Quanta Magazine has over the past couple years been establishing a well-deserved reputation as the smartest and best science journalism around. At the opposite extreme, over many years of interacting with science journalists, the most embarrassingly incompetent one I’ve run across has been KC Cole, so I was surprised today to see that Quanta has published a piece by her. <\/p>\n
Back in 2006 she wrote a review for the LA Times<\/a>, basically explaining that Lee Smolin and I shouldn’t be listened to because we were incompetent embittered failures who didn’t understand the beauties of string theory. When I contacted her and the LA Times to complain that her review had completely misrepresented what I wrote in my book about neutrino physics, she wrote back to explain to me that I didn’t know what I was talking about, whereas she was an expert on neutrino physics. Her other main evidence for my ignorance was this:<\/p>\n As for Woit’s claim that string theory has “absolutely zero connection with experiment,” experiments already planned for a new European particle accelerator will look for the existence of extra dimensions and extra families of particles — both predicted by string theory. In fact, many statements about string theory in these books are plain wrong.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The topic of her new article is The Strange Second Life of String Theory<\/a>, which makes the claims that string theory has failed as a theory of quantum gravity (which will be news to a lot of string theorists), but that “it has blossomed into one of the most useful sets of tools in science.” <\/p>\n The article has all sorts of interesting quotes from experts about the state of string theory these days, mostly indicating that people have given up on it and are trying to figure out how to move on. For instance:<\/p>\n David Gross: \u201cAfter a certain point in the early \u201990s, people gave up on trying to connect to the real world,\u201d Gross said. \u201cThe last 20 years have really been a great extension of theoretical tools, but very little progress on understanding what\u2019s actually out there.\u201d<\/p>\n Robbert Dijkgraaf: \u201cBut now we have this big mess.\u201d \u201cThings have gotten almost postmodern.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNobody knows whether to say they\u2019re a string theorist anymore,\u201d said Chris Beem, a mathematical physicist at the University of Oxford. \u201cIt\u2019s become very confusing.”<\/p>\n At last year\u2019s big annual string theory meeting, the Stanford University string theorist Eva Silverstein was amused to find she was one of the few giving a talk \u201con string theory proper,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Juan Maldacena jokingly defines “string theory” as “Solid Theoretical Research in Natural Geometric Structures.\u201d<\/p>\n Like many of his colleagues, [David] Simmons-Duffin says he\u2019s a string theorist mostly in the sense that it\u2019s become an umbrella term for anyone doing fundamental physics in underdeveloped corners. He\u2019s currently focusing on a physical system that\u2019s described by a conformal field theory but has nothing to do with strings. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n I’m amused to hear that according to Maldacena and Simmons-Duffin, it appears that I’m a string theorist. One thing Cole gets right is that most theorists are now working on questions about quantum field theories. Sean Carroll objects to this:<\/p>\n It\u2019s the kind of work that makes people such as Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, wonder if the field has strayed too far from its early ambitions \u2014 to find, if not a \u201ctheory of everything,\u201d at least a theory of quantum gravity. \u201cAnswering deep questions about quantum gravity has not really happened,\u201d he said. \u201cThey have all these hammers and they go looking for nails.\u201d That\u2019s fine, he said, even acknowledging that generations might be needed to develop a new theory of quantum gravity. \u201cBut it isn\u2019t fine if you forget that, ultimately, your goal is describing the real world.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a question he has asked his friends. Why are they investigating detailed quantum field theories? \u201cWhat\u2019s the aspiration?\u201d he asks. Their answers are logical, he says, but steps removed from developing a true description of our universe.<\/p>\n Instead, he\u2019s looking for a way to \u201cfind gravity inside quantum mechanics.\u201d A paper he recently wrote with colleagues claims to take steps toward just that. It does not involve string theory.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Cole tells us that<\/p>\n Like many a maturing beauty, string theory has gotten rich in relationships, complicated, hard to handle and widely influential. Its tentacles have reached so deeply into so many areas in theoretical physics, it\u2019s become almost unrecognizable, even to string theorists.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n According to her, string theory has made “essential contributions to cosmology” (this likely is news to cosmologists), especially by revealing the multiverse, which is now “taken for granted by a large number of physicists”, one of whom you might think is David Gross, since she writes:<\/p>\n \nInflationary models get tangled in string theory in multiple ways, not least of which is the multiverse \u2014 the idea that ours is one of a perhaps infinite number of universes, each created by the same mechanism that begat our own. Between string theory and cosmology, the idea of an infinite landscape of possible universes became not just acceptable, but even taken for granted by a large number of physicists. The selection effect, Silverstein said, would be one quite natural explanation for why our world is the way it is: In a very different universe, we wouldn\u2019t be here to tell the story.<\/p>\n This effect could be one answer to a big problem string theory was supposed to solve. As Gross put it: \u201cWhat picks out this particular theory\u201d \u2014 the Standard Model \u2014 from the \u201cplethora of infinite possibilities?\u201d<\/p>\n Silverstein thinks the selection effect is actually a good argument for string theory. The infinite landscape of possible universes can be directly linked to \u201cthe rich structure that we find in string theory,\u201d she said \u2014 the innumerable ways that string theory\u2019s multidimensional space-time can be folded in upon itself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The piece ends with a different genre of hype:<\/p>\n Arkani-Hamed believes we are in the most exciting epoch of physics since quantum mechanics appeared in the 1920s.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I actually spent much of the day down in Princeton at the IAS, attending some of the talks at the Natifest<\/a> in honor of Nati Seiberg’s 60th birthday. Lots of different ideas were discussed by the speakers, with essentially no mention of string theory. A serious journalist who talked to all the people Cole did would likely have noticed the obvious and framed the same material quite differently: string theory hasn’t worked out and theorists have moved on to other things, with the center of gravity of the subject now the deeper study of quantum field theory.<\/p>\n Update<\/strong>: I took a look again at the KC Cole review of my book, the second page of it is here<\/a>. It was even more dishonest and unethical than I remember. She takes my <\/p>\n superstring theory has had absolutely zero connection with experiment,<\/p><\/blockquote>\n and turns it into<\/p>\n Woit\u2019s claim that string theory has \u201cabsolutely zero connection with experiment,\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Note how pulling a phrase out of sentence, you get to do fun stuff like change the tense of the sentence.<\/p>\n On the neutrino issue, Cole writes:<\/p>\n To say, as Woit does, that fundamental mysteries about neutrinos are being ignored will come as news to the dozens of physicists who\u2019ve been working on these problems for years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This is based on the fact that on page 93 of the US edition I write, after giving a description of the things the standard model leaves unexplained, including a parameter count that ignores neutrino masses:<\/p>\n One complication that has been ignored so far involves neutrinos.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n and then go on to explain about the experimental evidence for neutrino masses. The \u201cignored so far\u201d obviously means \u201cignored so far in this chapter\u201d, not \u201cfundamental mysteries about neutrinos are being ignored\u201d by physicists.<\/p>\n When I contacted her to complain about this, her response was that there was nothing wrong with what she had done, and that, unlike me, she was an expert on neutrino physics.<\/p>\n The Quanta article has lots of her characteristic “quotes”, words or phrases pulled out of context. I’ll bet that lots of those misrepresent what the person being quoted actually said. I’d urge the Quanta editors to re-fact check this piece, asking for full quotes, in context.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Quanta Magazine has over the past couple years been establishing a well-deserved reputation as the smartest and best science journalism around. At the opposite extreme, over many years of interacting with science journalists, the most embarrassingly incompetent one I’ve run … Continue reading