Not Even Wrong

Scott Aaronson has adopted a sensible attitude towards the controversy over string theory, announcing in a new posting entitled Mercenary in the String Wars that his allegiances in this “War” are for sale to the highest bidder. I encourage all my extremely wealthy financial backers to take him up on this.

He seems to have reached this decision after enjoying an all-expenses-paid vacation in the Bay Area courtesy of the Stanford string theorists, despite having a great deal of sympathy for the criticisms being made of string theory. While there, he gave a talk for which he makes his notes available, on the topic of Computational Complexity and the Anthropic Principle. It’s quite entertaining, although the fact that anyone is seriously debating the kind of issues Scott discusses is a good indication of how far off the rails string theory has gone.

Scott seems surprised to discover that, in private discussion, string theorists are far more reasonable than he expected from their writings, from the behavior of string theory bloggers like Lubos, and from his conversations with Greg Kuperberg, who is convinced that string theory critics are “intellectually non-serious” (I forgot to mention in my last posting that Kuperberg was someone else I had in mind when quoted in 02138). His experience agrees with my own, that in private conversation I find that most string theorists and I agree much more than one would guess. In such a context I’ve just about always found them more than willing to admit that the current situation of string theory is disturbing, progress has ground to nearly a halt, and that the whole landscape business is extremely problematic. That these attitudes are not well reflected in the public utterances of string theorists I think is due to several factors. Given the problems facing the theory, many find it best to just avoid being quoted publicly, and those who do talk to the press feel that their field is to some extent under unfair attack in the media and they should make their best effort to defend it. Those who spend their time vigorously defending string theory as a healthy research program, attacking its critics on blogs and elsewhere, often represent only a tail in the statistical distribution of views and behaviors of the string theory community.

I also suspect that one reason Scott found the Stanford string theorists behaving more reasonably than he would have guessed is that the last year or so has not been kind to their early hopes that statistical calculations would allow some sort of real predictions to emerge from the anthropic landscape. It has become increasingly clear that this kind of idea just can’t work, for reasons that have been extensively discussed here.

I predict a lively discussion in the comment section over at Scott’s blog, and encourage people to use that venue. Already John Preskill has weighed in with what he thinks is an unintentional double entendre about Susskind: “When I listen to Lenny Susskind, I really believe that information can come out of a black hole.”

Update: Scott is pretty funny, but I have to admit that Lubos is completely hilarious.

There’s a new magazine aimed at Harvard alums, named 02138 (after the local zip-code), and its second issue has just appeared. Personally I’ve never quite understood the phenomenon of people who retain a lifelong fascination with the fact that they attended Harvard, but it seems that there are a lot of them, and the magazine is partly aimed at them or at anyone with an interest in the place or its alumni. The university already has an alumni magazine that it sponsors, but 02138 appears to intend to provide something edgier and not so much along the lines of promotional material.

This latest issue contains an article about the string controversy, written by John Sedgwick and with a focus on the Harvard angle, including me, fellow Harvard grad Brian Greene, and current Harvard faculty member Lubos Motl. The piece is called Unstrung Heroes, and for the full thing I guess you’ll have to subscribe to the magazine. I fear that Sedgwick has done an excellent job of accurately putting together the most outrageous statements that he could find on this topic, including some things I told him when he came down to New York a couple months ago. He also got some interesting quotes from quite a few physicists about the current state of string theory. These included Glashow, who “said he considers a big book like Woit’s long overdue, because string theory has gone exactly as we imagined. If anything, he adds, it’s even worse than it was.” Weinberg is quoted as saying:

The critics are right. We have no single prediction of string theory that is verified by observation. Even worse, we don’t know how to use string theory to make predictions. Even worse than that, we don’t really know what string theory is.

Cumrun Vafa “calls string theory the major leagues in the field of quantum gravity. As for other theoretical pursuits, he derides them as little efforts here and there.” Barton Zwiebach promotes string theory as possibly being able to “see the origin of the universe, and the very meaning of how space and time are born and what they are.” Michael Peskin claims that we might discover a universe that existed before time as we know it began, while noting “But there is a big debate as to whether this idea makes any sense.”

Sedgwick tells the story of Lubos Motl’s reference to me as the “black crackpot”, and Lee Smolin as the “blue crackpot” (because of the colors of the covers of our books), and his discussion of the desirability of my death. Lubos has evidently been told he’s not supposed to say things like that anymore, and responded to a request for an interview with “I don’t enjoy elementary human rights right now.” There’s a quote which I think originated as a comment on my blog to the effect that Lubos has done for the image of string theory “what the movie Deliverance did for canoeing holidays.”

Perhaps the most outrageous quote is an accurate one from me characterizing some of my experiences criticizing string theory from a position outside the field’s standard rigid hierarchy as being analogous to what happens when one messes with the dominance hierarchy of a chimpanzee troupe. This leads to a lot of strange behavior, flinging of shit, showing of behinds, and all sorts of bizarre behavior. In order to avoid offending people I wasn’t referring to, I should explain that I had in mind specifically some of my experiences when first starting this blog, see in particular the comment section of this posting.

It’s a bit embarassing that I’m made out to in some degree be the hero of this piece, the oppressed underdog that the author tries to set up in contrast to overlord Brian Greene. Sedgwick sees the story of how string theory dominates an academic field despite very limited achievements as quite analogous to the phenomenon he had personal experience with of how “theory” came to dominate the humanities in academia. I think there is something to the analogy, with both kinds of “theorists” starting out as an insurgent minority needing a certain amount of fanaticism to survive and expand their influence. Both groups revel in the complexity and obscurity of their work, convinced that those who disagree with them are stuck in the past or just too dumb to appreciate the great achievements of the difficult ideas involved in the two kinds of “theory”.

Chris W. has pointed me to a site that brings together the two sorts of “theory”. It’s called Scriblerus Press, is run by Sean Miller, who has a blog and is working on a PhD thesis in English on the topic of “the cultural currency of string theory.” Scriblerus is sponsoring and now looking for contributions to an anthology of short creative works that deal with string theory in one way or another.

The January Notices of the AMS is out. Two quite interesting articles, one of which is an interview with my colleague Joan Birman. She just recently officially retired, but, at the age of 79 is still very active in research and a major presence in the department, an example to us all. The second is an article by Anatoly Vershik about the Clay Millenium Prizes. Vershik argues that these million dollar prizes are not good for mathematics, and that the story of the proof of the Poincare conjecture shows why. Top mathematicians who think they have a chance of solving one of the Clay problems are going to work on them whether or not the prize exists (the money certainly didn’t motivate Perelman). The prizes give the public a deformed view of what is important about mathematics and encourage unseemly squabbling about how “credit” for a solution will be assigned. Vershik writes:

In my opinion, all this clamor and fuss show that this method of promoting mathematics is warped and unacceptable, it does not popularize mathematics as a science, on the contrary, it only bewilders the public and leads to unhealthy interest.

There’s an excellent article about James Clerk Maxwell in the December Physics World. It’s the 175th anniversary of Maxwell’s birth this year. He lived only to age 48, dying in 1879. The author of the article speculates that “Had he not died so young, Maxwell would almost certainly have developed special relativity a decade or more before Einstein.”

For an update on the US federal budget situation for science, see this AAAS web-page. As far as I can tell, the situation is that (as often happens) the Congress has not yet passed FY2007 appropriations for most of the government, including the DOE and NSF, even though we’re now more than a couple months into the fiscal year. As a result, these agencies are operating under a continuing resolution, without access to the increased funds that were supposed to flow because of the “American Competitiveness Initiative”. The new Congress will have to deal with this after it convenes in January, and news reports I heard today said that Congressional leaders were considering not producing new appropriations bills but running the government on a continuing resolution for the rest of FY2007. Unclear to me what this means for science funding, but it doesn’t sound good. Over the next few years, if the new Democratic Congress makes a serious effort to bring the US federal budget deficit under control, science funding may be under pressure.

At the Scientific American blog, J R Minkel has a story called Comic Books Looove String Theory, about developments in the Ex Machina comic, which is about “a retired semi-super hero turned Mayor of New York City who can control machines with his mind.” In issue 10 a lunatic starts ranting

It’s not about the branes, it’s about the bulk. You were supposed to tell people… Witten is close, but we’re closer.

Minkel doesn’t mention the recent string theory themes in Zippy the Pinhead.

Witten’s new paper with Gukov mentioned here is now available. It is about 160 pages long and generalizes the earlier Kapustin-Witten paper to the ramified case. This involves constructing “surface operators” in the 4d gauge theory, operators attached to surfaces in much the same way ‘t Hooft operators are attached to curves. Unfortunately it doesn’t discuss connections to Khovanov homology that Gukov described in his Strings 2006 talk “Surface Operators in Gauge Theory and Categorification” (I’d provide a link, but the Strings 2006 site seems to be down). The authors also note that Frenkel and Gaitsgory have a “unified approach” to this ramified case, but that “Unfortunately, we make contact here neither with the use of conformal field theory nor with this unified statement. We hope, of course, to eventually understand more.” So, there’s lots more to do…

If you want to get an idea of what it costs to run a theoretical physics center, check out the report of the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics. The interim director of the MCTP is Gordon Kane, and they will be hosting a symposium next month to celebrate his 70th birthday.

Over at Cosmic Variance, there’s a discussion of the new Martin Scorsese film String Kings, which features “a scene showing work on an extension of the New Jersey turnpike, involving string henchmen (disguised with hard hats and overalls) a large cement truck and Peter Woit.” I guess this doesn’t seem like such a great plot idea to me for some reason. Personally I’ve been thinking that the whole recent controversy over string theory would make a great comic novel. The thing to do is to somehow get David Lodge interested…

Update: The Strings 2006 site is back up, and the Gukov talk mentioned is here.

Update: More about the FY 2007 science budget situation from Science and from FYI.

Various things that I’ve run across recently that seem worth mentioning:

The proceedings of the big yearly lattice gauge theory conference that was mentioned here, Lattice 2006, are now available here.

The New York Times today in its Science Times section has a very interesting article by Dennis Overbye entitled China Pursues Major Role in Particle Physics. It tells some of the history of particle physics in China, describes the BEPC accelerator in Beijing which has just had a luminosity upgrade, and discusses the role China may play in future accelerator projects, especially the ILC. A US physicist who sometimes works at BEPC, Frederick Harris, is quoted as saying “The rate China is growing, this is something they could contemplate hosting in 10 years.” Perhaps the future of high-energy frontier accelerator projects really will be in China.

There’s also an associated article about the spring 1989 physics conference in Beijing that overlapped with the Tiananmen Square massacre, with David Gross quoted as saying “Until the shooting began, the visit was delightful.” He and Vafa describe the bloody van that was supposed to be their transport, after it had been used to pick up wounded students, two of whom died.

Physics World has an article about physicists willing to make bets, called Physicists who fancy a flutter, featuring Tommaso Dorigo’s recent $1000 bet with Gordon Watts and Jacques Distler over what the LHC will see.

New Scientist has a feature article Physics Goes Hollywood, about Costas Efthimiou and a course he is teaching at the University of Central Florida. The idea of the course is to have students watch movies, often ones with a sci-fi theme, then use real physics to critique the accuracy of scenes in the movies. Costas is a particle theorist who has worked on conformal field theories, and was a visitor here at Columbia for a while, from what I remember. He has several papers about teachng physics using films, most recently this one.

The Cao-Zhu paper giving the details of the proof of the Poincare conjecture that originally appeared in the Asian Journal of Mathematics has now been posted in revised form on the the arXiv. The revised version includes an apology to Kleiner and Lott for not acknowledging the use of their work in the original version.

Geometric Langlands is definitely the hot topic of the moment, I just learned about two more conferences about this that will take place soon. One is a Gottingen Winterschule, on January 4-7, the second is a program on Langlands Duality and Physics, to be held at the Schrodinger Institute in Vienna from January 9-20.

A couple weeks ago in Hamburg there was a conference on Kahler Geometry and Mathematical Physics, held to celebrate the 100th birthday of Erich Kahler.

Princeton will be hosting a conference next year entitled Geometry and the Imagination in honor of Bill Thurston’s 60th birthday.

Dmitry Vaintrob, son of mathematician Arkady Vaintrob, has won a $100,000 scholarship from the Siemens foundation based on a research project in string topology. For more discussion of this, and what it means for string theory, see here.

Update: Two more.

Giorgios Choudalakis took a poll back in August of grad-students, postdocs and professors associated with Fermilab, asking them what they expected the LHC to find. Here are the results. More about this at Fermilab Today.

A commenter points out that this week’s Zippy the Pinhead deals with one character’s doubts about string theory. Over the last few years, the comic has often dealt with string theory, to see this try typing “string” into this search page.

There’s filming going on outside my office window today, right at the entrance to the Columbia Mathematics building. The film is Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, with a screenplay based on the David Foster Wallace book of the same name.

On the way in here I stopped at a bookstore and took a look at the new Thomas Pynchon novel Against the Day. Over at Cosmic Variance, Mark Trodden and Sean Carroll are Pynchon fans and have postings about this. I was quite fond of Vineland and enjoyed some of Pynchon’s earlier books, but he lost me with Mason and Dixon, and this new one doesn’t look promising. From flipping through it, one important topic seems to be quaternions and their relation to 4d space-time geometry, and a group of characters are called the Quaternioneers. I almost bought the book, thinking that it was my duty as a chronicler of the nexus of math, physics and popular culture to read the thing. But when I picked it up, its sheer heft caused an immediate feeling of discouragement, so I put it back down and will wait for reports from others.

There’s a new movie out this week called Deja Vu, and evidently string theory play a significant role in its time-travel/multiverse based plot. My colleague Brian Greene was scientific consultant on the film, and the Cosmic Log MSNBC blog has a story about this, noting that he’s also involved in another time-travel movie project (Mimzy), and appeared in yet a third (Frequency). The MSNBC story does explain that time-travel is not a big topic of current physics research, but describes physicists as “intrigued by the trippy concepts spawned by string theory – indicating that the universe could follow any of 10⁵⁰⁰ possible courses, and that our course seems to be going down just the right path to allow for the development of stars, galaxies and life” (the story does note that some people have a problem with this and gives “Not Even Wrong” a mention). While I gave up on the idea of spending $35 on the Pynchon book and devoting endless hours to reading its more than 1100 pages, spending $10 and devoting a couple hours to watching a cheesy movie seems like a much more viable way of fulfilling my blogger duties, so I think I’ll be doing that this evening.

Continuing on the science fiction theme, next year’s Les Houches summer school will be on the topic String Theory and the Real World.

In further media news, last week I talked with someone from the CBC radio program The Current, and supposedly they were going to use some of this in a program on the controversy over string theory that aired yesterday. Also someone tells me that this past week’s issue of Der Spiegel has an article on this.

Finally, for some non-media science fact, the week before last there was a workshop in Paris on High Energy Physics in the LHC Era. There were quite a few interesting talks, including one by Albert de Roeck on post LHC accelerator possiblities (mainly the SLHC, a luminosity upgrade of the LHC), by Alessandro Strumia on astrophysical neutrino experiments, and by Fabio Zwirner on supersymmetry (see page 18 of his slides for a good reason not to believe in supersymmetry). The summary talk was given by Luciano Maiani, who argued that the next machine after the LHC should be a larger proton-proton machine, on the SSC size scale, to be built in the US (since it wouldn’t even fit at CERN), with an electron-positron collider to be built at CERN.

Update: For a more general discussion of the question of whether new physics that solves the naturalness problem will be visible at the LHC, see a recent posting by Tommaso Dorigo, who is reporting on a conference going on in Bologna, especially the talk by Andrea Romanino.

Update: The movie is completely generic, including no strings, but just a standard-issue wormhole.

You know things are getting strange when Esquire magazine starts running an article on the current state of particle theory. As you might expect, their take on this is rather odd. It centers around Nima Arkani-Hamed and begins with:

For a hundred years, physicists have been scraping away at the strange and complicated phenomena obscuring the true face of our universe. Finally, a few brillant young thinkers may be on the verge of getting the first real glimpse.

which is pretty much complete nonsense, totally ignoring the huge success of the standard model in favor of the latest extremely speculative models promoted by some people.

The Esquire writer talked to several theorists, including Lee Smolin and Laurent Freidel at Perimeter, where he describes young postdocs as hanging out at a local hipster bar, with one of their number describing string theorists as “the post 9/11 theocons”, afraid of anything new: “The string theorists just masturbate to their same ideas.” The postdocs do note that at Perimeter string theorists and non-string theorists get along fine. Freidel, a faculty member at Perimeter, is described as not having slept for two weeks straight when he was working on a solution of QCD, with his wife asking a colleague “Can you do something? He’s going insane.”

After describing Perimeter, the article then moves on to Witten and Maldacena at the Institute in Princeton. Witten’s comments about the current state of things go as follows:

Well, you can’t have your best year every year… I’ve lived through two periods, the mid-eighties and mid-nineties, where for about six or seven years, roughly, there were a lot of really interesting results that were also relatively easy. And I’ve also lived through several periods by now where you have to work a little harder to get something interesting.

Witten goes on to say that he is putting his hopes in the LHC and the idea that it is likely to tell us something about the nature of electroweak symmetry breaking.

There’s some attempt to describe Maldacena and his AdS/CFT conjecture, which is characterized as “a mind fuck, but not crazy.” The article then moves back to Arkani-Hamed at Harvard, with “For crazy, you have to go about 250 miles north.” His view of the current controversy over string theory is said to be “forget the antistring polemicists! They’re just reactionaries! This could be the greatest discovery of our time!”, and he heavily promotes the anthropic landscape and the idea that the LHC will provide evidence for it. He says:

The mantra of string theory ten years ago was that the theory was smarter than you… Well, exactly that–just follow the theory where it leads you and it leads to this precipice. And now we have to decide what to do. So now a number of people are deciding to jump… And I think that those of us that decided to take the plunge are staring at the true nature of the beast for the first time.

Personally, I think if a scientific theory with no experimental evidence for it takes you to the edge of a precipice and tells you to jump, the sensible thing to do is to say “No Thanks!”, back away, and go find another theory. But that’s just me.

The latest New Scientist also has something about the string theory controversy, an article by Michio Kaku entitled Will we ever have a theory of everything?, part of a series of articles on “The Big Questions”. Kaku describes the controversy dramatically:

It’s all-out war. The hostilities have begun. With guns blazing, daily salvos are being fired by both sides. Welcome to the conflict raging within the rarefied world of theoretical physics, where a civil war has erupted over string theory and a theory of everything.

While I disagree with the far too rosy picture he paints of the prospects for string theory, Kaku takes a very sensible attitude towards the whole thing:

So who’s right? Actually, both have a legitimate point of view. But far from signalling a collapse in physics, this debate is actually rather healthy. It’s a sign of the vitality of theoretical physics that people are so passionate about the outcome. Science flourishes with controversy.

and ends, reasonably enough with:

One day, some bright, enterprising physicist, perhaps inspired by this article, will complete the theory, open the doorway, and use the power of pure thought to determine if string theory is a theory of everything, anything, or nothing.

New Scientist also asked various well-known physicists what they thought might happen in physics in the next 50 years. Weinberg says that he hopes for a final theory of particle physics, with discovery of superpartners a first step. Tegmark also hopes for a final theory, one which will have us living in just one of many “parallel universes”. ‘t Hooft hopes for a deterministic model that would unify quantum mechanics and gravity, Randall for a new understanding of space and time, Carroll for a theory of the big bang, Wilczek for a new golden age of particle physics catalyzed by the LHC, Kolb for the discovery of gravitational waves and Vilenkin for the discovery of a cosmic string. The most popular question on many these people’s minds is that of whether or not we live in a multiverse (Tegmark, Rees, Krauss mention this). Among mathematicians, Marcus du Sautoy suggests we’ll have a proof of the Riemann hypothesis, Timothy Gowers favors P=NP.

Among all these and other scientists, I think the most plausible prediction comes from my graduate school roommate, Nathan Myhrvold, who thinks a revolution will come from materials science, with the development of new “metamaterials”, substances with new, intricate synthetic structures.

Update: Somehow I hadn’t noticed that New Scientist also had a prediction from Witten:

String theory will continue to be an extremely fertile source of new ideas. It will still be viewed as the interesting candidate for quantum gravity, and may even be more or less understood by 2056.

Interesting that he thinks that 50 years from now the situation will be much the same, with string theory still just a “candidate” for quantum gravity, and he doesn’t predict that we will have string-based unification of particle physics and gravity.