Not Even Wrong

For up-to-the-minute news about the Higgs, far better informed than any media source could ever be (and thus a great example of why blogs are changing the way the media works), your best bet is Tommaso Dorigo’s blog. His latest posting explains well what the current state is, and predicts that, with the data expected from the Tevatron through 2009, they should be able to have 2.5-3 sigma evidence for a 115 GeV Higgs if it is there, or if it’s not, rule it out at 95% confidence level up to 130 GeV. He shows a recent plot from D0 based on 1 fb^-1 of data, and discusses the fact that D0’s limits on a Higgs are not quite as good as expected at low mass. When similar data from his own experiment (CDF) becomes available, it will be interesting to compare the results. Not being able to rule out a low-mass Higgs at the expected level probably just means that it’s harder to do than expected. But there’s another possible interpretation: maybe there’s something there….

Tommaso also has a posting about a new Physics World article discussing the recent blog-centered discussion of statistically-not-very-significant sightings of a possible new particle that could be a supersymmetric Higgs. Evidently these events have caused some consternation within CDF and D0 about the possible implications of bloggers in their midst and how this changes communication of their results to the public.

This month’s Blog Life column in Physics World covers Not Even Wrong, accurately and well.

On the mathematical side of things, Terry Tao continues to come up with amazingly good blog entries. His latest is a series of three postings (here, here and here), reporting on my colleague Shouwu Zhang’s lectures at UCLA on the topic of rational points on curves. This is a fundamental issue in number theory and arithmetic geometry, and the fact that Tao is a great mathematician, but not an expert, may have a lot to do with why his explanation of Shouwu’s lectures is relatively easy to follow. One of the problems with academia is that one’s illustrious colleagues (like Shouwu) get invitations to give lecture series like this elsewhere, but not at their home institutions. So, while I didn’t get to hear Shouwu’s lectures, Tao’s account of them is excellent compensation.

For an interesting article by a young philosopher about the question of beauty in physics, see this article in Perspectives in Science (based on his doctoral dissertation).

On May 22 the CUNY Graduate Center program on Science and the Arts will host an event entitled String Theory for Dummies. Unfortunately I’ll be out of town that day…

A couple weeks ago there was a workshop in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem on String Theory: Achievements and Perspectives, honoring the sixtieth birthday of Eliezer Rabinovici and Shimon Yankielowicz. Videos and some transparencies from the talks are available here. Susskind gives his usual propaganda for the anthropic string landscape, but seems rather defensive, starting off saying that he “feels like he’s at the center of a circular firing squad” (which maybe does describe what is going on in string theory these days), and that “some people say I’m a traitor” or that “my ideas are dangerous.”

Gross ended the conference with a remarkable discussion of the current state of string theory. He put up various cartoons illustrating the fact that the public perception of string theory has turned rather negative (including the recent one from the New Yorker: “Is String Theory Bullshit?”), but took solace in a recent use of string theory in an advertisement for women’s bikinis. He declared that “I am still a true believer in the sexiness of string theory”, and that he continued to think it is clearly on the right road. But, after giving the standard list of string theory achievements, he did admit that he was much less optimistic than 20 years ago, and spent some time discussing what he sees as the main failure to date: the continuing lack of a fundamental dynamical principle behind string theory. The question “what is string theory?” still has no real answer, and he has “the very uneasy feeling that we’re missing something big, that semi-classical intuition fails”, and that this will make the landscape disappear. Perhaps most remarkably, Gross admitted to some discouragement about AdS/CFT. He noted that the recent Klebanov et. al. results promoted by press release as connecting string theory with physics were actually due to an impressive gauge theory calculation. According to him, what has happened is that gauge theory techniques have proved more powerful than string theory techniques. He went on to discuss the landscape, explaining that he found the anthropic principle impossible to falsify, completely against the way physics has made progress in the past, and just “an easy way out”. Gross ended his talk by pointing out that 90 percent of the conference talks used supersymmetry, and that currently there was a “really weird situation”: supersymmetry was an essential tool, but there was absolutely no evidence for it. He said that he continues to believe that supersymmetry will be found at the LHC and has been willing to take 50/50 bets on the subject for bottles of wine, etc.

I haven’t yet had time to listen to many of the other talks, it looks like there are quite a few worth listening to, although as usual recently a depressingly large amount of landscape-based rather philosophical and pseudo-scientific argumentation.

I spent Thursday out at Stony Brook at the celebration of the 40th birthday of the ITP. It was great to catch up with many people I haven’t seen in nearly twenty years, hear what a lot of ex-Stony Brook people are doing, and meet some interesting new people (including some blog readers!).

Yesterday I spent much of the day downtown at the headquarters of the New York Academy of Sciences, which was hosting this semester’s Northeast String Cosmology Meeting, organized by Brian Greene and others from Columbia. The setting was pretty amazing, up on the 40th floor of the new 7 World Trade Center building, which has a spectacular view of lower Manhattan. Richard Bond gave a talk on topics concerning inflation and the CMB. He ended with lots of detailed calculations of CMB effects due to cosmological models involving string theory compactifications, especially a “Roulette Inflation” model. The joke was that God does not just play dice with the universe, but roulette also. In the question period Neil Turok politely pointed out that he was randomly choosing initial conditions, and getting very different imprints on the CMB, so wasn’t really able to predict anything. Nima Arkani-Hamed spoke on “Quantum Horizons and the Landscape”, talking about very general philosophical issues of horizons in AdS, the landscape, whether there are any “sharp observables” in this context and associated limits on the applicability of effective field theory. He ended by claiming that the situation is like that of the quantum theory in 1911, with the angst people are experiencing due to the landscape just like the difficulties physicists faced early in the century in going from classical physics to quantum physics. He didn’t mention that the old quantum theory was making lots of verified experimental predictions, whereas he is giving talks on whether, even in principle, the landscape can predict anything. Seems kind of different to me.

Among the many people there was Alan Guth, who, according to this blog entry someone pointed me to, has started “to have been converted over to thinking that anthropic arguments might have some merit.”

While I found these two talks depressing and all too symptomatic of the sad state of this subject, there was a huge bright spot at the workshop. Witten gave a really amazing talk about 2+1 d gravity. He has some fascinating new ideas about this, but they deserve a completely separate posting, which I’ll try to get to writing up tomorrow…

Upcoming events in and around New York, including several I’m planning to attend:

The New York Academy of Sciences is having an evening of lectures this Wednesday, hosted by Frank Wilczek, on the topic of Expanding Frontiers of Physics and Cosmology. Speakers will be Max Tegmark and Nima Arkani-Hamed.

The YITP at Stony Brook is having a symposium to celebrate its 40th anniversary, and many former students, faculty and postdocs will be in attendance. I plan to definitely spend Thursday out there, maybe also Saturday.

One reason I likely won’t be out at Stony Brook on Friday is that I’d like to attend at least some talks at another event that will be downtown at the new location of the New York Academy of Sciences. It’s the 9th Northeast String Cosmology Meeting, co-sponsored by Columbia’s ISCAP. Edward Witten will be among the four people speaking.

There will be an event entitled When the Scientist Becomes the Story at NYU next week, on May 8th, featuring a discussion about John Nash and Francis Crick with their biographers.

Much farther in the future will be next year’s program on representation theory, algebraic geometry and physics at the mathematics division of the IAS in Princeton. This will include a conference November 26-30 with a title reflecting my favorite topic “Gauge Theory and Representation Theory”. Presumably much of the focus will be on the Geometric Langlands program.

Closer in time, but farther in distance, I’ll be speaking at a science festival called FEST in Trieste on May 18th. In June my book is supposed to be coming out in an Italian edition. I have to be in London the evening of May 23rd, then will head back to New York the next day. Currently trying to come up with a plan for how to spend the time in between, with the leading possibility a train trip through the Alps to Geneva, then a stop in Paris on the way to London.

In other news:

Lee Smolin has put up on his web-site a response to the review of his book and mine by Joe Polchinski.

On the Fields Medalist blogging front, there’s a report from Terry Tao about a symposium at UCLA where he and three other Fields medalists gave talks. He gives a detailed description of the talks, including one by Richard Borcherds on QFT that sounds somewhat mystifying to me. Alain Connes at his blog gives his take on some of the talks delivered at the recent conference in his honor.

I’ve recently for no particular reason run into various interesting domain-names that some mathematicians and physicists are using for one purpose or another: monodromy.com, cohomology.com, and stringvacua.org.

A couple links mentioned by commenters here that deserve more visibility:

Neutrino Unbound is a site devoted to all things neutrino.

An interesting document concerning a bet made several years ago about whether supersymmetry will be found at currently (or soon-to-be) accessible energies is available here. Maybe someone can think of a way to get more particle theorists on the record about this…

Update: For upcoming events really far afield from here, I should mention that the new Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Beijing is starting to get organized. Jonathan Shock reports that there will be an opening ceremony at the end of May, a two month program on Quantum Phases of Matter starting in June, and a program on String Theory and Cosmology in the fall.

Update: I’ve just heard that Discover Magazine has chosen the finalists in its “String Theory in Two Minutes or Less” contest. No, I didn’t enter. Here they are.

Edward Witten has a new expository article, aimed at mathematicians, to appear at some point in the Bulletin of the AMS, but now available here. It’s based on colloquium-style lectures to mathematicians he has given over the last few years (including here at Columbia) and is entitled “From Superconductors and Four-Manifold to Weak Interactions”. The paper is organized around describing various aspects of gauge-symmetry breaking, but pretty much sticks to aspects of the problem that don’t involve the full quantum theory, just analysis of classical Lagrangians.

He begins with a description of the Landau-Ginzburg model of superconductivity, and various physical phenomena that it describes including the Meissner effect, Abrikosov-Gorkov flux lines, and Type I and II superconductors. Solutions for a special case are described using complex-analytic techniques. Exploiting an analogy to the Landau-Ginzburg case, he next takes up the Seiberg-Witten equations and their use by Taubes to get invariants for symplectic 4-manifolds and existence theorems for pseudo-holomorphic curves in them.

Witten’s final topic is electroweak gauge symmetry breaking and the Higgs mechanism in the Standard Model. He ends by remarking that in the superconducting case the analog of the Higgs field is just an effective field for a different underlying physics, and mentioning technicolor as an implementation of something similar in the electroweak case, while noting that precision electroweak data shows no signs of anything other than an elementary Higgs field. He comments “But it is always possible that the right alternative has not yet been proposed” and explains how the LHC should definitively see a Higgs particle if the SM is correct since current bounds place its mass between 115 and 200 GeV.

The paper is purely expository, and aimed at mathematicians. It’s interesting to see that, even though there aren’t any really new developments in the area of gauge symmetry breaking, Witten clearly sees it as a fundamental problem every bit as deserving of being explained to non-physicists as string theory.

At the big annual APS meeting, now going on in Jacksonville, of the 9 plenary talks, one is about particle theory. The talk is entitled “String Theory, Branes and if You Wish, the Anthropic Principle” and it was given by Shamit Kachru of the Stanford group. Here’s the abstract, which besides the usual claims that string theory is “our most promising framework for a unified theory of the fundamental interactions” and that “the underlying theory is unique”, also makes the claim to have “testable ideas about inflation and particle physics”. No clue what these ideas are, so I don’t know if they include the testable prediction the landscape makes about the proton lifetime. Also unclear why the Anthropic Principle is being demoted to “if You Wish”. Lots of experimental talks on particle physics at the conference, here’s a Fermilab press release on CDF and D0 results discussed at the meeting. Lawrence Krauss was speaking on “Selling Physics to Unwilling Buyers”, I wonder what that was about. More about the meeting at the Physics Meetings blog.

David Ben-Zvi has put up on his web-site his lecture notes from last week’s series of lectures in Oxford on geometric Langlands. As usual, a very readable survey of the subject, emphasizing links to representation theory.

For another source of material about representation theory and the (non-geometric) Langlands program, see the web-site hosted by the Clay Mathematics Institute devoted to the collected works of James Arthur.

There’s yet another round of discussion on bloggingheads.tv between science writers John Horgan and George Johnson. This week the LHC and the state of particle physics are some of the topics they consider.

From Fermilab, various new sources for discussion of the future of experimental particle physics include:

A web-site for the steering group tasked with developing a roadmap for future use of US accelerators. This week’s meeting includes a presentation on reconfiguring the Fermilab accelerator complex to produce larger numbers (factor of 3 more) protons, for use by neutrino experiments and others.

The Fermilab Physics Advisory Committee met on March 29-31, here are the presentations and report.

Last week there was a workshop devoted to considering what effect early data from the LHC would have on plans for the ILC (via Tommaso Dorigo).

Finally, Steven Miller, author of “String Kings”, has a new blog he is working on, devoted to essays on mathematical physics, theoretical biology and the history of science.

Update: Two more.

Seed magazine has a series of “cribsheets” about science. For physics, they cover nuclear power, the elements, and now string theory. The lack of predictivity of the theory is given a positive spin as being due to the “rich diversity” of string theory. At Cosmic Variance, Sean Carroll approvingly refers to this as “it only refers glancingly to the anthropic principle, which is a much more accurate view of the state of discussion about string theory than one would get by reading blogs.”

Nature has an article about the state of the LHC and the possibility that the Tevatron might be the first to see the Higgs. LHC project manager says that they were already running about 5 weeks behind schedule before the problem with the quadrupoles appeared, but says “In my view the magnet problem has been blown out of proportion… It is a very small part of a bigger picture.” If the schedule slips much more, there might not be time for an engineering run in 2007, and the first science run might be delayed until later in 2008.

Update: Thanks to commenter F. for pointing to the slides from Kachru’s talk. It’s a clear presentation of the moduli stabilization problem and the techniques that he and others used to solve it, while at the same time making the landscape problem much worse. The “testable” ideas mentioned in his abstract are the usual sort of thing behind claims like this: not actual tests of string theory, but effects in certain very specific models among the infinite variety of ones you can get out of string theory. Kachru doesn’t much address the issue of whether the landscape framework is testable science in the conventional sense, other than to describe people’s attempts to use eternal inflation to explain how the vacuum gets selected and try and get physics out of this as “notoriously confusing.” He also describes counting of vacua as favoring high-scale supersymmetry breaking, so maybe there is a prediction: no supersymmetry at the LHC.

Update: For the latest from FNAL on the LHC magnet problems, see here.

I just learned from Cosmic Variance that a review of the Director’s Cut version of String Kings is now out. It seems that the Director’s Cut version includes more scenes featuring a certain “man on the edge” in New York City…

I won’t bother to write up something about the background of today’s MiniBooNE results, since Tommaso Dorigo has already done a better job than I ever could. He also provides a link to where the live feed of the seminar will be, starting at 11am CDT. I’ll be in class at that time, but an hour later will try and attend the local seminar here at Columbia featuring Mike Shaevitz discussing the results.

And the result is….

No mu-neutrino to electron-neutrino oscillations of the sort that would explain the LSND result and require an extension of the Standard Model (beyond giving masses to the 3 known neutrinos). MiniBooNE was designed specifically to look for this, and has successfully ruled it out at 98% confidence level. They do see something anomalous in their data at low energy, but it is not compatible with being due to the kind of neutrino oscillations they were looking for. It’s also true that they just first got a look at this data two weeks ago, still have a lot of work to do to see if there is some sort of background contamination they hadn’t expected at these energies, or something they didn’t know about low energy cross-sections. Maybe it will take them a while to sort this out, but the bottom line is that what they were looking for is definitely not there.

Press release here, paper to come soon.

Update: For an excellent description of the result from Heather Ray, one of the MiniBooNE experimenters, see this guest posting at Cosmic Variance.

Update:

Warning: serious people should stop reading now, the rest is a low form of entertainment.

For something truly hilarious, you really should be following Lubos’s continually evolving misunderstandings of this experimental result, which he has taken as a reason for launching into another bizarre rant about me and Lee Smolin. As near as I can figure out, Lee and I are responsible for the misguided idea of designing an experiment like MiniBooNE to check into the possibility that LSND was seeing evidence of a sterile neutrino. His posting keeps changing (its URL is miniboone-confirms-lsnd, title now “Miniboone Refutes LSND”), with the early versions saying:

Evidence for several types of neutrino oscillations have been known for a decade or more. That includes atmospheric neutrino oscillations, solar neutrino oscillations, and a lab experiment called LSND in Los Alamos.

Today, Fermilab’s MiniBooNE experiment has confirmed that the LSND results were correct and a more subtle explanation than the simple two-flavor oscillation is necessary. The result rules out the possibility that the observed oscillation is a two-flavor oscillation involving a new sterile neutrino. Their results indicate that there is something surprising that doesn’t fit the most obvious model.

He does seem to have more recently gotten a clue about this and noticed that it doesn’t confirm the LSND results, editing his posting and adding the standard obsessive rant. I see that in his previous posting (about a Harvard faculty meeting), according to him the proposed new Harvard core curriculum states that “All of science education must lead to increasing food production for the working class in the next 5 years [added to please Peter Woit]”.

It seems that I am not only determining the course of neutrino experiments, but also setting the Harvard core curriculum. My powers are truly immense…

Update: Lubos has now changed the file-name from “miniboone-confirms-lsnd.html” to miniboone-refutes-lsnd.html, and deleted the comments from people explaining to him that he was confused. The new version starts off with:

I have erased several comments that only increased the amount of confusion, changed the filename to break links from crackpots’ blogs, and hope that the text below is now more or less OK.

The latest “This Week’s Finds” by John Baez discusses Felix Klein and his “Erlanger Programm”, which essentially was the idea that geometry should be understood as the study of Lie groups G, their subgroups H, and coset spaces G/H. This, supplemented with Cartan’s notion of a connection, allowing things that only locally look like G/H, is very much at the heart of our modern view of geometry. John gives links to quite a few things worth reading by and about Klein here. Another very interesting document is Klein’s own history of 19th century mathematics “Development of mathematics in the 19th century”.

I’m very much looking forward to the next installment of TWF, where John promises some insights into Hecke algebras. He also has a wonderful posting that generated an interesting discussion at the n-category cafe on the topic of mathematical exposition, entitled Why Mathematics Is Boring.

For some more mathematics blogging of the highest possible quality, see Terry Tao’s postings on his Simons lectures at MIT, here, here and here.

I wrote a bit about the LHC Theory Initiative here last year. They have just announced the award of two graduate fellowships and say that they will be awarding postdoctoral fellowships in the future. Unclear from this if they were successful in their efforts to get NSF funding, the solicitation of applications for the fellowship just mentions an older grant to Johns Hopkins.

NPR has run a two part series on the LHC (here and here). The first part features CERN theorist Alvaro de Rujula. I had the great pleasure of taking a particle theory course from him when I was a student at Harvard a very long time ago. He cut an impressive figure, and provided a survey of the subject that was both enlightening and entertaining.

Scott Aaronson provides quotes from someone else (Gian-Carlo Rota) whose lectures I attended around the same time, including one that ends “You and I know that mathematics, by definition, is not and never will be flaky”. I kind of agree with the sentiment in the full quote, but my experience with Rota back then was a rather weird one. For some misguided reason I had decided that since category theory was the most abstract kind of mathematics I had heard of, it would be a good idea to take a course on it. The only course on the subject was a graduate course down at MIT offered by Rota, so I started going down there to sit in on it. A few lectures into the course Rota all of a sudden announced that he had decided that only those students actually enrolled for credit should be taking the course, and that the several of us who were just auditing should leave. So we did, somewhat mystified (it’s not like the room was over-packed or anything). To this day, I still don’t know what that was about. Perhaps Rota knew that he was doing me a favor by stopping me from thinking about category theory at that point in my education, when in retrospect it seems likely that it really would have been somewhat of a waste.

There’s a lot more about Rota at this web-site. His capsule reviews in the back of the journal he edited, Advances in Mathematics, provided outrageous entertainment for many years (although some might at times think that they were, well, flaky…).

This past weekend I was at the University of Central Florida, participating in a symposium organized by Costas Efthimiou of the physics department there. It was sponsored by two student organizations, the university’s Society of Physics Students and Campus Freethought Alliance. There were two speakers, Jim Gates and myself. I suspect that the organizers and many in the audience were hoping for some fireworks between Gates and myself, taking opposite sides on the controversy over string theory, but I fear that we disappointed them.

My talk was entitled The Challenge of Unifying Particle Physics, and my intention was to avoid spending much time going over the problems of string theory, since I’m pretty tired of that, and instead to try and explain to the audience some of the basic facts about symmetries, representations and quantum mechanics, together with an outline of the current state of efforts to unify physics. Gates gave a very general talk about particle physics, unification and string theory, featuring a lot of very impressive graphics he has developed as part of a multi-media course called Superstring Theory: The DNA of Reality.

In the end, there wasn’t that much for us to disagree about. My critique of string theory as a unified theory is based on the claim that the idea of using strings in 10d doesn’t work because the variety of possibilities for handling the extra 6 dimensions makes predictions impossible. Gates has always been skeptical about extra dimensions and wasn’t about to defend them, let alone the landscape. I take his general attitude to be similar to that of Warren Siegel, who he collaborated with in the past, and who explains his point of view here. Recently Gates has been very much interested in representation theory, in his case the representation theory of supersymmetry, where he and collaborators see fundamental problems still to be resolved, and have new ideas about using Clifford algebras to attack them. For one of their recent papers written from the more mathematical end of the problem, see here.

I very much enjoyed my time in Orlando; high points were getting to meet with and talk to some of the physics students there, meeting someone who sometimes comments here who came to the talk, and especially getting the chance to discuss things with Jim, who I found to be impressively knowledgeable and thoughtful about every topic that came up.