Not Even Wrong

Slate today has an article entitled Theory of Anything? about Lawrence Krauss’s recent book and the controversy over string theory. The article begins by describing Krauss as having “a reputation for shooting down pseudoscience.” and goes on to say:

Yet in his latest book, Hiding in the Mirror, Krauss turns on his own—by taking on string theory, the leading edge of theoretical physics. Krauss is probably right that string theory is a threat to science, but his book proves he’s too late to stop it.

The article ends with the following summary:

Hiding in the Mirror does a much better job of explaining string theory than discrediting it. Krauss knows he’s right, but every time he comes close to the kill he stops to make nice with his colleagues. Last year, Krauss told a New York Times reporter that string theory was “a colossal failure.” Now he writes that the Times quoted him “out of context.” In spite of himself, he has internalized the postmodern jargon. Goodbye, Department of Physics. Hello, String Studies.

Update: Lubos Motl deals with the Slate article with the all-too-familiar favorite tactic of many string theorists when faced with criticism of the theory: don’t respond to the argument being made, but instead attack the intelligence and competence of the person making the argument. After all, they’re not a string theorist, so how bright can they be? In this case Lubos informs us that “Boutin’s intelligence resembles that of dogs”, while repeating his favorite claim that the status of string theory is much like that of the theory of evolution.

Here’s a collection of things I’ve run across recently that may be of interest:

The Tevatron is doing quite well, with sizable increases in luminosity in recent months. There are some articles telling about this in Fermilab Today, and you can get up to date information about how things are going here. At the moment they’re doing better than their “design” projection, which is meant to be quite optimistic.

On December 1 there will be a live 12 hour webcast called Beyond Einstein, which will feature many different groups and individuals talking about physics.

December 1 will also be the opening of the 23rd Solvay conference in Brussels. These conferences have a very illustrious history. This year the topic is The Quantum Structure of Space and Time, and most of the invited participants will be string theorists. Of the 60 participants there seems to be exactly one physicist from the LQG camp, Abhay Ashtekar. There will also be an event for the public, with talks by string theorists Brian Greene and Robbert Dijkgraaf, and a debate featuring five string theorists and Gerard ‘t Hooft.

Witten has been giving talks about his new work on gauge theory and geometric Langlands. Notes from a talk at Penn last month are on-line, and video from a talk at Rutgers last week should soon appear.

A conference was held earlier this month at Queen Mary College in London entitled From Twistors to Amplitudes, with many interesting talks on using twistor techniques to study gauge theory amplitudes.

There’s a new site called Mixed States which does a good job of aggregating blog entries about physics.

There are all sorts of links relevant to research in number theory at the Number Theory Web.

Robert Wald has an article on teaching general relativity. Until I taught our graduate differential geometry course I hadn’t realized just how tricky the definition of a tangent vector can be. Most of the difficulty with teaching GR has to do with the large amount of sophisticated geometry needed.

This is one of the funnier things I’ve read in a while. It seems that, like all non-string theorists, internet con artists are really stupid.

Update: Two recent talks by Alain Connes at the KITP in Santa Barbara are now online. One is entitled Non-Commutative Geometry and Space-Time, the other, discussing his ideas about the Riemann hypothesis, is called Noncommutative Motives, Thermodynamics, and the Spectral Realization of Zeros of Zeta.

There’s a new posting over at Cosmic Variance by JoAnne Hewett of SLAC about string theory, entitled A Particle Physicist’s Perspective. It gives a good idea of what I believe most non-string-theorist particle physicists think about string theory.

She does express some very controversial views, ones that are widely held in the physics community, but rarely publicly expressed:

I find the arrogance of some string theorists astounding, even by physicist’s standards. Some truly believe that all non-stringy theorists are inferior scientists. It’s all over their letters of recommendation for each other, and I’ve actually had some of them tell me this to my face.

and she describes string theorists as holding the arrogant belief that

String theory is so important that it must be practised at the expense of all other theory. There are two manifestations of this: string theorists have been hired into faculty positions at a disproportionally high level not necessarily commensurate with ability in all cases, and the younger string theorists are usually not well educated in particle physics. Some literally have a hard time naming the fundamental particles of nature. Both of these manifestations are worrying for the long-term future of our field.

I suspect that some of Hewett’s strong feelings about this come from being at Stanford, where the theoretical physics group is made up mostly of members of the looniest wing of the string theory enterprise. The logo of the new web-site of the Institute for Theoretical Physics there is a representation of the multiverse, and Stanford is probably the major center for landscapeology in the world (and perhaps in the multiverse).

My alma mater, Princeton, is rather different in that landscapeology is not popular, but the particle theory groups both at the university and at the Institute have only hired string theorists for the last twenty years, displaying the kind of attitude that Hewett finds disturbing.

While most string theorists demonstrate no more than the usual theoretical physicist’s helping of arrogance, it has certainly been my experience that some of them display a degree of arrogance that is pretty astounding. This includes some of the earliest and most prominent string theory bloggers, where the phenomenon is pretty much off-scale. When it comes to purely intellectual arrogance and confidence in one’s own beliefs, I’m no paragon of humility, but I don’t take the attitude that people who disagree with me are idiots who don’t know what they are talking about, an attitude I’ve encountered amazingly often from more than one string theorist.

There’s an article (unfortunately not available for free) in today’s New York Times based on an interview with the normally publicity-shy mathematician Jim Simons of Chern-Simons fame. Simons runs the incredibly successful hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, and I’ve written something about this earlier. The New York Times article describe his mathematical career as follows: “A former crypt analyst – a code breaker, that is – he did important work in mathematics that helped lay the foundation for string theory.”

The recently relaunched science magazine Seed has a new web-site. You can read their article on physics blogs, and it will be interesting to see what they do in coming months with the new site.

I’ve criticized the Templeton Foundation in the past for their endless attempts to blur the line between science and religion, supporting some of the most dubious research in cosmology and physics. To be fair to them, at least they are not promoting Intelligent Design, something they make clear in a statement released on Monday. The statement challenges a front-page Wall Street Journal story that referred to Templeton as a supporter of ID. Evidently one of the main pieces of evidence that the Wall Street Journal gave for this was Templeton’s support of IDer Guillermo Gonzalez as part of their Cosmology and Fine-Tuning Research Program.

So, if you’re interested in seeking funding from Templeton, you’d be aligning yourself with an organization controlled by right-wingers that wants to bring religion into science, but they’re not IDers. If you decide to go for it, it looks like Dec. 1 is the day when fq(x), a Templeton funded program run by highly reputable physicists, will announce how to apply for money from them. If you just want to extract money from Templeton for something completely flaky, I’d suggest considering another new program they are funding, Science and Theology Advanced Research Series (STARS), devoted to research “on the ways science, in light of philosophical and religious reflection, points towards the nature, character and meaning of ultimate reality.” It appears that, if you play your cards right, you can get a free winter break in Cancun, as well as grants of \$20,000 in walking around money and multiples of \$100,000 to look into this ultimate reality thing.

There’s an interesting guest posting from Lawrence Krauss over at Cosmic Variance. I think I’ll turn off the comment section on this posting here, since if people want to discuss this, it is probably best done over there.

Yesterday, Princeton University, as part of an effort to bring physics to a wide audience during the centennial of Einstein’s great work of 1905, sponsored a performance of Superstrings. This event featured a lecture by Oxford physicist Brian Foster as well as a performance by violinist Jack Liebeck, and it was one in a series of such events that have taken place around the world.

I’ve always wondered what non-physicists come away thinking after being exposed to things like this. There’s not much real scientific content, lots of wonderful music that has no real connection to the physics at issue, and many impressive analogies that could easily confuse listeners as to what the point of the analogy is. This time, one can see some of the effect the event had by reading an article about it in the Daily Princetonian.

The report recounts how the performers explained superstring theory:

“The concept of superstrings can be illustrated with a demonstration of quantum cookery,” Foster said, as Liebeck helped him into an apron. A mesh colander modeled the universe with very fine holes corresponding to fluctuations in the space-time continuum. Foster poured flour through the holes, exemplifying how point-like particles cannot be contained in the universe, making a “delicious mess” on the floor of the stage.

To complete the analogy, Foster introduced uncooked pasta in three different varieties, one for each generation of matter, which he nicknamed “quantum pasta” or “superpasta.” Although composed of the same ground-up grain as the flour, these “particles” avoided the problem of the point-like particles, staying contained within the colander.

Besides convincing at least some of the audience that supersymmetry is the idea of using uncooked spaghetti instead of flour, Foster did admit there was no evidence for any of this: “Superstrings may be purely philosophical and may have no measurable contributions to our universe”. It might have been more helpful if he’d mentioned that “purely philosophical” here really means “wrong”.

Some other facts about physics that the reporter learned yesterday are that:

gravity distorts the smoothness of Einstein’s continuum, a problem he attempted to resolve through quantum mechanics.

There are three “generations” of matter — the quark, lepton and boson.

Superstring theory will resolve the large discrepancies in the masses of these elementary particles.

All in all, it seems to me that these performances are not helping the public understanding of science, but rather signficantly setting it back. I’m sure that those bloggers who are highly concerned about the public understanding of science in general, and string theory in particular, will want to address this issue and demand the immediate cessation of events like this.

Last weekend Princeton held a Special Symposium in honor of Alexander Polyakov’s 60th birthday. Witten talked about his recent work on Langlands duality. He’ll also be speaking about this next week at Rutgers and December 1 and 2 up in Boston.

I hear from someone who attended the symposium that Gross gave a talk with title officially still TBA, but for which he said he’d use the title “Strings and Instantons”, since that is what all of Polyakov’s titles are. His theme was irresponsibility and he recalled around 1990 having dissuaded Polyakov from going to Santa Barbara and spending his time on the beach, getting him to come to Princeton instead. Of course Gross himself then soon left Princeton for Santa Barbara. Gross also said that, unlike his usual practice, he would end his talk on time since he didn’t have much to say due to being busy with the events of the past year.

On a completely unrelated topic, Fermilab recently held a celebration of the tenth anniversary of the discovery of the top quark, and the talks are on-line. Also on-line at Fermilab are some on-going lectures by Chris Quigg on The Electroweak Theory and Higgs Physics.