A few items that may be of interest:
- Edward Frenkel has a new Youtube show/podcast, entitled AfterMath. I gather that part of the concept here is a follow-on to his book Love and Math, but in this different format. He’s always thought-provoking and well-worth listening to on almost any topic, I’m looking forward to seeing what he does with this.
- Also in the Bay area, Michael Peskin recently gave a talk on How Should We Think about 10 TeV pCM Colliders?. Much of it is a very sobering look at the possible known ways to build a collider capable of colliding elementary particles at 10 TeV in the center of mass. The technical challenges are daunting and if this is going to get done it’s going to take quite a while and be very expensive.
Besides the technological and financial problems, he faces up to the main problem of justifying such a project:
Are the secrets of electroweak symmetry breaking and the Higgs field to be found at 10 TeV ? If we believe in this, we must still find arguments to convince our skeptical scientific colleagues. If we don’t believe in it, we are believing that there is no point in making the next step in collider physics.
We cannot imagine the future of particle physics without grappling with this question.
More specifically, he sees the challenge as
to get the money to build such a collider, we would need
definitive proof of violation of the Standard Model from HL-LHC or Higgs factories
or
a clear and compelling model to be tested (as the MSSM was for LHC).
In my opinion, this puts a large burden on the theory community
- To be sure that an e+e- Higgs factory actually is built
- To put forward simple and attractive models of EWSB with a “little hierarchy”
Unfortunately I don’t see any evidence of any attractive ideas about 2., and the sad history of the hype about SUSY and naturalness means that people are going to be looking a lot more skeptically at any claims by theorists to have such a thing.
- Speaking of Peskin, if you’re looking for an alternative to Peskin and Schroeder, there’s a recent new QFT book that I’ve seen which appears to be quite good: Introduction to Quantum Field Theory, by Anthony Williams. It doesn’t go as far as Peskin and Schroeder and other textbooks that get seriously into Standard Model physics, but it has a lot more detailed and careful explanations of the basics of relativistic quantum field theory. As such it should be significantly more readable by advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students.
- Finally, two questions I’m wondering about, curious if anyone reading this knows the answer:
Whatever happened about the bet between Ken Lane and David Gross over SUSY? Did Gross pay up?
What’s going on with the 2025 Breakthrough Prizes? In past years, these things have been announced in September, Hollywood “Oscars of Science” ceremony in the spring. This year, nothing in September, and October is almost over, so wondering if the Breakthrough Prize people have a new concept for the prizes for the coming year.
- One more thing: I just noticed that the SMF has recently published a 1963 text of Grothendieck’s, his notes for a fall 1963 seminar at Harvard on duality theorems in algebraic geometry. Hartshorne ran the seminar and later wrote up notes, which were published as LNM 20, Residues and Duality.
Update: I’ve confirmed with Ken Lane that it seems David Gross won’t admit that SUSY has been a failure and he’s given up on Gross ever paying off on the bet. For more about the reaction of Gross and others to losing SUSY bets, see here
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=8708
For documentation of the 1994 Gross/Lane bet, see page 62 of
https://indico.cern.ch/event/527162/contributions/2159007/attachments/1298122/1936489/deroeck_SUGRA_2016_v4.pdf
Update: Thanks to commenters who have answered both of my questions. Besides finding out what happened with the Gross/Lane bet, this comment explains that the new plan for the Breakthrough Prize is to announce it at the same time it is awarded at the Hollywood “Oscars of Science” event in April (so, 2025 prizes announced and awarded April 2025).
Thanks for the tip about the Williams’ book.
BTW, do you plan to add chapters 12-16 to your notes on QFT? I’m about to start reading them.
Off topic: Hi Prof. Woit, I am eagerly looking forward to your QFT notes as I am half way through your book
Did Gross pay his SUSY bet to Lane?
According to a Physics Forum entry, Lane did enjoy an expensive restaurant meal at Gross’s expense (in 2016? or 2017?).
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/interesting-anecdotes-in-the-history-of-physics.1059261/page-4
Give us your take on this year’s physics Nobel Prize! Is it physics? Is it worth of a Nobel Prize? Is it an indictment of physics research? Has the Nobel committee jumped on a bandwagon?
Andrzej Daszkiewicz/James Lai
Sorry, but I haven’t found the time to work on that project. I’ve been working out the details of how Wick rotation works for chiral spinors. As part of that, I understand much better how Euclidean QFT/path integrals are related to the Minkowski QFT/operator formalism. Whenever I get to writing more about QFT I want to incorporate this material.
David Brown,
I’m not sure that physics forum entry reflects anything other than that by 2017 there was sufficient LHC luminosity that Gross had lost by the precise terms of the bet. Did Lane really get his dinner?
While Gross over many years heavily promoted (as a “prediction” of string theory) the claim that the LHC would see superpartners, I’m not aware of any place where he ever admitted that this didn’t work and that he had lost the bet.
Peter,
I thought of writing about the Nobel Prize, didn’t do so because it seemed that everyone likely could guess what I thought. Also, the reaction I was seeing online was lots of outraged physicists, so better to let them be the ones to complain about this, instead of more complaints from me.
In case you can’t guess what I think about this, it reflects the ongoing problem the physics Nobel committee has, that large parts of fundamental physics have basically been dead for quite a while, so they have to find new areas to give the prize to. On the AI aspects, the last thing the world needs now is more rewards and attention given to AI research. While Hopfield has claims to be a physicist and one could make a reasonable case that the work he did counts as physics, the choice to reward Geoffrey Hinton with a physics prize is really hard to understand.
In reply to an email inquiry, Professor Lane kindly sent the following response:
“No, Gross never paid. I think he never will. He is what is called a “welsher” — an unfortunate term; it has nothing to do with people of Wales, who are maligned by this term.”
For documentation of the Gross/Lane bet, see page 62 of these slides:
https://indico.cern.ch/event/527162/contributions/2159007/attachments/1298122/1936489/deroeck_SUGRA_2016_v4.pdf
Years ago one of Ken Lane’s former students relayed the tale of Ken giving a talk to a group people involved in giving out funding. At the end, one of the questions was what will he do if his theory (technicolor) doesn’t work out, and his response was something like “I guess I’ll fall on my sword and retire.” We had a good laugh about that, but now after reading this blog for a few years it’s clear that such behavior is not universal.
From the Breakthrough Prize: The foundation will announce the next prize laureates in April 2025 coinciding with the annual ceremony. Moving forward, the yearly schedule will be altered with the nomination portal open from April to July (specific dates to be announced), with again the prize laureates being announced in April.
Talking of introductory books on QFT, I wondered if you’d looked “A Prelude to Quantum Field Theory” by Donoghue and Sorbo?. It seems like it should be a good once over lightly for tourists who just want a bit more detail than, for example, Zee or Carroll’s recent pop physics books on the subject, but I’ve seen comments that it goes a bit too far in the direction of terseness.
Peter Woit
Instead, I feel you should and hope you write more in depth about the recent Nobel. I guessed your reaction but more insight would shed light on progress in physics and epistemology. As long as Hopfied is concerned, it looks to me his RNN is a spin glass. Parisi’s shared Nobel in 2021 was, in particular, also for resolving SK model of spin glass. He interestingly wrote: “I think that the Nobel prize in physics should continue to spread into more regions of physics knowledge,” … “Physics is becoming wider and wider, and it contains many areas of knowledge that did not exist in the past, or were not part of physics.” But I agree on the AI hype wagon, unfortunately.
Pasquale Di Cesare,
I’m afraid it does look like the parts of physics I care most about are dying off (or dead already…). Funding and attention is moving towards other topics, ones I know little about and have no interest in taking the time to learn more. So, for topics like neural networks, seems best for me to not write about them, whether people want to call them “biology” or “physics” or whatever.
> Are the secrets of electroweak symmetry breaking and the Higgs field to be found at 10 TeV ? If we believe in this, we must still find arguments to convince our skeptical scientific colleagues. If we don’t believe in it, we are believing that there is no point in making the next step in collider physics.
I have just recently started reading your amazing blog so I still don’t know for sure your opinions on the matter of the future of particle physics experiments.
It seems to be a popular trope that particle physics makes no new discoveries and only confirms prior knowledge (the standard model) and therefore that theoretical particle physics (string theory, GUTs, sterile neutrinos, glueballs, etc) is “dead”.
This trope is false and stems from the fact far too few people are aware of the experimental anomalies.
Moreover it also is a result of not considering wether current colliders are “underpowered” in order to constrain the existence e.g. of a new particle.
I invite the reader to see figure 3 page 11
https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.03870
The paper shows that there are actually many major anomalies in particle physics, moreover most importantly it shows there are anomalies at every order of magnitude of energy, from 0.1GEV to 1TEV.
The paper is very far from exhaustive as new anomalies are discovered each year in hep ex, even more if you take into account the interellated cosmological anomalies (such as the galactic center gamma ray excess or the photon count excess).
As such, particle physics (and cosmology) are, which is extremely misunderstood, in their golden age.
The other trope is that to discover new physics we need higher energy colliders..
As seen, spanning 5 order of magnitude of energy, there are anomalies at every level. Therefore it seems likely new anomalies will keep being discovered beyond 1 TEV, especially considering the known anomalies in ultra high energy cosmic rays.
Moreover there are particles that are best observed at 10TEV. The higher energy also increase the statistical power, allowing to move known anomalies beyond 5 sigmas.
However, while a 10TEV collider would be useful, especially via resurrecting the already dug desertron, in terms of cost versus reward, there is the extreme low hanging fruit of making low energy and 1TEV energy colliders with higher accuracy, as yes, there are more new physics to be found in the 0.1Gev to 1tev range than in the 10tev range. Much more important that raw energy, is the accuracy of the collider, which is the product of its luminosity (as shown by the tremendous success of belle II) and by its paradigm (electron collider, LINAC, muon collider), which is what is needed to once and for all confirm the myriad of known anomalies as scientific discoveries.
And this crucially lack funding despite being moderate cost…
While some major specific particle factories are being delayed.. the salvation and revolution in particle physics is coming very soon, via the arrival of two new higher than LHC precision colliders: NICA https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.12893
and FAIR https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.09550
Those two projects, will change particle physics forever as being the first colliders to not be underpowered, not regarding energy, but regarding precision, the signal to noise ratio (of which belle II has shown the path). And are operational in 1-2 years not the decades..
Another advance parallel and as useful as colliders, are experiments that sets new limits of the electric dipole moment and lacks funding.
Among the known anomalies, the one that should be confirmed the soonest (1-2 years) should be the lowest energy anomaly: the X17 particle.
Now in terms of “novel” ideas in particle physics that are actually original, there is one considerably underknown, which is the extreme prospect of resurrecting the Sakata model, which works very surprisingly well.
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Sakata-Model-Revisited%3A-Hadrons%2C-Nuclei-and-Stefanovich/2b49b07cd8a0b82bbbfff2e5bbeb134721b3a9df
Of note is that the best empirical fit no longer is the standard higgs but a higgs triplet https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.14492