Not Even Wrong

I’d been wondering why Lubos Motl seemed rather subdued in recent months, now one of his recent postings makes some reasons for this clear. Evidently since April he’s been the victim of someone who has been sending him grotesque anonymous death threats. Luckily the person responsible for this has now been identified by the police. In the comment section of the next entry in his blog, Eva Silverstein tells of also being the victim of similar threats, and again the police had to be called in.

Lubos’s participation in the controversy over the president of Harvard’s remarks about women in the sciences seems to have earned him both warnings from senior colleagues (I guess this is what his “leashing” was about), as well as harassment by some other anonymous figure. There’s no excuse for people trying to hide behind anonymity to engage in personal attacks. While Lubos is not known to completely refrain from personal attacks himself, at least he has always put his name to them.

In his latest posting he discusses in detail Silverstein and McGreevy’s claims that one can understand something about the initial singularity of the big bang in terms of tachyon condensation in string theory. Like Jacques Distler, he says that he doesn’t understand these claims, which to me seem to be a lot more coherent, but not of a significantly different nature than those of the Bogdanovs.

One of the big experimental HEP conferences, the Lepton-Photon Symposium, has just ended and many of the talks are on-line. This is the 22nd of these conferences which happen every two years. New data from the Tevatron about the top quark was discussed, and a paper with the new top quark mass results has been released.

There’s a new web-site with news about the LHC.

Last month there was an Einstein Symposium in Alexandria, and presentations are on-line. They’re for the general public so pretty content-free, but it is interesting to see what Witten’s latest view of string theory is: “I’d like to believe — but of course I don’t know — that string theory is on the right track…” Michio Kaku begins his presentation with advertisements for his books, then tells the audience that testing string theory would require creating a “baby universe”, that “Mind of God = music resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace” and that the standard model is “supremely ugly” (which strikes me as something supremely stupid to say).

If you can’t wait for next week’s Strings 2005 in Toronto, there’s a summer school on strings going on at Perimeter, and a meeting in Crete that just ended, along with many more string conferences to come. The one series of talks I won’t be able to make it to, but would love to hear would be Graeme Segal’s talks in Oporto on 2d QFT.

The DOE has just announced the award of seven new Outstanding Junior Investigator grants in high-energy theory and experiment, one of which is going to Lubos Motl.

Via Steve Hsu, the news from the Wall Street Journal is that Renaissance Technologies is about to launch a new hedge fund that could end up managing $100 billion, 10% of the total managed by all hedge funds today.

Renaissance Technologies is run by mathematician Jim Simons, perhaps the most successful hedge fund manager ever. His current Medallion hedge fund manages $5 billion, and his personal net worth is estimated to be about $2.5 billion. Renaissance employs many Ph.D. mathematicians and other scientists, but is quite secretive about their investment strategies. If you ask people who are working there about what they are doing, you get answers like “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

Simons was an undergraduate at MIT, got his Ph.D. from Berkeley in 1961, then was a junior faculty member at MIT and Harvard. He worked for a while at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Princeton, but was fired over criticism of the Vietnam War. He then went to SUNY Stony Brook, where as chair he built up a great math department, one especially strong in geometry. His work with Chern in the early seventies led to an extension of Chern-Weil theory involving “Chern-Simons forms”, which have been of great importance in physics.

During the seventies he started trading currencies and commodities with his own money, leaving Stony Brook in 1978 to form his own investment fund. Over the years he has been generous to the mathematics community, supporting MSRI, the IAS, the Stony Brook and MIT math departments, and many conferences and workshops. I have no idea what his long term plans are for his current billions or the additional ones his new hedge fund may generate, but if even a fraction of them end up financing pure math research, this could have a very dramatic effect.

The status of Perelman’s proof of the Poincare conjecture is still somewhat confusing. For some background see a previous posting and a later follow-up. Last week the ICTP in Trieste issued a press release entitled Poincare Conjecture Solved, which states that Perelman’s proof “has been confirmed by an international group of mathematicians whose findings were presented to participants at a conference” at the ICTP. The conference was a summer school, and the press release goes on to claim that “The 60 participants, more than half from the developing world, reaffirmed the approving judgement of the mathematicians.”

If you look at the write-ups of the talks, the only relevant thing in print is in the lecture notes of Carlo Sinestrati where he states “The details of the proof are still being checked by the experts in the field; however, the main ideas of the papers are by now widely understood.” So, it’s not clear who exactly is supposedly now willing to vouch for Perelman’s proof, and the comment that the students at the school “reaffirmed” that it is a proof is kind of silly, given the difficulties involved.

There’s a month-long summer school going on right now at MSRI in Berkeley, sponsored by the Clay Mathematics Institute. Many relevant materials are available at the web-site of the summer school. As far as I know, none of the experts there is yet quite willing to claim that a complete proof using Perelman’s techniques has been written down and checked, although they do seem to be getting close to this point.

There’s an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the Quantum Diaries Webloggers. It points out that since this project is organized by the high energy physics labs, it “presents a sanitized version of life in high-energy physics”, with one of the participants quoted as saying “None of us wants to be responsible for saying anything negative.” Well at least there is one weblog dealing with high-energy physics where things are not sanitized….

From Gordon Watts, one of the Quantum Diaries webloggers, I learned about the Tevatron Connection Program, which brings together theorists and people from the CDF and D0 experiments at the Tevatron. It seems to me that new results on the top mass were first made public this past weekend at this conference (see here and here). The latest combined CDF/D0 result is (“pending final CDF/DO review”):

top quark mass = 174.3 +/- 3.4 Gev

compare to the previous result using Run I data of

top quark mass = 178.0 +/- 4.3 Gev

In the standard model, the new top quark mass implies a value for the Higgs mass of 94 +54/-35 Gev. Note that much of this range is excluded by the LEP result that the Higgs mass must be above 114 Gev. In the minimal supersymmetric standard model with this top quark mass, getting the Higgs mass above 114 Gev requires making the superpartner of the top quite heavy, introducing a certain amount of fine-tuning into the theory. For more about this, see a posting by Jacques Distler.

Via David Goss and Lubos Motl, the news that CNN’s Candy Crowley has a piece about Witten. Unlike Lee Smolin’s Why No “New Einstein”? piece, CNN more or less identifies Witten as the new Einstein. Witten is quoted as giving the following rather defensive statement about string theory: “I just think too many nice things have happened in string theory for it to be all wrong… Humans do not understand it very well, but I just don’t believe there is a big cosmic conspiracy that created this incredible thing that has nothing to do with the real world.” He’s kind of defending against a straw man, since virtually no one is saying string theory is “all wrong” or “has nothing to do with the real world”. It quite possibly can provide some sort of dual description of QCD, and that is what much research in string theory these days is aiming for. On the other hand, the conjecture that you can make a unified TOE using string/M-theory in 11 dimensions at this point shows every evidence of being all wrong.

According to today’s New York Times, “string theory allows for a vast number – 10,500 – of possible ‘worlds’ wth different self-consistent sets of laws and constants.” If 10,500 is “vast”, I wonder what 10⁵⁰⁰ is? I also wonder how long it will take for the news to get through that actually this number is infinite, which is somewhat bigger than “vast”.

The Times piece is an extract from a recent Scientific American article on variable constants of nature. It also includes the standard claim that M-theory is “the best candidate for a theory of everything”, but perhaps an editor is editorializing by pairing this with the news from an astrologer that Saturn is going from Cancer to Leo and Mars is in Taurus. At least the astrologer is able to make predictions: “Many born during this summer of ’05 … will impact the world greatly in years to come.”

Here’s a collection of interesting things I’ve run across recently:

A website devoted to Hermann Weyl. The author is a religious sort, but of the good kind.

A movie taken at the 1927 Solvay conference. It is on the website for “The End of the Certain World”, which is a biography of Max Born. I’ve read the book and some of it is interesting, but I have little sympathy for one of its themes, that Born felt he didn’t receive enough recognition for his work (he got his Nobel Prize in 1954, long after many other Nobel prizes were given for quantum mechanics). Frankly I think any physicist like Born who had the incredible luck to be at Gottingen in 1925-26 should have spent the rest of his life thanking his lucky stars and not complaining about his career.

Harvard mathematical physicist Arthur Jaffe has a website. In particular the site has some interesting expository papers, including an autobiographical memoir about the IHES in the early 60s, a survey of constructive quantum field theory, and a work in progress, an introduction to quantum field theory from a rigorous point of view.

There’s a recent lecture by Eric Zaslow on Physics and Mathematics which he gives the supremely ugly name of Physmatics.

Some of the lectures from String Phenomenology 2005 in Munich last week are on-line. Lots of talks about flux vacua and the landscape, nothing that seems to have the remotest connection to physics. For a report from the conference, see Robert Helling’s weblog.

The talks from a conference held at Potsdam in April on Geometry and Physics after 100 years of Einstein’s Relativity are available.

The Bonn Arbeitstagung is a summer conference that was started by Friedrich Hirzebruch in the late fifties, and which often has been the site of announcements of important developments in mathematics. The 2005 Arbeitstagung ended last week and notes from the talks are on-line.

If you didn’t follow this a couple years ago, you can read John Baez’s detailed description of the Bogdanoff Affair. For more about my dealings with them, see here,, here, and here. If you want to read their stuff, go to the website of the Mathematical Center of Riemannian Cosmology which purports to be in Latvia.

In brief, the Bogdanovs are two brothers in France with a TV show who got Ph. D.s based on work which on the whole was complete nonsense. I’m not surprised that they managed to get Ph. D.s, and one of them was failed on his first attempt. It’s not unusual in academia to be faced with having to decide what to do with students who seem to be enthusiastic and work hard, but don’t perform at an acceptable level. There are lots of reasons to just pass them with the lowest possible grade (for one thing, this gets rid of them). One of my colleagues refers to this as the “infinitely elastic C-minus”.

What was disturbing about the Bogdanov story was that they managed to get papers published in six refereed journals, some of which were quite respectable. Some of these papers were essentially identical. After this story became public, the editorial board of one of the journals (Classical and Quantum Gravity) issued a statement saying that the paper they published shouldn’t have been accepted, and that they were taking (undisclosed) steps to change their refereeing process so this wouldn’t happen again. This seemed to me strong evidence that there is so much nonsense now in the theoretical physics literature that the refereeing system has broken down. Many referees are now either unwilling or unable to identify nonsense when they see it.

I had discussions about this with quite a few physicists at the time, and many of them took the position that this wasn’t such a big deal. Their attitude was roughly that “So what if these guys managed to get something nonsensical past some lazy referees? Everyone in the community can tell that what they wrote is nonsense and just ignores it. It’s not true that we can no longer tell nonsense from serious work”. I became somewhat convinced that I was being too harsh on string theorists and others when I thought that they had completely lost the ability to identify nonsense. Maybe the only scandal here was the laziness of referees, not the infection of the whole subject by nonsense to the point where lots of people can’t tell the difference. Well, I just changed my mind, clearly at least some string theorists can’t.

I feel somewhat constrained in what I can say about the details of this, due to the fact that someone I’ve been in contact with tells me of being threatened with a lawsuit by the Bogdanovs for having criticized them publicly. I’m also not about to engage in discussion of the details of their nonsense, which is what they, like all crackpots, really want. It’s just a complete waste of time.