Not Even Wrong

The buzz is that Hawking has a new idea about how to resolve the “Black Hole Information Paradox”, the well known incompatibility between standard ideas about black holes and the unitary time evolution of the wave function that is fundamental to quantum mechanics. Evidently Hawking has asked to give a talk about this at GR17, a big conference on general relativity that will be held July 18-23 in Dublin.

The abstract for his talk goes like this:

“The Euclidean path integral over all topologically trivial metrics can be done by time slicing and so is unitary when analytically continued to the Lorentzian. On the other hand, the path integral over all topologically non-trivial metrics is asymptotically independent of the initial state. Thus the total path integral is unitary and information is not lost in the formation and evaporation of black holes. The way the information gets out seems to be that a true event horizon never forms, just an apparent horizon.”

I can’t tell exactly what that means either, so I guess we’ll have to wait for the talk. My own prejudice about quantum field theory is that the relation between the Euclidean and Minkowski space formulations of quantum field theory is actually much more interesting and subtle than people think. It’s not just a technical trick. So I’ll be interested to see what Hawking has to say about this.

Something else at the conference that may be interesting will be Sir Roger Penrose’s public talk entitled “Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in Modern Physical Theories”. Guess what he is referring to by “Fashion”.

One contributor to the comments here (JC) has pointed out that Susskind has withdrawn from the arXiv his recent paper on the stupendous Landscape of sting theory. This is pretty unusual, but often when it happens the author puts in the withdrawal statement some indication of why the paper was withdrawn, something Susskind didn’t do in this case. Another contributor to the comments (Serenus Zeitblom) points out that one should look at recent changes to Douglas’s paper on the arXiv, which is now up to its fourth version.

One feature of the arXiv is that all posted versions of papers are available, so one can compare them and see what changes the author made. The history of Douglas’s paper is quite something. The original version was posted on May 30. Susskind’s now withdrawn paper was posted on June 17, and in it he claims that Douglas’s paper showed that Susskind’s argument in an earlier (May 21) paper (which exists in three versions) was wrong. The latest version (4) of Douglas’s paper now says that earlier versions of the paper are wrong. So, one reason Susskind withdrew his paper is presumably that its claims that his earlier paper was wrong were now wrong because they were based on Douglas’s wrong paper. Got that? This all seems to me to be a new and original version of the “Not Even Wrong” phenomenon.

Some other high points of the changes in the four versions of Douglas’s paper:

1. Going from version 1 (May 30) to version 2 (June 2), he changes

“If I had to bet at the moment, I would still bet that string theory favors the low scale, for the reasons outlined above, but it is not at all obvious that this is what will come out in the end.”

to

“At this point, it is not at all obvious whether high or low scales will be preferred in the end.”

2. Going from version 2 (June 2) to version 3 (June 22), he adds a reference to Susskind’s June 17 paper, some criticism of it, and the sentence

“The correct assumptions could be determined from string/M theory considerations with more work, and we are optimistic that this can be done in time to make convincing predictions before LHC turns on in 2007.”

3. Going from version 3 (June 22) to version 4 (June 29), he removes the sentence above (I guess he became less optimistic last week) and announces that the argument in the previous versions was wrong.

Some of the talks given at the Lattice 2004 conference are now available on-line. Particularly interesting is Kenneth Wilson’s historical talk about his roles in the development of the renormalization group and of lattice gauge theory. He also refers to the website of the Dibner Institute.. One interesting thing there is a collection of materials relevant to the history of the renormalization group.

The Dibner Institute is at MIT, but during my high school days I recall visiting the library for the history of science that Bern Dibner had founded which was located close to where I lived, in Norwalk, Connecticut. The collection was moved up to Cambridge after Dibner’s death in 1988.

It seems that the Fermilab Tevatron is a quite sensitive detector for earthquakes. According to the Accelerator Update for yesterday, a small earthquake in Illinois caused the machine to lose its beam and a superconducting magnet to quench. A few hours later, a more significant earthquake in Alaska was quite visible to the Tevatron accelerator operators, and would have caused another quench, but they hadn’t restored the beams yet.

Two of the year’s largest particle theory conferences are taking place around now, with Lattice 2004 attracting 280 physicists to Batavia, Illinois this past week and Strings 2004 drawing almost 500 to Paris starting tomorrow. Normally I feel kind of sorry for string theorists since their field is in such bad shape, but this week I’m jealous since I would have loved to have an excuse to go to Paris this summer (I’m not jealous of the lattice gauge theorists who are getting to spend the week in Batavia).

Maybe I’m wrong about this, but the Paris string theory conference seems to me to be the largest gathering of particle theorists that I can remember ever having taken place. In recent years these things have been huge, with attendance around 400-450, but this one should be even larger. It is so over-subscribed that they haven’t been taking on-line registrations for weeks.

Both conferences should have transparencies from the talks available soon on-line and the list of titles and speakers in Paris is now available. Some of the ones that look like they might be interesting are Robbert Dijkgraaf speaking about “Topological M-theory”, Nikita Nekrasov on “Chasing M/F theory” and maybe Greg Moore, whose title is the mystifying “Anomalies, Gauss laws, and Page Charges in M-theory”. One big theme of the conference looks like it will be N=4 super Yang-Mills theory. This is an interesting and well-defined quantum field theory, and one can study it whille claiming to be a string theorist because of the AdS/CFT conjecture and Witten’s recent work reformulating it in terms of topological strings in twistor space.

Next Saturday in Paris there will be a whole day of talks devoted to the unrelenting hyping of string theory to the general public, something which is a standard feature of the “Strings XXXX” conferences, but not the “Lattice XXXX” ones. Somehow I suspect the speakers will neglect to emphasize the utter lack of any progress towards making any contact with reality during the past twenty years. In case the Paris conference is not enough, there are quite a few satellite conferences, including a pre-conference workshop at the IHES and post-conference workshops at CERN and Durham.

Update: It looks like Jacques Distler will be reporting direct from the conference.

Further Update: It seems that they have a WiFi connection at the Paris conference site. From my web server logs, it appears that one thing attendees at the conference are doing during the more boring talks is reading “Not Even Wrong” on the web. Hi Guys!

Just got the following e-mail:

Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2004 19:40:58 +0200
From: fau.alex (fau.alex@wanadoo.fr)
To: woit@cpw.math.columbia.edu
Subject: Mr Woit

hi,
I am a french student and I will go in 1re(in France) the next year
and I want to speak with specialists because I want to work in science
when I will be adult … That’s why I write to you !
I want to know who are you ? What did you study, …
Thanks in advance for your answer
Best regards
Alexandre Faure

At first I thought “Oh yes, just another in the avalanche of fan-mail. Wonder if I should take the time to respond?” Then, looking more carefully at the HTML version of the e-mail, I found an embedded link at the bottom:

href="mailto:liu-yang.imp@th-phys.edu.hk"

That address looks awfully familiar.

The KITP at Santa Barbara seems to be going all out to hype claims of observability by LIGO of effects of cosmic strings. The front page of the KITP website prominently features the story, and adds the personal phone numbers of the authors to encourage the press to contact them (something I’ve never seen theoretical physicists ever do before). Maybe these guys have already hired an agent.

After an expensive upgrade to increase its luminosity, the Tevatron at Fermilab was turned back on in March 2001 to start “Run II”, during which it was hoped that the machine would run with a dramatically higher luminosity than during “Run I” which ended in 1995. During Run I, about 140 inverse picobarns of collisions were generated, at the rate of about 3 inverse picobarns/week by the end of the run. The plan for Run II was for the new machine to get to a luminosity of about 17 inverse picobarns/week soon after the recomissioning, and ultimately to reach about 100 inverse picobarns/week.

This plan turned out to be wildly overoptimistic, as it took nearly a year and a half to get the machine operating even at the luminosity achieved during Run I. During FY02 the initial hope was to accumulate 320 inverse picobarns, rising to 830 in FY03 and 1300 in FY04. Instead 80 were produced in FY02 and 330 in FY03. While in FY02 the machine performed much worse than planned at the beginning of the year, in FY03 it did slightly better than planned.

As this fiscal year (FY04) is coming towards its end, the machine is doing significantly better than planned at the beginning of the year. The last few weeks have seen about 13 inverse picobarns/week being produced. Another measure, the luminosity at the beginning of a “store”, reached a record value on Monday of 8.28×10^31 cm^2/sec. This is about five times higher than achieved at the end of Run I. You can follow the progress (as well as the trials and tribulations) of the Fermilab accelerator physicists through on-line daily reports and continually updated luminosity charts. For a collection of documents showing the history of the Run II problems and the most recent estimates of what will be achieved, see the proceedings of the latest review of the Tevatron luminosity, which took place last February.

About 2000 inverse picobarns of collisions will probably be needed before the Tevatron experiments can push up the current experimental limit on the Higgs mass (114 Gev) that comes from experiments at LEP. There now seems to be a good chance the Tevatron will get to this point before the LHC starts operating at much higher energy in FY 2008. If the LHC achieves anything like its design luminosity, it will quickly make the Tevatron obsolete. Then again, having seen how hard it was to get the upgraded Tevatron running, the job of commissioning the LHC may not be so easy…

There’s a quite remarkable article by Barry Mazur in the latest issue of the Bulletin of the AMS. It brings together ideas about elliptic curves and deformations of Galois representations that were used by Wiles to prove Fermat’s last theorem, mirror symmetry, quantization, non-commutative geometry and much more. I’m not convinced it all hangs together, but it’s a wonderful piece of expository writing.

Mazur claims to be inspired by a very interesting seminar held every week in the Harvard math department called the Basic Notions Seminar, parts of which have recently been put online. This issue of the Bulletin is dedicated to the great French mathematician Rene Thom, who died nearly two years ago. The articles by Michael Atiyah and Dennis Sullivan about Thom’s work in topology are well worth reading.