Not Even Wrong

Pierre Cartier has written a short biographical article about the remarkable French mathematician Jean Dieudonné. Cartier estimates that Dieudonné wrote about 80,000 pages of mathematics over the course of his career. He was a driving force behind Bourbaki, often taking on the bulk of the writing tasks. With Alexandre Grothendieck he co-wrote EGA, the huge foundational text on algebraic geometry (some people note that, considering the French meaning of his name, this text could be described as “God-given”).

A new institute devoted to theoretical particle physics has been organized, the Galileo Galilei Institute for Theoretical Physics, which will be located in Florence. The purpose of the institute is to organize advanced workshops, the first of which will take place next spring. There will also be an inaugural conference next month. The institute is clearly modeled after the KITP in Santa Barbara, and its web-site design looks very familiar…

A group called Thales and Friends, based in Greece and sponsored by MSRI, has organized a recent conference about Mathematics and Narrative that took place last month on Mykonos. Their web-site has abstracts of the talks and some other interesting material.

Update: There’s an article about this in the Independent.

The KITP in Santa Barbara, a few steps from the beach, is running a semester long program on Mathematical Structures in String Theory that started this past week. Some of the talks are already on-line.

On the other coast, as part of the Simons Workshop at Stony Brook, Witten will be giving a talk at Smith Point beach on “Gauge theory and the Geometric Langlands Program”. This sounds like it might be very interesting and mercifully off the main topic of the workshop, which seems to be swamps not beaches.

I’ve never really understood how Wikipedia works, especially how it protects itself from getting filled with nonsense. The entry about the Bogdanovs has evidently recently been the subject of repeated attempts by the Bogdanovs to modify it, one can follow the history here. This sort of thing seems to be enough of a problem that steps are being taken to prevent this kind of abuse.

Joe Lykken just finished giving a series of talks at the SLAC summer school, now entitled “String Theory for Physicists”. This was changed from the original title, “String Theory for Dummies” (still on the poster). Presumably somebody realized that the title could be taken the wrong way, giving the impression that string theorists think non-string theorists are stupid.

Lykken’s talks are actually unusual for this kind of exercise in expounding string theory to non-string theorists. They begin with a long list of the pros and cons of string theory. I’d disagree with him about some of the “pros” he lists, but it is remarkable that he gives a detailed discussion of the problems with string theory. I’ve never seen a string theorist do that before. During the last few months I’ve been sensing a definite change in the atmosphere surrounding string theory. String theorists are on the defensive, and many science journalists and members of the general public are starting to get the idea that there might be something funny going on. For the first time there was open pessimism and defensiveness expressed at the panel discussion at Strings 2005 and the recent New York Times article about it had a somewhat mocking tone.

There’s a posting at cosmicvariance.com by JoAnne Hewett about the panel discussion and Times article, and many comments, including some from yours truly. Jacques Distler proves that he thinks anyone who doesn’t agree with him about string theory is just ignorant (OK, maybe he just thinks that I’m the only one who is ignorant) with his trademark tactic when he’s on the losing side of an argument: take something perfectly accurate that your opponent writes, change the wording to something else that can be interpreted as inaccurate, then use this as evidence to back up a sneering put-down of your opponent. Jacques seemingly can’t help himself from doing this. For an all-time classic, check out his contribution to one of the first postings here, where he attacks me for saying that the standard model is a chiral gauge theory.

Unfortunately, Jacques isn’t the only string theorist who thinks that this is an intelligent way to behave. Besides another well-known string theory blogger I could mention, at one point I had a remarkable experience with an unknown “prominent string theorist” (I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Jacques) who was asked to referee something I’d written about string theory. This referee wrote a report saying that I was just so wrong it wasn’t worth explaining why, but that they would give one example. Their example was constructed by taking a sentence out of context, then changing a singular to a plural to allow the sentence to be construed as saying something inaccurate. Some string theorists seem to be willing to go to any lengths to preserve their belief that any criticism of the theory is based on ignorance. My impression is that a lot more criticism is coming their way, and it will be interesting to see how long they try and keep claiming that their critics are just dummies.

Update: Lubos Motl is back from vacation, with a posting about the Toronto panel discussion.

Since I accidentally deleted a post, so had to spend some time fixing things, I decided to go ahead with a long-planned project to try and change around the software here. The old Movable Type software is gone, replaced by Word Press. It seems to be working, but I still need to add in the old links, and fiddle with the configuration a bit. Let me know if anything seems to be broken.