Not Even Wrong

The anthropic string theory landscape seems to be having ever greater success in taking over fundamental physics and turning it into pseudo-science. It’s being promoted by no less than 2008 presidential candidate Wesley Clark, the following is from a transcript of his remarks to science bloggers at a blogger convention in Las Vegas:

Read Leonard Suskind’s new book, called “The Cosmic-” It’s called “The Cosmic Landscape And Intelligent Design” if you want to see something that’s overpowering. Suskind is the inventor of cosmic string theory, and what he does is he takes cosmic- he takes the idea of the universe. He says the universe is- see, what’s happening in intelligent design is people are saying, ‘Ah well, you see, the, the, the wavelength of, of, of the electron and Planck’s Constant and all these numbers are so odd. They don’t- they’re not even numbers, you know. They, they, they don’t balance each other. It’s sort of 1.- It’s like the figure of pi, 3.14159… Why would it be such an odd number? Why, why wouldn’t god make the universe, you know, symmetrical?’

(laughter)

Then they said, ‘well, because, you know, it’s like there’s only one on 10 to the 50th chance that the universe could have worked out in a way that mankind could survive. Therefore, you know, this must have been an intelligent designer who created this universe especially for us.’ What Suskind does is he turns it on its head. He says, “You know, if you look at string theory and the 9+1 dimensions” or 10+1 dimensions, and I’m not sure how he knows that time only has one dimension, but he does. (inaudible) would say I’m very arrogant for questions questioning this.

(laughter)

But what Suskind does is he turns it upside down. He says, “Look there are- there is an infinite number of universes.” He calls it a multiverse, and he says that however the motive forces, and nobody understands why quarks pop in and out of existence. Nobody understands it, but apparently they do. And apparently there are many, many universes, and we’re here in this one. And maybe there are others in which Planck’s Constant has a different number, in which the speed of light is not 186,200 miles per second. Who knows? We don’t know.

Commenter Patrick wrote into point out a review article on this from graduate student Joseph Conlon, published in the latest issue of Contemporary Physics (not available on the arXiv or anywhere else for free as far as I can tell). It’s entitled, “The string theory landscape: a tale of two hydras”, with the first hydra the non-renormalizability of gravity (supposedly slain by string theory), the second the prolifieration of vacuum states. Conlon seems to think that the fact that string theory can’t ever be used to predict anything is not a serious problem:

We started with a dream of a unique string theory compactification reproducing the structure of the Standard Model. This is a dream apparently shattered by the existence of the landscape. Granting the landscape and its existence, does this mean string theory is inherently unpredictive at low energies? If this is true, this is sad but no disaster. Quantum field theory, of itself, is also unpredictive.

I’ve written elsewhere about why this analogy with QFT doesn’t hold, but on the face of it there’s obviously something wrong, since we use QFT all the time to make detailed, testable predictions about the real world, something that string theory, according to Conlon, will never be able to do.

Talks from the plenary section on “naturalness” at SUSY 06 are online. The usual advertising job from Susskind and Linde, the one that seems to have impressed Wesley Clark. Wilczek gives a more substantive talk, and seems to have some interesting new speculative ideas about models near the end.

On another topic, I’ve been wondering what the current state of peer-review of hep-th papers is. Personally I think it has been several years since I’ve looked at any of the main journals that publish papers in this area, and I suspect this is true of many people these days. The Bogdanov affair several years ago showed that refereeing in this area had become pretty much a joke, with the brothers having no trouble finding five journals willing to accept utter nonsense.

Looking at the arXiv and SPIRES listings, which seem to contain publication information after submitted papers have been accepted, many papers (e.g. Susskind’s single-authored papers on the landscape), don’t seem to ever have been peer-reviewed and published. I’m curious what people think of this. How many hep-th authors have stopped submitting their papers for refereeing? Is the data on the arXiv and SPIRES an accurate reflection of this? Does the fact that an author’s preprints don’t have publication data for the last few years mean they weren’t submitted for refereeing, or could this be due to time lag in refereeing/publication, or incompleteness of the data?

Update: Courtesy of Google, there’s now an on-line talk by Washington Taylor promoting the Landscape to people working for the company. He gives the number of vacua as at least 10¹⁰⁰⁰. The number of well-known physicists out there promoting this nonsense to the general public is amazing (via Lubos).

Since many people have been posting off-topic comments here that were censored over at Lubos Motl’s Reference Frame, I’m creating a separate posting so that there will be an appropriate place for these. Also, if you want to try and carry on a discussion with Lubos on the topics of these comments, here is the place to try (although I don’t quite know why you’re bothering…).

John Horgan has an excellent new blog that he has recently started up, called The Scientific Curmudgeon. Horgan may be best known for his provocative 1996 book The End of Science, which was one of the first books for the general public that expressed skepticism about string theory (another was David Lindley’s 1993 The End of Physics). His portrayal of Witten in the book was a bit of an unfair hit job, but he got the story of what was going on in particle theory about right, unlike just about every other science writer working at the time. In recent years his attention has turned to issues of neurobiology and cognitive science, as well as the relation between science, religion and mysticism. He now teaches at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, and runs its Center for Science Writings.

Horgan describes himself as a “hopeful skeptic”, writing:

I still see science as our best hope for understanding ourselves and the universe, and for creating, if not a sci-fi utopia, then at least a much better world. Scientists can provide us with cleaner, cheaper sources of energy; better treatments for cancer, AIDS and other diseases; more detailed accounts of how brains make minds. That’s why, in spite of writing a book called The End of Science, I’ve remained in the science-journalism racket, why I work at a science-oriented school, why I encourage young people to become scientists. But I also encourage greater recognition of science’s limitations and fallibility. It is precisely because science is so consequential that we must treat its pronouncements skeptically, carefully distinguishing the genuine from the spurious.

One of his recent postings discusses the issue of the Templeton Foundation, yesterday’s is a charming story about his daughter, linked with a tale of his adventures among the cosmologists back in 1990.

As usual recently, so much going on that I don’t have time to write much about a lot of it, but here are some quick links and comments.

The SUSY 06 conference is taking place this week, hosted by UC Irvine, with talks at the Marriott Hotel in Newport Beach. Here’s the program, which now has links to slides for some of the talks in the parallel sessions, although not at the moment for those in the plenary sessions. This evening there will be a plenary session on Naturalness, with talks by experimentalist Burton Richter, theorists Frank Wilczek, Leonard Susskind and Andrei Linde. This line-up is very heavily weighted toward the anthropic point of view, I wonder why the organizers couldn’t find anyone from the other side. Various bloggers are at the conference reporting, including Clifford Johnson and Sabine Hossenfelder. B. Yen, who normally covers off-road motor-racing, has decided to cover something even more exciting, academics at a SUSY conference, and is providing stills, video, and podcasts via iTunes from the conference site.

Strings 2006, this year’s edition of the big yearly string theory conference held each summer begins next week in Beijing. The conference web-site itself still doesn’t yet have even a schedule of talks or titles of talks, but Jonathan Shock will be at least one person blogging from there, and he has begun with a long posting of advice about Beijing for people traveling there for the conference.

The big political news of a few days ago was the blogger convention in Las Vegas, with potential 2008 presidential candidates showing up to try and impress the most influential people in the country at the moment, bloggers. Sean Carroll reports from the science-blogging caucus there that Wesley Clark made his pitch by coming out strongly in favor of Leonard Susskind and the anthropic string theory landscape. I know, this sounds like a weird joke, but it’s not.

In other political news closer to home here, today’s New York Times has a story about some of Einstein’s off-prints being auctioned by Christie’s, for the benefit of New York’s progressive Working Families Party.

Dave Bacon has a posting about a new arXiv front-end from the IOP called Eprintweb.

The Tevatron is back in business colliding particles, having overcome the attack of the killer raccoons. There’s a report from Gordon Watts who explains the importance of plastic ducks for his experiment’s data acquisition system.

John Baez’s latest This Week’s Finds is out, this time it’s mostly a very enlightening discussion of the relation of music theory and group theory. His web site also contains some wonderful notes by Michael Shulman from a minicourse John gave on n-categories and cohomology theory. John’s web-site increases it resemblance to a modern blog with an RSS feed set up by Serkan Cabi.

The math blogosphere seems to my mind somewhat weirdly dominated by those with an interest in category theory. Besides John and Urs Schreiber, there’s David Corfield, Robin Houston, and the only math blog at ScienceBlogs, that of Mark Chu-Carroll.

Urs has interesting reports from the ESI Research Conference on Homological Mirror Symmetry going on this week and next.

Last week was the annual Johns Hopkins workshop on particle physics, this year held at the Galileo Galilei Institute in Florence. Many of the talks are on-line.

Le Monde has an article about Dubna.

There’s definitely an increasingly widespread backlash against string theory going on in the wider culture. A Columbia colleague last night sent me an extract from a book his daughter was reading. It’s called 100 Bullshit Jobs … and how to get them by Stanley Bing, and one of the “Bullshit Jobs” listed is that of “Quantum Physicist String Theorist”. Skills required for the job are listed as

Bullshit at such a high level of discourse, with such a profound understanding of arcane mathematical concepts, that everybody thinks they are stupider than you.

The listing describes

… string theorists, who have now broken up into two warring camps, each fighting for control of PBS. One school says that there are many, many universes, possibly an infinite number. The other school is more conservative and counts just a couple of cosmic alternatives, and has the benefit of being represented by a total babe.

I also heard recently from the people who put out Axes and Alleys, the official magazine of the Royal Tractor Repair and Maintenance Society of Outer Mongolia. Their latest issue has a graphic on page 27 inspired by their impression of superstring theory.

Finally, as near as I can tell Lubos has finally gone completely bonkers. In his last few ranting postings, people who disagree with him no longer have the intelligence of dogs, but are compared to squirrels (or, in my case, microbes). His latest posting is about why the scientific status of string theory and of evolution theory are the same (although he thinks “evolution is more dogmatic while string theory is more open-minded work in progress”), and I’m sure the people at the Discovery Institute will enjoy it greatly. He goes on about the fact that at one point, under great duress, Jacques Distler did admit in the comment section of a blog that he disagreed with Lubos on this point. Lubos compares this to Judas’s betrayal of Jesus:

This almost sounds like a story from the New Testament except that in the past, there would be 1 Judas in such a story. Today we have 387 Judases with various confused and triply corrupt self-interests and relations to the bad players in the game of life.

Instead of dissociating themselves from Lubos’s increasingly nutty postings about string theory, some string theorists such as Moshe Roszali and Joe Polchinski instead have decided this is a good time to encourage him and start participating in the comment section of his blog. Polchinski contributed to a top ten list of greatest achievements of string theory produced by Lubos two more: the “fact” that the unknown theory is somehow known to have no parameters, and the existence of the landscape and thus the anthropic solution of the CC problem.

The fact that Polchinski seems to think Lubos’s blog is a good place for him to spend his time is kind of funny given that he has publicly attacked me for saying unpleasant things about people (I did once describe a paper of his in an uncalled-for way), as well as privately telling people he won’t read my blog because of the nasty personal things I say about people. For some reason he seems to have no problem with Lubos, to the point of being willing to encourage him as he gets more and more delusional. This is really sad.

Update: Some of the plenary talks at SUSY 06 are now on-line. The schedule of talks with titles for Strings 2006 is now on-line.

All sorts of news very recently on the science blogging front:

Seed’s ScienceBlogs site has been revamped, with 25 new blogs for a total of 43 science bloggers. First it was Cosmic Variance with 5 bloggers, now it is ScienceBlogs with 43. How can a single artisanal blog maker like myself compete with these massive blogging conglomerates? Still not very many physicists over at Seed. Besides Chad Orzel, one of the new ones is astrophysicist Steinn Sigurosson who has been running a blog called The Dynamics of Cats.

One physics blog I ran across recently, one that isn’t moving to Seed, is Angry Physics.

Besides Seed, Nature magazine has started up a site called NatureBlogs. They are running blogs on chemistry, genetics, and neuroscience, as well as a more general one on web technology and science. There’s also a newsblog for comments on news stories appearing in Nature, as well as a discussion blog related to a radical new concept in peer review that they are trying out: a blog where certain papers submitted to Nature are posted, asking for commentary on the paper, to be considered as part of the peer review process.

Nature also just launched another new project which I’d been hearing about for a while from my brother, called Nature Network Boston. It’s intended as a networking site for scientists in the Boston area, and has news, event listings, groups, and, guess what, more blogs. Maybe Lubos can start a string theory fanatic’s group there…

Finally, Jacques Distler is helping to provide access to these proliferating blogs with a new aggregation site he calls Planet Musings. As usual, Jacques is careful to make sure that anything he has control over censors links to people who disagree with him…

The latest issue of Seed magazine (not yet available online, as far as I know), contains responses from various well-known physicists who were asked what they hoped to learn from the LHC. Here’s the gist of what they had to say:

Lisa Randall: The magnificent thing is that we know there should be an answer to the question of the weakness of gravity, and that it should be revealed at the LHC.

Leon Lederman: The long-simmering concern over the weakness of Einstein’s gravity may well be confronted. However, what is for sure is that the LHC, with its awesome reach, will answer all of our current astro-particle problems…

Alexander Vilenkin: If no trace of supersymmetry is found, this would be – necessarily indirect – evidence for the existence of the multiverse.

Sir Martin Rees: I’m hoping that it will clarify the nature of the particles that constitute the “dark matter” in the universe.

Edward Witten: The LHC wil tell us whether this notion [electroweak symmetry breaking] is correct, and if so how it works.

Max Tegmark: Our theory of particle physics has 26 pure numbers in it. Why do they have these particular values? How did the universe begin? Did it?

Leonard Susskind: I see only two possible outcomes of the LHC project – either there will be low energy supersymmetry or there won’t. … the big question is whether the gauge hierarchy fine-tuning is similar to the cosmological constant fine-tuning, or if it has a more conventional supersymmetric explanation.

Steven Weinberg: What terrifies theorists is that the LHC may discover nothing beyond the single neutral “Higgs” particle.. We fervently hope for some complicated discoveries.

John Schwarz: There are many speculative ideas for possible discoveries at the LHC. These include indications of extra dimensions, black holes, strings, magnetic monopoles, etc. I believe that all of these exist, and I would be thrilled to have experimental confirmation – but I am pessimistic about the prospects for finding them in the LHC’s energy range… I could be wrong. That’s why it is important that these experiments be carried out.

Sean Carroll: The beauty of science is that we don’t know what surprises may await us in these domains.

Gordon Kane: The LHC could discover the superpartners in a supersymmetric world. In addition to strong theoretical evidence for Higgs physics, there is strong experimental evidence that Higgs particles do exist with a mass implied by supersymmetry… Probably the main thing we have learned in the past two decades is that any understanding of nature at the most fundamental level (beyond a description) will require extending our thinking to embed our world in extra dimensions… An optimist (like me) can make the defendable argument that the LHC could test supersymmetry, establish string theory and move on to the remaining “why” questions.

My predictions: The LHC won’t see supersymmetry and won’t tell us anything about dark matter, dark energy or why gravity is weak. Witten has it exactly right, what the LHC will do will be to start to tell us what is causing electroweak symmetry breaking. It’s possible that Weinberg’s worry will be borne out, and, at LHC energies, we’ll just see what appears to be an elementary scalar, which will be depressing. But I think it’s equally likely that symmetry breaking is not coming from an elementary scalar, but from something much more interesting, quite possibly something we haven’t thought of, and the LHC may start to give us evidence for what this is.

I’ll also predict that we are still a few years from finding out what the LHC will tell us. These will be completely wasted years for particle theory if people just give up on looking for new ideas and sit on their hands (or wander pointlessly in the landscape), waiting for the LHC to revive the subject.

Study of the string theory landscape seems now to have become the hot research topic that one should be working on in order to be taken seriously as a cutting-edge researcher in particle theory. Last week there was a workshop at Trieste on String Vacua and the Landscape that drew many researchers. Some of the talks from the workshop are available on-line.

Following on the heel’s of Susskind’s popular book promoting the landscape, which has received excellent reviews from particle and string theorists, there’s a new one on the same topic coming out later this month from cosmologist Alex Vilenkin, entitled Many Worlds in One: The Search for other Universes.

As string theorists in search of something to write papers about pour into the landscape, with its more than 10⁵⁰⁰ possible hot research topics to work on, Sean Carroll reports from a cosmology workshop at the Perimeter Institute that trouble may be ahead for the subject. Sean gives a short summary of the talks at the workshop, in the majority of cases ending with “Made fun of the landscape”, or “Made fun of the anthropic principle”.

The main argument for the landscape mania has always been that it justifies Weinberg’s “prediction” of the size of the cosmological constant. I’ve written elsewhere about why this is not a legitimate scientific prediction, and is off by at least an order of magnitude anyway. Evidently Steinhardt and Turok are about to put out a paper claiming that the situation is much worse than this, that if you take anthropic reasoning seriously, the natural “prediction” of the landscape is that:

the cosmological constant should be quite large (many times the matter density, although presumably not at the Planck scale), and we should live in a single lonely galaxy in an empty universe dominated by vacuum energy.

It will be interesting to see if landscapeologists will be willing to admit that the only supposed “prediction” of this subject doesn’t work at all, and that it is not only pseudo-science, but failed pseudo-science.

I ordinarily keep a short list on my desk of things I’ve seen recently that I’d like to write about here. The last few days this list has gotten way too long, so I’ll try and deal with it by putting as many of these topics as I can in this posting.

The June/July issue of the AMS Notices is out, with many things worth reading. The two long articles are one by Ken Ono about Ramanujan and one by Arthur Jaffe telling the story of the founding of the Clay Mathematics Institute and the million dollar prizes associated with seven mathematical problems. There’s also a book review of Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality, news about the proposed US FY 2007 budget for mathematical sciences research, and an account of a public talk by Michael Atiyah, who evidently closed by explaining some of his very speculative ideas about how to modify quantum mechanics, then said:

This is for young people. Go away and explore it. If it works, don’t forget I suggested it. If it doesn’t, don’t hold me responsible.

The June issue of Physics Today is also out. In its news pages it reports that Robert Laughlin is out as the president of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), and will return to Stanford in July “where he plans to teach, research, and write ‘anything that brings income.'” The report gives conflicting reasons for why things didn’t work out for him at KAIST, but notes that “90% of KAIST professors gave him a vote of no-confidence and nearly all deans and department chairs quit their administrative posts to protest his continuing in the job.”

There’s an extremely positive review of Leonard Susskind’s The Cosmic Landscape by Paul Langacker, which ends:

The Cosmic Landscape is a fascinating introduction to the new great debate, which will most likely be argued with passion in the years to come and may once again greatly alter our perception of the universe and humanity’s place in it.

Why any particle theorist would want to encourage other physicists outside their field to read this book and give them the idea that it represents something theorists think highly of is very unclear to me.

Finally there’s an article by Jim Gates entitled Is string theory phenomenologically viable? Gates aligns himself with the currently popular idea that string theory doesn’t give a unique description of physics:

The belief in a unique vacuum is, to me, a Ptolemaic view – akin to that ancient belief in a unique place for Earth. As I wrote in 1989, a Copernican view, in which our universe is only one of an infinity of possibilities, is my preference, but there were very few Copernicans in the 1980s.

He seems to promote the idea that one should not use 10d critical string theory and thus extra dimensions, but instead look for 4d string theories, and that perhaps the problem is the lack of a “completely successful construction of covariant string theory.” For more about this point of view, see Warren Siegel’s website.

There are quite a few idiosyncratic things about Gates’s article, including the fact that he refers to non-abelian gauge degrees of freedom as “Kenmer angles”, after Nicholas Kemmer (not Kenmer) who was involved in the discovery of isospin.

Some of his comments about string theory are surprising and I don’t know what to make of them. He claims that “some aspects of string theory seem relevant to quantum information theory”, and the one supposed observational test of string theory he discusses is one I hadn’t heard of before and am skeptical about (observing string-theory-predicted higher curvature terms in Einstein’s equations through gravitational wave birefringence). His discussion of supersymmetry seems to assume that observation of superpartners is unlikely, since for reasons he doesn’t explain he expects their mass to be from 1 to 30 Tev. Finally, he worries that people will not investigate things like covariant string field theory since we are about to enter an “era that promises an explosion of data”. I certainly hope he’s right about the forthcoming availability of large amounts of interesting new data.

The Harvard Crimson has an interesting article about Ken Wilson.

John Baez is getting ever closer to having a blog in its modern form, now he has a diary.

Read about the tough summer life of theoretical physicists in Paul Cook’s report from Cargese (which reminded me of when I went there as a grad student), and JoAnne Hewett’s report from Hawaii (which reminded me of a very pleasant vacation I spent on the Big Island).

Science magazine has an article about progress on increasing luminosity at the Tevatron, hopes for getting enough events there to see the Higgs before the LHC, and the debate that is beginning about whether to run the machine in 2009.

Slides are available from the Fermilab User’s Meeting.

There’s a news story out from China (and picked up by Slashdot) about the new paper by Huai-Dong Cao and Xi-Ping Zhu soon to appear in the Asian Journal of Mathematics. This paper is more than 300 pages and is supposed to contain a proof of the Poincare conjecture and the full geometrization conjecture, filling in an outline of a proof due to Perelman, who used methods developed by my Columbia colleague Richard Hamilton. Other groups have also been working on this in recent years including my other Columbia colleague John Morgan together with Gang Tian; for another example, see the notes on Perelman’s papers recently put on the arXiv by Bruce Kleiner and John Lott. Cao and Zhu have evidently been explaining their proof in a seminar at Harvard run by Yau during the past academic year, and Yau will talk about this at Strings 2006 in Beijing later this month. When the paper appears it will be interesting to see what some of the other experts in the field think of it and whether there’s a consensus that the proof of Poincare and geometrization is finally in completely rigorous form.

Update: According to a blog entry from the Guardian, “Perelman seems to be active in string theory.”