This is the time of year during which a large number of physicists and mathematicians must turn their attention to the problem of finding employment for next fall. Physics Today has a jobs site here, which has a new posting that may interest some of my readers. Thanks to Michael Williams for pointing this out to me.
If applicants need a PD18 form, it’s available here.
I briefly met John Hagelin when I was an undergraduate. At the time he was a Harvard particle theory graduate student, soon to get his degree and start a quite respectable career in the subject. His biography on his web-site claims that:
His scientific contributions in the fields of electroweak unification, grand unification, super-symmetry and cosmology include some of the most cited references in the physical sciences. He is also responsible for the development of a highly successful Grand Unified Field Theory based on the Superstring. Dr. Hagelin is therefore at the pinnacle of achievement among the elite cadre of physicists who have fulfilled Einstein’s dream of a “theory of everything” through their mathematical formulation of the Unified Field—the most advanced scientific knowledge of our time.
Hagelin moved on from doing physics research, first to help run the Maharishi International University (now the Maharishi University of Management) in Fairfield, Iowa, then to run for president as the candidate of the Natural Law Party (it seems that “Joe the Plumber” was a member of this). Nowadays, the Maharishi has passed away, and Hagelin has moved to New York, where he is Executive Director of the Global Financial Capital of New York.
Soon after Hagelin moved to New York, his organization bought an impressive building down near Wall Street (chosen because “It’s one of the very few buildings in all of New York City that’s oriented due east”), with the goal “to inspire financiers to come forth to support the creation of Heaven on Earth”. They also are buying up land near Princeton “where, with the support of the township, a university for 5,000 Yogic Flyers is to be established.” Part of the plan seems to be to raise $3 billion or so from the financial industry, by offering 10% interest on 15 year loans.
Last year they held a news conference to explain how the a “surging stock market” was one
of the concrete signs of the success of the Invincible America Assembly in Iowa—the largest-ever scientific demonstration project to document the effects of large group meditations on the economic and social trends of the nation, according to Dr. John Hagelin, world-renowned quantum physicist, executive director of the International Center for Invincible Defense, and President of the Global Union of Scientists for Peace, who is leading the Assembly.
This year the story is a bit different, with a recent press release entitled Quantum Physicist Offers Solution to Global Market Meltdown explaining that:
a group of nearly 2,000 advanced experts is now in place at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa. He said the influence of coherence generated by this group is helping to calm the nation in the midst of the global crisis, but a larger, more powerful group of 8,000 experts (the square root of one percent of the world’s population) is needed to neutralize worldwide fears and re-establish confidence in the global markets.
The cost to establish this group on a permanent basis, Dr. Hagelin said, would be negligible compared to what has been lost in a single hour during the current financial crisis.
In a recent Open Letter to the Yogic Flyers of the Nation, Hagelin, the Raja of Invincible America, urges them on as follows:
I am writing you from Wall Street, where I am living and working with members of my national team at the Global Financial Capital of New York, one block from the New York Stock Exchange. We are starting to make remarkably good progress in our efforts to bring Maharishi’s knowledge of enlightenment and invincibility to leaders here whose thinking and actions vitally impact the whole world. However, ultimately, our success is dependent on you. We will be successful when the leaders are receptive to our message. But their openness is 100% dependent upon the numbers in the Domes. Why? Because a rise in national consciousness directly translates into a rise in openness among leaders of business, health, education, defense, government, etc.
At this critical time I urge everyone to fly together in large groups
Maharishi said we need 2500 experts flying together to guarantee invincibility for America. This requirement is because the turbulence in the collective consciousness of one country can easily spread like a wildfire to create a similar turbulence in another country. And this is why, at this critical time, with the economic stability of the world hanging in the balance, I urge everyone in Iowa and everyone in the country to recommit to fly together in large groups.
Update: Today was a beautiful day, and on a bike ride downtown I stopped to take a look at 70 Broad Street, the headquarters of Global Financial Capital of New York. Looking in the windows of the below ground level and the lobby level, the place looked pretty much abandoned. The building has some floors upstairs, maybe there is some activity up there.
They did just put out this press release, announcing a press conference to be held in the lobby at 11am on Tuesday and webcast. Hagelin will be announcing a $1 billion plan to fund 1000 experts in New York and 8000 experts in Iowa who will “create coherence for the whole world—the basis of an invincible, prosperous global economy.” No word in the press release about where the $1 billion was going to come from.
Update: Video of the press conference is here. The plan is simple: just give Hagelin and his followers $1 billion, and they’ll have this financial crisis all sorted out soon, by means of experts using the unified field.
I just recently got my hands on a copy of the new Princeton Companion to Mathematics, and I fear that this is likely to seriously impact my ability to get things done for a while, as I devote too much time to happily reading many of its more than 1000 pages.
The book is an amazing document (and physically, a beautiful, if weighty object), unlike anything else I know of. Its coverage of mathematics and mathematical culture is very wide and sometimes deep, but it makes no attempt to be comprehensive. Thus, the accurate title “Companion to” rather than “Encyclopedia of”. The most remarkable aspect of the book is the extremely high quality of the contributions from a large number of different authors. It includes many wonderful long expository articles, mostly at a level that a good undergraduate math student could hope to appreciate, with much of the book accessible to an even wider audience. The articles are often written by some of the best researchers and expositors around. For example, one can find Barry Mazur writing on Algebraic Numbers, Janos Kollar on Algebraic Geometry, Cliff Taubes on Differential Topology, Ingrid Daubechies on Wavelets, Persi Diaconis on Mathematical Statistics, and many, many others of similar quality. The table of contents is available here.
The book also includes extensive articles on historical topics in mathematics and short biographies of a large number of mathematicians, as well as coverage of applications and a section largely devoted to describing the art of problem-solving and how mathematics really gets created. This section includes a beautiful set of five essays called “Advice to a Young Mathematician”, which give five different equally fascinating perspectives from some of the best in the subject about how they achieved what they did, as well as what they have learned from years of helping students become researchers. The authors of these pieces are Michael Atiyah, Bela Bollobas, Alain Connes, Dusa McDuff, and Peter Sarnak. Luckily for all young (and old) mathematicians, this chapter is freely available here.
The person most responsible for this is clearly the editor (and author of some of the pieces), Fields Medalist Timothy Gowers, who had help from many others, including fellow Fields Medalist Terry Tao. Gowers has a weblog, and he has written about the book in these entries (and there’s a podcast interviewing him on the book web-site at PUP). Terry Tao has a posting about the book here.
If you’re looking for a gift for someone with a serious interest in mathematics, no matter what their background, you won’t do any better than this.
String theory in general seems to have gone very quiet recently, but attempts to intensively promote the string theory landscape view of fundamental physics show no signs of slowing down at all. The Princeton Center for Theoretical Science is running a year-long program Big Bang and Beyond, partially funded by the D.E. Shaw hedge fund. Next month there will be a program on “String Landscape: Examining how the string landscape alters approaches to fundamental physics and cosmology”, featuring a public lecture by Leonard Susskind.
A couple weeks ago at Harvard, Frederik Denef gave a colloquium promoting Landscape research. The talk concentrated on making an analogy between the string theory landscape and condensed matter phenomena, relating this to recent attempts to use duality to study 3d CFTs of interest in condensed matter physics. Frederik also described a web-site (2ndcheek.com) which explains how string theory proves the Bible is right. Unfortunately this web-site no longer seems to be in operation.
Also at Harvard, or at least across the street, landscapeologists and other string phenomenologists have taken over the Clay Mathematics Institute this week for a workshop on Stringy Reflections on LHC, yet another attempt to make the case that string theory has something to say about the LHC, despite strong evidence against this (see for instance David Gross’s talk at Strings 2008). Some of the slides from the talks have begun to appear on-line, and Michael Dine’s landscape talk is here.
Update: David Berenstein has a report from the conference in Cambridge here.
The hypothetical field with one element (known as Fun) now has its own blog, ceci n’est pas un corps. Among the many things of interest, there’s a link to a video of Alain Connes explaining his recent paper with Consani and Marcolli on the subject. This is part of a project at the Journal of Number Theory to get authors to produce video introductions to their papers.
Over at the n-category Cafe, there’s a discussion of Alan Weinstein’s new paper on The Volume of a Differentiable Stack. A stack is a sort of replacement of a quotient space, of a sort that allows one to keep track of the fact that different points may correspond to different stabilizers. One would like to naturally assign as many properties of spaces as possible to stacks, and one interesting question is how to count sizes, for instance how to define volumes. If everything is finite, it turns out the thing to do is to count points by dividing by the size of the stabilizer, but something much more subtle is required in the differentiable case, where the sets involved are all infinite.
The last year has seen a flurry of activity on hep-th that goes under the name of the “M2 mini-revolution”, or maybe AdS4/CFT3. I’d been waiting for some expository accounts of this to appear to read more about it, and there’s a new one here. It includes graphs that show a total of 157 papers on the topic with 223 authors. Things didn’t really get started until this past spring, with the number of papers peaking at 40/month in July, with 53 new authors joining the game that month. Since then, the trend is downwards, with 21 paper in September. Thomas Klose does a good job of surveying the subject and what has been learned about it. The only applications mentioned are in the last line of the last page, which refers to possible future uses in condensed matter physics.
The 2009 fiscal year has started already, with no federal budget in the US. The idea now seems to be to wait until it’s half over next March or so, then have the new administration put together a 2009 budget and a 2010 budget simultaneously. In the meantime, a continuing resolution has been passed, under which money can be spent at the level of the 2008 budget. This is pretty bad news for US HEP, since the relevant 2008 level was one involving serious budget cuts. The effect of these was mitigated by a later supplemental appropriation, and that can evidently be used to keep the Fermilab budget at a level such that layoffs can be avoided (see discussion from Oddone here). But it remains completely unclear what will happen to the lab a few short months from now.
This past weekend the Skeptics Society at Caltech cosponsored with the Templeton Foundation a conference on Origins: the BIG Questions. The afternoon session was devoted to discussing God, the morning featured physicists promoting anthropics. An account of the talks is here, including this about Lenny Susskind’s talk
The conference began with a real bang – the Big one of course, and a lesson on what preceded that singularity as best understood today by physicists. Susskind condensed his Stanford undergraduate cosmology course into a beautiful one-hour primer on the universal constants (Planck’s, gravitational constant, speed of light…) that support life. It turns out that life can only evolve and survive in a narrow window of values for these constants, a fact that Christians have recently embraced as proof of an intelligent designer. But Susskind explained how quantum mechanics support the existence of a multiverse that regularly spawns new universes with different sets of constants, making it inevitable that our comfy universe should appear. (I asked him whether a future day Dr. Strangelove could create the conditions that spawn a new universe in our own – he said no, but without a compelling explanation.)
and this about Sean Carroll’s:
Caltech physicist Sean Carroll delivered a great talk on time’s arrow – how time fits into the universe and how it cannot exist without fluctuations in entropy. He explained how the physical constants give our universe just the right amount of clumpiness so that time can flow, and he presented an alternative theory – consistent with quantum mechanics – on how universes can bear “babies” with differing constants.
After Carroll, Caltech biologist Christoff Koch explained how:
consciousness may in fact entail a new force not yet discovered by physicists.
Update: Sean has a posting about the “Origins” conference, mainly devoted to explaining what was wrong with the presentation of a crackpot who was speaking as part of the religion segment.
Half of this year’s Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to Yoichiro Nambu for his work on spontaneous symmetry breaking, the other half to Kobayashi and Maskawa for the CKM matrix as an explanation of CP breaking. A detailed explanation of the scientific context of the prizes is here.
The prize for Nambu is well-deserved and rewards one of the deepest, surprising, and most important ideas in particle theory, that of spontaneous symmetry breaking. In 1960 Nambu realized that non-invariance of the vacuum state under an axial symmetry could explain the existence of pions and determine many of their properties. He also realized that this phenomenon is closely related to what happens in various condensed matter models (including the BCS model of superconductivity), where the ground state is not invariant under a symmetry of the theory. Nambu has often been mentioned as a candidate for the award, and it’s surprising that it has taken nearly 50 years for it to come about. I’m a bit curious about how often Nobel Prizes in other fields are awarded for work done a half-century ago. Unfortunately the rather difficult times particle physics has found itself in the last few decades may mean that the best way for a particle theorist to get the prize is to have been around during the field’s heyday, and to remain in good health.
The Kobayashi-Maskawa award is a somewhat less obvious one, since it didn’t involve a surprising breakthrough, and it is about something completely different than Nambu’s work. In the early-mid 60s, starting with work by Nicola Cabibbo, it had been shown that (in modern language…) flavor mixing matrix for two generation models of the weak interactions is governed by a single angle, now known as the Cabibbo angle. In 1972, Kobayashi and Maskawa pointed out that for three generations the matrix is determined by three angles and a complex phase. The complex phase makes this a possible source of CP violation, and it seems to be the main if not only source of observed CP violation. The Nobel committee text makes the claim that:
This is in fact a result known in mathematics since around 1950, but the contacts between mathematics and physics were not great around 1970.
This is a rather odd description of the situation, since the mathematical facts involved here are quite simple ones about which 3×3 unitary matrices satisfy certain conditions, and presumably could have been derived by mathematicians who first worked with such matrices in the 19th century if this particular condition had come up. I can’t think of anything mathematicians learned around 1950 that is needed to solve the problem, and, once stated physicists could easily solve it without help from mathematicians (who perhaps would have been more likely to just have been a hindrance in this case…)
The quark mixing matrix embodies most of the unknown parameters of the Standard Model, and as such is a crucial object for experimental studies of particle physics. Because of this, the KM paper is the second most highly cited paper in particle physics (after Weinberg’s “A Model of Leptons”), but this ranking doesn’t reflect the depth or importance of the ideas.
Lots of other blogs are also covering this. Tommaso Dorigo points out that it’s a bit anomalous that a Nobel Prize for the CKM (Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa) matrix doesn’t include Cabibbo, who is still around. Lubos Motl thinks that what is important here is that Nambu is also a string theorist, and that one of the people on the committee making this choice was a string theorist, Lars Brink.
Update: Lots of coverage of this in the press. Michio Kaku has an editorial in Forbes, where, like Lubos, he sees the real significance as being that Nambu is a string theorist:
And there may even be a theory beyond the Standard Model, a true theory of everything that can unify all forces. It’s called string theory.
Not surprisingly, one of the founders of string theory is Professor Nambu, a newly minted Nobel Laureate who has years of research ahead of him. The best is yet to come.
Discussion of quantum gravity at a level similar to that of parts of the professional physics community makes it to prime-time TV:
Update: I should have credited where I first saw reference to this (no, I don’t normally watch this show…), it was at Capitalist Imperialist Pig. If you are having trouble with the embedded link to the video, you might have better luck following his link to the cbs web-site and seeing what you can find there….
Update: Lubos is claiming credit for this, implying that he’s the model for Sheldon. He has a point. I always thought that the string theory community should worry about the implications of having Lubos represent them on the web, now there’s prime-time TV to think about.
Steve Hsu has a recent posting Survivor: theoretical physics, which links to data about the theoretical particle physics job market compiled by Erich Poppitz from listings on the Theoretical Particle Physics Rumor Mill web-site.
Back in 2001-2 I also spent some time looking at this data, and estimated that in recent years there had been typically about 15 tenure-track hires each year in particle theory, of which roughly half were going to string theorists. Starting around 2000, the number of hires started to increase, as it has increased throughout academia during a period of reasonably healthy university budgets and an increasing number of retirements (of those hired during the 60s when many universities expanded dramatically). Since 2000 the number of hires has typically been more like 20, anomalously high at 28 in 2007. The anomalously low number of 15 for this past year’s hiring may be a fluctuation, but it also may be an indication of either university budget cutbacks or increasing unpopularity of particle physics in US physics departments. The fraction of string theory hires has gone down dramatically, to more like 25% over the last 5 years.
I don’t have any data at hand about the recent total number of people getting particle physics Ph.D.s, and whether this number has grown with the number of faculty hires. I did find at one point a number of 78 for particle theory Ph.D.s in 1997, but I don’t know if this included degrees in cosmology, which increasingly has become mixed with particle theory. Poppitz also lists numbers of hires by institution. Princeton comes out significantly ahead with 23 people getting jobs over 15 years. I’d guess there are typically about 3-4 people/year getting theory Ph.D.s there. So, traditionally, if you want to maximize your chance at a job, Princeton is the place to go. Not clear how this will work out in the future, given the very small number of string theorists getting hired.
To get some idea of the imbalance between Ph.D.s being produced and tenure-track jobs, in 2007 one institution, Harvard, produced 8 theory Ph.D.s. That’s more than half the total number of tenure-track hires this past year. In the past a large number of these Ph.D.s ended up working in finance, but prospects in that industry are not looking so good either.
I’ve heard reports from Harvard that yesterday and today Heisuke Hironaka has been giving talks in the math department there, claiming to have a proof that singularities of algebraic varieties can be resolved for any dimension in characteristic p. This would be a major advance in the field of algebraic geometry. I don’t know any details of the proof, but Hironaka is, at 77, an extremely well-respected mathematician, not known for making claims unless they are very solid.
Hironaka won the Fields Medal in 1970, largely based on his 1964 proof of the resolution of singularities, in the characteristic zero case. For an introduction to that proof, see this article from the Bulletin of the AMS.
Update: From comments here it seems that the source of my information about Hironaka’s talk was most likely overly optimistic about exactly what Hironaka was claiming. The current situation seems to be that several groups are working on this, with promising ideas of how to get to a proof, but with no definitive proof yet done. There will be a workshop at RIMS in December, with the goal of sorting out the current situation:
The aim of the workshop is to review recent advances in the resolution of singularities of algebraic varieties with special emphasis on the positive characteristic case. After many years of slow progress, this is now a rapidly developing area with several promising new approaches. Our aim is to keep the program flexible, in order to give the maximum opportunity to discuss and explore new developments. We expect a joint effort to understand characteristic p, and that the purpose is not that everybody exposes his/her own results.
Besides the meltdown in the financial markets, perhaps of more concern to physicists is a meltdown at CERN, specifically in the connection between two magnets during powering tests being conducted at 11:17 last Friday the 19th. Here’s the daily report from that day on the LHC beam commissioning site. By the next day it had become clear that it would be necessary to warm back up the sector to deal with the problem, leading to this press release. It was immediately clear that doing this would take at least a couple months, and make it impossible to have physics collisions at the LHC this fall. Today, a new press release confirms this:
The time necessary for the investigation and repairs precludes a restart before CERN’s obligatory winter maintenance period, bringing the date for restart of the accelerator complex to early spring 2009. LHC beams will then follow.
The press releases refer only to a “large helium leak” and the failure of an electrical connection, making the problem sound rather minor. I tried contacting a physicist at CERN to find out if they had any more information, but was told that he or she was under instructions not to discuss anything about what had happened beyond what was in the press releases, and that CERN was specifically concerned that information might show up in blogs. This policy seems to be being unevenly enforced, since today the Everything Blog carries the following report:
I was in a meeting at CERN when someone ran to the front of the room with a computer, then after letting the speaker finish and setting up the computer to project the press release/e-mail (agonizing moments: it was a Mac), they let us know. I was worried that the sector with the helium explosion had collapsed like an old mine— there were rumors going around that this is a weak point in the tunnel. (Of course there would be such rumors.)
I have learned a few more graphic details about the event in the last few days. First off, it was two tonnes of helium, not one. But I’ve also learned that this was a more explosive and dramatic event than I had imagined— helium is fortunately an inert gas, but the temperature gradient caused it to explode violently, probably causing physical damage to the nearby components. And now that section of the LHC is an ice tunnel, maybe with stalagtites hanging down and a Yeti moaning in the distance.
Up until now, the policy at the LHC has been to be quite open about the commissioning process, with detailed technical information provided on web-sites that were freely accessible. For instance, there’s detailed news about how beam commissioning was going up until the accident available here. Going forward, it will be interesting to see how CERN deals with the problem of letting not-so-good news out to the public. Just about one year ago, I wrote about some earlier LHC problems, and it has always worried me a bit that having a huge LHC publicity onslaught before the machine was actually ready and working might not have been a good idea. Going through the often painful process of solving the problems likely to show up in a project of this scale may provide a different education of the public than the one people were hoping for.
Update: Yesterday there was a LHCC meeting at CERN, broken up into an open and closed session. The slides from the talks are available here, and give a wealth of information about the state of the machine and detectors, and what they were able to accomplish during the short period that they had a beam. There’s no info about the accident in the slides, but video of the talks is here, and at the end of the talk by Lyn Evans (9-18min into the video) he gave a report on the accident and answered questions. The problem has been traced to an electrical fault in the magnet busbar, and bizarrely occurred during the test of the last circuit of the last sector that was being commissioned for 5 TeV operation.
Evans says that the machine will be down until “early spring”. Before the accident, the plan had been to bring the LHC back up in early June, after various work needed on the injection system. The current plan is to try and get this work done instead this fall, so that they can start up more quickly in the spring.
