Mission Accomplished

Posted on February 18, 2009 by woit

A few years ago the asset value of string theory in the market-place of ideas started to take a tumble due to the increasingly obvious failure of the idea of unifying physics with a 10/11 dimensional string/M-theory. Since then a few string theorists and their supporters have decided to fight back with an effort to regain market-share by misleading the public about what has happened. Because the nature of this failure is sometimes summarized as “string theory makes no experimental predictions”, the tactic often used is to claim that “string theory DOES make predictions”, while neglecting to explain that this claim has nothing to do with string theory unification.

A favorite way to do this is to invoke recent attempts to use conjectural string/gauge dualities to provide an approximate calculational method for some strongly coupled quantum systems. There are active on-going research programs to try and see if such calculational methods are useful in the case of heavy-ion collisions and various condensed-matter systems. In the heavy-ion case, we believe we know the underlying theory (QCD), so any contact between such calculations and experiment is a test not of the theory, but of the calculational method. For the condensed matter systems, what is being tested is the combination of the strongly-coupled model and the calculational method. None of this has anything to do with testing the idea that string theory provides a fundamental unified theory.

The yearly AAAS meeting is the largest gathering where scientists present results to the press and try and draw attention to recent scientific advances. This year’s meeting was held over the past weekend and featured a program Quest for the Perfect Liquid: Connecting Heavy Ions, String Theory, and Cold Atoms. While the presentations were largely a serious attempt to explain this area of research to the public, the fact that this has nothing to do with string theory unification somehow doesn’t seem to have been mentioned, with the result one would expect. The program was reported on under the headline A first: String theory predicts an experimental result, with the story beginning:

One of the biggest criticisms of string theory is that its predictions can’t be tested experimentally–a requirement for any solid scientific idea.

That’s not true anymore.

Another report entitled A prediction from string theory? at Physics World starts off:

Skeptics find much to complain about in string theory, but perhaps their most stinging criticism has been its inability to be falsified by experiment. A few years ago, one string theorist even told me that a particle accelerator big enough to “see” a string would be so large that its opposite ends would be causally disconnected. So this is not a problem we’ll be solving any time soon.

Yet even if we’ll never see a string in the lab, it turns out that string theory does make a few predictions about how matter should behave at the quantum level…

The dramatic news that claims that string theory can’t be tested have been refuted was then spread widely by Digg, so much so that the Symmetry Magazine site featuring the story crashed. The discussion on Digg showed what got through to the public from the efforts of the scientists involved:

Without a testable hypothesis it was only a String MODEL. Now we truly have a String Theory.

Michio Kaku just had an orgasm.

Brian Greene’s next book will be titled “Told You So Bitches!”

The one string theorist involved in all this was Clifford Johnson, who gives a minute-by-minute description of his participation here. It ends by invoking the phrase made famous by the last US president:

Mission accomplished. (Hurrah!)

Update: There a better story on this at Ars Technica, which avoids the misleading “test of string theory” claim.

Update: Another story about this is Experimenting With String Theory?, where the author for some reason also missed the fact that this has nothing to do with unification, writing:

So there you have it: finally, a potential concrete way to experiment with the predictions of string theory. But I’ll let the expert say that:

“This is the first time string theory can help experiments,” Johnson said. “We haven’t proven string theory, but have found a place where string theory has been a modest guide and making testable predictions.”

Another string theorist has a long blog entry about this here, where the punch-line is:

And it is just manifestly wrong to say that the lab tests of the predictions of AdS/QCD or AdS/CMT have nothing to do with string theory’s being the unifying theory of gravity and other forces and matter, or a theory of everything, if you wish. They have everything to do with it.

Update: Chad Orzel has sensible things to say about this here, in the context of a more general debate about the role of science journalists. In the comment section Moshe Rozali’s comment I suspect reflects the feelings of most string theorists about this:

As for the specifics of your example, I would comment on it, but I decided to go and extract my own wisdom tooth instead. I think that would be much more fun.

Posted in This Week's Hype | 82 Comments

Too Many Topics

Posted on February 15, 2009 by woit

Last Friday at the KITP there was a celebration of Stanley Mandelstam’s 80th birthday, with talks available here, and some messages from other physicists here. Geoffrey Chew recalls how Berkeley hired Mandelstam away from Columbia, where no one was very interested in what he was doing, in 1958. The next year the same thing happened with Steven Weinberg…

Recently I’ve noticed two books on a narrow topic not of general interest, but perhaps of interest to readers of this blog: histories of US math departments. They are:

  • Recountings: Conversations with MIT Mathematicians, about MIT.
  • Mathematics at Berkeley, about Berkeley.

    • Perhaps of even more esoteric interest, later this year Princeton University Press will publish Mathematicians: An outer view of the inner world, a book of photographs of mathematicians by Mariana Cook. Some of the photographs are available at her web-site here.

    Via Ars Mathematica: Fulton’s Algebraic Curves is available for free online. It’s a good place to start if you’re looking for a challenging introduction to algebraic geometry at the (quite) advanced undergraduate level.

    Some wonderful expository pieces about areas of mathematics:

  • Ben Webster on higher categories and knot homology.
  • Vaughn Jones on operator algebras and TQFT.
  • Cliff Taubes on Seiberg-Witten Floer homology, in a review of the recent book by Kronheimer and Mrowka.

    • The AMS Notices has an article about the current state of every mathematician’s favorite tool: TeX.

    Les Houches this year will have a summer school devoted to lattice gauge theory.

    For the latest on the question of whether the Tevatron will manage to see the Higgs or rule it out, see excellent postings by Tommaso Dorigo here and here. The bottom line is that by the time the LHC has enough data to start saying something about the Higgs, the Tevatron experiments will have over 10fb-1 of data to analyze, which may, if improvements in their analysis work out, give them a two-thirds chance of seeing the Higgs at 2 sigma level over the entire expected mass range, or a 50/50 chance of seeing it at 3 sigma level over a large range, including a small range just above the 114Gev LEP limit. The Tevatron may remain very competitive with the LHC for some signals far longer than people have been expecting. And, at least for the next 18 months, the US stimulus legislation may make Fermilab better funded than CERN for a change…

    I fear I’ve been remiss about not reporting on the IHES Grothendieck conference that I attended a couple days of when I was in Paris last month. Luckily, there’s a new blog here with a report.

    Protests and strikes in France over Sarkozy’s attacks on the French scientific research system continue, see an English language report here. Some people may have misunderstood my previous mention of this. While it’s not a topic I’m well-informed about, Sarkozy’s argument in favor of moving to something supposedly more American, featuring a market-based, no central government regulation ideology has an obvious problem if you’ve been reading the newspapers.

    Update: Video of the IHES Grothendieck talks is available here.

    Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments

    The Landscape for Undergraduates

    Posted on February 14, 2009 by woit

    I was in a local Barnes and Noble today, and noticed that there’s a new, second edition out of Barton Zwiebach’s A First Course in String Theory, which is the textbook for MIT’s course 8.251 String Theory for Undergraduates. The new addition includes a 10 page section explaining the details of how to compute numbers of vacua in the landscape based on flux compactifications, and arguing that this provides an explanation of the value of the cosmological constant. Landscape ideology has now made it to the undergraduate level.

    However, this only seems to be the case at MIT. A couple years ago I wrote about undergraduate string theory courses here, noting that there was an increasing trend to offer them, with MIT, Caltech, Stanford and Carnegie-Mellon providing examples. Recently this seems to have turned around, with Caltech, Stanford and Carnegie-Mellon not offering such a course this year. Somehow I don’t thinking adding coverage of the landscape to the textbook is going to encourage physics departments to teach this material to undergraduates.

    Posted in Multiverse Mania | 13 Comments

    Money For Everything

    Posted on February 12, 2009 by woit

    It now appears that the final US stimulus bill will include very large amounts of spending on scientific research. See here for a copy of the conference agreement. It has \$3 billion for the NSF, \$1.6 billion for the DOE office of science, and \$1 billion for NASA. These amounts are to be spent on top of the regular budgets (about \$6 billion for NSF, about \$1.6 billion for DOE office of science, as well as $400 million for ARPA-E, and \$17 billion for NASA). Basically, the government agencies responsible for funding math and physics research are receiving a one-time influx of money, of order half their annual budget, to be spent as quickly as possible. It will be very interesting to see what they do with it…

    Update: More here.

    Posted in Uncategorized | 17 Comments

    Chamonix For You

    Posted on February 6, 2009 by woit

    The 2009 Chamonix workshop on the commissioning of the LHC has just finished, ending with a message from the Director General, and the opening to the public of the web-site with slides from the meeting (bearing the warning “The Chamonix workshop was an open exchange of views and opinions. All the presentations made at the workshop are available here. The views expressed in individual presentations do not necessarily represent those of the CERN management.”)

    Here’s the press release and message from Rolf Heuer:

    Many issues were tackled in Chamonix this week, and important recommendations made. Under a proposal submitted to CERN management, we will have physics data in late 2009, and there is a strong recommendation to run the LHC through the winter and on to autumn 2010 until we have substantial quantities of data for the experiments. With this change to the schedule, our goal for the LHC’s first running period is an integrated luminosity of more than 200 pb-1 operating at 5 TeV per beam, sufficient for the first new physics measurements to be made. This, I believe, is the best possible scenario for the LHC and for particle physics.

    There were discussions in Chamonix between accelerator and detector physicists on several important issues. Agreements were reached whereby teams drawing from both communities will work together on important subjects, such as the detailed analysis of measurements made during testing of magnets on the surface.

    Since the incident, enormous progress has been made in developing techniques to detect any small anomaly. These will be used in order to get a complete picture of the resistance in the splices of all magnets installed in the machine. This will allow improved early warning of any additional suspicious splices during operation. The early warning systems will be in place and fully tested before restarting the LHC.

    Another important topic for the future was the radiation hardness of electronics installed in the service areas and the tunnel. For many years, particle detector electronics have been designed to cope with events such as loss of beam into the detectors. Until now, this has not been necessary for the accelerators, but will become so when the LHC moves to higher beam intensity and luminosity. Again, with detector and accelerator physicists working closely together, the experience gained from the detectors can be applied to the LHC itself.

    As the Bulletin reported on 30 January, opening up a magnet in which an anomalously high electrical resistance was measured made the reason for the anomaly immediately obvious – a splice had not been correctly made. This is one of two such splices that were identified in the five sectors tested, and as a result the magnet containing the second will also be removed from the tunnel for repair. Since resistance tests can only be conducted in cold magnets, three sectors remain to be tested: sector 3-4 where the original incident occurred and the sectors on either side. Within sector 3-4, the 53 magnets that are being replaced in the tunnel will all be tested before cool down, and the sectors either side will be cooled down early enough to intervene if necessary with no impact on the schedule. This leaves around 100 dipole magnets that we’ll not be able to test until September and a correspondingly small chance that we may find further bad splices that will need to be repaired before operation.

    The Chamonix workshop involved a lot of work by many people. Much progress has been made, and the management now has all it needs to make an informed decision next Monday on LHC restart. I’d like to thank all those involved, and I will be writing to you again early next week to let you know our decision.

    Looking at a few of the slides, it seems that the schedule for work this year has slipped, with the current plan that the machine will be cold in August, checkout in September, with powering tests in Sector 34 taking place in parallel with the checkout, which will end the third week of September. Beam commissioning will not be able to start until then, and the assumption has been that it would take two months to commission the beam and begin collisions for physics. If first collisions are not until late November, it’s clear why they want to run over the winter. The main consideration evidently is cost, they will have to come up with 8 Million Euros more for more expensive power.

    This assumes not all sectors are warmed up. Warming them all up to install the quench protection they would like would add another 5 weeks to the schedule.

    Update: CERN has a press release today confirming the new schedule:

    The new schedule foresees first beams in the LHC at the end of September this year, with collisions following in late October. A short technical stop has also been foreseen over the Christmas period. The LHC will then run through to autumn next year, ensuring that the experiments have adequate data to carry out their first new physics analyses and have results to announce in 2010. The new schedule also permits the possible collisions of lead ions in 2010.

    The decision was made to go ahead while installing additional relief valves in the four sectors that have been warmed up, leaving installation in the four remaining sectors for next year.

    Update: There was a talk today at CERN by Lyn Evans on LHC status and future plans. The current plan for upgrading the LHC luminosity involves a “Phase I” in 2013 that would double the luminosity, and an upgrade of the accelerator complex that would be completed in 2017 and allow further luminosity increases.

    Posted in Experimental HEP News | 7 Comments

    What is String Theory?

    Posted on February 3, 2009 by woit

    Yesterday Joe Polchinski gave a lunch-time talk at the KITP on the topic of What is String Theory? No answer to the question, but he provided an outline of three topics being discussed at the current KITP workshop program that have something to do with it.

  • String field theory: he wrote down the Witten open-string action and advertised that as the best candidate for a definition of string theory that could go on a t-shirt. He noted some of the problems with this, especially how to understand closed strings, which are somehow “emergent”, “hidden in the measure” on string field space, which one doesn’t really understand.
  • The Berkovits pure spinor formalism for quantizing the superstring: if you want a consistent theory, you need supersymmetry, and Polchinski explained that the quantization of both supergravity and the superstring are ferociously complicated subjects. He hopes that the Berkovits formalism will provide a more lucid (perturbative) quantization of the superstring, one allowing a proof of finiteness at higher loops. This topic doesn’t really address the “what is string theory?” question, since it is supposed to be equivalent to other ways of quantizing the superstring, and only valid perturbatively.
  • AdS/CFT and integrability: here there’s an answer to the “what is string theory?” question, but it’s in some ways a disappointing one for the idea of a single string theory that unifies everything and goes beyond QFT. If you believe the full gauge/string duality speculative framework, there are lots of string theories, each of which is defined by fiat to be a certain QFT. If this is right, perturbative string theory is just a tool useful in the study of some strongly-coupled QFTs, and non-perturbative string theory isn’t really a subject distinct from QFT. If you want to unify physics starting from thinking about the SM, at short distances you have a weakly-coupled QFT, with no role for string theory. And, in this picture, there are lots of string theories…

    • At the end, someone asked about the LHC and supersymmetry, Polchinski responded that string theory didn’t require LHC-scale supersymmetry, but if supersymmetry was discovered at the LHC then there would be a “sociological” effect encouraging to string theorists. I also noticed recently that Polchinski has a web-page On some criticisms of string theory.

    In his discussion of the pure spinor formalism, he noted that supersymmetry doesn’t seem to “resonate” with mathematicians, but that pure spinors are more something they recognize. This is certainly true, with supersymmetry something frustratingly close to some standard mathematical constructions, but quite different in other ways. Pure spinors occur naturally when one tries to construct spinors geometrically. Projectively, the space of pure spinors is SO(2n)/U(n), a space which has some quite beautiful properties. In the Borel-Weil geometric construction of representations, spinors are holomorphic sections of a line bundle over this space (for details of this, see the chapter on spinors in Loop Groups, the book by Pressley and Segal).

    For the superstring, one is interested in the case of n=5, and a certain sigma model with target space the space of pure spinors. There’s a more general class of sigma models of which this is a special case, and for more about some of the interesting connections of this to other subjects, see the recent KITP talks by Nekrasov and Frenkel. The Frenkel talk is especially interesting, since it involves several other quite beautiful related ideas. He describes one motivation for studying some of these sigma models that comes from geometric Langlands. While he was at Santa Barbara, Frenkel also gave two nice survey talks about geometric Langlands, see here.

    Update: Clifford Johnson explains here that not only do we not know what string theory is, but we can’t even say anything useful about what it isn’t, other than “it is not a theory of strings”. The problem with this situation, according to him is:

    people who don’t know what they’re talking about, and sometimes with an axe to grind, shouting loudly (and sometimes deliberately misleadingly) about it.

    Update: More thoughts from Clifford on the question of how to deal with string theory critics.

    Posted in Uncategorized | 49 Comments

    No Chamonix For You

    Posted on January 30, 2009 by woit

    In the last posting I linked to the web-site for next week’s LHC Performance workshop at Chamonix, where the state of efforts to recover from last September’s accident and plans for this year will be discussed. As in many previous cases, linking to an authoritative information source about what is going on at the LHC had the effect of it being quickly shut off to the public. I guess CERN really is serious about the idea that information about problems at the LHC is now only supposed to come from the DG’s office.

    So, from now on, I’m sorry to have to do this, but I won’t be linking to any such information sources that people point me to or that I run across. Instead, I’ll try to continue to post here authoritative information that comes my way, without indicating its source. Today, I’ll just note that I’ve heard from an authoritative source about the current informed guesses for when the LHC will be able to start doing physics. The current hope is for first usable collisions at 5 TeV (per beam) in October, with two months for a physics run at that energy before winter shutdown. Peak luminosity would be a few times 1031, integrated luminosity a few tens of pb-1.

    Update: CERN does seem to be making an effort to put out more information about the status of the LHC through their press office. Yesterday there was this update posted as “breaking news”, not waiting for the next issue of the weekly bulletin. The news in the update is uniformly good, telling us about how it has been “a good week”. What will be interesting to see in the future is whether less encouraging news makes it out to the public…

    Update: The web-page denying access to the Chamonix slides has been changed, it now reads:

    This site is temporarily password protected during the duration of the LHC workshop but will be re-opened immediately after the workshop.

    I guess that CERN still wants the news of whatever is presented at Chamonix to first come from their press office, but realizes that making available the detailed technical discussion behind this news is a good idea.

    Posted in Experimental HEP News | 21 Comments

    CERN: The View From Inside

    Posted on January 27, 2009 by woit

    Tommaso Dorigo has a new post up on Information control from CERN, where he discusses a Physics World interview by Matthew Chalmers of the head of communications at CERN, James Gillies.

    Gillies addresses what CERN sees as a problem: information coming out first in blogs rather than from the CERN director through official press releases. One aspect of this is the release of information about experimental results, and Tommaso discusses this question on his blog. Unfortunately, I think CERN and the LHC are still quite a ways away from having any experimental results that need to be protected. For the rest of this year, the LHC will be getting a lot of attention from high energy physicists, but what they will be interested in is the question of how the machine is progressing towards the goal of colliding beams at a useful luminosity. For most of the history of the project, CERN’s information policy was remarkably open: the slides from presentations made before the technical committees guiding the project were posted in locations that, while not advertised, were easy to find and did not require a password to access. Anyone with a serious interest could follow along and get first-hand technically accurate information about what was happening.

    Things changed rather dramatically after the accident last September 19th. Publicly accessible logbooks were edited to remove information, and public access to the websites of the technical committees was shut off:

    Who ordered links to photos and some presentations to be password protected after they appeared on blogs?

    [Aymar] wanted the CERN community to receive the news from him before it was made more widely available, so access to slides was temporarily restricted. People just hadn’t realized how much in the spotlight we are now.

    Gillies doesn’t address the issue of why these websites have now been restricted, a policy that appears to be permanent and go beyond a “temporary” restriction. According to Chalmers:

    CERN’s new director general [Rolf-Dieter Heuer] told staff on 12 January, that from now on people would hear about events first from him, not the press.

    This kind of tight control of information about what is happening at the LHC seems to me to be a misguided policy. The best and most timely source of information for CERN staff about the LHC should be first-hand information from the engineers and physicists working on the project, not whatever has made its way up the chain of command and then been laundered for public consumption. Shutting off access by physicists to accurate technical information and making the DG the only source of news about what has happened at the LHC is likely to just encourage unchecked rumor.

    Next week at Chamonix there will be an LHC Performance Workshop, and the slides are supposed to be publicly available here as the presenters post them over the next few days. These slides should give an accurate picture of where the project is and what a realistic proposed schedule for the rest of the year would look like. According to the Physics World interview, CERN’s plan is that “a realistic schedule will be announced” after the Chamonix workshop. Of course, by then, many people will have already have a good idea about what this schedule will be, that is, if the slides are not password-protected….

    Posted in Experimental HEP News | 8 Comments

    Lots of Unrelated Topics

    Posted on January 27, 2009 by woit

    I’m trying to finish writing up something about equivariant cohomology for the BRST project, slowed down by realizing there was something interesting about this that I didn’t understand. Soon that should be sorted out….

    In the meantime, here are various other things that might be of interest:

    The El Naschie/Elsevier saga continues, latest here.

    There’s a new book out from Cambridge University Press entitled On Space and Time, which has chapters from different authors stretching from solid physics to theology, with lots of quantum gravity in between. The editor, Shahn Majid, is blogging here, on a site run by Cambridge.

    Evidence for time travel has appeared in the British newspaper The Independent, which recently published an editorial by Mike Duff about string theory that appears to have come through a worm-hole connected to about 13 years ago.

    There really are good reasons that theorists who insist on devoting their lives to absurdly speculative models of extra dimensions which have nothing to recommend them other than not being obviously inconsistent should stop promoting these things in the press. One of these reasons is that doing this tends to lead to articles like this one on Fox News.

    British theorists at Durham are getting some new funding.

    American scientists are lobbying for their piece of the stimulus pie that should be cooked and ready to serve within the next couple weeks. An editorial by David Gross and Eric Kandel is here, a letter from 49 Nobelists here. The latest news indicates that the NSF and DOE are still in line for massive short-term budget increases.

    In France, President Sarkozy argued in a speech that French scientific research needs to be reformed, with the economic crisis that originated in the U.S. a good opportunity for the French to modernize and do things more the way they are done over here. Many French scientists are reacting with “shame and anger”, and planning on joining a general one-day strike this Thursday. I know little about the problems and virtues of the French research system, but perhaps scientists there should tell Sarkozy it’s a deal if he is willing to put up the sorts of cash the current U.S. administration is discussing.

    There have been a few physics arXiv preprints that seemed worth a mention recently, although all of them have been discussed extensively by Lubos, who seems to be saner these days:

  • Smolin and Ellis argue here that if you take the landscape seriously you end up predicting a negative cosmological constant, falsifying the idea. This is along the same lines as other such wrong predictions (e.g. proton decay), and since their existence hasn’t slowed down the spread of landscape ideology, I doubt one more will do the trick.
  • Several authors here find 10668 as a lower bound when calculating the number of possible vacua in a certain class that might give the standard model at low energies. This is high enough to make getting any predictions (other than the wrong ones…) impossible, but along the same lines as previous estimates which didn’t slow down the landscapeologists. No reason to think this one will either.
  • Petr Horava has an interesting proposal for a new candidate sort of quantum gravity here, one with Lorentz breaking at short distances. I don’t know if this is any more testable than other such proposals. Even though his proposal has absolutely nothing to do with string theory, it’s rather amusing that the author finds it necessary to somehow invoke string theory:

    Given this richness of string theory, it might even be logical to adopt the perspective in which string theory is not a candidate for a unique theory of the universe, but represents instead a natural extension and logical completion of quantum field theory. In this picture, string theory would be viewed – just as quantum field theory – as a powerful technological framework, and not as a single theory.
    If string theory is such an apparently vast structure, it seems natural to ask whether quantum gravitational phenomena in 3 + 1 spacetime dimensions can be studied in a self-contained manner in a “smaller” framework. A useful example of such a phenomenon is given by Yang-Mills gauge theories in 3 + 1 dimensions. While string theory is clearly a powerful technique for studying properties of Yang-Mills theories, their embedding into string theory is not required for their completeness: In 3 + 1 dimensions, they are UV complete in the framework of quantum field theory.
    In analogy with Yang-Mills, we are motivated to look for a “small” theory of quantum gravity in 3+1 dimensions, decoupled from strings.

    So, the idea seems to be that now string theory is a “logical completion” of qft, although not needed to describe any of the forces we know about.

    • For two new survey talks at UCSB by Edward Frenkel about geometric Langlands, see here. He also gave an interesting talk there as part of the KITP string theory program, on recent work (summarized here) that has relations to both geometric Langlands and to the pure spinor formalism.

    Update: One more. The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article on SCOAP3, the plan to make the entire high physics literature open access by coming up with $14 million/year to pay off the publishers. I don’t really see this. The idea seems to be that the money is needed to get peer review, and the size of the literature is about 10,000 papers/year. So, cutting out the publishers, referees could be paid $1,400/paper to do peer review. This might dramatically increase the quality of refereeing, or at least the take-home pay of many physicists. Some quotes:

    But Mr. Mele says journals still play a crucial role in the professional life of scientists, even though readership has declined. “We do not buy journals to read them, we buy journals to support them,” he said. “They do something crucial, which is peer review.”

    Without journals, he asks, how would colleges evaluate the work of scientists to know whom to hire or whom to promote? And how would other scientists know which of the thousands of preprints contain the most important findings?

    “What we are really paying for here is for a service of peer review,” he said.

    but here’s the problem, at least in the U.S….

    The librarians praised the goals of the project, but some asked whether it was sustainable. After all, if the journals make their contents free online, why should college libraries use their shrinking resources to pay for them?

    Some librarians at public institutions say they cannot participate even if they want to. “Most states require that public funds allocated for purchasing have to be used to actually purchase something,” said Dennis Dillon, associate director for research services at the University of Texas at Austin. That is certainly the case in Texas, he said. “They can’t be used to pay for something that everyone already has for free.”

    Update: For more LHC-related hysteria generated by publicity-hungry academics, see this. It originates with a group at the Institute for the Future of Humanity, last seen promoting the idea that we live in a simulation.

    Posted in Uncategorized | 14 Comments

    The Worst Jobs in Science: Theoretical Physicist

    Posted on January 19, 2009 by woit

    After the recent news that being a mathematician is the best job in the US, next month’s Popular Science magazine has come out with a list of the worst jobs, not overall, but in the sciences. “Theoretical Physicist” makes the list, right in between “Monkey-Sex Observer” and “Vermin Handler”. Here’s the text about this:

    For much of the past century, physics was an exciting, wide-ranging exploration. But to be a theoretical physicist today, you pretty much have to stake your career on one incredibly popular but pretty much unprovable notion: string theory. Since the idea that the universe is composed of small vibrating “strings” gained a following in the 1970s, the theory, which in some forms posits 10 dimensions and seeks a unifying “supersymmetry,” has captured the theoretical-physics community in the U.S. The easiest way to earn an appointment is to dive head-first into a branch of string theory, which dominates the top programs at Princeton, MIT and other influential institutions. The problem is, we simply have no idea if we’re on the right track, because the theory isn’t verifiable.

    Lee Smolin, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, who investigates quantum gravity and string theory, believes that the physics monoculture is stifling. “Science has become too risk-averse, and its progress is being hurt as a result,” he says. When CERN’s Large Hadron Collider restarts later this year, however, it could end the waiting, helping to confirm parts of string theory — or dash it altogether. If supersymmetric particles called sparticles are bashed into existence: yay! But if the W boson particle does not react as hoped, that damages a central pillar of the theory. Across the U.S., whole careers are boiling down to the chance that a big box comes up with something.

    It’s true that, for string theorists, a lot is hanging on the question of whether sparticles are found at the LHC. If none are seen, I suspect that will pretty conclusively finish off in most theorist’s minds the idea that string theory unification can be connected in any way with observations. The business about string theory and W-bosons is utter nonsense, presumably coming from this.

    As mentioned here repeatedly, claims that hiring in particle theory is dominated by string theory are behind the times. String theorists are now yesterday’s fad, with terrible job prospects if they don’t have a permanent position. Today’s fads are LHC phenomenology and cosmology (news from the rumor mill about two new jobs is that UCSB wants “candidates with interests in phenomenological aspects of particle physics and related areas of astrophysics and cosmology”, Rutgers wants “a focus on LHC physics, broadly conceived.”) String theory is on its way out in American universities it seems, but the long-standing pattern of fad-driven hiring isn’t. Which is one thing that makes the idea of trying for a career in theoretical physics these days about as appealing to many smart young people as the idea of going into the vermin handling business…

    Posted in Uncategorized | 54 Comments