Not Even Wrong

Yesterday Sean Carroll and I appeared on the BBC Radio 4 program The Material World, in a segment on String theory – knot good enough?, about the controversy over string theory. The segment started with a piece from the play Humble Boy by Charlotte Jones, in which the main character is working on string theory. I don’t think anything either of us said was particularly controversial or would be in any way surprising to a regular reader of either of our blogs. The same program had a segment on the multiverse three weeks ago.

Some more titles of talks at next week’s Strings 07 have appeared. Witten’s talk is entitled “Three-Dimensional Gravity Revisited” and presumably will be about the new ideas described here. So, at least one talk there will be about a non-string theory approach to quantum gravity more along the lines of the LQG program. The schedule doesn’t seem to include any discussion session like the one at Strings 05 where the audience voted against the anthropic landscape.

A competing conference to Strings 07, Loops 07 will be taking place at the same time next week, but in Mexico, not Madrid. It’s much smaller, with less than a third as many participants. There will be one plenary talk on string theory, Moshe Roszali speaking on “Background Independence in String Theory”.

As the hunt for the Higgs is heating up at Fermilab, and CERN has officially announced the delay of LHC startup until next May, there’s a group of filmmakers who may be well-positioned if something exciting is found at the Tevatron. For the last few years 137 Films has been making a film to be called The Atom Smashers, following scientists working at FNAL. Filmmaker Clayton Brown is keeping a blog about this.

Yet another bogus “possible [experimental] signature for string theory”. Even Lubos doesn’t seem to believe this one, so I’ll just quote his argument:

My personal guess based on our work on the weak gravity conjecture is that the black hole bound is also satisfied in string theory for localized macroscopic objects, up to small corrections. This belief of mine is supported by the observation that Gimon & Hořava don’t have any explicit solution for their “superspinar”.

Christina Sormani tells me she has created a Wikipedia article on the proof of the Poincare conjecture, see here. For the latest on Perelman, see here.

Experimenters at the Tevatron have released data showing the existence of a new baryon, built out of a down, strange and bottom quark, and having a mass of 5.774 +/- .019 GeV. It has been given the name “Ξ_b“. The FNAL press release is referring to this as a “triple-scoop” baryon, since it contains one quark from each of the three generations. Tommaso Dorigo has a new posting about this.

Postings on this blog tend to involve a certain amount of discussion of bad behavior by theorists, so I guess I should point out here that this story comes with some accusations of less than good behavior by experimentalists in the way this was announced. The press release is all about the announcement of this discovery by the D0 experiment, and about their paper, which was submitted to the arXiv Tuesday night. It turns out though that D0’s competition, CDF, also has had the same result for a while, and it had already been “blessed” but not officially announced. So CDF was “scooped” at the last moment for the “triple-scoop”, and I imagine there are dark accusations going around about how D0 might have found out about this and rushed out the paper and press release. Supposedly there is an informal one-week notification period that the two experiments normally observe to keep this kind of thing from happening. Anyway, looks like they’re trying to fix it up a bit: the FNAL web-site contains a “special announcement” of back-to-back seminars about this, D0 at 1pm, which will “immediately be followed” by a CDF seminar. The D0 seminar is called

First observation of a new b-baryon, Ξ_b

whereas the CDF seminar is entitled

Observation of a new b-baryon, Ξ_b

Pretty much everybody in the math community seems to be getting a blog. Many of the new bloggers are quite good research mathematicians (including even some Fields Medalists). Two very new ones are:

Secret Blogging Seminar: Named after a “Secret Russian Seminar” at Berkeley, a group blog of several ex- and current Berkeley math graduate students (Ben Webster, A.J. Tolland, Scott Morrison, Noah Snyder and David Speyer)

Math Life: The blog of UT Austin’s number theorist Fernando Rodriguez Villegas

A few things I learned from the Secret Blogging Seminar postings and following associated links:

The Microsoft Research group at UCSB working on “topological quantum computation” is now known as Station Q, and has a web-site.

Googling “Secret Russian Seminar” led to the web-site of Scott Carnahan, a student of Richard Borcherds who will be a postdoc at MIT this fall. Carnahan has some interesting sets of notes there, including notes from Borcherds’ 2004 course on QFT. Back in 2001, Borcherds had taught an earlier version of this course, and notes taken by Alex Barnard are available. According to Carnahan, Borcherds began the 2004 course with the comment:

Some of you might remember I gave a class a few years ago on the standard model. It ran into a few technical problems, the main one being the fact that I didn’t know what I was talking about. I’ve learned a thing or two since then, and I’m going to try again.

I’ve finally been making some progress in understanding some mathematics associated to BRST; if this keeps making sense I hope to get something written about it this summer. I recently noticed that the pretty much incoherent Wikipedia entry on the BRST formalism, has been joined by another incoherent one on BRST quantization. Both entries contain the warning at the top “This article or section may be confusing or unclear for some readers”, which is an understatement.

A new issue of Symmetry Magazine is out, and it contains a report on the recent string theory debate in Washington between Brian Greene and Lawrence Krauss. An editorial noted how amazing it is that this sort of thing drew 600 people willing to pay $25. There’s lots of interest out there in fundamental physics in general, and this controversy in particular.

Can’t remember where I saw this earlier today, but there’s a famous quotation I hadn’t heard before from economist John Kenneth Galbraith which seems to apply well to the current situation in string theory:

Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

Update: One more. Adrian Cho at Science Magazine has an article about the debate going on over how long to run the Tevatron. The chair of the P5 panel is saying that they will recommend running through 2009, but that “It would take some unusual circumstances to justify running beyond 2009.” But, if the LHC takes longer to get working correctly than planned (there’s a history of this with new accelerators), and Tommaso’s Dorigo’s rumors of sightings of a Higgs at the Tevatron ever start to firm up, it’s going to be hard to justify starting to tear the machine down…

Update: Yet one more about math blogging. Lieven le Bruyn has changed his blog from NeverEndingBooks to Moonshine Math (also known as NeverEndingBooks, v. 2). He begins with a wonderful blog posting about the j-function which explains one of my favorite remarkable facts about numbers:

$$e^{\pi\sqrt{163}}=262537412640768743.99999999999925\ldots$$

Last week both SLAC and Fermilab hosted “Users Meetings”, providing a forum to discuss the current status and future plans of the two laboratories. The SLAC agenda is here, and talks from previous years are available here, with this year’s perhaps available later.

The Fermilab meeting was also celebrating the 40th anniversary of its first Users Meeting, which was held back in 1967 at a time when Fermilab was under construction, with plans for a 200 GeV fixed-target machine underway, led by director Robert Wilson. This year’s talks are available here. The status of the Tevatron is described in Roger Dixon’s talk. Already the machine has delivered nearly 3 fb^-1 of luminosity to the two experiments there, half of this over the last year. They are projecting to have 6-7 fb^-1 by the end of FY 2009 (a bit more than two years from now). The current plan calls for operation of the Tevatron only until the end of FY 2009, and a year or so ago there was even some discussion of shutting it down before then. With the machine operating well, a healthy US HEP budget, the LHC startup now not until 2008, and some cautious optimism that that the Tevatron might be able to accumulate enough data to see the Higgs under some scenarios, it looks like no one is about to shut the Tevatron down early, rather the question will be how much extra time to give it. There seems little point to shutting it down as long as the LHC is not producing results that make it obsolete, and no one knows yet how long that is going to take. While those running Fermilab would like to know what they will be doing several years in advance so that they can plan and budget, it may be difficult to do this since no one knows what will happen with the LHC.

Fermilab is in the middle of a long-range planning exercise, with a Steering Group meeting trying to put together a plan by August 1. They have many of their materials available on-line. Some of the discussion revolves around the question of the ILC, with talks showing that in principle it would be possible to start construction of the ILC in 2012 and have it built by 2019, but few people believe that things will happen this fast. Whether building the machine makes sense will depend on what is seen at the LHC. Other scenarios are under discussion, for example see here. Other than the LHC, the main things one could conceive of building at Fermilab would be a more intense proton beam (proton driver), or accelerating muons to provide a “neutrino factory” and perhaps ultimately a muon collider.

While US HEP has a difficult task ahead to figure out what to do after the Tevatron shuts down and the energy frontier moves to CERN, at least the budget situation is looking a lot better than it was a few years ago. At the Users Meeting, there was a presentation by the DOE’s Robin Staffin showing budget figures that included a 6.8% increase planned for FY2008, after a 5.9% increase from FY2006 to FY2007. For some reason the federal government seems to have decided to put significantly more money into fundamental physics research, and HEP is benefiting from this. For more about the general situation with the Federal science research budget, see this recent talk by John Marburger, the director of Office of Science and Technology Policy.

For the budget situation in mathematics, see this report in the latest Notices of the AMS about the NSF budget numbers. After flat budget numbers for the past couple years, there was a 3.3% increase for mathematics research in FY2007, and the proposal for FY2008 has a 8.5% increase. Math is cheap compared to HEP, with the NSF spending on math (which is the bulk of federal math research funding) only about a quarter the size of the HEP budget. The AMS Notices article also computes numbers for what fraction of the NSF budget goes to different fields, noting that in FY2004 18.3% was for math, 20.9% for physics, while the FY2008 proposal goes 17.8% to math, 23.6% to physics.

Update: Also at SLAC, this week the DOE is there to review the lab. Presentations prepared for the DOE are on-line. Michael Peskin gave a presentation about the work of the theory group. He highlighted (besides hopes about the LHC) the work of SLAC’s Lance Dixon on computing perturbative QCD amplitudes, including its relation to N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills and to the conjectural finiteness of N=8 supergravity.

Yesterday evening there was a public debate about string theory held in Paris, between Lee Smolin and Thibault Damour. So far, accounts of the debate have appeared in Le Monde and at Fabien Besnard’s blog Mathephysique.

The Le Monde article is not very informative, but indicates that Damour defended string theory against charges that it was not testable by claiming that it predicted “possible classes of experimentally testable phenomena” at the LHC. Besnard gives a more detailed account, describing how Damour answered these charges of lack of testability with: “Lee, a subtle thinker, surely doesn’t believe himself the naive Popperian position he is defending”. He also evidently claimed that string theory was testable because it would be confirmed if a violation of the equivalence principle was found (he really should talk to Lubos, see here). Remarkably, he also claimed that observation of the kind of DSR dispersion relations that Smolin thinks LQG leads to would not be a problem for string theory, since one could also get them out of string theory (here I think he needs to talk to both Lubos and Jacques Distler).

Update: I hear that the event was recorded, and audio should be available by the end of the week at the web-site linked to above.

In recent years many people in the particle theory community have been wondering what’s going on with the Stanford theory group, as it has become dominated by work on things like the anthropic landscape. It turns out that, for a while now, there was someone there who even they were wondering about. Her name is Elizabeth Okazaki, and evidently for the last four years she has

attended graduate physics seminars, used the offices reserved for doctoral and post-doctoral physics students and — for all intents and purposes made the Varian Physics Lab her home

this despite the fact that she has no formal affiliation with the university. Some press stories about this are available from The Stanford Daily (more here) and the San Francisco Chronicle.

According to the Stanford paper, students interviewed said that Okazaki:

claimed to be a visiting scholar in the humanities, looking to provide an interdisciplinary perspective on string theory. On several instances, she has said that she was working with Physics Prof. Leonard Susskind, one of the world’s most respected string theorists.

but

Susskind told The Daily that Okazaki was not officially associated with him or his lab in any way.

“As far as I know, she has no official connection with anyone in the physics department,” Susskind said. “In fact, as far as I can tell, she has a very limited knowledge of physics itself.”

The story in The Stanford Daily on-line has a long associated comment thread, containing (besides a lot of nonsense) some comments from people in the Stanford physics department that provide more insight into the situation.

The San Francisco Chronicle article quotes Stanford graduate student Surjeet Rajendran about the situation as follows:

A university has a lot of weird people… Some of the faculty are weird, some of the grad students are weird. So you don’t really know who’s who. And you feel rather, I guess, rude asking them, ‘What the hell are you doing?’

For another perspective on this, see Scott Aaronson’s posting on The Groupies of Science, where he makes the point that “Science Needs More Groupies, Not Less”, and argues that:

When we discover a stowaway on the great Ship of Science, why throw her overboard when we could make her swab the decks?

There seems to be a peculiar trend going on in the particle theory community. Just about all theorists I talk to, correspond with, argue with on blogs, etc. claim to be quite unhappy with the Landscape, and insist that most of their colleagues share this view. On the other hand, all evidence is that Landscape research is becoming increasingly influential at the highest levels of the string theory community. The most prominent yearly string theory conference, Strings 07, will soon be taking place in Madrid, and titles of many of the talks there have just been announced. The largest contingent of speakers is from Stanford, and it appears likely that landscape studies will be the most popular topic at the conference, with various aspects of AdS/CFT running a close second. Just counting the number of times “Landscape” appears in the title of a talk, so far there are 4 such talks out of 31 with announced titles. Last year at Strings 06, out of about 50 talks, 2 had “Landscape” in the title. Naively extrapolating this eternally inflationary trend to the future, pretty much all Strings 1X talks should be about the Landscape…

Another indication of where the field is going is the yearly TASI summer school aimed at training graduate students in particle theory. This year the topic is “String Universe”, and several of the lecture series are about the Landscape, with two having “Landscape” in the title. Videos of the talks are being made available now, even as the summer school is going on. I learned about this from Clifford Johnson, who writes that the talk he most wanted to look at and recommends to everyone is Raphael Bousso’s on “Cosmology and the Landscape”.

Harvard’s Lubos Motl traditionally has been a landscape skeptic, but in recent months he has been writing more and more positive things about this subject. His latest posting advertises a new paper by Raby and Wingertner calculating statistics on (an extremely small piece of) the heterotic landscape.

Update: Lubos has written a posting entitled Landscape 2007 in response to this one. His point of view seems to be that although he doesn’t like the Landscape, he doesn’t have a workable vacuum selection principle, and as time goes on and no such principle is found, this makes the Landscape more and more likely to be correct. He doesn’t seem to even consider the possibility that the existence of the Landscape and the lack of a vacuum selection principle means that string-based 10/11d unification is just a failed idea. I suspect his point of view may be widely shared among string theorists, explaining the simultaneous unhappiness with the Landscape and its increasingly widespread adoption as a research program.

Here are various things of interest that accumulated while I was away:

Last week there was a conference in Florence on the early history of string theory, some of the talks are available here.

Lots of blogging activity among Fields Medalists: there’s a lot worth reading in Terry Tao’s reporting on a series of lectures by Yau at UCLA here, here and here. At the blog of fellow Fields Medalist Alain Connes, there’s mention of on a recent conference at Vanderbilt (slides here), as well as a report from Connes about a recent conference on the philosphical ideas of Wolfgang Pauli. Finally, yet another Fields Medalist, Richard Borcherds, has a blog. Not only do Fields Medalists like to have blogs it seems, but they also like to use them to discuss physics…

Some other blogs I’ve run across include A Strange Universe, from gravitational wave physicist Warren Anderson, which includes his Dire Straits inspired Papers For Nothing. Also John Armstrong’s The Unapologetic Mathematician, which has a lot of expository material, and Julie Rehmeyer’s MathTrek, a blog at the Science News web-site.

Steven Weinberg has canceled a planned public talk at an event to be held in conjunction with PASCOS 2007 at Imperial College in London in July, an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of the arrival of Abdus Salam at Imperial. In a letter to Mike Duff (available here), Weinberg says that he is boycotting the event in response to news of a boycott of Israel by the British National Union of Journalists, due to his belief that there is no possible explanation of this other than widespread anti-Semitism in Britain “especially in the intellectual establishment” or “a desire to pander to the growing Muslim minority in Britain.” Note: any attempts to use mention of this news to justify attempts to carry on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the comment section of my blog will be ruthlessly suppressed.

As usual, Tommaso Dorigo is doing a great job of making current collider physics actually seem exciting and interesting. He’s now spreading rumors of a 4-5 sigma excess of multi-b-jet events being seen by D0. What does CDF data show? He’s keeping his mouth shut about that… Maybe there will be some excitement at the upcoming summer conferences…

There’s a new Harvard College magazine about math, run by undergraduates called The Harvard College Mathematics Review. The first issue contains an article by Noam Elkies about the abc conjecture, and one by Dennis Gaitsgory about how not to teach linear algebra.

Via Mathephysique, here’s an interview with theorist Edouard Brezin.

I keep running across more and more web-sites of theory groups that are putting up material from their theory seminar talks. The latest is the HEFTI Seminar Archive at Davis.

Mike Hopkins gave a Distinguished Lecture Series in Toronto recently. Only audio from the talks is available on-line, and I can attest that forcing someone to try and follow a talk they are interested in like Mike’s The Topological WZW Space of Conformal Blocks just by listening to the audio without always being able to tell what he is writing on the board is just cruel.

Via the n-Category Cafe, notes from a recent conference in Kyoto on Link (also known as Khovanov) homology and categorification. Lots of interesting talks to read, but I’m especially fond of the abstract of Dror Bar-Natan’s talk, which begins:

I’m over forty, I’m a full professor, and it’s time that I come out of the closet. I don’t understand quantum groups and I never did.

Now I don’t feel so bad. Also, for inspiration, check out his Dream Map.

Update: A Chicago network news show has a recent segment about Fermilab and the hunt for the Higgs.

Update: The D0 rumor has made it to Slate.