In a Stanford University press release today, Susskind promotes the “Landscape”, calling each different vacuum state a “pocket universe”. Referring to people like David Gross who oppose the idea, Susskind says: “More and more as time goes on, the opponents of the idea admit that they are simply in a state of depression and desperation”.
I’m wondering exactly which string theorists have admitted to him their depression and desperation.
It seems that Susskind’s new book coming out in a couple months isn’t about the Landscape, but rather black holes and holography. He’s writing another one now, to be called “The Cosmic Landscape”.
In other news, Witten will be giving a Distinguished Lecture Series in April at the Fields Institute in Toronto as part of their year-long program on the geometry of string theory. Witten seems to have decided that there’s not much to say about string theory these days, since the topics of his talks are listed as “Relativistic Scattering Theory”, “Gauge Symmetry Breaking”, and “The Quantum Hall Effect”.
Robert; Chris W,
I agree that the funding of scientific-engineering activities is very limited to a rapid obtaining of tangible products.
However, mi point is that all money devoted during 30 years to the string theory program has been, in general, a waste of money. 30 years x 1000 researches = a lot of money useful in other fields. My point is also that string theory was overly emphasized in mass media. I.e. all people will know the failure of the program and, yes I suspect that will be utilized by “New Age anti-scientists”, “political opportunists”, and TVC for the attack of our endeavour.
The “Depression and Desperation” that some of my colleagues have on theoretical chemistry is not used for attacking science, because the problem is known only by specialists on the field. Due to the success of string theory on popular media, I suspect that the “Depression and Desperation” of string theorists will be exported to other fields of physics and science.
Lunsford,
With “heroes” I mean that they have been advertising the heroic idea of that they are doing the most fundamental research, the most difficult stuff, they are even doing the mathematics for it, (so difficult that nobody more can understand it), they are solving all difficult questions on math and physics than mathematicians and physicists cannot, etc.
Moreover, they have been sending the idea of that others physicists are very bad people and attacking them without compassion. Then people looked like authentic heroes.
Of course, it is not true and people are completely misunderstood. Most part of string theorist are very, very arrogant people with a superficial knowledge of things. Moreover, they always were the first on heavy attack to every man that thinks or says the contrary.
I think that all current non-string scientists (including “renegades”) that heavily critiqued string program would joint now and write a letter explaining that the failure of string theory would be taken as a vital lesson on future funding of science, but also explaining that the rest of scientific communities would be “favoured” in a future. I think that if a non-string theorist devoted many of its time to demystify string theory, now cannot be culpable (on funding, lost of public credit, etc aspects) of the failure of it.
For example, I have read that perhaps Witten will research on a different field, perhaps biology. My question is, if Witten solicits funding from an agency for researching on Y biological point and Z respected biophysicist also solicits, will Witten get more “credit” and thus money, even if most of their last decades research was nonsense? I think that Witten would be just a step below in the “ranking” for obtaining funding when compared with Z author.
That letter would be distributed between funding agencies, mass media, etc. I wait for interesting Woit questions on this topic.
Following up on Robert’s post, the NIH and HHS are coming under significant pressure from the religious right, most notably the Traditional Values Coalition (TVC), to justify its granting decisions in most research related to HIV, AIDs, and sexuality and sexual behavior. The same critics sometimes pay special attention to research rationales that incorporate evolutionary arguments, including those that involve cross-species studies of behavior and physiology.
For example, see the Washington Post (Oct 2003) and The Scientist (Nov 2003).
Penrose clearly states when he’s speculating, and yes, “..Mind” is a turd of a book. “Road..” is not.
-drl
Funding in the areas ( “engineering and “applied” research (medicine, electronic, etc.)”), assumed to benefit from cuts to that for “pure” research, is itself under very real pressure. Anything other than the next market driven quick-fix finds support very difficult to sustain. These less arcane fields of endeavour are also subject to attacks from New Age anti scientists, political opportunists etc; it’s not just the hep-th guys who are feeling the pinch.
And Penrose (who you deeply admire) isn’t a “carnival barking sensationalist”?
What is “Emperor’s New Mind” if not ridiculous speculation?
Laugh all you will, but it’s a little known fact that Spears is an expert in semiconductor physics, as you can learn here. Likewise, Stephen Hawking is a bad ass gangsta rapper.
Juan R said:
String theorists are “heroes” for people. I believe that is the direct result of string community propaganda.
They mostly seem like assholes to me, or fawning Wittenite hero worshippers. Both attitudes are destructive of creativity. Perhaps you meant “heroes” with encheeked tongue.
I predict a new era of further restrictions on funding of basci science on favor of enginnering and “applied” research (medicine, electronic, etc.). I also believe that people will look science carefully saying “perhaps this new book about the theory X is a fiasco as string theory was”.
I agree, and the fault lies with money-grubbing carnival-barking sensationalists like Greene, Davies, Zee, Kaku, etc. etc. etc. who sacrificed science on the altar of their own vaulting ambitions.
Science was better when it didn’t come in a Fisher-Price box.
-drl
D R Lunsford said,
“Good question, what will come next? One thing that won’t happen – those who attacked string theory from the outset, and who have been proven abundantly correct, will get no credit.”
Sincerely, I hope that you are “wrong” in this aspect (I suspect that your comment was ironic here).
String theorists are “heroes” for people. I believe that is the direct result of string community propaganda.
I predict a new era of further restrictions on funding of basci science on favor of enginnering and “applied” research (medicine, electronic, etc.). I also believe that people will look science carefully saying “perhaps this new book about the theory X is a fiasco as string theory was”.
Will be the era for autolitarism, fanatic religion, and anti-thecnologists?
How can we recover the image of science, so bothered by the string propaganda?
/:set\AI,
I absolutely agree. Five years ago non-commuting catwalks would have been unthinkable. Now they are commonplace. Who do we thank for that? Britney Spears, of course!
I think it is important to point out- that with all the Britney bashing many have forgotton that her work in blue shoes has led to important understanding concerning the uses of octonions in fashion
Matthew,
I didn’t realize that SYM facilitates physical YM calculations. One is never too old to learn, and now the interest in super-twistors makes a lot more sense.
However, when I said that the twistor amplitudes are “wrong at the loop level”, I didn’t meant that they disagree with YM, but that they disagree with SYM, due to various anomalies and connection to nonunitary conformal supergravity. At least, this is the impression I get from Witten and Berkovits, and especially from Motl. If Motl says that something is a problem in string theory, one can be sure that this problem is HUGE.
Note the “experimenter’s wishlist” has at most 5 jets in the final state. Accompanied by W’s and Z’s. How are twistors going to help with this?
In general, interesting physics channels have 2 or 3 hadronic jets in the final state, not counting b’s — those would give you two or three more, but they aren’t gluons.
No one has ever shown me any convincing argument that N-gluon scattering amplitudes are at all relevant for LHC physics when N is not small.
Well, my data point on the usefulness of the multi-leg YM amplitudes was the same talk that “anonymous” pointed to. I’m certainly willing to be corrected.
stop wasting your time and move to non-perturbative QCD
As a lattice person I’m forced to agree 🙂
The expressions may be concrete, but they are probably physically irrelevant (i.e. SUSic), and probably wrong on the loop level, no?
The tree level amplitudes are the same. So if you compute them in SYM or YM it makes no difference. At loop level, they’re “wrong”, but that’s misleading. Say you have an amplitude with a gauge boson loop in it. You can replace that with a combination of an N=4 SYM amplitude, an N=1 SYM amplitude and a regular YM amplitude, but with a scalar running in the loop rather than a gauge boson.
Now you can just write down the answer for N=4 SYM, it’s known. And it’s “easy” to compute the N=1 SYM amplitude (and the hope is that they’ll all be known soon), so all you’re left with is the scalar. And as we all know, computing loop diagrams with scalars in them is a lot easier than computing those with gauge bosons. You can pull the same game with fermion loops as well.
So the fact that you can write down all the N=4 SYM amplitudes really does make one loop regular YM calculations a lot easier. You can see the replacement rules in Lance Dixon’s lecture notes (hep-ph/9601359, equation 89).
Good question, what will come next? One thing that won’t happen – those who attacked string theory from the outset, and who have been proven abundantly correct, will get no credit.
This has really been an interesting episode in the history of science. We who were young in the 80s were in some sense not allowed a “championship season”, or even a career, but we got to see a timeless result proven with great force and clarity – you can be absolutely brilliant and have no Earthly f*cking idea what is really going on 🙂 Whatever physics is, mental horsepower is only one part of it. That in itself made it worth the ride. Good judgment still counts.
-drl
I don’t know the person who gave a talk at KITP listing what experimenters want to know about QCD etc. If you need a solid assertion, you should ask people like Kunszt, Keith Ellis, Mangano, Al Muller… who have no stakes in twistors. We won’t miss Higgs because of a miscalculated QCD background! More precision in hard scattering is completely washed out by our ignorance in soft fragmentation. To the anonymous QCD practitioner — stop wasting your time and move to non-perturbative QCD… unless you need a faculty position this Fall.
Jean-Paul
Hi,
I am completely sure that current string-M theory is wrong. My doubt is when this will be admited by own string-M theorists.
What will hapen then? A revolution on public perception of science? A new regime of ultraconservative funding of new ideas?
Dear Jean-Paul,
I have to strongly disagree with your assertion that all relevant QCD amplitudes were known in the early 1990s.
There is a nice talk online which compares the (poor) theoretical status
http://online.kitp.ucsb.edu/online/collider_c04/campbell/oh/13.html
to “An Experimenter’s Wishlist”
http://online.kitp.ucsb.edu/online/collider_c04/campbell/oh/05.html
I forgot the reference:
http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/~jonas/piedpiper.html
SSC was the last challenge for perturbative QCD — by early 1990’s all QCD amplituted needed for the next 100 years of collider physics were known. The twistor business may be interesting in itself, but if you ask a honest QCD professional, he/she would tell you that it is completely useless for LHC jet simulations etc. The real challenge is to understand the fragmentation processes, i.e. soft physics related to quark confinement.
Now coming back to the interesting difference between blue shoes and twistors. By working on twistors, or in general, on the “hottest” (but in long-term completely irrelevant) topics a whole generation of high energy physicists were able to secure jobs at top ivy league institutions.
To conclude — you don’t get rich or famous by wearing Britney’s shoes but you do if you follow Ed the Piper.
Jean-Paul
Matthew said
“…The difference is that Witten’s work on twistors has lead to concrete expressions for Yang-Mills amplitudes, many of which could not be computed before…”
I’m not talking about YM amplitudes or the scientific usefulness of twistors. I’m talking about a herd mentality.
You say:
Everyone follows Witten because his utilization of twistors has guided us towards deeper understanding in the very important field of physics.
My wife says:
Everyone follows Brittney because her utilization of blue shoes has guided us towards deeper understanding in the very important field of accesorizing.
…I’m still not sure I see a difference in mentality.
The expressions may be concrete, but they are probably physically irrelevant (i.e. SUSic), and probably wrong on the loop level, no?
What’s the difference between Britney Spears wears blue shoes so we all wear blue shoes, and
Ed Witten works on twistors so we all work on twistors.
The difference is that Witten’s work on twistors has lead to concrete expressions for Yang-Mills amplitudes, many of which could not be computed before. There is a reasonable hope that this line of attack could lead to *closed*form* expressions for all one loop Yang-Mills amplitudes. That would be very useful, particularly in the LHC era, where huge QCD backgrounds will be the norm.
Umm, ST is based on one such dead end, KK theory. It was “dead before arrival”.
-drl
http://relativity.livingreviews.org/Articles/lrr-2004-2/ gives a fascinating account of a previous dead end in field theory. Mind you he’s writing about events 80 years ago so it’s fairly easy to get a sense of perspective. Who knows how long it will take before a similar account can be written of the current era?
The last group that I can recall doing this type of “physics by press release” was Pons and Fleischmann announcing their discovery of “cold fusion”.
But I’m being rather unfair to Pons and Fleischmann grouping them with Susskind.
Unlike Susskind’s meta-physics, their result was testable.
Nor was the purpose of their press release to engage in emotional diatribes or ad hominem attacks.
It was to announce what they, mistakenly, believed to be a new physical phenomena.
As a physicist, I may not be driven to depression an despair by Susskind’s sillines, but I certainly am embarrassed.
From Sean Carroll’s summary of the AAAS meeting (just posted):
That line of argument strikes me as mostly fallacious, but maybe that’s just because I’m depressed and desperate.
Jean-Paul Said
“…The rise and fall of superstring theory is a fascinating social phenomenon that’s certainly worth a book or two…”
Definitely fascinating, but in my opinion, not that surprising. An aptitude for complex mathematics is not an exemption from the hard wired instincts governing the rest of society.
What’s the difference between Britney Spears wears blue shoes so we all wear blue shoes, and
Ed Witten works on twistors so we all work on twistors.
This is absolutely no differnent that pet rocks, or the communist scare, or the Micheal Jackson moonwalk.
More on topic,
It’s also not surprising that Susskind would rather tear down the few hundred year old edifice of predictable testable science, than admit to himself that his lifes work and deepest beliefs are misguided.
We should just hope Susskind doesn’t succeed. History is rife with examples of highly intelligent people who, based soley on ego, pissed away a lot more.
ksh95 — you are making a good point. But one of the main reasons why too many young people went into
this type of pure research was hype and “false advertising” made under the presussure of your “public opinion”. The rise and fall of superstring theory is a fascinating social phenomenon that’s certainly worth a book or two — I assure that they would sell much better than “The Cosmic Landscape”.
Jean-Paul
Jean-Paul Said
Even if it takes more than 20 years to figure out what (if any) is the physical content of superstring theory, serious scholars will keep working… while clowns will keep entertaining the public.
Hmmm, that’s easy to say for a physics purist who lives stricly in the physics world. It’s much harder to say for those of us living in the real world, where congressional budgets, public opinion, and academic politics reign supreme.
Personally, I haven’t a dog in the quantum gravity race, but I understand the value inherent in wowing the publics imagination, and framing research in terms of societal benefits.
It could be reasonable to question a clown’s contribution to pure research, but to question their global value…???
It is really puzzling how any serious physicist can listen to this nonsense. I think that the field was unintentionally brought down by “outsiders” who started proposing “n’importe-quoi”, as we say, ideas based on “everything goes”: large extra dimensions,
brane-worlds, which have nothing to do with strings but for general public appear far more comprehensible and sexy than superstring dualities etc. Split supersymmetry is another example of pure nonsense. Even if it takes more than 20 years to figure out what (if any) is the physical content of superstring theory, serious scholars will keep working… while clowns will keep entertaining the public.
Jean-Paul
Perhaps in time physicists will look back and remember “the Landscape” as being but a pathological feature of string theory that eventually got sorted out, just like the infinities of quantum field theory were. But Susskind does remark:”Ed Witten worked very hard to show that there was only one or a small number of legitimate solutions to the theory and he failed–failed totally”. However, that does raise the obvious question: what chance does anyone else have of success then? It is noticable too that terms like “string”, “brane”, “M-theory” are not turning up in Witten’s preprints as of late.
Well if I were still a string theorist, Susskind’s antics would certainly have driven me to depression and despair by now.
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