I was on vacation for a while, but haven’t been posting much mostly since there’s not that much to write about. Like every summer, there are huge numbers of string theory conferences going on all over the world, but from looking at the talks that are available, the subject is about as dead as it has been for the last couple years, with essentially no new ideas. The reaction of string theorists to all the criticism that they have been getting in recent years about the lack of any connection of string theory to the real world seems to have been to rename their conferences things like String Theory and the Real World.
One other reason I haven’t been writing as much is that there are an increasingly large number of quite good math and physics blogs out there, run by other people who are doing a great job of writing about the kinds of news that I’ve often posted items about. There’s a mini-revolution going on in research-level mathematics blogging, with various Fields medalists being joined by groups of some of the best graduate students and post-docs around. Following on the heels of Berkeley’s wonderful Secret Blogging Seminar, there’s Cornell’s Everything Seminar and the Max Planck Institute in Bonn’s Vivatgasse 7 (mainly about arithmetic algebraic geometry).
Also at the Max Planck Institute, a couple weeks ago there was the yearly Arbeitstagung, a conference devoted to recent mathematics research and run in a somewhat unconventional way. The concept is to mostly not schedule talks and speakers in advance, but to instead just try and get a group of the best possible people to show up, and then to more or less democratically decide on who should speak about what, depending on who has something new to talk about. The first Arbeitstagung was organized by Friedrich Hirzebruch exactly 50 years ago, back in 1957, partly with the goal of bringing Germany back into the mainstream of mathematics research after the post-WWII period. Hirzebruch remained the organizer for many years (and was also director of Max Planck), and was there this year to give the opening lecture, on The first Arbeitstagungen in 1957, 1958 and 1962. At the first Arbeitstagung in 1957 some of the talks announced dramatic new results in mathematics, including the birth of K-theory. Grothendieck’s talk included the first definition and use of K-theory (of coherent sheaves on a projective algebraic manifold) in his proof of what is now known as the Grothendieck-Riemann-Roch theorem. Hirzebruch had worked some of this out more concretely before, and he reported on his work with Borel-Hirzebruch which links up representation theory, characteristic classes and topology in a fundamental way. Bott was not there, but had recently discovered Bott periodicity, and over the next few years Atiyah used this and the Dirac operator to reformulate Grothendieck-Riemann-Roch as a general index theorem in the context of differentiable manifolds, proving the theorem with Singer, and lecturing about it at the 1962 Arbeitagung. Hirzebruch gives an excellent description of some of this history. The talks are all available online, but I fear that there was nothing discussed this year that seems to reach the heights of what was being discovered back in those early days 50 years ago.
The latest news on the LHC schedule is: close the machine April 2008, beam commissioning starting May 2008, first beams at high energy July 2008, about exactly one year from now.
The Notices of the AMS has a wonderful set of articles this month about George Mackey, I wrote a bit about him here.
The Harvard string theory group will be minus not just Lubos Motl this coming year, but also Nima Arkani-Hamed, who will be on leave (I’m not sure where he’s going or what his plans are). I hear that the two of them had a joint goodbye party.
Starting today, Arkani-Hamed is pushing the multiverse at the String Theory and the Real World conference. For the hundredth puff-piece about how wonderful the anthropic multiverse pseudo-science is, see the article Islands in the Sea, at fqxi.org.
Bloomberg.com is carrying a review of Endless Universe, the recent Steinhardt/Turok book I wrote about here. The author of the review seems to have noticed the same thing about the book that I did:
Given the recent controversy surrounding string theory — the publication last year of Lee Smolin’s “The Trouble With Physics” and Peter Woit’s “Not Even Wrong” — it’s disturbing that Steinhardt and Turok don’t even address their dependence on it. Does their model work if string theory is wrong?
My sense is that it doesn’t, but they never even face the possibility — lending inadvertent weight to Smolin’s and Woit’s complaints that string theory is strangling physics. I hope the authors can someday publish a second edition in which they don’t treat string theory as the only game in town.
Despite its problems, string theory does now have a shop and a blog.
Update: The news is that Arkani-Hamed will be moving from Harvard to the Institute for Advanced Study.
Update: In case any one was worried that Lubos’s move back to Europe would end his entertainining rants about the stupidity of anyone expressing skepticism about string theory, don’t worry. The latest is Bloomberg: another idiotic article, which begins:
Elizabeth Lopatto is the name of the latest breathtaking idiot who was hired to write about theoretical physics for Bloomberg. I am periodically amazed that the newer journalists are always able to exceed the degree of mental breakdown of their predecessors.
and then goes on from there…
The “fatigue” of some string conferences in recent years, looks a lot like the similar “fatigue” of those GUT and supergravity conferences from the early-mid 1980’s (before string theory became very popular), when those subjects were losing their luster.
Though age from folly could not give me freedom, It does from childishness: can Fulvia die?
Could someone bring me up to date?
I’ve not been keeping track of the Motlodrama. Why will Harvard be
“minus” the abovenamed asset next year?
Thanks for the link to the article ‘Islands in the Sea’, which states on page 3:
Of course, they are right to emphasise that, despite the fact that string theory can’t be falsified, one of it 10^500 vacua might still be the real world.
Similarly, you can’t falsify religions because they are too vague and contain caveats like ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test …’ (e.g., Deuteronomy 6:16 and Matthew 4:7).
Don’t you think that instead of being so negative about the failure of string theory to make falsifiable predictions, you should start to be more positive and point out its great success as an invincible religion? One of the great drawbacks to other religions is the lack of mathematical obfuscation in them, and the fact that anyone can read their secrets. A religion based around mathematical speculation has valuable advantages over existing religions: 1) Infidels can be dismissed by the high priests as merely mathematically illiterate ignoramuses; 2) Hollywood stringy sci-fi films can be made as powerful propaganda tools to convert the heathen masses to string theory; and 3) String theory, unlike regular religion, is a theory of everything unobservable, so it is like knowing the mind of God; hence it really is the one true religion, if correct (it is be impossible to disprove, so it is correct for religious purposes).
Suppose that the assumptions which make the landscape of string theory finite sized turn out to be false, and the landscape is really infinite in size. (This is quite possible if dark energy turns out to be a misunderstanding of experimental facts, like phlogiston theory.)
In that case, string theory will come in an infinite number of forms. Since infinity is the biggest possible number in mathematics, it then must contain the real universe we see because the probability that a set of infinite possibilities will contain reality must be equal to 1, mustn’t it?
On the other hand, the probability that any particular vacua, selected at random out of the infinite number of vacua, will be equal to 1/infinity = 0.
Lubos has left his position at Harvard and returned to the Czech republic, not clear what his future plans are. I don’t know the full story of why he left Harvard.
Peter, you are and apparently always will be a critic, and I mean that in the worst possible way. To complain the way you do without adding anything to the solution of what you complain about only calls attention to your own inadequacies.
That being said I enjoy many of the math and physics links.
Good luck,
Anon
Anon,
Well, I got into this critic business because no one else was doing it and it needed doing. I’d be happy to hand off the job to someone else, but there don’t seem to be many takers (possibly because of all the abuse about one’s inadequacies from anonymous and other sources that comes with the role…)
Anyway, another reason for fewer posts is that something I’ve been working on for a very long time finally seems to be working out and I’m spending more time on that. Maybe I’ll turn out to be not so inadequate after all, maybe not, we shall see…
Glad you enjoy at least some of the material here!
One of the great drawbacks to other religions is the lack of mathematical obfuscation in them, and the fact that anyone can read their secrets.
I take it you are not familiar with the works of William Dembski.
“but I fear that there was nothing discussed this year that seems to reach the heights of what was being discovered back in those early days 50 years ago.”
Exactly. Theoretical physics is far from being alone in its malaise. And some might argue that the influence of Grothendieck and people like him play the same role in mathematics that string theory plays in physics. Too much hype, too few real results.
gunpowder,
I think mathematics and theoretical physics are both experiencing one problem that is similar: they’re victims of their own success. As you figure things out, you do the easier things first, what remains are more and more difficult problems.
But Grothendieck’s story is quite different than that of string theory, in some ways it’s more like the Standard Model. During the 50s and 60s he came up with ideas that are the foundation of the way algebraic geometers now think, and they do this because it actually successfully solves problems. It is true that the kind of abstraction Grothendieck pursued is something that led many less talented than him into fruitless areas. There was a reaction against this in the 70s and 80s, with a rather balanced view about abstraction emerging.
I actually find it surprising how much progress mathematics is able to make despite its increasing difficulty. The proofs of the Poincare conjecture and Fermat’s last theorem in recent years are striking examples.
There’s nothing like the landscape going on among top-level mathematicians, and I don’t think the problem with string theory is that of too much empty abstraction. Rather the problem is the refusal to admit that a specific, concrete idea has failed, that of getting particle physics out of a 10/11d string/M-theory.
Hi Peter,
I was not following Lubos’s story either. Can it be that he was denied tenure or something like that?
On the opening page for the “String theory and the real world” conference, they state:
“String theory has given us new insights into quantum gravity, and has provided non-perturbative techniques for analyzing dynamical questions and computing observable predictions. It has suggested a variety of candidate solutions for all of the generally recognized problems of fundamental physics: the hierarchy problem, the cosmological constant problem, the nature of dark matter, and the origin of the fundamental constants. ”
Is there any support for any of this? Or is it generic ad copy?
Regards to all, TW
Sad to hear that Lubos has left Harvard.
Was Lubos’ leaving due to his radical way of defensing string theory on his personal web that caused Harvard to do something that Lubos hated very much?
ali + mathjunkie,
Lubos wasn’t there long enough to come up for a usual tenure decision so I don’t think it was that. If his colleagues in the theory group had any problems with how he was defending string theory, I never heard about it.
Tom,
It’s ad copy, based on some kernel of truth, but highly misleading. The part about providing a “variety of candidate solutions” to the great problems of physics is laughable in a way since it tries to make a virtue out of the theory’s main problem, that of being consistent with almost anything.
Peter, thanks for your rely.
Just found that Lubos put down on his personal web “Pilsen, CZ” as his current location. So, Lubos is back to his country where he grew up. Anyway, we can still watch how he defends string theory there.
All the circumstantial evidence suggests it was the opposite that actually happened.
Personally, I’m glad this long foreseen parting has at last happened.
The Harvard tag gave Lubos a credibility he doesn’t deserve and would never had gained by himself. His blog is full of lies, half truths and deliberately misleading information just about everything and everyone, from computers to politics, from physics to pedagogy, and everything in between.
Right now, as far as his internet personna is concerned, he’s just another nut with a blog, one among thousands, lost somewhere in Central Europe. Who could care less what he says?
lyme,
I agree with you. Lubos has become another Peter Woit.
That’s what he would like to think… There’s a long distance from Pilsen to Columbia, and not just geographically… Time will tell what he will become, it’s still too early to draw conclusions.
But, as far as I’m concerned, the crucial difference between one and the other is that I’m able to answer your post because it’s still there for me and everyone to read.
Please stop it with the personally insulting comments, about Lubos or about anyone else.
As soon as I opened the “string theory blog” you cite, I knew there was something wrong… The photos there are just too good to have been shot by physicists…
Arkani-Hamed will be joining IAS starting this fall. Apparently,
the powers that be in Princeton think more highly of his work
than you do, Peter.
wow,
Thanks for the news. Interesting to hear that the inner sanctum of what Polchinski describes as the “cult of monovacuism” will now include one of the most vigorous proponents of the anthropic multiverse. Susskind must be rejoicing at fresh evidence of the capitulation of resistance…
In my humble opinion. From a political and marketing standpoint, Motl was a walking liability for both the department and university. The physics department, at arguably the world’s most famous institution, housed a racist, sexist, attack-dog who would scream as loudly as he could to anyone and everyone….what an embarassment!
I’m surprised, and somewhat disheartened, he lasted as long as he did.
IMHO,
Again, I wish people would stop it with the loaded characterizations of Lubos’s personality.
From what I hear, he can be quite charming personally, with the attack-dog screaming act restricted to his internet activities. Some people really don’t do well when you give them a keyboard…
It doesn’t surprise me that Harvard put up with him so long (and for all I know, they were willing to continue to do so, with him being the one who decided he had enough of it there). Universities in the US, at least in principle, have a very strong prejudice in favor of not restricting free speech. My guess is that much of Lubos’s problem was that he seemed to be putting all his time and energy into ranting on the blog, not doing research. If he had been producing impressive papers about string theory in between the ranting, I don’t think he would have had much of a problem.
What did surprise me was the apparent unwillingness of his string theorist colleagues to forcefully tell him that the kind of response to scientific criticism he was engaged in was both inappropriate and damaging to their interests, or to take any action to distance themselves from what he was doing. As far as I was ever able to tell, he felt he was expressing the views held privately by his colleagues, with the only difference between them and him being that he was more honest and willing to stick up for what he believed. I have some reasons to believe that he wasn’t unreasonable to think this, in particular given a few of the anonymous Cambridge-based attacks I’ve been the target of.
Unfortunately I think Lubos’s conviction that anyone who criticizes string theory must be an incompetent idiot, with their criticism of string theory something morally reprehensible deserving of personal attack, is not unique to him, but shared by some influential people. When I first started publicly criticizing string theory, I was shocked by how many people told me they thought I was doing something very brave and foolhardy. There has for quite a long time been an ugly atmosphere in the particle theory community over this issue, and Lubos’s behavior makes quite clear what the nature of the problem is.
Hi Peter,
I enjoyed reading your book and Lee Smolin’s as well. I’ve just been reading your comments on the LHC, and do you know what? It’s my considered prediction that there’ll be a Higg’s boson found within six months of the machine switched on in May next year, with considerable excitement. But come July 2009 – 10 there’ll be string theory conferences saying where the hell are the predicted black holes?
Will they still carry on with string theory then? Unfortunately, yes. They’ll make excuses such as: The LHC wasn’t powerful enough. Lets build one the circumference of the Earth and then we’ll get a result. Dream on!
Let’s face it. Once the Higg’s boson is proved to exist, it’s a monumental waste of money building ever larger more expensive colliders for all they’ll produce is yet more Higg’s bosons. We’re better off researching into the known anomalies produced by varying basic so called “constants”.
I’m not a physicist. I’m doing natural history and archaeology, but even I can see this hole that the physics community has dug itself into.
Ivone,
I think it will be longer than that to find the Higgs. Even if all goes well, the machine won’t start producing real data of any interest until July. And, if history is any guide, it may take quite a while to get the LHC working the way it is supposed to. Analyzing the data from these very complicated experiments is also a long and time-consuming business, and the Higgs is not the easiest thing to look for. Personally I think I would bet on a Higgs in 2010…
The string theorists aren’t really predicting black holes, they don’t expect to see them. That possibility is a remote one and doesn’t happen in most popular versions of string theory.
What we’re all hoping for is not just the discovery of the Higgs, but studying its properties and finding something unexpected, or finding not a Higgs, but something else that plays the same role. Depending on what the LHC sees, there may or may not be a convincing case for spending the money on higher energy accelerators.
lyme, the distance from Central Europe (as well as from China, India and other places you look down upon) to Columbia is of the same order of magnitude as most places in the US – proved by many a faculty list.
Pilsen, in particular, is a nice city with more than thousand years of history, which has given us the Pilsner beer,
Skoda motor company, music of Smetana and goals of Pavel Nedved…
“From what I hear, he can be quite charming personally, with the attack-dog screaming act restricted to his internet activities.”
Having known Lubos for the past few months in and out of the class room, I found him to be quite inspiring as a teacher and deeply considerate as a person. Of course on many non-physics topics he struck me, at times, as being hopelessly misguided or ill-informed. Yet I never recall him being arrogant and unwilling to listen. His web persona is something of a mystery to many. At any rate, his wonderful sense of humor, physical insights and, most of all, great kindness will be remembered by several of us.
Oles, that is good to know. Let us hope then he lands up at a place without an internet connection, so that the dark side find no expression.
I don’t look down upon anything. I’ve been there, done that, and know exactly what I’m talking about. And yes, Czekia is at exactly the same distance from the Ivy League as Tennesee. But on the way out distances dilate very fast, much faster than on the way in. The clock is ticking quite fast for Lubos.
On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.
On the internet, nobody knows you’re really a nice guy.
So Lubos finally made good on his threat to leave Harvard (and academia?)… it’ll be interesting to see what his next move is. Maybe a job at his hometown uni, but considering the love and admiration he expresses on his blog for Czech president Klaus, and his interest in science-related political stuff in general, it wouldn’t surprise if he has lined up some government job there. Perhaps we can look forward to the spectacle of future Education Minister Motl imposing string theory on the Czech high school curriculum… At any rate, good luck to the guy, he’s been an entertaining character (modulo the repugnant sexist/racist stuff he sometimes spouts). Will be interesting to see if/how his blog style changes now that he is presumably “unleashed” and able to “enjoy basic human rights”.
Sounds like you’re having a fine adventure. Good luck!
Just had this thought:
If Peter hadn’t pointed out the improper aspects of string theory (like being untestable), Lubos would not have fighted back and he would have more time doing research. He might have made breakthroughs and…then he would go to IAS…
But the above is just for fun. 🙂
Never mind all that – seen today’s New Scientist?
TLH,
Thanks, already on it. See next posting…
Oles: If you are a team member in good standing, Lubos can be very nice to you. (But you are wrong about the sense of humor – Lubos likes the sarcastic put-downs but he laughs only to his own jokes, the jokes of his peers and to the slapstick kind of stuff.) A narcissic, brilliant and agressive guy with twenty chips on his shoulder is not the best kind of advisor that one can have in the grad school.
He seriously compares himself to Feynman and Jesus Christ (but not to Borat). He actualy wants is to be loved and admired by all the smart people while defeating the idiots who get in the way of progress.
Peter Woit Said:
That’s easy to say and well-and-good in principal, until it starts costing Harvard Corporation money…Prestige and image have value also.
Maybe I put to much faith in the ethics and morals of the physics community, but I can’t imagine many condoning Motl’s behavior (at least in private). You often mention most string theorists unwillingness to publicly “take any action to distance themselves from what he was doing”. That may be true, but a lack of public admonishment is not the same thing as approval.
Either way, at the end of the day it’s hard to imagine any scenario where a Harvard Asst. Prof who “decided he had enough of it there” chooses to leaves Harvard and the American Scientific establishment behind to mingle with Borat.
Actually, a simple google search gives a reasonably plausible explanation.
http://www.physicsbanter.com/particle-physics/79483-lubos-motls-forced-resignation-harvard.html
IMHO,
I’m quite sure that the claims by Sarfatti that he was responsible for getting Lubos fired are nonsense. I would think that Lubos’s colleagues would consider complaints from a source like Sarfatti a point in Lubos’s favor, not a reason for firing him.
I don’t claim that Lubos’s string theory colleagues approved of how he was defending string theory, but I never saw any evidence at all that they disapproved of it enough to tell him to cut it out.
Woit said:
Oh yes, I’m sure those particular claims are nonsense.
What was of interest to me was the information that there was a forced resignation as far back as January. If true, it now seems that the Harvard Physics Department is not as morally and ethically bankrupt as they first appeared.
The asset/liability ratio was decreasing for quite some time and finally even his suporters agreed that Lubos was not worth the constant aggravation.
I don’t think Sarfatti can claim credit Lubos for himself – for example about 5 years ago there was a minor affair when Lubos discovered that a (politically-correct + pompous) lecturer of slavonic studies in Glasgow misrepresented his old czech degree as a Ph.D. – the degree in question was roughly equivalent something intermediate between MS and Ph.D. Lubos allerted Glasgow uni, called the lecturer a commie spy colaborator and suggested he should commit suicide. As a result the lecturer threatened a legal action and complained at Harvard. Lubos was reportedly on the occasion ordered by his superiors to take his extracurricular interests easy and to stay out of the spotlight. He managed, for about 3 weeks.
milkshake,
I hadn’t heard that part of the Lubos story before, presumably it has to do with this:
http://www.blisty.cz/art/9429.html
In Lubos’s latest posting, it seems that I’m the villain of the latest Die Hard movie…
Yeah, it is this stuff – for many months the same e-zine even had a free advert on its sidebar for the Motl’s czech translation of the Elegant Universe and would post some Lubos articles there. You can imagine how it progressed from there.
IMHO wrote: “…at the end of the day it’s hard to imagine any scenario where a Harvard Asst. Prof who “decided he had enough of it there” chooses to leaves Harvard and the American Scientific establishment behind to mingle with Borat.”
unless he/she is a free spirit who is also a fanatic and a bit of a nutter. Not everyone in this business is a careerist, and different people value different things. Just look at Perelman. Lubos has been writing for a long time on his blog about his distain for Cambridge and academia in general, so my bet is that it’s more a case of him jumping than being pushed.
amused said:
His entire self worth is wrapped up in an unwavering belief in his superior scientific intellect….and he chose to leave academia???
I’ll take that bet any day of the week!
IMHO, you have got the facts a bit wrong. He was just an undercover secret agent working for an anti-string conspiracy, and his had to leave Harvard before his cover was blown (when his ‘defense’ of string theory had become obviously self-defeating).
It’s true – Lubos was a gift to us String sceptics. He’s going to be hard to replace.
Ok IMHO, I’ll wager US$100 on it (that he jumped rather than was pushed).
And Chris, I don’t see the big difference between Lubos entertaining us from Harvard or from Czekia. Chances are he’ll be even more entertaining from Czekia!
Amused,
It’s not a question of that. The point is that now Lubos will just be another dissident like Nigel Cook, Jack Sarfatti, Thomas Larssen, Danny Ross Lunsford, Matti Pitkannen, Tony Smith, me and – for all I know – you. Much easier to ignore than a Harvard Assistant Professor.