Things don’t seem to be going well these days for string theory in the “marketplace of ideas”. From an article about gasoline-saving pedals:
The 1990’s were the host of many great fads. Furby, Tamagachis, string theory, the examples are as numerous as the many incarnations of Prince.
Um…it’s “tamagotchi” or “tamagochi”…
Well, I have to admit that this is clear evidence that string theory is going out of fashion and Peter Woit has emerged victorious.
String Theory should be out of fashion, but it isn’t at all. Just check how many articles are posted everyday…
Blame that on the tenure system. It is rather anachronic to offer lifetime job protection after just a few years of work experience in this day and age.
Tenure system was largely responsible for stifling out-of-box thinkers in academia and therefore partially contributed to the rise of String. Now it will continue to protect people who really belong to the trash heap of history.
M.Wang, surely on the contrary the tenure system encourages out of the box thinkers. Once you’ve got tenure you don’t have to worry about publishing x papers per year, or how many citations you have. You can just work on whatever you want.
If you’re a postdoc who has to make applications to new institutions every 2 years you’re forced to work on whatever is fashionable.
With or without tenure system, the postdocs will have no job security until they make it to the next (or the next next) level.
Full professorship, however, will be available to younger researchers if we do away with the tenure system or at least lower the mandatory retirement age. FBI agents have to retire at the age of 57. Why do physics professors stay on into the 60s or 70s? How many innovative advances were done by people older than 50 anyway?
what’s wrong with tamagotchis? thay are cool 🙂
Dear Wang:
The tenure system is far better than the alternative you are suggesting. If you want to have an example of how bad things can get, consider the case of someone who gets to recompete for his professorship every few years without any security and a salary that is considerably below what you could get in industry positions, where they pay better so you to take the risk of lossing your job. You would not be able to get the best people to do research and public universities would not have the funds to pay for their salaries (they would be considered too expensive). There has to be something at the end that will make such an investment on time for individuals to be worth their while and tenure plays an important role in guaranteeing the quality of the research. It is not neccessarily fair, but it is cost-effective and I would say that it is being put to good use.
Mandatory retirment in professions where there is physical rigor and you could potentially harm someone by not being able to react quickly enough or where you might be taking a risk on your life is rather standard. For most other professions around the world, retirement age is around 65.
In academic positions the experience of professors far outweighs their drop in productivity as they age: they train new generations that relish the opportunity to be able to work with them. Consider the fact that retiring people early is just an added cost to society: you have to pay their retirement benefits after all.
Also, tenured professorships, especially in theoretical physics, usually involve people spending ten to fifteen years previous in training for the chance to get one: a pHD plus a few postdoctoral positions plus the time as a junior professor with no guarantees of getting tenured. I would not call that ‘just a few years experience’, but rather a very expensive investment in funds trying to get the best people for the job. You want to keep that investment giving returns for as long as you can.
I’d be happy to retire at age 57 if I was given a nice pension. Under the current system in vogue at most US universities, I can’t afford to retire at 57 and I probably won’t be otherwise employable at that age.
David,
I understand where your arguments come from. Unfortunately, they are basically the same ones that socialists the world over had used in the past hundred years to justify lifetime job protection. The reality, which if you want you can find in any Econ 101 textbook, is that a rigid job market shaves off about 1-2% in annual productivity growth. Why would university jobs be immune from this universal law of economics? No reason whatsoever.
A common mistake made when arguing in favor of continuing the socialist status quo is to assume that the rest of the system will remain unchanged when the obvious safety net is dismantled. In reality, human society is a dynamic organism. Without the rigid job protection, the employers and the employees (as well as other stake holders such as students) will set new rules and form new norms that maintain a better balance among efficiency, fairness and safety.
Experience is important in a lot of other disciplines. For example, the French railroad workers can easily argue that it takes decades to learn to operate their railroads safely and proficiently, but look at the end result of their rigid job protection: a ridiculously low productivity level. Forty years ago, the French GDP was significantly higher than the British. Now it is the other way around, thanks to the Thatcher revolution in 80’s, which, if summarized to one principle, is about unleashing creative destruction through increase in job mobility.
Ironically, theoretical particle physics is the one academic field where experience has had very little to do with meaningful achievements historically. This is a profession that should value innovation above all else, much like the silicon valley. Can you imagine Google or Intel offering tenures to their employees? Don’t Intel engineers deserve the job security? Doesn’t their experience count?
Theoretical particle physics is also rather unique among academic fields in that nowadays young PhDs have to do 4 or 5 postdocs on a routine basis. The mathematicians don’t have to. The chemists don’t have to. The EE majors don’t have to. Don’t you think this is very wrong to these young researchers and detrimental to the whole discipline as well? With a serious problem such as this plaguing the field, Physics really is crying out for structure reform. Breaking down the job protection for senior staff is a time-tested way of improving the welfare of entry-level personnel. If there is a better way to help the postdocs, I don’t know it.
I should add here that the cruel practice of a potentially career ending review every one or two years was unheard of in the capitalist world until Jeff Skilling introduced it into Enron. Somehow, it never quite caught on among other corporations. I am just aghast at the way the physics community takes as a given.
The entrenched interests may be too strong to even allow the mere contemplation of reform in academia right now. But in a few decades, when the economic center of gravity moves to China and India, tougher competition in higher education may finally force some real changes. I can think of a few rational possibilities, such as clearer separation of teaching and research duties, more flexible hiring and firing practices, greater emphasis on students’ welfare, and, yes, better pay for the junior faculty members. Until then, my sympathy to all the struggling postdocs.
David,
I understand where your arguments come from. Unfortunately, they are basically the same ones that socialists the world over had used in the past hundred years to justify lifetime job protection. The reality, which if you want you can find in any Econ 101 textbook, is that a rigid job market shaves off about 1-2% in annual productivity growth. Why would university jobs be immune from this universal law of economics? No reason whatsoever.
A common mistake made when arguing in favor of continuing the socialist status quo is to assume that the rest of the system will remain unchanged when the obvious safety net is dismantled. In reality, human society is a dynamic organism. Without the rigid job protection, the employers and the employees (as well as other stake holders such as students) will set new rules and form new norms that maintain a better balance among efficiency, fairness and safety.
Experience is important in a lot of other disciplines. For example, the French railroad workers can easily argue that it takes decades to learn to operate their railroads safely and proficiently, but look at the end result of their rigid job protection: a ridiculously low productivity level. Forty years ago, the French GDP was significantly higher than the British. Now it is the other way around, thanks to the Thatcher revolution in 80’s, which, if summarized to one principle, is about unleashing creative destruction through increase in job mobility.
Ironically, theoretical particle physics is the one academic field where experience has had very little to do with meaningful achievements historically. This is a profession that should value innovation above all else, much like the silicon valley. Can you imagine Google or Intel offering tenures to their employees? Don’t Intel engineers deserve the job security? Doesn’t their experience count?
Theoretical particle physics is also rather unique among academic fields in that nowadays young PhDs have to do 4 or 5 postdocs on a routine basis. The mathematicians don’t have to. The chemists don’t have to. The EE majors don’t have to. Don’t you think this is very wrong to these young researchers and detrimental to the whole discipline as well? With a serious problem such as this plaguing the field, Physics really is crying out for structure reform. Breaking down the job protection for senior staff is a time-tested way of improving the welfare of entry-level personnel. If there is a better way to help the postdocs, I don’t know it.
I should add here that the cruel practice of a potentially career ending review every one or two years was unheard of in the capitalist world until Jeff Skilling introduced it into Enron. Somehow, it never quite caught on among other corporations. I am just aghast at the way the physics community takes as a given.
The entrenched interests may be too strong to even allow the mere contemplation of reform in academia right now. But in a few decades, when the economic center of gravity moves to China and India, tougher competition in higher education may finally force some real changes. I can think of a few rational possibilities, such as clearer separation of teaching and research duties, more flexible hiring and firing practices, greater emphasis on students’ welfare, and, yes, better pay for the junior faculty members. Until then, my sympathy to all the struggling postdocs.
As a tenured professor, I certainly see some of my colleagues who should have retired long ago. On the other hand, most professors are still quite competent at teaching at 65 and 70 (and some are still so as they get into the upper 70’s, but this is much less common), and a few are still doing very good research at this age. So I would suggest 57 is much too low for retirement age.
Actually, I believe it is illegal for universities to have mandatory retirement ages in the U.S. It is definitely possible to have one-time retirement incentives, and I suspect from this fact that it would be possible to have a system where you received a somewhat larger pension if you retired between 65 and 70 than if you stayed on longer. I think this would be a good idea (with maybe very rare exceptions for outstanding indivicuals).
One way of reconciling M Wang’s viewpoint on Professors, retirement and innovation from people over 50 is that maybe Professors don’t have that much to do with actual direct innovative research? They teach, sit on departmental committees, know how to write grant proposals in appropriate language that funding committees are comfortable with, they sit on funding committees, write funding letters to alumni, engage in networking, etc, all useful jobs that really don’t have much to do with being innovative.
Of course that’s probably a heretical viewpoint.
I see I was a bit unclear: above I meant to say “maybe under the current system Professors don’t have that much to do with actual direct innovative research anyway?”
David,
I understand where your arguments come from. Unfortunately, they are basically the same ones that socialists the world over had used in the past hundred years to justify lifetime job protection. The reality is that a rigid job market shaves off about 1-2% in annual productivity growth. Why would university jobs be immune from this universal law of economics? No reason whatsoever.
A common mistake made when arguing in favor of continuing the socialist status quo is to assume that the rest of the system will remain unchanged when the obvious safety net is dismantled. In reality, human society is a dynamic organism. Without the rigid job protection, the employers and the employees (as well as other stake holders such as students) will set new rules and form new norms that maintain a better balance among efficiency, fairness and safety.
Experience is important in a lot of other disciplines. For example, the French railroad workers can
easily argue that it takes decades to learn to operate their railroads safely and proficiently, but look at the end result of their rigid job protection: a ridiculously low productivity level. Forty years ago, the
French GDP was significantly higher than the British. Now it is the other way around, thanks to the Thatcher revolution in 80’s, which, if summarized to one principle, is about unleashing creative destruction through increase in job mobility.
Ironically, theoretical particle physics is the one academic field where experience has had very little to do with meaningful achievements historically. This is a profession that should value innovation above all else, much like the silicon valley. Can you imagine Google or Intel offering tenures to their employees? Don’t Intel engineers deserve the job security? Doesn’t their experience count?
Theoretical particle physics is also rather unique among academic fields in that nowadays young PhDs
have to do 3 or 4 postdocs on a routine basis. The mathematicians don’t have to. The chemists don’t have to. The EE majors don’t have to. Don’t you think this is very wrong to these young researchers and detrimental to the whole discipline as well? With a serious problem such as this plaguing the field, Physics really is crying out for structure reform. Breaking down the job protection for senior staff is a time-tested way of improving the welfare of entry-level personnel. If there is a better way to help the postdocs, I don’t know it.
I should add here that the cruel practice of a potentially career ending review every one or
two years was unheard of in the capitalist world until Jeff Skilling introduced it into Enron. Somehow, it never quite caught on among other corporations. I am just aghast at the way the physics community takes as a given.
The entrenched interests may be too strong to even allow the mere contemplation of reform in academia right now. But in a few decades, when the economic center of gravity moves to China and
India, tougher competition in higher education may finally force some real changes. I can think of a few rational possibilities, such as clearer separation of teaching and research duties, more flexible hiring and firing practices, greater emphasis on students’ welfare, and, yes, better pay for the junior faculty members. Until then, my sympathy to all the struggling postdocs.
Wang starts his spiel with “Econ 101” and ends it with his sympathies for the postdocs. I see a contradiction there. Maybe these struggling postdocs are part of the problem. The market is way oversupplied. Maybe people should realize that there are no jobs in theoretical physics and bail out way before they get into the multiple postdoc mill. Isn’t it painfully obvious already? What are all these people doing in graduate school? If you are not the next Witten, try solid state, maybe you can get a job at Intel.
Dear Wang:
The truth is that there is no practical reason to employ all the people who graduate in studies in theoretical physics in academia. If people want to stay, the shortening of positions at the end means that they have to take temporary jobs more often. There is a reason why people do more postdocs in theoretical physics than in math. It is a market effect: there is enough funding for postdocs to stay around a while. If there was more soft money in math, you would have people doing more postdoctoral positions as well. You are also wrong on another count: a postdoc position is not the same thing as an entry level position. Junior professorships are entry level positions. A postdoc is a temporary position with a definite time limit. The review system is there because there is a lot of competition for those positions. This is not the Enron system you are describing.
You can complain about the system all you want, but the following fact remains true: if you do truly outstanding research, you will get a permanent position quickly. This has always been the case and this is a reward for truly innovative research.
My statements about having incentives to keep the best people motivated are still true. You can set up these incentives in two ways: with money incentives, or by giving some protections. There are places where there is no tenure in place and they pay more. If you can outcompete the individuals out of their jobs in those places, go ahead and do so.
The protections that are in place are there for a reason: you can get fired for having the wrong kind of opinion, and you can politicize positions to a degree where innovative research is essentially impossible. This is a more common danger in the humanities, but it is not unheard of in sciences, especially if you are going against a well entrenched belief of some community. This is, you would not give protection to dissenters who might be right. You can not base a robust system of academic dissent on utopian assumptions about the way individuals behave, so you have to put mechanisms in place to prevent certain abuses. The tenure system is one of those mechanisms. It might not be perfect, but it works sufficiently well and so far it has worked better than the alternatives. On my part, I have no illusions about idealism on this regard.
You also fail to understand that there is a lot of risk in doing research: most of the times it does not pay off, but when it does, it pays big. There is some element of luck in this. Sometimes it takes years to actually get progress done. If you are measured by Wall Street style standards (quarterly profits, etc, the same thing as recent citation counts) or any short term style metric, a lot of innovation goes down the drain. This is why most of the fundamental research is handled by public investment rather than private investment.
Dear David,
You speak like a true beneficiary of the status quo. The system works great. Those who suffer are not as good as I am and therefore just sour-graping. My job should be secure no matter what. There cannot possibly be any justification for contemplating any changes. Guess what? I read corporate earnings announcements for a living, and must have seen similar arguments a hundred times over. Unfortunately, these arguments inevitably come from failing executives who have cost their shareholders billions and are on their way to the guillotine.
I can pick apart your arguments one by one. For example, physicists do more postdocs than chemists or EE because the field of physics has more money!? You must be living in one of the other universes. But anyway, these details are not really essential to the issue here. Whether or not the system needs reform ultimately comes down to whether it works well, i.e. does it generate good returns for the investors. If the firm is failing, we don’t care if the CEO is Jesus reincarnated. Out of the door he goes. If the firm is booming, the managers can be caught stealing money from the company (Think Steve Jobs’ backdated options grants at Apple) and still get a big round of applause.
Had theoretical particle physics been a private enterprise, what would its annual report look like? Well, that is actually a trick question, because no companies would not be producing an annual report after burning through billions of dollars of taxpayers’ and donors’ money in the past few decades and generating nothing but hot air. It would have been forced into bankruptcy a long time ago.
So, the basic fundamental difference between you and me is that you think the field works great while I think it has failed completely in the past three decades. As long as we come from these opposing premises, there can be no agreement in our conclusions.
I am not insider. My involvement with physics is basically that of an activist shareholder. I become a shareholder of the field by way of donation and tax, which in a good year is enough to pay the salary of a professor for many years. In all honesty, I am offended by a member responsible for the failure of the field who has the gumption to tell me that he knows how to judge the quality of young incoming practitioners. Don’t you see that it is the tenured professors who need to be judged here?
Dear Wang:
I’ve heard a lot of rhetoric through my life, and you are spouting quite a lot of it. Let me set the facts straight for your benefit:
Theoretical physics is dirt cheap. It is in experimental physics that the billions of dollars are spent. And they have a lot to show for it. Most of what is currently known as the Web came out from the solutions that were worked out by experimenters that needed to be able to access data all over the world for experiments in particle physics. You should read the Wikipedia article about the origin of the WWW. I don’t know how much of the world’s Economy runs on the web, but if I were you I would stop making ridiculous statements about the value of the physicists contributions to the economy.
Lasers where a theoretical conjecture of the 1930’s. In the 60’s the first laser was built. Now, many technologies that people use depend on lasers, and there is a comparable number of working lasers to the numbers of people in the world. It can take 60-90 years for ideas to mature.
Many things that start their life in physics labs end up being engineering problems afterwards that produce enormous amounts of wealth. All of this is byproduct of fundamental research.
From many points of view, theoretical physics is there to help understand the experiments that are performed all over the world and society has benefitted directly from that. A true understanding of physics requires theory, and the corresponding experts are theoretical physicists.
The most important contributions of modern theoretical particle physics (last 30 years) have been related to establishing the standard model of particle physics as a law of nature, matching the model to data to unprecedented accuracy. Puzzles of how the neutrino flux from the sun was off led to extraordinary experiments that showed that neutrinos have a mass. This was a direct contribution from theory to the understanding of nature and I would say that is pretty impressive considering how messy the sun’s nuclear reactions are.
There have also been enormous improvements in the understanding of various mathematical structures from studies in theoretical physics, particularly with the insight of techniques developed in the string theory community.
Need I say more? Probably I do, because you seem to believe that theoretical physics is a bunch of nonsense practiced by a coven of evil tenured professors who are full of hot air and decide by finger what goes on.
Theoretical particle physics has not failed. A lot of ideas have been falsified by data however. But such is life in research: it is the norm rather than the exception.
Also, nowhere have I said that my job should be secure no matter what. But if you ask me to take risks, then the pay should match the risk expectations. It is the same as with interest rates in banks.
If the tenure system cuts down productivity by 2%, but it is 30-40% cheaper, most people would favor the tenure system. If you come up with a better alternative, I’m all ears.
Go ahead and pick at my arguments one by one. I would like to hear a well documented research monograph on why the tenure system is so corrupt, rather than a lot of posturing and an attitude of “I do understand economy and you don’t”. Trust me, I do understand it well enough.
The reason I posted the ‘apology’ for tenure, is that there are good reasons for the system to be in place. If I quote those reasons as a matter of an explanation, that does not mean that I refuse to see alternatives or that I am just supporting the status quo just because I’m an insider. Your arguments are not convincing because you are not proposing a real alternative.
You maybe felt insulted because I answered your post with a differing point of view? I don’t know. What I do know is that you resorted to name calling and less than civilized conversation. Fortunately I come from another universe where we don’t take the bait so easily. You feel that we are not judged and reviewed? Trust me, the tenured professors are judged by their piers and by the granting agencies. The grant contracts are allocated according to how people’s output in research is perceived. Also, I do have the capacity to judge my junior colleagues. As a matter of fact, it is part of my job description, and I take it very seriously.
Sincerely yours,
Prof. David Berenstein.
Prof. David,
This discussion is getting too personal for my comfort, so I will try to conclude it with very brief statements of facts.
I was talking about THEORETICAL particle physics in the past 30 years, not experimental, not solid state, not math and not the 1930s or 1970s.
The WEB came out of CERN. -> Experimental.
Laser prediction -> 1930s.
Physics lab Technology. -> Experimental.
Standard Model. -> 1970s.
String Math. -> Not physics.
Solution of Solar Neutrino puzzle. -> Experimental.
As for working with experimentalists, I would be more sympathetic if nonzero neutrino mass and/or small positive cosmological constant have been predicted before discovery. Instead, they cause consternation. (Clarification: All those papers published without nudging us closer to the right answer are considered negative contributions by me, regardless of their very positive contributions to the authors’ careers.)
Rigid labor market reduce the ANNUAL GROWTH RATE of productivity by 1-2%, not the productivity itself. The overall growth rate can turn negative in extreme cases, as I suspect TPT is one such case.
When I talked about judgment, I meant objective or at least disinterested 3rd-party judgment. A community of tenured professors judging themselves does not qualify.
My complaint about the tenure system is largely focused on TPT, as my original post indicated. The other fields, well, have produced results, so they can keep doing whatever they were doing with public money.
By the way, I do think TPP is under-funded. No real revival will come unless more money is invested. But no more money will come unless TPP produces some real results first. I hope LHC will lead to such real results and allow the community to break out of its 30 year torpor.
Despite my outsider status, I do wish the field well. TPP is close to the ultimate intellectual pursuit in my mind, but any collective human endeavor has to be subject to the laws of economics and TPP is no exception.
I have had some really terrible managers and have been a bad one myself, at least initially. I know how hard it is to manage people. Realistically, the tenure system will not change, but the tenured professors, if they want, can easily take some one or two weeks courses at the B-schools to learn the art of management. I found the experience silly at times but very helpful overall.
Another suggestion is for the decision makers of the field to consciously promote young people NOT in their mold. I don’t mean nasty personalities and out-of-the-world behaviors, but conformity leads to inbreeding, which in turn leads to degeneration. This seems to be one of the causes of TPP’s current problems.
There are two issues which affect mathematical physics:
1) As a discipline it is amorphous. The jobs are spread around maths, physics and even engineering departments. As such it lacks a clear identity and is often viewed with suspicion by members of the host departments. Until recently they were accepted because of the stunning record of achievement of mathematical physicists up until the late seventies.
2)The shelf life of a researcher in mathematical physics is shorter than in any experimental field. It is well established that there is very little prospect of anyone over the age of 45 making any significant breakthrough. Even the greatest names were effectively burnt out by this age and were relegated to pursuing unproductive research paths while training the younger generation.
The problem is particularly acute in String Theory, where an entire generation of theoretical physicists now occupy tenured positions. No longer productive, and fearful that their entire research career may have been in vain they grimly hold on in the hope that a new generation will make the breakthroughs that will validate their own work. Their counterparts in maths and physics departments view them with increasing resentment. In return, string theorists feel increasingly under siege and band together even more strongly.
Either a breakthrough comes or this doesn’t end well.
Dear M. Wang,
“..while I think it [theoretical particle physics] has failed completely in the past three decades.”
Why do you feel that the field has failed in the past three decades? What in your mind would count as a success?
Dear Wang:
I agree that it was getting personal. It was exactly for that reason that I gave my full name. I believe anonimity kills many discussions and invites trouble.
I am definitely open to new ideas and suggestioons as to how to improve the system. I also appreciate the notion of expert advice. It is ill-informed to believe that the merits of individuals in our fields of knowledge should not be measured by the experts in the field, but that an outside committe who does not have experience in the field will know better. A proper answer that addresses this issue of judgement should be a lot more nuanced and should provide a realistic set of rules for implementation, rather than what you described.
The truth is that in order to make progress in physics in terms of possitive results (as you called them), one needs new experimental data that needs to be explained. If there are no prospects for new experimental data ever, then the corresponding theory fields die. The reason funding has not stopped in physics, is beacuse the positive contributions to technology from physics research have not stopped happening. In this situation, you keep on funding areas that have promise, but there are never guarantees on results. This is a situation where in order to win the lotery you buy as many tickets as you can, and so long as the ones that pay do it big, you keep on doing it. If there was a way to decide in advance which tickets are loosers for certain, then people usually wouldn’t buy them. However, such a thing is not there and history has shown that betting on fundamental research has been a good bet so far.
Physics essentially moves forward when new technologies make it possible for people to observe new phenomena. It is a sad thing that we don’t celebrate the technical ingenuity of experimentalists more. Their results are what have made physics into one of the most successful developments in the understanding of nature that humanity has ever seen.
In high energy particle physics we have had a lack of new experimental evidence for new stuff other than the standard model for many years.
The addition of neutrino masses to solve the solar neutrino flux problem was one of those cases where there was a puzzle and a theoretical solution. The solution predicted various new phenomena that were later observed experimentally and parametrized them. These were seen later, and the parameters are being measured. Thus, it was verified. This is the way progress usually happens. There are very few cases where somehting started as abstract theory than was then seen.
Historically theory has followed data and not there is a feedback mechanism that makes theory give new ideas of where to look for stuff.
Also, confirming that a model of nature is correct is an incredible arduous task. Even though we would personally like some deeper understanding of nature, it is presumtuous to assume that we are entitled to it. If and when it happens, we should all celebrate.
Currently, there are experimental hints that supersymmetry might fit the current High energy physics data better than the Standard model.
Supersymmetry is one of those theory inventions that could be seen at the LHC and it would be a triumph of theoretical physics in the sense you described.
As I said above, theoretical particle physics aims to explain results of experiments and it is necessary to understand the data that is already there and to know where to look for new things. Most ideas can be thrown away because they predict deviations from current data that are beyond the experimental bounds.
Knowing where to look is especillay important in an experiment like the LHC where the output of information makes it impossible to keep all events that are produced. Designing the triggers so that one does not throw away the new physics requires an enormous amount of theoretical input and experimental know-how. In the end, we might come out with empty hands. But this is the nature of scientific research.
Another myth is that string theorist are no longer productive. The ideas of string theory, and in particular the gauge/gravity correspondence are being used to explain and analyze the data of the heavy ion collisions at RHIC. They also provide good models for the hydrodynamic behavior of strongly interacting systems and can give new models for solvable systems that might be good at describing condensed matter systems that we have already observed in the lab. Very little of this information makes it to the newspapers, but it is all happening as we speak.
The other myth is that string theorists do not promote diversity of thought or of ohter approaches. Some do and some don’t. Over-generalizations and demonizing a whole community does not help towards having productive discussions.
GS,
As I mentioned, if the TPP community had come up with a cohesive theory about the neutrino masses or the small positive cosmological constant before the experimental discovery, it would have counted as a big triumph in my mind. Even after the fact, such a theory would still have been respectable and well worth the public investment.
At the next rung of lowered expectation, something coherent to replace the ridiculously pointless SUSY extension in Higgs physics would be nice. But I am a realist. Chances are the theorists of this generation will not come up with anything remotely close to the truth until the truth scream in their faces from LHC.
DB,
I want to apologize for the use of the phrase “econ 101” in one of my earlier post. It was unnecessary and counterproductive.
I meant to write in a blunt manner, but that comes across as rude, which was not my intention and I regret it.
if the TPP community had come up with a cohesive theory about the neutrino masses
Huh? The theory behind neutrino masses was completely developed long before said mass was detected.
Also, to say that supersymmetry is pointless is silly. It may well not be right (and it looks less likely than it used to), but SUSY has a number of independent motivations (none of which have to do with string theory FWIW) that made it the most popular extension of the SM out there.
Anyways, theory preceding experiment is a nice dream, but it’s not how things usually work. Rather, the experiments come first and theories develop to explain the data. It is an unfortunately disadvantage of the past few generations of theorists that we haven’t had data to play around with. It’d be great if we could discern the secrets of the universe through thought alone, but the number of people who have managed to do that in history can probably be counted on one hand.
David,
I am criticizing the entire TPP community from a sociological/economical point of view. Nothing I said should be taken as personal.
I do not consider the idea of neutrino mixing as a comprehensive theory because it is not well integrated into a large framework.
String application on RHIC physics is positive but unfortunately minor. Overall, the return on investment in String remains miserably low.
The failure to promote a diverse set of talents is universal. It is so deeply ingrained in human nature that even well-meaning people may subconsciously favor young people who remind them of themselves. But tenured professors wield too much power over the postdocs and doctoral students, and many become so arrogant that they laugh at the idea of diversity. Senator Fulbright’s famous sentence, “Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence.” definitely applies to some big-name physicists.
My biggest problem with the tenure system is exactly the concentration of power of the old over the young. This is basically a carryover of the medieval apprentice system. Putting aside to fairness issue, one still has to consider its effects on a field facing strong headwind already.
My feeling is that tenured professors in TPP have only one thing in common: They were smart physicists, at least at one time in their careers. Otherwise, they are not guaranteed to have good tastes, much less real-life wisdom. To give every single one of them so much power over aspiring young scientists is truly not prudent.
To be a good manager, one has to have that wisdom. Humility and broad view outside the field also help. Unfortunately, these qualities are exactly those that are suppressed in the selection process of a successful physicist, where narrow-mined focus and unrealistic confidence (in self or in the adviser) are the necessary ingredients to make it to the top.
Therefore, it was not surprising that TPP community has gone over the string cliff like rats following the pied piper. Here the pied piper role is played by the de-facto leaders of the field in the past three decades: Susskind, Weinberg, but most important of all, Witten.
I have never met Dr. Witten personally. From what I have heard, he is a brilliant theorist and a nice guy too. Unfortunately, as a leader, his failure was total and complete. Certainly, he holds no official title of the kind and most likely does not want the leadership responsibility. But there is no denying that almost everyone in TPP thought of him as the leading light from the mid-80s to mid-2000s. And leadership is something that one simply cannot shirk at will.
In wielding his enormous unofficial power over the flock, Dr. Witten failed to promote the diversity we talked about. He failed to suppress the idol worship that became more and more obvious and unhealthy over the years. In fact, he failed to recognize any sociological aspect of the leadership task befalling on him and did nothing to guide the community onto a more productive direction. For this failure, I consider him the most responsible for the current miserable state of TPP.
Finger-pointing is not a very productive exercise itself. But I am surprised that nobody in physics ever utters this obvious truth, not even Woit or Smolin. Facing the truth, however, is often the first step toward progress. So there you have it. I have spoken the unspeakable. If anyone wants nominate other candidates as the guilty, I am all ears.
Aaron,
Please read my last comment about why neutrino mixing is not really a triumph for the theorists.
I presume that you were referring to the hierarchy problem as one of the “independent motivations”. But this only makes sense if there is a natural way to break SUSY at much-lower-than-Planck scale. Does such a way exist?
You are absolutely right in saying that it is rare for theory to precede experiments. But knowing this fact, how can the whole field spend the past 30 years building conjectures upon previous conjectures and extending the whole process to the 6th or 7th power? If SUSY itself is a questionable extension, why waste time building String other than to pad one’s publication list?
Where is the first-order conjecture that has at least a 50-50 chance of being true?
I am no string theory fan, but i don’t think you can blame
it all on Witten.
He’s just this guy, you know?
Neutrino mixing a triumph? I don’t know about that. Neutrino masses are pretty much obvious from the point of view of effective field theory. There’s an operator you can write down, and you expect it to be surppressed by the inverse scale of some new physics, and voila, that’s what you get. The seesaw mechanism goes back to the seventies, I think (although I’m very bad with physics history), long before the detection of neutrino masses.
As for SUSY, the hierarchy problem is certainly a motivation. So are the existence of a natural WIMP candidate, the unification of the couplings, ewsb, and maybe other things I’m forgetting. By themselves, none of these are at all conclusive, but if you take them all together, it’s not too hard to see how people got excited.
As for natural breaking of SUSY at small scales, this is hardly a new question. See this, for example. (If you’re not at a university, it’s not too hard to find a copy on the web.) Anyways, things have progressed considerably since then. Are there still problems with SUSY? Of course, but I hardly think that means that one should discard the entire idea.
This does not make any sense to me. We all know that the SM has been a phenomenal success. But we wouldn’t know that if not for the work of the particle physics community, both experimenters ant theoreticians, over the last 30 years.
So, how can one say at the same time that the SM is successful and that the past 30 years have been spent by the whole community building speculations? I think Mr. Wang is seriously confused about the nature of particle physics.
Does Witten really consider himself the leader of the string theorists? My impression is that he thinks of himself as a really smart guy looking at interesting things, but not as somebody who sets the direction for the entire TPP communicty.
Aaron,
See-saw mechanism is not just old but also isolated from the overall theoretical framework. There has been very little effort on integrating it with the rest of the beyond-SM project.
The Witten paper you quoted is a standard string effort. That is, all it says is that dynamic breaking of SUSY is not impossible in string. But the fact that anything is possible with string is something we already know without having to waste any time.
When the right idea comes out, it should link different pieces together in a previously unimagined and natural way. TPP practitioners are so ruined by string that they no long care about this any more.
Wilbur,
The great majority of the progress in particle physics during the past 30 years is in experiments. What did theorists do that contributed to the verification of the SM, which was already 99% complete by the mid 70s?
Peter,
Witten certainly did not want to be the leader, but that was the problem. People still treated him like one. The weight of responsibility did not find the shoulder that could or would carry it.
Wang,
My memory could be wrong, but it seems to me that the idea for the see-saw mechanism comes originally from grand unification, in particular SO(10)-type unification. In fact, one of the reasons that SU(5) GUTs are disfavored (besides proton decay) is that they do not have a singlet for the right-handed neutrino. If neutrinos had turned out to be massless, then this would have almost certainly meant that the SM came from an SU(5) GUT, and proton decay would probably have also been observed.
Regarding your claims about a supposed lack of progress in theoretical particle physics over the last thirty years, nothing could be farther from the truth. What has generally been lacking is the tools necessary to fully test ideas such as the Higgs mechanism and supersymmetry. In more recent years, other ideas such as warped extra dimensional theories have been proposed which will also be tested at LHC alongside older ideas such as supersymmetry and technicolor. The only way that any of your above arguments can possibly have any merit is if there is no evidence for any of these ideas at LHC. As David mentioned earlier, all evidence at present seems favor low-energy supersymmetry.
As an aside, I don’t believe the paper of Witten’s linked by Aaron above was written within the context of string theory as it was written in 1981.
Dear M. Wang,
A question for you, just to get an idea of what you expect from physicists… phenomenologists and theorists have studied a variety of scenarios for TeV scale physics, e.g. SUSY, technicolor, composite Higgs, extra dimensions, etc. If upcoming experiments end up supporting any one of these scenarios, would you still consider the efforts of the past 30 years to be a failure?
One way to quantify the amount of recent progress (or lack thereof) in theoretical physics is to look at the age of the youngest theory Nobelist around. At this time it is Wilczek, who is around 55. I don’t think that there ever (after 1902) was a time when the youngest was that old, and made his discoveries so long ago.
“If upcoming experiments end up supporting any one of these scenarios,”
gs, isn’t this is a quite big IF, given constraints from the Tevatron and elsewhere?
Dear Thomas,
Once the results from the LHC are in, it is quite likely that many Noble prizes will be awarded to theorists, e.g. Higgs, Zumino, and so on depending on what is found. Theories have to be confirmed by experiment before Nobel prizes can be awarded.
As far as whether or not it is likely that something will be found at LHC, the answer to that is almost certainly. Either the Higgs will be found or something equivalent to it. If the Higgs is found, then there must be something which stabilizes its mass against quadratic divergences. Whatever the case may be, it should be seen at LHC. In the case of supersymmetry and the Higgs, it is hardly surprising that no signal (above background) has been seen at the Tevatron as the beam energy is just not high enough to produce large numbers of events.
Mr. Wang,
your statement that the verification of the SM was complete by the mid
1970s is completely ludicrous. What was complete by then was the
formulation of the SM. Notice that the weak bosons where first
experimentally observed in 1981/1982, so no direct verification of the
SM could have taken place before that.
You seem to believe that after the SM was formulated only experimental
work remained to be done. That is wrong. You fail to realize that
the theoretical work needed to quantitatively match the
experimental results, and also to guide the experimental effort, is
gigantic and absolutely non-trivial. And, since you don’t know it,
it’s first-rate physics.
To give you just two obvious examples: the computation of QCD
scattering amplitudes at tree level is an active subject of
research even today. (And one, by the way, which has received inputs
from string theory.) Another example is the verification of the CKM
model of CP violation, to which an enormous amount of theoretical work
has been, and still is, directed.
If you want to see literally hundreds of other equally relevant
examples just take a look at the current literature. Take, for
example, the areas of hadron spectroscopy, jet physics, deep inelastic
scattering, electroweak boson scattering, flavor physics, …, even
QED, … the list is virtually endless. That is what is called
particle physics.
According to your wrong idea of how physics research is conducted, one
should say that, for example, condensed matter physics is a purely
experimental field, since the Schroedinger equation has been known
since the 1920s. Obviously, that’s not how physics works.
Eric, do you really think that Higgs or Zumino is below 55? 🙂
It is standard lore that it is impossible to find nothing at the LHC, because of the Landau pole. That’s why nothing would be so exciting – it would make LHC the most important null experiment since Michelson-Morley. I wouldn’t bet against a Higgs, though. On second thought, I might risk a hundred bucks if Sean Carroll still offers 19:1 odds.
However, yours is a stronger claim: that just an SM Higgs is also impossible. It will be interesting to see how that prediction pans out in the next few years.
Wilbur,
Your points are well taken. But how many TPP papers published during the past 30 years have been on the subjects you listed? How many were not? Is the ratio around 1/2, 1/5, or closer to 1/20? If the bulk of publications fall into categories that you would rather not mention, what does that say about the overall progress in TPP?
M. Wang,
I don’t have statistics on the last 30 years of
theoretical physics papers, so I cannot give a
definite answer to your question. I don’t know
whether detailed studies of that kind actually
exist.
Like I said in my post, the topics I mentioned
were just examples, not an attempt at a complete
classification of particle physics subfields. For
example, I didn’t mention lattice QCD, where much
progress has been made in the last two decades.
All I can say is that if you’re trying to prove
that SM physics has been a marginal field in
theoretical particle physics for the last 30
years, you’re going to have a very hard time doing
so.