Not Even Wrong

• The AMS-02 experiment results will be announced tomorrow, 1700 CERN local time, webcast here. The normally reliable Jester says rumor is no dark matter. For this kind of astrophysics news, you should find a site with an expert to interpret the results, I’ll try and provide a link here.
• Weird. The Templeton Prize was supposed to be announced on Thursday, but they’ve changed their announcement to read “April 2013 (exact date to be determined)”. Did someone turn it down or something?
• There’s a very long oral history transcript here of an interesting interview with Joe Polchinski. It covers a lot of ground of the history of what went on in particle theory during an era which included the rise of string/M-theory. The interview took place in 2009, and has a certain amount of “string wars” sort of material, since that was the period when this was winding down. Someone should fix the proper names in the transcript though…
• As part of his Einstein Chair at CUNY, Dennis Sullivan has run a seminar for many, many years, with quite a few interesting speakers. There’s now video online of many of the talks.
• Howard Burton, who was the founding director of the Perimeter Institute now has a multimedia magazine called Ideas Roadshow, with one of the first programs a long interview with Nima Arkani-Hamed (access free for to this if you sign up).
• I keep on finding out about more math blogs worth a look, for instance Chromotopy and DZB’s blog (via Motivic Stuff).
• Eckhard Meinrenken’s book Clifford Algebras and Lie Theory is now out. The book is online here if your institution is paying Springer.

Update: A live blog from the AMS talk is here. See the comment from “M” here which has an abstract of the talk giving some of its main conclusions.

Update: CERN has a press release with the results here.

… these features show evidence of a new physics phenomena.

The exact shape of the spectrum, as shown in Figure 2, extended to higher energies, will ultimately determine whether this spectrum originates from the collision of dark matter particles or from pulsars in the galaxy. The high level of accuracy of this data shows that AMS will soon resolve this issue.

Update: For a summary of the significance of this for dark matter, see Resonaances.

The paper is here. The delay in the public announcement was clearly caused by Ting’s decision, unusual these days, to not submit a preprint to the arXiv when the results were ready, but just quietly submit to a journal (PRL, on March 14th), and say nothing publicly until the paper was accepted and published.

Update: Better (as in free) link for paper.

Update: The Templeton Prize was announced today, April 4: Desmond Tutu.

In recent years much of the attention of string theorists has turned to applications of string theory (via AdS/CFT) to heavy-ion physics and condensed matter physics. Since I’m no expert on either topic, I’ve been curious to hear what experts think about this. In the case of heavy-ion physics, as far as I can tell, this doesn’t seem to have worked out very well, with string theory not of much use to say anything about heavy-ion physics at the LHC (although I’d be interested to hear from those more knowledgeable about this). There does still seem to be some promotional activity in this area, with Joe Polchinski last month giving a popular talk in which he claimed that

The quark-gluon liquid, produced at the RHIC accelerator in NY and by the LHC, is best modeled as a black hole, by applying AdS/CFT duality.

On the AdS/CMT front, one expert is now being heard from. In the latest Physics Today, Philip Anderson has a piece called Strange connections to strange metals, in which he responds to an earlier Physics Today article by Hong Liu, From black holes to strange metals, which claimed:

String theory relates gravity to the physics of a novel phase of matter observed above the superconducting transition temperature.

Anderson writes:

It [the earlier Physics Today article] is one of many quasi-journalistic discussions I have seen of results using the AdS/CFT (anti–de Sitter/conformal field theory) correspondence from quantum gravitation theory ostensibly to solve condensed-matter physics problems such as the “strange metal” in the cuprate (high Tc) superconducting metals. As the probable source of the buzzword phrase “strange metal” to describe the phenomena observed in the cuprates and of a theory that bids well to explain those phenomena in detail, I think I have a reasonable motivation to object to the publication of those claims, even though advanced tentatively, when so much is known about this particular phase.

He ends with a summary of what he sees as the problem with the whole AdS/CMT idea:

As a very general problem with the AdS/CFT approach in condensed-matter theory, we can point to those telltale initials “CFT”—conformal field theory. Condensed-matter problems are, in general, neither relativistic nor conformal. Near a quantum critical point, both time and space may be scaling, but even there we still have a preferred coordinate system and, usually, a lattice. There is some evidence of other linear-T phases to the left of the strange metal about which they are welcome to speculate, but again in this case the condensed-matter problem is overdetermined by experimental facts.

Hong Liu responds here.

Anderson will be here at Columbia to give a colloquium April 15 on The Discovery of the Anderson-Higgs Mechanism. I’ve written something about this history here, look forward to hearing about it from Anderson himself. There’s much speculation about a possible Nobel for the Anderson-Higgs mechanism this year, one wonders if the Nobel committtee has any AdS/CMT proponents…

Update: An additional comment about this just occurred to me: the criticism of Anderson’s work on the Anderson-Higgs mechanism has always been that he didn’t appreciate how different relativistic systems. Now he’s claiming the AdS/CMT proponents don’t appreciate how different non-relativistic systems are.

On Thursday someone pointed out to me that it was Alexander Grothendieck’s 85th birthday. Hopefully he is well and celebrating appropriately. Coincidentally I just heard the following rumor. Supposedly a couple months ago the librarian at the IHES got a phone call from a man who said his name is Alexander Grothendieck, that he needed a specific book from the library and asked if he/she could mail it to him at a certain address somewhere in the south of France.

The librarian said that books are lent only to IHES members and no books are sent by mail. The man on the phone said something and the librarian said that he/she must consult with the director. The director then went ahead and had the book sent.

Perhaps someone can confirm this rumor. Of course the first question that comes to mind is: “What book was it???” (And yes, if I do find out, I suppose I shouldn’t blog the answer, to respect Grothendieck’s privacy…)

It seems to be part of the job description of anyone in the sciences to periodically complain that scientific research funding is insufficient, with the situation going from bad to worse. For some recent examples, see this from Bruce Alberts, the Editor-in-Chief of Science, and this endorsement from Professor Matt Strassler.

In the contrarian spirit of this blog, I want to suggest that the situation is actually quite a bit more complicated, and the story of research funding is not completely a one-sided one of the oppression and impoverishment of scientists. Also in the spirit of this blog, I want to avoid topics I don’t know much about, which in this case includes the vast majority of scientific research and how it is funded, especially outside the US. The biggest component of R&D funding in the US is the military, and I have no idea what this money is going towards and whether it is being well-spent. I’ve also heard that there are increasingly vast sums being spent by the US on classified research, not necessarily accounted for and showing up in obvious places in the budget, but I have not idea whether this is even true or what the size of this is. While ignorant about what military R&D spending is going to, I confess to a general prejudice that it seems to me to be huge and if I knew more I’d probably be strongly in favor of there being less of it.

The next biggest component of R&D spending is biomedical, and again, I’m woefully ignorant. Unlike spending money to find better ways to kill people, biomedical research is inherently something worthwhile, so more of it undoubtedly is better. But whether it is now being spent well, or whether taking away from some other priority to spend more in this area would be a good idea, I haven’t a clue.

On overall US federal spending levels, Alberts compares a level of .87% of GDP in 2013 to a level of 1.25% of GDP in 1985. He’s getting his data from here, but those numbers do tell a more complicated story. Measured in constant (2012) dollars, non-defense R&D/year went from $32 billion in 1985 to a maximum of $67 billion in 2004, and has been relatively flat since then, with $64 billion projected for 2013. Defense R&D went from $65 billion in 1984 to a maximum of $90.5 billion in 2008, has dropped significantly in recent years to $76 billion for 2013. Another set of overall numbers from the same source are for the NSF budget, which went from $4.6 billion in 1998 to $7.25 billion in 2013.

For a while on this blog I used to try and keep track of the US budget situation and periodically report on it, at least the numbers I could find and understand for math and physics. The most important thing to say about the situation of recent years is that the US federal budget process has completely broken down. Budgets have gone from being passed late to never, with government spending now allocated by some baffling system of continuing resolutions and last-minute “cliffs”. There appears to be nothing anymore like a sensible process for making future plans and sticking to them. Those responsible for managing research facilities are not only in the dark about how much money they’ll have to spend over the next few years but sometimes don’t know how much they’ll have to spend next month or next week. No matter what you think spending priorities should be, trying to run organizations this way is completely nuts and a disgrace to the country.

Getting close to fields I do know something about, here are some other numbers (also 2012 dollars): NSF yearly spending on math and physical sciences has gone from $924 million in 1998 to $1,323 million in 2013. DOE Office of Science has gone from $3.3 billion in 1997 (including $895 million for HEP) to $4.5 billion in 2013 (including $764 million for HEP).

Theoretical physics is very much small potatoes on the scale of science funding in general. For FY2012 the DOE spent $67 million on theoretical and computational physics, the NSF $13.6 million (+6 million for Physics Frontier Centers), up from $11.7 million (+6.3 for Physics Frontier Centers) in FY2008 (real, not inflation adjusted dollars). Increasingly, large amounts of funding are coming from the private sector. The Simons Foundation spent $40 million on grants for math and physics in 2011. The Perimeter Institute has gotten $150 million or so from Mike Lazaridis over the years, and the Templeton Foundation has recently provided $2 million to Perimeter, after $8 million to FQXi, and millions more in other grants such as $2 million for the philosophy of cosmology. Yuri Milner has in the past few months handed out about $37 million in checks to physicists, with one goal that of supporting their research.

The overall pattern seems to be that science in general has not been doing that badly, although HEP funding in the US has been cut significantly, as the US lost leadership in HEP to CERN with the LHC becoming the focus of attention. US experimental HEP faces huge challenges in the future, but they have more to do with the SSC debacle of 20 years ago and the lack of a compelling technological way forward to higher energies than with general federal science budget cutting. Funding for theory from conventional government sources has been fairly flat, with new sources of private funding starting to have a major impact.

As for the work conditions of US academics, Matt sees the situation as:

Whereas before the year 2000 it was easy for U.S. universities to attract the best in the world to teach and do research at their institutions, and to train the next generation of American scientists, the brain drain since that time has been awful.

On the other hand, my own experience at Columbia (a wealthy private institution) and in mathematics has been that the post-2000 period has been one where the US in general and Columbia in particular have done very well in competing for talent. While the middle class in the US has been in decline, top-flight US academics have seen significant salary increases. The AMS compiles yearly numbers for salaries (see here), which show the mean academic-year salary for a mathematics full-professor to be $127,674 at large public research universities, $148,074 at large private research universities. Back in 1999 the numbers were $85,571 (public) and $95,977 (private). Comparing to median US incomes, the ratio has increased from 4.26 to 4.73 during this time in the public university case, 4.77 to 5.49 in the private university case. At the top of the profession, average salaries for full professors at Harvard (in all fields) were $122,100 in 1998-9 (6.07 times US median), $198,400 in 2011-12 (7.36 times US median). The general pattern is that of the rest of US society, with the rich getting richer, and staying very much competitive for talent with the rest of the world.

As usual, informed and on-topic comments are welcome. If you just want to rant though about the evils of government spending, or go on about how in a just society scientists would get lots more money, please do it somewhere else.

The long awaited CMB results from the Planck satellite are now out, see here. A NASA press conference is about to start here.

You really should be reading about this somewhere else, from a much better informed blogger, someone expert in cosmology, which I very much am not. My non-expert impression is that, as rumored, the results are quite vanilla: 3.3 +/- .3 [Richard Easther had 3.2 +/- .2, don’t know why] light neutrinos, so no evidence for a fourth neutrino, no significant non-gaussianity. No cosmic strings, see here, which has

conclusion that there is at present no evidence for cosmic strings in the Planck nominal mission data.

In recent years multiverse mania has involved lots of claims to see evidence of other universes in earlier CMB data. Nothing about this in the Planck announcements I’ve seen, presumably they looked and didn’t find anything, or maybe thought it wasn’t even worth looking…

I’ll try and make a list of informed commentary that I find, and keep a list here. Suggestions for additions are welcome.

Richard Easther live-blogged the announcement here.
Sesh Nadathur has comments here.
Ethan Siegel has a posting with background here.
The word from Resonaances is here.

As I predicted a few days ago, the string theorists in Princeton have made their choice for the $3 million dollar Fundamental Physics Prize: another Princeton string theorist, Alexander Polyakov. Evidently there’s no official announcement, so Matt Strassler has retracted his original posting about this, now calling it an “unsubstantiated rumor”, but someone at the ceremony e-mailed me with the news, so it is substantiated.

Earlier today I did watch the first part of the awards ceremony, although I had to leave to do something else before the Polyakov announcement. It was quite remarkable, designed to look very much like an Oscar ceremony, with Morgan Freeman as master of ceremonies, and the Laureates getting a big trophy to take home, as well as the $3 million check. The program was largely a string theory hype-fest, with the description of the accomplishments of the Laureates making no distinction at all between what was purely speculative and what wasn’t. Viewers of the part I saw would have no idea that string theory is not tested, settled science.

Polyakov was one of the leading figures during the 1970s and early 1980s in the effort to understand the non-perturbative behavior of QFTs, especially the question of how confinement in QCD works. By the early 1980s, one of the most promising ideas about this was to try and find a string theory dual for QCD (and I spent quite a bit of time reading papers by Polyakov and collaborators about string theory and possible relations of it to gauge theory). As far as I can tell, Polyakov was never much of an enthusiast for 10d string theory unification, but kept arguing that what was interesting about string theory was the possible dual relationship to gauge theory, a point of view that has become the dominant one in recent years with the rise of AdS/CFT (which Polyakov played a role in).

For more about Polyakov’s work, the best source is the man himself. He has written some wonderful articles about this history and the evolution of his thinking, see for instance here, here and here.

Anyway, congratulations to Polyakov, a great physicist who now won’t be impoverished compared to his colleagues. Perhaps in future years the scope of the Fundamental Physics Prize can be widened, with string theorists at Harvard and Santa Barbara sharing in the loot.

Update: Here’s a picture of Polyakov and the trophy you get with the $3 million. The money will provide him with “more freedom and opportunity to pursue future accomplishment.”

Update: The official announcement is here.

Update: Nature has a report about the awards ceremony, as Internet billionaire throws lavish soiree for physicists.

Just woke up to see that this year’s Abel Prize has gone to algebraic geometer and number theorist Pierre Deligne, who is one of the truly great figures in 20th century mathematics. Deligne first became well-known for his proof of the Weil Conjectures in the 1970s, and has had a long and and very fruitful career since then, much of it spent at the Institute in Princeton. While working mainly in a part of mathematics far from physics, he also has had a long history of interactions with physicists, participating in the IAS year-long program on QFT, and most recently getting involved in current research on amplitudes. An excellent choice, congratulations to him!.

Update: See Tim Gowers’s blog for more, including his talk presenting Deligne’s work.

Conventional wisdom in the particle theory for about 30 years has been that the Standard Model has a huge “hierarchy” or “naturalness” problem, the solution to which is supposed to appear at the LHC via SUSY or some other new BSM physics. With no SUSY or other BSM physics appearing at the LHC, this conventional wisdom is now moving towards claims that fundamental physics has been shown by the LHC to be “unnatural”, with parameters that are environmental, artifacts of our position in the multiverse generated by the anthropic landscape of string theory. For an example of this, see Seiberg’s Now What? talk at Aspen (Arkani-Hamed also spoke, with presumably a similar point of view, although the talk is not available).

It seems to me that a much more logical conclusion to draw would be that the LHC has just shown that the hierarchy/naturalness argument was mistaken. I’ve never understood why people found it convincing, and have often argued about this here on the blog. From the “hierarchy” angle, the problem is why the ratio of the electroweak-breaking scale to the GUT or Planck scale is such a small number, but we don’t actually have any evidence for GUT physics or for quantum gravitational physics, so no good reason to be sure that such high scales are relevant to anything or the cause of a hierarchy problem. From the “naturalness” side, while the theory is renormalizable, one can worry about the sensitivity to high energies of its cutoff dependence, but it’s unclear to me why one should be that concerned about this. More worrisome is that the Higgs sector introduces most of the undetermined parameters of the SM, a much more serious defect of the standard theory.

Today at a workshop on The First Three Years of the LHC, Joe Lykken gave a talk on Higgs without Supersymmetry, in which he argues that there is no naturalness problem or need for supersymmetry, and makes a specific suggestion about how to think about the high energy behavior of the Higgs. He starts off with:

is there a Higgs naturalness problem?

•For decades the HEP community has asserted that naturalness is the central issue
•Simply put, we have assumed that either EWSB is natural, in which case we need to explain why, or that it is fine-tuned, in which case we also need to explain why
•I will argue that this is a false dichotomy,and that LHC results are hinting at a third path

then explains the standard dogma about quadratic sensitivity to the cutoff. He argues that the solution to this problem lies in properly understanding the scaling behavior of the Higgs, following ideas that go back at least to W. Bardeen in 1995 (see here). The fact that the renormalization group flow of the quartic term in the Higgs potential takes it to zero at high energies is interpreted as a suggestion that the right UV boundary condition is that the Higgs potential vanish. From there Lykken goes on to discuss more specific ideas, which may lead to observable new physics at LHC scales.

These aren’t really new ideas, but I think Lykken is drawing the right lesson from the LHC results: the naturalness argument for SUSY has now been shown to have been misguided, and it’s time not to give up and adopt the pseudo-science of anthropics, but instead to question the dogmas that have dominated the subject for decades.