Not Even Wrong

One can get some idea of what progress there might have been in particle theory during 2007 by querying the SPIRES database for 2007 papers that already have lots of citations. Doing

find topcite 50+ and date 2007

turns up 20 papers of which 6 are experimental papers. Remarkably, the 14 other papers are all about one topic: unparticles. These all refer to Howard Georgi’s initial Unparticle Physics paper from March 2007, in which he describes a possible effective field theory that would be scale invariant and correspond to unusual phenomena potentially observable by collider experiments, phenomena he describes in terms of “unparticles”. In less than a year Georgi’s paper has accumulated 118 citations, with the blogger at Resonaances making fun of the phenomenon of “unpapers” with abstracts such as:

We consider unparticles in whatever uncontext. You are encouraged to forget the paper as soon as soon as you add it to your citation list.

but also making the very relevant comment that this does seem to be getting attention because it is a legitimately new idea:

I must give the credit to Howard for drawing our attention to a whole wide class of collider signatures. Besides, I appreciate Howard’s writing style. He is probably the last man on Earth who truly enjoys particle physics.

As far as I can tell, unparticles don’t solve any of the problems of the Standard Model, but they are theoretically possible phenomena of a different kind that experimentalists can look for, and having as many as possible of such phenomena is very worthwhile. The more different things people are looking for, the more likely they’ll find something unexpected that otherwise might not have been noticed.

This week New Scientist has a long and quite good cover story about unparticles, and recent attempts to use them to explain dark matter, which ends with:

Georgi reserves judgement on whether his unparticles really could be the key to solving the dark matter problem until more work is done, but he’s pleased that people are investigating the possibility. “All I knew was that I had found something cool and I wanted other people to take a look and see what kinds of weird things they might be capable of doing – what mysteries they might solve,” he says. “I’m happy because that’s exactly what people are now doing.”

The story has also made it into the Telegraph.

Besides the unparticle phenomenon, there appear to be very few 2007 theory papers that anyone is paying much attention to. I’ve tried to search around and come up with a list of 2007 papers that have so far gotten 25 citations or more, and a list follows. I’m probably missing some [Note added: additions welcome, and will be added to the list]. The main themes shared by most of these papers are AdS/CFT and attempts to construct metastable vacua as part of a study of the landscape [Note added: this characterization is of the hep-th papers, adding in lots of ones I missed from hep-ph shows that the hep-ph ones cover a much wider variety of topics] .

SPIRES has yet to compile a 2007 “topcites” list, but it looks like the pattern should be very much the same as the last few years:

Some things I’ve run across in the last few days:

This month’s Scientific American is devoted to The Future of Physics, a special report made up of three excellent articles on the LHC machine, the standard model and its discontents, and plans for the ILC. The articles all avoid hyping string theory or other science fiction and instead stick to real, serious material about HEP. Congratulations to the people at SciAm, everyone should go out now and buy a copy of this month’s magazine to encourage them. Chad Orzel and other non-HEP physicists are peeved that the “Future of Physics” business is a misnomer, since it should have been titled the “Future of HEP Physics”. They’re right. Still, the articles are good, so they shouldn’t hold the headline business too much against the magazine.

The LHC still has no up-to-date schedule available, but looking at the latest news about the commissioning and comparing to old schedules, it seems to me that if all goes well from now on, the machine should be cooled down and ready to be checked out in late summer, with beam commissioning during the fall, and, maybe, a short physics run late in the year.

Witten and Kontsevich were awarded the Crafoord prize, for “for their important contributions to mathematics inspired by modern theoretical physics”. This is certainly well-deserved for both of them. One doesn’t know where to start in listing Witten’s contributions of this kind, and Kontsevich’s ideas about “homological mirror symmetry” have had dramatic impact on mathematics, leading to a whole new field of study. There’s an article about this at Science where Witten claims to be “totally startled” to be recognized for his achievements in mathematics. Not sure why a Fields medalist would get startled about this… Witten and Kontsevich get $125,000 each.

The first Eisenbud prize for a paper written during the last 6 years that brings together mathematics and physics was awarded to Ooguri, Strominger and Vafa for their 2004 paper Black Hole Attractors and the Topological String. They share $5000.

Last week there was a conference at the Fields Institute in Toronto on Mathematical Physics and Geometric Analysis, featuring series of talks by Victor Guillemin and Shlomo Sternberg, with lecture notes available online. Sternberg’s lectures give a careful discussion of some of the differences in conventions between physicists and mathematicians, the Higgs mechanism and Weinberg angle, various facts about spinors, and the models he worked out with Ne’eman that use superconnections to unify Higgs and fermions. In these models he gets a prediction of the Higgs mass, as twice the W-mass, about 160 Gev. Coincidentally, Tommaso Dorigo reports on the Higgs search at the Tevatron, which is getting close to being able to exclude the existence of a Higgs in a small energy range: around 160 GeV.

From Dave Bacon, an odd story about a recent arXiv withdrawal. I have no idea what this is really about.

The Templeton Foundation continues to spend a lot of money on a wide variety of projects, many having something to do with physics. At FQXI, the request for proposals to be funded in 2008 is now closed. Their community web-site includes several interesting articles on topics in theoretical physics. In “breaking news”, they report proudly that several of their members were in the recent NYT article on Boltzmann Brains.

Also funded by Templeton is the CTNS STARS (Science and Transcendence Advanced Research Series) grant program, which recently announced $100,000 grants to five groups, one of which includes my Columbia colleagues Brian Greene and philosopher David Albert.

Yet another Templeton-funded endeavor is a new science and religion library at Cambridge University, where, at a cost of $2 million or so, the International Society for Science and Religion will choose 250 books for the library, coming out to about $8000 each. I haven’t yet heard from them, but will be happy to provide a copy of my book at a modest fraction of that price.

Last summer I wrote here about a plagiarism scandal involving more than 60 arXiv preprints, more than thirty of which were refereed and published in at least 18 different physics journals, some of them quite prestigious ones (see also the page at Eureka Journal Watch). At the time I wondered what action the journals involved in this scandal would take in response to it. Nearly six months later the answer to this question is now in: essentially none at all. As far as I can tell, almost uniformly the journals involved don’t seem to have a problem at all with being used to publish plagiarized material.

Unlike the journals, the arXiv has taken action. It has withdrawn the papers, replaced their abstracts with lists of where they plagiarized from, and put up a web-page explaining all of this. After the scandal became public, one journal, JHEP, did withdraw the one rather egregious example of plagiarism it had published. This was only done after JHEP originally refused to do anything about this when first contacted last March, arguing that since the plagiarized articles were cited in the paper it was all right, and besides, they would only consider doing something if the plagiarized authors filed a formal complaint. Copies of the correspondence about this (and much else) are at this web-site.

The nature of the plagiarism varied greatly among the papers withdrawn by the arXiv. Sometimes all that was involved was self-plagiarism (large parts of one paper were identical with others submitted by some of the same authors), but mostly what was being plagiarized was the contents of papers by others. Mustafa Salti, a graduate student at METU, had his name on 40 of the withdrawn papers, many of which have been published in well-known journals. I checked a few of the online published journal articles corresponding to the withdrawn papers and, besides the JHEP paper, I didn’t find any others where the online journal article gave any indication that the paper was known to be plagiarized.

A more complicated case is that of Ihsan Yilmaz, where the arXiv lists three of his eight arXiv preprints as withdrawn due to plagiarism and one as withdrawn due to “excessive overlap” with two other papers of which he was co-author. Very recently one of his Physical Review D papers, a paper that was not one of the ones on the arXiv, was retracted with the notation:

The author withdraws this article from publication because it copies text, totaling more than half of the article, from the articles listed below. The author apologizes to the authors of these papers and to the publishers whose copyright was violated.

After the scandal broke, Yilmaz had a letter published in Nature where he justified the sort of plagiarism found in his articles, claiming “using beautiful sentences from other studies on the same subject in our introductions is not unusual.” Evidently the editors of the journal General Relativity and Gravitation agreed with Yilmaz. They decided not to do anything about the papers they had published that were withdrawn from the arXiv, writing an editorial in which they defended the papers, while noting that “we do not regard such word for word copying of introductory and descriptive material by others as acceptable.”

I heard about the GRG editorial via an e-mail from a group of the faculty at METU, who write that:

The note is clearly quite unacceptable and insufficient in the fight against plagiarism. We cannot help but ask whether the Editors seriously believe that those who cannot compose their own sentences are in fact capable of producing genuine research worthy of publishing in General Relativity and Gravitation.

and note the retraction of the Physical Review D article, which they regard as a much more appropriate response

Update: Someone helpfully sent me pdfs of the two GRG articles, marked up to identify the plagiarized passages. Looking at these, I find it hard to understand why any journal would not withdraw such papers if they made the mistake of publishing them.

Update: The journal Astrophysics and Space Science is retracting four of the plagiarized papers, by putting up errata on-line which appeared today and are dated January 11, 2008, saying:

After investigation and at the request of the President of the Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Turkey, the Editors of Astrophysics and Space Science have decided to retract this paper due to extensive plagiarism of work by others.

The papers involved are gr-qc/0505079, gr-qc/0602012, gr-qc/0508018, gr-qc/0509022.

Every year around this time the Edge web-site posts responses from a large number of scientists to some particular question. This year the question is “What have you changed your mind about? Why?”, and the results should be posted tomorrow. John Baez has posted his answer here. He writes that he changed his mind about the question of whether he should be thinking about quantum gravity after he realized “the more work we did, the more I realized I didn’t know what questions we should be asking!”, and compares the effort to “throwing darts in a darkened room and hoping to hit the bull’s-eye.” Since changing his mind he has been working on other things, and feels that as a result “I’m making more real progress understanding the universe than I ever did before.”

I think I share John’s point of view on this in many ways, even though I’ve never actively worked on a quantum gravity research project. The problem with quantum gravity research has always seemed to me that, since you can’t measure quantum gravitational effects, you’re in great danger of coming up with lots and lots of “quantum gravities”, but unable to ever know which if any of them has anything to do with the real world. This is kind of what has happened with string theory in recent years. One hope has always been that one will find a mathematically uniquely compelling model, but that has yet to happen. To me the best bet has always been that one might understand quantum gravity by unifying it with the standard model, in a compelling way such that the unified theory explains some of the things the standard model leaves unresolved. This hope was also behind much of the original interest in string theory: it wasn’t just a quantum theory of gravity, but also a theory of particle physics that could be tested.

Like John, I think we still have a long ways to go towards understanding at a deep enough level how quantum field theories really work, and how the internal symmetries of particle physics and the space-time symmetries of gravity can be unified into a more fundamental structure. Progress towards this goal may even require new mathematics, and this means there are all sorts of things to think about and work on.

One person who hasn’t changed his mind about some things is Lubos Motl. According to his latest posting, I’m

…a typical incompetent, power-thirsty, active moron of the kind who often destroy whole countries if they get a chance to do it.

The arXiv puts out charts each year showing the number of submissions by category, the ones for 2007 are now available here. Commentary about this here and here. The general trend is that quite a few years ago the number of HEP papers leveled off, as just about all of them were posted on the arXiv. The number of math papers is still growing quickly, it is only recently that posting math preprints to the arXiv has become a widespread practice. While mathematicians probably write papers at a slower rate than physicists, there are a lot more mathematicians than particle physicists.

The end of 2007 has brought one undesirable change. Recently I was down in Princeton, and found out that the University Store, traditionally one of the best places in the world to buy math and physics books, has now gone out of the book-selling business, turning it over the Labyrinth Books. The new Labyrinth store has some math and physics books, but far, far fewer. Maybe they just are getting started, and 2008 will bring better news about this.

This past summer Terry Tomboulis posted a preprint claiming to have a proof of confinement. Recently there has been a note posted on the arXiv by Ito and Seiler claiming to have found a problem with his proof, and a response from him claiming there is no problem. I’d love to hear from an expert who has taken the time to follow these arguments carefully and can explain what is going on here.

For a recent article by Arthur Jaffe surveying the history of rigorous studies of quantum field theory, see here.

Heading off late tomorrow for a 9 day vacation in Paris. Blogging will probably be light to non-existent and it will take me longer to get around to deleting comments. Please don’t feed the trolls.

Best wishes to all for the new year….

Theoretical physics and mathematics are much cheaper to fund than experimental particle physics. I don’t know yet what the implications of the FY 2008 budget are for these fields, but it appears that they are not facing large cuts like Fermilab. In other funding-related news:

DARPA, a Defense Department division responsible for funding research that might lead to new technology with military applications, is soliciting applications for grants to fund pure mathematical research. In the past they have funded work on the geometric Langlands program, now they have put out a list of 23 Mathematical Challenges, illustrating what they would like to fund. These include some conventional Clay Millennium Prize problems like the Riemann Hypothesis and Hodge Conjecture, and some less conventional ones like

Biological Quantum Field Theory
Quantum and statistical methods have had great success modeling virus evolution. Can such techniques be used to model more complex systems such as bacteria? Can these techniques be used to control pathogen evolution?

There’s even one I find extremely tempting:

Geometric Langlands and Quantum Physics
How does the Langlands program, which originated in number theory and representation theory, explain the fundamental symmetries of physics? And vice versa?

Benjamin Mann, the program officer, explains the rationale here.

On the question of grants, there are some interesting comments by Tom Banks in the comment section of this posting at Cosmic Variance. The posting quotes Harvard president Faust as warning lesser schools that they should get out of the business of scientific research, since Harvard is going to be vigorously and successfully competing for increasingly scarce government funding for such research. Banks describes how when he and others were trying to build up the string theory group at Rutgers

…we never got the kind of government funding that the elite institutions have (I’m counting dollars per person). This was at a time when certain elite institutions were at a low ebb and were getting scandalously large amounts per person in return for mediocre research. And of course, in the end, two of our most successful researchers got stolen away by elite institutions.

I guess he’s referring to Seiberg, who went to the IAS, and Shenker, who went to Stanford. I don’t know which are the “certain elite institutions” that were doing “mediocre research” that he is referring to.

The Rutgers string theory group was originally built up when the university spent large amounts of money to bring in several prominent string theorists. One version of this story that I heard was that a Rutgers official called up Dan Friedan one day in his office, and asked him what it would take to get him and several other well-known string theorists to move there. Friedan had no interest in going to Rutgers, so made up what he considered an absurd list of demands (huge salaries, lots of postdocs, new building, little or no teaching, etc., etc…). The official thanked him and then hung up, with Friedan convinced he’d never hear any more about this. A couple hours later though, the phone rang again. It was the same official, telling Friedan that they would be more than happy to meet all his demands.

Another institution that I hear is trying to compete with the elite by starting up a new, well-funded institute for research in math and physics is Stony Brook. The money is coming from Jim Simons, as part of a donation announced last year. Some other information about donations from Simons to other institutions is available at the Simons Foundation website. This foundation is largely devoted to funding research on autism, but also describes donations to the Math for America program to recruit math teachers, as well as to Brookhaven, Stony Brook, the IAS, IHES and MSRI. Simons has been funding summer workshops at Stony Brook for several years that are largely devoted to string theory. The math department has an NSF-funded RTG program in geometry and physics, and the web-site there includes links to write-ups of some of the expository talks that are part of the program.