strings 2010 talks will be web-cast. There’s now a participant list. With 192 participants, this will be the smallest Strings XXXX conference in many years.

    Posted in Strings 2XXX | 5 Comments