Not Even Wrong

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”.

The Perimeter Institute announced yesterday a new partnership with the Templeton Foundation, in the form of something to be called the Templeton Frontiers Program. The research areas to be supported are “quantum foundations and information, foundational questions in cosmology, and the emergence of spacetime.” A $2 million grant from Templeton will pay for three postdocs, as well as other programs in this area.

The previous major Templeton effort in this area was the $8.8 million dollars in grants a few years ago that funded FQXI. I’m not aware whether FQXI is still getting money from Templeton, or if it has successfully found other sources of funding.

Update: I hadn’t realized this, but over the last year, the Templeton Foundation has awarded an even larger sum of money in direct individual grants (for details, see here). They’ve made about $2.4 million in grants for research in the area of foundations of quantum theory, and another $1.1 million in grants in mathematics/logic, emphasizing foundational results on the limits of mathematics. These are quite large sums relative to the previously available research funding in these particular areas.

According to World News Forecast, 11:11am on 11/11/11 could, if Uri Geller is right, be a portal to another universe. This is from Geller’s web-page on the subject:

String theory is said to be the theory of everything. It is a way of describing every force and matter regardless of how large or small or weak or strong it is. There are a few eleven’s that have been found in string theory.

I find this to be interesting since this theory is supposed to explain the universe! The first eleven that was noticed is that string theory has to have 11 parallel universes (discussed in the beginning of the “11.11” article) and without including these universes, the theory does not work.

The second is that Brian Greene has 11 letters in his name. For those of you who do not know, he is a physicist as well as the author of The Elegant Universe, which is a book explaining string theory. (His book was later made into a mini series that he hosted.) Another interesting find is that Isaac Newton (who’s ideas kicked off string theory many years later) has 11 letters in his name as well as John Schwarz. Schwarz was one of the two men who worked out the anomalies in the theory. Plus, 1 person + 1 person = 2 people = equality.

Whether or not a portal to another universe does open up, there will be a film opening that day about the topic, see here. In possibly related news, Brian Greene’s Fabric of the Cosmos series will start appearing on broadcast TV 11/2/11, with the first episode already available here if you are an iperson.

The first Solvay conference was in 1911 (at the Hotel Metropole in Brussels, where I stayed one night of my recent trip to Belgium, without knowing the history), attended by the great men of the early days of quantum theory, and one woman (Marie Curie). For more about the 1911 conference, see this recent paper by Norbert Straumann. Today the 25th Solvay conference got underway in Brussels City Hall, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the first conference.

Like the first one, this conference is by invitation only, and it upholds a policy of confidentiality that goes back to 1911, with not even a schedule or list of attendees for the scientific session publicly available that I can see (just the statement that they are “most of the prominent physicists working on the subject). We do however have Lisa Randall reporting on Twitter about the proceedings. Evidently she’s the only woman there [note added: wrong interpretation, Eva Silverstein is also there, but the number of participants has doubled since 1911]:

Seems ratio of x to y chromosomes hasn’t changed in 100 years since first Solvay conference in 1911…

The only other source of info on the internet seems to be this Cal Tech news item, which lists the Solvay chair as David Gross and rapporteurs as:
John Preskill (Quantum Computation)
Anthony Leggett (Quantum Foundations)
Ignacio Cirac and Steven Girvin (Control of Quantum Systems)
Frank Wilczek (Particles and Fields)
Edward Witten (String Theory)
Alan Guth (Cosmology)

The gender distribution may have stayed the same, but it looks like the age distribution is somehat different. Today the average age of the chair and Rapporteurs is about 61, back then it was about 46.