As usual recently, so much going on that I don’t have time to write much about a lot of it, but here are some quick links and comments.
The SUSY 06 conference is taking place this week, hosted by UC Irvine, with talks at the Marriott Hotel in Newport Beach. Here’s the program, which now has links to slides for some of the talks in the parallel sessions, although not at the moment for those in the plenary sessions. This evening there will be a plenary session on Naturalness, with talks by experimentalist Burton Richter, theorists Frank Wilczek, Leonard Susskind and Andrei Linde. This line-up is very heavily weighted toward the anthropic point of view, I wonder why the organizers couldn’t find anyone from the other side. Various bloggers are at the conference reporting, including Clifford Johnson and Sabine Hossenfelder. B. Yen, who normally covers off-road motor-racing, has decided to cover something even more exciting, academics at a SUSY conference, and is providing stills, video, and podcasts via iTunes from the conference site.
Strings 2006, this year’s edition of the big yearly string theory conference held each summer begins next week in Beijing. The conference web-site itself still doesn’t yet have even a schedule of talks or titles of talks, but Jonathan Shock will be at least one person blogging from there, and he has begun with a long posting of advice about Beijing for people traveling there for the conference.
The big political news of a few days ago was the blogger convention in Las Vegas, with potential 2008 presidential candidates showing up to try and impress the most influential people in the country at the moment, bloggers. Sean Carroll reports from the science-blogging caucus there that Wesley Clark made his pitch by coming out strongly in favor of Leonard Susskind and the anthropic string theory landscape. I know, this sounds like a weird joke, but it’s not.
In other political news closer to home here, today’s New York Times has a story about some of Einstein’s off-prints being auctioned by Christie’s, for the benefit of New York’s progressive Working Families Party.
Dave Bacon has a posting about a new arXiv front-end from the IOP called Eprintweb.
The Tevatron is back in business colliding particles, having overcome the attack of the killer raccoons. There’s a report from Gordon Watts who explains the importance of plastic ducks for his experiment’s data acquisition system.
John Baez’s latest This Week’s Finds is out, this time it’s mostly a very enlightening discussion of the relation of music theory and group theory. His web site also contains some wonderful notes by Michael Shulman from a minicourse John gave on n-categories and cohomology theory. John’s web-site increases it resemblance to a modern blog with an RSS feed set up by Serkan Cabi.
The math blogosphere seems to my mind somewhat weirdly dominated by those with an interest in category theory. Besides John and Urs Schreiber, there’s David Corfield, Robin Houston, and the only math blog at ScienceBlogs, that of Mark Chu-Carroll.
Urs has interesting reports from the ESI Research Conference on Homological Mirror Symmetry going on this week and next.
Last week was the annual Johns Hopkins workshop on particle physics, this year held at the Galileo Galilei Institute in Florence. Many of the talks are on-line.
Le Monde has an article about Dubna.
There’s definitely an increasingly widespread backlash against string theory going on in the wider culture. A Columbia colleague last night sent me an extract from a book his daughter was reading. It’s called 100 Bullshit Jobs … and how to get them by Stanley Bing, and one of the “Bullshit Jobs” listed is that of “Quantum Physicist String Theorist”. Skills required for the job are listed as
Bullshit at such a high level of discourse, with such a profound understanding of arcane mathematical concepts, that everybody thinks they are stupider than you.
The listing describes
… string theorists, who have now broken up into two warring camps, each fighting for control of PBS. One school says that there are many, many universes, possibly an infinite number. The other school is more conservative and counts just a couple of cosmic alternatives, and has the benefit of being represented by a total babe.
I also heard recently from the people who put out Axes and Alleys, the official magazine of the Royal Tractor Repair and Maintenance Society of Outer Mongolia. Their latest issue has a graphic on page 27 inspired by their impression of superstring theory.
Finally, as near as I can tell Lubos has finally gone completely bonkers. In his last few ranting postings, people who disagree with him no longer have the intelligence of dogs, but are compared to squirrels (or, in my case, microbes). His latest posting is about why the scientific status of string theory and of evolution theory are the same (although he thinks “evolution is more dogmatic while string theory is more open-minded work in progress”), and I’m sure the people at the Discovery Institute will enjoy it greatly. He goes on about the fact that at one point, under great duress, Jacques Distler did admit in the comment section of a blog that he disagreed with Lubos on this point. Lubos compares this to Judas’s betrayal of Jesus:
This almost sounds like a story from the New Testament except that in the past, there would be 1 Judas in such a story. Today we have 387 Judases with various confused and triply corrupt self-interests and relations to the bad players in the game of life.
Instead of dissociating themselves from Lubos’s increasingly nutty postings about string theory, some string theorists such as Moshe Roszali and Joe Polchinski instead have decided this is a good time to encourage him and start participating in the comment section of his blog. Polchinski contributed to a top ten list of greatest achievements of string theory produced by Lubos two more: the “fact” that the unknown theory is somehow known to have no parameters, and the existence of the landscape and thus the anthropic solution of the CC problem.
The fact that Polchinski seems to think Lubos’s blog is a good place for him to spend his time is kind of funny given that he has publicly attacked me for saying unpleasant things about people (I did once describe a paper of his in an uncalled-for way), as well as privately telling people he won’t read my blog because of the nasty personal things I say about people. For some reason he seems to have no problem with Lubos, to the point of being willing to encourage him as he gets more and more delusional. This is really sad.
Update: Some of the plenary talks at SUSY 06 are now on-line. The schedule of talks with titles for Strings 2006 is now on-line.
I heard on the public radio program “From the Top”, a young musician and aspiring physicist describe string theory as “kind of the joke of the physics world”.
I guess Polchinski and Roszali don’t take Lubos’ bad behavior as seriously as you or others do. He might be very incendiary on the web but he’s actually a nice, charming person in reality, has a lot of good friends and is liked and respected by many. He’s of course not as brash in person as he is online so that explains a lot. He has two alternate personas and his web persona is something of an alter ego to his more well-behaved persona offline.
Plus, in this day and age when there’s a lot of backlash against string theory and its advocates, Lubos is the one person ranting and raving the loudest, and because of this, he enjoys quite a lot of support from the silent majority of string theorists. And just as most democrats are reluctant to criticize michael moore, string theorists are hesitant to speak out against lubos. He’s their mouthpiece. He’s their self-appointed warrior, the one who passionately defends this field they’ve devoted their lives to. He says everything they wish they could say but can’t because they’re scared of the backlash, or they just can’t take the heat.
Peter writes:
John’s web-site increases it resemblance to a modern blog with an RSS feed set up by Serkan Cabi.
Now I just need to get a quarrelling crowd of readers who reply to everything I write by venting their own pet peeves. 🙂
Sequoia,
You should read the articles in The Times, The Sunday Times and The Financial Times in the UK about Peter’s book. Executive summary: Peter has a point. The dominance of String Theory is in no way commensurate with its scientific achievements.
It may well be that LM is perfectly nice on a one-to-one basis, but he has no judgement. Comparing Darwinian theory with String theory is just stupid. And this man was a boy genius? Well, so was Stephen Wolfram and if he wants to tell me, in 1,200 pages, that all the problems of science can be solved by Cellular Automata then, even though he may be brighter than I am, I have to then say that I know at least one thing that he does not. At least, unlike LM, he provides me with usable software. If just being clever was what it is all about then I – like the vast majority of others – probably cannot compete. But being clever is not what physics is about. It is about building consistent models of the physical world. This is a particular kind of craftsmanship that has nothing to do with whether people like you or not (cf. Wolfgang Pauli), or whether you are a good person (cf. Werner Heisenberg), and it is not perfectly correlated to your academic record (cf. Albert Einstein). What actually matters is what matters to the craftsman, namely the quality of the end product. This is where judgement comes in. String Theorists do not behave like scientists. They behave more like children blowing bubbles, watching and comparing notes on the pretty rainbow flecks that their mathematical games produce. They hope that it might at some stage connect with reality, but this does not seem to be a priority. However, when criticisms are made – of the kind that they should have made of themselves – they start to squeal like children threatened with the removal of their toys. I ask you, why should we continue to write them a blank cheque?
” He says everything they wish they could say but can’t because they’re scared of the backlash, or they just can’t take the heat.”
If that is the case then they are an incredible bunch of cowards.
Chris:
I don’t think that string theorists are more guilty than anybody else. Simply string theory occupied such a prominent place in science during last 30 years and developed a huge publicity machine. That’s why it is an easy target. I think that the problem with modern physics is much deeper. In part it can be attributed to (rather miraculous) successes of the last 50+ years, when such ill-defined concepts as renormalization, gauge invariance, spontaneous symmetry breaking, asymptotic freedom, etc. actually produced real physical results. It became commonly accepted that we can continue on the same path: invent a trick or two that will eventually bring us a “theory of everything”. It seems to me that we reached the limit of such trick-based approaches.
In my opinion, instead of rushing to TOE, we should carefully reexamine our foundations – the relativity and quantum mechanics. However, as was pointed out a few times on this blog, these lines of research are not considered fashionable or sexy in academia. Indeed, how one can move forward by looking backward? Nevertheless, that’s exactly what we need to do. Though this change of attitude would require a major disaster, like the null LHC result.
Lubos is now linking mention of your name on his blog to a somewhat warped version of this blog: http://sites.gizoogle.com/showpage.php?url=http://www.math.columbia.edu/%7Ewoit/wordpress/
Warping is what you can expect from a string theorist.
I’ve always wondered whether somebody’s aggressive behavior online and/or in person, is a compensation of some sort for shortcomings in other parts of their personal lives. (ie. The Napoleon Syndrome or some kind of inferiority complex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_complex )
They hope that it might at some stage connect with reality, but this does not seem to be a priority.
This is belied by the focus of many groups on string theory model building. Many people are out there looking for confirmatory possibilities.
In fact, although I doubt you’ll like it, for a lot of people this anthropic thing is an attempt to connect to the real world. You may disagree with the philosophy, but that is a separate issue from the motivation.
Most string theorists aren’t bad people. Really.
Peter, your website is becoming all-Lubos, all the time. You’re talking about him several times in every article.
If you were both third graders, I’d suspect you two have a crush on each other.
Peter: Category theory always seems disproportionately well-represented on the web to me. What’s even odder is that it’s not just a fascination with categories, but with n-categories. I think part of it is that John Baez has always been such an effective advocate of his n-categorical point of view that he’s both attracted people to the subject and inspired them to follow his example and post about it on-line.
None of us at arsmath are big category theory fans, so we’ll just have to single-handedly restore the balance. 🙂
who’s the total babe?
The other school is more conservative and counts just a couple of cosmic alternatives, and has the benefit of being represented by a total babe.
who’s the total babe?
Lisa Randall and Eva Silverstein are both lovely young women—accomplished speakers and brilliant to boot. I’d guess that the author of “100 Bullshit Jobs” was referring to Lisa Randall. But the reference is inaccurate—she does braneworld models, rather than string/M theory proper. Babe or not, I don’t understand how she could be said to “represent” any group or school of string theorists.
Peter: Burt Richter is as outspoken a critic of the anthropic principle as you could possibly ask for. At the session, he essentially described the anthropic principle as theology. And he got audience applause for it, too.
hogghy: The babe is probably Lisa Randall.
“Moshe Roszali and Joe Polchinski instead have decided this is a good time to encourage him and start participating in the comment section of his blog.”
“This is really sad.”
NO, this is appropriate. Most of the string theorists don’t even mention your name because you have firmly established yourself as a maniac.
Walt: What’s even odder is that it’s not just a fascination with categories, but with n-categories.
Well, once you’ve see that ladder heading all the way up to the heavens, it seems somewhat unambitious to stop on the first rung.
the serious question about Lubos is: is he following a strategy and we are unable of seeing his goal, or we are having fun of a person with personality problems?
Sorry, a.
Lubos as Michael Moore? More fitting is Ann Coulter, or Bill O’Reilly. Some of it may be calculated to get attention, a big part of it is narcissism. intolerance towards people who have audacity to form a different opinion and simply lack of tact/manners.
Saying that he is perfectly nice person except for his internet persona is like saying that your neighbour is a nice guy, except for occasional killing sprees.
I really do wonder what other faculty members at Harvard think of him – I will ask around. Since a lot of his psychotic rantings are now part of permenent record on the web, anyone with access to google can find them, even years later. I only imagine that while most faculty members don’t give a flying fart about string controversy, they don’t want to be sharing commitee duties with someone who doesn’t handle opposing opinion well and is likely to fly off the handle, spewing personal attacks and put-downs every time he gets a little “upset”.
Some people really ought to pospone getting a blog until they are fully tenured – at least. Most of us learn to control our emotions, instead of going off and letting everyone know how we REALLY feel.
Blogs seem to be opening up a channel to peek beyond that “filter” in some people. And what we can all see is often not very pretty.
Note to self – think twice about getting my own blog.
Maybe Polchinski’s and Roszali’s support has more to do with Motl’s political opinions than his persona as a strong theory spokesperson. I recall Motl invective against those who called Summer’s statement of “anti-semitism in intent if not in effect” as ridiculous. Perhaps this endeared Motl to them. Sort of like how Motl would perhaps appear as an ally to those against saving our environment. Though its hard to imagine even those people sinking as low as these two…
I missed a math babe? Where?
Anyway, after finding the reviews online and finding this place, I had no idea that it would be so controversial to say, y’know, prove it.
Since I’m in the U.S. I haven’t been able to read the book yet, I couldn’t actually compare it to whoever this Lubos person is. All of that writing seems needlessly caustic (unless there’s some caustic language in the book I don’t know about).
I don’t think much can or should be read into the appearance of Moshe and Polchinski on Lubos’ blog; the discussion there just happened to turn to something that interested them. Polchinski also posted his comment on Christine’s blog, and Moshe seems like a reasonable enough guy who just wants to have pure physics discussions without all the sociological stuff etc (which is easy enough for him since he doesn’t have to deal with the consequences of it). I’m sure Moshe would also join in here if there was a pure physics discussion on a topic that interested him; he has done so regularly in the past at any rate.
As for Lubos and his 387 Judases, that’s quite bizarre indeed! Presumably Distler is supposed to be one of them, but then who are the other 386?
AR,
Thanks for the report. Any insight into why the organizers couldn’t find a theorist skeptical of the anthropic stuff and had to bring in an experimentalist to do the job?
amused,
Unclear who the other 386 Judases betraying Lubos/Jesus are. In his comment section, he does thank Clifford Johnson for refusing to publicly renounce the evolution/string theory analogy, so Clifford isn’t one of them.
Note that Roszali and Polchinski’s comments were purely about their own suggested additions to Lubos’s list of the great achievements of string theory. In context I wouldn’t describe this as pure physics discussion without the sociological stuff.
anonymous,
I strongly doubt that Roszali or Polchinski’s support of Lubos has anything to do with his political views.
better ideas?,
“the serious question about Lubos is: is he following a strategy and we are unable of seeing his goal, or we are having fun of a person with personality problems?”
He’s following a strategy, one which is obvious: paint anyone who criticizes string theory as a crackpot who should not be paid attention to. Sympathy with this strategy is probably why string theorists almost universally refuse to criticize him. His problem is that he does have personality problems, which makes his efforts self-defeating.
“Note that Roszali and Polchinski’s comments were purely about their own suggested additions to Lubos’s list of the great achievements of string theory. In context I wouldn’t describe this as pure physics discussion without the sociological stuff.”
Neither would I, but from their perspective it probably was.
Do I get to be a Judas, too? The idea that string theory is remotely as well supported as evolution is inane.
(extra letters may be added to said description as per the reader’s discretion)
Maybe they’ve been reading my blog or website and have finally realized that you have to actually put forth a meaningful argument against the physics and facts, since willful ignorance and comparisons to theology don’t mean squat to science.
Btw, on the topic of Lubos, he has let slip in a comment over on Sabine H.’s blog that he will soon be leaving academia to start a new religious cult. Or more precisely, to bring an existing one to the masses. Apparently it is going to be called the Church of M.
(Ok he only explicity mentioned the leaving academia part, the rest is from reading between the lines.)
Dear Prof. Woit,
Thanks for your useful info!
Best, Y
this was the 4:57 PM comment on a certain thread of Bee’s in case anyone wants to find it.
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2006/06/science-and-democracy.html#c115024305475393420
“Lumo said…
I am not so much concerned about the future of any funding because I am leaving Academia soon and I never cared about money much anyway.
Moreover, I am also a leading expert in loop quantum gravity so that switching funding to LQG would not affect me even if this question were relevant. 😉
What I am primarily concerned about are aggressive crackpots who have no idea what they’re talking about and who attempt to distort science as such and force scientists to share their idiotic beliefs, just like the religious bigots in the 16th century wanted to stop scientists from doing their work, and sometimes they did so rather efficiently.
Sorry to say but the list of these bigotic individuals also includes Christine who just told us that she believes that string theory is not a “theory”. What is it? Apple juice? Have you lost your mind?
Sorry to say but I have just seen far too much about her so that I must conclude that Christine is clearly just a plain stupid person. Every sufficiently well trained parrot can say these simple sentences that XY theory could be plain wrong, and all these things…”
Bee’s original post was here
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2006/06/science-and-democracy.html
and was dated Monday 12 June in the evening.
Comment seems to have begun at around 7AM the next morning, if I interpret correctly, and to have continued throughout the day. The greater part of what appears in the first 30 comments was by Dr. Motl.
The comment in question is #22, by my count.
I hope everyone realizes how privileged we are to have the pleasure of witnessing these e-vents, or perhaps a better word would be e-ruptions.
Before anyone gets too excited about the prospects for Lubos leaving physics to found his own new religion, I’ll just point out that quite a while ago he was already mentioning to me the possibility that he might leave physics. Several years later, he’s still here. I don’t see any more reason to take seriously what he says about this than anything else he writes.
“Do I get to be a Judas, too? The idea that string theory is remotely as well supported as evolution is inane.”
Hi Aaron, I guess that’s a decision for Lubos, but it might help your chances if you refer to Lubos by name in your denunciation. Like Jacques did 😉
Btw according to my computer your comment just appeared now, or at least subsequent to the others above. I’m pretty sure the same thing happened before with a comment from Smolin during our previous encounter. So there might be some bug in the blog software. I noticed the same thing happened with a comment on Lubos’ blog today, in fact Lubos also noticed and remarked on it.
amused,
The spam filtering software I’m using (Akismet) is highly mysterious in its ways and every so often for reasons I can’t fathom decides to identify a valid comment as spam. When this happens the comment is held in a queue, not released until I get around to checking what’s in the queue. So sometimes you’ll see comments mysteriously appearing here many hours after they were submitted.
Before anyone gets too excited about the prospects for Lubos leaving physics to found his own new religion, I’ll just point out that quite a while ago he was already mentioning to me the possibility that he might leave physics. Several years later, he’s still here.
But there are good reasons to expect that he has problems finding attractive positions. It would surprise me greatly if Harvard would offer Lubos tenure – a school that fired Paul Ginsparg would hardly offer tenure to somebody with Lubos publication record, or lack thereof. Normally other schools would be happy to pick up whatever Harvard threw away, but perhaps not in this case; everybody knows that offering Lubos a position is asking for trouble, which most departments are reluctant to do.
I suspect that when Lubos described himself as leashed last year, he had been given warnings that his blogging activities jeopardized his chances to get tenure. As he now evidently has given up hope, he feels completely unleashed.
I am sure if denied tenure, Lubos will feel that it is because of his “controversial” right-wing political views or his stand on global warming or women in science.
Lack of interesting or even incrementally productive scientific results, his lack of manners, or his blog behavior will not enter as a possibility.
Leaving aside his “internet persona” he would have a solid chance at landing a faculty position in second-tier school, if his tenure gets denied. But behaving like a jerk and pissing people off left and right is not exactly a good way to make friends. I suspect by the time he is on the market again, the number of people who “heard” of Lubos’, let’s say “excentricity”, to put it mildly, will reach critical mass, when most departments will have a couple of faculty who know him (and not from a good side). Once again, this has nothing to do with political views, blogging or string theory – just basic civilty and manners. Surely he is a character, and will be famous, but notoriously famous. Simply put, he is a liability for the department. A timing bomb waiting to go off in a meeting, or in a class or in a seminar. Could you imagine if he called students the things he calls people who disagree with him?
I come to conclusion that while a lot of people are smart in a bookish way, a lot of success in science comes down to how well they can coexist with others. A high ratio of egotistic nerds with lack of communication skills often makes it more difficult to form scientific collaborations.
I have difficulties to grasp the concept of anyone “leaving physics”. I tend to believe that if one is in, it is in forever. I can understant “leaving publication” or even “missing focus”. But for instance, if it happens that some result depends seriously on the work of a person that has “leaved physics”, I tend to believe that one can phone this person, explain the situation, and get it back.
It’s completely amazing that by a fortunate circumstance, (3/2)^12 just slightly larger than 2^7 (that is, 12 fifths are very nearly 7 octaves). The next “close call” (at least as close as the 12-7 case) is (3/2)^53 ~ 2^31. Someone actually built an organ with scales containing 53 notes (in effect, 31 white keys and 22 black keys). A major scale has 32 notes and the stave has 17 lines and 16 spaces. There are 53 separate tonalities and a bewildering variety of minor and diminished scales.
If the first “good number” had been much less or more than 12, Western music as we know it would have been much, much different.
-drl