Not Even Wrong

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.

Particle physics is enjoying a wave of popularity on the late night talk shows this week. On Friday, MIT experimentalist Peter Fisher appeared on the Conan O’Brien show, helping O’Brien see how long he could keep his wedding ring spinning on his desk.

Last night it was a theorist’s turn, with Lisa Randall appearing on the Colbert Report, promoting the idea of extra dimensions.

There’s a new round of nonsense about theoretical physics making its way through the media, especially the British tabloids. The original source is a preprint from a few months ago by Aref’eva and Volovich entitled Time Machine at the LHC (it refers to another earlier one by other authors If LHC is a Mini-Time-Machines Factory, Can We Notice?). These papers discuss the possibility that the LHC will produce not just black holes, but also wormholes that would be “Mini-Time-Machines” (MTMs).

New Scientist now has a cover story based on this which begins:

As you may have heard, this will be the year. The Large Hadron Collider – the most powerful atom-smasher ever built – will be switched on, and particle physics will hit pay-dirt. Yet if a pair of Russian mathematicians are right, any advances in this area could be overshadowed by a truly extraordinary event. According to Irina Aref’eva and Igor Volovich, the LHC might just turn out to be the world’s first time machine.

The article invokes work by Nima Arkani-Hamed and others to justify the idea that the LHC will produce black holes and possibly wormholes, and Kip Thorne to justify the possibility of time travel. Several physicists are quoted in favor of the plausibility of the underlying idea, it not its practicality.

The story has now made it to the Sun, which has two stories: Time Travel Russia’s in and Visits From Crack to the Future. According to the Sun, the LHC will be switched on in May (not true….) and from that time on time travel will be possible:

The laws of physics suggest that no one from the future will be able to travel back any further than when the machine was switched on — with 2008 being Year Zero.

According to the Daily Mail:

Time travel could be a reality within just three months, Russian mathematicians have claimed. They believe an experiment nuclear scientists plan to carry out in underground tunnels in Geneva in May could create a rift in the fabric of the universe.

The Telegraph has Time travellers from the future ‘could be here in weeks’, but the article at least has some skeptical quotes, for instance from David Deutsch, who describes the idea as “not cranky”, but unlikely to work.

New Scientist does seem to realize that this kind of silliness may have gone too far, publishing an article by Michael Hanlon entitled Is Big Science peddling science pornography?. I think Hanlon raises extremely important questions that the physics community needs to address, although he makes a mistake by pinning this on “Big Science”. The people working hard to make projects like the LHC a reality are not the culprits here, irresponsible theorists are. Hanlon writes:

Physics and cosmology stories are like this these days. Once it was all hard sums and red-shifted galaxies; awesome enough one would have thought. Now it’s time machines and universe-eating particles.

Does any of this bear any relation to reality? Or is Big Physics guilty of some serious sexing-up, drifting away from the realm of hard data and into the softer universe of science pornography?

As well as accidental time machines we are told of cosmic strings – gigantic filaments of super-stuff that warp and tear space-time like ladders in a pair of celestial stockings – and crashing branes, titanic slabs of maths that give rise to the big bang in the exotically lovely ekpyrotic universe of Neil Turok.

Not crazy enough for you? What about the multiverse? One of the biggest sell-out lectures at last year’s Hay-on-Wye festival in Wales starred the UK’s astronomer royal, Martin Rees, who entertained his audience with a discussion of the possibility, indeed the probability, of multiple worlds – endless parallel realities existing in a gargantuan super-reality that makes what we think of as the universe as insignificant as a gnat on an elephant’s backside. Or there’s the simulation argument, philosopher Nick Bostrom’s delicious idea that since it should be possible to replicate an entire universe in a computer, and that this could be done countless times, statistical cleverness proves that we are not the real McCoy but the figments of some electronic entity’s imagination.

…Scientists, and people like me who stick up for science, are happy to pour scorn on astrologers, homeopaths, UFO-nutters, crop-circlers and indeed the Adam-and-Eve brigade, who all happily believe in six impossible things before breakfast with no evidence at all. Show us the data, we say to these deluded souls. Where are your trials? What about Occam’s razor – the principle that any explanation should be as simple as possible? The garden is surely beautiful enough, we say, without having to populate it with fairies.

The danger is that on the wilder shores of physics these standards are often not met either. There is as yet no observational evidence for cosmic strings. It’s hard to test for a multiverse. In this sense, some of these ideas are not so far, conceptually, from UFOs and homeopathy. If we are prepared to dismiss ghosts, say, as ludicrous on the grounds that firstly we have no proper observational evidence for them and secondly that their existence would force us to rethink everything, doesn’t the same argument apply to simulated universes and time machines? Are we not guilty of prejudice against some kinds of very unlikely ideas in favour of others?

Update: The time travel story has even made it to the Chronicle.

Microsoft announced today that they’ll be opening a new research lab, in Cambridge, which will be called Microsoft Research New England. The director of the lab will be mathematical physicist Jennifer Chayes, with deputy director her husband Christian Borgs, who is also a mathematical physicist. For an interview with them, see here, for a story in today’s New York Times, see here.

Jennifer and her ex-husband Lincoln Chayes (also a mathematical physicist, now at UCLA) were my class-mates during graduate student years in Princeton, as well as frequent companions on trips down to City Gardens in Trenton to see bands like the Ramones. The two of them at the time had even more impressive leather outfits than the Ramones.

Update: There’s more about this at the Xconomy web-site.

Over at John Horgan’s blog, he quotes an e-mail from Princeton cosmologist Paul Steinhardt, who corrects Horgan’s account of a recent conversation between them, writing

I said that I thought that the idea of a string landscape and the notion of anthropic selection had run its course. I think it is too early to give up on string theory.

While Steinhardt sees anthropic selection of our universe out of a multiverse as an idea that has run its course and is on its way out, it’s still quite popular in certain quarters. The Templeton Foundation, through the FQXI organization, is a major source of funding for anthropic multiverse research. FQXI’s web-site has a new story up entitled Philosophy of the Multiverse, which asks “On what side of the borderline between science and philosophy are multiverses?” The writer evidently couldn’t locate anyone to take the “it’s philosophy, not science” side of the argument, quoting Sean Carroll, Anthony Aguirre, Alexander Vilenkin and Aurelien Barrau as supporters of anthropics as science. Barrau suggests that we may need to change the definition of science to accomodate the multiverse.

Whatever Steinhardt says, at least the Mormons are getting on the multiverse bandwagon, with their journal Dialogue recently publishing a long article entitled Eternal Progression in a Multiverse: An Explorative Mormon Cosmology. The article begins:

This article is an examination of the Mormon doctrine of eternal progression within the context of big-bang cosmology, a description of a finite universe that appears to contradict that doctrine. I argue that a multiverse cosmology, a theory that posits a multiplicity of universes, resolves many of the problems posed by big-bang cosmology.

and goes on to explain how the multiverse agrees well with the doctriine of “eternal progression” in Mormon theology:

In a Mormon multiverse cosmology, God does indeed manifest his infinite creative prowess in the respect that God (any god along the infinite chain of gods) creates children, some of whom progress to become gods, who in turn create their own universes and children, some of whom progress to become gods, and so on, forever. Each universe in the ensemble of universes becomes an extension and continuation of the creativity of every “ancestral god” in an eternal family of deities. The creativity and glory of each god increases exponentially with the production of new universes. In this cosmology, the multiverse is a hallmark and witness of the infinite work and glory of God and the dwelling place for an infinite number of eternal progressing beings.

While solving the problem of justifying eternal progression, the multiverse idea leads to all sorts of new possible research directions:

In a Mormon multiverse cosmology, many questions remain open. Are there communication and movement of the gods and other premortal and postmortal beings between universes? When a universe experiences a big crunch or big freeze, does the god of that universe generate a new universe or “relocate” to another universe fit for carrying out the “great plan of happiness” for a new household of spirit children? Did God, our Father in Heaven, achieve godhood in this universe or a prior one? If God was exalted in a prior universe, how many universes has he governed? Jesus Christ is the redeemer for this universe, but is he the redeemer for others? Are some universes “stillborn” in the sense that they do not have the required values of the physical constants for a universe capable of sustaining life? Because the multiverse is infinite, are there replicas of us in other universes as postulated by the replication paradox? Cosmologists speculate whether the physical laws are the same across the ensemble of universes, but what about the spiritual laws? Are the spiritual laws “multiversal” or just “universal”? As multiverse cosmologies develop scientifically, these questions and others will stimulate much discussion.

The author ends the piece with a quote from Andrei Linde: “Universes can have babies — it’s nice.”