Not Even Wrong

To some extent, if one wants to understand some of the recent history of physics, one should take into account important demographic trends in the subject. For particle physics in the U.S., in recent years the Particle Data Group has been conducting an annual Census of U.S. Particle Physics. The American Institute of Physics has a collection of reports available on-line. The NSF and other various other organizations periodically issue hysterical reports about there being too few physics students getting Ph.D.s. For some perspective on this, in 2003 there were a bit more than 1100 physics Ph.D.s awarded in the U.S., and during 2001-2002, about 230 retirements per year of permanent faculty. Due to large recent increases in graduate student enrollment, the number of Ph.D.s is expected to increase significantly during the next few years. There doesn’t seem to be much danger that anytime soon U.S. universities will see any change in the current situation of having vastly more qualified candidates for academic jobs than actual permanent jobs available.

In the specific case of particle theory, the Particle Data Group figures show roughly 450-500 tenured faculty, and 400-450 graduate students. So, the entire U.S. tenured particle theory professoriate could be just about replaced by one 4-5 year cohort of graduate students. The theoretical particle physics job market will remain extremely competitive for the forseeable future.

Unfortunately, the main hope for young physicists who want an academic job is that current tenured faculty are getting old and have to retire or die sooner or later. The latest data I’ve seen (from a 2000 AIP membership survey) indicated that the average age of tenured physics faculty had reached nearly 60. If anyone knows of more recent data I’d be interested to hear about it. I don’t know of any good on-line sources for historical data, but the December 1995 issue of Physics Today had an interesting article about demographic trends in physics entitled “What future will we choose for physics?”. The authors of that article claimed that before 1970 the median age of physics professors in the U.S. was relatively stable and under 40. In 1970, the number of physics Ph.D.s awarded hit an all time high of nearly 1600, and faculty hiring essentially fell off a cliff. According to the Physics Today article, from 1970 on the median age of tenured faculty increased linearly at the rate of about 8 months/year.

One effect of the aging of the physics community is that Physics Today has been running an increasing number of obituaries, since it has a long-running policy of printing a picture and several paragraphs about each of their members for whom obituaries are submitted. As of this month, facing the prospect of having to devote an increasing fraction of space to this purpose, they have abandoned this policy, announcing that from now on they will only publish obituaries in special cases, setting up a separate web-site for on-line obituaries, since these won’t be appearing in the magazine itself.

Update: Andre Brown wrote in to point out that the 1995 Physics Today article is available on-line.

This week there’s a large conference in Potsdam on non-perturbative/background independent quantum gravity called Loops ’05. The programme is on-line, and there is live-blogging from Robert Helling.

Update: String theorist Robert Helling has more coverage of the conference. This includes the hilarious criticism (quoted approvingly by Jacques Distler) that too many of the talks were “so vague and speculative that they are not even wrong.” Helling does notice that the string theorist speaker (Stefan Thiessen) delegated to talk about what is going on in string theory had nothing to say, and just repeated the failed dogma from more than 20 years ago. Maybe at Strings 2006 they’ll even let someone from the LQG camp speak, or at least there will be live-blogging from an LQGer.

Note: This is a reconstruction of my original posting. Unfortunately I accidentally hit the wrong button when trying to edit a typo in a comment, deleting the posting and all comments. Thanks to Steve and Aaron for helping me retrieve the content of the posting, but unfortunately most of the comments were lost. If you have copies of them, please send them to me or resubmit them yourself.

Update: For something truly bizarre, see Lubos Motl’s comments on Loops ’05, where he attacks the talks there as “not even wrong”, while in the same posting respectfully reporting on a talk by Cumrun Vafa at Radcliffe on the Swampland, a talk at which several people evidently expressed the opinion that it could never lead to an explanation of anything about physics.

Update: There’s a bit more about Loops ’05 in the latest issue of John Baez’s “This Week’s Finds”.

Update: The talks from the conference are now on-line.

A commenter here wrote in to point out that Margaret Wertheim, a science columnist for the Los Angeles Times, has a new piece entitled Physics strings us along. She discusses Lisa Randall’s new book as an example of physics that has become completely unmoored from empirical evidence and instead “has become in effect a form of speculative literature” (much like John Horgan’s characterization of this sort of thing as “science fiction in mathematical form”). Wertheim notes that it is becoming hard to distinguish theoretical physics from religion and magic, supposedly less rational practices, claiming that “in recent years science itself has been showing increasingly magical tendencies”, concerning itself with “entire landscapes of universes for which there is no empirical evidence whatever. ”

She is writing a book about “the role of imagination in theoretical physics”, and she seems overly enthusiastic about how “Unchained by the fetters of verification, string theorists are free to dream, articulating through their equations vast imagined domains in which almost anything that is mathematically possible is deemed to be happening ‘somewhere.'”

An assortment of news and links that may be of interest:

The Tevatron has achieved a record luminosity for a hadron collider: 1.41×10³²cm^-2sec^-1. This is higher than the best luminosity at the ISR at CERN, and that was a proton-proton collider. Getting to high luminosity at the Tevatron is a lot harder since one need to create and store an intense beam of antiprotons.

The proceedings of this year’s Lattice 2005 conference are now online.

Prior to the summer’s big algebraic geometry conference in Seattle, there was a Graduate Student Warm-Up Workshop at which there were some excellent expository talks, for which lecture notes are online. A couple of these talks were specifically relevant to physics (Jim Bryan’s and Ron Donagi’s), but they are all interesting and worth reading.

The Bulletin of the AMS has a new editor and will soon have a new cover. One article soon to appear is a short piece by Michael Atiyah on Mathematics: Art and Science which contains a very interesting explanation of his views on mathematical beauty. Another is a review article Floer Theory and Low Dimensional Topology by Dusa McDuff. Floer theory has its origins in Witten’s work on supersymmetry and Morse theory. McDuff goes over this, and explains recent results on Heegard Floer theory due to Peter Ozsvath and Zoltan Szabo. Ozsvath is my colleague here in the math department, and he has recently been joined by Mikhail Khovanov who moved here from Davis. The relation of Khovanov’s new homology theory for knot invariants and the Heegard Floer theory is the subject of recent work by several mathematicians, including a second new Columbia faculty member, Ciprian Manolescu.

There’s a fantastic new set of introductory lectures on quantum field theory by Luis Alvarez-Gaume and Miguel Vazquez-Mozo. In less than a hundred pages they cover a wide range of subjects including the basics of quantum field theory, anomalies, renormalization, external field problems and supersymmetry. Page for page it’s by far the best introduction to the subject I’ve ever seen. For some other similarly excellent introductions to the subject, see one by ‘t Hooft and one by Pierre van Baal.

The last two items come from links on Gerard ‘t Hooft’s excellent web-site which includes a useful page on How to Become a Good Theoretical Physicist. He has just put up a new page on How to Become a Bad Theoretical Physicist, where he notes that “It is much easier to become a bad theoretical physicist than a good one.” This page is still under construction, I fear that he has a large amount of potential material for it.

Witten gave a lecture on the beach at Stony Brook on the topic of gauge theory and the Langlands program two months ago, and lecture notes are now available. Lubos Motl has a posting about this, where he promotes the idea that people should stop referring to the “Langlands Program” and just refer to “Langlands duality”. Somehow I suspect that mathematicians will keep doing what they have always done, using “program” to refer to the general, well, program, and “duality” to refer to the more specific, well, duality, that one would like to prove as part of the program.

An earlier posting of mine contains a lot of relevant links, to which should be added the notes from David Ben-Zvi’s talk in Seattle this summer.

A new physics journal was launched this week, it’s an offshoot of Nature called Nature Physics and will cover research in pure and applied physics. In an opening editorial, the editors of the new journal explain what its goals are. Back over at their mother publication, in their own editorial, the editors of Nature welcome the new publication, although they can’t help pointing out that “Nowadays, thanks to the allure of biology’s progress and benefits, physics is just another discipline.”

The Townes Symposium will be taking place in Berkeley starting tomorrow, and if you’ve got \$500 burning a hole in your pocket, you might want to help subsidize the Templeton Foundation in its efforts to bring science and religion together. If you want dinner on Saturday that will be another \$300, although you could buy a whole “Laureate Table” for \$10,000, and presumably get to dine with one or more of the 18 Nobel Laureates that Templeton has convinced to attend.

Among those in attendance will be string theorists Raphael Bousso, who will promote the Landscape pseudo-science, David Gross, who won’t be promoting the Landscape pseudo-science (I hope), Michio Kaku, who will speak on science fiction, and Leonard Susskind, who will promote the Landscape pseudo-science and his forthcoming book. One physicist that attendees won’t get to hear from is Sean Carroll.

At some point during the symposium the new fq(x): Foundational Questions in Physics and Cosmology project will be unveiled. About all I know about this project so far is that it “is a multi-million dollar, multi-year effort to catalyze research and dialogue at the boundaries of physics and cosmology that are related to really big questions” and is based on the idea that “positivistic, deterministic, or materialistic philosophies no longer have secure places” because of modern physics and chaos theory. It will answer questions like “Why existence? What makes meaning?”, and its domain name is registered to Max Tegmark.

Update: The fq(x) website has just appeared. On the whole the project seems more sensible and free of religious nonsense than I had feared. It is being run by Tegmark, assisted by astronomer Anthony Aguirre. The advisory board consists of real physicists (Barrow, Rees, Silverstein, Smolin, Wilczek and Zeh), not religion and science people. It looks like the Templeton Foundation has provided $5 million in seed money, to be spent over 4 years, with the idea that after 4 years the project would have attracted funding from elsewhere. They will announce the first competition for grants on December 1. Grants will be awarded based on “a competitive process of expert peer review similar to that employed by national scientific funding agencies, and will target research unlikely to be otherwise funded by conventional sources.” They hope to “Expand the purview of scientific inquiry to include scientific disciplines fundamental to a deep understanding of reality, but which are currently largely unsupported by conventional grant sources.” I wonder what kind of research they have in mind to fund that isn’t getting funded by the current sources of funding, that will be interesting to see.

Well, it looks like I was right to not try and guess this year’s Nobel Prize, since it has been awarded for work in an area of physics I know nothing about. None of the commenters here managed to guess correctly either. The prize goes to Glauber, Hall and Hänsch for work in the field of optics.

Roy Glauber is 80 years old now, and taught the first quantum field theory course I ever took. At the time I was an undergraduate at Harvard and the course was way over my head. All I remember from it now is that it involved a lot of writing down and manipulating long formulas involving mode expansions and annihilation and creation operators. I did end up with some facility in doing this, but didn’t much understand what it all meant. Buried somewhere in my office should be notes for that course, perhaps I’ll try and dig them up and take a look at them, since I suspect I can probably now appreciate much better what Glauber was trying to teach than I could way back then.

Congratulations to Glauber, Hall and Hänsch!

Update: Hongbao Zhang didn’t guess the prize winner’s names, but he did correctly guess that it would go to physicists in the field of quantum optics. Congratulations!

When I first started thinking about using “Not Even Wrong” as the title of a book, I did some research to try and find out where the supposed Pauli quote came from. No one seemed to have any information about this, other than the attribution to Pauli, and various different stories existed about the context in which he had used the phrase. I started to worry that these stories, like many of the best ones about Pauli, might be apocryphal, so I contacted a few physicists who had some connection to Pauli to ask them about this. Prof. Karl von Meyenn, the editor of Pauli’s correspondence, wrote back to tell me that the phrase doesn’t occur in his correspondence. He pointed me to a biographical notice about Pauli written soon after his death by Rudolf Peierls as the best source for the story of Pauli using the phrase.

Peierls writes

No account of Pauli and his attitude to people would be complete without mention of his critical remarks, for which he was known and sometimes feared throughout the world of physics…

Quite recently, a friend showed him the paper of a young physicist which he suspected was not of great value but on which he wanted Pauli’s views. Pauli remarked sadly ‘It is not even wrong.’

The Peierls article is in

Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, Vol. 5 (Feb. 1960), 174-192.

It is on-line via JSTOR.

Just recently, Oliver Burkeman wrote a short piece for The Guardian about the Pauli phrase and its recent uses. I talked to him on the phone about this and his article contains some accurate quotes from me, together with a link to this weblog.