Not Even Wrong

The IAS in Princeton announced today that Robbert Dijkgraaf will take over from Peter Goddard as director starting next summer.

Like Goddard, Dijkgraaf has devoted much of his career to string theory, more specifically the formal side of the subject, including conformal quantum field theories, topological quantum field theories, and their manifold interesting relationships to mathematical issues. Unlike Goddard, he’s from a later generation, getting his Ph.D. in 1989 and entering theoretical physics after string theory had begun to play a dominant role. His cohort of theorists who entered the subject as Young Turk revolutionaries riding the wave of string theory is now settling into the role of Grand Old Men.

Dijkgraaf is known as a masterful expositor, with pretty much any survey article by him you can find sure to be lucid and very much worth reading. He also has world-class political skills, recently overseeing the review of the IPCC, a topic putting him at the center of the religious war over climate change. His background makes him an ideal choice to lead an institution like the IAS, one with a great history in theoretical physics and mathematics, and an important ongoing role to play in keeping those subjects healthy.

An explanation of something that readers of this and other related blogs may have run into recently:

An ex-boyfriend of a close personal friend of mine has been posting here and elsewhere repulsive and delusional material about the two of us. A few weeks ago he wrote to her to demand money, telling her that if she didn’t pay up he would go on a campaign to broadcast information discreditable to me and embarrassing to her. She didn’t pay him and what you may have seen is the result of him making good on his threat.

I’ve never met this person, and his accusations are simply untrue. If you’re owner of a blog where this is posted, please delete this material, although it might be a good idea to save a copy in case it becomes evidence in a criminal case. Otherwise please just ignore it completely, unless you’d like to help me out by contacting the blog owner to tell them what is going on and ask them to delete it. Thanks.

Note added: I appreciate the intention, but please do not post comments or advice about this here on the blog.

Via Steve Hsu, at the AIP Center for History of Physics, there’s a transcript of an interview with Sidney Coleman from 1977. It’s provocative and amusing, like the man himself, as well as informative history. Go and read the whole thing, but here are some excerpts:

But you do enjoy working with students or do you?

No. I hate it. You do it as part of the job. Well, that’s of course false…or maybe more true than false when I say I hate it. Occasionally there’s a student who is a joy to work with. But I certainly would be just as happy if I had no graduate students…

I guess your remark means then that you would like to avoid teaching undergraduate courses or even required graduate courses…

Or even special topics courses. Teaching is unpleasant work. No question about it. It has its rewards. One feels happy about having a job well done. Washing the dishes, waxing the floors (things I also do on a regular basis since I’m a bachelor) have their rewards. I am pleased when I have done a good job waxing the floor and I’ve taken an enormous pile of dirty dishes and reduced them to sparkling clean ones. On the other hand, if I didn’t have to, I would never engage in waxing the floors, although I’m good at it. I’m also good at teaching; I’m considered very good at teaching, both by myself and others. And I’m also terrifically good at washing dishes, in fact. On the other hand, I certainly would never make a bunch of dirty dishes just for the joy of washing them and I would not teach a course just for the joy of teaching a course…

So I guess really you would be happier with the format of an institute of theoretical physics? Rather than a teaching institution like a university?

Well no. That makes it too abstract. Because that means, would you like to have a position at, say, the Institute for Advanced Studies? And then all sorts of other things would enter the picture. Like you’d have to live in Princeton which is truly an awful experience.

I was there as a young bride a long time ago.

Young brides get the worst of it. They’re even worse off than the people who are at the University or the Institute because at least the people at the University or the Institute can fill their days by engaging in their professional interests from the moment they wake up until the moment they go to sleep. But if you don’t have that, there is really nothing. Nothing. It’s a terrible place. Dullest place in the world. No I wouldn’t say that, but certainly the dullest place at which decent science or decent scholarship is done in the world today. The only advantage to Princeton is that it’s close to Princeton Junction.

Personally I’m quite glad that Harvard was wealthy enough to support Coleman, while forcing him to teach, since I benefited quite a bit from his teaching, right around the time of this interview. I had heard before that he didn’t enjoy his time in Princeton. Once at lunch at the IAS, a senior physicist visiting there told me about the advice Coleman had given him when he told him he was going to Princeton for a year. The advice was “Be sure to bring with you everything you need.” The senior physicist then told me that: “I recently realized what Sidney was trying to tell me: there are no women here so I should have brought someone with me…”

With the Solvay Centenary conference now finished for over a week, some information has been posted about it on the Solvay Institute web-site, where you can see a group picture of the attendees on the main page. Lisa Randall’s comment comparing the gender balance to that at the first conference is actually rather restrained, given that the fraction of women (2.9%, 2 out of 69, Randall and Silverstein) is smaller now than back in 1911 (4.1%, 1 out of 24, Skłodowska-Curie). Oddly, only women working in extra dimensions seem to have made the cut.

The schedule of talks is here. Perhaps someday we’ll see proceedings of the conference and learn what was in the talks and discussions. For now, this page has links to some outlines of the rapporteur talks. There were two separate sessions related to quantum computing (here and here), as well as sessions on condensed matter, particle physics, quantum gravity and string theory.

The string theory talks seem to have just been about possible applications to condensed matter and to quantum gravity, rather than about using string theory to get a unified theory. Witten attended, but appears not to have given a talk of any kind.

Thomas Love pointed me to a wonderful article from last year by Rudolf Haag. It’s more or less a short memoir of his scientific career, entitled Some people and some problems met in half a century of commitment to mathematical physics. There’s a lot about the history of mathematical physics related to quantum field theory that I learned from the article, which covers the second half of the twentieth century. Haag started out his career heavily influenced by Wigner and his work on representations of the Poincaré group, investigating what this had to do with quantum field theory. He has been one of the leaders of the operator algebra approach to formulating QFT.

His comments about the Witten and string theory bring back memories of the late eighties, when several people told me of similar experiences. Haag writes:

I had been asked to give a physics colloquium talk about my views on quantum gravity and hoped to have some discussion with Ed Witten. Next morning he greeted me by saying: “Your talk was very interesting but I would really advise you to work on string theory”. When he saw the somewhat incredulous look on my face he added “I really mean it. I shall send you the manuscript of the first chapters of our book”. This ended our discussion. Back in Hamburg I received the manuscript but it did not convert me to string theory. I remained a heathen to this day and regret that meanwhile most physics departments believe that they must have a string theory group and have filled their vacant positions with string theorists. To be precise: It is good that people with vision like Ed Witten spend time trying to develop a revolutionary theory. But it is not healthy if a whole generation of young theorists is engaged in speculative work with only superficial grounding in traditional knowledge. In many popularised presentations the starting point of string theory is explained as the replacement of the fundamental notion of “particles” with its classical picture of a point in space or a world line in space-time by a string in space respectively a two-dimensional worldsheet in space-time. This, I think, is a misunderstanding of existing wisdom. First of all, paraphrasing Heisenberg, one may say “Particles are the roof of the theory, not its foundation”.