Fundamental Physics Prize

Posted on July 31, 2012 by woit

String theory may not be doing so well in the popular press or among physicists, but at least a fabulously wealthy Russian investor is a fan. Yuri Milner recently deposited \$3 million each in the bank accounts of 5 string theorists (basically the theorists at the IAS and Ashoke Sen) and four others, choosing them himself as recipients of the “Fundamental Physics Prize”. It seems he intends to keep doing this in the future, making “Fundamental Physics” a very lucrative business to be in.

Update: Now that I’m awake, I noticed what is odd about this prize, after realizing that the winners are kind of a list of the most prominent people in the field who haven’t won a Nobel Prize. What this does is turn the Nobel Prize on its head; you get it for doing work that is untestable or wrong, but that has a high profile:

Unlike the Nobel in physics, the Fundamental Physics Prize can be awarded to scientists whose ideas have not yet been verified by experiments, which often occurs decades later. Sometimes a radical new idea “really deserves recognition right away because it expands our understanding of at least what is possible,” Mr. Milner said.

Peter Higgs’s ideas from 50 years ago have finally been verified by experiment, and as a result, if he can hang in there, he may share (probably 1/3) a Nobel Prize of nearly \$1.5 million \$1.2 million (reduced recently from \$1.5 million). The Fundamental Physics Prize winners get about six 7.5 times more for ideas that have gotten a lot of hype, but no experimental test (or at least not enough to satisfy the Nobel Committee of physicists). Even better, you get the prize for your over-hyped ideas even if experiment does show them to be wrong:

Dr. Arkani-Hamed, for example, has worked on theories about the origin of the Higgs boson, the particle recently discovered at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, and about how that collider could discover new dimensions. None of his theories have been proven yet. He said several were “under strain” because of the new data.

One wonders about the implications of this for the future of theoretical physics: why should young theorists work on unpopular ideas and/or try hard to find testable ones? That will get you only \$500K \$400K, and there’s \$3 million to be had if you work instead on a speculative and untestable idea that you see on TV.

Update: The Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation has a website here. The board consists of Yuri Milner and Steven Weinberg (although it is specified that only Milner chose the prize recipients). The goal of the prize is to “bring long overdue recognition” to its recipients and “more freedom and opportunity to pursue even greater future accomplishments”. It’s not quite clear why the particle physics professors at the Institute for Advanced Study (all of whom got a prize) have been suffering from a lack of freedom and opportunity to purse their research.

Update: For a profile of Yuri Milner by Michael Wolff at Wired, see here.

Update: Geoff Brumfiel at Nature has a story about this here. Ian Sample covers the story for the Guardian here.

Update: Adrian Cho at Science reports this story as Russian Gazillionaire Lobs Money at Theoretical Physicists:

David Lee Roth, the sometimes singer for the legendary rock band Van Halen, supposedly once remarked: “Money can’t buy you happiness, but it can buy you a yacht big enough to pull up right alongside it.” If so, then nine theoretical physicists can now afford to join the next-to-happiness flotilla, thanks to the generosity of Russian billionaire Yuri Milner.

Update: Another article about Yuri Milner is here. It seems that he has had a dramatic effect on the venture capital business in Silicon Valley, with his tactics there somewhat analogous to his tactics in setting up this prize. Where Jim Simons has put a lot of effort into making carefully targeted investments of different sizes in math/physics research, Milner has just dumped large sums of Russian money indiscriminately on the main figures in the “hot” area of the subject with no-strings-attached, which is somewhat the same as his investment philosophy in Silicon Valley. He had a lot of success there with investments in things like Facebook, but it’s still to be seen whether this was a bubble that will burst. One big difference with physics though is that in the business world you’re ultimately judged on whether you make money or not. In physics you’re supposed to be judged on whether your experimental predictions turn out, but his investments in physics are structured to evade exposure to that problem.

Update: There’s an article about Sen getting the prize here. Note the headline: this is now referred to as “Physics highest honour”.

Update: Another article about this, from Luca Mazzucato, Fundamental Physics Prize: A Russian money shot for string theory which explains:

Every physics student’s wet dream when they join grad school is to ascend one day to the Olympus of Nobel Laureates, up there in the clouds with Einstein, Feynman and the like. And, of course, Barack Obama and the Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. But most grad students who score the highest points, like the proverbial fly to honey, get inevitably attracted to string theory – that is, the ones who ditch Goldman Sachs job interview. And their Nobel Prize aspirations will never have a chance of materializing – just like that dream house in the Hamptons. That’s because string theory, a.k.a. The Theory of Everything, despite its appalling beauty and tremendous fascination, is not going to come close to the real world any time soon. And since the Nobel Prize may only be awarded to those scientific predictions that pass the merciless test of experiment, that brightest students’ wet dream – alas, among many others – stands no chance of being fulfilled.

This was the status of string theory up until a week ago, when Yuri Milner – Russian tycoon, Facebook shareholder, and former theoretical physicist himself – dropped the bomb: nine overnight wire transfers to as many physicists’ bank accounts, that instantly turned the reclusive scientists into millionaires.

Update: There’s an interview at the Times of India with Sen about the prize, which includes the question and answer

How does the discovery of the Higgs boson impact your research?

It’s one of the great discoveries of our time. Its discovery has been eagerly awaited since the time Peter Higgs, the British theoretical physicist, proposed the Higgs boson 50 years ago. It tells us that standard model and string theory are correct and that I and every other theoretical physicist who has been working under the assumption that it exists are not on the wrong path after all.

This echoes David Gross and Juan Maldacena’s similar claims at Strings 2012 that evidence for the SM is evidence for string theory.

Posted in Favorite Old Posts, Uncategorized | 149 Comments

Strings 2012

Posted on July 28, 2012 by woit

The big yearly string theory conference was held this year in Munich over the past week. Strings 2012 was the latest in a series of conferences that started more than 20 years ago. I’ve now written something about so many of these things that I’ve added a category for them, so you can review the last eight years of the history of these conferences by clicking here.

This year the conference drew 385 participants, a bit lower than the 400-500 that showed up at many of these things when held in Europe in the past, but higher than last year’s 259 (conference was quite expensive) or 2010’s 193 (conference was in the middle of nowhere in Texas, off-season). The week before Strings 2012 there was String-Math 2012, which brought nearly 200 mathematicians and physicists to Bonn. This is the second in a series, which seems intended to supplement or rival Strings 2XXX, with plans already in place for String-Math 2013 (Stony Brook) and String-Math 2014 (Alberta). Unfortunately the String-Math talks have not been posted yet, although I hear there are plans to do this.

One important aspect of Strings 2XXX conferences in recent years has been their role as PR events designed to promote string theory to the public and the media, and fight the perception of a failed subject. This year a press conference was scheduled last Tuesday, but there seems to be no publicly available record of it. About the only Strings 2012 story in the press that a quick search turned up was this one, which had nothing from the press conference, but Thomas Grimm explaining how everything is fine with string theory and maybe the LHC will find extra dimensions.

Another part of the PR activity at Strings 2XXX is promotional talks for the public, which this year included one from Witten about String Theory and the Universe. In honor of the Higgs discovery Witten said that he would add material at the beginning of the talk about particles rather than strings. He is still holding out hope for SUSY at the LHC, although now down-playing the fine-tuning argument and pointing to split supersymmetry as the thing to hope for, with answers to come “within a few years”.

The question session was unusually skeptical and challenging, beginning with a very hostile and long-winded question about whether he wasn’t worried that he had led physics down a 30-year path of failure. Unfortunately the questioner was intent on making a hostile speech, and much time was wasted trying to get him to shut up so that Witten could address the question. His answer was basically that 30 years wasn’t so long, the Higgs discovery had taken 50, and he gave other such examples. I don’t think any of his examples addressed the real issue, which is not that practical tests of string theory are far away, but that it makes no predictions, even if you had the technology to test it. To defend the falsifiability of string theory he gave the dubious argument that if table-top experiments showed quantum mechanics to be wrong, that would show string theory was wrong.

Mathematician Michael Hutchings was there, and he blogs about the public talks here, including a description of the question period:

The most interesting part was the question period afterwards. The first questioner launched into a very aggressive rant about how Witten was abusing his scientific responsibility by leading thousands of people to waste their intelligence on a theory for which there is no experimental evidence. The chairman basically needed to shut him up (and should have done so earlier)….

Anyway I was kind of shocked to see such an agressive attack from the general public. I’m glad I don’t have questioners attacking me because my work does not have enough real-world applications or whatever.

This was the first Strings 2XXX post-conclusive LHC evidence ruling out the discovery of SUSY in the form expected from arguments about “naturalness” and the “hierarchy problem”. Even the talks that tried to make some contact with the real world mostly ignored the SUSY problem, but the talk of Savas Dimopoulos on What Has the LHC Done to Theory? did address this head-on. On “naturalness” he quoted Samuel Beckett (“I’d wait till it was black night before I gave up”), arguing that one should hang in there with this until the bitter end, which he saw as coming late this year or early next year after the data from the 2012 run is analyzed. His basic point of view was that there are only two choices: versions of SUSY that solve the fine-tuning or naturalness problem (which are about to be ruled out), and versions of SUSY that don’t (e.g. split SUSY), which imply the multiverse to deal with fine-tuning. The only other option discussed was “high-scale SUSY” (SUSY broken up near the Planck scale). I guess the concept of SUSY extensions of the SM just being wrong is not within the realm of conceivability, given that they are part of the standard ideology of how to connect string theory with particle physics.

The slides from the talks are available here. I didn’t notice anything really new, just much the same topics as have been popular in recent years (e.g. adS/CFT and connections to condensed matter, amplitudes, higher spins). At Strings 2011 there was a lot of comment that few of the talks involved strings and string phenomenologists were shut out. This year’s conference had more stringy talks, as well as some on string phenomenology, possibly because it was organized by Dieter Lüst and his group in Munich, which does string phenomenology. Only one multiverse talk, Ben Freivogel on Predictions from Eternal Inflation, which, not surprisingly, had no predictions (but he did ask anyone who had one to get in touch with him, since his future employment would require some).

Hiroshi Ooguri’s summary talk reviewed his summary talks from 2004 and 2008, which featured many of the same topics and much the same story. The LHC results were completely ignored, and one of his slides seemed to me just delusional:

Significant progress has been made in understanding how to derive the Standard Model of Particle Physics from Superstring Theory.

Claims of such progress have been made at every one of these conferences for more than 20 years, with actual string theory predictions getting farther and farther away. There’s a reasonable case to be made for continuing interest in string theory, but I find it hard to believe that even many string theorists seriously believe there has been progress in recent years towards using string unification to predict anything.

The one talk that hasn’t yet been posted is David Gross’s Outlook and Vision. He has given such talks at a large fraction of these conferences, so one knows pretty much what to expect. I do wonder though if he’ll address the negative LHC results about SUSY, which at some point are going to cost him money, since he has made bets on this.

Update: I suppose I should ignore Lubos, but his reaction to the questions at Witten’s talk is pretty amazing. It seems that they are somehow all my fault (and Lee Smolin’s), and he gets into the spirit of Munich of a bygone era with his “endorsement of the creation of gas chambers for this scum” [this has now been removed]. The suggested way for Strings 2XXX conferences of the future to deal with this problem is to have all questions submitted in advance to make sure there aren’t any ones like this year’s.

Update: Video of David Gross’s “Outlook and Vision talk” is now available. It struck me as much more defensive and hype-ridden than versions of this from past years. We’re told that there is “every reason to be optimistic” that the LHC will discover how forces unify and how things fit into the string framework, with the standard arguments for LHC-scale SUSY given, no mention of the negative experimental results. About string theory, Gross claims “unbelievable progress every year”, and it includes everything that is “nice” and “consistent” about fundamental physics, including all consistent QFTs.

He echoes Witten’s argument that string theory is falsifiable since testing quantum mechanics tests string theory with his own claim that evidence for the SM is evidence for string theory (the SM is the “foundation” of string theory). He describes the press conference held last Tuesday as involving a lot of journalists complaining about the lack of testability of string theory, and Maldacena coming up with the argument that the LHC has successfully tested string theory since it hasn’t found anything incompatible with it.

The one substantive remark was that he thinks work on higher spin symmetries may provide a hint about what he sees as the fundamental problem with string theory: no one knows what the theory is, or what symmetry principle it should be built upon.

Posted in Strings 2XXX | 54 Comments

Short Items

Posted on July 26, 2012 by woit

A few short items:

  • To compare and contrast to the activities of the Simons Foundation, there’s the Templeton Foundation, which has a $1.7 billion or so endowment to spend:

    They have a new Big Questions Online site, which asks Does Quantum Physics Make it Easier to Believe in God?

    At Oxford and Cambridge, Templeton is putting $1 million into Establishing the Philosophy of Cosmology, by, among other things, having a conference in January on Is God Explanatory?

    This miniseries will explore the theological and, by extension, metaphysical questions that pertain to cosmology. The origin and order of the cosmos have helped inspire belief in a “Supreme Being” or “First Cause” for millennia; but what bearing, if any, does the modern scientific approach to studying cosmology have on such beliefs? Does introducing God into the discussion add anything?

    This week this Foundation is funding a Workshop on Philosophy and Physics in Tuscany, with blogging from Sean Carroll and here.

    An apt quotation from Carroll a few years ago would be this one:

    The problem with the Templeton Foundation is not that they coerce scientists into repudiating their beliefs through the promise of piles of cash; it’s that, by providing easy money to promote certain kinds of discussions, those discussions begin to seem more prominent and important than they really are.

  • Sometimes you’ll see trackbacks in the comment section to Intelligent Design blogs which have become my fans since I’m critical of the multiverse. Often these get identified by the spam filter as spam, but when they get through I tend to leave them, partly because I’ve had my own problems with trackback censorship (see here), partly because they provide some insight into how the Intelligent Design people are using multiverse mania for their own ends. From one of these links I learned about a recent article in the Skeptic Society newsletter by Michael Schermer. At some point I wrote to him to warn him that claims of scientific testability for the multiverse were bogus, so he should consider avoiding this as an argument with IDers. After some e-mails back and forth it wasn’t clear if I had made any headway with him. The new article shows that he hasn’t given up on this, but maybe my arguments had some effect.
  • For an update on the sad story of Paul Frampton, who earlier this year was the victim of a scam that ended putting him in jail in Argentina on drug-smuggling charges, see here, here, here, here and here. A website to provide support for him has been set up here. It includes letters of support from various people including Edward Witten.

Update: There’s an article in the Telegraph about the Frampton story here.

Posted in Multiverse Mania, Uncategorized | 12 Comments

Simons Investigators

Posted on July 26, 2012 by woit

The Simons Foundation has announced the surprise selection of 7 mathematicians and 9 theoretical physicists as Simons Investigators. Those selected will get \$100,000/year for 5 years, renewable for another 5, their departments \$10,000/year, their institutions \$22,000/year.

According to a Washington Post story, this is just the beginning of the program, which will continue to make these $1 million no-strings-attached awards to prominent mathematicians, theoretical physicists and theoretical computers scientists every one to two years.

This isn’t something you can apply for, the Simons Foundation has a panel which made the selections. These awards are being compared to the MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grants”, which provide the same unrestricted \$100,000/year size grants, but only for five years. When the MacArthur program started back in the early eighties, particle theorists and mathematicians were often chosen (Witten and Wilczek were among the earliest choices), but in recent years that has been very uncommon. Two of the seven mathematicians chosen (Terry Tao and Horng-Tzer Yau) were also MacArthur Fellows.

The goal of the Simons program is to provde “a stable base of support for outstanding scientists, enabling them to undertake long-term study of fundamental questions.” I guess this means the idea is to make it possible for them to work on longer-term more ambitious projects without worrying about the NSF cutting off their grants. It’s interesting that the Simons Foundation sees this as a problem to be addressed, given that these are about the most prominent people in math and theoretical physics, among those least likely to ever have a grant application turned down.

In other Simons Foundation news, Yuri Tschinkel, an algebraic geometry from NYU, will take over from David Eisenbud as Director of the Division for Mathematics and Physical Sciences. Eisenbud is returning to MSRI in Berkeley for a second stint as Director there.

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

How the Higgs can lead us to the dark universe

Posted on July 22, 2012 by woit

The media frenzy surrounding the Higgs discovery announcement has on the whole consisted of stories that reasonably accurately deal with the scientific implications. Journalists have for instance by now learned that “string theory predictions” are a good thing to ignore. As usual though, theoretical physicists themselves can be counted on to inject some misleading hype into the press coverage when they get a chance.

Sean Carroll is doing his part, with a new piece at CNN entitled How the Higgs can lead us to the dark universe, which begins:

The incredible discovery of the Higgs boson will open up new ways of probing the part of the universe that is invisible to our everyday senses: beyond ordinary matter, into the extraordinary world of dark matter.

Since most people just read the title and first paragraph of stories like this, CNN’s readers will likely go away believing that Carroll’s favorite speculative hypothesis, one which hasn’t been working out very well, is the important significance of the Higgs discovery. What he’s referring to are “Higgs-portal” models of WIMP dark matter. For examples of some recent papers discussing what the LHC has to say about such models, see here and here. In recent years experimental results have not been kind to these models. Negative recent results from direct detection experiments like Xenon100 haven’t helped, nor have negative results from monoject searches at the LHC. The significance of the Higgs discovery for the Higgs-portal to dark matter idea is not that it provides evidence for this, but quite the opposite. Seeing signal sizes in various channels that roughly agree with the SM puts new limits on this kind of idea (because if it were true the branching ratios would be non-SM, as the Higgs had a new and potentially large possible decay channel to dark matter particles). Since one can construct a wide range of possible models of dark matter of this kind, many with behavior indistinguishable from the SM, there’s no way to rule them out completely. It’s of course possible that detailed future studies of the Higgs will find non-SM branching ratios that give evidence for a coupling to dark matter. My impression though is that most theorists find this rather unlikely, and I’d be curious to know what probability Carroll assigns to the idea that he is promoting. Back in 2008, he gave 15% as the probability for any kind of evidence of dark matter at the LHC, and the negative results about SUSY (which he assigned 60% probability) rule out many of the most popular models with LHC-visible dark matter.

Carroll has a new book coming out about the Higgs in November, The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World. The table of contents and the description of the book here look quite promising, but unfortunately he seems to have decided that the way to market a book about the Higgs story is with the dark matter hype:

A doorway is opening into the mind boggling, somewhat frightening world of dark matter. We only discovered the electron just over a hundred years ago and considering where that took us—from nuclear energy to quantum computing—the implications of the Higgs discovery hold the potential of changing the world.

I’m somewhat curious to know why dark matter is “frightening”. In Carroll’s last book the big speculative idea being marketed was the multiverse, it’s interesting to see that he’s chosen to move away from that particular mania to much more solid physics, although keeping it hype-free seems to be too much to ask.

First out of the gate post-discovery with a book about the Higgs won’t be Carroll, but maybe Lisa Randall, with an e-book entitled Higgs Discovery: The Power of Empty Space, which I know nothing about, other than that it’s supposed to be available Tuesday. Presumably it’s an update of material in her recent Knocking on Heaven’s Door, where, like Carroll, she moved away from the highly speculative material about extra dimensions of her first book, Warped Passages.

I have seen an early version of one quite good new book about the Higgs, Jim Baggott’s Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the ‘God Particle’, which is scheduled to be released August 13 in the UK, September 6 in the US and the US. It will come with a foreword by Steven Weinberg, which is already available here.

Update: Over at Resonaances, Jester, who is an expert on this topic, comments:

Finally, a simple and neat theory of dark matter that annihilates or scatters via a Higgs exchange, the so-called Higgs portal dark matter, is getting disfavored because Higgs would have a large invisible branching fraction, and thus a suppressed rate of visible decays.

Posted in This Week's Hype | 18 Comments

Two New Experimental Results

Posted on July 18, 2012 by woit

Today brings news of two new experimental results, both consistent with the Standard Model:

  • At the Higgs Hunting 2012 conference starting today, ATLAS reports results from the WW decay channel for the Higgs. At the July 4 joint announcement, CMS had reported results in this channel, but not ATLAS. Analyses of last year’s data had indicated fewer excess events in this channel than expected from a 125 GeV SM Higgs (see here). The 2012 data from CMS and ATLAS now show an excess in this channel of a size quite compatible with an SM Higgs. For more about this, and a nice summary of the latest combined data for various Higgs channels, see viXra log. The gamma-gamma channel Higgs signal is high, the tau-tau channel is low, others close to expected, but deviations from the SM predictions are not especially significant.
  • At DarkAttack2012, Columbia’s Elena Aprile gave a talk this morning presenting new results from Xenon100. These show no evidence for a dark matter detection and provide the strongest exclusions yet of conjectural high mass WIMPs such as SUSY is supposed to provide. The Xenon100 results now rule out most of the region where pre-LHC CMSSM SUSY model fits showed a dark matter WIMP was supposed to be (see for instance slide 31 here).

Update: There’s a press release about the Xenon100 result here.

Update: At Higgs Hunting 2012, two excellent summaries today of the theory implications of the Higgs results, from Matt Strassler and Michael Peskin.

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 11 Comments

Implications of LHC Results

Posted on July 16, 2012 by woit

The past few days at CERN there has been a workshop on Implications of LHC results for TeV-scale physics. This is the third in a series of these workshops, which have a goal of evaluating the implications of LHC results for choosing what new HEP facilities to design and fund.

One can argue about the implications, but the LHC results so far are in some sense very simple

  • the Higgs has been discovered, with properties consistent with SM predictions, more detailed tests of this consistency to come.
  • no evidence has been found for non-SM phenomena. The LHC has produced stringent bounds on extra dimensions and strongly interacting superpartners. The only remaining hope for a strongly interacting superpartner in the current data is for the stop, but evidence against that is accumulating, see for instance here.

The hope that the LHC would see extra dimensions was always quite a stretch, but the idea that it would see strongly interacting superpartners has been conventional wisdom for a very long time. It seems to me that many theorists who have spent the majority of their careers arguing for this conventional wisdom are having trouble admitting what has happened.

For some perspective on this, I recently ran across a 1997 Physics Today essay contest, which asked for submissions that would reflect what a “Search and Discovery” piece from the future might look like. The winner was Gordy Kane’s Experimental Evidence for More Dimensions Reported. It’s supposed to be from May 2011, and assumes that GUTs and supersymmetry were discovered long ago, even

fully accepted in 2000 after the discovery at Fermilab of the needed supersymmetric partners.

According to Kane, 2011 would see discovery of extra dimensions at the LHC, through observation of a 950 GeV KK state.

Michael Peskin also submitted something similar to the Physics Today contest, purporting to be an October 2016 Search and Discovery column entitled Do Squark Generations Show Geometry? In Peskin’s account, the first superpartner was found at LEP in 1999 when it got up to a center of mass energy of 200 GeV, By 2008 a large number of superpartners had been discovered, with ATLAS reporting precise values for four squark masses. Like Kane, he not only conjectures that by now we’d have a huge, well-tested SUSY phenomenology, but that our decade will see the discovery of extra dimensions, of a sort predicted by string theory. For Peskin, the discovery of extra dimensions comes about in 2016 from an electron-positron linear collider operating at a center of mass energy of 1.7 TeV.

Today Peskin gave a talk entitled Will there be Supersymmetry at the ILC?. He starts off by explaining his motivation as follows:

One often hears:

“If SUSY is not found at the LHC before the shutdown, then we will know that SUSY will not be found at the ILC.”

People attending this workshop know that this is incorrect. I hope that this will be explained clearly in the report to the European Strategy Study.

Despite the negative LHC results, Peskin is still trying to argue that one can expect to find supersymmetry at the ILC (which operates at a much lower center of mass energy than the LHC). He asks the question “Are light SUSY particles excluded at the LHC?” and answers it with:

I will first give some sociological evidence against this
statement:

1. No theorist who believed in SUSY before 2009 has renounced SUSY in the light of the LHC exclusions. (*)

2. Model builders are still building models with 200 GeV charginos.

(* Gordy Kane might be considered an exception. )

I’m assuming the remark about Kane is a joke…

He goes on to argue that surely at least one strongly interacting superpartner (the gluino) will be found after the long shutdown, when the LHC operates at or near design energy:

So, when we eventually reach the gluino at LHC 14 TeV, the
generic jet+MET observables will begin to work and SUSY will be discovered unambiguously.

The light SUSY sector will still be hard to explore at the LHC. We
will feel lucky that we are already constructing the ILC !

After the long history of LHC SUSY predictions that haven’t worked out, I’m not sure how seriously this will be taken as an argument for funding the ILC. There’s a draft of a section of the report on the implications of the negative LHC results here.

I suspect that arguments about whether to build the ILC over the next few years will revolve around its capabilities in terms of doing a much better job than the LHC to study the properties of the Higgs. Attempts like Peskin’s to argue that it should be built in order to look for supersymmetry are not likely to be taken very seriously by anyone outside the community of those who have been devoting the last few decades to thinking that SUSY is right around the corner, and still are unwilling to give up on this.

Bonus Higgs section: The last couple weeks have seen about a hundred Higgs-related things I could have linked to. For a random sampling, see this interview with Higgs, this from the Daily News and this survey of atrocities.

Bonus culture section: From last night’s first episode of the new season of Breaking Bad:

“We’re living in a time of string theories and God particles. Feasible, doable, why not?”

Update: Geoff Brumfiel at Nature has some quotes from various theorists, including

  • From Joe Lykken:

    Under the weight of the LHC’s hard evidence, SUSY and other beloved theories are feeling the strain. “There’s going to be a huge massacre of theoretical ideas in the next couple of years,” predicts Joe Lykken, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois….

    And hopes of finding extra dimensions that would mysteriously swallow up energy from collisions in the LHC are evaporating faster than the postulated microscopic black holes that also failed to make an appearance. “I was one of the people who pushed the idea of extra dimensions that we could see in our lifetime,” says Lykken. “Now that we have data, I’m becoming much more conservative.”

  • Frank Wilczek is hanging in there:

    It is too soon to write off SUSY, agrees Frank Wilczek, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 for his work on the standard model. “The last man standing, as far as ambitious ideas beyond the standard model go, is supersymmetry.”

  • Last year Gordon Kane was predicting SUSY discovery (gluinos) this summer. Now:

    It will take years’ more data to test some of the most promising ideas, says Gordon Kane, a theorist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a longtime SUSY champion.

Update: At Berkeley they had an event to explain the implications of the Higgs to the public, which learned that we need to go beyond the “three known multiple universes”:

…the Standard Model Higgs has problems. To fix them, alternatives have been proposed that involve a composite Higgs – one composed of other matter particles – that has extra spatial dimensions beyond our three known multiple universes and something called supersymmetry.

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 33 Comments

Short Items, Higgs-free

Posted on July 7, 2012 by woit
  • The Simons Foundation has some more wonderful interviews with mathematicians. There’s one with Pierre Deligne, and another with Robert MacPherson. The MacPherson piece describes not just mathematics, but also the unusual personal and professional collaboration of MacPherson and his student Mark Goresky.
  • James Milne has a wonderful article explaining John Tate’s mathematical achievements, for the Abel Prize volume.
  • Science Watch has an interview of Nima Arkani-Hamed by Gary Taubes, about supersymmetry, with Arkani-Hamed rather defensive on the topic. These Science Watch pieces are built around the researcher’s most highly-cited papers. In this case these would be not about supersymmetry, but about extra dimensions, and it would have been interesting to hear discussion of LHC results relevant to those. While extra dimensions at the TeV scale got a lot of attention from 2000 on, the topic disappeared from view once LHC results started arriving.
  • Jim Holt’s book Why Does the World Exist? was reviewed on this blog here, and is now available. If you’re interested in Nothingness, you must read this book.
  • OK, I can’t resist one Higgs-related item. One explanation for why Gordy Kane’s claims to have predicted the Higgs mass from string theory haven’t made it into recent media coverage of the Higgs is that not only do physicists not take it seriously (Matt Strassler characterizes this as “garbage and propaganda”), but even string phenomenologists feel “animosity” towards these claims. For more, see this report from a recent string phenomenology conference.

Update: One more. Oisin McGuinness pointed me to a new web-site at the IAS run by Dennis Hejhal, which has various hard-to-find material relevant to Atle Selberg. It includes an unpublished interview of Selberg by Betsy Devine (who is Frank Wilczek’s wife).

Update: Yet one more. A couple weeks ago the KITP hosted a talk by Nova’s Paula Apsell,their Journalist in Residence, entitled Controversy in Science. She covered the topics of Evolution, Climate Change, and the Multiverse. Go to about 43 minutes into the program for the segment on the multiverse, which dealt with Brian Greene’s hour-long program on the subject. David Gross objected strenuously to the program and how it was made, criticizing it for not distinguishing solid science from speculation, being manipulative and not seriously presenting the arguments of opponents. Gross explained that he had been interviewed for four hours for the program, but what went on the air was virtually all Brian’s point of view, with only a short bit from him which he felt didn’t represent his arguments. Joe Polchinski however thought it was just fine…

Posted in Uncategorized | 38 Comments

Court Judgement in Nature/El Naschie Case

Posted on July 7, 2012 by woit

Nature has finally won its court case against Mohamed El Naschie, see here. This was based on a 2008 Nature story by Quirin Schiermeier, which during the case was removed from the Net, but now is back up. The court found that this article was accurate, not libelous. I had talked to Schiermeier and was accurately quoted in the article. Over the past couple years, I’ve heard a few times from Nature‘s lawyers that the case was in progress, but didn’t know the details. The court judgement has full details, and is kind of interesting reading, it’s available here (thanks to Hamish Johnston for pointing me to this).

I first came across El Naschie when a commenter back in May 2005 mentioned his papers here. It was immediately clear that the journal El Naschie was editing for Elsevier was highly problematic, and surprising that they hadn’t done anything about it long ago. From the court documents it seems that they finally realized how much damage it was doing to their reputation and decided to shut it down, giving notice to El Naschie in June 2007. By then, much of the damage was done. If you talk to mathematicians who support the Elsevier boycott, the story of this journal is one that gets mentioned often as evidence for just how bad Elsevier’s policies have been. It was the Elsevier problem that immediately caught my attention when I took a look at the journal and responded to the 2005 comment.

Neil Turok was brought in for the job of evaluating El Naschie’s papers, and you can read the results in the court judgement. Perhaps the most striking thing about all this is not the weird El Naschie story or the problematic Elsevier story, but that it brings serious discredit to the British court system. This is a case that should have quickly been thrown out by any reasonable judicial system. Instead the defendant was forced to devote huge resources in terms of money and time to mount a defense. Many are pointing out that only a large corporate organization like Nature can afford to do this.

Update: There’s an excellent piece in Nature this week by Quirin Schiermeier, the reporter who wrote the article about El Naschie that led to the lawsuit. While supported by Nature, he had to devote a great deal of time and energy to the suit, and he makes clear the intimidating effect on accurate reporting that the British libel system imposes, with effects reaching well beyond British borders.

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Higgs, Higgs, Higgs

Posted on July 5, 2012 by woit

I’m trying to get over my Higgs obsession, and move on to other topics, but one last posting about this for now…

The first thing to say is that this is the biggest thing to happen in fundamental physics in about 30 years (i.e. since the discovery of the W and Z). It’s a remarkable event and huge success for high energy physics, vindicating at the same time the colossal efforts that have gone into making the LHC and its detectors work, as well as the theoretical framework of the electroweak part of the Standard Model. Today’s New York Times has a front-page story by Dennis Overbye, above the fold, which is very well done. In general the press reports that I’ve seen have been quite good, with minimal speculative nonsense thrown in. According to Overbye, CERN DG Heuer made the right decision to go ahead and simply claim discovery only on Tuesday afternoon. All in all, CERN has done an excellent job of communicating this story to the public (except perhaps for the “don’t believe the bloggers” business, but what else could they do…).

Attention will turn now to who gets rewarded for all this, in particular, who gets a Nobel Prize? Personally I think the experimentalists are first in line, and with no obvious figureheads, a prize for three groups: ATLAS, CMS and the CERN accelerator engineers and physicists would be highly appropriate. If it’s not too late in their process, maybe this could even be done in time for this year’s prize, announced October 9.

As far as theorists go, Frank Close has posted something about this here. With the restriction to three people, he argues for Englert, Higgs, Kibble. Personally I think Anderson deserves a piece of it, see here. There’s also a good argument to be made that what has just been validated is not the older work on the Higgs mechanism, but the Weinberg-Salam model of 1967 (extended to quarks), and that has already been rewarded with a Nobel.

I’ve been trying to get accurate numbers for the signal sizes seen by CMS and ATLAS in the various channels, but the only information out there now is the slides from the two talks. Resonaances includes the crucial plot from each experiment giving the signal sizes normalized to the SM, and eyeballing these and averaging, one gets 1.0 in the ZZ channel, 1.75 in gamma-gamma channel, about .75 in the WW channel (only CMS reports 2012 data). In the bb and tau-tau channels, no significant signal is seen, but the expected signal size there is very small. The errors per experiment are something like +/- .4, which you can make your own judgement about how to reduce for the combination. The bottom line is that, within errors, everything is consistent with the SM predictions. The gamma-gamma channel is the one to watch, it is about 2 sigma high.

The DG also announced a new LHC schedule, extending this year’s proton-proton run by two months, to mid-December. This will hopefully allow the experiments to each accumulate another 20 inverse fb of data, finishing this run and going into a two year shutdown with a total of 30 inverse fb to analyze and use to improve the results on the Higgs.

While this announcement is a great triumph for physics, unfortunately it significantly increases the probability of what has become known as the “Nightmare Scenario”: a SM Higgs discovery and nothing else at LHC energies. Before the LHC results started to come in, this scenario and its consequences was easy to ignore, but we may be getting closer to the point where it needs to be taken very seriously.

Update: For a rather complete analysis of the data about the different Higgs decay channels, see this new preprint.

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