Not Even Wrong

There’s a wonderful piece of software out there I hadn’t heard about, called Mathgen, which generates impressive looking mathematics research papers that are utter gobbledygook. A Mathgen paper on Independent, Negative, Canonically Turing Arrows of Equations and Problems in Applied Formal PDE was recently accepted (see the full story here) by the journal Advances in Pure Mathematics, one of many “open access” journals put out by Scientific Research Publishing. If you’re looking for theoretical physics papers instead of pure math, Scientific Research Publishing has the Journal of Modern Physics. Some work on Mathgen is probably required before it is ready to submit papers to this journal.

These journals charge authors $500 to publish their papers, something which is now being sold as a wonderful mechanism for providing “open access” to the scientific literature. At the same time they make very clear what one big problem with this is: the financial incentive for the journal becomes to publish as many papers as possible, since that’s the only way to increase revenue. Scientific Research Publishing does a good job of showing where this model for funding dissemination of academic research leads.

FQXi has recently issued a Request for Proposals, using money from the Templeton Foundation to fund about $3 million in grants for research on the “Physics of Information”:

• What is the relationship between information and reality? Can information exist without any “material” substance? Can matter exist without any information? Or, are information and reality two sides of the same coin?
• How does nature (the universe and things therein) process information? Are there fundamental limits? How is nature shaped and transformed by processing information?
• What are the fundamental differences between classical and quantum information?
• What can the physics of information reveal about black holes, singularities, physics at the Planck length, and the origins and fate of our universe?

This follows on the heels of $4 million in grants announced last week on the topic of New Frontiers in Astronomy and Cosmology.

• From commenter Clark here, news that Mochizuki has acknowledged that the problem pointed out by Vesselin Dmitrov with his proof of the abc conjecture on MathOverflow is a real one, but claims that the argument can be fixed, with fixes that he explains here. He is preparing updated versions of the papers containing flaws.
• As new negative results about SUSY keep coming in, Nanopoulos et al. issue new “predictions” of a SUSY signal just around the corner. In light of this from ATLAS, here’s an updated list of “best fits” for SUSY (first posted here)

  arXiv:1007.5100 455 GeV (“Golden Point”)
  arXiv:1009.2981 455-481 GeV (“Golden Strip”)
  arXiv:1111.0236 512 GeV (“Universe F-U2”)
  arXiv:1111.4204 518 GeV (“Profumo di SUSY”)
  arXiv:1203.1918 610 GeV (“Aroma of Stops and Gluinos”)
  arXiv:1205.3052 708 GeV (“The Sweet Fragrance of SUSY”)
  arXiv:1210.3011 756 GeV (“Primordial Synthesis”)

  The authors have stopped going on about how this all smells, but now are acknowledging help from Tommaso Dorigo (see here).

• Tomorrow at Boston University there will be a conference on quantum gravity, celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the First Osgood Hill Conference on Quantum Gravity.
• The Higgs continues to get lots of positive media attention. This week’s episode of The Big Bang Theory was called The Higgs Boson Observation, and features lots of Higgs-related things on the blackboards.

  At the IAS in Princeton, Yuri Milner’s multi-million-dollar men are giving public talks about the Higgs. Last week was Juan Maldacena on The Symmetry and Simplicity of the Laws of Nature and the Higgs Boson, next week it will be Nima Arkani-Hamed on The Inevitability of Physical Laws: Why the Higgs Has to Exist. At some point these talks may appear here.

• On Friday the Templeton Foundation handed out $5.6 million as part of its New Frontiers in Astronomy and Cosmology competition, some to students for writing essays, most of it to physicists and astronomers, many of whom promise to find ways of testing the Multiverse (grant winners are here). Intriguingly, David Spergel is not just “testing” the Multiverse, but “detecting or falsifying” it, I wonder what that’s about.
• Lots of self-examination going on in the US HEP community about what to do post-Higgs discovery. Argonne had an HEP Higgs Retreat (no slides for “SUSY is Dead?” it seems). The past few days at Fermilab there was a DPF Community Planning Meeting, organizing activities to lead up to next summer’s “Snowmass” Community Study, to be held in Minneapolis. What’s long overdue but unlikely to happen would be a US Community Study of the implications of the SUSY/string theory fiasco for HEP theory.
• The Calculus of Love is a short film with a math theme involving the Goldbach conjecture.
• For a debate about Pythagoreanism, the idea that math is the key to the universe, see here. An interesting debate, but maybe they should have had some mathematicians involved…
• Last week I was up in Boston and went to some of the talks at a conference in honor of Daniel Quillen, who passed away last year. Quillen’s remarkable and influential work was at the boundary of topology and algebra, in particular he was largely responsible for discovering how to properly define algebraic K-theory. An early version was distributed of material about Quillen that will appear in the November Notices of the AMS, including a long explanation by Graeme Segal of the high points of Quillen’s mathematical contributions (Note added: this is now available here). I found the talks by Segal and Hopkins both inspiring and baffling, with Hopkins in particular starting off slow and comprehensible, but reaching escape velocity by the time he got around to what sounds like an exciting new result about the Brauer group in the context of stable homotopy theory. This is joint work with Lurie and Lieblich, but you’re going to have to find someone other than me to explain it to you.
  This coming week I’ll be in Toronto for the Fields Medal Symposium, which will cover all things Langlands. The opening public lectures will be live-cast, see here.

I had decided to retire from the Nobel Prize prediction business at the top of my game after my first prediction soon after this blog was started. I haven’t heard anything about what tomorrow’s announcement will be, but did just notice something that gave me pause, this quote in a Cosmos magazine article:

“There’s nothing stopping us from giving the prize to an organisation. But it has not been the custom in the scientific prizes,” said Lars Bergstroem, secretary of the committee for the Nobel physics prize.

“The Nobel Peace Prize has often been awarded to organisations. But in the science prizes we have tried to find the most prize-worthy individuals.”

If there really is nothing but custom to keep them from awarding the Nobel this year to ATLAS, CMS, and CERN for the Higgs, I can’t see a better occasion to break with the custom, and they’ve had a long time to decide whether or not to do this. So, here’s a (probably wrong…) prediction for tomorrow: ATLAS, CMS and CERN as Nobelists.

Update: As predicted, that prediction was wrong: the prize went to Haroche and Wineland for work manipulating individual quantum states. Maybe next year for the Higgs…

Yuri Milner’s Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation announced today the process by which future winners of the $3 million Fundamental Physics Prize will be chosen (for more about this, see here), a process which involves setting up yet another prize, the Physics Frontiers Prize. The idea is that by the end of the year, the Selection Committee of previous prize winners will pick three winners of the new Physics Frontiers Prize, and these will be the candidates for the 2013 $3 million Fundamental Physics Prize. One of the three will get the $3 million, the other two will get $300,000 and automatically renominated for the $3 million prize each year over the next 5 years. So, I guess you might not want to win immediately, since if you get passed over the first time, you might end up with $3.3 million instead of $3 million.

There’s also a separate $100,000 New Horizons in Physics Prize “targeted at promising junior researchers”. Nominations for these two categories of prizes can be made by going to the Fundamental Physics Prize website.

The press release quotes Nima Arkani-Hamed, member of the Selection Committee as:

This is a tremendous opportunity to recognize the highest levels of achievement in fundamental physics. We look forward to receiving nominations for outstanding candidates ranging across all areas of the field.

Arkani-Hamed is in India, where an interview with him appeared today (hat-tip an e-mail from him to Lubos Motl), with comments about the Milner prizes:

I really think it’s a fantastic thing for Physics—to have a showcase every year where scientists get to talk about the exciting aspects of the subject. I don’t think any physicist or scientists are motivated to research by the thought of a prize or the money involved in it. But, it definitely helps in creating awareness among the youngsters, and encourages more people to take up the subject.

the Higgs:

There are people trying to figure out the indirect effects between the different Higgs like particles. These are very difficult experiments and will take another 20 years before any confirmation is reached.

the future of particle physics:

What’s going on in particle physics is not just the evolution of the standard model but the rise of a new branch of physics that can solve some of the age old problems. Super symmetry is a very good example of what this physics should look like. For the first time we will have some evidence that there’s actually really fine adjustments of the parameters of fundamental physics hardwired into the way nature works. This will be very shocking for many people and teach us something profound.

and string theory:

In late 1990s one of the most important theoretical discoveries was that string theory and particle physics are not different but different descriptions of the same thing. All the good viable ideas people have had in the past 40 years are now branched together to seek the truth.

Update: Haaretz reports that Witten “said he would probably donate part of the $3 million he won in a surprise award to J Street, the liberal pro-Israel group.”

Please note that any attempts to pursue, from either side, the Arab-Israeli conflict on my blog’s comment section will be immediately deleted.

Update: Just realized that the Witten/J Street news is rather old, from shortly after the announcement of the original prizes. I didn’t hear about it at the time, curious if there’s other news about what plans the prize winner have for their winnings.

Some short items of a wide variety of kinds:

• Witten has posted to the arXiv a long paper about the work on superstring perturbation theory that he has been doing. Superstring Perturbation Theory Revisited, together with two papers of background material (see here and here) weighs in at 400 pages. For an explanation of the main points, you might want to start with one of Witten’s recent talks on the subject, for instance this one at Strings 2012.
  Witten doesn’t make much in the way of claims for the significance of this work, portraying it more as a project of going through the foundations of the subject of how you define higher loop superstring amplitudes in a much more careful way than was common during the mid-late 80s when this was a hot topic of research. The technicalities here are ferocious, well beyond my expertise. It will be interesting to see if this project revives interest in the subject and others start working on it again.
• Also on the arXiv is a new paper from Paul Frampton, with affiliation now including the Centro Universitario Devoto, part of the prison where he is unfortunately still incarcerated in Argentina. He argues here that he is still able to fulfill his duties as a University of North Carolina professor from Devoto prison, but doesn’t seem to have gotten the university to agree about this.
• There’s a conference at DESY this week on Lessons from the first phase of the LHC, with talks on Friday discussing “Where could SUSY be hiding?” and “Searches for new physics at the LHC: some frustration, but no despair…”. For some additional context to the SUSY issue, I recently ran across this talk from SUSY 02, 10 years ago, which argued that SUSY arguments implied that “superpartners are probably being produced” at a new collider that had been running for a year or two (the Tevatron Run II at that time).
• The SCOAP³ consortium has announced a plan to support commercial journals publishing HEP papers, paying them 1000-2000$ per HEP paper they publish according to a complicated formula. Elsevier would get about $2.4 million/year for papers in Physics Letters B and Nuclear Physics B, but somehow reduce its subscription fees to compensate. I don’t understand at all how this is supposed to work (obvious problems include that of why anyone would subscribe once it was all open access, and what the mechanism is to stop publishers from increasing revenues by publishing more second-rate papers). Nature has an article explaining more about what is going on here. Steven Harnad describes the scheme as Unnecessary, Unscalable and Unsustainable, Peter Coles as “Particle physics volunteers to be fleeced…”
• String theory advertising available here, Sean Carroll commentary about this here.
• At Foundations of Physics, Gerard ’t Hooft has a new paper which doesn’t seem to be on the arXiv, On the Foundations of Superstring Theory (you may need a subscription to read it). Here’s the abstract:
  

  Superstring theory is an extension of conventional quantum field theory that allows for stringlike and branelike material objects besides pointlike particles. The basic foundations on which the theory is built are amazingly shaky, and, equally amazingly, it seems to be this lack of solid foundations to which the theory owes its strength. We emphasize that such a situation is legitimate only in the development phases of a new doctrine. Eventually, a more solidly founded structure must be sought.
  Although it is advertised as a “candidate theory of quantum gravity”, we claim that string theory may not be exactly that. Rather, just like quantum field theory itself, it is a general mathematical framework for a class of theories. Its major flaw could be that it still embraces a Copenhagen view on the relation between quantum mechanics and reality, while any “theory of everything”, that is, a theory for the entire cosmos, should do better than that.

  There’s a recent blog posting about this here, including commentary from ’t Hooft himself.

• If you’re trying to keep up on reaction to Mochizuki’s claimed proof of the ABC conjecture, try looking here. Still I think a very long ways to go before experts understand this well enough to evaluate whether this is a solid proof.
• I recently heard from Nick Carlin, who has unearthed the following scientific documents: Strange Particle Interactions in a Bubble Chamber and The Angular Correlation of Polarization of Annihilation Radiation, from late 1977 or spring 1978. Handwritten commentary is from William J. Skocpol and Robert V. Pound.

Update: Some frustration, but no despair is now on-line. The first slide is pretty amusing…

Update: More news about the latest in Paul Frampton’s case here.

Following up on last week’s European Strategy Group Meeting in Krakow, this week UK particle physicists are doing something similar, with a Particle Physics Advisory Panel community meeting in Birmingham.

The talks on the experimental side tell much the same story as the Krakow talks. On the theory side, the UK meeting has more, with a phenomenology talk which discusses prospects for “Saving SUSY” while noting that:

It’s ironic that the solution to the absence of SUSY is to add even more stuff: composite 3rd generation or Higgs, R-parity violating couplings, scalar gluons, or new singlets.

There’s extensive discussion of UK particle theory funding here. I don’t understand very well how particle theory is funded in the UK, but was interested to note that the slide on page 5 has string theory’s piece of the pie stable at 27% last year (also 27% in 2008, 28% in 2005). Mike Duff (see commentary here) wrote a piece for the forthcoming 40 Years of String Theory volume arguing that the 2006 books by Lee Smolin and me were responsible for destroying funding of string theory in the UK, but the numbers in this new talk don’t seem to bear this out. I gather there’s a separate story about the EPSRC and mathematical physics, and curious to hear from anyone who knows more about that. But if the state of affairs is that the mathematical end of string theory is being defunded while the phenomenological end is going strong, that can’t be because someone in authority read my book…

Update: The US has its own version of this planned to take place over the next year, Snowmass 2013, starting with a meeting next month at Fermilab. It looks like this will be purely about planning on the experimental side, with the problems of particle theory not on the agenda.