News from CERN

Posted on December 5, 2012 by woit

Very light posting recently, partly due to being busy keeping up with my class, but more due to just not noticing anything particularly newsworthy. Matt and Lubos have quite a lot to say about Time magazine’s not describing the Higgs mechanism accurately, but I find it hard to get too excited about that, with my sympathies lying with any poor journalist given the impossible task of explaining this in a few words to the public.

Today at CERN there’s an LHCC meeting, with status reports on the machine and the experiments available here. The 8 TeV proton-proton physics run has just about ended, with the next week or so to be devoted not to luminosity production, but to machine studies. The integrated luminosity for the run will be about 23 inverse femtobarns, significantly above the original plan for the year. A heavy-ion run will end in February, after which the machine will be shut down for a long period in order to fix the magnet interconnects and other problems, to allow running at or close to the design energy of 7 TeV/beam. The current plan has proton-proton physics at 6.5 TeV/beam starting again about April 2015.

It seems likely that there will be no new results about the Higgs until the Moriond conference in March. CMS and ATLAS will then have quite a while to work on doing the best possible analysis of their 7 and 8 TeV data for information about the Higgs. From now on, attention will focus on what CMS and ATLAS have to say about the signal sizes in the various channels where the Higgs is supposed to show up, as well as theoretical studies of how possible next generation accelerators would perform in terms of doing better at these measurements than the LHC. The LHC Higgs Cross Section working group is meeting today and tomorrow on this topic, talks are available here. Next week the KITP will host a similar workshop.

The continuing big story from the LHC is that of no SUSY or other BSM physics showing up. The LHCC ATLAS slides have

Physics beyond the SM did not show up yet. There is no need for preliminary conclusions. Let’s continue our work and look were we haven’t looked so far.

but theorists are definitely starting to draw preliminary conclusions, needed or not. At Scientific American, Glenn Starkman has a piece entitled At CERN: Down in the Mouth in Paradise which paints a sorry picture of the situation caused by SUSY not showing herself:

The Standard Model is absurdly fine-tuned, we were told – balanced on a knife-edge off which it has no right not to tumble. It has an un-natural hierarchy of scales. It has too many free parameters, and some of them are very, very small. Why, the electron mass is less than 0.00001 times the weak scale (the energy scale governing weak interactions such as the W and Z boson masses), which is itself 10-17 (that 0.0000000000000001) times the Planck scale (the energy scale governing gravity)! And speaking of gravity, the Standard Model can’t accommodate quantum gravity. We need Low-Energy Supersymmetry, or Technicolor, or Large Extra Dimensions, or … One of these MUST be found at the LHC!

Forty years of theoretical work has been based on these expectations. Papers with thousands of citations have been written. Courses taught. Textbooks published.

Prizes awarded! Illustrious careers navigated! And yet despite all this build up of theoretical expectations, there is no experimental hint of anything outside the Standard Model at the LHC. Hence the long faces and worried words wherever theorists gather to drink coffee. Hence the disappointment in the eyes of the young experimentalists looking forward to the next accelerator, the next frontier where their mark will be made…

Walk the halls, go to theory seminars, have lunch with a theorist, or an ambitious young experimentalist. Look for the classic symptoms of grief.

Denial. Vigorous debates about whether the fact that the dog did not bark in the night suggests that it is a Chihuahua or a Rottweiler. My friends – at some point if there is no barking, we must conclude there is no dog.

Anger. At those of us “misguided” enough to doubt the imminence or even the necessity of Beyond the Standard Model physics.

Bargaining. Perhaps BSM physics has not been discovered because we’ve been demanding too much explanatory power from science. If we just relax our expectations for the predictivity of science, and introduce a multitude of universes in which we occupy a particular one best suited to our existence, then we can let our extensions to the Standard Model be un-natural, many of their properties unpredictable, and explain why they haven’t been discovered yet!

Depression…

We’re not ready for Acceptance! At least, sitting here listening to the LHC hum, I can still hope.

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 9 Comments

Assorted Links

Posted on November 23, 2012 by woit
  • 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.

Posted in Uncategorized | 34 Comments

Scrutinizing the Cosmological Constant Problem

Posted on November 20, 2012 by woit

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | 26 Comments

Latest from Arkani-Hamed, Ellis and Gross

Posted on November 20, 2012 by woit

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | 36 Comments

New Higgs Results

Posted on November 13, 2012 by woit

New results about the Higgs should appear over the next day or so, perhaps first here and here. First to appear is the CMS tau-tau result which is a signal strength of .72 +/- .52 the SM value.

Will update this posting with the results as they appear.

I guess the rumors were right: no update from ATLAS for gamma-gamma, they’re just presenting the earlier data: signal strength of 1.8 +/- .5 times the SM value. “Ambitious campaign underway to include a larger data-set.”

ATLAS WW channel signal strength is 1.5 +/- .6 times the SM value (see here). For some reason they are only using 2012 8 TeV data, not combining with the 7 TeV data.

Atlas tau-tau signal strength is .7 +/- .64 times the SM value (see here). Very similar to the CMS value. They are not yet sensitive to the bb channel, where the Tevatron has the advantage and has evidence of a signal.

Update: All new results are out now, but rather anti-climactic since neither CMS nor ATLAS is reporting new results for the channel with the strongest signal (gamma-gamma), where the signal strength may be anomalously high. ATLAS is also not reporting for the other high statistics channel (ZZ). CMS is, with signal strength .8 +.35/-.28 the SM value. They also claim to rule out (at 2.5 sigma) the hypothesis that this is a pseudoscalar rather than scalar. Everything reported is in line with the SM, but for the most interesting numbers we may have to wait until next March (Moriond).

For much more details about all this, see Tommaso Dorigo here and here, Matt Strassler here and here, Philip Gibbs here. For primary sources, CMS here, ATLAS here, presentations here.

Update: For another excellent source, see Jester, who has the scoop on why ATLAS and CMS didn’t update some channels:

It came to a point where the most exciting thing about the new Higgs release was what wasn’t there 🙂 It is difficult not to notice that the easy Higgs search channels, h→γγ and ATLAS h→ZZ→4l, were not updated. In ATLAS, the reason was the discrepancy between the Higgs masses measured in those 2 channels: the best fit mass came out 123.5 GeV in the h→ZZ→4l, and 126.5 GeV in the h→γγ channel. The difference is larger than the estimated mass resolution, therefore ATLAS decided to postpone the update in order to carefully investigate the problem. On the other hand in CMS, after unblinding the new analysis in the h→γγ channel, the signal strength went down by more than they were comfortable with; in particular the new results are not very consistent with what was presented on the 4th of July. Most likely, all these analyses will be released before the end of the year, after more cross-checking is done.

Update: Two interesting workshops on prospects for a Higgs factory are being held at Fermilab this week. See here for one that is on-going, see here for Tuesday’s one-day mini-workshop on prospects for a muon collider Higgs factory. I’d never seen much before about the idea of using a gamma-gamma collider to study the Higgs, curious if that’s really technologically viable.

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 20 Comments

SUSY in the Hospital?

Posted on November 13, 2012 by woit

HCP2012 Higgs results will be announced Wednesday (I’m hearing that CMS tau-tau signal is .7 +/- .5 x the SM value), but interest may focus much more on the strong SUSY exclusions being announced there. So far the LHCb result on B(s)->mu+mu- has been the one getting all the attention, with a BBC News story describing it as “a significant blow to the theory of physics known as supersymmetry”. In the story experimentalist Chris Parkes describes the current situation as “Supersymmetry may not be dead but these latest results have certainly put it into hospital.” John Ellis is having none of this though:

Supporters of supersymmetry, however, such as Prof John Ellis of King’s College London said that the observation is “quite consistent with supersymmetry”.

“In fact,” he said “(it) was actually expected in (some) supersymmetric models. I certainly won’t lose any sleep over the result.”

The story has been picked up by Slashdot, and the Register (which has Supersymmetry takes an arrow to the knee).

The bad news for SUSY out of Kyoto however does not end there. ATLAS and CMS are both coming out with new analyses using this year’s 8 TeV data which significantly expand previous limits on SUSY, getting close to ruling out popular last-ditch efforts to save the theory. For the latest, look at this HCP2012 page, this ongoing Chicago workshop, and CMS results announced here (like this), ATLAS results announced here.

The last ditch effort to save the idea that SUSY solves the so-called hierarchy problem goes under the name of “Natural Supersymmetry”. It involves moving most superpartners to high masses where the LHC can’t see them, keeping only the stop, sbottom, gluinos, and a couple neutralinos at LHC accessible masses. If you look at the bounds given on these masses for instance here, and compare to the latest LHC results, you’ll see that there’s trouble on all fronts for this idea, which is now very close to being essentially ruled out.

Gordon Kane is fighting back against the BBC by going to Lubos Motl’s blog to argue that the LHCb result is no problem for his string theory “predictions”. You see, his “prediction” is now that most superpartners are way beyond what the LHC can see, so not only is the LHCb result not negative for SUSY, but it “adds to the evidence for supersymmetry and for M/string theories”. Kane doesn’t mention any of the other SUSY excluding results coming out this week, or their implications for his “prediction” of the gluino mass. Last year Kane was telling Tommaso Dorigo

I and others expect this decay to tops and bottoms is the signature by which gluinos will be found, with masses well below a TeV

and his slides had a gluino mass prediction of about 600 GeV. Late last year he was arguing that the gluinos would be seen by this past summer. More recently, he’s modified the graph in his slides to move the gluino up to 1 TeV. This week ATLAS reports a new gluino mass limit of 1.24 TeV, so Kane will have to modify his slides yet again.

The combined effect of the bad press and the devastating experimental results on the 30 year old SUSY juggernaut will be interesting to follow. At this point, it is hard to see how one could rationally expect anything positive for SUSY to come out of further analyses of the 7 TeV and 8 TeV data. I suppose many will try and delay acknowledging failure by saying one must wait for the 13 TeV data, which we won’t see until 2015 or so, but I don’t think this is going to convince many people.

Update: Matt Strassler objects to the BBC article, on the grounds that one should not describe what is happening to SUSY in terms of “blows” or it getting hurt. Instead, one should stick to saying it is getting “cornered”, and he agrees that “the cornering of supersymmetry is well underway”. The question this raises though is what happens to SUSY once it is cornered if you object to it getting hurt. I suspect the hope of many SUSY theorists is that even once cornered, SUSY will continue to be well-treated, receiving annual $3 million prizes and being taught to new generations of graduate students.

Update: The Daily Mail covers this, with the non-tabloid-like headline Experts take conflicting opinions as to how far results support the theory of super symmetry. Oliver Buchmueller joins Gordon Kane in the bizarre game of claiming negative results as positive for SUSY, making the argument

‘This is another piece in the puzzle and with it the world appears even more SM-like,’ he said. ‘It supports SUSY, because that is the only theory that can include the Standard Model in a wider concept of New Physics.’

Update: More about this from Matt Strassler, who writes about Theory Killers at the HCP conference. I guess it’s still all right to kill “theories”, as long as SUSY herself doesn’t get hurt.

Update: The rather odd controversy over the BBC story goes on, with Lubos Motl and Matt Strassler continuing to argue that the scientific method implies that SUSY can’t get hurt. I would have thought that it was uncontroversial that if proponents of an idea claimed that it would be vindicated by an experiment, and the experimental result came back negative, that was not good for the idea, but, at least for SUSY, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Yes, SUSY comes in infinite varieties, many of them never testable, but the experimental results shooting down its versions sold as the most well-motivated ones do have implications for its health. I see no reason why one needs to wait for the LHC to examine every possible remote corner of parameter space that it can access before remarking on what has happened.

Update: It is being pointed out that the BBC story is inaccurate: the LHCb bounds on Bs meson decays that rule out a large chunk of SUSY theory space were already there in March. So, on this front SUSY entered the hospital in March, not this past week. Of course, an even bigger inaccuracy in the BBC story was describing SUSY as an idea that has only encountered serious health problems recently, rather than many years ago…

Update: There’s now a fourth rant from Matt Strassler about the LHCb result, a topic on which he has become a bit of a zealot. The point being made is that SUSY was already so badly injured pre-LHCb that they didn’t make things any worse. It’s quite possible he’s right about this, would be interesting to hear a response from the LHCb people.

Update: A characteristically lucid posting on the topic from Jester: BS and SUSY.

To conclude, you should interpret the LHCb measurement of the Bs→μμ branching fraction as a general, strong bound on theories on new physics coupled to leptons and, in a flavor violating way, to quarks. In the context of SUSY, however, there are far better reasons to believe her dead (flavor, CP, hierarchy problem, direct searches). So one should not view Bs→μμ as the SUSY killer, but as just another handful of earth upon the coffin 😉

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 52 Comments

HCP2012

Posted on November 9, 2012 by woit

The Hadron Collider Physics Symposium will be next week in Kyoto, with announcements of new results from the LHC, some details of which are starting to trickle in. Chris Quigg explains what to look for here.

The LHC has just recently passed the milestone of 20 fb-1 of data at 8 TeV this year. Perhaps this will get up to 25 fb-1 by the end of this run later this year. After a heavy ion run early next year the machine will go into a long shutdown (until late 2014) for repairs to allow operation at close to design energy (probably at 13 TeV). Next week results will be reported based on 12 fb-1 (CMS) and 13 fb-1 (ATLAS) of this year’s 8 TeV data (compare to this past summer’s results based on 5.3 fb-1 (CMS) and 5.9 fb-1 (ATLAS)). Expect results from the full 2012 data at Moriond in March, with an official combination of results from the two experiments next summer.

On Monday LHCb will report the latest results on B(s)->mu+mu-, and the latest Higgs news should come at the Higgs parallel session on Wednesday. There will also be quite a few new, stronger limits on SUSY.

I’m hearing that these new results already can rule out the idea that this new particle is a pseudo-scalar. There will be no confirmation of an unexpectedly high gamma-gamma rate. Some excesses in the tau-tau channel are being seen, of roughly the size you would expect for a SM Higgs. So, all in all, things are still consistent with a SM Higgs. If not, please let me know….

Update: The B(s)->mu+mu- results from LHCb are out (see here), providing good agreement with the SM, and new, strong limits on possible SUSY models (see the last slide). More from Matt Strassler and Michael Schmitt.

For another source for new LHC results, together with interpretation of their signficance, the Chicago 2012 Workshop on LHC Physics is starting today.

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 26 Comments

A Lost Generation?

Posted on November 4, 2012 by woit

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?

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on A Lost Generation?

Latest Links

Posted on October 26, 2012 by woit
  • 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!

Posted in Uncategorized | 32 Comments

Why Author Pays Open Access is a Bad Idea

Posted on October 20, 2012 by woit

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | 50 Comments