{"id":13108,"date":"2022-10-23T15:59:44","date_gmt":"2022-10-23T19:59:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=13108"},"modified":"2022-10-23T15:59:44","modified_gmt":"2022-10-23T19:59:44","slug":"david-e-kaplan-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=13108","title":{"rendered":"David E. Kaplan interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a long interview with David E. Kaplan (not the same person as David B. Kaplan…) by David Zierler at the AIP Oral Histories site<\/a>. The whole thing is quite interesting and I recommend reading it, but I do want to point out that it shows that I’m a voice of moderation on the string theory issue. Some extracts follow:<\/p>\n

About Ann Nelson and string theory in the 1990s:<\/p>\n

She was extremely dismissive of string theory, and thought it was\u2014you know, there was\u2014my impression from her and from other people of that generation that weren\u2019t doing string theory was that the string theorists were colluding in a sense, or were dismissing anything but string theory, and deciding that if you did string theory then you\u2019re much smarter than the people who are not doing string theory. There was some unhappiness in the theoretical field. And the cancellation of the SSC probably added to that tension between the two.<\/p>\n

But I don\u2019t think she came of it from taking a side. I think she looked at the situation and said, \u201cString theory is total bullshit.\u201d In the mid-\u201980s, there were some realizations\u2014there were some consistency checks that kind of worked in string theory, and people got super excited. Oh, my god, string\u2014yeah, it could be the, you know, underlying thing to particle physics. But that was it.<\/p>\n

The successes after that were few and far between. But there was an obsessive\u2014like we\u2019re studying the theory of quantum gravity. And it was deridingly called the theory of everything. And then they took that on, you know. We\u2019re studying the theory of everything. And then the young people who want to do the greatest stuff would go to string theory. And there was a concern and some upset by the people not doing string theory that they\u2019re absorbing a lot of people to do this crap, which is not very physics like. \u201cIt\u2019s I believe the theory, and so I\u2019m going to study all aspects of it, and maybe one day we\u2019ll connect it with the physical world.\u201d As opposed to I believe in the phenomenon, and I\u2019m trying to explain that and more, and so I\u2019m going to try out different theories and see what they\u2019re consequences are.<\/p>\n

And now I look back, and it\u2019s obvious that string theory was bullshit in the sense of there were so many people working on it, and they were not manifesting any real progress externally. It was all internal consistency checks and things like that. And so at the time, you know, whenever it came up\u2014and it didn\u2019t come up much because there were no string theorists in Seattle\u2014she was just very dismissive, like, you know, \u201cWhat are those people doing? I don\u2019t know what they\u2019re doing.\u201d [laugh]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

About being a postdoc at SLAC:<\/p>\n

There were a lot of string theorists at Stanford. I didn\u2019t understand any of those talks. Or sometimes when the talks were not in strings, Lenny Susskind would yell at the speaker that this is bullshit or whatever, da, da, da, da\u2014you know, abusive at some level. So Stanford was weird in that way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

About realizing what was going on in string theory, his evaluation of past (Strominger-Vafa) and current claims about string theory and black holes:<\/p>\n

But\u2014so I don\u2019t\u2014and it\u2019s part of probably why I didn\u2019t understand\u2014I didn\u2019t think of myself as a physicist because there\u2019s a lot of physicists working very hard on what? I don\u2019t know what they\u2019re working on. It\u2019s not\u2014you know, I used to just think I\u2019m too stupid to understand what they\u2019re working on. And finally reading some of those papers, they\u2019re not what\u2014it\u2019s stupid. There\u2019s a lot of stupid stuff in there. String theory really is just stupid. It\u2019s unbelievably stupid. There\u2019s so many people who are working on it that don\u2019t actually know physics that they can\u2019t even describe a physical characteristic of the thing they\u2019re calculating. They\u2019re missing the whole thing.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s when I realized string theory is like a video game. There are people just addicted to it. That\u2019s all that\u2019s happening. And it\u2019s couched in the theory of everything and da, da, da, da.<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s all. I just kind of\u2014I learned quite a bit about these things. And then I saw the people like Lenny Susskind, who was terrorizing people who work on regular physics, as just a plain asshole. That there are actual people who are deciding string theory\u2019s important, wanting to do string theory, and they\u2019re even protecting the field. And some of those people are talking about how entropy now of a black hole can be described as a geometric thing, an entanglement, and that Hawking\u2019s paradox about evaporating black holes is really wormholes, virtual wormholes coming from the inside to the outside, and all kinds of language. And you could test information theory of black holes using atomic physics experiments. And it\u2019s literally bullshit.<\/p>\n

There are people\u2014prominent people\u2014in physics who say, \u201cI\u2019m applying for this money from the DOE, but I know it\u2019s bullshit.\u201d And then there are experimental atomic physicists who don\u2019t know and are shocked to learn that \u201cWhat? String theorists don\u2019t have a Hamiltonian? They don\u2019t actually have a [laugh] description? What am I testing?\u201d<\/p>\n

So I have converted a little bit to the opinions of my predecessors, only because I\u2019ve actually done the work. I\u2019ve actually tried to understand black holes of late, and I\u2019ve gone back to those papers which are the breakthrough, celebrated, amazing papers about black holes, and there\u2019s nothing in them. It\u2019s really\u2014it\u2019s just a very simplistic picture where, look, if you take this hyper-simplistic picture, these numbers match these numbers, which means thinking about a black hole having entropy is correct, da, da, da, da, da.<\/p>\n

No matter that the black hole they\u2019re talking about is extremal. It doesn\u2019t actually Hawking radiate. It\u2019s a totally hyper-supersymmetric, multiple charges, free parameters. So now that I\u2019ve finally dug into it, I realize that\u2014not that all humanities fields are bad. But it\u2019s much more like a humanities field where there are the prominent people in the field, and they decide what\u2019s interesting. And that if you impress those people, you can get ahead. But that dictates then what research is done. And they\u2019re not going to discover anything in that context. They\u2019re not going to get anywhere. There\u2019s not a lot of people doing\u2014you know\u2014thinking outside the box or just thinking diff\u2026you know, doing different things, you know.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

About the argument that string theory must be worthwhile because lots of people are doing it:<\/p>\n

Zierler:<\/strong><\/p>\n

What is your response to a string theorist who would say, and I know this because one has said this to me, \u201cLook, four people were doing this in 1968, 20 people were doing it in 1984, 1,000 people were doing it in 2000, and now there\u2019s 6,000 people who are doing string theory all over the world. And that\u2019s proof that there\u2019s something here that\u2019s worthwhile\u201d? What is your response to that line of reasoning?<\/p>\n

Kaplan:<\/strong><\/p>\n

[laugh] Take those numbers, continue the exponential, and apply it to Christianity\u2014<\/p>\n

Zierler:<\/strong><\/p>\n

[laugh]<\/p>\n

Kaplan:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2014and Islam and Judaism and Buddhism. Give me a fucking break. They\u2019re describing a religion that can attract and addict people. That is exactly the kind of statement that shows it\u2019s bullshit and non-scientific. They\u2019ve proven it for me that they are not about discovering something. They\u2019re about dominating the field for the purpose of what? That\u2019s proof? Give me a break. Give me a fucking break. Slavery was very popular, and became widely used. Nazism. Come on. You can take extreme examples and show that that is so non-scientific and sick that the progress they have made is to get more people to work on something that isn\u2019t producing anything. Oh, man, I wish you didn\u2019t tell me that. [laugh]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

About the current state of the field:<\/p>\n

There are so many things to think about. I don\u2019t know what narrowed our field. I don\u2019t see it as we\u2019re dying because we\u2019re coming to the limits of what we can do, the limits of what we can calculate in string theory, and the limits of how big of a ring we can build. I think most people are just doing useless stuff.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

And so that\u2019s why I\u2014the whole depression or whatever, that\u2019s a product of the non-willingness to feel stupid by the majority of our field. Expertise is more important to them than discovery. And that\u2019s what I think is happening. And so what we\u2019re seeing is not the death of the field, but the death of a direction that is being committed to by 98% of them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a long interview with David E. Kaplan (not the same person as David B. Kaplan…) by David Zierler at the AIP Oral Histories site. The whole thing is quite interesting and I recommend reading it, but I do want … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13108"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13111,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13108\/revisions\/13111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}