Not Even Wrong

HEPAP today released a new publication designed to convey to the general public excitement about prospects for particle physics in the coming years. It’s entitled Discovering the Quantum Universe, and it has a companion web-site. Both the web-site and the document itself are beautiful and impressive productions. The web-site also contains the earlier 2004 HEPAP report Quantum Universe, which was mentioned in one of the earliest posts of this blog. The newer document is based on an earlier version from last summer, and one of its main goals is to make the case for a linear collider. In some sense this is promotional material for the conclusions recently reached by the EPP2010 panel. Also part of the promotional activity today is a briefing for members of Congress that will include a talk by my colleague Brian Greene.

While I hope that this all has the intended effect of getting the public, the Congress and the Administration excited about particle physics and willing to support it at the level necessary to fund a new generation of machines and experiments, as you might guess I have my doubts about the wisdom of some of the material included in this report. Unlike the EPP2010 report, which oversold string theory a bit, this report oversells it a lot, with language like:

… preliminary studies have looked at the ability of linear collider experiments to detect the telltale harmonies of strings. Here linear collider precision is essential, since the string effects appear as small differences in the extrapolated values of the superpartner parameters. A combined analysis of simulated LHC and ILC data shows it may be possible to match the fundamental parameters of the underlying string vibrations.

The inclusion of this kind of language seems to me to be misleading and irresponsible. Ten years from now when we have real LHC data, know that the ILC can’t tell us anything about string theory, and are asking the US government to put up large sums to finish the ILC, we’ll have to hope that the relevant decision makers didn’t get convinced by this report that the ILC is a machine designed to get information about string theory.

Update: More about this at Cocktail Party Physics.

The Dibner Institute and Burndy Library at MIT will soon be closing, with the Burndy collection moving to the Huntington Library in California near Caltech. The Dibner Institute is devoted to research in the history of science and technology, and I mentioned it a couple years ago here. Among the interesting things the Dibner has on-line are copies of lecture notes on quantum electrodynamics from Freeman Dyson in 1951 and Fritz Rohrlich in 1953.

Stony Brook announced yesterday that Jim Simons will be making a $25 million dollar donation to the university, focused in the area of mathematics and physics. This is a great deal of money for a math or physics department, and it is the largest single cash donation ever made to any of the SUNY institutions.

Simons was responsible for building up the Stony Brook math department, which he joined as chair in 1968. About his hopes for what his donation will do, he says:

During the past thirty years mathematics and physics have grown increasingly intertwined. This is particularly true in the cases of string theory, quantum field theory and cosmology, which have all depended upon and stimulated advanced work in geometry and topology. Buttressed by its close relationship with Brookhaven National Laboratory and building on a fine faculty already in place we believe our gift can help propel Stony Brook into the very top rank in these central fields.

I’ve been much too busy the past few days, so haven’t had time to write anything new here. One thing that has been keeping me busy is going over the copy-edited version of the American edition of my book, which will be published in September by Basic Books. The British edition, published by Jonathan Cape, should be available June 1, both in Britain and Canada, and presumably one can order it from the British or Canadian versions of Amazon. The American version will have a somewhat different preface, and has been separately copy-edited, so there will be minor changes (beyond just changing British spellings back to the American ones I first wrote down…). Late last week I was sent an early copy of the British version of the book itself, and I’m very happy with how it looks.

Last week I also spent a significant amount of time at my colleague John Morgan’s 60th birthday conference, which was held here in the math department. Morgan is one of the leading figures in topology, and over the years has worked on a wide range of different kinds of mathematics, often bringing the subject together with other very different parts of mathematics. At the moment he’s involved in at least two projects, one involving Calabi-Yaus with Chuck Doran, another an ambitious attempt with Gang Tian to work out the details of Perelman’s proof of the Poincare conjecture. He’s also doing a stellar job as chair of our department.

Morgan has collaborated with and interacted significantly with Witten over the years, and Witten gave a wonderful talk at the conference on Gauge Theory and the Geometric Langlands Program. This was really just a taste aimed at mathematicians of his recent work on geometric Langlands and gauge theory. He explained some of the history of Montonen-Olive duality, some of the relevance of supersymmetry to mathematics, and then explained what an ‘t Hooft operator in gauge theory is, and that it is related to the Hecke operators studied in geometric Langlands.

Here are some quick links to interesting things I’ve run across recently:

John Baez has a new edition of his proto-blog “This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics”. It contains a beautiful exposition of the circle of very different sorts of mathematics that all gets related via Dynkin diagrams.

Greg Moore and his recently graduated student Dmitriy Belov had a beautiful new paper on self-dual field theory in 4l+2 dimensions.

Christianity Today has an article entitled Science in Wonderland, which mentions Susskind and string theory and notes:

This theory has not met with, shall we say, universal approbation, not least because it can’t be empirically tested. You could even say it’s not science, and some have said that, but they don’t hiss the way they do when they talk about Intelligent Design.

The AMS has a new web-site devoted to Mathematical Imagery.

In the comment section here, Bert Schroer pointed to some web-sites I wasn’t aware of that contain all sorts of links to various material related to the algebraic approach to QFT. These include the home page of Stephen Summers and the Local Quantum Physics Crossroads” hosted at Gottingen.

Update: If you want to know why the mathematics associated with Dynkin diagrams can’t be usefully explained or viscerally understood without string theory, as well as why John Baez is a proto-human, you can consult the blog of a prominent Harvard faculty member. He also notes that

Peter Woit is another proto-human who eats everyone who dares to look in between the clouds. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

and explains in great detail why

it is important not only to learn string theory well but also to emphasize that and explain why people like Peter Woit are intellectual barbarian cannibals. 😉

I’ve been thinking there’s too much politics on this blog recently, and yet I still think the political activities of well-known theorists are worth noting here. As commenter Arun pointed out, this Sunday’s New York Times has a letter to the editor criticizing the human rights violations at Guantanamo, signed by many prominent particle theorists, including Susskind (whose name comes first, perhaps he’s the organizer), Bjorken, Deser, Dyson, Gaillard, Gross, Polchinski, Schwarz, Wilczek, Witten and Zumino.

Over at the science policy blog Prometheus, Roger Pielke has a posting called A Very Bad Dream Indeed, in which he strongly criticizes the authors of this letter for writing such a letter that has nothing to do with science policy. He seems to be worried about these scientists “transforming their privilege in the scientific domains into authority in non-scientific domains.” Somehow, I just don’t see the possibility of theoretical physicists grabbing political power and ramrodding through policies they support as being something much worth worrying about. My reaction to this particular letter was not “who do these people think they are to do this?”, but rather “how come everyone else isn’t doing this?” The situation at Guantanamo is a disgrace to this country and that the courts allow it to continue is shocking.

More about this at No Se Nada, the blog of Kevin Vranes.

OK, now, no more about politics for a while. I promise….

The EPP2010 report by the Committee on Elementary Particle Physics in the 21st Century is out today, and it is entitled Revealing the Hidden Nature of Space and Time. This committee was convened to recommend priorities for high energy physics in the U.S. over the next 15 years. Its membership included non-physicists and it was chaired by economist and ex-president of Princeton Harold Shapiro. The inclusion of people from outside the field emphasized the need for wide support for funding of U.S. particle physics if it is to remain healthy. The latest issue of Nature contains an article about the report entitled US particle physics fights for survival, and an editorial Making collider endorsement count. A press release about the report is here.

At the press conference announcing the report (which was webcast), Shapiro emphasized that the non-physicists on the committee had not been fully aware of the difficult situation US particle physics was in. They were very sobered by the state of US HEP, which he described as facing a serious danger that it would be half its size in 4-5 years, as current programs ended without a compelling follow-on program. The most important recommendation of the committee was that construction of the ILC in the US, probably at Fermilab, be vigorously pursued and that:

The United States should announce its strong intent to become the host country for the ILC and should undertake the necessary work to provide a viable site and mount a compelling bid.

Constructing the ILC in the US would require an increase beyond the rate of inflation in HEP funding, and the committee considered a scenario of budget increases of 2-3%per year that would probably be required, although solid numbers for what the cost of the ILC would be are still not yet available. Emphasizing the ILC in this way was described as a “high-risk, high-reward” strategy, and that taking these risks was necessary for US HEP to retain any leadership role in the field.

More specifically, the committee recommended six action items, ranked by priority:

1. Realize the physics potential of the LHC experimental program.

2. Launch a major program of R and D for the ILC, significantly expanding current expenditures on this.

3. Announce US intent to become the host country for the ILC.

4. Increase the current share of the HEP budget devoted to studying dark matter, the CMB and dark energy.

5. Develop a staged program, with international cooperation, of neutrino experiments, with emphasis on neutrinoless double-beta decay, accelerator based experiments, and search for possible charge-parity violation. This last might involve large detectors that could also be used to search for proton decay.

6. Support (especially if they’re not very expensive) high-precision experiments that probe beyond the Standard Model physics, such as a future B factory, lepton-flavor violation and rare-decay studies, searches for electric dipole moments, and precision measurements of muon g-2.

The committee did a very good job of recognizing the difficult situation of US HEP, and coming up with a plausible strategy for how to make the best of it. I have my doubts about whether it’s really a good idea to sell this as “Revealing the Hidden Nature of Space and Time”, since it’s not especially likely that that is what is going to happen. There’s no particularly good reason to believe that extra dimensions will show up at the LHC or ILC energy scales, so over-selling this is dangerous. I do understand that it’s a lot harder to get people excited about the new physics that this is likely to really all be about: understanding the nature of electro-weak symmetry breaking.

This was a study of what to do about experimental HEP, so the problems of theoretical HEP were not addressed. Unfortunately, besides the usual arguments for supersymmetry, over-hyped ideas about string theory make an appearance as the committee calls for “Improved tests of general relativity to search for effects of extra dimensions or string theory” and “Measuring time variation of physical constants with spectroscopy of distant objects to search for effects of extra dimensions and string theory”, without noting that string theory makes no predictions about either of these. One other thing included in the report is new, improved verbiage about the status of string theory. In Witten’s biographical sketch, it is described as “one of the leading candidates for the grand unified theory of elementary particle physics”, which seems to me to be a downgrade from the phrase “the leading candidate” which until recently was often used to describe the status of the theory.

Update: More about this from Chad Orzel, Lubos, Clifford Johnson at Cosmic Variance, Tommaso Dorigo and The New York Times.

Update: Also from Alexey Petrov, who in a comment at Cosmic Variance links to a very different point of view about prospects for constructing the ILC in the near term: a recent resignation letter from Bill Foster, who was the Proton Driver project leader at Fermilab (the Proton Driver would be a high-luminosity, lower energy accelerator, useful for, among other things, producing a more intense neutrino beam).

Update: More from JoAnne Hewett at Cosmic Variance.

Dan Freed recently gave the Andrejewski Lectures at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig, and has put the slides from his first lecture on-line. These give a beautiful overview of his work with Hopkins and Teleman relating loop group representations and equivariant K-theory, and explain one aspect of the relation to topological quantum field theory. His second and third lectures aren’t available on-line. The second was supposed to cover the way they use Dirac operators, which is explained in their papers. The third lecture was evidently about the relation to Chern-Simons, which isn’t in their papers so far, and which I’d be quite curious to know more about.

This fall, Dan will be giving a graduate course on Loop Groups and Algebraic Topology, which should be quite interesting.