Not Even Wrong

Over at Dynamics of Cats, Steinn Sigurdsson has a posting on Yarn Theory, to some extent a review of Lee Smolin’s The Trouble With Physics. Steinn is an astrophysicist, but started out life as a string theorist before getting disillusioned with the subject. His account of his early career is well worth reading, doing a good job of capturing the atmosphere around 1990 at Caltech, a major center of string theory research. He was working on orbifold heterotic string compactifications, discouraged by how many there were. Not much has changed…

His general point of view on string theory is that it has led to the discovery of a family of unified theories, but that it is missing some basic principle that would tell us which is the true theory and why. He is sympathetic to Smolin’s criticisms of the dysfunctional way theoretical research is being pursued, focusing efforts on one very speculative idea and making it unlikely that people who chose to try and work on others will be able to make careers for themselves:

… a lot of people will not only not believe that this is a real problem, they will make sure nobody else believes you either. Someone out there quite likely is already on the right track to the true theory, but their odds of survival in the current academic system are not wonderful. We may just have to wait a generation or two for a good approach to be rediscovered, which is a shame, cause some of us want to know! Now!!

It is the same market flaw that gives us beautiful flawless large red apples in supermarkets – with no taste. To get the old intense flavour varieties that everyone loves when they taste, we would have to choose small bruised discoloured apples when we shop, and leave the flawless big red apples with no taste in the bins. But collectively we do not, and the market responds. All for the fear of being the one department head consumer to go home with an occasional rotten apple. The real shame is that the big red shiny tasteless apples are rotten just as often, they just look so good sitting there, waxed and sprayed, in the bin. ‘Course if you only get to buy one apple every three years you learn to be very conservative in your choice; don’t want a rotten or even tart apple this decade.

I think Steinn gets to the rotten core of the problem here. There are very good reasons for conservatism in deciding what kinds of research to encourage, but with the very difficult situation that particle physics now finds itself in, the standard mechanisms for making these decisions have led to a seriously problematic situation. There are various things one could imagine doing to help get out of this, but even getting started on a discussion of them first requires that the powers-that-be in the field acknowledge the existence of a problem, and that has yet to really happen.

On a completely different subject, there’s a new preprint by Michael McGuigan which manages to cite both Not Even Wrong (the book), and a Lubos Motl blog entry. The citation of my book seems unnecessary, surely there are other sources critical of string-based unification that have priority. The article is about the “see-saw” mechanism for getting the right magnitude of the cosmological constant, and it is for this that Lubos’s blog gets a citation. This does seem to be a more promising idea about the CC than many. I for one think it will be a wonderful development if the field of particle theory turns around, stops promoting pseudo-science justified by the Weinberg anthropic CC “prediction”, and heads instead in a more promising direction, all based on an entry in Lubos’s blog…

Alain Connes is now a blogger, contributing to the new Noncommutative Geometry blog. There will be a conference in his honor next month in Paris.

Today and tomorrow there’s a HEPAP meeting going on in Washington, with some of the presentations available here. Excluding the SLAC linac, which is getting moved around in the budget, the DOE HEP FY208 budget request is for $782 million, a very healthy more than 16% increase over FY2006. There’s also an HEP demography study being discussed, which somehow involves “tagging” and “tracking” HEP physicists, and they seem to be having trouble with the tagging. Not clear what sort of analysis will be performed on the data once all HEP physicist tracks have been reconstructed.

Next month on the 28th there will be a debate on the topic of

Does string theory merge general relativity and quantum mechanics to explain the origin of time, space, and the universe? Or is it extraordinarily complex mathematics that has nothing to do with physics, and so explains nothing?

between Lawrence Krauss and Brian Greene at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in Washington. I recall attending a similar debate at the Museum of Natural History almost exactly six years ago here in New York, also featuring Krauss and Greene. Some things seem destined to never change…

At the big AAAS conference held in San Francisco the past few days there was a session on “A New Frontier in Particle Physics”, about the LHC and the promise of physics at the TeV scale. Burton Richter’s talk there on Charting the Course for Elementary Particle Physics is now available at the arXiv.

Richter uses the “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times” line from Dickens to characterize the current state of particle physics. He expects the LHC to begin operations at full energy in summer 2008, with physics results beginning to appear in 2009. As for the ILC, at the earliest it would be completed in 2019, and he sees no chance of it being built if the LHC doesn’t find something new by 2012. He also sees a luminosity upgrade of the LHC being considered next year, one which would take place after the machine had been running for 5 years or so.

He also discusses the MiniBooNE experiment at Fermilab, a neutrino experiment that is late in reporting results. They are doing a “blind analysis”, not “opening the box” and looking at the final answer from their data until the last moment. Richter is dubious about this, saying: “I never did like blind analyses”, claiming that they prevent experimenters from seeing problems in the data, and he worries that the MiniBooNE result (which is trying to check results from the LSND experiment that disagree with the standard picture of neutrino physics) will be inconclusive.

We should know soon, I see that on March 1 there is a colloquium scheduled at Princeton by one of the MiniBooNE experimenters on “New Neutrino Oscillation Results from the MiniBooNE Experiment”. For a recent talk about MiniBooNE given at Columbia, see here. This talk did also definitely mention the possibility of an inconclusive result, requiring a more sensitive experiment that might take place at the SNS (Spallation Neutron Source) in Oak Ridge.

Also at the AAAS meeting was yet another session on the wonders of the multiverse called “Multiverses, Dark Energy and Physics as an Environmental Science,” featuring the usual Stanford team of Linde and Susskind, with Lawrence Krauss brought in to provide a little bit of reality. Stanford has put out a press release promoting Andrei Linde’s talk at the meeting. Linde goes on about what he calls 10¹⁰⁰⁰ vacua, and how they are “an unexpected gift from string theory… an eternal feast where all possible dishes are served.” He seems to be positively gleeful about the “Alice’s Restaurant” aspect of this pseudo-science, where “you can get anything you want…”

Update: For the YouTube generation, Stanford has a video here.

Update: Jon Bagger’s talk at the AAAS is available here.

Update: Various reports on the AAAS multiverse session including here, here (Wired blog, couldn’t get in the room, too full), and here (New Scientist blog, describes the session as “you might have mistaken the proceedings inside for a stand-up comedy act”).

Terry Tao’s article What is Good Mathematics?, written for the Bulletin of the AMS, is now available at the arXiv.

There’s a new article also on the arXiv by Zvi Bern et al. explicitly constructing the 3-loop 4-point amplitude of N=8 supergravity. They find various extra cancellations beyond those expected from supersymmetry, and argue that this and other calculations “strongly suggest that N=8 supergravity may be finite.” The innumerable claims made over the years at the beginning of pretty much every string theory book or popular article that you definitely can’t quantize gravity just using QFT are now no longer operational. There is quite a lot of interest in this topic, with an array of possible computations that need to be done in order to sort this out. Just at the Mathematics Institute at Oxford the past few weeks there have been talks related to this by David Dunbar, Kellogg Stelle, Bo Feng, and Michael Green. The Resonaances blog has a report about a talk by Lance Dixon, one of the co-authors of the new paper. Also a nice report on a talk about supersymmetry by David Kaplan, who gives an excellent definition of fine-tuning of parameters: “a model is fine-tuned if a plot of the allowed parameter space makes you wanna puke” (accompanied by an illustrative plot of the situation in mSUGRA).

I’m waiting for the above news about supergravity finiteness to hit the media, perhaps some of the people working on this need to get to work on their press releases. There’s yet more press about the Distler et. al. “test of string theory.” The Daily Texan has an article called Test May Prove Far-out Theory, where Distler explains how the LHC seeing effects consistent with unitarity, analyticity and Lorentz invariance will provide “more evidence” for string theory. The reporter who wrote this called me up, and includes a garbled version of what I had to say. I was trying to be polite and stick to just pointing out that the paper at issue was not a string theory calculation and its title had been changed to remove reference to string theory, something I suggested the reporter might want to ask the paper’s authors about. He seems to have not taken up my suggestion. I probably should have just used more straight-forward language, something along the lines of “dishonest bulls**t”.

The US Congress finally finished dealing with the FY2007 budget, sending a bill to the president which he’ll sign. It restores money to the NSF and DOE, avoiding a freeze at FY2006 levels that looked possible for a while and would have forced shutdowns at Fermilab and RHIC.

Finally, Capitalist Imperialist Pig informs us that Princeton is taking the occasion of shutting down its parapsychology lab to also close down its string theory program and redirect the funds to research on global warming. Somehow I suspect this may be a bit of an exaggeration, but they do seem to be making moves away from string theory and towards phenomenology, sponsoring workshops next month on Physics at LHC: From Experiment to Theory, and Monte Carlo Tools for Beyond the Standard Model Physics.

Update: Here’s a link to the Kaplan talks on SUSY.

The March issue of the Notices of the AMS is out. Excellent summaries of the mathematical work of the 2006 Fields medalists and interviews with three of them (everybody except Perelman). By the way, does anyone know if the 2006 or 2002 ICM proceedings are available on-line (the AMS is advertising the published books for the 2006 ICM, 3 volumes for $428)? There’s also an interesting article about Jim Simons and “Math for America”, the New York City based program designed to encourage people with a mathematics background to go into teaching. The program is partially funded by a yearly charity poker tournament attended by various people in the financial industry. I’d heard from one of them about this, but didn’t realize the scale on which they were operating. Last year’s tournament brought in $2 million.

This year’s Fields Medalist Terence Tao has an article submitted to the Bulletin of the AMS entitled What is Good Mathematics? See here for commentary from David Corfield.

Last month McGill University sponsored a large public symposium on the Anthropic principle that attracted overflow crowds, and featured Paul Davies, George Efstathiou, David Gross and Lenny Susskind. Gross and Susskind made more or less precisely the same points they have been making publicly about the string theory anthropic landscape for the last 4 years. You can watch the video for yourself here. Susskind seemed a bit less of an aggressive salesman of the anthropic point of view than in the past, acknowledging that the question of how you put a measure on the multiverse (this is needed if you want to make even statistical predictions) still has no solution. Gross made his usual points that accepting the landscape is premature, since we don’t know what string theory is, don’t understand the “emergent” notions of space and time it seems to lead to, and lack consistent time-dependent states describing something consistent with what we know about cosmology.

Besides the Becker-Becker-Schwarz and Dine fat textbooks on string theory that have just come out, another one is due out soon. It is by Elias Kiritsis and is called String Theory in a Nutshell (at nearly 600 pages, kind of a big nut). Princeton University Press is bringing it out in May. One of the leading physicists chosen to give a blurb is Harvard’s Lubos Motl, who also features on the Dine book. Evidently people who write string theory textbooks and their publishers feel his endorsement will do a lot to sell the books. Some of his recent postings refer to me as a “Communist” of a more “primitive and fanatical” sort than the ones he had to contend with during the Soviet era. I’d like to make clear that my political tendencies lean more toward some combination of anarcho-syndicalism and Clintonism than Soviet Communism. He also refers to the loyal readers of my blog as “human waste” (that’s you, folks…)

Instead of doing the work I had planned, I spent much of today having a very enjoyable time reading the mystery novel The Newtonian Legacy by particle theorist Nick Evans. A copy is available at his web-site here, and there’s a FAQ about the book here (I pretty much agree with his LHC predictions).

The book is well-done, very entertaining, and a good read that keeps you wanting to know what will happen next. It includes lots of popular-level explanations about particle physics and the ideas particle theorists are studying these days, so it might be an excellent way to introduce someone to these ideas. It is set at a fictional theoretical physics research institute in England, and many of the characters are particle theorists of one stripe or another (string theorists, phenomenologists, lattice gauge theorists).

The novel includes quite a few amusing portrayals of characters embodying the current sociology of particle theory: a postdoc trying to decide whether to write into the Rumor Mill to tell them he is on a short list at a place he’d rather not go to in hopes of getting other places to offer him a job, a lattice gauge theorist who stalks out of a string theorist’s talk in disgust, postdocs comparing the string theory landscape to religion, a self-satisfied American physicist from the West Coast convinced that string theory has the answers to the ultimate questions of science, and quite a few others.

The main character, Carl Vespers, is a particle theorist who, besides getting involved in the investigation of a mysterious death and having people trying to kill him, has to contend with more than one attractive woman throwing themselves at him, tempting him away from his long-distance girlfriend. All in all, a highly accurate portrayal of the life of a typical particle theorist. Highly recommended.

The “Reference Design Report” for the ILC was released today, and here’s a presentation about this from Barry Barish, the director of the ILC GDE (Global Design Effort). The most closely held numbers in the report have been the cost estimates (see here for a document about the status of cost estimates that warns “don’t post cost estimates on public web or wiki sites!”).

The cost estimate comes out to $4.87 billion for the technology components, $1.78 billion in site-specific costs, 13000 person-years of labor, and two detectors (no cost estimate for these). In round numbers, roughly $10 billion. The machine would consist of two 11km linacs end-to-end, with an interaction region in which two detectors could be moved in and out. The biggest part of the cost is the cost of the linacs, which would accelerate electrons and positrons to tunable energies with collisions at center of mass energy between 200 and 500 Gev. A possible future upgrade of the machine would take it to 1 Tev.

The plan for the future is to start working on a “Technical Design”, a much more detailed design that would show exactly how to build the machine. The hope is to make a decision on whether to build the ILC around 2010, based on what the LHC has found, and on how much progress CERN has made on the much more ambitious CLIC design. Construction would take 7 years, so the earliest such a machine could be in operation would be around 2017.

The full report is here.

Update: More at Science magazine and the New York Times.

Update: Joanne Hewett has an excellent detailed posting about this over at Cosmic Variance.

Alexey Petrov, a particle theorist at Wayne State University, has a blog worth following called Symmetry Factor. He has news about the 2008 budget request for HEP at the DOE, which according to him includes a 12.7% increase in the final 2007 number and a 3.7% increase for 2008 above that (not sure where his numbers come from). This would be a very healthy increase over these two years. Research in the physical sciences has become a big priority for the Bush administration for some reason, it’s a major part of the “American Competitiveness Initiative”. The NSF is also seeing a large increase in its FY2008 request: 8.7%. For various news stories about this, see here, here, here and here. Still unclear what will happen to this budget request in Congress where the Democratic majority will be in control. They have been sympathetic to science research spending in the past, but may or may not want to go along with the emphasis on the physical sciences embodied in this request. Then there’s the small matter of the huge US government deficits to consider. Somebody, someday might decide to try and do something about them.

Maybe I’ve been a bit unfair in the past to the Templeton Foundation, which recently issued this statement.

The IAS held a workshop last month on Homological Mirror Symmetry, notes are available here. Next month there will be a part two, which will mainly concentrate on Geometric Langlands. The schedule is here.

Via Jonathan Shock, the news that particle physicist Nick Evans has written a particle physics murder mystery entitled The Newtonian Legacy, and is making it available on-line for free. I’ll definitely be reading it soon.

Last evening I gave a talk here in New York downtown at the Cafe Scientifique. I think the talk went quite well: the place was packed, the audience attentive and asked quite a few good questions. Up next month is Glennys Farrar of NYU, who will be talking about dark matter. This event is pretty new, organized largely by Stefanie Glick who just got it started last fall. Also in New York are two other similar monthly science events: Secret Science Club, organized by Dorian Devins at Union Hall in Brooklyn (Janna Levin will be there tonight), and Columbia’s Cafe Science, which features Columbia faculty members (my colleague John Morgan will be speaking with Sylvia Nasar next week).

John Baez has a new issue of This Week’s Finds. He has a lot of interesting things to say about Euler characteristics and how you measure sizes in a category. Among many things I learned from Graeme Segal when he was here last semester was the idea of thinking of the Faddeev-Popov prescription in the path integral approach to gauge theory as reflecting the fact that one should think of gauge fields as a category. The category is the category whose objects are bundles with connection, and gauge transformations are the automorphisms of these objects. The general principle that when you count objects in a category you need to divide by the number of automorphisms provides a sort of motivation of the Faddeev-Popov calculation.

The US FY 2007 budget situation for math and science, which was looking very bad just recently, has taken a huge turn for the better as the House has voted to increase funding for the DOE Office of Science and the NSF. More information about this here, here, here, and here. Looks like Fermilab and RHIC will emerge from the budget process unscathed. Soon the president’s FY 2008 budget proposal will be unveiled, and we’ll see what the new Democratic majority will do about science funding.

This week’s press release announcing a “test of string theory” is from the University of Wisconsin (also here, here, and undoubtedly elsewhere). It’s no competition at all for last week’s spectacular press releases about “string theory tests”, but like the many other examples of the genre it is designed to make claims about string theory highly likely to mislead unsuspecting readers. I made some comments about this here. It’s not really that hard to come up with these “tests of string theory”, since “string theory” now has been invoked to justify studying a huge variety of different kinds of models, and is compatible with just about anything. All you have to do is find one, no matter how complicated, obscure and lacking any evidence or motivation, where you can choose the parameters so as to create effects not visible to current experiments, but perhaps visible to potential experiments, even ones many decades down the road. Without too much trouble you should be able to get a paper about this published, and at that time your university press office will surely be happy to put out a press release for you announcing that “Researcher(s) at University X have discovered a way to test string theory.” This has been going on for years, and people seem to never tire of it.

Sean Carroll seems to find it amusing that many articles on the arXiv can now be thought of as a new form of performance art. John Horgan, who got a lot of grief years ago for accusing physicists of engaging in “ironic science”, should really enjoy this.

Update: The Distler et. al. media juggernaut rolls on, informing the world that : The LHC, due to be finished by and running by the end of the year, may rule out the string theory, as well as the work by Distler and his colleagues offers something profound – a way to actually test string theory, and that if Distler’s bounds are satisfied, it would provide a weak support for string theory. The last article quotes Distler to the effect that string theory is just an “effective theory”, which I’m sure will clarify this for the public.

Update: The Shiu et. al. “test of string theory” press release has also led to lots of misleading stories. For an example check out Physicists devise test for string theory, where you’ll learn that “the University of Wisconsin theorists predict that upcoming experiments on the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite will have the sensitivity needed to prove the case for string theory.” Somehow I suspect string theorists will not give up on string theory if the Planck data doesn’t work out, and there won’t be any press releases…

Just to show that New Scientist doesn’t always get it wrong, there’s an unusually good article in this week’s issue by Davide Castelvecchi about prospects for new discoveries at the LHC. Besides the usual story, he concentrates on the question of how the data will be analyzed.

For one perspective on the problem, he gives an amusing quote from Ian Hinchliffe of Atlas who says:

People always ask me, “If you discover a new particle, how will you distinguish supersymmetry from extra dimensions?”. I’ll discover it first, I’ll think about it on the way to Stockholm, and I’ll tell you on the way back.”

Nima Arkani-Hamed optimistically claims that “The most likely scenario is that we’re going to have a ton of weird stuff to explain,’ and Castelvecchi quotes him and others as promoting a new sort of “bottom-up” data analysis. Here the idea (various implementations exist under names like VISTA and SLEUTH) is that instead of looking “top-down” for some specific signature predicted by a model (e.g. the Higgs, superpartners, etc.), one should instead broadly look at the data for statistically significant deviations from the standard model. Castelvecchi mentions various people working on this, including Bruce Knuteson of MIT. Knuteson and a collaborator have recently promoted an even more ambitious concept called BARD, designed to automate things and cut some theorists out of a job. The idea of BARD is to take discrepancies from the standard model and match them with possible new terms in the effective Lagrangian. Arkani-Hamed is dubious: “Going from the data to a beautiful theory is something a computer will never do.”

While the article focuses on the LHC, the role of such “bottom-up analyses” may soon be explored at the Tevatron, where they have a huge amount of data coming in, and have already put a lot of effort into the “top-down” approach (for the latest example, see Tommaso Dorigo’s new posting on CDF results about limits on Higgs decays to two Ws.) For the next few years all eyes will be on the LHC, but it will be the Tevatron experiments that will have a lot of data and be far along in analyzing it. Maybe lurking in this data will be the new physics everyone is hoping for, and it will be of an unexpected kind that only a broad-based “bottom-up” analysis might find. Doing so may raise tricky questions about what is statistically significant and what isn’t, and require a lot of manpower, at a time when these experiments will be losing lots of people to the LHC and elsewhere.