Not Even Wrong

I’m about to head off for a short New Year’s vacation in West Texas, but wanted to recommend a wonderful article that just appeared at Nautilus. It’s a memoir by Bob Henderson (who I met when he wrote about me, see here), appearing under the title What Does Any of This Have To Do with Physics? (although the title of the web-page, What Graduate School in Theoretical Physics is Really Like, is more descriptive).

Henderson was a graduate student at Rochester in theoretical physics, working with S.G. Rajeev. He later went to work on Wall Street, and more recently in journalism. His Nautilus piece is the best explanation I’ve ever seen of what it’s like to start working in this field as a graduate student, should certainly be required reading for anyone thinking of going into the subject. It’s also somewhat of a profile of Rajeev, who has worked on a wide variety of topics in theoretical physics.

One of the main themes of the piece is Henderson’s thinking about how and why he left theoretical physics, why he “quit”. Something to keep in mind is that this kind of decision is what most people who get Ph.Ds in the subject end up facing. There are 5-10 times more people getting Ph.Ds in this field than there are permanent positions doing research in it, so the career path starts out with a game of musical chairs that you are highly likely to lose. Different people make the choice to quit the game and do something else at different points and in different ways.

Henderson does an excellent job also of explaining what the real problem is with doing this kind of research: that of figuring out what the right thing to calculate is. For everyone, but especially for those at the beginning of a career, the subject is a huge collections of topics one doesn’t understand. One has to somehow choose a direction to pursue, and it most likely won’t go anywhere:

Writers talk of the terror of facing a blank page, but it’s no different for theorists like Rajeev trying to choose which path to take. There are an infinite number to choose from, and most go nowhere or back from where you came. The clock is always ticking and you spend so much time in the dark that it can make you not only question your path, but your own self worth. It can make you feel stupid.

Sticking with this and making a career of it involve some combination of good luck (being in the right place at the right time), ability, self-confidence, not having a family to support, and a host of other factors. As Rajeev explains to him:

Without naming names, he ticked through a catalog of his contemporaries who’d succeeded in theoretical physics even without having the towering mathematical intellect that I was sure it took and that Rajeev surely has. They’d made it, Rajeev explained, by focusing on problems that played to their strengths, or by taking advantage of computers, or by collaborating with peers who had complementary skills. Some socially gifted but not so mathematically talented types had gone quite far this way, earned a lot of renown.

Anyway, the whole piece is well-worth reading. Another recently published Nautilus piece that I learned about from a link on this one is The Universes of a Woman in Science. It’s by Kate Marvel, who shares with Henderson (and hundreds if not thousands of others…) the experience of getting a theoretical physics Ph. D. (string cosmology in her case), and then leaving the subject for another field (in her case, climate science, which she blogs about here).

A couple weeks ago a large group of US HEP theorists wrote a letter to the DOE High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) (available at page 7 here) expressing alarm at trends in DOE funding of HEP theory, ending with

We formally request that a subpanel of HEPAP be formed to investigate and better understand this damaging trend and to make recommendations to address its consequences and restore a thriving Theory program, and we strongly urge that HEPAP support measure to rebuild and maintain the prominent and world-leading standing of US High Energy Theoretical Physics.

The letter claims that since 2011 the overall DOE HEP Theory program has been cut by 17%, with the university component of this cut by 30%. It also claims that 25% of DOE-supported university theorists have had their funding cut off in the last four years, with the number of postdocs going down by about 30%.

At last week’s HEPAP meeting there was a discussion of this, but I don’t know what was decided. Some numbers presented there indicated that from FY2013-2015. the DOE theory budget went from $51.2 million to $49.32 million. The net number of funded PIs was reduced by more than 10% (25 out of about 230), with 52 PIs dropped, 27 new ones coming in. The conclusion of that presentation was that “The theory program in its current state cannot be described as thriving.” The emphasis in the letter and this presentation on “thriving” is a reference to one of the P5 recommendations that is supposed to be governing how the DOE HEP budget is allocated:

The U.S. has leadership in diverse areas of theoretical research in particle physics. A thriving theory program is essential for both identifying new directions for the field and supporting the current experimental program.

The most detailed recent information I can find about the DOE HEP theory budget is in this presentation from August. It shows a decline from FY10 to FY16 from $53.09 million to $46.69 million, with most of this in the component going to university groups, which went from $27.25 million to $21.765 million. The current number of postdocs supported is listed as about 125 (100 at universities, 25 at the labs), the number of graduate students is about 120.

Concern about this decrease in funding first became public two and a half years ago (see my blog post here) with Sean Carroll’s blog post describing a “calamity”. Various HEPAP presentations warned physicists about the dangers of public complaints and these died down for a while, but the continuing cuts to the university component of theory funding seem to have led to the decision to send this new letter.

An odd part of this story is that it’s unclear why this decision to reduce DOE HEP theory university funding significantly was made. It’s true that the overall DOE HEP budget has been cut over the same period (from $810.5 million in FY10 to $795 million in FY16) but unknown why the university theory component was cut 20% over this period while the overall cut was only 2%. Note that none of these numbers are adjusted for inflation.

It would be very interesting to hear comments from anyone who knows more about what is going on here. The usual generic comments that government spending is bad will be deleted. Keep in mind that the amount of money at issue here is (2.7% of the HEP budget, .00058% of the total federal budget) very small on the scale of government funding of science, and now ever small on the scale of private science funding (the Simons Foundation alone last year gave out $233 million in grants).

Update: A full copy of the letter with all signatures is here. An explanation of where the numbers in the letter come from is here.

The 2017 Breakthrough Prizes have just been announced, here are the winners and a few comments. Note that I’m leaving the usual singing of praise of the many virtues of the laureates to others, since there should soon be a lot of such stories appearing. Instead I’ll concentrate on issues that aren’t getting as much attention.

Already announced back in May, there is a special Breakthrough Prize for the LIGO collaboration: \$1 million to be split by Drever, Thorne and Weiss, \$2 million to be split by the other 1012 members of the LIGO collaboration. Quite likely Drever, Thorne and Weiss will get the Nobel Prize next year (the LIGO result was published too late for consideration this year). A very good thing about the Breakthrough Prize though is that it is given to the entire collaboration, with awards going to every one. They have done similar things in the past, with awards to the LHC experiments, to neutrino experiments and to the accelerating universe supernova experiments.

The Nobel Prize in Physics and most other such prizes are never awarded to a group, just (at most three) individuals. In an era of large scientific collaborations this isn’t fair, with all the recognition and prize money going to some small set of people, nothing to anyone else. I’m glad to see that, for these experimental prizes, the Breakthrough Prize has been following a different model.

The 2017 \$3 million Breakthrough Prize in mathematics goes to Jean Bourgain of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. I’m not particularly familiar with his work, you’ll have to read about it elsewhere. He is a well-known figure in the math community, already a recipient of many prizes including the Fields Medal, Shaw and Crafoord prizes.

I’ve never been convinced that this mathematics $3 million prize is a good idea, since it typically goes to someone like Bourgain who, besides being an essentially randomly chosen lucky winner from a sizable pool of similarly distinguished mathematicians, already has prize money and a very well paid position with minimal responsibilities. This isn’t going to help him do better mathematics. A much better way to spend the money would be on endowing new permanent academic positions in mathematics, allowing more talented young people to have a career in mathematical research.

The philosophy behind the Breakthrough Prizes, very visible in the glitzy award ceremony (you can watch it on the National Geographic channel this evening, 10pm EST), is that scientists don’t get the kind of fame and stardom they deserve, so Milner and Zuckerberg are going to help fix this. What motivates good mathematics though is something very different, and bringing to mathematics more of the Hollywood star system is not going to improve mathematics research. In recent decades much of US society has moved to a brutal winner-take-all system. While our Silicon Valley overlords have flourished under this, I don’t think their bringing more of it to scientific research is a good idea.

While one can argue that the huge checks to mathematicians don’t have any particular negative effect, the situation in theoretical physics is quite different. Since the original laureates chosen by Milner, the yearly prizes that have gone to theorists (as opposed to the experimental prizes mentioned above) have all gone to string theorists (there was also a special prize given to Hawking). First there was Polyakov, then Green and Schwarz, and this year the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Physics goes to three more string theorists: Joe Polchinski, Andy Strominger, and Cumrun Vafa.

In the case of string theory, I don’t think one can seriously argue that the field suffers from a lack of public attention. Mountains of hype about string theory have been produced in the last 32 years, seriously damaging the field of theoretical physics. This year’s prize adds to that mountain, with hype-ridden citations [press materials] backing the glitzy ceremony and million dollar checks. The language tries to turn physics research Hollywood: for instance, relativity and quantum theory are “the two superstar theories of modern physics”.

Perhaps the worst aspect of these prizes and citations [associated explanatory materials] is that they often hype and reward failed theoretical ideas: if your ideas work maybe you’ll get part of a \$1 million Nobel Prize, but if they fail, as long as they’re about string theory, you’ll get part of a \$3 million Breakthrough Prize. The citation [description of “Contributions”] for Strominger includes this about string theory:

Andrew Strominger played a major role in its emergence when he showed that it not only reconciles quantum mechanics with gravity, but can also contains within it the other observed particles and forces.

This refers to Strominger’s early work on Calabi-Yau compactifications, while not mentioning that this idea has never worked out.

These prizes are often awarded for ideas about the black hole information paradox, independent of whether these ideas work. Maldacena’s citation from 2012 tells us that he got the award partly for “resolving the black hole information paradox”, and the Strominger citation [description of “Contributions”] tells us that “His work hints at a solution to the famous ‘black hole information paradox’”. Polchinski is rewarded for a

big idea, deriving from the principles of quantum mechanics: ‘firewalls’ –blizzards of high-energy particles around black holes. The existence of firewalls would signal a fault line in the foundations of physics: at least one of the two superstar theories of modern physics – relativity theory and quantum theory – would have to be incomplete at a fundamental level.

Anyone reading this is unlikely to figure out that the significance of Polchinski’s “big idea” is that it purports to show that the solution to the paradox supposedly given by Maldacena actually doesn’t work (not surprising, since it was never more than a speculation). If you’re a string theorist, you don’t actually need to solve a problem to get a prize: speculation about what the solution to a problem might be is good enough, as is finding problems with the speculations of other string theorists. This sort of thing does nothing to improve the difficult situation of current theoretical physics, quite the opposite.

Tomorrow there will be a symposium at UCSF featuring 15 minute “TED-style” talks giving “pragmatic versions” of what could be done during the next ten years. For string theory, the blurb for the talk or talks is

Medium-term goals of string theory, from resolving the paradoxes of black holes to estimating the lifetime of the universe.

After a cycle of two prizes for resolving the information paradox and then unresolving it, I suppose it’s a reasonable goal for string theorists to go through another cycle or so during the next ten years. The idea of using string theory to “estimat[e] the lifetime of the universe” anytime soon goes beyond any of the usual hype, so we’ll have to see what that’s about tomorrow.

Update: Smaller \$100,000 “New Horizons” prizes, some split in various ways, went to 6 theoretical physicists (Asimina Arvanitaki, Peter Graham, Surjeet Rajendran, Simone Gombi, Xi Yin and Frans Pretorius) and 4 mathematicians (Mohammed Abouzaid, Hugo Duminil-Copin, Ben Elias and Geordie Williamson). Congratulations to all, especially to the Columbia contingent (Mohammed is a faculty member now, Ben was a grad student here, and TA one year for my representation theory course).

Update: Some of the language quoted above as part of the citations for the string theory awards was actually in a separate section of materials distributed to the press called “Contributions”, which gave more specifics of what the award was being made for. I’ve changed the wording above to more accurately reflect this.

Update: Just watched the Breakthrough Prize ceremony on TV. Very nice short portrait of Jean Bourgain and his work, and remarks by him. The string theorists were right at the end, and the DVR cut off in the middle of a clip of outrageous hype from them (I guess the ceremony went slightly longer than scheduled).

Update: Nature has coverage of the prizes here, emphasizing the award to Polchinski for firewalls, with some justification from Milner.

Update: Livestream of the symposium is here. Polchinski and Strominger will be talking about black hole information paradox/string theory, Vafa will describe “a research program for putting rigorous bounds on the lifetime of our universe, by studying the range of possibilities permitted by the laws of string theory.”

A few pre-Thanksgiving items:

• International Journal of Modern Physics A has a new issue with “Featured Topic” part I of a discussion of the proposed Chinese supercollider project. The high profile contributions are from C. N. Yang, China should not build a supercollider at this time, and a response from David Gross: Why China should build the Great Collider. Both I think do a good job of making the case for and against the project, with the central question that of the high cost. If this was a $1 billion project there would be no question it would get done, and if it was a $100 billion project it could never happen. The problem is that the order of magnitude is $10 billion.

  There are some other contributions to the debate, including sensible pro-collider pieces by Yifang Wang and Weimin Wu. There’s also a bizarre piece by Henry Tye, making an ad hominem argument against Yang, based on the fact that in 1980 Yang was skeptical about the future of high energy physics. I’m afraid that this doesn’t work very well as an argument against Yang, whose prediction of no post-1980 breakthroughs looks unfortunately prescient these days.

• According to the New York Times, one possibly imminent non-HEP breakthrough is a Microsoft quantum computer. Their project grew out of one they funded led by topologist Mike Freedman.
• Last weekend there was a celebration at Caltech of John Schwarz’s 75th birthday. No slides or video of talks it seems. I’ve wondered what Susskind’s take on supersymmetry is these days, so curious what might have been in his talk entitled “Supersymmetry and the Limits of What We Know”.
• Howard Burton was the founding director of Perimeter, helping to get it off the ground and turn it into the success it has become (Sabine Hossenfelder here notes that the term of the current director Neil Turok is up and wonders who is next). In recent years Burton has been running something he calls Ideas Roadshow, and now has a new blog called In Search of Refinement. He writes about a recent event with Roger Penrose, discussing his new book, and has kind things to say about my review of the book. Ideas Roadshow now has accumulated a significant number of interesting interviews, worth your while if you’re looking for high-quality but not free internet content to support.

Update: One more. Yet more private funding for US scientific research. The New York Times reports on the Simons Foundation Flatiron Institute, a planned $80 million/year, 200 employee research institute. The focus will be on computational work, and doing better science by freeing scientists from having to apply for grants.

Chad Orzel has a very sensible piece at Forbes, headlined What Math Do You Need For Physics? It Depends, which addresses the question of what math a physicist like him (experimental AMO physics) really needs. I’m glad to see that he emphasizes the same basic courses my department offers aimed at non-majors:

• Multivariable calculus
• Differential equations
• Linear algebra

together with statistics (which here at Columbia is handled by a separate department). He disses complex analysis, for reasons that I can understand. That’s a beautiful subject, and the results you can get out of analytic functions and contour integration are often unexpected and seemingly magic, but they’re not of as general use as the other subjects.

One subject he doesn’t mention that I would argue for is Fourier Analysis, which is the class I’ll be teaching next semester. That’s an incredibly useful as well as profound subject which every physicist should know, but it is true some of its basics often gets taught in other courses (for example in ode courses as a method for solving differential equations).

Orzel starts off with an amusing discussion of a physics version of “Humiliation”, admitting that he’s never used or really worked through a proof of Noether’s theorem, widely considered “the most profound idea in science”. I’ve argued here for the Hamiltonian over Lagrangian method, in which case a different set of ideas about symmetry is fundamental, with Noether’s theorem playing no role. In the Hamiltonian case symmetries are generated by functions on phase space, and finding the function that generates any symmetry is a matter of Poisson brackets (as an experimentalist, maybe Orzel has never calculated a Poisson bracket either though…).

One says that a function F on phase space generates an infinitesimal transformation if such an infinitesimal transformation changes the function G by {G,F} (the Poisson bracket of the functions G and F). A basic example is the Hamiltonian function, with {G,H} the infinitesimal change of G by time translation, or in other words, Hamilton’s equation
dG/dt={G,H}
When {H,F}=0, we say that the infinitesimal transformation generated by F is a symmetry, since H is left unchanged by such transformations. Using the antisymmetry of the Poisson bracket, this can also be read as {F,H}=0, with Hamilton’s equation then the conservation law that F doesn’t change with time.

All this seems to me much more straightforward than the Lagrangian Noether’s theorem approach to symmetry transformations and conservation laws. My own analog of Orzel’s admission would be admitting (which I won’t do) how long it took me in life to understand this fundamental point (I blame my teachers).

For lots and lots more about this, see chapters 14 and 15 here.

News site TechEye is reporting that String theory might be about to finally be killed off, with a story that starts off

The world’s top boffins are debating finally killing off one of the more elegant scientific theories about the nature of reality.

This isn’t exactly the most reliable information source, with one problem that the story is about supersymmetry, with the only connection to string theory this:

For ages the world’s cleverest physicists have been divided over the concept of supersymmetry – a theory which stipulates that all known fundamental particles have heavier, supersymmetric counterparts called sparticles. It appears to be based on the theory that the universe is made out of string which was teased into shape by cats which are potentially dead or alive [are you sure about this? Ed.]

The writer seems to have gotten the material for the story from a more reliable source, the Economist, which recently had A bet about a cherished theory of physics may soon pay out. That story starts by explaining about Ken Lane’s 1994 bet with David Gross that the LHC would not see supersymmetry. As mentioned here, this year’s data should be enough to resolve the question they were betting about. It is likely that results from SUSY searches using most of this year’s data will be presented at the usual mid-December LHC Jamboree at CERN, and unless there’s dramatic news my sources are keeping from me, these results will be negative.

The bet was for an expensive dinner at Girardet’s, a three-star Swiss restaurant which has now closed, and

Dr Lane says it is time for Dr Gross (who won the Nobel prize in 2004) to cough up—if not with dinner at Girardet’s then at another suitably ritzy venue. After receiving no response to several e-mail prompts, however, Dr Lane is growing impatient. “David appears to be welshing [misuse of language, see here] on our bet,” he says.

but

Dr Gross is not ready to concede quite yet. The data are in, but their analysis is not complete. “It looks like I will lose this bet by the end of the year,” he says, “but we should await the word from the experimenters themselves.” (Dr Lane says the original terms have been met and Dr Gross should throw in the towel.)

As for whether this really kills off SUSY, there’s a pithy quote from Sabine Hossenfelder:

Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, is one of many who think it is time for theorists to focus on other problems—how gravity behaves at the very small scales of quantum mechanics, for instance. If the LHC finds no trace of sparticles in this year’s data, she believes the last thing the field needs is another round of Susy model adjustments. “That’s not science,” she says. “That’s pathetic.”