Not Even Wrong

According to the WordPress software, this is either post 999 or 1000 on this blog, depending on whether you count one I haven’t gotten around to finishing. I’m not sure that number is reliable anyway, since there are various anomalies due to a long-ago transition from Movable Type to WordPress. Some other statistics: 27,089 approved comments since the beginning (March 2004), 84,259 spam comments since the latest spam filter was turned on a couple years ago, 510,530 page hits last month (mostly spam, robots), and 8,842 subscribers at Google Reader.

The blog has turned out to be far more of a success than I ever expected when it was first started. There were few similar blogs back then, with Jacques Distler’s Musings having been around for a while, and Sean Carroll’s Preposterous Universe just starting up. Lubos Motl’s Reference Frame quickly followed, I gather somewhat in response to mine. These days, Musings seems to have gone dormant, but Sean and Lubos are still at it. I haven’t kept track of physics blogs in general, but there are now quite a few that deal with particle physics in one way or another. For particle phenomenology, Resonaances is a great source of information, for experimental HEP Tommaso Dorigo has a wonderful blog, and Philip Gibbs at viXra log does a great job of keeping track of the state of the LHC (for the latest, see here).

There’s also now a huge variety of research-level math blogs, including a very active blog by Fields Medalist Terry Tao. The new site Mathblogging.org is an exhaustive source of information and links. The big recent change in the math blogging world is the amazing phenomenon of MathOverflow, which features many of the best young mathematicians around carrying on the sort of conversations about research-level mathematics that traditionally go on in math common rooms. In an odd way, mathematics has often been somewhat of an oral tradition, since the impenetrability of much of the literature often meant that the only way to learn about something was to find an expert and get them to explain it to you. Now you can do this on-line, and this may significantly change how mathematics is done. Just as listening in to common room conversations was a great way to learn things, poking around the links on MathOverflow can provide quite an education. The moderation system somehow maintains a high level of discussion, although sometimes it lets its hair down to allow discussions like the ongoing one about Mathematical “Urban Legends”. There one can learn that one’s suspicions about string theorists educated at Princeton are correct, with Jeff Harvey contributing the following:

Since the OP gave a physics example, here is another one, also at Princeton. Why are they always at Princeton? Student finishes his presentation on very mathematical aspects of string theory. An experimentalist on the committee asks him what he knows about the Higgs boson. He hems and haws and finally says “well, it was discovered a few years ago at Fermilab”, Experimentalist: “Can you tell me the mass?” Student: “I think around 40 GeV.”

This was more than 20 years ago and actually happened. I was there. The student passed, but the next year all Ph.D students working on string theory were required to take a course on the phenomenology of particle physics.

There’s now a physics version of mathoverflow starting up, but so far it seems to me much less successful, with far too much in the way of the high-school level topics and un-informed discussion that plagues most internet physics discussion forums. There are some examples of serious questions and well-informed people writing in, so maybe things will improve and it will turn into something very worthwhile, replacing much of what is now going on at blogs.

I’m surprised to still be doing this nearly seven years after starting, but now doesn’t seem to be the time to stop. Particle theory has long been a rather intellectually dead topic, but whatever the news is from the LHC, it promises to shake the field up in one way or another, a process that should be interesting to follow. In coming weeks I may try and find time to learn some more about the features of WordPress, adding some features to the blog, or at least refreshing its rather tired look. Don’t be surprised if its appearance starts to change, or at least become unstable…

The Templeton Foundation has just released their “2010 Capabilities Report“, a sort of bi-annual report. It shows that in 2009 they had assets of $1.5 billion, and spent $31.8 million on “Science and the Big Questions”. For 2010 two of their funding priorities were Quantum Physics and the Nature of Reality and Foundational Questions in the Mathematical Sciences, but they have yet to report what grants they made in those categories.

The foundation is now being run by Jack Templeton, a surgeon who is devoting his efforts to spending his father’s money according to his instructions. For a couple of recent articles explaining what is going on at Templeton these days from two very different perspectives, see God, Science and Philanthropy at the Nation, and Honoring his Father at World magazine. The Nation article reports that the Foundation should soon have $2.5 billion or more to spend as the father’s estate is settled, and discusses how Jack Templeton’s right-wing politics and the Foundation’s goal of bringing science and religion together make many scientists uneasy. At the World on the other hand, they seem concerned that the Foundation is supporting the theory of evolution, for reasons that Jack Templeton spells out:

Every five years, three independent analysts are to conduct a review to see if Jack Templeton (or his successor) is making grants consistent with Sir John’s intent. If they find that Jack is giving 9 percent or more of the grants to causes inconsistent with paternal intent, he has one year to get back into line. If not, Jack and his top two officers will be fired.

Nor can Foundation trustees make changes by themselves or choose new board members. Templeton family members, plus winners of the annual Templeton Prize, plus heads of several organizations Sir John respected (such as the Acton Institute) are honorary members: There are about 75 in all, and 95 percent of them must be in agreement for any substantive change in foundation goals and purposes to be made. Even to change the location of the board’s annual meeting requires a 75 percent vote of the honorary members.

The Foundation maintains Sir John’s “core funding areas.” The lead one, “Science & the Big Questions,” includes questions about evolution. Other Templeton core areas are Character Development (“We can determine how to be the masters of our habits”), Exceptional Cognitive Talent & Genius (humans can be “helpers in the acceleration of divine creativity”), and Genetics (the Foundation is not yet accepting unsolicited proposals in that area). Jack Templeton would not discuss any differences from Sir John in those areas: His calling is to do the will of his father.

The son clearly sees things the same way as his father in one other Core Area, Freedom & Free Enterprise. Jack recalls how Sir John “often spoke, year after year about ‘people’s capitalism’ and what it would mean if the overwhelming majority of people in any country were shareholders themselves with the result that they would be much less likely to be envious and instead would focus much more persistently on ‘the good of the whole.’

Besides science, Templeton has traditionally funded lots of activities related to religion, as well as ones promoting “Character Development” and “Freedom and Free Enterprise”. Another core funding area is “Exceptional Cognitive Talent and Genius”, where they try to identify and nurture “young people who demonstrate exceptional talent in mathematics and science.” Their newest interest is in genetics, where they’ve just started to make grants, including one in support of the “Genetics of High Cognitive Abilities Consortium.”

One of the Templeton Foundation’s biggest grants, featured on the front-page of their web-site, was $8.8 million given to set up FQXi. They list this grant as having an end-date of December 2009, and the plan was for FQXi to get later funding elsewhere. FQXi is still in operation, either with leftover Templeton money or new funds from other sources. They announced today the award of $1.8 million dollars in grants for research into “The Nature of Time”, based on this request for proposals, which asked for research “unlikely to be supported by conventional funding sources”. The list of grants announced includes quite a few that satisfy that criterion, but winners also include some prominent theorists working on not exactly unconventional topics such as Andy Strominger on AdS space-time, Joe Polchinski on holography and AdS/CFT duality, Hiranya Peiris on analyzing WMAP data, and Berkeley’s Raphael Bousso on the Multiverse (along these lines). Maybe the last one does qualify as “unlikely to be supported by conventional funding sources”.

In further support of the cause of investigating the Nature of Time, FQXi will pay for an event entitled Setting Time Aright which will take attendees on a chartered cruise from Bergen to Copenhagen late this summer.

Update: Two more.

Update: There’s a review of the new Brian Greene book by George Ellis at Nature this week. It emphasizes the problem of lack of testability.

This week the Simons Center is hosting a workshop on Differential Cohomology and its applications in physics. I won’t try and give an explanation of what differential cohomology is here, with a little luck the videos of the talks will soon be on-line. Very briefly, this subject is about an extension of the usual sort of cohomology theory that provides finer information. It was discovered independently by Deligne in an algebraic geometry context (his construction is often called “Deligne Cohomology”) and by Jim Simons and Jeff Cheeger in a differential geometry context. The subject made its appearance in physics first through Wess-Zumino-Witten terms in non-linear sigma models and the Chern-Simons term in gauge theories.

Dan Freed’s first lecture included an extensive discussion of one recent example that uses a generalized cohomology theory, and thus generalized differential cohomology, see here for details. Mike Hopkins discussed his work with Singer which led to this paper, and some ongoing work from a more generalized perspective. He started with some history, explaining that things began with a specific example he noticed in work on topological modular forms that Witten had found around the same time in work on the partition function of the fivebrane. He described this initial impetus as like discovering that they both were looking at the same intriguing specific tropical fish, with attempts to understand it leading to a huge ferocious formalism he characterizes as a shark that lept out of the tank.

In the afternoon, Jim Simons gave a wonderful description of the early history of his work on Chern-Simons invariants and Cheeger-Simons differential characters, leading up to recent work trying to prove that certain properties uniquely characterize this kind of theory. He began his talk by noting that only one small piece of chalk was available and complaining “I paid all this money for this place and all I get to use is one broken piece of chalk?”. The story started when he tried to work out a combinatorial formula for the signature in 4 dimensions, by analogy with what one does starting with the Chern-Weil formula for the Euler characteristic. In the signature case, the evaluation of a 4d Pontryagin class leads to the study of a 3-form on the boundary, which he investigated with Chern, leading to Chern-Simons theory. This is much the same problem as the one that (more than a decade later) I started working on as a graduate student in physics, trying to figure out how to calculate the second Chern number of a lattice gauge field configuration.

Finally Krzysztof Gawedzi gave an interesting talk reviewing the by-now-extensive history of the use of this kind of mathematics in physics, including various incarnations of the notion of a “gerbe”. Unfortunately I’m back in the city now, hope to follow the rest of the workshop via video at some point.

There’s an explanation at the latest Abstruse Goose.

To recycle some of my own writing, from page 107 of NEW, the book:

When I was a graduate student at Princeton, one day I was leaving the library perhaps thirty feet or so behind Witten. The library was underneath a large plaza separating the mathematics and physics buildings, and he went up the stairs to the plaza ahead of me, disappearing from view. When I reached the plaza he was nowhere to be seen, and it is quite a bit more than thirty feet to the nearest building entrance. While presumably he was just moving a lot faster than me, it crossed my mind at the time that a consistent explanation for everything was that Witten was an extra-terrestrial being from a superior race who, since he thought no one was watching, had teleported back to his office.

And, before anyone takes this seriously, I certainly don’t believe this is the explanation for the “M” or that any actual teleportation occurred. To quote the next paragraph of the book:

More seriously, Witten’s accomplishments are very much a product of the combination of a huge talent and a lot of hard work. His papers are uniformly models of clarity and of deep thinking about a problem, of a sort that very few people can match. Anyone who has taken the time to try and understand even a fraction of his work finds it a humbling experience to see just how much he has been able to achieve.

Update: Clifford Johnson at Asymptotia points out a recent talk by Witten to a non-specialist audience about knots. It there is a Martian plot going on here, at least it has led to some wonderful insights about mathematics and quantum field theory that human beings might never have otherwise been able to figure out…

Update: The America COMPETES Reauthorization has just passed the House and will go to the president to be signed, something no one expected to happen a week or so ago, more details about the legislation here. I gather that it authorizes 5 to 7% increases for science agencies. Problem is that these are not the actual appropriations, which are still up in the air, awaiting action next year by the next Congress. But this does indicate that there is bipartisan willingness to at least pay lip service to protecting the research and development part of the budget.