Another Journal Board Resigns

Last year about this time the entire editorial board of the Elsevier journal Topology resigned, this August it’s the turn of the Springer journal K-theory. The editors of this journal have all resigned, issuing the following statement:

Dear fellow mathematicians,

The Editorial Board of ‘K-Theory’ has resigned. A new journal titled ‘Journal of K-theory’ has been formed, with essentially the same Board of Editors. The members are A.Bak, P.Balmer, S.J.Bloch, G.E.Carlsson, A.Connes, E.Friedlander, M.Hopkins, B.Kahn, M.Karoubi, G.G.Kasparov, A.S.Merkurjev, A.Neeman, T.Porter, D.Quillen, J.Rosenberg, A.A.Suslin, G.Tang, B.Totaro, V.Voevodsky, C.Weibel, and Guoliang Yu.

The new journal is to be distributed by Cambridge University Press. The price is 380 British pounds, which is significantly less than half that of the old journal. Publication will begin in January 2008. We ask for your continued support, in particular at the current time. Your submissions are welcome and may be sent to any of the editors.

Board of Editors
Journal of K-theory

The subscription cost for the Springer journal had been $1590, $1325 for electronic-only access.

I notice that while the editorial board of Topology has resigned, that hasn’t caused Elsevier to stop publishing and selling the journal. While I’m sure that a recent paper copy of the journal that I saw did not carry the names of the editors that resigned, the online version of the journal appears to still carry the names of the old editors, giving no indication that they have resigned. As far as I know, Elsevier has not been able to recruit a replacement editorial board, but they are still selling the journal, at a yearly subscription price of $1665.

Update: Via the comment section, there’s the related news that

  • The Ecole Normale Superieure has chosen to no longer have Elsevier publish the journal Annales Scientifiques de l’École Normale Supérieure; the new publisher will be the non-commercial Société Mathématique de France. The Elsevier website states:

    As of 2008 no longer published by Elsevier, please contact publisher Societe Mathematique de France for details.

    and, unlike the case of Topology, they appear to be no longer trying to sell subscriptions to the journal. Presumably the ENS controlled rights to the journal and its name so was able to simply remove it from Elsevier, unlike the case of the former editorial board of Topology.

  • Bruce Bartlett reports that a wiki called MathSciJournalWiki has been set up, devoted to providing information about scholarly journals, especially in mathematics. Members of the math community are encouraged to contribute to it.
  • Update: It turns out that there may be more to this story. See in particular the comment posted here by Andrew Ranicki, who says that no papers submitted to K-theory since April 2006 have been forwarded to Springer, and that he and Wolfgang Lueck will be acting as interim managing editors for the Springer journal to sort out this situation.

    Posted in Uncategorized | 32 Comments

    Really Quick Links

    The Fermilab Steering Group is about to come out with its report. Their roadmap for Fermilab proposes that if the ILC project is delayed “Fermilab should pursue additional neutrino and flavor physics opportunities”, in particular with “Project X”, a high-intensity proton linac. One of their remaining tasks is to pick a name for Project X.

    In the category of magazine articles that I hear have just come out, but I don’t have a copy of, and aren’t available on-line, there’s

  • a cover story about the state of particle physics and string theory by yours truly in the latest Cosmos magazine
  • an article about Lisa Randall in Vogue.
  • The talks at the recent Imperial College event in honor of Abdus Salam are now on-line. This is the event Steven Weinberg boycotted, but Gerard ‘t Hooft was there to talk about Salam and the state of theoretical physics. His talk was entitled “The Grand View of Physics”, and is available here.

    Among the recent large “’07” conferences with talks available on-line are:

  • Loops ’07, mainly on LQG.
  • SUSY ’07, mainly on supersymmetry.
  • Lattice ’07, mainly on lattice gauge theory. Blogging from Georg von Hippel, including a description of today’s CreutzKronfeld celebrity deathmatch over rooted fermions.
  • Posted in Uncategorized | 23 Comments

    University Grants Program Subpanel Report

    The HEPAP University Grants Program Subpanel has just issued a report, concerning the “University Grants Program” in US HEP, that part of the DOE and NSF high energy physics budget which supports research based mainly at universities (as opposed to government laboratories such as Fermilab). Obviously this is the part of the HEP budget that is of most direct concern to university researchers, especially theorists, who receive most of their government funding this way (a small number of theorists are supported by national labs, not universities).

    On the experimental side much of the report is concerned with how to manage what will happen over the next few years as many researchers move from working on experiments in the US to the LHC, in particular how to deal with the higher travel and living expenses this will require. I’ll concentrate here on some comments on the extensive parts of the report that deal with theoretical particle physics.

    The report is surprisingly light on actual budget data, with few specific numbers about past budget trends, current budget levels or future budget plans. 2006 NSF university grant funding is given as $19 million for experimental particle physics, and $11.8 million for particle theory, astrophysics and cosmology. DOE university grant funding is described as about $110 million per year, with no breakdown between experiment and theory. The only historical data given is that this kind of DOE funding peaked in 1992, at a level of $150 million in current dollars, supporting a total of 1685 people back then, as opposed to 1495 in 2005. The main budgetary recommendation of the report is that 1 % of the total US HEP budget (about $8 million) be redirected to the university grants program as the SLAC and Fermilab collider programs wind down over the next few years.

    The recommendations for theoretical particle physics mostly concern funding for graduate students, calling for increasing the number of graduate students in particle theory, especially students working on calculations directly relevant to LHC experiments:

    Funding directed at university-based theoretical particle physics for the purpose of increasing the number of HEP-grant-supported graduate students should be given a higher priority in the overall HEP program. Support for students and postdocs doing calculations related to upcoming experiments is particularly urgent.

    Though the universities are strong in formal theory, there has been a decline over the years in conventional particle theory (phenomenology), for a variety of reasons. Phenomenology embraces a number of different areas, including data analysis, collider physics, computational physics, perturbative QCD, lattice field theory, model building, flavor physics, and neutrinos; it overlaps with such areas as strings, astrophysics, and cosmology. All these areas are important; but those directly connected with the LHC are increasingly critical. The entire LHC experimental program requires a strong theoretical component involving calculating Standard Model backgrounds and new physics processes, together with interpreting the experimental results and teasing out their implications. However, the number of theorists working on such topics in the United States, especially at the universities, is inadequate. For example, there are only a handful of people in the U.S. working on computational physics, such as event generators. Many more will be needed to fully utilize the physics potential of the LHC. It is important that much of this effort be centered at universities because (a) much of the experimental analysis will be done at
    universities, and (b) a university presence is needed to attract graduate students. A general concern is the overall decline in the agencies’ support of graduate students in theory, both formal theory and phenomenology. This decline makes it difficult to train a sufficient number of students. The problem is aggravated by increasing competition for the limited number of available teaching assistantships (TAs) from students in other subfields of physics.

    A key component of a strong Terascale physics program (at the LHC and the ILC) is a strong theoretical program involving the calculation of Standard Model backgrounds and new physics processes, together with interpretation of the experimental results. However, as pointed out in this report, the number of theorists working on such topics in the United States, especially at the universities, is inadequate. Addressing this vital need requires an additional level of effort.

    Overall, the field of high energy physics faces several critical manpower and infrastructure problems. Declining graduate student support affects the intake of new physicists and therefore the future of particle physics overall.

    The report gives no actual numbers (which, presumably are available, since the DOE and NSF should have counts of how many students they support each year), but, based on responses from a survey of university grant PIs, it says that the number of grant-funded RAs for HEP grad students has been decreasing, with, especially for theorists, student support having to come from TAs:

    The overwhelming response stressed that the level of (NSF and DOE) grant support for RAs for graduate students is insufficient and has indeed been declining over the last decade. At the same time, respondents noted that the cost of supporting a graduate student on a grant has increased, especially because of stricter university requirements regarding tuition remission and fringe benefits.

    As a result, particle physics groups routinely rely on other sources of funds for all or part of their graduate student support. One major resource is TA positions for particle physics students, addressed in more detail below. Some respondents noted that their universities have limited fellowship support for some students. A handful also mentioned seeking outside support from other federal agencies. Many said that they had been forced to turn away qualified students due to a lack of grant support. Some also indicated that students had turned down the chance to join a particle physics research group because other departmental areas could promise steadier RA support, rather than a mixture of TA and RA support…

    Survey respondents brought up several difficulties caused by this reliance on TA support. First, spending time as a TA slows senior students’ research progress (increasing their time to graduation) and hampers experimental students’ ability to travel to particle physics labs. Second, TA support is also currently a declining resource for particle physics at many institutions, because university administrations are providing less overall TA money to physics departments, departments are reducing the number of semesters any student may spend as a TA, or other physics subfields are requesting more TA slots. Third, if a particular research group (usually particle physics theory) makes unusually large demands on the available TA slots, this creates friction and resentment within the department as a whole.

    The report has no mention at all of what the desirable level of particle theory Ph.D.s might be from a larger perspective. There is zero discussion of the relationship between how many such Ph.Ds are produced, and how many jobs doing particle theory research are likely to be available in the future. This is presumably because the authors are well aware that there remains a huge imbalance between the number of smart people getting Ph.D.s in this subject, and the number of opportunities for them to make a career in the subject. The reference to “friction and resentment within the department as a whole” over TAs makes clear what one of the main concerns driving this recommendation is. The amount of power and influence one’s group has in an academic department, including prospects for being allowed to hire more people, is heavily influenced by how much grant money one brings in, especially how much funding for the graduate program one can provide. This is made even more explicit at another point in the report:

    Because of eroding support, more and more theoretical graduate students are being required to teach more and more of the time. This is unfortunate for at least two reasons: first, it lengthens the time to degree; and second, it signals to physics departments a hint of declining support for HEP research, exacerbating hiring worries.

    While the report mentions the need to find some more money for postdocs (since those working on experiments will need to travel to Europe more often), it emphasizes support for grad students, not postdocs. It does this even though it is postdocs who are doing much of the most original work in the field, and the small number of postdocs (and junior faculty positions) is what makes career prospects for particle theory students extremely problematic. I can’t even really make sense of this one paragraph from the report that deals with this:

    Given the choice between hiring more graduate students and taking on a postdoc, many faculty members will opt for the latter when faced with limited available funding. However, while this may seem be the best solution in terms of immediate research workload, the long-term negative effects of this choice on the field as a whole are clear.

    One of the most interesting things in the report is the set of numbers from survey responses about how many grant-supported theory researcher are working in which areas, and what hiring plans by area are for the next 5 years. Figure 3 on page 43 divides theory researchers into six categories, and gives counts for how many are working in each category now, how many expected in 2012. The number of string theorists is supposed to drop from 103 to 84, “field theorists” from 91 to 77, “model builders” from 88 to 70, and “QCD/Lattice QCD” from 50 to 41. “Particle phenomenologists” are supposed to increase from 188 to 194, and “astrophysicists and cosmologists” from 136 to 176. Obviously boundaries of these fields are unclear, especially since string theory in recent years has to some extent moved away from formal theory, with more people describing themselves as “string cosmologists”, “string phenomenologists”, “string-inspired model-builders”, and much of the attention of the field devoted to trying to do QCD calculations with string theory.

    If you take these numbers seriously, a grad student would be nuts to work on anything except cosmology or phenomenology, since all other subfields show about as many people leaving them as would be accounted for by retirements, so essentially no new hiring. My suspicion though is that these numbers reflect what departments say they would like to do, not what they will do. Most departments now say they want to hire in the areas of cosmology and phenomenology. But faced with the fact that competition for the best people in those areas is tough, and finding it much easier to get good people in other subfields, I suspect there will continue to be quite a lot of hiring in these other subfields, in string theory especially, which seems to be what looking at the latest data from the Rumor Mill shows.

    Given the huge and supposedly increasing dominance of these numbers by the “particle phenomenology” category, the report’s call for an urgent increase in funding to produce more phenomenologists is not so easy to understand. However, the authors make clear that what they want to see is more of a very specific sort of phenomenology: people working on things like event generators to precisely calculate standard model backgrounds for the LHC experiments, something which has always been more popular in the Europe than in the US. The recent NSF-funded “LHC Theory Initiative” is specifically designed to address this, and is being promoted with nationalistic calls to fight the “outsourcing” of these calculations to European theorists. The authors of the report are calling for more Ph.D.s in conventional, experiment-based phenomenology, not more Ph.D.s in string theory or “string phenomenology”. They choose to do so, for obvious political reasons, not by calling for a reallocation of resources within the field of particle theory, but for new resources for this purpose, even if it will lead to a smaller fraction of particle theory Ph.D.s being able to find jobs doing the research they have been trained to do.

    Posted in Uncategorized | 19 Comments

    Quick Links

    The New York Times has an article this morning by Dennis Overbye in its Science Times section about the hunt for the Higgs and the various rumors that were circulating earlier this year. It does a good job of accurately summarizing and reviewing the situation (although of course the blogs were and remain the place to go for breaking news, up-to-date and accurate information…). Steven Weinberg recalls the time back in 1977 when he quickly wrote up a paper with Ben Lee about a model concocted to explain rumored “trimuon” events (which turned out not to be there). There are quotes from bloggers Tommaso Dorigo, Gordon Watts and John Conway, and, in a new posting on his blog, Gordon is now trying to deny that he uses the term “Dude” in actual conversation. Unfortunately, anyone at D0 who knows anything seems to have clammed up, no more rumors that I’m aware of about whether they’re seeing anything exciting.

    The 2007 Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics is going on in Manchester, England, and many of the talks are already on-line. This is a conference more aimed at experimentalists than theorists, so there doesn’t seem to be much new in the theory talks. There are so many experimental talks that I think I’ll have to wait for the summary talk to appear to figure out what to pay attention to.

    There’s a long list of things I was going to write about, but Sabine and Stefan at Backreaction got there first (here, here and here):

  • Nature has a special section on the LHC. Very good and much more in depth than most of the huge amount of press coverage of this story. Especially interesting is the article by Chris Llewellyn Smith telling the history of how the LHC came to be.
  • The LHC Theory Initiative, a now NSF-funded project that will provide some graduate fellowships and post-docs for people working in phenomenology relevant to the LHC, is being promoted with a University of Buffalo press release. It claims that currently Europeans dominate the field of LHC phenomenology, so the NSF funding is needed to stop this “outsourcing” of crucial high-tech employment to foreigners. HEP in the US is quite an amazing industry, the only one I know of that outsources technical work to countries where the labor costs more than it does in the US….
  • This year’s award for most ludicrous hep-ph paper is likely to be won in a walk by this one. Tommaso is even better than Sabine on the topic.
  • There’s a new chapter out of the particle physics novel The Newtonian Legacy (blogged about here) by Nick Evans. Not often that the Cern Courier carries material about Higgsless models and lingerie in its pages…

    Posted in Uncategorized | 53 Comments

    My Life With Stephen

    Jane Hawking, Stephen Hawking’s ex-wife, has written a book about her life together with Stephen, which has recently appeared here in the US under the title Travelling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen. At around 400 pages, it’s an abridged version of the 600 page Music to Move the Stars: A Life With Stephen, which appeared in the UK back in 1999. A US production company, Film and Music Entertainment (FAME), has acquired an option to make a movie of the book (weirdly enough, the contract is on-line), but I don’t know whether the movie is actually going to get made.

    The Hawking’s separation in 1990 and later divorce was widely covered in the media, and the book doesn’t dwell on the depressing details. Stephen went to live with one of his nurses, Elaine Mason (who at the time was married), and later married her. Jane later married Jonathan Jones, a musician she had met a decade earlier, partly through her church choir, and who developed a close relationship with her and the rest of the Hawking family during the 80s. At the time of the UK edition of the book, there was little contact between Jane and Stephen, but it appears that Stephen is now in the process of getting divorced from Mason, and has re-entered Jane’s life.

    Up until the publication and huge success of A Brief History of Time, the Hawkings were not especially well-off, and dependent on others (including the MacArthur Foundation) for the high costs associated with Stephen’s care. After 1989 though, the book and other projects brought in huge sums of money, which made him a wealthy man and perhaps played some sort of role in the collapse of the marriage.

    The Hawkings were married back in 1965, at a time when Stephen’s illness had already become apparent, and his prognosis for long-term survival was not good at all. For the next 25 years, Jane spent most of her time in the back-breaking labor of caring for an invalid husband while raising three children. While Stephen went from success to success, the center of attention due to his brilliant scientific work and triumph over his disability, Jane received little support, encouragement, or recognition for the sacrifices she was making, and one would have to be a saint to not develop some resentment for the situation and for the way it ended. She tells the whole story in some detail, and it’s in many ways a rather sad one.

    Among the sources of conflict between them were: religion (she was a believer, he a fervent atheist), his family (described as definitely not nice to her), and his devotion to physics:

    I sensed that there was yet another partner lurking in our already overcrowded marriage. The fourth partner first appeared in the form of a trusted and quiescent friend, signalling the way to success and fulfilment for those who followed her. In fact she proved to be a relentless rival, as exacting as any mistress, an inexorable Siren, luring her devotees into deep pools of obsession. She was none other than Physics, cited by Einstein’s first wife as the correspondent in divorce proceedings.

    She describes how, during his work on black holes leading up to the discovery of Hawking radiation, Stephen would isolate himself:

    For Stephen those periods of intense concentration may have been useful exercises in cultivating that silent, inner strength which would enable him to think in eleven dimensions. Unable to tell whether it was oblivion or indifference to my need to talk that sealed him off so hermetically, I found those periods sheer torture, especially when, as sometimes happened, they were accompanied by long sessions of Wagnerian opera, particularly The Ring Cycle, played at full volume on the radio or the record player. It was then, as I felt my own voice stifled and my own spontaneity suppressed inside me, that I grew to hate Wagner.

    Jane also tells the story of Stephen’s first public talk on black hole radiation, after which the chairman of the session, J.G. Taylor:

    …sprang to his feet, blustering, “Well, this is quite preposterous! I have never heard anything like it. I have no alternative but to bring this session to an immediate close!”

    After this brusque cut-off of any questions, she describes how later she observed:

    Still blustering and indignantly muttering to his students, J.G. Taylor stood behind me in the queue, unaware of my identity. I was rehearsing a few cutting remarks in Stephen’s defence when I heard him splutter, “We must get that paper out straight away!”

    After she reported this to Stephen, he sent his paper off immediately to Nature, where the referee turned out to be Taylor himself. The article was first rejected, then finally accepted after a second referee was consulted. It appeared in the March 1 1974 issue with the title Black Hole Explosions?. Taylor’s paper (with P.C.W. Davies as co-author) arguing that Hawking was wrong appeared a few months later as Do Black Holes Really Explode?. After writing many papers on string theory during the late eighties, more recently Taylor has devoted his time to the study of neural nets and consciousness.

    While Jane quite liked many of the relativist colleagues of Stephen’s that she was meeting, especially if they weren’t in a group talking about physics, she was much less impressed by the particle theorists that Stephen started spending his time with after the mid-seventies as his work concentrated on quantum gravity and unification:

    Nor, I have to confess, did the set of scientists with whom Stephen was now associating attract me in the least. On the whole, particle physicists were a dry, obsessive bunch of boffins, little concerned with personal contact but very concerned with their own scientific reputations. They were much more aggressively competitive than the relaxed, friendly relativists with whom we had associated in the past.

    Despite Stephen’s disability, the Hawkings did an immense amount of traveling, especially for professional purposes, and Jane describes her impressions of the places they went and people they met. One of the few things she gets wrong is the name of Andrei Linde’s wife, Renata Kallosh, who they met on a trip to Moscow. Linde is now one of the most fervent proponents of the anthropic principle, which appears at one point in the book as Jane tells about early debates between Stephen and Brandon Carter during the late sixties and early seventies. She describes it as philosophically close to the medieval Ptolemaic universe, trying to put man at the center of all things.

    The book is mostly not a book about physics though, but very much about what it was like to struggle with caring for someone coping with a grave disability, a difficult and not always rewarding task even in this remarkable case of someone who has overcome obstacles and achieved about the highest pinnacle of success possible.

    Posted in Book Reviews | 30 Comments

    Various News

    There’s a potentially important new paper on the arXiv from Terry Tomboulis, entitled Confinement for all values of the coupling in four-dimensional SU(2) gauge theory. Tomboulis claims to prove that SU(2) lattice gauge theory has confining behavior (area law fall off of Wilson loops at large distances) for all values of the coupling at the scale of the cutoff, no matter how small. This conjectured behavior is something that quite a few people tried to prove during the late seventies and eighties, without success. Tomboulis is one of the few people who has kept seriously working on the problem, and it looks like he may have finally gotten there. The method he is using goes back to work of ‘t Hooft in the late 1970s, and involves considering the ratio of the partition function with an external flux in the center of SU(2) and the partition function with no such flux. For a recent review article about this whole line of thinking by Jeff Greensite, see here. For shorter, less technical articles by Tomboulis about earlier results in the program he has been pursuing, see here, here, and here.

    As far as I can tell, even if this holds up, it won’t get Tomboulis the million-dollar Clay prize being offered for the solution of the Yang-Mills Millenium Prize Problem. There the problem is stated as rigorously constructing Yang-Mills for any gauge group, not just SU(2), showing that it has the expected properties, and a mass gap. I don’t know whether Tomboulis’s methods can prove that there is a mass gap. In any case, I also don’t know why the Clay prize asks for a mass gap rather than confinement, which seems more physically relevant.

    The latest HEPAP meeting was this past weekend in Washington and presentations are available here. The news from the DOE is that it looks like Congress will approve a FY 2008 HEP budget at or above the White House request of $782.2 million, an increase of at least 4%. This will include $60 million for ILC R and D (up from $42 million in FY2007). This will include funds for site surveys in the US, which in principle will include sites other than Fermilab, although I find it hard to believe a US site other than Fermilab would end up being chosen.

    There’s a report from the University Research subpanel that puts near the top of its recommendations “A higher priority in the overall HEP program should be given to funding directed at university-based theoretical particle physics for the purpose of increasing the number of HEP-grant supported graduate students.” Given the continuing high ratio between students getting Ph.Ds in particle theory and jobs for them when they get out, I would have thought the priority would go to finding ways to fund jobs for students once they get out, rather than increasing the number of Ph.Ds.

    There’s a recommendation from the P5 panel that the Tevatron should definitely run through FY2009, and in September they’ll start looking at the case for running even longer than that. There’s also a discussion of “European reaction” to comments from the DOE’s Ray Ohrbach that the US needs a plan in case the ILC doesn’t start happening soon. Typical reaction from the Europeans was said to be that the US is not a reliable partner, and makes unilateral decisions without consultation. CERN has recently been promised a budget supplement over the next few years that could pay for an LHC upgrade (they were in hock over the LHC), and by 2016 that would be done and paid for. At that time CERN will have money to spend on a new big project and a higher energy linear collider using CLIC technology would be a possibility (the semi-joke made was that the work advancing this possibility is now going on mainly in the US, at SLAC).

    A progress report from the Fermilab Steering Group, which is supposed to report to the Director on Aug. 1, included extensive discussion of “Project X”, a proposal to dramatically increase the power of proton beams by building an 8 GeV proton linac. Part of the idea is that building this smaller linac would help get experience needed for doing the ILC.

    Also at Fermilab, I noticed that they have a web-site devoted to the history of the place, and here is a recent talk by Adrienne Kolb on the subject.

    According to CNN, one of the “Geniuses who will change your life” is Harvard’s (soon to be Princeton’s) Nima Arkani-Hamed, who is described as follows:

    Nima Arkani-Hamed thinks big. He has a theory that our universe is one of an infinite number of universes — meaning the largest thing we can wrap our minds around is actually pretty tiny

    He didn’t pull the “multiverse” out of thin air, though. After becoming a Harvard professor at age 30, Arkani-Hamed first made a name for himself by suggesting that our universe is five-dimensional. Then he moved on to the multiverse, theorizing that our own universe has a hidden feature called “split supersymmetry,” which means that half of all particles have partner particles.

    The theory will be tested soon in Switzerland’s brand-new Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and if the LHC finds Arkani-Hamed’s partner particles, it could prove that the multiverse is real — and that our place in it is that much smaller.

    The claim that if you see split supersymmetry, this proves that the multiverse is real seems pretty much laughable to me.

    Clifford Johnson is in Aspen, at what its director describes as a “summer camp for physicists”. He has a posting about his experiences there, describing how the big topic of conversation is the recent Strings 2007 conference. He asks for people to write in telling about which of the Strings 2007 talks they found most interesting (although so far, a half day later, no one seems to have taken him up on this). Like Jacques Distler, after Witten’s talk, Clifford seems to be most impressed by Seiberg’s talk on BMSSM (Beyond the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model) physics, based on his recent paper with Dine and Thomas. The idea is that, even with its 105 extra parameters, the MSSM still requires a lot of fine-tuning to get around the LEP bound on the Higgs mass, so you should analyze adding even more terms to the Standard Model besides the minimal supersymmetric ones. Distler was very excited by the Seiberg talk, arguing that these results should have been found years ago but weren’t. Various people wrote into his blog to point out to him that this wasn’t right, that mostly these things had been done a while ago, including by several authors back in 2003 (see hep-ph/0301121 and hep-ph/0310137). Seiberg et. al. issued a revised version of their paper where they added quite a few references, including one to work back in 1999 by Alessandro Strumia (hep-ph/9906266) where he already discussed the impact of the two operators identified by Dine et. al on the Higgs mass.

    Update: The debate over string theory really has reached the general public, at least in New York: a few months ago there was a cartoon in the New Yorker, this week, it has made the New York Magazine web-site celebrity coverage.

    Posted in Uncategorized | 59 Comments

    Carroll and Johnson on Bloggingheads

    There’s an interesting exchange today between Sean Carroll and George Johnson on bloggingheads.tv. They cover a range of topics, including the controversy over string theory and the role of blogs. Johnson describes his time last fall at the KITP, telling about drinking very expensive Scotch with Steve Shenker, and many discussions with the string theorists there who were concerned that they were getting bad publicity and didn’t know what to do about it. Some were concerned that Lubos Motl was not exactly representing them well.

    Sean gives a fairly standard defense of the landscape (“maybe it really is the way the world works”), with no discussion of the main problem with the landscape, that it shows no signs of making falsifiable predictions that would make it legitimate science. Some other points of the discussion include speculation about “what if Feynman and Gell-Mann had blogs?”, and Sean’s analogy of the string/LQG debate with mainstream/”heterodox” academic economics.


    Update
    : Sean has his own posting about this.

    Posted in Uncategorized | 81 Comments

    String Theory: The Fightback

    The public perception of string theory has definitely changed over the last few years, with the latest evidence this week’s cover story in New Scientist, which begins:

    It’s the theory everyone loves to hate.

    The article (available fully only to subscribers, I fear) is entitled String Theory: The Fightback, and its story line is that, because of all this criticism, after nearly 25 years of work, finally:

    string theorists themselves have realised they must find ways to put their models to the test. They may still be far from being able to observe a string in a laboratory, but experiments planned for the near future – and even one currently under way – could provide tantalising evidence either for or against string theory…

    Now the string community is fighting back by devising creative, if indirect, ways to look for signs of strings – from hidden dimensions to ripples in space-time and other potential signatures of a stringy universe. The time has come to put string theory to the test…

    Critics should take heed. Experiments now show that string theory may be testable after all. One study at a time, string theorists seem to be homing in on models that will make specific, falsifiable predictions.

    What follows is the usual misleading hype of bogus “tests” of string theory, of the sort I’ve written about extensively here. They are:

  • The networks of cosmic superstrings promoted by Polchinski.
  • For one of my postings about this, see here. More than three years ago Polchinski and the KITP at Santa Barbara issued a press release about this trumpeting the idea that such superstrings could be observed by LIGO “over the next year or two.” The problem with this kind of “test” of string theory is that you can easily come up with string theory models that produce lots of cosmic superstrings (already falsified), no observable amount of cosmic superstrings (can’t use to test string theory), or precisely the amount of cosmic superstrings such that no hint of them would be seen until now, but there would be networks of the things lurking just below the threshold of measurability, to be discovered by the next generation of experiments (highly unlikely, pretty much pure wishful thinking). Polchinski has now stopped talking about LIGO and a year or two, and instead is promoting measurements of pulsars and five to ten years:

    According to Polchinski, though, our best bet for observing gravitational waves emanating from strings is to use pulsars. A pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star that fires out a beam of electromagnetic radiation as it rotates, like a lighthouse. These flashing beacons act as some of the most accurate clocks in the universe, and a gravitational wave rippling between a pulsar and Earth would disturb the otherwise precise timing of the pulses arriving here. The most likely cause of such fluctuations would be black holes colliding, but waves from strings would yield a unique timing pattern that would make them stand out. “Over the next five to 10 years,” Polchinski says, “these [pulsar observations] will probe the most interesting models.”

    My colleague Brian Greene is quoted about this, making the essential point about this kind of “test”:

    Sure, catching sight of a cosmic string would be a boon for string theory, but is there any observation that would serve as a death knell? For many sceptics, it’s not that string theory is so hard to prove correct that puts them off, but rather that you can’t falsify it. “I’m not aware of any test that if it fails will prove string theory wrong,” says physicist Brian Greene of Columbia University in New York. “That’s a real headache. You’d like to have a situation where you have a prediction, and if it’s right the theory is right, and if it’s wrong the theory is wrong.”

  • Quoting this recent paper, supposedly “according to Linde and Kallosh, no string-based inflation model can possibly create detectable gravity waves”.
  • The problem is that the quoted paper doesn’t actually say that. Here’s the paper’s concluding paragraph:

    However, a possible discovery of tensor modes may force us to reconsider several basic assumptions of string cosmology and particle phenomenology. In particular, it may imply that the gravitino must be superheavy. Thus, investigation of gravitational waves produced during inflation may serve as a unique source of information about string theory and about the fundamental physics in general.

    Given the wealth of possible string theory scenarios, I have no doubt that if an imprint of gravity waves is found in the CMB, there will be string theory models that would “predict” it. As for the idea that not seeing such gravity waves would be evidence for string theory, here’s what Glashow has to say:

    Not everyone thinks these tests will be useful, however. “Not seeing something is hardly evidence for string theory,” says Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow of Boston University, Massachusetts, an outspoken critic of string theory. He feels that such a result would mean very little. “String theorists are very wise. They can come up with a way to explain anything.” String theory is simply not testable, he says. “There are an enormous number of string theories and they describe zillions and zillions of universes, none of them observable in any way. It sounds to me like angels dancing on the head of a pin.”

  • String theory is being tested at RHIC and, conjecturally AdS/QCD makes predictions about strong interaction physics.
  • “We’re still very far from being able to say, here is the exact string theory that describes QCD,” Susskind says. “But the connections that show up between nuclear physics and string theory are fascinating. Sceptics won’t consider this evidence for string theory, but nuclear physicists will use string theory and in time discover how accurately it describes these experiments.”

    What Susskind is neglecting to mention here is that these are tests of whether string theory is a useful way to do calculations in an already tested theory of the strong interactions, and has nothing to do with the question of testing the idea of string theory as a unified theory of quantum gravity and particle physics.

    Also in New Scientist, there’s a story about Neil Turok’s recent talk at PASCOS entitled “Is the Cold Spot in the CMB a Texture?” which links to the string theory article. Evidently there’s a patch of CMB where the temperature is anomalously low (the probability of this happening supposedly being 2 percent) and one can speculate that this may be due to a topological defect of some kind. Amusingly, the online version of the New Scientist article includes an interpolated editorial comment that someone forgot to take out before publication:

    Turok presented the findings at a conference on particles Hi Anil. This threw me a bit. We say the team noticed previous work by Turok, and then before we know it Turok is the one presenting the work. When did he join them, strings and cosmology at Imperial College London last week.

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    Less Stuff Than Usual

    I was on vacation for a while, but haven’t been posting much mostly since there’s not that much to write about. Like every summer, there are huge numbers of string theory conferences going on all over the world, but from looking at the talks that are available, the subject is about as dead as it has been for the last couple years, with essentially no new ideas. The reaction of string theorists to all the criticism that they have been getting in recent years about the lack of any connection of string theory to the real world seems to have been to rename their conferences things like String Theory and the Real World.

    One other reason I haven’t been writing as much is that there are an increasingly large number of quite good math and physics blogs out there, run by other people who are doing a great job of writing about the kinds of news that I’ve often posted items about. There’s a mini-revolution going on in research-level mathematics blogging, with various Fields medalists being joined by groups of some of the best graduate students and post-docs around. Following on the heels of Berkeley’s wonderful Secret Blogging Seminar, there’s Cornell’s Everything Seminar and the Max Planck Institute in Bonn’s Vivatgasse 7 (mainly about arithmetic algebraic geometry).

    Also at the Max Planck Institute, a couple weeks ago there was the yearly Arbeitstagung, a conference devoted to recent mathematics research and run in a somewhat unconventional way. The concept is to mostly not schedule talks and speakers in advance, but to instead just try and get a group of the best possible people to show up, and then to more or less democratically decide on who should speak about what, depending on who has something new to talk about. The first Arbeitstagung was organized by Friedrich Hirzebruch exactly 50 years ago, back in 1957, partly with the goal of bringing Germany back into the mainstream of mathematics research after the post-WWII period. Hirzebruch remained the organizer for many years (and was also director of Max Planck), and was there this year to give the opening lecture, on The first Arbeitstagungen in 1957, 1958 and 1962. At the first Arbeitstagung in 1957 some of the talks announced dramatic new results in mathematics, including the birth of K-theory. Grothendieck’s talk included the first definition and use of K-theory (of coherent sheaves on a projective algebraic manifold) in his proof of what is now known as the Grothendieck-Riemann-Roch theorem. Hirzebruch had worked some of this out more concretely before, and he reported on his work with Borel-Hirzebruch which links up representation theory, characteristic classes and topology in a fundamental way. Bott was not there, but had recently discovered Bott periodicity, and over the next few years Atiyah used this and the Dirac operator to reformulate Grothendieck-Riemann-Roch as a general index theorem in the context of differentiable manifolds, proving the theorem with Singer, and lecturing about it at the 1962 Arbeitagung. Hirzebruch gives an excellent description of some of this history. The talks are all available online, but I fear that there was nothing discussed this year that seems to reach the heights of what was being discovered back in those early days 50 years ago.

    The latest news on the LHC schedule is: close the machine April 2008, beam commissioning starting May 2008, first beams at high energy July 2008, about exactly one year from now.

    The Notices of the AMS has a wonderful set of articles this month about George Mackey, I wrote a bit about him here.

    The Harvard string theory group will be minus not just Lubos Motl this coming year, but also Nima Arkani-Hamed, who will be on leave (I’m not sure where he’s going or what his plans are). I hear that the two of them had a joint goodbye party.

    Starting today, Arkani-Hamed is pushing the multiverse at the String Theory and the Real World conference. For the hundredth puff-piece about how wonderful the anthropic multiverse pseudo-science is, see the article Islands in the Sea, at fqxi.org.

    Bloomberg.com is carrying a review of Endless Universe, the recent Steinhardt/Turok book I wrote about here. The author of the review seems to have noticed the same thing about the book that I did:

    Given the recent controversy surrounding string theory — the publication last year of Lee Smolin’s “The Trouble With Physics” and Peter Woit’s “Not Even Wrong” — it’s disturbing that Steinhardt and Turok don’t even address their dependence on it. Does their model work if string theory is wrong?

    My sense is that it doesn’t, but they never even face the possibility — lending inadvertent weight to Smolin’s and Woit’s complaints that string theory is strangling physics. I hope the authors can someday publish a second edition in which they don’t treat string theory as the only game in town.

    Despite its problems, string theory does now have a shop and a blog.

    Update: The news is that Arkani-Hamed will be moving from Harvard to the Institute for Advanced Study.

    Update: In case any one was worried that Lubos’s move back to Europe would end his entertainining rants about the stupidity of anyone expressing skepticism about string theory, don’t worry. The latest is Bloomberg: another idiotic article, which begins:

    Elizabeth Lopatto is the name of the latest breathtaking idiot who was hired to write about theoretical physics for Bloomberg. I am periodically amazed that the newer journalists are always able to exceed the degree of mental breakdown of their predecessors.

    and then goes on from there…

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    Too Much Good Stuff

    I’ve been finding recently that an increasing serious problems with blogs is that there are too many good ones with material worth reading. I’ve learned quite a lot recently from many well-informed blog postings, but the sheer number of these makes it hard to find the time for other things one should be doing.

    I’ll violate my usual rule of sticking to math and physics and report that my brother Steve is joining me in the family blogging business by being involved as Publisher in a new venture that just launched this week called Xconomy. Basically it’s a blog based up in Cambridge, with offices in Kendall Square, devoted to news about what they call the “exponential economy”, that part of the economy responsible for what is perhaps too optimistically described as exponential growth in certain areas. They’re focusing on events and news relevant to new technology, especially bio-technology, businesses in the Boston area. For some interesting blog postings by their CEO Bob Buderi about what it’s like to start up this sort of business, see here and here. For a nice posting about Doc Edgerton, see here.

    Back to physics and math, over at Backreaction there’s an excellent posting on the GZK cutoff and high energy cosmic ray experiments, and a report from Loops 07 sent in via Blackberry by Sabine Hossenfelder.

    An American Physics Student in England tells about a recent conference on Heavy Flavour Physics, giving a very nice overview of what is going on in that field.

    The latest This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics from John Baez is out (available here, blog entry and comments here). It’s a wonderful description of the various mathematical patterns that the standard model particles fit into. Most well known is what happens in SU(5) and SO(10) GUTs, where one can fit the fermion quantum numbers into something that can equivalently be described as the spinor representation in d=10, or the exterior algebra $\Lambda ^* (\mathbf C ^5)$. John goes on to explain various possible connections to the exceptional groups, including a recent idea from Garrett Lisi about how to use E8 to get three generations.

    The blog entry comments discuss two recent papers by Chamseddine and Connes about their non-commutative algebra approach to this question of mathematically characterizing the SM degrees of freedom. The papers are on the arXiv, entitled A Dress for SM the Beggar, and Why the Standard Model. Because of these papers and Witten’s recent one, John seems to be getting a bit more optimistic about physics, writing “I get the feeling that theoretical physics may not be quite so stagnant after all!”

    All sorts of interesting stuff at the Secret Blogging Seminar, including yet more about Connes: a “review” by A. J. Tolland of the first quarter of the new book by Connes and Marcolli (available here), which A. J. claims has the title Noncommutative Geometry, Quantum Fields, Kitchen Sinks and Motives. Like the earlier fat book on non-commutative geometry by Connes, it’s an amazing document, ranging widely over physics and mathematics, covering ground from QFT to the Riemann hypothesis, at a level varying from expository sections on well-known subjects to more speculative research-level discussions. I’ve just started looking at it, may bring along a copy for summer vacation reading when I head up to a lake in New Hampshire tomorrow.

    Other interesting things at the same blog include reports (here and here) from Ben Webster about talks by Sergei Gukov on categorification and gauge theory (about which he has a new expository paper here), as well as about an earlier talk by Gukov on Arithmetic Topology and Gauge Theory.

    Also worth reading are posts from Ben Webster about centers of blocks of category O, various comment section discussions with David Ben-Zvi at both this blog and the n-category cafe, and a series of postings by David Speyer about quadratic reciprocity and geometric class field theory (I’m running out of energy to provide links…).

    From Ben-Zvi (who could run a really great blog if he chose to…) there are notes from the recent conference at Northwestern on non-commutative geometry. These include an intriguing lecture by Beilinson, as well as lectures by Nadler and Ben-Zvi himself about their recent work which connects geometric Langlands with questions about more conventional representation theory using striking ideas about how to handle loop spaces. They have a recent paper about this, which has been very high on my list of things I wish I understood better ever since David gave an inspiring talk about this here a couple months ago.

    Finally, one more thing definitely worth looking at in light of Witten’s new work: an expository and historical article by Jim Lepowsky about the story of the relation of vertex operator algebras and the monster group. He explains what is so remarkable about the specific vertex operator algebra that Witten is connecting to 3d gravity on AdS, including the ways in which it is conjecturally uniquely the “smallest” such structure in a specific sense.

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