Not Even Wrong

For presentations a couple days ago at the latest HEPAP meeting, see here. One piece of news, from this presentation, is that there likely will be a delay in the scheduled startup of the HL-LHC, with the next LHC run (Run 3) extended for an additional year (through 2024), and the next shutdown (LS3) extended by a half year. The HL-LHC would then start physics in 2028.

Most of the HEPAP discussions have to do with funding. The pattern of recent years has been one of huge decreases in funding proposed by the Trump administration. These are completely ignored by both the Democrats and Republicans in Congress, which passes large increases in funding (then signed into law by Trump). For FY2020 this continues: at DOE the HEP budget for FY2019 was \$980 million, for FY2020 the White House budget request was a massive cut to \$768 million. This was taken no more seriously by anyone than the last few of these, with the FY2020 House Mark \$1,045 million, the Senate Mark \$1,065 million. The FY2020 budget remains to be finally finished and passed, in the meantime the federal government has been operating under a sequence of continuing resolutions.

Specifically on theory funding, JoAnne Hewett has a presentation on The State of Theory. It has no numbers in it, but the DOE numbers given here show an increase from \$60 million in FY2017 to \$90 million in FY2019 for Theoretical, Computational and Interdisciplinary Physics. But within this category, pure theoretical HEP is pretty flat, with big increases for Computational HEP and a huge new investment in Quantum Information Science (\$27.5 million in FY2019). There does seem to have been some sort of decision to de-prioritize conventional theoretical HEP in favor of newer trendy areas.

Hewett describes the general consensus on current problems with theory funding as

• Universal concern on ever decreasing levels of funding for university groups: concern that university programs are dying.

  -Private institutions attempt to offset cuts with non-federal funding sources.
  -Cuts to program further accumulated in 2019. Many postdocs learned in May 2019 that their contracts would not be renewed for the fall. It was then too late to apply for new positions.

• Lab theory programs are also losing researchers.
• Even distribution of cuts across U.S. theory program has indirect proportional effect to small programs.
• Large fluctuations cycle-to-cycle is making groups less cohesive and more inclined to opt for “safer” research projects.
• There is the perception that the recent emphasis on QIS comes at a cost to more traditional HEP theory research.
• Summer salary has been capped or reduced to 1 month in many cases. Removal of summer salary across the board is demoralizing.

and ends with

The situation is becoming increasingly unstable.
University-based theory is suffering its most serious crisis in decades.
Its future is in jeopardy.

It would be interesting to see some numbers on the size of new private research funding going to HEP theory (for instance funding from the Simons Foundation or the private funding of the CMSA at Harvard). I don’t know of such numbers but I’m curious whether what is happening is that the total funding level has seen reasonable growth, but increases in funding are going to a small number of elite institutions, with the rest of the field in decline.

On the question of caps or reductions in summer salary, I doubt that any significant number of researchers is reacting to only getting 1 month of summer salary by signing up for another job (e.g. teaching summer school) and not doing research during the other two months of the summer. There has been another huge influx of money to the field that in some sense replaces grant-funded salary supplements: the multi-million dollar Breakthrough Prizes. A sizable number of HEP theorists have now partaken in all or part of one of the \$3 million prizes. If you add in this money, on average HEP theorists may have been seeing significant increases in income, however with almost all of it going to a small number of people (at the same elite institutions that are doing well). What we’re seeing may just be the same trend as in the rest of the US economy: a move to a star system with ever larger increases in inequality.

Another problem for the field of HEP theory may be that funding is stagnating because the DOE and NSF are skeptical about its intellectual health. Hewett notes that “Formal theory resides solely in university environment and has undergone significant funding cuts.” Trying to make the positive case for this part of the field, she lists three areas of advances, but oddly, the first two are identical. The two areas of advances in formal theory she describes are:

Advances in strongly coupled quantum field theory (gravity/field theory duality, bootstrap program, amplitudes) has implications for particle physics, cosmology and beyond.

Geometric advances in particle physics constructions from String/F-theory has implications for the “swampland program”.

For the second of these, it’s quite possible that most physicists don’t see this as an advance at all.

Update: Physics World has more about the delay here. It is supposed to be announced on Tuesday. The cause evidently is a budget gap caused by some planned contributions from non-member countries now not happening. The story doesn’t explain which non-member countries are involved or why their planned contributions are now not expected.

The great German artist Anselm Kiefer now has a show up in London at the White Cube Bermondsey gallery, with a review in the Guardian entitled Terrifying Odyssey Through a Cursed World. The review describes some of the works as follows:

Another room is given over to panoramic blasts of brown and black that map sweeping vistas of desolate fields. A road twines through a morass of mud and collaged sticks. Lines of fence poles vanish in the distance. These scenes are drawn in black on a vertiginous scale. Kiefer uses perspective, the Renaissance technique of showing the real world shrinking towards a single vanishing point, to define his landscapes – but the perspective view is a transparency on top of a muddy tumult of colour and texture, with real, 3D stuff stuck over that in turn. From the right distance, the picture of a landscape can be read clearly, like a painting by Van Gogh. Go closer and the picture dissolves in a mess of bulges and muck.

What’s the inspiration for these works (besides the Holocaust)?

These landscapes are entitled Superstrings, a reference to string theory, an influential idea in contemporary physics that seeks to unify quantum mechanics with Einstein’s relativity.

and the show is entitled Superstrings, Runes, The Norns, Gordian Knot. The gallery website explains:

White Cube is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Anselm Kiefer. The exhibition brings together many of the interests that have characterised Kiefer’s work for decades, including mythology, astronomy and history. Located across the entire Bermondsey space, it features a large-scale installation and paintings that draw on the scientific concept known as string theory.

The Guardian review continues:

The main gallery at White Cube Bermondsey is already pretty bleak in its featureless emptiness. Kiefer makes it work for him by heightening the chill, turning the White Cube into a morgue for Europe. Snow-covered landscapes with none of the cheer of Bruegel stretch away to infinity. They are marked with sticks as black as gravestones and nets that catch at nothing. Kiefer’s science reading clearly hasn’t cheered him up. The curvy grids of space-time become horrible wire traps in a devastated nowhere. We might be on the no-man’s land of the Ukraine border. Anyway, this place has got death in its hard black furrows.

Another review, at City A.M. tells us more about Kiefer’s motivations:

This is where we come to string theory – the monolith of Kiefer’s new show. Though he admits that he doesn’t quite understand what string theory is, Kiefer professes complete fascination with the idea that there is a scientific equivalent to the allegorical Gordian Knot – an idea that he picked up after thirty years of subscribing to Spektrum, a German monthly science magazine…

String theory cannot be verified empirically. Rather, it is an attempt to provide an all-encompassing description of the universe. And that, says Kiefer, is just why it is beautiful. “I suppose it’s like painting,” he says. “You cannot prove if a painting is good or bad. That is the point of it – it is descriptive… and there’s something sublime in that.”

From the images available, the work does look quite amazing. Kiefer quite possibly has gotten to the very heart of superstring theory, seeing in it a dark, desolate and blasted mythology which “cannot be verified empirically.”

Now back from a trip to the West Coast, here are some accumulated things that may be of interest:

• One thing I didn’t do while there was attend the 2020 Breakthrough Prize symposium. For videos of three talks about supergravity, see here. At the time of the award I wrote here about why a \$3 million prize for a failed idea about particle theory was a bad idea. Listening to the talks, I think an even worse idea is telling the public that this is a great example of why they should trust science.
• For another dubious idea from the West Coast, in January the KITP is bringing high school teachers to Santa Barbara to teach them about Spacetime, Holography, and Entanglement. Most of the programs the KITP has run for teachers (see here) have been devoted to explaining important, solid science. Back in 2001 when they promoted string theory I thought that was a bad idea, this latest one isn’t much better. Again, when the credibility of science is under attack, why go to the public (or, in this case high school teachers) to promote a highly speculative research program? Is it really a good idea for high school teachers to be exposed to this kind of hype, presumably with the hope that they’ll somehow transmit it to their students?
• On the evergreen topic of bad multiverse science, Scott Alexander here defends multiverse speculation, responding to Jim Baggott’s article. He and the authors of the more than four hundred comments debate at length a red-herring issue. Alexander writes:
  

  My understanding of the multiverse debate is that it works the same way [as respectable paleontology]. Scientists observe the behavior of particles, and find that a multiverse explains that behavior more simply and elegantly than not-a-multiverse.

  Yes, if theorists had a simple, elegant multiverse theory with lots of explanatory power, you could get into interesting arguments about its testability and whether the idea was solid science or not. The problem is that no such multiverse theory exists. If you want to talk about the MWI multiverse, your problem is that solving the measurement theory problem by just saying “the multiverse did it” may be “simple” and “elegant”, but it’s also completely empty. If instead you want to talk about the cosmological multiverse, the problem is that you don’t have a theory at all (and the actual fragments of a theory you do have are complicated and ugly). For more about this, see my posting and article on Theorists Without a Theory.

For something more positive, while traveling I noticed two quite interesting articles which explain in a detailed technical way approaches to two of the great unsolved problems of our time, while carefully discussing why the approaches have not (yet?) worked, leaving the great problems unsolved.

• For mathematics and the Riemann Hypothesis, see Alain Connes and Caterina Consani’s article The Scaling Hamiltonian, about the attempt to understand the zeros of the Riemann zeta function in terms of the properties of a specific Hamiltonian operator, which in some sense is a generator of a group of scaling transformations.
• For physics and quantum gravity, see Donoghue’s A Critique of the Asymptotic Safety Program, which has a detailed discussion of the problems with making sense of both quadratic gravity Lagrangians and the idea of a non-trivial fixed point gravity theory theory. I was interested to see that he has a lot to say about the Lorentzian vs. Euclidean signature issue, something often ignored.

Finally, I recommend reading Elizabeth Landau’s interview at Quanta with astronomer Virginia Trimble and Trimble’s excellent advice to us all:

Pay attention. Someday, you’ll be the last one who remembers.

Update: Two more math-related items well worth a look:

• Dan Rockmore at the New Yorker on Where do ideas come from?
• A profile of Terry Tao at the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

Update: Yet another blog entry from Scott Alexander about the multiverse, with more hundreds of comments. What is it with the fascination for this empty argument?

At BBC Science Focus, more multiverse promotion from Sean Carroll. He does end though by getting to the real point (note that when theoretical physicists say a question is “hard to answer”, it means they have no idea how to answer it):

Many-Worlds is a lean and mean theory, but it’s possibly too lean and mean; there is very little structure to rely on, so questions like “Why do probabilities behave the way they do?” and “Why is classical mechanics such a good approximation to the world we see?” are hard to answer.

This is exactly the problem that those arguing over this at Slate Star Codex and elsewhere don’t seem to understand: saying “all is the Schrodinger equation” doesn’t tell you how to connect the theory to the world we observe. Adding in an ontology of multiple universes does nothing at all to solve this problem.

Some links related to the foundations of math and physics:

• Kevin Hartnett at Quanta has a long article on Jacob Lurie and his work on infinity categories. Unfortunately Lurie didn’t participate in the article himself, so comments are only from others. The article does a good job of giving at least a vague sense of what these very abstract foundational ideas are about, as well as examining the math community’s struggle to absorb them. Lurie’s work on this is spread out over more than 900 pages here and more than 1500 pages here. Recently he has been putting together an online textbook/reference version of this material as Kerodon, which is modeled after and uses much of the same software as Johan de Jong’s Stacks project.
• At Mathematics without Apologies, Michael Harris has some comments on a recent discussion of the Mechanization of Math, held here in New York at the Helix Center. A video of the discussion is available here.
• In the new (November) issue of the AMS Notices John Baez has a review of a recent collection of articles about the foundations of mathematics and physics. The book, Foundations of Mathematics and Physics One Century After Hilbert, contains contributions about both math and physics, although in his review Baez concentrates on issues related to physics. He notes “The elephant in the room is string theory.”
  The same issue of the Notices contains an informative long article about Michael Atiyah and his career, written by Alain Connes and Joseph Kouneiher (Kouneiher is the editor of the book reviewed by Baez).

The 2019 Physics Nobel Prizes were announced this morning, half going to Jim Peebles for his work on big bang cosmology, half to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for discovery of an exoplanet.

You can read elsewhere more details about the prize winners and their work, but I do want to point out that this announcement means (since there will be no further Physics Nobel Prize awards before the start of 2020) that John Horgan has won his 2002 bet with Michio Kaku, with \$2000 going to the Nature Conservancy. The winning prediction from Horgan was:

By 2020, no one will have won a Nobel Prize for work on superstring theory, membrane theory, or some other unified theory describing all the forces of nature.

If one looks at the comments back then, Gordon Kane signs on to an even stronger variant of the Horgan/Kaku bet:

By 2020 there will be a Nobel Prize for a string- or unification- or supersymmetry-based theory or explanation or experimental discovery.

Luckily for him he doesn’t seem to have put up any money for this, since he has now lost this bet.

For my own comments at the time, see here (this was a couple years before this blog was started). As I explained there, I was willing to sign up on Horgan’s side of the bet if the “other unified theory” clause was eliminated. Unlike Horgan, I’m not a sceptic at all of the existence of a unified theory, or of humanity’s ability to find it. My argument (which I think has held up well) was that we’re not going to get there by pursuing superstring theory or anything like it. In a better world, the LHC would have found not a vanilla Higgs, but something unexpected that gave us a new idea about electroweak unification, one that pointed to a successful new idea about a fully unified theory. I didn’t think this was likely, but I thought it was possible, and I wasn’t interested in betting against the possibility I would most like to have seen.

What shocks me about where we are now that Kaku and Kane have lost their bets is not that they lost, which was to be expected, but that this loss seems to have had zero effect on their behavior. Kane’s endless replacement of failed predictions by new ones is a well-known story. For Kaku, one can get some idea of his current point of view from this interview:

Yahoo News: So tell us about your work in string field theory. You’re trying to finish Einstein’s equation?

Michio Kaku: That’s right. We want to find the “God Equation” — the ultimate theory that explains the entire universe. We want an equation that’s maybe 1 inch long that would allow us to “read the mind of God” — those are Einstein’s words.

Yahoo News: And how’s it going?

Michio Kaku: We think we have it! It’s called string theory. It’s not in its final form, and it’s not testable yet, [but] we have the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva.

We’re testing the periphery of the theory, but the theory itself is a theory of the universe — so it’s very hard to test. But we physicists are optimistic. We think we will be able to test the theory. And we think it is the final theory. So physics ends at that point. Another era opens up, but one era ends when we finally prove this is the Theory of Everything….

If string theory is correct, it means that all the subatomic particles — the electrons, the protons — are nothing but musical notes on a tiny vibrating rubber band. So that physics is nothing but the harmonies of the vibrating rubber bands. Chemistry is nothing but the melodies you can create from the vibrating strings. The universe is a symphony of strings.

And the mind of God is cosmic music resonated through hyperspace.

Kaku also appears in this recent story, which Sabine Hossenfelder refers to as “math fiction”. For this kind of phenomenon I prefer Horgan’s version: “science fiction in mathematical form”.

I don’t know of other bets on string theory, but there were quite a few bets about SUSY. I assume David Gross has now paid off his lost bets on SUSY, haven’t heard though anything about that. At the Copenhagen SUSY bet event, the losers (Arkani-Hamed, Gross and Shih) showed no signs that losing a bet on a scientific outcome had any effect at all on these scientist’s views on the issue they were willing to bet on.

Update: Horgan has posted his own take on this here.

Various HEP-related links:

• The physics briefing book for the ongoing update to the European Strategy for Particle Physics is now available, for more see here. This describes the physics that one might hope to do with various proposed new machines. The hard part comes in the next few months: coming up with a proposal that has some chance of getting funded.
• Jim Baggott has a new article in Aeon, But is it Science?, arguing that the heavy advertising to the public by physicists of untestable speculation about multiple universes endangers the credibility of the field. I of course am very much in agreement with this, and have often pointed out the problem, see here. Baggott specifically refers to the massive recent publicity campaign from Sean Carroll. Carroll in this case is promoting a multiple universe untestable interpretation of quantum mechanics, but in the past has been equally determined to promote the untestable multiple universe versions of unification, as well as an untestable multiple universe explanation of the arrow of time. Carroll will be touring Australia and New Zealand in February, presumably to further promote this sort of thing.
• There’s an ongoing Cosmic Controversies conference in Chicago this week, which tonight will feature a panel discussion on “Do we need the Multiverse and can it made turned into a scientific theory?”. Tomorrow the panel topics will be more promising: “What more can we learn from particle physics about cosmology?“ and “Convergence or Disruption”. You can find video posted from the conference here including a live stream.
• Slava Rychkov is giving a series of lectures on Lorentzian methods in conformal field theory. Lecture notes are appearing here, videos here.

Update: Wired describes job opportunities for physicists and astrophysicists in the fashion industry.