Not Even Wrong

Alvaro de Rujula has posted on the arXiv under the title “Fifty years of Yang-Mills Theories: a phenomenological point of view” some of his recollections from the mid-seventies. These bring back my own memories of taking a course on particle theory from him at Harvard around 1977-78. One amusing aspect of the course was that when introducing a concept carrying someone’s name, de Rujula would always say something like “this is the so-called Weinberg angle, which of course was discovered by Glashow”. In one lecture he did something a bit different, saying something like “this is the Cabibbo angle, which, strangely enough, I think actually may have been discovered by Cabibbo”. de Rujula’s paper contains one of his famous drawings from the period and an amusing picture of Georgi and Glashow arguing. His asides are entertaining, but some so obscure I confess to not knowing exactly what he is referring to.

Today’s arXiv postings also contain a review talk on the state of string theory. It discusses the “landscape” with the comment “However, with such large numbers of vacua involved, one must wonder whether the scheme is at all testable, even in principle.” Normally string theory reviews start by describing the theory as the “only known” or “best candidate” or “most promising” approach to unification. This one replaces those phrases by “dominant framework”, and one certainly can’t argue with that.

The Theoretical Particle Physics Jobs Rumor Mill has a new home. It’s no longer at the University of Washington, now it’s at the College of William and Mary Physics department.

Now that it’s available again, the Rumor Mill has the striking news that Harvard has chosen for a faculty position one of its postdocs: Lubos Motl. Lubos is well-known as undoubtedly the most rabidly fanatic string theorist around, always willing to heap abuse and scorn on anyone who questions the idea that string theory is the language in which God wrote the world. Unlike many string theorists though, he actually knows what is going on in the field and is someone who can give you an accurate view of exactly what the state of the theory is (all you have to do is strip out his ravings about how string theory is unique and the source of all good ideas in physics and mathematics). He’s also not foolish enough to swallow the “Anthropic” nonsense that is becoming ever more prevalent among string theorists, and it’s a been a bit scary recently to see him acting as the voice of reason in the subject.

HEPAP is the Department of Energy’s “High Energy Physics Advisory Panel”, which holds meetings 3-4 times a year. At these meetings, people from the DOE and NSF report on the latest news about US government funding for particle physcs, and physicists from the universities and national labs report on how their experiments are going.

The latest HEPAP meeting was held this past weekend in Washington, and some of the presentations there have already been made available online. These include a detailed report on the progress of the LHC and the two experiments (CMS and Atlas) that will do physics there. The LHC construction is 90% complete, with magnets beginning to be installed in the tunnel. Things seem to be on track for turning on the machine in the spring of 2007. Optimistically, this would mean the first physics results should be available sometime in 2008.

Another presentation gave an overview of the DOE’s support of university-based particle physics. This includes the largest source of support in the US for theoretical particle physics. In FY 2003 the DOE spent \$23.3 million supporting theory research at 68 universities, funding 215 faculty, 116 postdocs and 114 graduate students. The other main source of US funding for particle theory is the NSF, which spends about half as much as the DOE (\$12 million in FY 2003).

HEPAP also adopted a new report on the “Quantum Universe“. This follows the trend of recent years of trying to justify particle physics research by emphasizing its relation to the very healthy and sexy field of cosmology. The acid test of this over the next few years will be to see if it helps with the difficult problem of getting funding for the Linear Collider.

It seems that the second most important web-site in the particle theory community (the first is obviously the arXiv ) has been shut down by the University of Washington. The Theoretical Particle Physics Jobs Rumor Mill has for years been a comprehensive source of information about who’s hot, who’s not, the hiring plans of all the theoretical particle physics groups in the United States and Canada, and the career moves of more established theorists. I hope a new home for the site can be found at a less fearful institution. I’d consider putting it up here, but I’ve got enough particle theorists annoyed at me already…

A more and more common argument one hears from string theorists these days (for one version see a recent anonymous comment posted here) goes more or less like this:

“A fundamental theory shouldn’t be expected to predict things like fermion masses or the standard model gauge group anymore than it should be able to predict the physical properties of the planets. Anyone who expects this is making the same mistake as Kepler, who tried to relate Platonic solids to planet orbits.”

The idea here is that many or even all of the things we don’t understand about the standard model are not fundamental aspects of the theory we should expect to be able to predict. Perhaps they are determined by the details of the history of how we ended up in this particular time and place, just as the properties of the planets were determined by the detailed history of the formation of the solar system.

As far as we can tell, the properties of the standard model hold uniformly throughout the observable universe, so to adopt this point of view one needs to postulate the existence of an unobservable “multiverse” of which we see only one small part. The so-called “landscape” of an unimaginably large number of possible vacuum solutions for string theory provides one realization of such a multiverse.

What are the problems with this idea? First of all, it is not so easy to dismiss out of hand. One can certainly imagine the possibility of the existence of an M-theory (maybe now the “M” is for “Multiverse”) with a local vacuum state that corresponds to our universe, and some dynamics that allows evolution from one universe to another. Perhaps tomorrow night a preprint will appear on arxiv.org containing a simple equation expressing a dynamics such that the possibility of a universe exactly like ours does arise as some part of a solution. Should we believe in such a new theory, whatever it is?

There seem to me to be two possible cases in which such a theory would be compelling. The first would be if the theory made experimentally testable predictions. Perhaps it would have only one solution that agreed completely with current experimental observations. Then the properties of this solution could be used to predict the results of experiments not yet done. If these predictions were accurate, the theory would have strong evidence in its favor.

Even if the theory had so many solutions that one couldn’t readily use it to make predictions, one still might find it compelling due to its “beauty” or “elegance”. If it were based on a very simple equation or idea, the fact that the relatively complex structure of the standard model could be made to fall out of a much simpler equation would again be strong evidence for such a theory. Just how compelling this would be would depend on how much simpler it was than the standard model. If the new equation was more or less as complicated as the equations which determine the standard model, it wouldn’t be compelling at all.

The current state of affairs in particle theory is that many people believe that they are on the road to finding such a compelling theory, but all the evidence is that this is nothing but wishful thinking on their part. There is no viable proposal for an M-theory based on a simple set of equations with a solution corresponding to the real world. This simply does not exist. An easy way to embarass a string theorist who is going on about the beauty of the theory is to ask them to write down a simple set of equations that characterize this beautiful theory. They can’t do it now and I don’t see any reason to believe they ever will be able to in the future.

What string theorists have now is not a single, consistent theory, but a set of several inconsistent fragmentary theories that they hope can be turned into a consistent whole. This circle of ideas is significantly more complicated than the standard model that it is trying to explain.

Even this complex of ideas might be compelling if it could be used to explain one or more not yet understood aspects of the standard model, or if it made new experimental predictions that could be checked. All the evidence of recent years is that this is impossible. If the whole framework makes any sense at all, it appears to predict nothing and explain nothing about the standard model. Not a single one of the parameters of the standard model can be calculated, not a single experimental prediction, at any energy scale, can be made. It is becoming increasingly clear that the circle of ideas known as “M-theory” is completely vacuous.

Strong evidence that this is the case comes from the fact that string theorists have no idea what, if anything, M-theory is supposed to be able to predict. Polchinski and others feel they have demonstrated that M-theory can’t predict the cosmological constant, but can’t come up with anything else it can predict and, increasingly, seem happy to live with the idea of promoting a theory that can’t predict anything. This wholesale abandonment of the scientific method upsets some physicists such as David Gross quite a bit, but more and more people seem to have no problem with this. Frankly I find this all bizarre, disturbing, and becoming ever more so all the time.

A while back when looking for theoretical physics related weblogs I ran across

The Search For A Theory of Myself: The Struggle Against String Theory

which at first sounded right up my alley. It turns out to be the weblog of a grad student at UCSB who is taking a course in string theory there from Polchinski. He’s working quite hard at doing well in the course, and seemed very worried about his final on March 15. After the final postings stopped, so I was kind of worried about what had happened to him. Yesterday he finally posted again. He got an 88 % and seems to be all right.

The news that next week’s “Science Times” will run an article by NYT reporter James Glanz in which several leading string theorists say that they are giving up on the idea is rapidly spreading throughout the particle theory community. Evidently Glanz recently went down to Princeton to interview Edward Witten, who took the opportunity to announce that he has changed his mind about whether string theory will ever be a “Theory of Everything”. When Glanz contacted other string theorists and read to them what Witten had said, almost all of them told him that they too had been having their doubts about the theory.

Glanz quotes Witten as follows:

“One night a few weeks ago I was sitting at my kitchen table trying to make sense of Douglas’s latest work on the KKLT proposal and all of a sudden it really hit me that this is a completely lost cause. If perturbative string theory has any relation to Planck scale physics, then KKLT or something like it should work and string theory is vacuous since it can never predict anything. If perturbative string theory isn’t useful then we really don’t have anything since we’ve never been able to come up with a non-perturbative version that makes sense. Twenty years of this is enough. It’s time to give up.”

When Glanz asked him what he intends to do now, Witten responded:

“I don’t really know. There are still promising ideas about using string theory to solve QCD, and I could keep working on those. Maybe I should take up something completely different, like biology. I’m starting to worry that John Horgan was right about the ‘End of Science’. Right now I just definitely need a long vacation.”

When Glanz read Witten’s statement over the phone to David Gross, Frederick W. Gluck Professor of Physics at UCSB and Director of the Fred Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, Gross thought for a moment and then told him “Yeah, despite my quote last year from Churchill, I’ve also been thinking of giving up. Not sure though how I’m going to break this to the two Freds.”

The news of Glanz’s article has had dramatic effects at many universities and research institutes. At MIT yesterday, Prof. Barton Zwiebach shocked students in his Physics 8.251 “String Theory for Undergraduates” class by announcing that he wasn’t going to collect the homework due that day and was canceling his lectures for the rest of the semester. He also asked Cambridge University Press to halt publication of his new undergraduate textbook called “A First Course in String Theory”, the release of which had been planned for next month.

Search committees at several institutions that hadn’t finished their hiring yet this season held new meetings to decide how to react to the news. A prominent theorist at a UC campus told me in an e-mail that “our chair had the phone in his hand and had already dialed the number of a string theory graduate student from Princeton we were going to offer a post-doc to. I ran into his office as soon as I heard the news and stopped him just in time. Last week we were sure that string theorists were the smartest guys around and considered only them for jobs, but now there’s no way we’re going to hire any more, ever!”.

At the Institute in Princeton this year’s “Summer Program for Graduate Students in String Theory” scheduled for July has been canceled, with one of its organizers remarking “what graduate student would now be crazy enough to show up for a program like this?” Next week’s conference on “The Status of M-theory” at the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics has also been canceled on very short notice. The director there, Michael Duff, commented “We had to do this because the status of M-theory is all too clear. It’s passed on! This theory is no more! It has ceased to be! It’s expired and gone to meet its maker! … This is an ex-theory!”