Not Even Wrong

This post was originally going to be just about the latest SUSY exclusion results announced at SUSY 2012 and their significance, but I realized there’s nothing much new to say, and it would be tedious to just write the same things. ATLAS new results are here, including some using this year’s 8 TeV data. As before, not a hint of SUSY in the CMS or ATLAS data. Now that the expected places to find SUSY have shown nothing, emphasis is on how to search more obscure corners of the 100 + parameter space of the theory which are accessible at the LHC, but hard to study. For a good recent survey of this effort, see Matt Reece’s recent presentation here.

SUSY 2012 featured a plenary talk by Gordon Kane, promoting his string theory “predictions”. As usual, the gluino is right around the corner. Back in 2000, it was supposed to be around 250 GeV, with SUSY discovery at the Tevatron in 2001-3 (see here). Last summer the “prediction” was 600 GeV, just above the 500 GeV limits. Last December, the gluino discovery was imminent, by summer 2012. The latest news is that the gluino mass prediction is now 1 TeV, just above the 800 GeV limits according to Kane. You can watch the gluino move by comparing the same “prediction” plot on slide 22 here and slide 34 here. Kane now claims in bold face that “String/M theory prediction is that no gluino signal expected so far” (page 35) referring (I think) to this paper, which seems to say nothing of the kind. This is just getting more and more bizarre.

Matt Strassler (described here as “the chief US theoretician”) has rarely been critical of string theory hype (although he did in a comment refer to Kane’s claims as “garbage and propaganda”), preferring to see prominent blogging critics of string theory and SUSY hype as the bigger problem to deal with. Today though he took a dramatic and rather admirable step, with a posting about string theory that starts off with:

…the theory’s been spectacularly over-hyped, and the community’s political control of high-energy physics in many U.S. physics departments has negatively impacted many scientific careers, including my own.

He goes on to cast himself as a lonely moderate surrounded by two teams of extremists, arguing that

it is high time the ball were grabbed by the referee and placed quietly in the middle of the field where it belongs.

His refereed position in the middle of the field would have acknowledgement that “string theory cannot be tested at present, and that situation might continue for a very long time, perhaps centuries”, while lauding string theory for providing a range of important insights into other problems than unification. This refereed position seems to me already pretty much the mainstream position of string theorists I know. My problems with it are that it still allows the heavy promotion of a failed idea (string unification as “our best bet”, even if mysteriously “hard to test”), and the over-hype problem is also prevalent among discussion of string theory applications to other parts of physics.

Strassler gives an interesting example of how some ideas from string theory ended up providing inspiration for advances in amplitude calculations, although the main heros of the tale are the phenomenologists who have done the hard work behind these advances (see his exchange with the anonymous “dude” in the comments).

Oddly enough, what seems to have motivated Strassler to take this new public stand are the recent $3 million prizes awarded to his colleagues down the road at Princeton. He devoted this recent posting to attacking me and Nature News for quoting me about the prizes, but ended up agreeing with some of my concerns, specifically:

What upsets me is that there is a long, long list of deserving scientists, some of whom have received little recognition despite their important work, and some of whom could really use some research money and/or time off from teaching — and Milner overlooked them all…

Philanthrophy needs to be done with the consent and participation of the beneficiaries; otherwise it generally fails, and sometimes it causes complete disasters. For instance, you can completely destabilize an organization that is functioning well if you just hand one of its members a million dollar check without understanding the implications…

Anyway, as far as I can tell, the Milner prize is one thing our field didn’t really need. I can think of a few things we really do desperately need, at least in the U.S.

It’s pretty clear where Strassler thinks the money should have gone:

we have too many string theorists teaching at the top U.S. universities, and not enough theorists doing other aspects of high-energy physics, including Standard Model predictions…

He explained in the earlier posting that he has been trying to raise private money for an LHC Institute, but that this has failed because of the recession. I don’t know any details of this, but I do know that about five years ago he and Arkani-Hamed were proposing something like this to the NSF, with the two of them as co-directors. This foundered not because of the recession but because reviewers didn’t much like the idea of giving a lot of new money to well-funded theorists at Princeton and Rutgers, largely to retool string theory groups into LHC phenomenology groups.

That proposal advertised the likelihood of discovery of SUSY or something equally dramatic about a year after first beams at the LHC, with a large group of theorists needed to sort out the “LHC Inverse Problem” of how one was going to figure out the underlying physics responsible for the confusing plethora of non-SM signals the LHC would be seeing. Perhaps a reason for finding it hard to get funding for a theory LHC institute these days is not the recession, but the lack of any such advertised signal. On the other hand, with $12 million of cash in their pockets now, the IAS theorists should be able to themselves privately fund the proposed Arkani-Hamed/Strassler center, if they still think this a good idea.

Gerard ’t Hooft in recent years has been pursuing some idiosyncratic ideas about quantum mechanics; for various versions of these, see papers like this, this, this and this. His latest version is last month’s Discreteness and Determinism in Superstrings, which starts with cellular automata in 1+1 dimensions and somehow gets a quantized superstring out of it (there are also some comments about this on his web-site here).

Personally I find it difficult to get at all interested in this (for reasons I’ll try and explain in a moment), but those who are interested might like to know that ’t Hooft has taken to explaining himself and discussing things with his critics at a couple places on-line, including Physics StackExchange, and Lubos Motl’s blog. If you want to discuss ’t Hooft’s ideas, best if you use one of these other venues, where you can interact with the man himself.

One of ’t Hooft’s motivations is a very common one, discomfort with the non-determinism of the conventional interpretation of quantum mechanics. The world is full of crackpots with similar feelings who produce reams of utter nonsense. ’t Hooft is a scientist though of the highest caliber, and as with some other people who have tried to do this sort of thing, I don’t think what he is producing is nonsense. It is, however, extremely speculative, and, to my taste, starting with a very unpromising starting point.

Looking at the results he has, there’s very little of modern physics there, including pretty much none of the standard model (which ’t Hooft himself had a crucial role in developing). If you’re going to claim to solve open problems in modern physics with some radical new ideas, you need to first show that these ideas reproduce the successes of the estabished older ones. From what I can tell, ‘t Hooft may be optimistic he can get there, but he’s a very long way from such a goal.

Another reason for taking very speculative ideas seriously, even if they haven’t gotten far yet, is if they seem to involve a set of powerful and promising ideas. This is very much a matter of judgement: what to me are central and deep ideas about mathematics and physics are quite different than someone else’s list. In this case, the central mathematical structures of quantum mechanics fit so well with central, deep and powerful insights into modern mathematics (through symmetries and representation theory) that any claim these should be abandoned in favor of something very different has a big hurdle to overcome. Basing everything on cellular automata seems to me extremely unpromising: you’re throwing out deep and powerful structures for something very simple and easy to understand, but with little inherent explanatory power. That’s my take on this, those who see this differently and want to learn more about what ’t Hooft is up to should follow the links above, and try discussing these matters at the venues ’t Hooft is frequenting.

• There’s an interview with the CERN director here.
• John Preskill and others at the Caltech Institute for Quantum Information and Mattter now have a blog here.
• The usual summer workshop on math and physics at Stony Brook is now running at the Simons Center, see videos of talks here. Videos of talks from the Simons Symposium this spring in the Virgin Islands on knot homologies and BPS states are now available here.
• Last month there was a CBMS conference on Unitary Representations of Reductive Groups in Boston, with David Vogan the main speaker. For a nice set of survey lectures and others, see here. If you find the Vogan conference too old-school, a workshop on categorical representation theory this coming week organized by David Ben-Zvi may be more to your liking, lecture notes starting to appear here.
• The only thing stopping me so far from ordering a copy of Francis Farley’s novel Catalysed Fusion is that it looks like it is only available in ebook form, and I’ve until now avoided those and stuck to paper. According to an article in the Telegraph:
  

  …a steamy new novel written by a retired physicist lifts the lid on the organisation’s studious exterior to reveal an altogether more glamorous lifestyle of wild nights, adrenalin-fuelled sports and romantic trysts…

  Prof Farley describes a group of young researchers whose groundbreaking work and racy private lives intertwine as they enjoy the high life at Switzerland’s top ski resorts and France’s best beaches.

  Prof Farley revealed that he even based a character on himself – Ivan, a physicist and crack glider pilot who is married to a former stripper and sets up a new lab on a nudist Mediterranean island.

  He told the Daily Telegraph: “We were well paid, we had diplomatic status, no taxes. We got tax-free petrol and drinks and we went out and enjoyed life…

  “We worked hard and then some people would go home to their families but there were lots of little floozies about and other men had a roving eye, and so did some of the women.”

  Perhaps things have changed a bit since the eighties in Geneva….

• Text books for graduate students on SUSY and string theory are coming fast and furious these days. Next month will see Peter West’s Introduction to Strings and Branes, a few months ago there was String Theory and Particle Physics: An Introduction to String Phenomenology by Ibanez and Uranga. Even more recent is Freedman and Van Proeyen’s Supergravity, which now has one review on Amazon (from “Dan”):
  

  This is a must-buy for every high energy theorist who wants to know Sugra. The first nine chapters also make a great source for classical field theory and can be used as a complement for PhD students learning QFT and GR.
  A wonderful work!

Update: A few more recent and upcoming string theory textbooks are:

• Strings and Fundamental Physics
• Basic Concepts of String Theory
• D-Brane: Superstrings and New Perspective of Our World

Around the time of the Higgs discovery announcement last month I was contacted by someone from the Italian left-wing newspaper Il Manifesto, who asked if I’d write something for them about the Higgs. I told them that it would be much better if they could get an experimentalist to write about that topic, since the discovery was really an experimental achievement. They managed to get Tommaso Dorigo to write that piece for them (see here), but I agreed to write something for them a bit later, about the significance of other results from the LHC. That piece appeared in the newspaper today in Italian translation, an English version follows here.

This was written last week, under the combined influence of watching some of the Strings 2012 talks and thinking about the possible impact of the new $3 million Fundamental Physics Prizes, which largely went to string theorists. For this venue, I was unable to resist channeling my inner leftist (normally the only newspaper that wants me to write for them is the Wall Street Journal…) and making Russian financier Yuri Milner to a large extent the bogeyman of the piece.

A very serious concern that I wanted to raise is that of the long-term danger that fundamental physics faces in the combination of string theory ideology and the possible “nightmare scenario” of the LHC finding nothing that disagrees with the Standard Model. For decades now the theoretical side of the subject has been dominated by one specific set of not very compelling ideas: 10d superstrings at the Planck scale, with a SUSY GUT at slightly lower scale, and low-energy SUSY explaining the supposed “hierarchy problem” created by the vast difference between those scales and the scale of electroweak symmetry breaking (of order 100 GeV). The force most likely to challenge the hegemony of this ideology has always been the LHC, which was supposed to see superpartners responsible for stabilizing the electroweak scale. Watching the speakers at Strings 2012 made clear that the failure of this experimental prediction would not cause them to give up on this ideology, but instead to redouble efforts to prop it up at all costs.

The fundamental problem is the deeply entrenched nature of string theory ideology in the power centers of the academy and among the most talented theorists. Milner’s choice to provide out-scale rewards to such talented people is not the main problem, although he provided a convenient target for me in the piece. If we really do end up with the “nightmare scenario” of experiment not coming to rescue, it’s now all too clear where we end up: the textbooks of string theory and supersymmetry have already been written, and that will be codified as humanity’s best understanding of fundamental physical reality for the indefinite future.

Maybe some new theoretical ideas will somehow bloom, but otherwise our best hope to get out of this will be the efforts and innovations of talented experimentalists, likely requiring expensive equipment. It will be a challenge to continue to find public resources to fund this. Maybe if the trends of recent decades continue, it will be up to the financiers to decide whether humanity continues down the experimental path. Luckily, a lot of them seem to be interested in physics.

The article follows, you might want to skip it if you’re a regular blog reader here, since you won’t hear anything new and it’s a bit of a rant…

Last month came an announcement from Geneva that physicists of my generation had been anxiously awaiting since our student days nearly
forty years ago. Experimentalist Tommaso Dorigo wrote in this newspaper about the great achievement of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and his 6000 or so colleagues, who came together to produce and make the first measurements of a new fundamental element of nature: the Higgs particle.

For theorists like myself, this was a bittersweet victory for our subject. The Higgs particle showed up more or less exactly in the manner predicted by the so-called Standard Model, a wildly successful fundamental quantum theory developed between 1967 and 1973. This theory had passed critical tests time and time again, but until last month the trickiest part of the theory had not been tested by direct observation. Perhaps we were missing something important, and the real world would slap us in the face with results contradicting the theory, and giving us clues about how to find a better one. Instead, we saw the equations of our textbooks dramatically confirmed. We now await a long process of detailed investigation of this new phenomenon, a process which will keep Tommaso and his colleagues busy for many years to come.

The Higgs discovery emerged as a single sudden announcement, but over the last two years an equally important discovery has slowly come into focus, one small piece of data from the LHC at a time. Unlike the case of the Higgs, this discovery has been a vigorous slap in the face to the theoretical particle physics community, telling us in no uncertain terms that we’ve been wasting most of our time for the past thirty years. For these three decades, the subject has been dominated by research into an elaborate speculative scenario which has been investigated in exhaustive detail.

This scenario goes under the name of “superstring theory”, referring to a set of ideas that form not exactly a well-defined theory, but rather a conjecture that a theory with certain properties should exist. This theory would unify the Standard Model with Einstein’s theory of gravity known as General Relativity, embedding both in a complicated structure involving six extra dimensions of space. The possibility that these new dimensions would put in an appearance at the LHC has often been used to impress the public with flashy claims about the dramatic things that CERN’s new machine could find, things that sounded like (and were) science-fiction. Whatever they told the public, few physicists were expecting such dimensions to be observable in the data, since the conventional speculative scenario put their size at far too small a value to be seen at the LHC. No one has been surprised at all by the failure of any sign of extra dimensions to show up at CERN, despite a careful search for any possible evidence.

The “super” in “superstring” though is a different story. This indicates a crucial property of the conjectural unifying theory: each fundamental particle should come paired with another one of very specific properties, the particle’s “superpartner”. The electron should be paired with a new particle named the “selectron”, each quark with a “squark”, etc. Over the years an increasingly rigid ideology explaining the supposedly wondrous properties of this “supersymmetry” which would dramatically improve upon the Standard Model. That supersymmetry provided none of the powerful explanations of past observations we have come to expect from new symmetry principles was an inconvenient issue best ignored. As each new generation of accelerators came to life at CERN and at Fermilab in the United States, superpartners were looked for, but never found.

Supersymmetry entered the textbooks anyway and has now been taught to generations of graduate students. Always part of the story being told was the claim that superpartners should have masses roughly similar to the mass of the Higgs particle. When the Higgs was found, the superpartners had to be there too. Consistency of the Standard Model demanded that the Higgs could not be too massive, so long before the LHC was turned on, it was a sure thing that if the Higgs particle was there the LHC would find it. That part of the story worked out perfectly, but it has been accompanied by a huge embarrassment: no sign of any superpartners at all. Not only were they supposed to be not too much heavier than the Higgs, but many of them were supposed to be much produced much more copiously, and thus be much easier to see. By now the LHC experiments have shown that such expected particles are absent, unless they are made inaccessible by pushing their masses up to more than an order of magnitude higher than that of the Higgs, a value far beyond what had been advertised as reasonable.

The implications of this attack on theorists by the reality principle are just beginning to sink in. The big yearly conference of superstring theorists was held this past week in Munich, with different speakers taking different approaches to dealing with the problem. One speaker advocated not doing anything until next year, hoping against hope that newer data would give better results. Others took the attitude that it had been clear for quite a while that superstring theory wasn’t going to show signs of existence at the LHC, so best to just work on finding other uses for it. In the conference final “Outlook and Vision” talk, the illustrious speaker announced that all was well, and didn’t mention the LHC results at all. The ostrich-like tactic of burying one’s head in the sand seems to be on the agenda for now, but this will become increasingly difficult to maintain as time goes on and more and more conclusive negative experimental results arrive.

As a physicist, one problem with having an experiment tell you that your ideas are wrong is that it means you are ineligible for a Nobel Prize. Your hopes for a right to a part share in $1.2 million have been dashed, and, no matter how famous and well-paid an academic star you may be, you will have to content yourself with living on your salary, supplemented perhaps by smaller, less well-known consolation prizes.

Around the time of the end of the superstring theory conference though, dramatic news came from billionaire Russian financier Yuri Milner. Known for building the most expensive house in the United States, he decided to help support physics by depositing $3 million dollars per person in the bank accounts of 8 prominent physicists and one mathematician, rewarding 6 of them for their work in superstring theory. He has modeled himself after Alfred Nobel, announcing a new foundation that will give out Fundamental Physics Prizes each year. Unlike the Nobel, these prizes can go to work for which there is no experimental evidence. What he’s looking for are “transformative advances” like superstring theory, which have gotten the seal of approval of popularity among high-status academics. Even if experiment shows the ideas to be wrong, as in the case of the latest data about supersymmetry, that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the recipients should reflect the conventional wisdom in the academy. The choice of who to give the Prizes to included giving them to every single professor of particle physics at the world’s most prestigious academic institution, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The question of competition with the Nobel prize was dealt with by setting the value of the prize far above that of the Nobel, at a level significantly higher than any other academic prize in the world.

The slap in the face by experimental data and its threat to impose the reality principle on the most powerful figures in the world of theoretical physics has thus been met by a riposte from another powerful force. This is another reality, that of entrenched academic interests, funded by the billions of dollars available to financiers who want to impose their will upon the world, or at least the small part of it that will write the textbooks of the future. Which of these forces will carry the day? Will the budget cuts imposed on physics research in Italy and elsewhere cripple the ability of the LHC experiments to continue to reveal the structure of nature, leaving our future fundamental science in the hands of powerful interests who will decide which version of reality they like best?

In the longer term, the physics community now faces difficult choices. Any machine more powerful than the LHC will be expensive and require multiple decades to design, finance, build and operate. The temptation will be there to again promise discovery of exotic new dimensions and supersymmetries in order to convince governments to provide funding. Instead of such empty promises, physicists should just make the case that humanity deserves the chance to continue the experimental investigation of the fundamentals of physical reality. The alternative is all too clear: the lack of public money to fund experimental investigation will put those with private money in charge of deciding what our scientific reality will be.

I’ve checked the date on this, and it’s not April 1, so maybe this is actually true. According to the website of the Russian television news network RT, James Cameron to produce story of reclusive Russian genius:

Celebrated Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman, the man who solved a century-old problem then turned down a $1 million prize, is to be the subject of a Hollywood movie produced by James Cameron.

Throughout his career, Perelman has made several breakthroughs in mathematics, geometry and topology. And though Perelman is known for leading a secluded life and avoiding journalists, he agreed to participate in the project dedicated to his milestone achievements. Avatar and Titanic creator James Cameron is rumored to be producing the movie.

Israeli producer Aleksandr Zabrovsky told KP Daily that it took him three years to convince Perelman to sign on to the project. He then approached Cameron with the idea, who was reportedly enthusiastic about it.

The film is due to be shot in the US, with an as-yet-unnamed professional actor covering the role of Perelman.

I’m finding it hard to figure out how Hollywood will dramatize the story of reclusively thinking about the Ricci-flow equations for seven years or so. I guess it will all be in the special effects, for which Cameron is famous.

One should perhaps take this with a large grain of salt, considering the following (from the Wikipedia Perelman entry):

In April 2011 Aleksandr Zabrovsky, producer of “President-Film” studio, claimed to have held an interview with Perelman and agreed to shoot a film about him, under the tentative title The Formula of the Universe.[36] Zabrovsky says that in the interview,[37] Perelman explained why he rejected the one million dollar prize.[36]

A number of journalists[38][39][40] believe that Zabrovky’s interview is most likely a fake, pointing to contradictions in statements supposedly made by Perelman.

Vladimir Voevodsky is a mathematics professor at the IAS in Princeton, most famous for his proof of the Bloch-Kato conjecture, work which won him a Fields Medal in 2002. This conjecture relates the K-theory of fields and their étale cohomology (note that there are other, different, Bloch-Kato conjectures on special values of L-functions). For a description of Voevodsky’s ideas from 2002, see this by Soulé. The proof of Bloch-Kato was only finished later, including work by other people, for more about this see Weibel’s lectures on the proof, or Voevodsky’s talk at the IHES conference honoring Grothendieck. For a popular talk by Voevodsky, see “An Intuitive Introduction to Motivic Homotopy Theory”, video here, write-up here.

Voevodsky has had a somewhat unusual career, for an interview from 2002 where he discusses his early years in Moscow and at Harvard, see here. A recent interview with him by Roman Mikhailov in two parts has appeared (in Russian, I’m relying on Google Translate to get the gist of it) here and here. He describes what appear to be various delusional episodes, especially during a period in 2006 and 2007 when he was unable to work.

In recent years he has moved away from his work on K-theory, towards topics in applied math (for a while he was investigating population genetics) and foundations of mathematics. This year the IAS will run a year-long program he is organizing on what he calls Univalent Foundations of Mathematics. Back in 2010 he gave a popular talk at the IAS, entitled What if Current Foundations of Mathematics are Inconsistent?