Not Even Wrong

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.

There’s a nice article this week in Nature about AdS/CMT, entitled String Theory Finds a Bench Mate. According to the article, the whole thing is (partly) my fault:

But in 2006, string theory took a public battering in two popular books: Not Even Wrong by Peter Woit, a mathematician at Columbia, and The Trouble With Physics by Lee Smolin, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. Both books excoriated the theory’s isolation from experiment.

“It’s hard to say whether the interest in condensed-matter applications is a direct response to those books because that’s really a psychological question,” says Joseph Polchinski, a string theorist at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara. “But certainly string theorists started to long for some connection to reality.”

The main point of the story is to tell about what is probably the hottest topic in hep-th these days, attempts to use AdS/CFT to say something about some models in condensed matter physics. For some idea of what this is all about, see the review article What can gauge-gravity duality teach us about condensed matter physics? by Subir Sachdev, and take a look at the online talks from the KITP workshop Holographic Duality and Condensed Matter Physics.

The article does go into the history of this in some detail, including its roots in efforts to use AdS/CFT to say something about heavy-ion physics phenomena observed at RHIC (for the string theory promotional campaign surrounding this, see e.g. here). I had expected to see a lot about this topic when higher energy results from heavy-ion collisions at the LHC were released earlier this year, but it seems to have gone quiet, perhaps because of the kind of comparison of data with AdS/CFT predictions that Sabine Hossenfelder points out here:

As the saying goes, a picture speaks a thousand words, but since links and image sources have a tendency to deteriorate over time, let me spell it out for you: The AdS/CFT scaling does not agree with the data at all.

My knowledge of condensed matter theory is minimal, and the hype level surrounding string theory makes it hard to know whether to take at face value many of the claims being made. On general principles, this looks a bit more promising than the heavy-ion case, since there are many different kinds of systems one might look at, and the connections are more to QFT than to string theory. Experts quoted in the Nature article give opinions ranging from:

Polchinski admits that the condensed-matter sceptics have a point. “I don’t think that string theorists have yet come up with anything that condensed-matter theorists don’t already know,” he says. The quantitative results tend to be re-derivations of answers that condensed-matter theorists had already calculated using more mundane methods.

to condensed matter theorist Andrew Green’s:

“Maybe string theory is not a unique theory of reality, but something deeper — a set of mathematical principles that can be used to relate all physical theories,” says Green. “Maybe string theory is the new calculus.”

Time will tell whether this suffers the same fate as in the case of heavy ions.

The latest New York Review of Books has an article by Steven Weinberg entitled Symmetry: A ‘Key to Nature’s Secrets’. It’s a bit unusual for the NYRB, since it is both scientifically more technical than usual for them (coming from a write-up of Weinberg’s talk at this conference), and doesn’t review any books. The printed version tells readers to go to the web version for footnotes, but some of these just note that things are being over-simplified. One of the footnotes is worse than useless: the editors have replaced x^3=x as an example of an equation with solutions that break a symmetry (x goes to -x) by “x 3 equals x”, an equation with the same symmetry but only a symmetric solution (x=0). The idea seems to have been to remove or replace any symbols in the equation that might upset people.

Weinberg tells the conventional story of how the Standard Model emerged during the 60s and early 70s out of the realization that non-abelian gauge symmetries were important and an understanding of what happens when symmetries are spontaneously broken. He tries to do some much more ambitious things, explaining the idea of “accidental symmetries” that are due to the limited number of possible renormalizable terms you can build out of a specified list of fields, but I’m not sure the typical reader of the NYRB is going to get much out of this.

The question of how to explain the notion of “symmetry” is an interesting one, and I thought a lot about it when writing Not Even Wrong, the book. To my mind, most such explanations mix up two conceptually distinct things: the group of symmetries (a group), and the action of the group on some other mathematical object (the representation: mathematically a homomorphism from the group to the group of automorphisms of something). It’s both the group and the representation that are important in the use of symmetries in physics, although often what is important is the trivial representation. From a mathematician’s point of view, the simplest representations to look at are unitary representations on a complex vector space, so the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics is very natural. To each symmetry generator you get a conserved quantity, and it appears in quantum mechanics as the thing you exponentiate (a self-adjoint operator) to get a unitary representation. In Weinberg’s piece, which aims at sophisticated issues in particle theory, the question of the basic relation of symmetries and conservation laws is relegated to a footnote which says only “For reasons that are difficult to explain without mathematics…”.

Weinberg ends with a landscape sort of picture, involving symmetries emerging only when a specific ground state emerges out of an initial chaotic inflation state. Philosophically this is a popular view of the future of the subject these days, but one that has so far led nowhere, and one that I think even in principle can never lead anywhere. Much more interesting would be to try and draw lessons from what has worked well in the past: exactly the gauge symmetries and spontaneous symmetry breaking phenomena that led to the standard model. We may very well soon find out there is no Higgs particle, turning this whole subject into a wide-open one. Future progress may come from exactly the same place as in the past: new ideas about how to exploit the mathematical structures inherent in quantum mechanical symmetries.

Update: The missing exponentiation in the on-line footnote has been fixed.