Not Even Wrong

This is the time of the year when young particle physicists usually want to go to school, more precisely, a “summer school” held in some pleasant location. These typically have a series of survey lectures on the hot topics of the subject, aimed at the level of advanced graduate students and postdocs. These days, the lectures are often available on-line in some form, so anyone interested in learning some more about currently active research topics can do so, even if they have to miss the summer travel aspect of the school.

Here’s a partial list of some of the larger such programs:

Theoretical Advanced Studies Institute in Elementary Particle Physics: String theory and its applications, Boulder, Colorado June 1-25

Summer school on structures in local quantum field theory, Les Houches, June 7-25

50th Cracow School of Theoretical Physics, Zakopane, Poland June 9-19

2010 European School of High-Energy Physics, Raseborg, Finland June 20 -July 3

Summer School on Mathematical String Theory, Blacksburg June 21-July 2

Cargese Summer School on String Theory: Formal Developments and Applications, Cargese, Corsica June 21-July 3

PASI School on Quantum Gravity, Morelia, Mexico June 23-July 3

Prospects in Theoretical Physics: Aspects of Supersymmetry, Princeton July 19 – July 30 (why Princeton as a location to travel to for the summer is a bit of a mystery…)

Cargese Summer School on Physics at TeV Colliders, Cargese, Corsica July 19-July 30

International School on Strings and Fundamental Physics, Munich July 25-August 6

PSI Summer School on Particle Physics: Gearing up for LHC Physics, Zuoz, Switzerland, August 1-7

SLAC Summer Institute on Neutrinos, Stanford, August 2-13

Clifford Johnson is blogging from the quantum gravity school in Morelia, where he’s shocked to find the “totally bizarre” situation that the students there aren’t very enthusiastic about string theory. He attributes this to their ignorance:

Here’s the really odd thing about all this … : While this is a school on Quantum Gravity, after talking with the students for a while one learns that in most cases the little they’ve heard about string theory is often essentially over 20 years out of date and almost always totally skewed to the negative, to the extent that many of them are under the impression that string theory has nothing to do with quantum gravity at all! It is totally bizarre, and I suspect it is largely a result of things that are said and passed around within their research community.. So there are a few students here and there who have some familiarity with strings, huddling together at times for warmth in a sea of miscommunication, misinformation, and strange preconceptions.

I find it extremely hard to believe that the students at this school are ignorant of claims that string theory is a unified theory including quantum gravity, more likely they’re just unconvinced and more interested in other approaches.

Lubos reacts to this by noting that Clifford is finally encountering reality:

Clifford Johnson seems to be surprised that almost all the students have been brainwashed by various anti-stringy misconceptions. Clifford has clearly been living outside the reality at least for 4 years, and so have many other serious high-energy physicists.

and then goes beyond Clifford, arguing that the problem is not just ignorance, but sub-normal intelligence:

There’s no string theory group in Mexico – another fact that shouldn’t be shocking given Mexico’s average IQ around 85. The IQ increment needed to go from non-stringy quantum gravity to string theory is around 20.

One of the weirder battles of the String Theory wars became known to some as “trackbackgate”, referring to arguments over the arXiv’s policy of not allowing trackbacks to this blog. I’ve mercifully forgotten the details of the story, other than that I wasted a lot of time arguing the issue with the authorities at the arXiv and Cornell, an argument that I finally lost. If you’re interested in the history, a couple blog entries you could start looking at would be this and this.

At some point the arXiv’s policy changed, and some trackbacks to blog entries here started to appear, as well as trackbacks to all sorts of media stories that linked to the arXiv. A little bit of checking seemed to indicate that trackbacks would appear if I linked to papers not in hep-th, but wouldn’t appear when I linked to hep-th papers. A recent example would be this blog entry, which linked to and discussed this paper. This made me a bit curious about what the arXiv current trackback policy might be, but from past experience I figured that trying to contact them to find this out was unlikely to get me anywhere.

One day recently it occurred to me that a way to find out something about this would be to start up another blog, write a posting linking to an hep-th paper and see what happened. It’s quite remarkable how little time it takes to start up a blog, so an hour or so later String Theory Fan was on the web, with an About section:

This blog will be devoted to discussing the latest exciting developments in string theory, our best hope for a fundamental unified theory of particle physics and quantum gravity.

The author is an academic actively studying this fascinating subject.

a first blog entry spouting hype about string theory, the multiverse and how uninformed critics were, and a second one linking to and superficially summarizing a randomly chosen recent multiverse paper.

Well, I still don’t know what the arXiv’s policy is about trackbacks to hep-th papers, but the data shows that while Not Even Wrong doesn’t seem to qualify, String Theory Fan does:

Video of David Gross’s talk at the Physics at the LHC 2010 conference is now available. He devotes much of the talk to reviewing predictions he made back in 1993 of what would happen by 2008, and making new predictions for what will happen by 2020.

The 1993 experimental predictions that didn’t work out could mostly be explained away by the SSC cancellation, which pushed investigation of TeV scale physics into the future at the LHC. In 1993 Gross predicted two light Higgs particle and superpartners (due to supersymmetry), new Z-mesons (i.e some new U(1) gauge fields) and “There will be cloudy evidence of superstrings.” His 1993 predictions about theoretical developments related to string theory didn’t work out very well:

String field theory will begin to be a useful tool and will illuminate the underlying symmetries of the theory. (not at all, he admits)

New mechanisms of string supersymmetry breaking will be discovered leading to new and definitive low energy models. (new maybe, certainly nothing definitive)

The conceptual revolution arising from the nonperturbative formulation of string theory will be in full swing, revolutionizing the concepts of space-time geometry. (“on its way, but it hasn’t really revolutionized our concepts“)

For 2020, Gross makes one striking non-scientific prediction: The US will join CERN and there will be a joint plan to build a linear collider at CERN.

His experimental predictions include a repeat of the 1993 ones (superpartners, new Z-mesons, and the Higgs, although now he only mentions one Higgs), except that he has now given up on even “cloudy” evidence of superstrings showing up at the TeV scale. His theoretical predictions include a much scaled back version of the 1993 theoretical predictions about string theory: “If we’re lucky, string theory will start to be a theory with predictions (right now we don’t understand it)”.

As far as supersymmetry goes, he says that he is “totally convinced that SUSY should be there, at the 50% level” and repeats his offer to take bets at 50/50 odds. One of the main motivations for this is the argument that SUSY can provide a suitable dark matter candidate, and he predicts observation of dark matter by 2020 at non-accelerator experiments.

Finally, he ends up with an attack on the anthropic explanation of the CC, and predicts that a better one will be found by 2020.

Update: See Lubos, who has a lot more energy than I do, for a transcription of Gross’s predictions.

The Clay Mathematics Institute this past week sponsored a conference in Paris devoted to celebrating the proof of the Poincare Conjecture. This included a short ceremony on June 8th awarding the Millennium prize to Perelman, which included several laudations explaining his achievement.

The question of what happens to the million dollars remains unresolved, with the following statement issued yesterday:

The Clay Mathematics Institute has no plans for the Millennium Prize funds other than to respectfully wait for Dr. Perelman’s decision. No deadline has been fixed for his decision, and nothing has been said or will be said about the possible use of the funds. Please see the text and laudations below for what is truly important: Dr. Perelman’s great gift of a solution to the century-old conjecture of Henri Poincaré, and Thurston’s geometrization conjecture. Their solution was celebrated at a conference in Paris held June 8-9, 2010. Those present send their congratulations and best wishes to Dr. Perelman.

A report from one of last Saturday’s events at the World Science Festival has string theorists Brian Greene and Shamit Kachru admitting that they’d be surprised to see experimental evidence for string theory in their lifetimes:

John Hockenberry, the panel’s moderator, asked Greene if he thought experimental evidence would come during his lifetime.

“I’d be surprised,” said Greene.

“And in your lifetime?” Hockenberry asked Kachru.

“…I’d be surprised,” conceded the young physicist reluctantly.

For more reports about the same panel discussion, see here and here.

The Science Channel is starting up yet another show on physics tonight, with Michio Kaku’s Sci-Fi Science and Into the Universe with Steven Hawking being joined by Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. The topics being covered by Freeman are the usual ones: Black Holes, Aliens, Is Time Travel Possible? What Happened Before the Big Bang? etc.

The series unfortunately first starts out by bringing religion into it, with an episode called Is There a Creator?

Did our Universe just come into being by random chance, or was it created by a God who nurtures and sustains all life?

I gather that the episode begins with speculative physics elements that include Alan Guth on the multiverse and Garrett Lisi on E8 unification, but then moves on to speculative God stuff, with a neurophysiologist followed by the “maybe we’re just a simulation” business. The New York Times today has a depressing review, by a writer who wants more of the God part and less physics:

…this opening installment, which is supposed to be about whether there’s a Creator, almost immediately degenerates into theoretical yakking by scientists about unified theories of this and missing particles of that.

Especially with recent news coverage of that particle accelerator near Geneva, it seems as if we’d been hearing about this type of physics for a long time, and the discussion never does go anywhere or have much practical relevance. Anybody got a particle big enough to plug that busted oil pipe in the Gulf of Mexico?

Anyway, after about half an hour, Mr. Freeman’s show does get intermittently interesting because it turns itself more directly to the Creator question. (Questions are pivotal to this series; future episodes include “How Did We Get Here?” and “Are We Alone?”) Doesn’t answer it, of course, but does check in on an assortment of scientists who have an assortment of theories.

One thinks our idea of God is a kind of neuropsychological tic and plunks a ridiculous-looking contraption he calls a God helmet on research subjects’ heads to try to prove it. Another suggests that we’re nothing but a computer simulation created by our own descendants. If this program can stay away from same-old science and work this territory — theories that sound a little bit crackpotish, a little bit geniusy — it might set itself apart in an increasingly crowded genre.

Update: Chad Orzel weighs in here.