Not Even Wrong

Yuri Milner’s Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation announced today the process by which future winners of the $3 million Fundamental Physics Prize will be chosen (for more about this, see here), a process which involves setting up yet another prize, the Physics Frontiers Prize. The idea is that by the end of the year, the Selection Committee of previous prize winners will pick three winners of the new Physics Frontiers Prize, and these will be the candidates for the 2013 $3 million Fundamental Physics Prize. One of the three will get the $3 million, the other two will get $300,000 and automatically renominated for the $3 million prize each year over the next 5 years. So, I guess you might not want to win immediately, since if you get passed over the first time, you might end up with $3.3 million instead of $3 million.

There’s also a separate $100,000 New Horizons in Physics Prize “targeted at promising junior researchers”. Nominations for these two categories of prizes can be made by going to the Fundamental Physics Prize website.

The press release quotes Nima Arkani-Hamed, member of the Selection Committee as:

This is a tremendous opportunity to recognize the highest levels of achievement in fundamental physics. We look forward to receiving nominations for outstanding candidates ranging across all areas of the field.

Arkani-Hamed is in India, where an interview with him appeared today (hat-tip an e-mail from him to Lubos Motl), with comments about the Milner prizes:

I really think it’s a fantastic thing for Physics—to have a showcase every year where scientists get to talk about the exciting aspects of the subject. I don’t think any physicist or scientists are motivated to research by the thought of a prize or the money involved in it. But, it definitely helps in creating awareness among the youngsters, and encourages more people to take up the subject.

the Higgs:

There are people trying to figure out the indirect effects between the different Higgs like particles. These are very difficult experiments and will take another 20 years before any confirmation is reached.

the future of particle physics:

What’s going on in particle physics is not just the evolution of the standard model but the rise of a new branch of physics that can solve some of the age old problems. Super symmetry is a very good example of what this physics should look like. For the first time we will have some evidence that there’s actually really fine adjustments of the parameters of fundamental physics hardwired into the way nature works. This will be very shocking for many people and teach us something profound.

and string theory:

In late 1990s one of the most important theoretical discoveries was that string theory and particle physics are not different but different descriptions of the same thing. All the good viable ideas people have had in the past 40 years are now branched together to seek the truth.

Update: Haaretz reports that Witten “said he would probably donate part of the $3 million he won in a surprise award to J Street, the liberal pro-Israel group.”

Please note that any attempts to pursue, from either side, the Arab-Israeli conflict on my blog’s comment section will be immediately deleted.

Update: Just realized that the Witten/J Street news is rather old, from shortly after the announcement of the original prizes. I didn’t hear about it at the time, curious if there’s other news about what plans the prize winner have for their winnings.

Some short items of a wide variety of kinds:

• Witten has posted to the arXiv a long paper about the work on superstring perturbation theory that he has been doing. Superstring Perturbation Theory Revisited, together with two papers of background material (see here and here) weighs in at 400 pages. For an explanation of the main points, you might want to start with one of Witten’s recent talks on the subject, for instance this one at Strings 2012.
  Witten doesn’t make much in the way of claims for the significance of this work, portraying it more as a project of going through the foundations of the subject of how you define higher loop superstring amplitudes in a much more careful way than was common during the mid-late 80s when this was a hot topic of research. The technicalities here are ferocious, well beyond my expertise. It will be interesting to see if this project revives interest in the subject and others start working on it again.
• Also on the arXiv is a new paper from Paul Frampton, with affiliation now including the Centro Universitario Devoto, part of the prison where he is unfortunately still incarcerated in Argentina. He argues here that he is still able to fulfill his duties as a University of North Carolina professor from Devoto prison, but doesn’t seem to have gotten the university to agree about this.
• There’s a conference at DESY this week on Lessons from the first phase of the LHC, with talks on Friday discussing “Where could SUSY be hiding?” and “Searches for new physics at the LHC: some frustration, but no despair…”. For some additional context to the SUSY issue, I recently ran across this talk from SUSY 02, 10 years ago, which argued that SUSY arguments implied that “superpartners are probably being produced” at a new collider that had been running for a year or two (the Tevatron Run II at that time).
• The SCOAP³ consortium has announced a plan to support commercial journals publishing HEP papers, paying them 1000-2000$ per HEP paper they publish according to a complicated formula. Elsevier would get about $2.4 million/year for papers in Physics Letters B and Nuclear Physics B, but somehow reduce its subscription fees to compensate. I don’t understand at all how this is supposed to work (obvious problems include that of why anyone would subscribe once it was all open access, and what the mechanism is to stop publishers from increasing revenues by publishing more second-rate papers). Nature has an article explaining more about what is going on here. Steven Harnad describes the scheme as Unnecessary, Unscalable and Unsustainable, Peter Coles as “Particle physics volunteers to be fleeced…”
• String theory advertising available here, Sean Carroll commentary about this here.
• At Foundations of Physics, Gerard ’t Hooft has a new paper which doesn’t seem to be on the arXiv, On the Foundations of Superstring Theory (you may need a subscription to read it). Here’s the abstract:
  

  Superstring theory is an extension of conventional quantum field theory that allows for stringlike and branelike material objects besides pointlike particles. The basic foundations on which the theory is built are amazingly shaky, and, equally amazingly, it seems to be this lack of solid foundations to which the theory owes its strength. We emphasize that such a situation is legitimate only in the development phases of a new doctrine. Eventually, a more solidly founded structure must be sought.
  Although it is advertised as a “candidate theory of quantum gravity”, we claim that string theory may not be exactly that. Rather, just like quantum field theory itself, it is a general mathematical framework for a class of theories. Its major flaw could be that it still embraces a Copenhagen view on the relation between quantum mechanics and reality, while any “theory of everything”, that is, a theory for the entire cosmos, should do better than that.

  There’s a recent blog posting about this here, including commentary from ’t Hooft himself.

• If you’re trying to keep up on reaction to Mochizuki’s claimed proof of the ABC conjecture, try looking here. Still I think a very long ways to go before experts understand this well enough to evaluate whether this is a solid proof.
• I recently heard from Nick Carlin, who has unearthed the following scientific documents: Strange Particle Interactions in a Bubble Chamber and The Angular Correlation of Polarization of Annihilation Radiation, from late 1977 or spring 1978. Handwritten commentary is from William J. Skocpol and Robert V. Pound.

Update: Some frustration, but no despair is now on-line. The first slide is pretty amusing…

Update: More news about the latest in Paul Frampton’s case here.

Following up on last week’s European Strategy Group Meeting in Krakow, this week UK particle physicists are doing something similar, with a Particle Physics Advisory Panel community meeting in Birmingham.

The talks on the experimental side tell much the same story as the Krakow talks. On the theory side, the UK meeting has more, with a phenomenology talk which discusses prospects for “Saving SUSY” while noting that:

It’s ironic that the solution to the absence of SUSY is to add even more stuff: composite 3rd generation or Higgs, R-parity violating couplings, scalar gluons, or new singlets.

There’s extensive discussion of UK particle theory funding here. I don’t understand very well how particle theory is funded in the UK, but was interested to note that the slide on page 5 has string theory’s piece of the pie stable at 27% last year (also 27% in 2008, 28% in 2005). Mike Duff (see commentary here) wrote a piece for the forthcoming 40 Years of String Theory volume arguing that the 2006 books by Lee Smolin and me were responsible for destroying funding of string theory in the UK, but the numbers in this new talk don’t seem to bear this out. I gather there’s a separate story about the EPSRC and mathematical physics, and curious to hear from anyone who knows more about that. But if the state of affairs is that the mathematical end of string theory is being defunded while the phenomenological end is going strong, that can’t be because someone in authority read my book…

Update: The US has its own version of this planned to take place over the next year, Snowmass 2013, starting with a meeting next month at Fermilab. It looks like this will be purely about planning on the experimental side, with the problems of particle theory not on the agenda.

This fall I’m teaching on quantum mechanics for mathematicians, at the undergraduate level. There’s a web-page with more information here. I’ll be writing up lecture notes, which should appear on that web-page as the course goes on, starting Wednesday.

We’ll see how this works, but the plan is to teach many of the standard topics, although starting from a different point. Most quantum mechanics classes start out with classical mechanics, then somehow try and motivate quantum mechanics from there, following the historical logic of the subject. I’ll instead start with the simplest purely quantum systems, especially the two-state, spin-1/2 system, now famous as the “qubit” of quantum computation. This is also a central example for the theory of Lie groups, Lie algebras and representations, so something that every mathematician should become familiar with. Another advantage of starting here is that there’s no analysis, just linear algebra, and one can easily do everything rigorously.

Later on in the course I’ll get to the standard material about wave-functions and quantum particles in potentials. The emphasis will be though not on the analytical machinery needed as a rigorous foundation for this subject in general, but on specific problems and their symmetries, and the use of these symmetries to do real calculations, ending up with the spectrum of the hydrogen atom.

We’ll see how this goes, and what the students think of it. As lecture notes appear, corrections and suggestions of how to improve them would be appreciated.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a long story about the Templeton Foundation, entitled The Templeton Effect. Much of it is about various subfields of philosphy where Templeton money has been successful at bringing religion, theological concerns and religious philosophers to greater prominence. One section however describes the Templeton funding promoting a new field of Philosophy of Cosmology. Religion doesn’t explicitly appear here, but the story of how this “Philosophy of Cosmology” got underway gives a good example of how money influences intellectual pursuits:

Barry Loewer, a philosopher at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, isn’t likely to turn up at a Society of Christian Philosophers meeting with Newlands and Miller. “I myself have no interest in philosophy of religion and am not a religious person,” he says. For years, Loewer has been working with a group of philosophers, mathematicians, and physicists in the New York area, meeting and collaborating on papers—nothing very expensive. But about five years ago a colleague at Rutgers, Dean W. Zimmerman, told the group about the Templeton Foundation and suggested that they apply for a grant. Zimmerman, a top Christian philosopher, had already served on Templeton’s advisory board and participated in many foundation-sponsored activities.

The idea at first was to do a project about quantum mechanics and the foundations of physics, which was an interest of Loewer’s group. Templeton had other ideas. The foundation pointed the group in the direction of cosmology, with the prospect of a much bigger grant, and the researchers jumped at the idea. They realized that cosmology encompassed the questions of time and physical laws that had concerned them all along.

“You know that story of Molière’s where someone discovers that he has been speaking prose his whole life?” says Loewer. “It was a little bit like that.”

The nearly $1-million grant his team received from Templeton last year coincided with another, slightly larger one called “Establishing the Philosophy of Cosmology,” which was awarded to scholars at the University of Oxford. Despite the change of plans at Templeton’s behest, Loewer stresses, “They’ve been really helpful, and totally noncoercive in terms of any agenda that they might have. I had my eyes open for it.”

Not that philosophers are especially well practiced in negotiating the terms of million-dollar grants, much less in thinking about how such money might sway them. Neither Loewer nor Mele nor Miller nor Newlands could have anticipated back when they were in graduate school that they’d be administering projects like this; their training was for armchairs, libraries, and conferences. But now that the money is coming into the field, it is being welcomed even by those who lack the foundation’s spiritual proclivities. “Templeton picks some people whose Christian epistemology I might not share,” Brian Leiter says, “but there’s no quarreling that they’re serious philosophers.” Suspicions about some secret religious agenda tend to lessen the more widely the foundation’s substantial sums begin to spread.

Some links of mathematical interest that I’ve recently run across:

• The life and work of Alexander Grothendieck is one of the great stories of modern mathematics. Winfried Scharlau’s first volume of a biography of Grothendieck, covering the years up to 1948 is now available in English, see here. The third volume, covering Grothendieck’s life after 1970 is only available in German, see here. Leila Schneps is writing a second volume, covering his life and mathematics during the height of his career, from 1948-1970, with chapters appearing as they are written on this page. She is now up to 1952.

  The same page contains links to various wonderful articles about Grothendieck’s mathematics, many by mathematicians who interacted with Grothendieck during his period of greatest mathematical activity.

• Cédric Villani joins other Fields Medalists with blogs, see here. Villani has just published in France a memoir called Théorème Vivant, a mix of autobiography and description of a collaboration on a mathematics problem. More about the book here, here and here, with a video here.
• Many of the talks given at this summer’s String-Math 2012 conference are now available as slides or video, see here.