Not Even Wrong

• Paul Frampton has been found guilty on drug charges in Buenos Aires, looks like he will be able to serve out his sentence under house arrest, get released sometime in 2014. It’s unclear at this point how the University of North Carolina will handle this. For details, there’s Physics World, the Daily Mail, the Winston-Salem Journal, and Clarin.
• Erik Verlinde over the past couple years has gotten 6.5 million euros in prizes and grants to fund his work on entropic gravity (see here). Now, he’ll head up a new institution, the Delta Institute for Theoretical Physics, funded with 18.3 million euros from the Dutch scientific funding agency NWO as part of its Gravitation Programme.
  There’s an interview with Verlinde here. He says he’s working on explaining dark matter with his entropic gravity ideas. There’s no paper about this, I guess because:

  There are some small gaps in my reasoning and things that I still do based on intuition. I’m trying to fill in those gaps.

  but he thinks these ideas about dark matter will be tested in “no more than 10 or 15 years”.

• Another new theoretical physics institution is The Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics in Edinburgh, where they’re hosting an inaugural symposium in January.
• The latest TEDYouth is online, see here. It seems that they may think that Youth these days is pretty ADD, since they have all presentations limited to six minutes. In one of them (around 3:50) they’ve got Clifford Johnson explaining the exciting new idea of replacing particles by strings moving in extra dimensions.
• Mochizuki’s claimed proof of the ABC Conjecture still seems to be resisting the attempts of experts to understand and evaluate it. He has put on his web-site some slides for a talk next month, and promises a survey article next March.
• Easier to follow in principle, but at 367 pages still pretty daunting, is a new paper from Laurent Lafforgue, chronicling his attempt to develop “non-linear” versions of the Poisson formula that would imply Langlands functoriality.
• If you were wondering about that tatoo in Edward Frenkel’s film, see Mathematics, Love and Tattoos for an explanation.
• In other film news, there’s the Colliding Particles project for a film about the Higgs. They’ve got a new segment up, several more coming soon at one/week.
• The debate in the HEP community about the death of SUSY goes on, and will undoubtedly continue along the same lines for quite a while. Latest is from New Scientist, which has Steven Weinberg describing the situation in a way that that can’t be argued with:
  

  SUSY’s plausibility is reduced, but not to zero.

  For the argument over whether SUSY was and is an overhyped, implausible idea, on one side there’s Michael Peskin, with:

  I think that the serious effort given to SUSY is appropriate…”

  and on the other, taking the Not Even Wrong side of this argument, there’s Matt Strassler with:

  The theory, specifically as something we would observe at the LHC, was wildly over-promoted.

Update: One more. A Science magazine article about the problem with “Open Access” journals discussed here. According to Science:

Meanwhile, the OA industry is becoming increasingly diverse; it includes traditional powerhouses, such as Germany’s Springer, which now publishes about 300 OA titles, as well as a vast array of newcomers. OA publishers have a built-in incentive to lower the bar, Dupuis says, because in contrast to subscription journals, an OA title earns more revenue with every paper its editors accept.

Moreover, many so-called predatory publishers—which often eschew peer review, use fake editors, or contain plagiarized papers—have flooded the market, says Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver, who keeps an online list of these dodgy outfits.

Normally I do my best to ignore claims to have figured out the vacuum energy problem. There’s an endless number of them, mostly looking pretty dubious, and the world is full of people much more expert on the subject than me, so it seems that my time would be better spent elsewhere. I did however just notice a new preprint making such claims, Scrutinizing the Cosmological Constant Problem and a possible resolution, by Denis Bernard and André LeClair, and am curious about it. Unlike most of such things, the authors seem to know what they are talking about, and the whole thing looks not implausible to my non-expert eye. Can an expert tell me what is wrong with this (or, alternatively, tell me and my blog readers that it’s a new good idea, or an old one that is not well known)?

Comments better be about the Bernard/LeClair paper and well-informed, or will be ruthlessly deleted.

Three of the leading figures in HEP theory have today or recently spoken about their current view of SUSY in light of the negative LHC results, here’s a report:

• At the IAS recently, Nima Arkani-Hamed spoke on The Inevitability of Physical Laws: Why the Higgs Has to Exist. Yuri Milner was in the audience, and I gather that this (and Maldacena’s recent similar talk) was intended to fulfill the promise of giving a public talk that came with their receipt of $3 million Fundamental Physics Prizes.

  Both Arkani-Hamed and Maldacena talked not about their own work, but about the Higgs, with Maldacena emphasizing the importance of gauge symmetry, Arkani-Hamed the constraints imposed by unitarity and Lorentz invariance. At the end of his talk, Arkani-Hamed gave a big advertisement for SUSY, with a new and somewhat bizarre argument I hadn’t heard before. He argued that since QM + special relativity imply that elementary particles must have spin 0,1/2,1,3/2,2, and until recently 0 and 3/2 were missing, the fact that 0 (the Higgs) has now been seen implies (by the “totalitarian principle” that everything that can happen must happen) that the next thing to be discovered will require a spin 3/2 particle and this needs SUSY. Of the various weak arguments put forward for SUSY, this seems to me to be the weakest yet.

• At CERN today there was a 70th birthday celebration for Chris LLewellyn Smith. I didn’t watch John Ellis’s talk, but his slides are here. Evidently he argued that SUSY is not dead yet, pointing to the latest paper from the MasterCode collaboration. Their most recent CMSSM SUSY “predictions” have gluinos at either 2000 GeV (hard for the LHC to see at full energy after 2014) or 4000 GeV (impossible for the LHC ever to see).

  No mention was made of the similar pre-LHC predictions (see here and here) which had the Higgs at around 113 GeV, gluinos at 700 GeV or so, and squarks lighter than this, all of which have been shown to be radically mistaken. For some perspective on this on an even longer time scale, take a look at this 1984 survey article, Supersymmetry – spectroscopy of the future? : or of the present?. It gives much the same enthusiastic motivation for SUSY that we still get in all SUSY talks, with Ellis optimistic that the latest data had hints of SUSY with sparticle masses around 40 GeV (“nicely compatible” with the recent discovery of a 40 GeV top quark…).

• Also speaking today was David Gross, and I did get a chance to watch his talk. He commented on Ellis’s claim that SUSY was not yet dead by noting “we see no signs of life either”, then went on to lay out two “extreme scenarios”. The pessimistic one would be nothing but the SM at LHC energies and no detection of dark matter. In that case, about SUSY he commented that it “could be that Nature does not take advantage of this”, which I think is the first time I’ve ever heard him raise this possibility. The optimistic scenario was the usual picture sold pre-LHC: detection of SUSY and dark matter, non-SM Higgs. Gross said that he’s an optimist, but gave no argument for the optimistic scenario beyond the one that it’s a good idea in life for a scientist to be an optimist.

Update: More at Nature about SUSY’s problems and quotes from its defenders.

Update: Over at the Simons Foundation web-site, there’s an excellent new article about the SUSY debate by Natalie Wolchover.

I’m in Northern California, on a vacation originally intended to be short, but started early due to the storm in New York. I wanted though to recommend reading something that a commenter here pointed to. It’s an article by Mikhail Shifman (author by the way, of an excellent recent textbook I somehow haven’t found time to discuss here) about the current state of particle theory that he has just posted on the arXiv, with the title Reflections and Impressionistic Portrait at the Conference “Frontiers Beyond the Standard Model,” FTPI, Oct. 2012. The reference is to this recent conference, held at his institution.

Shifman surveys the current state of particle theory, with a range of interesting comments about the paradigms of grand unification, extra dimensions, supersymmetry and string theory that have dominated the subject for nearly 30 years. The negative LHC results provide a serious challenge to these paradigms, although I’d argue that they have been in trouble for a very long time, with the LHC just the final nail in the coffin. Much of the activity among theorists reported at the conference referred to by Shifman revolves around attempts to prop up some of these ideas. This is going to be increasingly unsustainable as stronger and stronger LHC bounds emerge. Where will this leave the field? Shifman argues that this is a time of opportunity, with the death of old paradigms opening the way for new ideas. I hope he’s right. Here are his final comments, of a sociological nature:

It is easy to estimate the total number of active high-energy theorists. Every day hep-th and hep-ph bring us about thirty new papers. Assuming that on average an active theorist publishes 3-4 papers per year, we get 2500 to 3000 theorists. The majority of them are young theorists in their thirties or early forties. During their careers many of them never worked on any issues beyond supersymmetry-based phenomenology or string theory. Given the crises (or, at least, huge question marks) in these two areas we currently face, there seems to be a serious problem in the community. Usually such times of uncertainty as to the direction of future research offer wide opportunities to young people, in the prime of their careers. To grab these opportunities a certain reorientation and reeducation are apparently needed. Will this happen?

• On the LHC front, new results will be announced at the Hadron Collider Physics Symposium in Kyoto, which opens November 12. Jester has a good summary of what to look for on the Higgs front here. The new results should be based on about 12-13 fb^-1 of 2012 8 TeV data (this past summer’s used about 5 fb^-1 each of 2011 7 TeV data and 2012 8 TeV data). Unblinding of the results should have taken place recently, so soon about 6000 physicists will know what the news is and start talking about it…
• The latest Scientific American has a cover story about particle physics that comes under the “This Week’s Hype” heading. It’s called “The Inner Life of Quarks” and discusses models in which quarks and other elementary particles of the standard model are composites of more elementary objects called “preons”. The fact that the papers on the subject it refers to are from 1979 should make one suspicious: an idea that hasn’t had major developments in 33 years is a dead idea. Besides the overwhelming experimental evidence against preons (with the LHC bringing in many new much stronger negative results), the idea has huge inherent problems. The main issue is that one is trying to put together composites with masses as small as MeVs (or lower, if you try to do this with neutrinos) while the data says that things are point-like up to TeV scales, with just the forces you know about up to such scales.
• For the latest on Paul Frampton’s troubles as the victim of a scam that has left him in an Argentine jail, see this article entitled Imprisoned UNC professor thinks he deserves a raise. I’m assuming this was before his trip to South America, but at some point Frampton clearly did some extensive research, comparing his salary ($107K) to those of some of his illustrious peers ($203K-$532K according to him, just using data from public universities). Not clear though that this was really something to bring up in his argument about whether the university should still pay him even if he’s in jail.
• I only recently heard the old news that Fields Medalist Vaughan Jones has left Berkeley to take a job at Vanderbilt University. Evidently one reason for doing this was a salary number of the sort that Frampton covets.
• Freeman Dyson has a piece in the New York Review of Books about Jim Holt’s new book Why Does the World Exist (see my take here). Not much in the review actually about Holt’s book, but Dyson takes the opportunity to enter the ring in the fight over nothingness with some late blows aimed at the philosophers. He doesn’t think much of modern philosophy, ending with:
  

  The great philosophers of the past wrote literary masterpieces such as the Book of Job and the Confessions of Saint Augustine. The latest masterpieces written by a philosopher were probably Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1885 and Beyond Good and Evil in 1886. Modern departments of philosophy have no place for the mystical.

  There’s a Chronicle of Higher Education piece about this here, Brian Leiter’s blog hosts a discussion here.

• I’m loathe to post anything about US politics here, since it’s a depressing and omnipresent topic these days, but for an HEP angle, see this in Science from Adrian Cho, and this in the NYRB from Steven Weinberg. Don’t even think though of posting comments about politics here…
• Greg Moore recently gave the Felix Klein lectures in Bonn on Applications of the six-dimensional (2,0) theory to physical mathematics . Video here, lecture notes here.
• This week at Stony Brook there’s a conference in honor of Blaine Lawson’s 70th birthday. Lawson is a great person and a wonderful geometer; I very much enjoyed getting to know him a little bit during my days as a physics postdoc at Stony Brook. He was one of several examples that convinced me that leaving physics for mathematics would at least promise hanging out with nicer people. I’ve been too busy this week to get out to Stony Brook, had formed a crazy plan to bike out there this weekend for Nigel Hitchin’s talk Sunday morning, but a nasty cold has put an end to that plan (Sunday’s weather prediction for an approaching hurricane might in any case have made a long bike trip not the best idea in the world). Videos of the talks are available here.

  Happy Birthday Blaine!

There’s a wonderful piece of software out there I hadn’t heard about, called Mathgen, which generates impressive looking mathematics research papers that are utter gobbledygook. A Mathgen paper on Independent, Negative, Canonically Turing Arrows of Equations and Problems in Applied Formal PDE was recently accepted (see the full story here) by the journal Advances in Pure Mathematics, one of many “open access” journals put out by Scientific Research Publishing. If you’re looking for theoretical physics papers instead of pure math, Scientific Research Publishing has the Journal of Modern Physics. Some work on Mathgen is probably required before it is ready to submit papers to this journal.

These journals charge authors $500 to publish their papers, something which is now being sold as a wonderful mechanism for providing “open access” to the scientific literature. At the same time they make very clear what one big problem with this is: the financial incentive for the journal becomes to publish as many papers as possible, since that’s the only way to increase revenue. Scientific Research Publishing does a good job of showing where this model for funding dissemination of academic research leads.