Not Even Wrong

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.

In more news about the Fundamental Physics Prize awards planned for tomorrow evening at CERN, it turns out that God himself (AKA Morgan Freeman) will be giving out the awards, as well as hosting a TV show about this the same evening.

Physicists have often claimed to be upset by the “God particle” business, but it looks like CERN and the Fundamental Physics Prize people may be now embracing the idea. Leon Lederman is the one originally responsible for the terminology, supposedly because his publishers twisted his arm into using The God Particle as the title of his 1993 book about the Higgs. Evidently they’ve twisted his arm again, with Beyond the God Particle set to appear in October.

Both Sean Carroll and Matt Strassler are upset about a CBS News report, which contains some scientifically inaccurate hype that they’re blaming on Michio Kaku. It’s unclear to me why, after 20 years of over-the-top hype about string theory and extra dimensions from Kaku (going back for instance to here), they’re all of a sudden up in arms about this now. Whatever the reason though, I very much agree with Matt’s

Doesn’t the taxpaying public deserve the truth? Isn’t the truth already exciting enough? And what will the public think of science if, in this information era, the promulgation of falsehoods and near-falsehoods on national media is unanswered by complaints from other scientists?

and think it’s great that he and Sean are now turning their attention to this problem.

Update: It’s definitely gang up on Michio Kaku day in the blogosphere, with PZ Myers and Chad Orzel chiming in. Still a mystery to me why this is happening today, since Kaku has been responsible for far more outrageous stuff continuously for over 20 years.

Update: Philip Gibbs comes in on Kaku’s side here.

There should be lots of breaking news this upcoming week, sometimes with real-time webcasts for those that want to follow along:

• Planck data release on Thursday the 21st. Media briefing in Paris will be at 10am local time, see here. In the US, NASA will host a press conference at 11am EDT, see here.

  The night before here in New York at 7:30 pm (watch here) two journalists and three leading cosmology theorists will be discussing the emergence of the universe or multiverse from nothing. Perhaps someone will ask them what this theoretical work implies in terms of predictions for the new results to come out the next day.

• On March 20th at noon in Norway, the winner of the 2013 Abel Prize in Mathematics will be announced here. This is a prize of about $1 million, set up in 2002 to be an equivalent of a Nobel prize in mathematics. They seem to like to give this one to people from the Courant Institute here in New York.
• I’m wondering what’s up with the Templeton Prize, a $1.66 million dollar prize normally awarded each year in March. Haven’t seen any announcements, but perhaps this will also happen this week.
• Finally, there’s Yuri Milner’s Fundamental Physics Prize, which at $3 million makes everyone else look like pikers. Last December, the news was that the award would be announced at a ceremony at CERN on March 20. Candidates for the prize are a group of three condensed matter physicists, string theorist Joe Polchinski of UCSB, and string theorist Alexander Polyakov of Princeton. With the decision being made by a group of previous winners largely consisting of string theorists from Princeton, if I had to guess the winner, I’d go with the string theorist from Princeton. Coincidentally or not, Polyakov is scheduled to give the String Theory Seminar at CERN on March 20, on the topic of Sensitive, unstable and turbulent vacua.

Update: The Fundamental Physics Prize announcement will be Wednesday at 8pm, live webcast here. The IAS faculty will be there in force, with TH String Theory Seminars scheduled for Arkani-Hamed and Witten on Tuesday, Seiberg on Thursday.

Update: The Templeton Prize will be announce April 4, see here.

My main method for keeping track of new information on the web has for many years now been RSS, with Google Reader for a while the main tool for this. Google yesterday announced that they’re shutting this down, with as far as I can tell the reason being that RSS doesn’t fit into their plan for world domination. So, like everyone else, I need to figure out how to change over to something new. For “what do I do now to keep track of other web-sites?”, there are hundreds of such discussions I can follow (Feedly seems to be getting the most attention), although I’d be interested to hear from anyone who is very knowledgeable about this. If it doesn’t run across multiple machines with different operating systems, I’m not very interested. If it only runs on mobile devices, forget it, although being able to run it that way would be a plus.

More importantly though, I’d like to ask for advice from my readers about how they keep track of new blog postings here and what could be done to make that easier. Extra points for links to how to implement solutions using a standalone WordPress installation. Note that I’m not trying to find ways to drive lots of new traffic here, more interested in making life easier for the generally well-informed readers I already have.

So far in life I’ve pretty much completely avoided knowing anything about social media and how they work, so advice on that front would be appreciated. About all I know now is that there is some way to set up twitter to provide announcements of blog postings, and that looks like one of the first things I might try. If there’s some way to do this kind of thing without festooning one’s site with other people’s logos and stuff about “likes”, that would be great.

Update: Looks like RSS is still the most useful for people. I have however set up a “notevenwrong” twitter account, and just installed a wordpress plugin that should add something there when a post is published or updated. Let’s see if it works…

Fresh off its great long article about the Higgs, the New York Times is devoting a similar amount of space to the other big mind-blowing high energy physics story of the past year or two, Paul Frampton and his adventures in South America. This coming weekend’s New York Times Magazine has a feature article on The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble, which covers the whole amazing story well.