US HEP Budget News

Posted on May 14, 2018 by woit

There’s a HEPAP meeting today, with news about the US HEP budget situation, presentations here. Since the 2016 election physicists have been worried about how the Republican Congress and Trump administration will treat scientific research in general and physics research in particular. For instance, I see that FQXI has just announced the winners of its latest essay contest, with the second place essay by Alyssa Ney (on “The Politics of Fundamentality“) claiming that “it is easy to point to trends in allocation of research funding away from basic research in the sciences”, noting:

Another indication of the present threat to physics funding is U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2018 proposed budget. This includes a decrease of 18.4% to the Department of Energy’s high energy physics program and a cut of 19.1% to nuclear physics. The budget slashes funding of basic science at the National Science Foundation (NSF) by 13%. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/what-s-trump-s-2018-budget-request-science

The actual enacted budget numbers for DOE HEP physics are:
FY2015 \$766 million
FY2016 \$795 million
FY2017 \$825 million
FY2018 \$908 million

It’s true that the Trump administration produced a FY2018 budget calling for a cut to \$627.7 million for DOE HEP, but that was no more to be taken seriously than anything else Trump says, and the Republican Congress instead passed a huge (10.1%) increase, to \$908 million. For FY2019 the Trump administration is calling for a DOE HEP budget cut to \$770 million (15.2% cut), but, again, no one should be taking that seriously. It’s still early in the budget process, but the House subcommittee dealing with the FY2019 DOE budget has responded to the request for a cut of 13.9% to DOE Office of Science by instead passing a 5.4% increase (it’s not yet known what the HEP part of that will be). For latest budget numbers, see here.

Over at the NSF, numbers for the Physics directorate for FY2017 are not yet available, but the enacted budget numbers for the NSF as a whole are:

FY2015 \$7,344 million
FY2016 \$7,494 million
FY2017 \$7,472 million
FY2018 \$7,767 million

The Trump administration requested a cut of 11% to NSF for FY2018, instead got a 3.9% increase. They are requesting a 3.8% cut for FY2019, the House subcommittee dealing with this instead has passed a 5.2% increase (to \$8,175 billion).

It should be uncontroversial to point out that the US budget process has been seriously broken for a while. FY 2018 started on Oct. 1, 2017. DOE HEP only recently got the \$908 million number for its budget and now is scrambling as it is “faced with a year’s worth of funding actions in around 4 months”. They’ve been spending their time preparing details of the Trump administration fantasy of how to cut 13.9% out of the FY2019 budget, instead of making rational plans for the future about how to spend the actual budget numbers they will get (OK, maybe they’re dealing with reality in secret…).

In order to avoid any misunderstanding about what I think about the current situation, my take on it is:

  • Until the 2016 election, US scientific research spending was relatively flat, due to the Obama administration’s attempt to reduce deficit spending and respond to Republican outrage at the budget deficit and demands for reductions in non-defense federal spending. We’re now starting to see large increases in research spending, as it becomes clear that whatever the current Republican party cares about, it’s not the deficit or the level of federal spending.
  • Physicists outraged at the Trump administration proposed research cuts need to realize that this, like everything else, is just theater, and understand that the current Republican party has just as little interest in cutting physics research as it ever had in reducing the deficit. Take a look at reality and stop complaining about your research funding. Fueled by huge increases in inequality in US society, truly awful things are happening in this country, but they’re not happening to you, quite the opposite. Stop whining about your science not getting enough respect and funding, and instead try and figure out what can be done to restore a healthy democracy and a more equal society.

Informed comments about HEP funding welcome, those who want to rant about politics are not. Sorry, it’s my blog, so I get to explain my point of view, even though I don’t want to engage here with the diseased post-truth reality TV show politics today’s Republican party has grotesquely exploited to come to power.

Posted in Uncategorized | 15 Comments

This Week’s (Stale) Hype

Posted on May 2, 2018 by woit

The usual hype machine is at work this week, with the usual mechanism:

Normally I try to defend the journalists involved, feeling that the most irresponsible behavior is coming from the scientists themselves. In this case, Hertog has a lot to answer for, but it’s not Hawking’s fault since he’s dead. Any semi-competent journalist should have realized that this is not news: the same stories had already been written and published a month ago, and then conclusively debunked in many places (see here, here and here for instance).

This is rather depressing, making one feel that there’s no way to fight this kind of bad science, in the face of determined efforts to promote fake physics to the public. It’s one thing for journalists to be misled by a new variant on an old debunked story, but that they’re getting misled again by exactly the same story is a new development.

Update: More hype from Hertog, this time from Scientific American, which tells us that his work is based on

string theory, one of the most dominant emerging paradigms in 21st-century physics.

Hertog is asked about the undeniable fact that his work predicts nothing:

How do you counter critics of string theory, who argue it cannot be tested?

I don’t agree with this statement; it is not my intuition that string theory can’t be tested. We may already have observations based on studies of the universe’s large-scale structure and evolution that are telling us something about the nature of quantum gravity. Of course, further theoretical work will be needed to arrive at a mathematically rigorous, fully predictive framework for cosmology.

So, your paper’s key predictions depend on the reality and nature of inflation. Will that be testable?

There are the obvious observables, yes. Just as it amplified tiny quantum fluctuations in the early universe, inflation should have amplified gravitational waves in the early universe, too. Gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime, first predicted by Einstein, that were finally observed just a few years ago—but the ones we have observed come from black holes and other stellar remnants in neighboring galaxies, not from the primordial universe. These amplified gravitational waves would leave their imprint on the polarization of the cosmic microwave background. Astronomers are actively trying to detect this polarization pattern.

So you are optimistic they will succeed?

Well, our theory certainly predicts that primordial gravitational waves should be there at some level.

As Sabine Hossenfelder points out, saying “at some level”, without even an order of magnitude estimate, is not a prediction at all. In addition, this non-prediction is exactly the same non-prediction of the theory (eternal inflation) that Hertog is claiming his work challenges.

Posted in Fake Physics, Multiverse Mania | 10 Comments

Physics News

Posted on April 30, 2018 by woit

Various physics-related news:

  • The LHC is back in business doing physics, with intensity ramp-up for the 2018 run ongoing. Today the machine is colliding 1551 bunches of protons, ultimate goal is to get to 2556 bunches. They are at least a week ahead of the planned schedule, which would have only reached 1200 bunches next week.
  • There’s a conference going on at the KITP this week, discussing the latest state of dark matter theory and experiment. By the way, see here for how prominent theorists communicate these days instead of using email…
  • At the Atlantic and Knowable Magazine, Tom Siegfried provides yet more multiverse coverage. Seems that he’s at work on a multiverse book.
  • At the Edge, Sabine Hossenfelder has an on-target analysis of the situation in fundamental theoretical physics. The problems she points to are ones that motivated books by Lee Smolin and myself back in 2006. Things haven’t improved since then and I hope she’ll have better luck generating concern for these issues than we did.
  • At Alta, Jennifer Ouellette has a fascinating account of the maneuverings for credit among the many observers of the neutron star merger last year. It sounds like some of those involved are suffering from the same disease as Brian Keating: not reality-based conviction that they’re in the running for a Nobel Prize.
  • Director Claire Denis is now at work on a sci-fi movie entitled High Life that sounds more promising than the last black hole movie. She’s getting scientific advice from Aurelien Barrau and comments:

    If there are theories about me, I’d rather not know. Astrophysics – now that’s fascinating. String theory, worm holes, the expanding universe, the Big Bang versus the Big Bounce – those are the kind of theories that make you feel like living and understanding the mystery of the world. Film theory is just a pain in the ass.


Update: One more. David Gross will be back in Princeton this week, giving talks on gravity and particle physics. I may head down Thursday to revisit scenes of my youth.

Update: I just watched some of the KITP dark matter “debates”, see here. Highly recommended if you want to hear informative exchanges between experts on the subject, see especially the Dan Hooper talk (and the MOND/dark matter debate here).

Update: For machine learning experts who want to try their hand at an HEP data analysis problem, a Kaggle competition to build a track reconstruction algorithm opened yesterday. For details, see here and here.


Update: Gross’s Princeton talk on the “Future of Particle Physics” was not much different than this one from a couple years ago (with the enthusiasm for supersymmetry deleted). I was thinking of writing something about this, comparing it to similar talks from way back when (see for instance here). Probably better though to wait for a better opportunity to write something substantive about where the path followed by Gross and others over the years has ended up.


Update: Video of the David Gross Princeton talk on the Future of Particle Physics is available here.

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

Losing the Nobel Prize

Posted on April 19, 2018 by woit

There’s a fascinating new book just now appearing in book stores, Losing the Nobel Prize, by astronomer Brian Keating. An excerpt from the book is available at Nautilus, with the title How My Nobel Dream Bit the Dust. Some reviews that are out are here, here, here and here. Sabine Hossenfelder is not too happy with the book (response from Keating here).

Much of the book is an excellent explanation, from the beginning, of a significant part of the current state of cosmology. It does a good job of even-handedly explaining the controversy over the scientific status of inflation and the multiverse, giving Paul Steinhardt’s views equal billing with those of multiverse enthusiasts like Guth and Linde. It’s written from the point of view not of a theorist, but of an observational astronomer, and thus explains well some of the details of the current state of the technology being used. Much of the book is about the BICEP telescope, operated in the hostile environment of the South Pole.

One of the strongest aspects of the book is that it is also the memoir of a life and a profession, giving a very personal take on what it’s like to get interested in astronomy as a kid, then grow up and pursue a career in the field. Keating’s book is very much in the tradition of Watson’s The Double Helix, giving a portrayal of himself and others that doesn’t leave out the very human aspects of ambition, competitiveness and jealousy.

Unlike the Watson book, which is about a great scientific achievement, the unusual aspect of Keating’s story is that what he was involved in was not a success, but the biggest fiasco in the history of his field. On March 17th, 2014, the New York Times reported on its front page that Space Ripples Reveal Inflation’s Smoking Gun, and this same story was reported by most media outlets. This was based on results from the BICEP2 telescope unveiled at a press conference at Harvard (press release First Direct Evidence of Cosmic Inflation). At the press conference, PI John Kovac claimed that the chance the results were a fluke was only one in 10 million.

I wrote several blog postings about the story as it evolved, you can find them here, here, here and here. The BICEP2 result was often portrayed as a definitive experimental vindication of the multiverse, which was one reason I was writing about it. By the later postings, I was covering the story of the collapse of the BICEP2 claims, as it became clear that what they had measured was a signal coming from dust in the galaxy, not from primordial gravitational waves.

Keating’s insider account of what happened makes clear that the true story is that the BICEP2 telescope, because of the way it was designed (sensitive to only one part of the sky at one frequency), was never capable of distinguishing primordial gravitational waves from dust. They were in hot competition with the Planck satellite collaboration, which did have the capabilities needed to distinguish the signal they were seeing from dust, and was generally assumed to be the experiment with the best chance of seeing primordial gravitational waves. BICEP2 could have released its data, making clear that it might be primordial gravitational waves or it might be dust, that Planck would need to weigh in to decide. This would have made a splash, but probably not a front-page one, and if the gravitational wave signal was real, Planck would have shared in the glory of identifying it.

Instead of behaving responsibly, the BICEP2 collaboration found arguments to convince themselves that the dust could not be a problem, arguments which included scraping data off a slide of a preliminary Planck result presented at a conference (while, it seems, misunderstanding the significance of the data in that slide). Keating gives a very defensive explanation of how this happened, claiming that he was well aware of the danger that the signal was just dust. About Planck, he writes

We desperately tried to work with the Planck team, while being careful not to tip them off as to what we’d found… The Planck team wouldn’t cooperate.

which I guess really means “we desperately tried to rip them off, but they weren’t that dumb.” While he had these concerns, in the end he decided to agree (as did the whole collaboration) with the tactic of writing a paper claiming dust wasn’t a problem and going public with an aggressive and heavily promoted discovery claim.

The cost/reward computation they were engaged in when they decided to go public with a problematic claim involved two possibilities:

  • Planck data would show the dust was not a problem. If this was the case, BICEP2 would be the people who found the primordial gravitational waves, Planck the losers who measured some boring dust.
  • Planck data would show that the signal was dust. This would be embarrassing, but, this is America, and all publicity is good publicity, right?

As far as I can tell, the BICEP2 scientists haven’t suffered much professionally from the fiasco. When David Spergel talked here at Columbia about the subject, he noted that this hadn’t stopped the PI, John Kovac, from getting tenure at Harvard. In the book, Keating mentions some “embarrassment and guilt”, but no negative professional consequences, instead explaining how a few months later Jim Simons came to him to offer to fund a next generation observational program (the Simons Observatory, of which he is now Director) to be built in Chile. The Nobel Foundation in 2015 was contacting him to request him to nominate candidates for 2016. Keating does write that he thinks the BICEP2 story shows that scientists should be given some formal training in ethical norms, but at the same time he makes clear that violating such norms sometimes provides significant rewards, with few penalties.

A major theme of the book is Keating’s obsession with the possibility of winning a Nobel Prize as well as long discussions of what’s wrong with the way Nobel Prizes are awarded and what he feels should be done about this. On some of these issues I agree with him. In particular, the Higgs discovery story makes clear the problem with awarding prizes only to individuals, not collaborations. You end up with a prize not for the most important experimental discoveries in physics, but for the most important discoveries made by experimental groups with a small enough list of high profile leaders.

Sabine Hossenfelder’s review was quite hostile about Keating’s complaints concerning how the Nobel Prize is operated, for reasons I didn’t understand until I read the book. It’s very hard to have much sympathy for Keating’s recounting of his many Nobel-related jealousies and resentments. In particular, even if there had been no dust, he was never really in the running for a piece of the BICEP2 prize nomination since he had been pushed out of a leadership role due to his involvement with a competing experiment. He still seems bitter about this and gives the impression that this is at the root of his complaints about the Nobel. One suspects that if there had been no dust and he had been given more prominence in BICEP2, after his trip to Stockholm he’d instead have written a book describing the Nobel Prize as the most well-designed and enlightened thing in the world. Instead of owning up to mistakes and writing a post-mortem about lessons learned and what to do about them, Keating’s choice to instead write a book blaming the Nobel Prize committee is a peculiar one.

Update: Keating has a Losing the Nobel Prize website, dedicated to promoting reform of the Nobel Prize along the lines suggested in his book.

Update: Not content with using notoriety achieved through incompetent and unethical scientific behavior to launch a bizarre and incoherent campaign against the Nobel Prize, Keating is taking to right-wing media outlets to attack the atheism of his fellow scientists, see here and here. I’m afraid that on the multiverse issue he has the stronger argument: multiverse proponents are making a huge mistake using that to go to war with religion.

Posted in Book Reviews | 39 Comments

Math News

Posted on April 12, 2018 by woit

Various mathematics-related news:


Update: This Friday and Saturday there will be a meeting in Cambridge on the topic of Ethics in Mathematics. Supposedly talks will be livestreamed on Youtube (perhaps here?).

Posted in Uncategorized | 20 Comments

Are We In the Swampland?

Posted on April 5, 2018 by woit

Way back in 2005, soon after the emergence of the “String Landscape” and the ensuing debate over whether this made string theory untestable pseudo-science, Cumrun Vafa in response started writing about the “Swampland”. In contrast to the “Landscape” of effective field theories that are low energy limits of string theory, the “Swampland” is the space of effective field theories that are not low energy limits of string theory. One motivation here is to be able to claim that string theory is predictive, since if you can show a theory is in the Swampland, then string theory predicts that theory doesn’t describe our world.

I wrote a couple blog postings about this back then, see here and here. The situation was rather comical, with Jacques Distler unintentionally making clear one problem with the whole idea. He was enthusiastic about it, and gave as one example the suggestion that one and two generation versions of the Standard Model were effective theories that could not be derived from string theory, but Volcker Braun immediately wrote in to tell him about such a derivation. At this time I started having my problems with the arXiv (and its moderator, Distler) about trackbacks, but that’s another story.

I haven’t paid much attention to the Swampland business since then, but noticed last night a new preprint with the title What if string theory has no de Sitter vacua?. The authors summarize their argument:

From this analysis we conclude that string theory has not made much progress on the problem of the cosmological constant during the last 15 years. There is a general agreement that the presence of dark energy should be an important clue to new physics. So far, string theory has not been up to the challenge. Or to be more precise, string theorists have not been up to the challenge.

The well-motivated introduction of the anthropic principle and the multiverse, was a big relief. The mathematical standards were lowered, and unconstrained model building could set in exploring a wild and free landscape of infinite possibilities. But beyond this suggestive connection between a possible multiverse and the rich mathematical structures of string theory not much solid results have been achieved. We reviewed some fraction of the mounting evidence that most, if not all of this landscape, is a swampland and we refer to [14,16,149] for similar lines of thought. We believe it makes more sense to listen to what string theory is trying to tell us, then to try to get out of the theory what one would like to have. In recent years, especially with the program of the Swampland [14, 150–152], there is luckily a growing community that embraces this idea. Perhaps this program really already made its first prediction: no measurable tensor modes in the CMB.

From what we have seen so far, we believe that the most sensible attitude is to accept there are no dS vacua at all because string theory conspires against dS vacua.

The suggestion here is basically that effective field theories on a deSitter background are in the Swampland, so can’t be derived from string theory. Since we seem to live in a deSitter space, the obvious conclusion to draw from this is that string theory is falsified: it can’t be the fundamental theory we are looking for. The authors discuss various unconvincing ways to try and avoid this conclusion.

By the way, the authors make the usual flawed argument that “the string theory landscape is just like the Standard Model”:

This kind of criticism is, however, misguided [10, 11]. One might compare with quantum field theory, where there is an infinity of fully consistent theories. Experiments are needed to pick the right one, and parameters must be fitted. When this is done the theory still has enormous predictive power, and no one would claim that the Standard Model is useless. One could argue in a similar way concerning the string landscape.

They also claim:

Paradoxically the critics of string theory and the proponents of the string landscape all agree on one thing: the landscape exists and we more or less know its properties.

At least this string theory critic has never agreed on this. I don’t believe “string theory” is a well-defined enough framework to answer the question of what all its ground states might be, or to properly characterize them. If you accept conjectures about the theory put forward by the landscapeologists, all evidence is now that the set of ground states they identify is so large as to make predictions impossible. The argument against string theory is that there are two possibilities here: either the theory is too poorly understood to tell us what its ground states are, or it does tell us something, and there are too many ground states to make useful predictions. Either possibility leads to the same conclusion that this is a failed idea.

It is rarely acknowledged just how serious the problem of a lack of a definition of “string theory” really is. To get some idea of how bad this problem is, one can consult one of the main references in this paper, a survey of the Landscape and the Swampland, based on Vafa’s 2017 TASI lectures (this paper also discusses the idea that deSitter is not in the Swampland). Claims are often made that AdS/CFT resolves the problem of defining a non-perturbative string theory of quantum gravity, but in the paper one finds:

We can now ask the question if using this AdS/CFT correspondence gives a non-perturbative definition of string theory. The motivation for this is that we can give a non-perturbative definition of SYM theory, for example by lattice regularization, whereas the holographic quantum gravity dual theory in AdS has no complete definition. The fact that the CFT side, i.e. the non-perturbative definition of SYM, gives in principle, a non-perturbative definition of the AdS side, is of course true. But this may be not very useful for deeper questions of quantum gravity. In fact the regime that the gravity side is weakly coupled is big corresponds to when the SYM is strongly coupled. In fact ‘t Hooft was trying to use string theory as a solution to the gauge theory question at strong coupling and not the other way around!…

we find ourself back at the beginning: we want to know fundamentally, what is quantum gravity? It should describe the quantum fluctuations of the metric. From a brief analysis of the standard Einstein-Hilbert action, we see that fluctuations of the metric at the Planck scale should become very violent, leading to potential changes in the topology of the spacetime [103, 104]. This leads naturally to the idea that quantum gravity should be equivalent to summing over all spacetime topologies and geometries:
$$Z_{QG} \sim \sum_{\text{top. and geo.}} e^{-S}$$
In general we have no idea about what description will lead to the correct sum over geometries and topologies. We only do know that there should be some mechanism that washes out the Planck scale fluctuations to produce a smooth space at lower energies. It seems that this description must come from some new fundamental principle, rather than from some duality such as mirror symmetry or AdS/CFT. This lack of knowledge of describing the gravity side quantum mechanically is “the missing corner” in our understanding of string theory.

In both this survey and the new paper, the tactic of trying to remove the Landscape to restore the predictivity of string theory hits up against the obvious problem: you’re left with no theory at all (the equation above, with an undefined sum and an undefined action, is the essence of no theory).

Posted in Swampland | 21 Comments

Raoul Bott: Collected Papers, volume 5

Posted on April 4, 2018 by woit

I noticed today that the final volume of Raoul Bott’s collected papers, which Loring Tu has been working on editing for quite a while, has finally appeared. The Springer webpage for the book is here, and its content is available at institutions with a Springer subscription here here. Many of the articles within can be accessed by other means, for example Tu’s article about Bott’s life and work is available here (updated version here) and the collection of articles by others about him is here.

After Bott’s death in 2005 I wrote a blog post here, and won’t repeat what’s there. Much of the material in this last volume is related to mathematics that grew out of Witten’s work on Chern-Simons theory. Unlike earlier volumes, which are devoted mostly to Bott’s important research papers (almost all of which are well-worth reading!), here many of the articles are of an expository nature, written for various lectures that Bott gave. The volume also includes various incidental material, such as speeches written for various events. Reading these gives a good idea of the wonderful human being that he was, it’s great to have them finally collected and available.

Posted in Book Reviews | 2 Comments

From Princeton to Prison

Posted on April 2, 2018 by woit

One of my graduate school classmates today sent around a link to a story about someone many of us remembered, Dragoljub Cetkovic. I somehow missed it last year when it appeared, it’s by Paul Halpern and entitled From Princeton to Prison: The ‘Boy Genius’ Who Was Recruited by John Wheeler and Sentenced by Trump’s Sister. As the story explains, Drago Cetkovic was a precocious young physicist, who John Wheeler brought to Princeton in 1974 (Barry Simon says it was actually Remo Ruffini, Wheeler’s postdoc, who had recruited him). Drago was studying quantum field theory, but wasn’t much interested in doing things like passing exams or working as a Research Assistant (the usual assignment for first-year grad students). This led to trouble and him getting kicked out of the graduate program.

By the time I arrived in Princeton, Drago was a mysterious fixture around the department, often to be found in the library. I recall a couple times asking him about what he was working on, receiving a dense and, to me, utterly incomprehensible explanation. There were rumors that he was somehow being supported on some grant or money from the IAS, but I have no idea how he made ends meet (Simon says he at times was sleeping on John Milnor’s floor). I left Princeton in 1984, and things evidently went downhill for him after that. As explained in the Halpern piece, as well as in this story from the time, in 1987 Drago for some reason left a cyanide-laced tea bag in a Princeton grocery store, and called in some sort of threat. He ended up being sentenced to five years in prison, I don’t know what happened to him after that.

Some of the stories about him refer to his supposedly threatening Barry Simon’s life (Simon was the faculty member in charge of graduate students who had to ask him to leave the program). I had heard this story, and one day when I was talking to Drago, asked him something like:

“Hey, I heard you threatened Barry Simon’s life, and that’s why he left Princeton to go to Caltech. Is that true?”

His answer:

“No, that is not true. And, if it were true, Caltech would not be far enough!”

I do wonder what happened to him, hope that he sooner or later ended up in a new and much better phase of life.

Update: My memory of those days is rather faulty, it quite likely was Nathan Myrhvold who asked him about Barry Simon. Nathan also recalls that he was working on spinor geometry. Maybe now I’d understand what he was trying to explain to me back then.

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Various News

Posted on March 28, 2018 by woit
  • Reader Chris W. pointed me to this story about what Cédric Villani, aka the Lady Gaga of French mathematics, has been up to. I see that the report of the “Mission Villani” is now available (in French or English) and it’s front page news at le Monde. There’s also an AI for Humanity website now up, and plans for all sorts of events tomorrow (video here) involving Villani and French president Macron.

    For insight into what this means, you’ll need an AI expert. I’m curious to hear if there’s anything really surprising in the report.

  • Neil Turok and collaborators have a new proposal for how to understand the Big Bang, with the headline version “The universe before the bang and the universe after the bang may be viewed as a universe/anti-universe pair, created from nothing.” There’s a short summary here, a longer paper with details here.

    The papers make various claims of predictions, I’m curious to hear from cosmologists what they think of these. Much of the papers does look like fairly straightforward QFT calculations, which I’ll try to look at more carefully when I find time.

  • The LHC is now in a machine checkout phase, ready for resurrection around Easter Sunday, with the start of beam commissioning for the 2018 run.

Update: A wealth of analyses of physics papers is available at this website and this preprint.

Posted in Uncategorized | 14 Comments

What is Real?

Posted on March 22, 2018 by woit

There’s a new popular book out this week about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, Adam Becker’s What is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics. Ever since my high school days, the topic of quantum mechanics and what it really means has been a source of deep fascination to me, and usually I’m a sucker for any book such as this one. It’s well-written and contains some stories I had never encountered before in the wealth of other things I’ve read over the years.

Unfortunately though, the author has decided to take a point of view on this topic that I think is quite problematic. To get an idea of the problem, here’s some of the promotional text for the book (yes, I know that this kind of text sometimes is exaggerated for effect):

A mishmash of solipsism and poor reasoning, [the] Copenhagen [interpretation] claims that questions about the fundamental nature of reality are meaningless. Albert Einstein and others were skeptical of Copenhagen when it was first developed. But buoyed by political expediency, personal attacks, and the research priorities of the military industrial complex, the Copenhagen interpretation has enjoyed undue acceptance for nearly a century.

The text then goes to describe Bohm, Everett and Bell as the “quantum rebels” trying to fight the good cause against Copenhagen.

Part of the problem with this good vs. evil story is that, as the book itself explains, it’s not at all clear what the “Copenhagen interpretation” actually is, other than a generic name for the point of view the generation of theorists such as Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, Wigner and von Neumann developed as they struggled to reconcile quantum and classical mechanics. They weren’t solipsists with poor reasoning skills, but trying to come to terms with the extremely non-trivial and difficult problem of how the classical physics formalism we use to describe observations emerges out of the more fundamental quantum mechanical formalism. They found a workable set of rules to describe what the theory implied for results of measurements (collapse of the state vector with probabilities given by the Born rule), and these rules are in every textbook. That there is a “measurement problem” is something that most everyone was aware of, with Schrodinger’s cat example making it clear. Typically, for the good reason that it’s complicated and they have other topics they need to cover, textbooks don’t go into this in any depth (other than often telling about the cat).

As usual these days, the alternative to Copenhagen being proposed is a simplistic version of Everett’s “Many Worlds”: the answer to the measurement problem is that the multiverse did it. The idea that one would also like the measurement apparatus to be described by quantum mechanics is taken to be a radical and daring insight. The Copenhagen papering over of the measurement problem by “collapse occurs, but we don’t know how” is replaced by “the wavefunction of the universe splits, but we don’t know how”. Becker pretty much ignores the problems with this “explanation”, other than mentioning that one needs to explain the resulting probability measure.

String theory, inflation and the cosmological multiverse are then brought in as supporting Many Worlds (e.g. that probability measure problem is just like the measure problem of multiverse cosmology). There’s the usual straw man argument that those unhappy with the multiverse explanation are just ignorant Popperazzi, unaware of the subtleties of the falsifiability criterion:

Ultimately, arguments against a multiverse purportedly based on falsifiability are really arguments based on ignorance and taste: some physicists are unaware of the history and philosophy of their own field and find multiverse theories unpalatable. But that does not mean that multiverse theories are unscientific.

For a much better version of the same story and much more serious popular treatment of the measurement problem, I recommend a relatively short book that is now over 20 years old, David Lindley’s Where does the Weirdness Go?. Lindley’s explanation of Copenhagen vs. Many Worlds is short and to the point:

The problem with Copenhagen is that it leaves measurement unexplained; how does a measurement select one outcome from many? Everett’s proposal keeps all outcomes alive, but this simply substitutes one problem for another: how does a measurement split apart parallel outcomes that were previously in intimate contact? In neither case is the physical mechanism of measurement accounted for; both employ sleight of hand at the crucial moment.

Lindley ends with a discussion of the importance of the notion of decoherence (pioneered by Dieter Zeh) for understanding how classical behavior emerges from quantum mechanics. For a more recent serious take on the issues involved, I’d recommend reading something by Wojciech Zurek, for instance this article, a version of which was published in Physics Today. Trying to figure out what “interpretation” Zurek subscribes to, I notice that he refers to an “existential interpretation” in some of his papers. I don’t really know what that means. Unlike most discussions of “interpretations”, Zurek seems to be getting at the real physical issues involved, so I think I’ll adopt his (whatever it means) as my chosen “interpretation”.

Update: For another take on much the same subject, out in the UK now is Philip Ball’s Beyond Weird. The US version will be out in the fall, and I think I’ll wait until then to take a look. In the meantime, Natalie Wolchover has a review at Nature.

Update: There’s a new review of What is Real? at Nature.

Update: Jim Holt points out that David Albert has a review of the Becker book in the latest New York Review of Books. I just read a print copy last night, presumably it should appear online soon here [Review now available here].

Update: Some comments from Adam Becker, the author of the book.

I won’t try to rebut everything Peter has said about my book—there are some things we simply disagree about—but I would like to clear up two statements he makes about the book that are possibly misleading:

Peter says that I claim the answer to the measurement problem is that “the multiverse did it.” But I don’t advocate for the many-worlds interpretation in my book. I merely lay it out as one of the reasonable available options for interpreting quantum mechanics (and I discuss some of its flaws as well). I do spend a fair bit of time talking about it, but that’s largely because my book takes a historical approach to the subject, and many-worlds has played a particularly important role in the history of quantum foundations. But there are other interpretations that have played similarly important roles, such as pilot-wave theory, and I spend a lot of time talking about those interpretations too. I am not a partisan of any particular interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Second, I don’t think it’s quite fair to say that I paint Bohr as a villain. I mention several times in my book that Bohr was rather unclear in his writing, and that sussing out his true views is dicey. But what matters more that Bohr’s actual views is what later generations of physicists generally took his views to be, and the way Bohr’s work was uncritically invoked as a response to reasonable questions about the foundations of quantum mechanics. It’s true that this subtlety is lost in the jacket flap copy, but that’s publishing for you.

Also, for what it’s worth, I do like talking about reality as it relates to quantum mechanics. But I suppose that’s hardly surprising, given that I just wrote a book on quantum foundations titled “What Is Real?”. I’d be happy to discuss all of this further over email if anyone is interested (though I’m pretty busy at the moment and it might take me some time to respond).

Posted in Book Reviews, Quantum Mechanics | 74 Comments