Not Even Wrong

The New York Times is reporting that tomorrow Yuri Milner will be announcing the award of a new set of prizes for fundamental physics work, this time including some experimentalists as recipients. The awards are

• $3 million for the experimental discovery of the Higgs at CERN. This will be split into three parts: $1 million to Lynn Evans for his work building the machines, $1 million to ATLAS current and ex-spokepersons Fabiola Gianotti and Peter Jenni, and $1 million to CMS current and ex-spokepersons Joe Incandela, Michel Della Negra and Tejinder Virdee. I’m suspicious that the NYT has missed CMS ex-spokesperson Guido Tonelli, who was on the list I heard about earlier today from a source at CERN.
• $3 million to Stephen Hawking for his work on black holes.
• Three “New Horizons” prizes of $100,000 each to younger theorists working on string theory and SUSY: Niklas Beisert, Davide Gaiotto and Zohar Komargodski.
• Two “Physics Frontiers” prizes of $300,000 each to string theorists Alexander Polyakov and Joe Polchinski, with a third $300,000 prize going to a group of condensed matter physicists (Charles Kane, Laurens Molenkamp and Shoucheng Zhang) who work on “topological insulators” among other subjects.

Polyakov, Polchinski and the group of condensed matter physicists are now the contenders for the $3 million 2013 Fundamental Physics Prize which the NYT story says will be awarded “by a vote of the judges on the morning of March 20 at CERN and announced in a ceremony that evening.”

The special award to the LHC physicists should help make up for the problem that no Nobel prize may end up going to the Higgs discovery because too many people were involved. Milner has the advantage of not being bound by long tradition and arguably out of date rules the way the Nobel Committee is.

On the theory side though, these awards make it clear that the Fundamental Physics Prize story is likely to be heavily dominated by awards from string theorists to string theorists for work on string theory. Besides Hawking, all the recipients have some connection to string theory, with the condensed matter physicists working on a hot topic which many string theorists see as the future of their subject. For more about the recent history of the string theory/condensed matter connection, see this article from last year in Nature which includes this, which refers to certain books published in 2006:

“It’s hard to say whether the interest in condensed-matter applications is a direct response to those books because that’s really a psychological question,” says Joseph Polchinski, a string theorist at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara. “But certainly string theorists started to long for some connection to reality.”

Update: The NYT article has been revised to include Tonelli.

Update: The press release with more details is here. There’s a story at the Guardian here. CERN has more here, including interviews with the LHC winners. They comment on the fact that they are getting awards that belong to much larger groups, with Incandela and Gianotti saying they are trying to find a way to distribute the money to younger members of the collaboration who most need it. Lyn Evans comments

I will not be driving around CERN in a Ferrari. That would be very bad for my image.

The Guardian has Hawking saying his plans for the money include helping his daughter who has an autistic son, and maybe a new vacation home.

About the question of what the previous Milner prize recipients are doing with their $3 million, I’ve heard rumors that the one mathematician, Kontsevich, has been giving it away to others. From the physics side, the only thing I’ve seen was that Witten planned to give some to J Street, a group working for peace in the Middle East.

Update: For commentary on whether ATLAS and CMS spokespersons should keep the money, see Tommaso Dorigo.

The journal Foundations of Physics has been promising a special issue on “Forty Years of String Theory: Reflecting on the Foundations” for quite a while now, with a contribution first appearing back when it really was 40 years since the beginnings (more like 43 now). The final contribution has now appeared, an introductory essay by the editors (’t Hooft, Erik Verlinde, Sebastian de Haro and Dennis Dieks).

The overall tone of the collection is one of defensive promotion of the subject. The fact that string theory’s massively overhyped claims to give a unified theory of particle physics have led to miserable failure is mostly completely ignored. From the introductory essay one would never guess that string theory was ever supposed to have something to do with explaining the Standard Model of particle physics and that there were hopes that it would find some sort of vindication at the LHC, perhaps via the discovery of SUSY (the LHC is not even mentioned in this essay). String theory is presented purely as a theory of quantum gravity that has led to new insights in mathematics and had various other applications through the dualities it has uncovered. It’s main shortcoming is described as

the lack of directly testable experimental predictions that would signal ‘string physics’

which seems to me intentionally misleading, implying that string theory makes indirectly testable predictions. The problem with string theory is that it makes no predictions about anything, not that it only makes indirectly testable ones.

Three of the eleven articles in the collection are described as representing critics of string theory. The first, from Carlo Rovelli, does do a good job of explaining many of the problems of string theory. Lee Smolin’s contribution is not much about string theory, but more an examination of the general issue of the “Landscape problem”, comparing a range of different theories in which the laws of physics are different outside our observable universe.

’t Hooft’s On the Foundations of Superstring theory calls for more attention to the lack of any fundamental description that tells us what string theory really “is”, taking the point of view:

we conjecture that the “true theory” is something totally different from superstring theory (and certainly also different from gravitating quantum field theories), but that string theory may approximate the truth to various degrees of accuracy in one or several of its compactified realizations, just as it does for some condensed matter systems and QCD.

He ends with an argument (which he notes is “one where only few readers will follow me”) that one problem with string theory is that it uses the conventional quantum formalism, which he feels is flawed, needing replacement by an “emergent” version of quantum mechanics. For more about the sort of thing he has in mind, see here.

Two articles by philosophers of science, Dean Rickles and Richard Dawid address the question of how to evaluate a supposedly scientific theory that, like string theory, makes no experimentally testable predictions. Both pieces seem to me to suffer from a rather uncritical attitude towards various forms of string theory hype. For Rickles, the dominance of string theory can be justified by its “mathematical fertility”, for Dawid the justification is “the assessment of scientific underdetermination” (roughly, there aren’t any other good ideas). That it has led to some interesting mathematics and that there’s not a lot of good alternative ideas out there are perhaps the two best arguments for pursuing string theory, but in both cases the situation is far more complicated than string theory advocates would have one believe.

The articles by string theorists (Balasubramanian, Giddings, Gubser. Martinec, Susskind and Duff) have a range of interesting things to say, sometimes amidst large dollops of string theory hype. Almost all evade serious discussion of string theory’s failure to say anything about the Standard Model (although Susskind argues, a la Multiverse, that this a positive feature of string theory). Giddings perhaps makes the most serious criticism of string theory in the entire volume, discussing its problems as a theory of quantum gravity, where other authors see a big success and the theory’s main selling point.

The article by Duff is by far the most bizarre thing in the volume, and I wrote about it extensively a year ago here. As Duff sees it, the problem is just that critics of string theory are misguided and misinformed. He includes a three page denunciation of Garrett Lisi which has nothing to do with string theory, characterizes the major recent research directions in string theory as fluid mechanics and the black hole/qubit correspondence, and has an appendix about the press release Imperial College put out making absurd claims that he had finally figured out how to make predictions from string theory (see here). The editors of the volume seem to be rather defensive about publishing such a thing, noting

Needless to say that the opinions expressed in this paper are entirely the author’s own and that it is not our intent to spark new popular or otherwise heated discussions.

but justifying it as

we are happy to include this paper in our special issue as addressing questions that are important not only to scientists but also to the wider public, which was among our initial intents.

and ending with

We warmly recommend Duff’s very readable and playful contribution.

Nothing about Duff’s piece struck me as “playful”, but that the editors see it as some sort of joke would explain why they thought it worth publishing.

Update: Over at The Browser, Steven Gubser recommends that people should read The Elegant Universe and four string theory textbooks. Asked about the “no predictions problem”, Gubser does his best to mislead, claiming the situation is just like that with QED that Feynman got the Nobel Prize for. As for SUSY, if the LHC finds it, that’s evidence for string theory, if not, no problem. There’s the old favorite “the LHC might produce microscopic black holes”. About whether string theory makes testable predictions about the heavy ion physics the LHC is studying

String theory might predict that such and such number is one, and the experiment might say well it’s about two, but it could instead be one. That’s the kind of accuracy with which things can typically be done.

• 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.