{"id":8110,"date":"2015-11-23T15:14:02","date_gmt":"2015-11-23T20:14:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=8110"},"modified":"2015-12-04T13:12:01","modified_gmt":"2015-12-04T18:12:01","slug":"this-weeks-non-hype","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=8110","title":{"rendered":"This Week’s Non-Hype"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since I often post here complaints about articles produced by the press offices of various institutions that hype in a misleading way physicist’s theoretical work, I thought it a good idea to make up for this by noting a positive example of how it should be done. The SLAC press office this week has a Q and A with Lance Dixon, with the title SLAC Theorist Lance Dixon Explains Quantum Gravity<\/a> which is quite good.<\/p>\n

Dixon gives an informative explanation at a basic level of what the quantum gravity problem is. He includes an even-handed description of the string theory approach to the problem, and explains a little bit about the alternative that he and collaborators have been pursuing, one that has gotten much less attention than it deserves. This is a very technical subject, so there’s a limit to how much he can explain, but he gives the general idea, and includes a link to his most recent work<\/a> in this area.<\/p>\n

Many promotional efforts for string theory begin by making claims that quantum field theory cannot be used to understand quantum gravity, due to the divergences in the perturbation series. This has been repeated so often, for so many years, that it is an argument most people believe. The situation however is quite a bit more complicated than this, with one interesting aspect of the story the discovery in relatively recent times that long-held assumptions about divergences in perturbative quantum gravity calculations were just wrong. Such calculations turn out to have extra unexpected structure, and thus unexpected cancellations, making naive arguments about divergences incorrect. Continuing progress has come about as Dixon and others have developed new techniques for actually computing amplitudes, uncovering unexpected new symmetries and cancellations.<\/p>\n

For a good summary of the current situation, see this talk by Zvi Bern<\/a>, especially page 7, where Bern details how, going back to 1982, “So far, every prediction of divergences in pure supergravity has either been wrong or missed crucial details”. For N=8 supergravity, current arguments say that a divergence should show up if you could calculate 7 loop amplitudes, but Bern warns against betting on this. In that talk he also explains the recent work with Dixon and others that gets mentioned in the SLAC piece, about the surprising nature of the divergence in pure gravity at two-loops, making its physical significance and whether it really ruins the theory not so clear.<\/p>\n

I was interested to read Dixon’s account of his thinking back in the mid-80s:<\/p>\n

I began to be concerned that there may be actually too many options for string theory to ever be predictive, when I studied the subject as a graduate student at Princeton in the mid-1980s. About 10 years ago, the number of possible solutions was already on the order of 10500<\/sup>. For comparison, there are less than 1010<\/sup> people on Earth and less than 1012<\/sup> stars in the Milky Way. So how will we ever find the theory that accurately describes our universe?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Although this never made it into media stories, I think that by a couple years after the initial enthusiasm for string unification in 1984, many theorists had already started to notice that the idea likely had fundamental problems, with a serious danger that it would turn out to be an empty idea. This now has become clear, but the idea lives on, with “QFT must have divergences” the main argument for continuing to take it seriously. Now that argument isn’t looking so solid…<\/p>\n

Update<\/strong>: A good explanation of the situation from 4 gravitons<\/a> who, thankfully, is not overly worried that he might be giving succor to the Woits of the world…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since I often post here complaints about articles produced by the press offices of various institutions that hype in a misleading way physicist’s theoretical work, I thought it a good idea to make up for this by noting a positive … 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_post_was_ever_published":false,"_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":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8110","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\/8110","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=8110"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8143,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8110\/revisions\/8143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}