Not Even Wrong

The String Vacuum Project, described as “a large, multi-institution, interdisciplinary collaboration”, that has been established over the last few years, is having its Kick-Off Meeting next month at the University of Arizona. This group had submitted grant proposals to the NSF for funding of such a project in the past, but I don’t know if they ever managed to get NSF or other funding. They motivate the project by claiming that

Given that relatively large numbers of string vacua exist, it is imperative that string phenomenologists confront this issue head-on…

In this context “relatively large” involves numbers like 10⁵⁰⁰, 10¹⁵⁰⁰, etc.

Bert Schellekens has a web-site devoted to promoting the Anthropic Landscape, where he argues that

The String Theory Landscape is one of the most important and least appreciated discoveries of the last decades.

Besides the web-site, he has slides from two general talks on-line (here and here). In the talks he compares string theorists to the famous Emperor parading in no clothes, except what he is criticizing is those string theorists who have been unwilling to acknowledge the existence and importance of the anthropic landscape. He’s critical in particular of

those people claiming that they have always known that String Theory would never predict the standard model uniquely, but that they did not think this point was worth mentioning.

His modernized version of the fable of the Emperor goes as follows:

Many years ago, there lived some physicists who cared much about the uniqueness of their theories. One day they heard from two swindlers that they could make the finest theory which was absolutely unique. This uniqueness, they said, also had the special capability that it was invisible to anyone who was stupid enough to accept anthropic thinking.

Of course, all the townspeople wildly praised the magnificent unique theory, afraid to admit that anthropic thoughts were inevitable, until Lenny Susskind shouted:

“String theory has an anthropic landscape”

It’s not clear who he would identify as the “two swindlers”….

According to Schellekens, the “string vacuum revolution” is on a par with the other string theory revolutions, but most people prefer to overlook it, since it has been a “slow revolution”, taking from 1986-2006. The earliest indications he finds is in Andy Strominger’s 1986 paper “Calabi-Yau manifolds with Torsion”, where he writes:

All predictive power seems to have been lost.

and in one of his own papers from 1986 where the existence of 10¹⁵⁰⁰ different compactifications is pointed out.

Schellekens claims that “string theory has never looked better”, but he completely ignores the main question here, the one identified by Strominger in 1986 right at the beginning. If all predictive power is lost, your theory is worthless and no longer science. What anthropic landscape proponents like him need to do is to show that Strominger was wrong; that while string theory seems to have lost all predictive power, this is a mistake and there really is some way to calculate something that will give a solid, testable prediction of the theory. The String Vacuum Project is an attempt to do this, but there is no evidence beyond wishful thinking that it can lead to a real prediction. Schellekens has worked on producing lots of vacua and describing them in a “String Vacuum Markup Language”, and in his slides describes one construction that involves 45761187347637742772 possibilities. These possibilities can be analyzed to see if they contain the SM gauge groups and known particle representations, but this is a small number of discrete constraints and there is no problem to satisfy them. The problem is that one typically gets lots and lots of other stuff, and while one would like to use this to predict beyond-the-SM phenomena, there is no way to do this due to the astronomically large number of possibilities.

He lists goals for the future (“Explore unknown regions of the landscape”, “Establish the likelihood of SM features”, “Convince ourselves that the standard model is a plausible vacuum”), but none of these constitutes anything like a conventional scientific prediction that would allow one to test to see if what one is doing has any relation to reality. In the end, he comes up with the only real argument for the String Vacuum Project and other landscape research, that of wishful thinking:

… and maybe we get lucky.

Update: There’s a story about the String Vacuum Project in this week’s Nature by Geoff Brumfiel. It includes skeptical comments from Seiberg and yours truly, as well as Gordon Kane’s claim that:

evidence supporting string theory could emerge “within a few weeks” of the [LHC]’s start-up.

Update: At the blog Evolving Thoughts, there’s a discussion of whether theoretical physicists have now taken up a “stamp-collecting” model of how to do science. I point out that this is stamp-collecting done by people who don’t have any stamps, just some very speculative ideas about what stamps might look like.

Larry Fleinhardt, the fictional Caltech string theorist in the TV show Numb3rs, has decided to give up on string theory for now and become a phenomenologist. According to the show’s co-writer Nick Falacci:

Like real-life physicists, Fleinhardt hit a roadblock trying to create an 11-dimensional supergravity theory.

So, he will be joining the DZero collaboration at the Tevatron and work on the search for the Higgs. According to Fermilab Today, an office for Fleinhardt at Fermilab has already been created.

It’s not clear if Ed Witten or his brother Matt had anything to do with this…

Today here in New York City there will be a formal announcement by governor Eliot Spitzer of a gift by Jim Simons of $60 million dollars to fund a new research center at SUNY Stony Brook, to be called the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook. Simons already made a donation of $25 million dollars to Stony Brook back in 2006 to support math and physics, with the idea of getting such a center off the ground. People there had told me last year that they were expecting Simons to fully fund an expensive new center with a new building once they had managed to find a suitable director, and recently I had heard that string theorist Michael Douglas had accepted the director’s position.

This is the largest gift ever made not only to Stony Brook, but to any of the institutions in the SUNY system. Besides the building and the position for Douglas, it is supposed to fund 30 visiting positions and presumably a sizable number of permanent positions in mathematics and physics (the 2006 gift also is supposed to pay for such positions). The scale of this should make the Simons Center among the best funded institutions in this field. Job prospects for string theorists have just improved significantly…

For more details see stories from the New York Times, Newsday, and Crain’s Business Report.

Update: More here.

Update: More in the New York Times here. The $60 million includes the previously announced $25 million, and will pay for a new building as well as an endowment of $40-45 million. The endowment will fund the director’s position, 6 more permanent positions, and 30 postdocs and visiting positions.

Last spring there was a conference held in Florence which brought together many of those who worked on dual models and string theory during the late sixties and early seventies. Slides from the talks are here, and many of the speakers have written up contributions that have been posted on the arXiv. The latest of these is From Dual Models to String Theory, by Peter Goddard, who now is the director of the IAS in Princeton. It contains a detailed description of what he remembers of those early days when people were trying to sort out the significance of the Veneziano amplitudes and how to consistently quantize the string. Goddard also has some interesting remarks on the rapid changes in fashion during those years, and some excerpts follow.

On his student days at Cambridge working under Polkinghorne during the late sixties:

I, and nearly all my fellow research students, worked on strong interaction physics. (One of us was trying to work out the correct Feynman rules for gauge field theories, but this tended to be regarded as a rather recondite or eccentric enterprise.)

At a summer conference in 1971:

For me, it was a memorable meeting and one particular vignette has stuck in my mind as an illustration of the prevailing attitude towards the use of modern mathematics in theoretical high energy physics. A senior and warmly admired physicist gave some lectures on the Regge theory of high energy processes. With great technical mastery, he was covering the board with special functions, doing manipulations that I knew from my studies with Alan White (who was also at the School) could be handled efficiently and elegantly using harmonic analysis on noncompact groups. Just as I was wondering whether it might be too impertinent to make a remark to this effect, the lecturer turned to the audience and said, “They tell me that you can do this all more easily if you use group theory, but I tell you that, if you are strong, you do not need group theory.”

About his years (1970-72) at CERN:

The two years I had spent in CERN had built up to an crescendo of intellectual excitement and, though I have found much of my subsequent research work gripping and often extremely satisfying (when teaching duties and the largely self-inflicted wounds of administration have permitted), nothing has quite matched this period. In particular, I had the privilege of working closely for seven or eight months with Charles Thorn, whose combination of deep perception and formidable calculational power had provided the basis of what we managed to do. And, the exhilarating combination of the open and cooperative atmosphere that prevailed amongst (almost all) those working on dual models in CERN, the relative youth of most of those involved, the sense of elucidating a theory that was radically different, even the frisson of excitement that came from doing something that was regarded by some of those in power as wicked, because it might have nothing directly to do with the real world – this cocktail would never be offered to me again.

About the situation in 1973-4 , after the discovery of asymptotic freedom:

By the end of 1973, as the fascination of dual models or string theory remained undimmed, though with ever increasing technical demands, the interest of many was shifting elsewhere. On 21 December, David Olive wrote to me, “Very few people are now interested in dual theories here in CERN. Amati and Fubini independently made statements to the effect that dual theory is now the most exciting theory that they have seen but that it is too difficult for them to work with. The main excitement [is] the renormalization group and asymptotic freedom, which are indeed interesting.”
…

In Berkeley [summer 1974], I wrote a largely cathartic paper [76] on supersymmetry, which probably helped no one’s understanding, except marginally my own. It had one memorable effect: namely, that when I reached Princeton I was invited to give a general seminar on supersymmetry, which most people did not know much about then. When I said I would rather talk about string theory, my offer was politely declined on the grounds that no one in Princeton was
interested, a situation that has changed in the intervening years. Somewhat put out by this response, I did not give a seminar at all.

About his decision in 1975-6 to work on gauge theory rather than strings:

I started to realize that following my interests in strings or dual models might be a fine indulgence for me, but it was not going to help my students get jobs. (One of the great attractions of Cambridge at the time was that chances for promotion were so slim – Jeffrey Goldstone was still a Lecturer – that one did not need to be distracted by the prospects for advancement: they seemed negligible.)

There seems to be a political scandal going on in Italy revolving around the GIM mechanism, with Antonino Zichichi somehow involved. Definitely a higher level of scandal than we have here in the US.

An Oral History Project at Princeton involving interviews with people associated with the Math department during the 1930s is here, and includes the following exchange with Wigner, who evidently wasn’t so happy with Weyl:

Interviewer: We haven’t mentioned Hermann Weyl yet. Can you tell me something about your relations with him? When did you first get to know him?

Wigner: When he came to Princeton I knew about his work, and I quoted it also. You know he was interested in group theory. But in Princeton we were really strangers to each other. He never mentioned my work in his book on the application of group theory to quantum mechanics, even though practically all that is in the book was contained in publications by me and in joint publications by Johnny von Neumann and me. I resented that because I needed a job then.

The TLS has a review of The Trouble With Physics.

For the latest from the frontiers of physics, see this at the KITP, and this at the arXiv.

There’s a P5 meeting going on at SLAC, talks here.

Bert Kostant of MIT gave a talk at UC Riverside entitled On Some Mathematics in Garrett Lisi’s ‘E8 Theory of Everything’, and as part of the festivities John Baez gave an elementary introduction to E8. There’s some discussion of this at his blog. It seems that the initial reaction from some string theorists that this material is so easy that undergraduates shouldn’t have too much trouble with it may have changed a bit. For a comment on the attitudes involved, see here.

Update: To try and make up for the high-level of snarkiness of this posting, here’s something else. This month’s National Geographic has an excellent big article about the LHC, with the usual National Geo impressive photography. No hype about extra dimensions, etc., just a serious explanation of what the LHC is all about and what physicists are trying to do, ending with the following wonderful quote:

…I asked George Smoot, a Nobel laureate physicist, if he thinks our most basic questions will ever be answered.

“It depends on how I’m feeling on any particular day,” he said. “But every day I go to work I’m making a bet that the universe is simple, symmetric, and aesthetically pleasing—a universe that we humans, with our limited perspective, will someday understand.”

Update: Two more

Late last week there was a meeting of HEPAP in Washington, presentations available here. Several dealt with the current budget situation, which is basically that the current FY2008 budget is a disaster, and the Bush administration has proposed huge compensatory increases for FY2009. No one seems to have any idea what Congress will do or when, so the future for US government support of HEP is completely unclear not only for the long-term, but even for the next fiscal year, which starts in a few months.

The NSF presentation noted that NSF funding for particle physics theory was down 4% in FY2008, to about $14 million, of which roughly $1.5 million goes to the KITP at Santa Barbara. The critical issues for the NSF particle theory program were listed as:

Need to involve more people in LHC-related physics.

Need new hires in phenomenology.

Traditional funding sources for students (being TAs) is becoming problematic. (need more funding for students)

You can see why string theorists these days are pushing the idea of “string phenomenology” and claims that somehow string theory is relevant to the LHC.

At the DOE, funding for theoretical particle physics was flat for FY2008, at $60 million, with a proposed 5% increase for FY2009.

There was also an interesting presentation about an on-going project to gather demographic information on the people working in particle physics. I was surprised to see that statistics show significant recent increases at all levels in the numbers of people working in particle physics. From 2003-2007 the number of graduate students went from 1129 to 1335 (making one wonder why the NSF is worried about not supporting enough graduate students…), postdocs and untenured research staff from 1331 to 1406, untenured faculty from 228 to 284, and tenured faculty or staff from 1343 to 1355. In particle theory, the total number of people went from 1292 to 1414, so this increase in numbers was not all in experiment.

Also worth reading is a presentation from Robert Sugar about the present state of Lattice QCD calculations.