Not Even Wrong

My spring break vacation is not quite over but, after 10 days of spectacularly beautiful weather, it’s now raining hard here today and I’ve got some time indoors to write something. First some quick links to things I’ve seen in my short periods of recent internet access (leaving the BICEP2 story for after I get back Tuesday …):

• I don’t often link to things at Tommaso Dorigo’s blog, since my advice is that you should just always follow it since it’s the best HEP experiment blog to be found. His latest has news of an impressive CMS limit on the Higgs width, something that I had never realized could be done. This should get a lot more attention than it has gotten; it’s a great example of experimental cleverness, getting at a seemingly impossible measurement in an indirect way.

  And, seriously, I’m not just saying this since Tommaso recently showed me around Venice…

• For another, very different, blog you should be following, there’s my friend Mathbabe, who has a simultaneously amusing and disturbing take on Princeton, which addresses the question of why it produces graduates like this one.

  From what I can tell, Princeton seems to be little changed since the time I spent there more than thirty years ago, and at the time it seemed devoted to staying much like the place of thirty years before that. Something that hasn’t changed is the vanishingly small number of women, with even fewer at the IAS on the other side of the golf course (and if you want to argue about why that is, please do it somewhere else).

  One thing I did enjoy about Princeton was getting to know some of my fellow students. In other HEP news, one of them, Jon Bagger, has just been appointed director at TRIUMF.

• The recent HEPAP meeting seems to have had some unusual activity from the DOE in response to Laurence Yaffe’s recent complaints about large cuts to theory grants. This included a presentation specifically about HEP Theory funding, but reading it I still don’t see the explanation for why, as Yaffe claimed, cuts in theory group funding seem to be much more widespread than in other areas (see page 9 of this presentation).

  The DOE/HEP presentation had a specific warning against discussion on blogs of funding problems, I’d guess specifically aimed at Yaffe:

  Intense discussion in the community around the sociological issues can easily be mistaken by decision makers as disputes over the P5 plan, so please be careful to frame discussion points properly, especially when discussing issues we face with others outside the field.
  – Blogging, posting on public websites are a de facto public conversation
  …
  ‘Bickering scientists get nothing’

• Scott Aaronson has a review of Max Tegmark’s Our Mathematical Universe, which argues that the main claim the book is designed to promote is empty, but everyone should read it:
  

  I think everyone interested in math, science, or philosophy should buy the book and read it. And I still think the MUH is basically devoid of content, as it stands.

I’m leaving for a spring break vacation in Northern Italy tomorrow afternoon, and will shut down comments while I’m away. Back in two weeks. Some events that will occur while I’m away that might be of interest:

• The 2014 Templeton Prize will be awarded about the time I land in Milan.
• There will be a HEPAP meeting this week, likely to have discussion of US HEP funding issues discussed here recently.
• Next week will be the 10th anniversary of the blog. So far 1350 postings, 37,540 comments posted (and about 250,000 spam comments…). When I get back maybe I’ll write something to mark the occasion.

I’m delighted to see Jester back in action, providing great material on the current state of HEP physics, with, over the past week and a half:

• A sober look at the sparse prospects for near-term (i.e. 2014) input from experiment, with the Planck CMB polarization results one of the few things for which there are significant expectations.
• An equally sober look at the problem of making the case for a 100 TeV collider, given that this will be the first time people don’t have a “no-lose theorem” showing that something new has to turn up in the new energy range being explored (of course the argument that it’s an unexplored new energy range remains an excellent one by itself for the exploration). About the arguments Arkani-Hamed is making, Jester has:
  

  Nima’s idea that we need a 100 TeV collider to prove that SUSY fine-tuning is larger than 0.01% is good. As a joke to relax the atmosphere. Certainly, the case for the new collider can be made stronger than that.Some ideas that are being bandied around are precision Higgs physics, double Higgs production, rare Higgs and top decays, non-perturbative electroweak effects, or WW scattering. These topics can be made more concrete and several more items can be added to the list.

• To give us all some hope, he has some news about a possible astrophysical X-ray spectrum signal that could conceivably be evidence for a sterile neutrino dark matter candidate. Right-handed neutrino fields fit naturally into the SM pattern of fundamental fields, but with zero SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1) charges. That such fields have something to do with dark matter looks more promising than the SUSY or axion proposals of introducing a new and different sector of fields. My knowledge of neutrino physics isn’t what it should be, so I’d be curious to hear of good references about the sterile neutrino dark matter issue.

Update: For some idea of the case being made for a larger collider, one might want to take a look at talks in Beijing a few days ago, where there’s a proposal for the Chinese to build it. Talks at a conference are here, and last Sunday there was a big event featuring Yau, Gross, Witten, Arkani-Hamed, ‘t Hooft, Maiani and Incandela, video here. On the whole people seem to be pretty much sticking to making the generic case for high energy, not promising superpartners or extra dimensions this time.

Laurence Yaffe has gathered some information about DOE funding of US HEP theory groups, showing sharp drops (average 23%) in such funding for groups reviewed in FY2013 and FY2014. These drops imply serious reductions in the numbers of theory graduate students supported and in the number of postdoc positions funded. To get an idea of the reaction to these numbers, the file name is calamity.pdf. Sean Carroll has a blog posting here, also with the “Calamity” title.

There’s something very odd though about these numbers, with no explanation available from Carroll or Yaffe, who both interpret the situation as a sharp reduction in US government support for HEP theory. If you look at the numbers for total amount of funding, there’s no evidence of the 23% drop (for sources of numbers, see references in Yaffe’s document, the DOE HEP budgets here, and HEPAP presentations here). The recent Congressional agreement on a FY2014 budget puts the DOE HEP total at $798 million, significantly higher than FY2013 ($750 million) which was reduced by the sequester, and higher than FY2012 ($770 million) and FY2011 ($776 million). Of these amounts, the amount going to theory seems stable at around $50-$55 million/year (exact numbers depend on exactly what you include, Yaffe quotes FY12 and FY13 at an identical $51.3 million/year).

So, the “calamity” of collapse of government support for theory is somehow taking place despite no collapse in the amount of money budgeted for this. What is going on? I’d love to hear from someone who understands this. The only explanation I’ve seen is that this is a temporary phenomenon having something to do with how the budgeting process works. Note that with the way typical multi-year grants are made, the DOE is promising to provide money several years in the future, despite the current US budgeting environment, where budgets are typically set not in advance, but often very late. The current fiscal year’s budget was set last month, although the fiscal year started Oct. 1. This was considered a huge success… One conjecture is that the DOE has been promising less to theory groups, partly because they only recently found out about the good FY2014 result, and partly because of a policy change to budget for future year outlays in current years. If this is the source of the calamity, it should quickly disappear as the FY2014 money comes in and the transition to new budgeting ends. Yaffe examines some other possibilities for explanations, but without anything conclusive.

The main concern raised is about the effects of a reduction in the number of US HEP theory grad students and postdocs. Perhaps more worrying than this though should be the trend of numbers of permanent research positions in the subject, which Erich Poppitz has gathered here. These numbers come from the Theoretical Particle Physics Jobs Rumor Mill, and show a constant level of 11 jobs/year for the past three years, about half the level of the years 2000-2007. The number of jobs posted this year is so far only 13, which can be compared to around 20/year in recent years. It’s still early in the season, so more jobs may appear, and more may get filled than in recent years, but the trend of US institutions hiring significantly fewer permanent people in HEP theory is clear. Given this trend, there’s a reasonable argument to be made that numbers of grad students and postdocs should also be reduced. There’s no evidence though that some decision has been made to do this, or that this is the reason for the numbers Yaffe is looking at.

Comments from anyone well-informed about this are strongly encouraged, while comments from people who just want to make the usual arguments about government funding for science rules/sucks will be deleted.

Update: More commentary at Ted Bunn’s blog. He sees this as possibly an implementation of changes at DOE designed to “decrease the effect of historical inertia”, which might be moving money from historically well-funded major groups to others.

Possibly all that’s going on though is just the “bridging” problem mentioned on slide 7 of this presentation. A decision was made to start grants later than in the past on April 1 (with the idea that typically it’s not going to be until that deep in the fiscal year that Congress has got its act together and given DOE a budget number). This meant though that money had to be taken out of upcoming grants to cover extending current ones until April 1 when new ones might start. The number on that slide reflects a 25% charge to new grants to cover this, suspiciously close to Yaffe’s 23% number.
The same slide though does point out that this is a temporary problem: “will be better in 2015”. If that’s all it is, and grad student/postdoc number are slated to go back up a couple years from now, maybe “calamity” isn’t the right word here.

Update: For more from Yaffe, see here.