The Pacific Institute for Theoretical Physics, based at UBC in Vancouver, held a Showcase Conference a couple weeks ago, which was supposed to “celebrate the exciting new developments taking place in theoretical physics”. According to the organizers there are lots of exciting new developments in string theory, since six of the invited speakers (Myers, Ooguri, Randall, Schwarz, Shenker, Susskind) spoke on that topic, but no one at all spoke about elementary particle physics. There were also quite a few talks on condensed matter physics.
The talk of John Schwarz consisted mainly of the standard recounting of the history and basics of string theory that anyone who has been to conferences like this has heard a hundred times. This part stopped with Maldacena’s work more than 7 years ago. On more recent topics, about the anthropic explanation of the cosmological constant, Schwarz says: “Is there another explanation? I hope so.” He ends by putting up a long list of questions about string theory, more or less the same list everyone has had for twenty years now.
Steve Shenker spoke on Emergent Quantum Gravity, with “emergent” the new buzzword of the field. There was a separate workshop on emergence overlapping with the Showcase conference, organized by Phil Anderson and others, with Susskind the only string theorist allowed to speak there. Shenker introduced a new terminology to justify string theory: it is “An algorithmically complete, consistent description of quantum gravity”, although he does add the caveat “In certain simple situations (like flat space)”. By this I guess he is trying to get around the problem of how to claim that your theory is complete and consistent when you don’t know what it is. The idea is that at least you have an algorithm for doing computations. Perhaps he means perturbative string theory, although that is neither consistent nor complete (the expansion in the number of loops diverges). Perhaps he means a non-perturbative formulation like a matrix model, which works in 11 flat dimensions, but then he really should note that he’s not talking about quantum gravity in four dimensions, which is what most people care about.
There was an interesting panel discussion on The Theory of Everything?, which was moderated by Steve Shenker. He seemed mainly interested in making the obvious point that string theorists weren’t actually claiming that their theory explained anything about, say, biochemistry. The panel was actually balanced between string theory enthusiasts (Shenker, Schwarz, Randall), and skeptics (‘t Hooft, Unruh, Wald). Some of Shenker’s introductory remarks are inaudible, but he did repeat his claim about the “algorithmically complete” nature of string theory. “t Hooft had some quite interesting comments. He recalled that at a conference back in 1985 he had been the only one who didn’t think that twenty years later string theory would have solved all the problems of particle physics, noting that it was now 20 years later, he had been right, everyone else at the conference wrong. He was making the point that string theory now is extremely far from solving any problems in particle theory, and one can’t tell if this situation will change in 20, 200 or 2000 years. He tried to say some positive things about string theory, but they were pretty half-hearted. For instance he noted that dualities were very interesting, but they linked one ill-defined theory to another ill-defined theory. He also noted that in its present formulation string theory is only defined on-shell, which he takes as meaning that it doesn’t give a true local description of what is going on. He has reasons for being suspicious of people who claim that all one needs is an on-shell theory.
Schwarz attributed the TOE terminology to John Ellis. He said that he feels string theory is very far from explaining anything about elementary particle physics, that it was “almost hopeless to find the right vacuum”. He described what landscapeologists are doing in a skeptical tone, but didn’t actually criticize this. Answering ‘t Hooft, he claimed that back in 1985 he and Mike Green were actually more pessimistic than most other people about the prospects for getting quick results out of string theory.
Bill Unruh made the standard criticism that what is wrong with string theory is that string theorists are motivated by beautiful math, not physics. He doesn’t seem to have noticed that few string theorists are now doing math, since unfortunately most of them have taken to heart the criticisms of people like him. The failure of string theory has unfortunately reinforced the skepticism of many people like Unruh about the use of math in theoretical physics.
Wald quoted what sounded like a recent description of what string theorists think they are doing, then revealed that his quotes were from the 19th century, and referred not to string theory, but to the popular theory of the time that atoms were vortices in the ether. He deftly made the point that it is quite possible, if not likely, that string theory is just as wrong an idea as the vortex one.
Lisa Randall made some defensive comments about string theory as a guide for future research, even if it turns out not to work. These included the bizarre political analogy that it was wrong to worry about string theory ruining the credibility of physics, because, after all, the bogus WMD business didn’t seem to have hurt Bush’s credibility.
There were then some questions and comments from the audience. Susskind was in the first row, looking very peevish and defensive. He kept repeating that the field of theoretical physics had “no real choice but to track this down”, meaning to investigate the infinite landscape, and that this would take the efforts of many physicists. He explicity worried that funding agencies would not give any grants to anyone working on the landscape, to which Unruh responded that the shoe was really on the other foot, with some NSF panelists refusing to fund anyone who wasn’t doing string theory.
The conference web-site also includes an explanation of string theory which claims that in recent years string theory has “evolved very rapidly”, that the reason it can’t be tested is because of the small distance scales involved, and that it may be testable by observing a “5th force”, all of which is a load of nonsense.
Lubos Motl has an interesting post going over all the possible ideas he can think of that might lead to the next superstring revolution. Needless to say, they all sound extremely unpromising to me. Judge for yourself. He also quotes the promotional material for Susskind’s book due out late this year. It seems that “the Laws of Physics as we know them today are determined by the requirement that intelligent life is possible”.
There are 245 papers under ‘Koide’ on SPIRES. You’re going to have to be a bit more specific.
People will pay attention if you can surprise them with something they already know.
-drl
If you can calculate something people will listen
Not “something” but “almost everything”. Look at Koide’s work. Published in Phys Rev D and other journals, including a prediction (mass of tau) that was verified exactly (not within one or two sigmas, but just in the gaussian peak) ten years after the publication. But the original interpretation, in the context of preons, needs of a lot more of calculations to jump from “model” to “theory” and, not being mainstream, nobody is going to waste time on it. Nor to try another explanation.
You only get attention if you can calculate AND your calculations are reusable in current work of other people.
Ok thanks mike, if you wouldn’t mind, could you drop an email telling me what was claimed and what is known?
-drl
…and don’t forget the free BBQs and afternoon teas.
>>Aaah! But that’s where you’re wrong. I know of a >>number of smart people that have been doing PhDs >>for well over 10 years.
>And getting paid?
One can get by on remarkably little as a student. One can always earn a bit of money tutoring, waitressing or whatever.
Aaah! But that’s where you’re wrong. I know of a number of smart people that have been doing PhDs for well over 10 years.
And getting paid?
So long as they keep coming up with good ideas that other academics can get credit for, they won’t be kicked out.
The “good ideas” being very important there.
Aaron: “If he had done that graduate school, there’s a good chance they’d have thrown him out if he didn’t have some good intermediate results.”
Aaah! But that’s where you’re wrong. I know of a number of smart people that have been doing PhDs for well over 10 years. So long as they keep coming up with good ideas that other academics can get credit for, they won’t be kicked out.
…like the development of relativity instead or…
well, ok I think I understand your position a little better now. Personally I am not going to worry that much about towing the line after I get a PHD because then I will be able to if nothing else at least publish on arxiv even without a job.
personally,I think that quantum gravity in the end will end up being not as hard as we think, just that the basic ideas that leads to it just hasn’t been thought up and explored yet. Also I think it is because people are trying to solve the problem all at once like the development instead of by increments like the developments of quantum mechanics.
so while you think non-tenured can i guess get away with writing some speculative papers(this being a strange definition of speculative that doesn’t include stringtheory papers) you think they shouldn’t do so.
Speculative in this case meaning outside the mainstream. And, generally, yes, young researchers won’t get very far spending their entire time outside the mainstream. The reason why is not that this is somehow transgressive, but that generally you won’t accomplish anything. It’s easy to speculate vaguely, but it’s very, very, very hard to get concrete results, ie, do calculations. Nobody wants to hear your ideas on what quantum gravity should be — everybody has them. If you can calculate something people will listen, but there’s a reason that quantum gravity has remained unsolved for fifty years: it ain’t easy.
So, if you want to have fun speculating occasionally, that’s cool, but in the meantime you should also publish results that people can point at when they want to hire you. If you want to put in the time and energy that generating a new theory of quantum gravity will probably entail, it’s probably a good idea to wait. Wiles, once he had tenure, was able to put aside seven years to work out Taniyama-Shimura. If he had done that graduate school, there’s a good chance they’d have thrown him out if he didn’t have some good intermediate results.
The point being is that, before you have tenure, and to a lesser extent even afterwards, you have to produce. I’m sorry you find this offensive, but it’s just the way things are.
oops that last sentence should have ended in a question mark.
I didn’t say I would be the next einstein my point was the non tenured often are the ones with the revolutionary ideas, I simply took the most extreme example of this that i could think of. Just a reminder of your origninal statement.
“there’s not much market for the sort of speculation that could lead to a new direction — that sort of thing, much like the interpretation of quantum mechanics, should be left to the tenured.”
so while you think non-tenured can i guess get away with writing some speculative papers(this being a strange definition of speculative that doesn’t include stringtheory papers) you think they shouldn’t do so.
Good luck being the next Einstein. If you’re good enough to revolutionize the field while working outside of it, then you won’t need any of my advice. But, for those of us who aren’t as smart as Einstein, there are better paths to take.
And, in the time since Einstein, can you name one physicist who wasn’t at a research institution that made a revolutionary contribution?
Just as another random note, many people seem to have missed the part where I said that one can intersperse the more speculative papers with the mainstream stuff.
Aaron how about my example(though I didn’t state it explicitly and just listed patent clerk as a job where you could still work on physics ideas at the same time) of Einstein who did not even work at a school at all let alone have tenure when he published his 1905 papers.
er… “not”=”now” in previous posting. I must use the preview button…
“When I was younger I had ideas but no skills, not I have skills but ideas are scarce”. Heard to a tenured teacher time ago. Consider also that the tenure track is very long, some people getting it when they are near 40 years old.
I will leave it to the readers of this blog to decide for themselves to what extent my brief summary is accurate or useful in the context of my comment to this blog, the point of which is:
If ‘t Hooft had waited for tenure to pursue an approach that his adviser Veltman “could not believe”, then the acceptance of the electroweak model would have at best been delayed substantially.
You miss the point. ‘t Hooft was working in a well established direction. He was working on theories that had been around for years (if in somewhat disrepute for a period). This is exactly the opposite of what I said someone should wait for tenure to work on. Your problem seems to be that Veltman didn’t believe that ‘t Hooft could do it. Fine, but I never said people shouldn’t work on things because their advisers don’t believe in them (or, more likely in this case, are threatened by them.) Your example is simply inapposite.
(And his current ideas on quantum mechanics are not Bohmian mechanics.)
On that 6-sphere paper: While I’m definitely very far from being an expert on the subject, I heard the author (who is, by the way, a physicist) talking about it a month ago, and it seemed to be seriously flawed to me then (even without understanding the details). Of course this means just about nothing, but that was my impression.
The 6-sphere paper was at math.DG/0505634, but has since been withdrawn.
Someone mentioned complex structure on 6-sphere – do you have a direct reference?
-drl
PS – kids probably still say “Thank God I’m done with density matrices!”
-drl
Peter said “I don’t think smart people will go into physics any more…”
Well difficulties didn’t stop you! You have no faith in these youngsters? It’s the same stuff to figure out after all.
-drl
Aaron seems to disagree with my brief summary of ‘t Hooft’s experience with renormalization of the electroweak model. My summary was primarily based on the following quotes from The Second Creation, by Crease and Mann (Macmillan 1986):
“… Early in 1971, Veltman had a conversation with ‘t Hooft that he has never forgotten, the interchange went as follows:
M.V.: I do not care what and how, but what we must have is at least one renormalizable theory with massive charged vector bosons, and whether that looks like Nature is of no concern, those are details that will be fixed later by some model freak …
G.’t H.: I can do that.
M.V.: What do you say?
G.’t H.: I can do that.
“And this he could not believe,” ‘t Hooft said years later …
…
To Steven Weinberg, ‘t Hooft’s proof just seemed like hand-waving. Then he heard that his friend … Benjamin Lee … was working on it … Besides lending ‘t Hooft’s work his considerable prestige, Lee spent most of August translating it into a form other theorists could comprehend. “I was really impressed with that,” Weinberg recalled …”.
I will leave it to the readers of this blog to decide for themselves to what extent my brief summary is accurate or useful in the context of my comment to this blog, the point of which is:
If ‘t Hooft had waited for tenure to pursue an approach that his adviser Veltman “could not believe”, then the acceptance of the electroweak model would have at best been delayed substantially.
In other words, I feel that Aaron’s “wait for tenure” prescription is bad for physics, although it may be a good strategy for achieving Aaron’s stated primary goal: to get a job.
Tony Smith
http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/
is it true that LQG has a good semiclassical limit, a large volume limit with a positive cosmological constant with the kodama state?
David,
I’m not convinced I’m the one that’s confused about the Stony Brook workshop. It’s entitled “Geometry of String Vacua”, and the scientific description, in toto, reads “A deeper understanding of the geometry of string compacitification has become increasingly important in connecting string theory to the real world, in the context of early universe cosmology as well as collider physics” (by the way, the idea that studying these compactifications has anything to do with collider physics is pretty funny). Among the speakers listed are Denef, Douglas, Kachru, Kashani-Poor and Silverstein, all of whom work on flux compactifications. More of the speakers work in this area than work on topological strings. If this is a workshop mainly devoted to topological strings, why does it need to be advertised as one devoted to physical string backgrounds?
Is this the same t’Hooft who had made some, uh, jokes about his former advisor much in the same way that Veltman would have done so about himself?
Drl,
No ‘Quantum Computer’ will ever be able to out perform a ‘scaled up classical computer.’ by Gerard t’Hooft
Yes. I tried to present this point before.
I think he is asking us to think differently for a reason?
Wow, t’Hooft uses Bohmian mechanics to gainsay quantum computing. Nice!
-drl
Perhaps Quantum Gravity can be Handled by thoroughly reconsidering Quantum Mechanics itself?Gerard t’ Hooft
“The problem with landscape studies is….there are an ever increasing number of people studying the Kachru et al Rube Goldberg machines. Stony Brook’s yearly workshop on mathematical physics will be devoted to this this summer.”
No it won’t. It will be devoted, as in the previous two years, to topological string theory. The phrase in the conference description that’s confusing you refers to vafa’s recent work in this direction.
Aaron said,
No. There just isn’t. Go work on inflation. Go work on electroweak symmetry breaking. Go work on dark matter. Go work on large extra dimensions. Go work on baryogenesis. Go work on susy breaking. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is forcing anyone to go into string theory. I don’t know where you get this idea that there is only one ‘approved topic’. It’s just not true.
I am not in the game directly, but heard people like Glasgow, Phil, or Peter claiming the contrary.
I read to Vafa claiming that ST may be present in any important physics departament. I heard to physicists claiming by brutal presure for following the last string fad in their laboratories.
I read a string theorist claiming that many string researchers do not believe in it!!
I read to Witten, B. Greene… Greene claims that ST is the only game in the city. An undergraduate student contacted with me saiyng exactly that, there is two options: ST or nothing.
If he is not informed probably will chose an string career.
Several people contacted with me and explained that leaved physics because either one studied ST or one leaved the field. That was said to me by a PhD on string theory now working outside of physics.
That and your posts on LQG, indicate that you may live in a different world. Alice?
The problem with landscape studies is not just the loony-tunes people in high places who have abandoned doing science to promote anthropism. There are an ever increasing number of people studying the Kachru et al Rube Goldberg machines.
All I can do is point to the papers on hep-th. I just skimmed through the ‘recent’ search and counted a grand total of one paper on the landscape. A search on ‘landscape’ in the title or abstract gives 31 papers in the past year. ‘Flux vacua’ gives 37. Hardly a deluge.
The problem with the idea that young physicists should just keep their head down, and work on approved topics until they get tenure is that right now, in fundamental particle theory, there is only one approved topic.
No. There just isn’t. Go work on inflation. Go work on electroweak symmetry breaking. Go work on dark matter. Go work on large extra dimensions. Go work on baryogenesis. Go work on susy breaking. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is forcing anyone to go into string theory. I don’t know where you get this idea that there is only one ‘approved topic’. It’s just not true.
I think I’ve said this three times now. If you don’t believe me, go to the Rumor Mill and click on the names of people offered jobs to see what they have worked on. It’s all there in black and white (and some blue, too).
I think kids should spend a lot of time haunting the journal stacks in the local library – oh wait the Internet replaced all that – my bad.
-drl
My, my, I go away for the day and look what happens here.
This week I’m commuting down to a conference at Rutgers, and today gave a talk there on loop groups and QFT. After the conference is over I’ll probably write something here about it.
Some comments on the comments:
I saw the preprint claiming to find a complex structure on the six-sphere. When I get a chance I’ll check with an expert to see if this seems like it might be real.
Mortain:
I thought about mentioning Lax’s Abel prize, but I don’t know Lax, or really anything about his work, so skipped it since I didn’t feel I had anything really to say about that.
I’ve been aware of the “not even wrong” phrase for longer than I can remember, I didn’t get it from Veltman. As I sometimes point out, I don’t necessarily have anything against speculative ideas that are “not even wrong”, many good ideas start out this way. I’m glad you enjoy the non-string theory posts, some of which are about things that are not even wrong, some about things that are right. Actually, string theory is slowly moving out of the “not even wrong” category to the “wrong” category.
I’ll stay away from fights about LQG, and just point out that if the number of people doing string theory now was the same as the number doing LQG, I wouldn’t have a problem with string theory. And the idea that LQG hype is on anything like the scale of string theory hype is pretty laughable.
A few comments about what Aaron had to say (and I’m glad he’s taking the time to give his point of view here):
While we agree string theory is in the doldrums, I don’t think the nineties was a “fruitful” period for particle theory. Pick any decade during the past century and I think you can come up with many more important advances than what happened in the nineties. The nineties were the doldrums, what is happening now is much worse.
The problem with landscape studies is not just the loony-tunes people in high places who have abandoned doing science to promote anthropism. There are an ever increasing number of people studying the Kachru et al Rube Goldberg machines. Stony Brook’s yearly workshop on mathematical physics will be devoted to this this summer. The infinite landscape provides an infinite number of relatively easy research problems that people can work on, happily thinking that they’re on the cutting edge of research. While there are lots of easy problems to work on, none of them have the most remote chance of having anything to do with physics. Sometimes you don’t need to do calculations like this to know that the result can’t be interesting.
The problem with the idea that young physicists should just keep their head down, and work on approved topics until they get tenure is that right now, in fundamental particle theory, there is only one approved topic. And it’s a topic that sensible young people quickly see is highly unappealing and won’t ever lead anywhere. So, the danger is that, rather than spend ten years working on what they can tell is a bad idea, smart people just aren’t going to go into particle theory anymore. I’m afraid I already see this happening.
“Work hard on some well-defined problems, write good papers, get your PhD’s and only later, when you get tenure should you think about these big problems”
Some of us suspect that t’Hooft also knows perfectly well that anyone who loves Physics enough to think for themselves will probably ignore this advice.
Aaron: “What I’ll say is that’s just how the world is: you need to get a job.”
Hah! Not in my world. What a load of arrogant bullshit you sprout.
“If ‘t Hooft had followed Aaron’s prescription, he (‘t Hooft) would have submissively abandoned his proof and assumed that he was too dumb to even understand how flawed his work must have been.”
Funny you should mention this. One of the best advice I’ve ever gotten was from ‘tHooft: At a conference some years ago (when I just started as a grad student) a bunch of us young students were clamouring around the guy to talk to him and someone asked him about his (then recent) work on holography, quantum determinism etc. His said that he was more than happy to speak to us about it but first wanted to know where in our physics careers we were to which the response was “beginning graduate students”. His reply was that before he tells us about this stuff he would just like to offer a little advice: work hard on some well-defined problems, write good papers, get your PhD’s and only later, when you get tenure should you think about these “big problems”.
A paper was just posted on math.DG arxiv claiming to construct a complex structure on the 6-dimensional sphere (it was thought not to exist, but nobody could prove that…)
Hi
Peter,
you mention,
“whereas I do see some hope that if one better understands the structure of the standard model, one may be able to get to quantum gravity from there.”
whereas it maybe possible that the converse is true. i.e., only by trying to study gravity or
thinking of ways to marry gravity with other forces , can one understand the structure of standard model in detail. Heck we
still do not know if GR is the correct classical theory of gravity since it hasn’t been tested as accurately as the other 3 forces in strong \
gravity limit. So I don’t think there is anything wrong if people are not studying particle phenomenology and instead spending time on trying to unite gravity with quantum mechanics. Maybe
particle phenomenology has reached a limit.
In fact I would argue that there should be more people working on studying and understanding GR in detail, classical alternatives to GR, and other approaches to QG besides string theory and LQG.
In fact there are very few people working on
“gravitation phenomenology” i.e. trying to undderstand various gravitational based experiments such as data from binary pulsar, gravity probe B, lunar laser ranging etc.
The problem with waiting until you get tenure is thas after years as a graduate school, years as a postdoc and years as a junior faculty making all sorts of compromises, you gradually and eventually change into becoming “one of them” without even noticing and assuming you are mainstream enough to get tenure, meaning you can act mainstream enough, decades of pretending will eventually get to you before then and you will start to believe…
That is the way the system works. By the time you get tenure, you have been throroughly brainwashed and completely orthodox. See, it’s usually the younger generation which forms the leading edge.
The key event leading to the acceptance of the electroweak component of the standard model was ‘t Hooft’s proof of renormalizability. At the time, not only was ‘t Hooft merely a grad student (certainly not tenured), and his tenured adviser (Veltman) not only did not understand what ‘t Hooft had done, Veltman did not beleive that his student ‘t Hooft was correct or even capable of solving such a problem. If ‘t Hooft had followed Aaron’s prescription, he (‘t Hooft) would have submissively abandoned his proof and assumed that he was too dumb to even understand how flawed his work must have been.
Hardly. For a history, you can see Weinberg’s recollections.
Aaron said: “… Some argue, then, that there should be research alternatives. There are two answers to that.
In terms of quantum gravity, there just aren’t that many games out there, and there’s not much market for the sort of speculation that could lead to a new direction — that sort of thing, much like the interpretation of quantum mechanics, should be left to the tenured. …
But the second answer to the question is the more important, because it really belies much of the impression that one might get from this blog. The simple fact of the matter is that there are alternatives in high energy to working in strings … phenomenology or cosmology …”.
With respect to Aaron’s second answer, phenomenology and cosmology are not alternatives in fundamental theoretical physics, and are not in direct competition with superstring theory. Aaron only lists one competitor of superstring theory, that is, LQG, and he dismisses it by saying “… it is fraught with difficulties, not the least of which are the lack of a classical limit and a bizarre quantization procedure which, if applied to a theory like the standard model, gets physically incorrect answers. …”.
That leads to Aaron’s first answer, which is that a fundamental theoretical physics alternative to superstring theory “… should be left to the tenured …”.
The key event leading to the acceptance of the electroweak component of the standard model was ‘t Hooft’s proof of renormalizability. At the time, not only was ‘t Hooft merely a grad student (certainly not tenured), and his tenured adviser (Veltman) not only did not understand what ‘t Hooft had done, Veltman did not beleive that his student ‘t Hooft was correct or even capable of solving such a problem. If ‘t Hooft had followed Aaron’s prescription, he (‘t Hooft) would have submissively abandoned his proof and assumed that he was too dumb to even understand how flawed his work must have been.
Fortunately for physics, ‘t Hooft did not follow Aaron’s prescription and maintained the correctness of his work even in the face of his adviser’s contrary opinion, and Ben Lee did the hard work necessary to understand ‘t Hooft’s proof and to recommend it to the physics community.
Aaron could say that the key element was the validation by tenured and respected Ben Lee, but the proof by untenured student ‘t Hooft was also necessary, and would not have happened had ‘t Hooft followed Aaron’s prescription.
When you look at today’s world of fundamental theoretical physics, it seems that there are no Ben Lee type people who are willing to work hard to understand anything outside of their own little boxes, and that amost all of their little boxes are superstring boxes.
Tony Smith
http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/
Aaron Bergman
said “I don’t believe a scattering amplitude has ever been computed in LQG.”
I am not sure of this because I not revised recent literature on the topic. I think that now graviton-graviton scattering amplitudes can be computed from LQG. Still is not that I said in my previous post.
I believe that computation of black hole entropy has “been done” for black holes far more realistic than from ST.
Hawking radiation, elimination of ultraviolet divergences in QFT, cosmological inflation, unobserved supersymmetry, and others are best explained in LQG. String theory does not explain nothing of that, absence of ultraviolet is still debatable, and supersymmetry is, at best of my knowledge, a crucial piece of the theory, still nobody observed it in laboratory.
“This goes back to Wheeler and possibly before.”
Hum!! I was not speaking about geometrodynamics, I believe.
“Unitarity violations are also an old idea.” Of course!!
“String theory, on the other hand, really is unitary.” This is still debatable, the best proof by Schwartz is some like his recent “I believe that string theory is unitary”.
anonymous
I said
“What if the failure of quantization of GR is on that GR is not correct after all?”
Of course I wanted to be provocative. Let me rewritte.
We want quantize GR, are we sure of that GR is correct before our attempts to quantize it?
Penrose is a relativist. He claim that in some test GR is tested at order of 10^12 (I believe) and claim for an adaptation of QM to GR. I ask: are those test completely infallible? Is GR the correct approach to gravitation? Note that I am not talking about possible Planck scale modifications of GR.
Initially, I took as completely true GR and studied its basis. However, a problem of confrontation of symmetries obligated to me to reconsider my thinking.
Sincerely I am not sure still, but I think that GR is not so correct and verified like I thought only a year ago!! The surprising is that some specialists in gravitation think the same. For example in a recent PR-D of last year the author says
“[…]the correct relativistic gravitational theory may be of a kind not generally considered hitherto””
At what extension GR is correct or incorrect. I think that first we would study this before claim for quantization.
Quantoken said
“No, no one is a culpable of the stringy failure and no one should be held responsible for the “failure”. Nature is the nature way it is and it would not have changed anything because somethign the researchers have tried or have not tried. If the nature is not 10-D, then it is not 10-D, and you can get a super-Einstein to research string theory, and he would not get anything different. He would not be able to force the nature to become 10-D. Only God can do that.”
I was obviously being provocative. The emphasis was in that string theorist are unable to recognize, still today, that they choose a wrong way that instead of studyng like nature is, they choose obligate to nature to be like they want to be. I was referring to scientific methodology
man this has strayed far from peter’s blog hope he doesn’t mind.
this is the internet people get snarky(i’m not really even sure what that means) rude. My point was that people care about having a job more then they care about following the research paths that inspire them whether it be a new try at QG or any number of the cases of fine tuning and other problems to be explained The only advantage to having a job as far as I can see is being able to form close working relations with the other faculty which is nice don’t get me wrong but I won’t loose the relationships i will make in grad school completely if I don’t get a job, I can still think about physics and try to come up with new ideas even if i am working as a carpentor a schoolteacher a beggar a writer or even a patent clerk. Maybe I won’t come up with anything successful or maybe I will, who knows.
>What I’ll say is that’s just how the world is: you need to get a job.
Yeah, what is the alternative ? To join the club of crackpots and failed physicists who find their purpose in life in proclaiming failure of what thousands of other, hard working physicists are doing…finding comfort in mutual shoulder padding and the belief, all those others must be wrong.
“your goal after graduate school is to get a job”
I think i understand what happened to particle physics now, thanks.
The temptation to be snarky here is almost irresistible. What I’ll say is that’s just how the world is: you need to get a job.
So, the question is how do people make their decisions on who to hire. They’re not going to give you a postdoc much less tenure based on nothing. You have to be able to show that you can produce real research. Now, you can spend graduate school trying to find a new theory of quantum gravity, but odds are you’ll fail. People have been failing at it for fifty years. It’s hard. And, then, you’ll be stuck with nothing but easy speculation and no job prospects.
What some people do is to work in the wacky stuff while generally doing mainstream stuff. To pick an example, Max Tegmark writes on the interpretaion of quantum mechanics, but if you check out his papers, you can see that the vast majority of his stuff is quite grounded.
What it comes down to is that, in order to succeed, you have to show that you can produce. And the way to do that is to work on tractable problems. But, I wish you luck in whatever you end up trying to do. Maybe you’ll succeed. We all hope someone will, eventually.
“your goal after graduate school is to get a job”
I think i understand what happened to particle physics now, thanks.
It is arrogance of the highest order to conclude that the failure of string theory to predict means a failure of fundamental physics in general. We do, after all, have all the successful theories developed before string theory came on the scene.
Who’s doing that? In fact, the success of the standard model is precisely an example (if the landscape, god forbid, turns out to be true) of certain generic predictions that hold for all realistic vacua.
While I can’t speak for mortain I can tell you that I didn’t first decide that i wouldn’t go into string theory from this blog, nor does all of my limited knowledge in strings come from it.
I’m not here to recruit anyone. There are more jobs in other fields. If you find them interesting, I highly recommend pursuing them.
I don’t like your assumptions that i am incapable of thinking for myself and was tricked by peter.
I’m not claiming anyone is ‘tricked’. I just recalled my experience about getting an impression of a field from an internet forum and noted that I certainly got a misleading impression.
This I also found rather unappealing:
“there’s not much market for the sort of speculation that could lead to a new direction — that sort of thing, much like the interpretation of quantum mechanics, should be left to the tenured.”
If there is no “game” in physics(particle or cosmology) that attracts me I plan, and already have a couple of spare ideas floating around my head that need development, on making my own “game” or I will fail trying untill someone else makes a “game” i’m interested in, whether the tenured want me to or not.
like chris said just cause this one model of how you think things might work is unpredictive doesn’t mean there isn’t another model out there that is, me I’m going to keep looking for that next model
I wish you luck because you will need it. The simple fact of the matter is that your goal after graduate school is to get a job, and the way to do that is to write papers that others read and cite. It might not be the ideal way for the world to work, but that’s just life. The good news is that, if you can play the game well enough and get tenure, you can do whatever you want. That, after all, is the point of tenure. But until then, it’s good to work on the tractable problems and get a record people can look at when application time comes around.