Not Even Wrong

Erich Poppitz has updated his statistics on the high energy theory job market to include data from 2009. He counts hirings to tenure-track faculty jobs, using data from the Theoretical Particle Physics Jobs Rumor Mill. For 2009, out of 12 hires listed on the Rumor Mill, he counts 9 as in high-energy theory, 3 as cosmologists. Of the 9 high energy theorists, he counts 7 as in phenomenology, 2 as in string theory. I’m not sure exactly who he is counting as a string theorist, probably Easson (string cosmology) and either Elvang (now working on QFT amplitudes) or Shih (supersymmetry breaking). It appears that it is now essentially impossible to get a permanent job in a physics department if you’re working on the more formal end of string theory (or string phenomenology, for that matter). You pretty much have to work in cosmology or phenomenology to have some sort of job prospects.

The academic job market in general in the US is in a terrible state, and this is reflected in the change from an average of around 20 hires per year in recent years to 9 in 2009. It looks like the situation won’t be any better for 2010. The imbalance between the large number of new PhDs and postdocs, and very few permanent jobs is quite remarkable. According to the postdoc rumor mill, this year already 8 people have accepted postdocs in Princeton, at the university and the IAS, making this small segment of the community large enough to fill almost all the available permanent jobs.

The US economy remains on its knees due to the economic crisis triggered by the blow-up of debt instruments, especially those designed by quants often coming from a physics background. Luckily for physics PhDs who now have no hope for a job in academia, what I hear from my financial industry friends is that, unlike the rest of the economy, their companies are doing quite well, embarking on new rounds of hiring.

No.

The WMAP team has just released a new set of papers based upon seven years of data from their experiment. For a summary of how this new data has sharpened some of their previous results, see the Cosmological Interpretation paper. They have also gone over claims by many groups to have found deviations from the standard cosmological model in their earlier data sets (for example claims to have found “the unmistakable imprint of another universe” which “points to string theory being on the right track.”) In a paper entitled Are There Cosmic Microwave Background Anomalies, the WMAP team reports:

In most cases we find that claimed anomalies depend on posterior selection of some aspect or subset of the data… We examine several potential or previously claimed anomalies in the sky maps and power spectra, including cold spots, low quadrupole power, quadropole-octupole alignment, hemispherical or dipole power asymmetry, and quadrupole power asymmetry. We conclude that there is no compelling evidence for deviations from the LCDM model

They give a humorous example of the problem that plagues typical claims to have found such anomalies, showing that the CMB sky map clearly contains the initials of Stephen Hawking, “aligned neatly along a line of fixed Galactic latitude.”

Update: For the WMAP team’s summary of its new results for the public, see here.

The New York Times today reports on a Physics of the Universe Summit held a week or so ago in LA. According to the Times, participants stayed at “a Hollywood hotel known long ago as the ‘Riot Hyatt,’ for the antics of rock stars who stayed there.” Talks were a couple miles south at the SpaceX factory, Larry Page of Google was there “handing out new Google phones to his friends”, the magician David Blaine performed card tricks, and Bob Dylan’s son Jesse showed some sort of film about the LHC. The only other information about this that seems to be available on the web is Sean Carroll’s blog posting here, where he gives a link to the slides of his talk.

Optimist Gordy Kane claimed that the LHC will soon discover supersymmetry, making physics on the verge of seeing “the bottom of the iceberg”. Lisa Randall (who evidently has a new book planned about science and the LHC) argued instead for focusing on less grandiose small problems. She was skeptical about supersymmetry, pointing out that we should have seen various evidence of it by now, and that the “wimp miracle” of a stable superpartner explaining dark matter doesn’t work well “without some additional fiddling with its parameters.” Joe Lykken summarized the situation as:

We’re confused, and we’re probably going to be confused for a long time.

Update: The Onion carries the news that World Physicists Complete Study of Physics. The quote from a physicist is:

Yeah, that about does it for physics. All done. Math can pretty much take it from here.

Update: Robert Helling gives his take on the Verlinde paper here. It reminds him of a certain proof that reaches an unreasonable conclusion using the rules “time=money” and “money is the root of evil”. I noticed this via an arXiv trackback. Funny, for some reason there are no trackbacks to my postings on this topic

A little while ago I did an interview for Big Think, and they just put it up here today, with some editorial comment here.

I really don’t like watching or listening to myself, so I’m not about to go through the interview and see exactly how what I tried to say came out and later got edited. If I said something unclear or nonsensical, perhaps someone will let me know. Regular readers of this blog are unlikely to hear anything they haven’t read before. Big Think has their own commenting system, and you can comment there if you wish.

Particle theory is about to have a significantly higher profile in midtown Manhattan, with the launch of two new programs this spring:

The Simons Foundation isn’t the only one announcing funding opportunities in math and physics. The Templeton Foundation’s list of funding priorities for 2010 is here, with applications opening February 1. In math and physics the topics they want to support research in are:

and

At least for 2010, they seem to have lost interest in the Multiverse.

Templeton is also supporting a member of the Harvard Math Department in a big way, with a grant of $10 million to math professor Martin Nowak to fund a program in Foundational Questions in Evolutionary Biology.

An Iranian theoretical physicist named Masoud Alimohammadi was assassinated in Teheran Tuesday. Alimohammadi’s publication list indicates that he began his career specializing in conformal field theory, and more recently had been working on questions in general relativity. Initial news reports inaccurately characterized him as a “nuclear physicist” and speculated that he was assassinated because of his association with the Iranian nuclear program, but there seems to be absolutely no reason to believe this.