Science, and a Bit of Religion

Posted on January 22, 2008 by woit

Some things I’ve run across in the last few days:

This month’s Scientific American is devoted to The Future of Physics, a special report made up of three excellent articles on the LHC machine, the standard model and its discontents, and plans for the ILC. The articles all avoid hyping string theory or other science fiction and instead stick to real, serious material about HEP. Congratulations to the people at SciAm, everyone should go out now and buy a copy of this month’s magazine to encourage them. Chad Orzel and other non-HEP physicists are peeved that the “Future of Physics” business is a misnomer, since it should have been titled the “Future of HEP Physics”. They’re right. Still, the articles are good, so they shouldn’t hold the headline business too much against the magazine.

The LHC still has no up-to-date schedule available, but looking at the latest news about the commissioning and comparing to old schedules, it seems to me that if all goes well from now on, the machine should be cooled down and ready to be checked out in late summer, with beam commissioning during the fall, and, maybe, a short physics run late in the year.

Witten and Kontsevich were awarded the Crafoord prize, for “for their important contributions to mathematics inspired by modern theoretical physics”. This is certainly well-deserved for both of them. One doesn’t know where to start in listing Witten’s contributions of this kind, and Kontsevich’s ideas about “homological mirror symmetry” have had dramatic impact on mathematics, leading to a whole new field of study. There’s an article about this at Science where Witten claims to be “totally startled” to be recognized for his achievements in mathematics. Not sure why a Fields medalist would get startled about this… Witten and Kontsevich get $125,000 each.

The first Eisenbud prize for a paper written during the last 6 years that brings together mathematics and physics was awarded to Ooguri, Strominger and Vafa for their 2004 paper Black Hole Attractors and the Topological String. They share $5000.

Last week there was a conference at the Fields Institute in Toronto on Mathematical Physics and Geometric Analysis, featuring series of talks by Victor Guillemin and Shlomo Sternberg, with lecture notes available online. Sternberg’s lectures give a careful discussion of some of the differences in conventions between physicists and mathematicians, the Higgs mechanism and Weinberg angle, various facts about spinors, and the models he worked out with Ne’eman that use superconnections to unify Higgs and fermions. In these models he gets a prediction of the Higgs mass, as twice the W-mass, about 160 Gev. Coincidentally, Tommaso Dorigo reports on the Higgs search at the Tevatron, which is getting close to being able to exclude the existence of a Higgs in a small energy range: around 160 GeV.

From Dave Bacon, an odd story about a recent arXiv withdrawal. I have no idea what this is really about.

The Templeton Foundation continues to spend a lot of money on a wide variety of projects, many having something to do with physics. At FQXI, the request for proposals to be funded in 2008 is now closed. Their community web-site includes several interesting articles on topics in theoretical physics. In “breaking news”, they report proudly that several of their members were in the recent NYT article on Boltzmann Brains.

Also funded by Templeton is the CTNS STARS (Science and Transcendence Advanced Research Series) grant program, which recently announced $100,000 grants to five groups, one of which includes my Columbia colleagues Brian Greene and philosopher David Albert.

Yet another Templeton-funded endeavor is a new science and religion library at Cambridge University, where, at a cost of $2 million or so, the International Society for Science and Religion will choose 250 books for the library, coming out to about $8000 each. I haven’t yet heard from them, but will be happy to provide a copy of my book at a modest fraction of that price.

Posted in Uncategorized | 16 Comments

Updates

Posted on January 16, 2008 by woit
  • On the HEP budget problem front, Adrian Cho has an interview with Ray Orbach of the DOE. Orbach is not very encouraging on the prospects for a supplemental FY 2008 appropriation:

    … my assumption is that the last thing that Congress or the president wants is a decorated supplemental. Because, you come in for the Office of Science, and there will be somebody else coming in, and before you know it, the thing will be enormous. … My guess is that it would be very hard to single out a particular program for a supplemental.

    He does promise a very healthy FY 2009 proposed increase:

    Now, I can’t tell you, obviously, the details of the president’s budget for ’09, but I can tell you that it will be a wonderful budget request. And because ’08 has been difficult for us, the gap between ’08 and ’09 will be large.

    He notes that the DOE and the president are convinced of the importance of supporting HEP research, that the problem is with the Congress:

    I think now the high-energy physics community understands how Congress feels and has a job on its hands to explain why it should be supported at the level of the president’s request.

    He doesn’t shed any light on the continuing mystery of who exactly in Congress made the decision to target HEP for cuts or what their thinking was, leaving it still unclear who it is that the HEP community is supposed to be making its case to. It would be nice to know this before next Christmas, since if this person or person doesn’t change their minds before then, most of the US experimental HEP community may want to make permanent plans to either emigrate or go into a different line of work.

    I’ve heard nothing about the effects of the FY 2008 budget on particle theory or string theory funding. Perhaps the plan of whoever is responsible for this is that the US should shift out of supporting experimental HEP research, and concentrate on string theory and anthropic landscape research, where it continues to hold a leadership position.

  • Nature has an article entitled Experimental cosmology: cosmos in a bottle about condensed matter analogs of black holes and physics related to cosmology. One topic covered is the recent bogus claim to “test string theory” using interfaces in liquid helium to model branes. Paul Steinhardt notes one of many problems with this idea, that “string branes are flat and attract one another, whereas the helium-3 ‘branes’ are curved and have no attractive force.” Joe Polchinski on the other hand is more enthusiastic, since any prediction could have a big impact. “You never know what you might find” he says.
  • The string theory hype machine remains in overdrive, putting out nonsense press releases at an unparalleled rate. This week’s string theory hype is from Japan, where KEK has put out a press release claiming Interior Structure of a Black Hole Computed Using Superstrings, which tell us that:

    It is expected that superstring theory will develop further and play an important role in solving interesting problems such as the evaporation of black holes, the state of the early universe and the creation of everything.

    The actual calculation behind the hype is a numerical simulation of a supersymmetric quantum mechanics system, which is described here.

    • Posted in Experimental HEP News, This Week's Hype | 21 Comments

    Have Cosmologists Lost Their Brains?

    Posted on January 15, 2008 by woit

    There’s a peculiar long article in the New York Times science section today by Dennis Overbye, entitled Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs? It’s about the debate raging among a small number of cosmologists about “Boltzmann Brains”, and the article does a pretty good job of explaining what the debate is about.

    This seems to be a debate that is mostly taken seriously by people who live near the coast in California, with the article quoting Susskind and Linde (Palo Alto), Lisa Dyson and Raphael Bousso (Berkeley), Hartle and Srednicki (Santa Barbara), Albrecht and Sorbo (Davis), and Sean Carroll (Pasadena). One of the few from further inland who is quoted is Don Page (Edmonton), described as a “prominent voice in the Boltzmann debate” who argues with Hartle over the issue of whether to count humans differently than insects since we have consciousness. Page’s recent arguments that God may like having lots of universes around are not quoted. On the other hand , Andrei Linde has a lot to say about what all this has to do with reincarnation, with the article ending with this quote from him:

    “If you are reincarnated, why do you care about where you are reincarnated?” he asked. “It sounds crazy because here we are touching issues we are not supposed to be touching in ordinary science. Can we be reincarnated?”

    “People are not prepared for this discussion,” Dr. Linde said.

    Overbye does note that:

    If you are inclined to skepticism this debate might seem like further evidence that cosmologists, who gave us dark matter, dark energy and speak with apparent aplomb about gazillions of parallel universes, have finally lost their minds.

    and, while he doesn’t quote any such skeptics, I suspect the title of the piece and the way he quotes some of the sillier things respectable cosmologists are saying indicates some sympathy for skepticism about this.

    If you do take all this seriously, you might want to discuss it over at Cosmic Variance where Sean has a posting on the topic. In the NYT piece he is quoted as saying:

    When you break an egg and scramble it you are doing cosmology

    to which his ex-colleague Jeff Harvey from Chicago responds in the comment section:

    When I break an egg and scramble it I’m making breakfast. I guess that is the difference between cosmologists and particle physicists.

    Update: The New York Times is listing this article as the most popular article on their site (in terms of how many people are e-mailing it to others).

    Posted in Multiverse Mania | 24 Comments

    Update on Plagiarism Scandal

    Posted on January 10, 2008 by woit

    Last summer I wrote here about a plagiarism scandal involving more than 60 arXiv preprints, more than thirty of which were refereed and published in at least 18 different physics journals, some of them quite prestigious ones (see also the page at Eureka Journal Watch). At the time I wondered what action the journals involved in this scandal would take in response to it. Nearly six months later the answer to this question is now in: essentially none at all. As far as I can tell, almost uniformly the journals involved don’t seem to have a problem at all with being used to publish plagiarized material.

    Unlike the journals, the arXiv has taken action. It has withdrawn the papers, replaced their abstracts with lists of where they plagiarized from, and put up a web-page explaining all of this. After the scandal became public, one journal, JHEP, did withdraw the one rather egregious example of plagiarism it had published. This was only done after JHEP originally refused to do anything about this when first contacted last March, arguing that since the plagiarized articles were cited in the paper it was all right, and besides, they would only consider doing something if the plagiarized authors filed a formal complaint. Copies of the correspondence about this (and much else) are at this web-site.

    The nature of the plagiarism varied greatly among the papers withdrawn by the arXiv. Sometimes all that was involved was self-plagiarism (large parts of one paper were identical with others submitted by some of the same authors), but mostly what was being plagiarized was the contents of papers by others. Mustafa Salti, a graduate student at METU, had his name on 40 of the withdrawn papers, many of which have been published in well-known journals. I checked a few of the online published journal articles corresponding to the withdrawn papers and, besides the JHEP paper, I didn’t find any others where the online journal article gave any indication that the paper was known to be plagiarized.

    A more complicated case is that of Ihsan Yilmaz, where the arXiv lists three of his eight arXiv preprints as withdrawn due to plagiarism and one as withdrawn due to “excessive overlap” with two other papers of which he was co-author. Very recently one of his Physical Review D papers, a paper that was not one of the ones on the arXiv, was retracted with the notation:

    The author withdraws this article from publication because it copies text, totaling more than half of the article, from the articles listed below. The author apologizes to the authors of these papers and to the publishers whose copyright was violated.

    After the scandal broke, Yilmaz had a letter published in Nature where he justified the sort of plagiarism found in his articles, claiming “using beautiful sentences from other studies on the same subject in our introductions is not unusual.” Evidently the editors of the journal General Relativity and Gravitation agreed with Yilmaz. They decided not to do anything about the papers they had published that were withdrawn from the arXiv, writing an editorial in which they defended the papers, while noting that “we do not regard such word for word copying of introductory and descriptive material by others as acceptable.”

    I heard about the GRG editorial via an e-mail from a group of the faculty at METU, who write that:

    The note is clearly quite unacceptable and insufficient in the fight against plagiarism. We cannot help but ask whether the Editors seriously believe that those who cannot compose their own sentences are in fact capable of producing genuine research worthy of publishing in General Relativity and Gravitation.

    and note the retraction of the Physical Review D article, which they regard as a much more appropriate response

    Update: Someone helpfully sent me pdfs of the two GRG articles, marked up to identify the plagiarized passages. Looking at these, I find it hard to understand why any journal would not withdraw such papers if they made the mistake of publishing them.

  • Topological defect solutions in the spherically symmetric space-time admitting conformal motion, I.Yilmaz, M. Aygun and S. Aygun. This was gr-qc/0607104, published version Gen.Rel.Grav. 37 (2005) 2093-2104. The arXiv describes it as “having excessive overlap with the following papers also written by the authors or their collaborators: hep-th/0505013 and 0705.2930.”
  • Magnetized Quark and Strange Quark Matter in the Spherical Symmetric Space-Time Admitting Conformal Motion, C. Aktas and I. Yilmaz. This was arXiv:0705.2930, published version Gen.Rel.Grav. 39 (2007) 849-862. The arXiv describes it as “it plagiarizes astro-ph/0611537, astro-ph/0506256, astro-ph/0203033, astro-ph/0311128, gr-qc/0505144, astro-ph/0611460, and astro-ph/0610840.”

    • Update: The journal Astrophysics and Space Science is retracting four of the plagiarized papers, by putting up errata on-line which appeared today and are dated January 11, 2008, saying:

    After investigation and at the request of the President of the Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Turkey, the Editors of Astrophysics and Space Science have decided to retract this paper due to extensive plagiarism of work by others.

    The papers involved are gr-qc/0505079, gr-qc/0602012, gr-qc/0508018, gr-qc/0509022.

    Posted in Uncategorized | 150 Comments

    More on FY 2008 HEP Budget Cuts

    Posted on January 10, 2008 by woit

    The disastrous US HEP budget cuts that were announced just before Christmas, a quarter of the way into the fiscal year, have been getting a lot more attention from bloggers now that the holiday season is over, and their implications are starting to become clear. There are new blog posts from HEP bloggers Tommaso Dorigo, Alexey Petrov, Gordon Watts, and Michael Schmitt (as well as non-HEP blogger Chad Orzel).

    It seems to me that Gordon Watts has it about right, entitling his posting “Screwed by the Democrats”. As far as I can tell, very few people know who it was that made the last-minute decision to hit HEP with these huge budget cuts targeted at its future programs or what their justification for this was. Presumably this was done by certain staff members of the heads of the relevant Congressional committees. Gordon explains how all the evidence points to physics getting cut precisely because the relevant parts of the executive branch had made it a priority in their proposed budget. When the Democrats lost the game of chicken that they and the White House were playing with the budget, and had to find some way to make cuts at the last minute, things that were an administration priority were first in line to get cut. So, HEP lost out here not because it has done a bad job at making its case, but because it did too good a job….

    One reason that these large cuts had to be made was the decision by the Congressional leadership not to do what they had done last year, which was to cut all earmarks from the DOE budget. A new AAAS analysis concludes that the new budget contains $4.5 billion in R and D earmarks, and that the DOE and Department of Agriculture were the most heavily earmarked R and D agencies.

    Some bloggers have suggested that physicists need to redouble their efforts in public education about HEP, but I think Gordon is a bit closer to the right idea, as he has sent $250 as a campaign contribution to Bill Foster, a Fermilab physicist who is running for Congress. Probably even more effective would be if the APS would put out a web-page explaining exactly which of our Congressional representatives were responsible for deciding to hit HEP with these cuts. If they would do that we could then all write to these people saying that we appreciate their public service and include a large check for a campaign contribution, at the same time mentioning that HEP funding happens to be a big personal concern. This seems to be how US democracy works these days: you need to pay to not get screwed, and we haven’t been paying…

    As for what the effects of these cuts are, there’s more news coverage here, here, here, here, and here (Fermilab has a web-page of links here). Here is the text of SLAC director Persis Drell’s talk at an All Hands meeting there. The effect of the cuts on SLAC will include having to lay-off 125 people and shut down the B-factory at the beginning of March. Layoffs will be announced in early February, with people leaving their jobs in early April. Senator Durbin of Illinois is talking about an effort to add money for Fermilab to the Iraq War “emergency funding” bill the Senate will be taking up this spring, but says “It won’t be a huge amount… I don’t want to suggest to anyone we will make them whole.” It’s unclear whether this is a realistic possibility, or just Durbin trying to look like he is doing something about this.

    Update: Here’s a letter about this from Dennis Kovar at the DOE. There’s a detailed article about the situation by Adrian Cho at Science magazine.

    Posted in Experimental HEP News | 34 Comments

    This Week’s Hype

    Posted on January 3, 2008 by woit

    New Scientist had the good sense to pass on last week’s hype about string theory testability, but is responsible for this week’s hype on the subject, with an article entitled String theory may predict our universe after all. It’s unclear why the article is appearing now, since it is based on a six-month-old preprint from a group at Oxford entitled Triadophilia: A Special Corner of the Landscape.

    The authors basically just point out that there are very few known Calabi-Yau manifolds with small Hodge numbers, which thus have a small enough Euler characteristic to give just three generations. They speculate that some unknown dynamical vacuum selection mechanism favors these particular manifolds. In their paper they look only at the topology of the manifolds, so the only “prediction” about our universe is that the number of generations will be small, and this “prediction” is based on assuming an unknown dynamics that favors small numbers of generations.

    There has been a huge industry since the late 1980s devoted to trying to extract physics out of the sorts of Calabi-Yaus studied by the Oxford group. This hasn’t gotten very far, with rather elaborate mathematical constructions being used to try and get the quantum numbers of the standard model particles to come out right. One problem with this is that one is not even sure that this is what one wants, since maybe the LHC will find more particles. The groups pursuing this strategy don’t seem to have taken much interest in the Candelas et. al paper, since SPIRES shows that no one has cited it during the last six months.

    It looks like 2008 is not going to show any slackening of the promotion by string theorists of bogus “Despite what the critics say, string theory really is predictive!” stories to the press. This one contains quotes from Polchinski that the paper is “neat” and “Maybe it gives us a clue”, and from Strominger that it is “beautiful”. Strominger also minimizes the fact that the Landscape is a problem for string theory, saying:

    I don’t think it is incumbent upon string theory to solve the problem of the landscape… If we can’t make the landscape go away, it doesn’t mean that string theory is wrong. It just means it is not a complete solution to all our problems.

    Michael Duff says the paper makes “some mathematically sound and interesting observations”, but does note that it doesn’t explain what selects small Hodge numbers, which is about the only slight amount of non-hype that makes it into the article.

    Update: As a commenter here points out, the New Year also brings new progress on the scientific investigation of the landscape/multiverse, with a preprint from Don Page about how God loves all universes, not just ours.

    Posted in This Week's Hype | 47 Comments

    End-of-year Links

    Posted on December 30, 2007 by woit

    Every year around this time the Edge web-site posts responses from a large number of scientists to some particular question. This year the question is “What have you changed your mind about? Why?”, and the results should be posted tomorrow. John Baez has posted his answer here. He writes that he changed his mind about the question of whether he should be thinking about quantum gravity after he realized “the more work we did, the more I realized I didn’t know what questions we should be asking!”, and compares the effort to “throwing darts in a darkened room and hoping to hit the bull’s-eye.” Since changing his mind he has been working on other things, and feels that as a result “I’m making more real progress understanding the universe than I ever did before.”

    I think I share John’s point of view on this in many ways, even though I’ve never actively worked on a quantum gravity research project. The problem with quantum gravity research has always seemed to me that, since you can’t measure quantum gravitational effects, you’re in great danger of coming up with lots and lots of “quantum gravities”, but unable to ever know which if any of them has anything to do with the real world. This is kind of what has happened with string theory in recent years. One hope has always been that one will find a mathematically uniquely compelling model, but that has yet to happen. To me the best bet has always been that one might understand quantum gravity by unifying it with the standard model, in a compelling way such that the unified theory explains some of the things the standard model leaves unresolved. This hope was also behind much of the original interest in string theory: it wasn’t just a quantum theory of gravity, but also a theory of particle physics that could be tested.

    Like John, I think we still have a long ways to go towards understanding at a deep enough level how quantum field theories really work, and how the internal symmetries of particle physics and the space-time symmetries of gravity can be unified into a more fundamental structure. Progress towards this goal may even require new mathematics, and this means there are all sorts of things to think about and work on.

    One person who hasn’t changed his mind about some things is Lubos Motl. According to his latest posting, I’m

    …a typical incompetent, power-thirsty, active moron of the kind who often destroy whole countries if they get a chance to do it.

    The arXiv puts out charts each year showing the number of submissions by category, the ones for 2007 are now available here. Commentary about this here and here. The general trend is that quite a few years ago the number of HEP papers leveled off, as just about all of them were posted on the arXiv. The number of math papers is still growing quickly, it is only recently that posting math preprints to the arXiv has become a widespread practice. While mathematicians probably write papers at a slower rate than physicists, there are a lot more mathematicians than particle physicists.

    The end of 2007 has brought one undesirable change. Recently I was down in Princeton, and found out that the University Store, traditionally one of the best places in the world to buy math and physics books, has now gone out of the book-selling business, turning it over the Labyrinth Books. The new Labyrinth store has some math and physics books, but far, far fewer. Maybe they just are getting started, and 2008 will bring better news about this.

    This past summer Terry Tomboulis posted a preprint claiming to have a proof of confinement. Recently there has been a note posted on the arXiv by Ito and Seiler claiming to have found a problem with his proof, and a response from him claiming there is no problem. I’d love to hear from an expert who has taken the time to follow these arguments carefully and can explain what is going on here.

    For a recent article by Arthur Jaffe surveying the history of rigorous studies of quantum field theory, see here.

    Heading off late tomorrow for a 9 day vacation in Paris. Blogging will probably be light to non-existent and it will take me longer to get around to deleting comments. Please don’t feed the trolls.

    Best wishes to all for the new year….

    Posted in Uncategorized | 20 Comments

    This Week’s Hype

    Posted on December 27, 2007 by woit

    Over the past year or so, as public awareness has grown that string theory is a failed idea about unification due to its inherent untestability, I’ve been surprised by the way in which many in the string theory community have chosen to deal with this. Instead of just honestly admitting what the problems are and describing the sensible reasons to keep working on string theory despite them, some have decided instead that the thing to do is to go to the press with misleading and dishonest claims that string theory really is testable.

    The endless examples of this in New Scientist are probably best ignored, but this week’s example is being promoted in the highly respectable journal Nature. It’s all based on this letter to Nature from a group of condensed matter physicists at Lancaster University, now prominently highlighted as an “Advance Online Publication” at the Nature Physics web-site. The authors describe an experiment in which they manipulate the boundary between phases in a superfluid, showing that when such boundaries come together, one gets left-over in the remaining phase the well-known topological defects that one would expect.

    The Nature letter itself makes rather ridiculous claims that this kind of otherwise unremarkable phenomenon is somehow closely related to brane cosmology and string theory. The authors do note that

    The precise correspondence between the 3He phase interface and a cosmological brane is still a matter of discussion, the closest correspondence probably being to the D-brane. For the present purposes we may note that the correspondences are as much topological as specific.

    While the letter makes no explicit claims about “testing” string theory, the press release issued by Lancaster is the usual sort of dishonest nonsense:

    Low-temperature physicists at Lancaster University may have found a laboratory test of the ‘untestable’ string theory.

    The test – which uses two distinct phases of liquid helium – is reported online this week in Nature Physics (published 23 December). Their paper will also be published as the cover article in the paper edition of Nature Physics in January.

    String theory is a multidimensional theory based on vibrating strings, as opposed to the point particles described in the Standard Model.

    Within string theory, a brane is a large surface embedded in higher dimensional space — our Universe could occupy such a brane.

    A collision between a brane and an antibrane can leave behind topological defects, including perhaps the Big Bang itself. But however elegant this theory, it makes no falsifiable predictions, or at least none using current technology.

    Richard Haley and the ULT Group have taken a lateral step to address this barrier….

    Similar wording is used in a press release put out by Nature about this.

    Nature has a relatively reasonable news story by Geoff Brumfiel about this, but also an article by string theorist Cliff Burgess hyping string cosmology (“The subject of string cosmology is a hot one these days, with theoretical advances in understanding string dynamics riffing with recent precise observations of the cosmic microwave background”) and the relevance of the Lancaster group’s work to it. He mostly sticks to hype in its pure form, just devoting one paragraph to the actual scientific result. There he ends up acknowledging that this actually has nothing to do with string theory in the following rather ludicrous way:

    The quality of the details of the comparison between 3He and cosmology is not really the point. Like a tap-dancing snake, what is amazing is not that it is done well, but that it is done at all.

    After this he shifts gears to start hyping AdS/CFT, without mentioning that this has nothing to do with the Lancaster group’s claims that he is writing about.

    The whole point of this kind of exercise is to generate misleading articles in the press that will convince some people that string theory really is testable. This seems to be working well, there’s already one entitled “Test tube universe” hints at underlying theory in the Telegraph, which tells the public that:

    A “universe in a test tube” that could be used to assess theories of everything has been created by physicists…

    The Holy Grail of physics is to establish an overarching explanation to unite all the particles and forces of the cosmos. But one of the complaints commonly levelled at a leading contender for a “theory of everything”, called string theory, is that it is impossible to test.

    But now, according to the study in the journal Nature Physics, it may be possible using the universe in a test tube. “It was a serendipitous discovery,” says Haley…

    For the past three decades it has been known that strings are one member of a bigger class of objects called branes, which exist in higher dimensional space, that could be extended in more than one dimension – from strings of one dimension, to membranes of two dimensions, to those of p dimensions, dubbed p-branes. Moreover string theories and p-branes are facets of one underlying 11-dimensional M theory, which suggests that we live in a brane world: a four-dimensional surface, or brane, in a higher dimensional mixture of space and time.

    People and most particles move in the brane, while the higher dimensions provide a framework to unify all forces, from gravity to those that act between atomic particles. While experiments have begun to highlight cracks in the current best theory, called “the standard model”, there is evidence that M theory’s extra hidden dimensions could be revealed next year when a Geneva atom smasher – the £4.4 billion Large Hadron Collider – begins experiments. But the Lancaster team offers another route to address this impasse.

    Update: Wired Science has an article about this entitled A Test for String Theory After All? Or Just PR?, which shows excellent judgment by linking to this posting…

    On the scientific front, it’s worse than I thought. There a conference in London at the Royal Society next month on Cosmology Meets Condensed Matter, where the head of the Lancaster group will speak, and the idea that “coherent phase boundaries mimic branes” is listed as one of the four justifications for the conference. I guess this emerging new field might best be called “Squalid-State Cosmology”.

    Update: David Appell has a posting about this, which includes a quote from Witten:

    There is definitely no test of string theory here.

    Unlike me, Witten goes on to try and find something positive to say about this.

    Update: Physics World has an article about this entitled Cosmic strings in a test tube? In the short article, one of the physicists working on this Richard Haley, is twice described as denying that this is a test of string theory, and Grisha Volovik is “adamant that the work is neither a test of sting [sic] theory…”. Despite these firm denials, the press release from Lancaster about a test of the “untestable” string theory is still up.

    Posted in This Week's Hype | 34 Comments

    Money, Money, Money

    Posted on December 26, 2007 by woit

    Theoretical physics and mathematics are much cheaper to fund than experimental particle physics. I don’t know yet what the implications of the FY 2008 budget are for these fields, but it appears that they are not facing large cuts like Fermilab. In other funding-related news:

    DARPA, a Defense Department division responsible for funding research that might lead to new technology with military applications, is soliciting applications for grants to fund pure mathematical research. In the past they have funded work on the geometric Langlands program, now they have put out a list of 23 Mathematical Challenges, illustrating what they would like to fund. These include some conventional Clay Millennium Prize problems like the Riemann Hypothesis and Hodge Conjecture, and some less conventional ones like

    Biological Quantum Field Theory
    Quantum and statistical methods have had great success modeling virus evolution. Can such techniques be used to model more complex systems such as bacteria? Can these techniques be used to control pathogen evolution?

    There’s even one I find extremely tempting:

    Geometric Langlands and Quantum Physics
    How does the Langlands program, which originated in number theory and representation theory, explain the fundamental symmetries of physics? And vice versa?

    Benjamin Mann, the program officer, explains the rationale here.

    On the question of grants, there are some interesting comments by Tom Banks in the comment section of this posting at Cosmic Variance. The posting quotes Harvard president Faust as warning lesser schools that they should get out of the business of scientific research, since Harvard is going to be vigorously and successfully competing for increasingly scarce government funding for such research. Banks describes how when he and others were trying to build up the string theory group at Rutgers

    …we never got the kind of government funding that the elite institutions have (I’m counting dollars per person). This was at a time when certain elite institutions were at a low ebb and were getting scandalously large amounts per person in return for mediocre research. And of course, in the end, two of our most successful researchers got stolen away by elite institutions.

    I guess he’s referring to Seiberg, who went to the IAS, and Shenker, who went to Stanford. I don’t know which are the “certain elite institutions” that were doing “mediocre research” that he is referring to.

    The Rutgers string theory group was originally built up when the university spent large amounts of money to bring in several prominent string theorists. One version of this story that I heard was that a Rutgers official called up Dan Friedan one day in his office, and asked him what it would take to get him and several other well-known string theorists to move there. Friedan had no interest in going to Rutgers, so made up what he considered an absurd list of demands (huge salaries, lots of postdocs, new building, little or no teaching, etc., etc…). The official thanked him and then hung up, with Friedan convinced he’d never hear any more about this. A couple hours later though, the phone rang again. It was the same official, telling Friedan that they would be more than happy to meet all his demands.

    Another institution that I hear is trying to compete with the elite by starting up a new, well-funded institute for research in math and physics is Stony Brook. The money is coming from Jim Simons, as part of a donation announced last year. Some other information about donations from Simons to other institutions is available at the Simons Foundation website. This foundation is largely devoted to funding research on autism, but also describes donations to the Math for America program to recruit math teachers, as well as to Brookhaven, Stony Brook, the IAS, IHES and MSRI. Simons has been funding summer workshops at Stony Brook for several years that are largely devoted to string theory. The math department has an NSF-funded RTG program in geometry and physics, and the web-site there includes links to write-ups of some of the expository talks that are part of the program.

    Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

    Disastrous FY 2008 DOE Budget

    Posted on December 18, 2007 by woit

    The White House and the Congress, several months into the 2008 fiscal year, finally seem to have come to agreement on a budget, one that fully funds the Iraq war, but has a huge cut in the budget for DOE particle physics research. According to the AIP FYI bulletin, the DOE HEP budget for FY2007 was $751.8 million, and the White House had requested and Congressional committees agreed to $782.3 million for FY2008. The new budget agreement provides only $688.3 million, an 8.5 percent cut from last year. The cut eliminates funding for NOvA this year at Fermilab, and effectively shuts down R and D on the ILC, providing only 25% of the requested amount, much of which has already been spent.

    Pier Oddone, the director of Fermilab writes in the December 18 Fermilab Today:

    This is a body blow to the future of the ILC, the U.S. role in it and Fermilab…. These proposed cuts, which come on top of the very limited particle physics budgets of the last few years, are destructive of our field and our laboratory. There is no way to sugar-coat this… If this bill becomes law I will be discussing consequences with you in more detail. Until then, I and many others who understand this disaster in the making are trying to inform Congress and the Administration of the dire consequences to the U.S. particle physics research program. These may be unintended consequences that were not considered in the pressure-cooker atmosphere that accompanies an omnibus budget bill.

    It’s not clear to me what the prospects are for doing anything about this at this late date in the budget process.

    Update: More here, here, here and here.

    Update: Also here, here, and here. A spokesperson for Fermilab says “This is the worst funding crisis in the history of the laboratory, no exaggeration” and that one option being considered is shutting down the lab for a few months. Lederman places the blame on spending for the Iraq war and says “I’ve been around this lab since it was all farmland, and I can’t remember a crisis of this severity”. Part of the problem may be the resignation of Dennis Hastert, who had been both the House Speaker and the representative for the district including Fermilab.

    Update: JoAnne Hewett has more at Cosmic Variance.

    Update: At an all-hands meeting at Fermilab, the director announced that the budget of the lab would be cut $52 million over what they had been expecting for the rest of the fiscal year. Dealing with this will require eliminating 200 full-time-equivalent positions, about 10% of the people working at the lab. They will immediately start shutting down ILC and NOvA, They will try and not shut-down the lab, focusing on keeping the Tevatron running, but will have a system of rolling 2 day/month furloughs, with not everyone furloughed at once. He said the first he heard about this was on Monday. It remains unclear who was responsible for this decision, which seems to have been taken in haste, with very few people involved. It also remains very unclear what this means for next year’s budget, or for the future of the ILC and NOvA.

    Part of the story here seems to have been that there was a Congressional decision to fund member’s earmarks, while cutting scientific research that was not funded this way.

    The APS has issued a press release about this which states:

    This action sends a strong message to the world: The U.S. is prepared to jettison support for one of our flagship areas of science that probes fundamental laws of the universe.

    The press release also criticizes the Congressional decision to preserve and expand earmarks while cutting other programs:

    The APS notes with some dismay that had Congress applied the same discipline to earmarking as it did last year, the damage to the science and technology enterprise could have been avoided.

    Update: One peculiar aspect of this story is how little attention it has gotten from the press (other than the local Illinois press) and from science blogs, where all I’ve seen is mention at Cosmic Variance and Tommaso Dorigo’s blog.

    The congressional representatives for the Fermilab district have put out a press release (on the Durbin and Biggert web-sites, looks like Obama couldn’t be bothered to put it up) calling on the DOE Office of Science to “increase the funding request” for HEP in the proposed FY 2009 budget. The language used seems to me to be rather weak, since it doesn’t mention either a size of increase or what base to use. See this comment that just came in for possible news about attempts to restore some of the Fermilab funding.

    Update: The Obama web-site now has the press release. There’s an article about this today in the New York Times.

    Posted in Experimental HEP News | 62 Comments