This week’s New Yorker has a quite good article by Benjamin Wallace-Wells entitled “Surfing the Universe” about Garrett Lisi and the controversy generated last year by his paper An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything (which I wrote about here). Unfortunately the article is not available on-line as far as I know.
One of the main themes of the piece is how Garrett ended up getting enmeshed in the controversy over string theory. I’m quoted as agreeing with the writer’s impression that one thing that got Garrett “enlisted in the string wars” was having my name appear first in his acknowledgements:
“It was probably not the most politic thing to do,” Woit said.
The description of the state of the string theory controversy is pretty accurate. Wallace-Wells got the following from Steven Weinberg
String theory still has great attractions, and there aren’t any alternatives… Well, there are alternatives and they’re worse.
and describes the situation as follows:
In physics, as in politics, the competition is crueller in lean times. “In terms of development of new theories, it has been maybe the slowest period in two centuries,” the science historian Spencer Weart said. By 2006, the fight over string theory had begun to leak out of the scientific community. Smolin and Woit published widely reviewed books criticizing string theory, and USA Today published an account of the assault headlined “HANGING ON BY A THREAD?”
The article explains the role of the arXiv and the blogs:
In recent years, as science reporters and interested amateurs have turned to the arXiv – and as some physics personalities have started blogs – the audience for physics has both expanded and fragmented. “I know for a fact that many of the leading figures in the field read the blogs, but so do high-school science students,” Woit, the Columbia mathematician and string-theory critic, said. “The scary thing is that frequently you can’t tell which is which.” The leading blogs have readerships that, while including some loud dissenters, tend to align with the perspectives of their authors – Distler, of the University of Texas, has a blog that attracts many string theorists and enthusiasts, while Woit’s blog draws more skeptics. It works somewhat in the way the blogosphere operates in politics. Andreas Albrecht, a physics professor at the University of California at Davis, said that the blogs had opened physics to a new sort of populism, one that the academic establishment had to figure out how to manage. “It just pushes thoses buttons,” Albrecht said. “There’s some really good stuff, but a lot of really sloppy stuff.” What you have, in other words, is the erosion of the referee and the rise of a scientific underclass.
The above quotes are from passages about the string theory controversy and ones where I had some involvement, but that’s only one aspect of the piece. There’s quite a lot more about Garrett, his story, and the physics/math context he is working in, together with a reasonable take on its significance, with everyone acknowledging that the ideas he is pursuing have problems and are still not such that success can be claimed. At the end of the article, Garrett explains that he’s still at work, now trying to see if an alternate form of E8 will work better.
Update: Lubos has the usual sort of rant about this. He doesn’t seem to have access to the article itself, so is basing his rant on my extracts. As a result, it includes an extensive personal attack on Spencer Weart….
Update: I hear that Bert Kostant has posted on his office door at MIT a copy of his e-mail exchange about E8 with the author of the New Yorker piece. So I guess that it’s all right to point to these files. Also, there’s an on-going Distler/Lisi exchange going on here. I haven’t followed the technicalities of this particular discussion, but the trademark Distlerian argumentation tactics are in operation, ensuring vastly more heat than light.
Update: It turns out that not everyone involved in that e-mail exchange had given their permission to make it public, so the files linked to above have been removed. Kostant has made his comments public, posted here.
Update: The New Yorker article is now available on-line.
Peter,
I am curious to hear your opinion on Albrecht’s view that:
“…the blogs had opened physics to a new sort of populism, one that the academic establishment had to figure out how to manage. “It just pushes thoses buttons,” Albrecht said. “There’s some really good stuff, but a lot of really sloppy stuff.” What you have, in other words, is the erosion of the referee and the rise of a scientific underclass”
Do you agree with this assessment ?
Regards,
Observer
Observer,
I agree with with Albrecht’s characterization of physics blogs. I guess it’s also true that the “physics establishment”, whatever that might be, doesn’t know what to make of blogs.
Academia is a very hierarchical and structured system, and the blogs mess with that. Not clear what the effect will be. At this point I think it’s hard to generalize, since the number of blogs is rather small and they’re often very different in nature.
There was no mention of Lubos Motl. His blog is the best physics blog, period. Not surprising that his blog goes un-noticed…he’s a conservative, and his opinion is certainly not required by the hysteria crowd!
Ah! I was beginning to think this article would just never appear. I am totally with Albrecht: the academic establishment has to figure out how to arrange with that populism. That’s neither a trivial question, nor something that is likely to just work out by itself. I just wrote on the weekend a rather lengthy post about how crucial objective peer review is to progress in science (with that I don’t only mean peer review in publishing, but generally critical feedback by the community). There’s most importantly three factors that influence researcher’s opinions: financial pressure, peer pressure and the public opinion. All of which are too influential today – the blogosphere touches on the two latter factors. See: We have only ourselves to judge on each other. The very least one can do is to raise awareness that such influence can hinder progress.
It almost seems as if one statement by Albrecht amounts to
(I can’t tell for sure, but this is the message I got from Peter’s summary.)
I would strongly disagree with this statement. But maybe something else was meant.
Dave,
Lubos was mentioned in the article, with a typical quote from him of the sort that makes it very hard to take him seriously. His political views aren’t the main reason string theorists find him an embarassment…
Urs,
That statement was not in quotes, so I think more an interpretation by Wallace-Wells than something Albrecht said. Wallace-Wells is also a writer and reporter on politics, I think he was fascinated by the political dimensions of this story, here especially by the analogs to the role blogs have had in politics.
Hi Urs,
Technological developments are a priori neither good nor evil. It depends a lot on how one uses them. To this one needs to critically look at assetts and drawbacks. The drawbacks of blogs I think are mentioned in the quote from that article are a) blogs tend to polarize people into camps of pro and con and don’t actually stimulate communication between these camps b) they make discussions about community matters public which isn’t always a good thing because it can make an exchange significantly more complicated and hinder constructive criticism c) blogs aren’t peer reviewed papers or textbooks, there’s a lot of ‘sloppy stuff’ indeed and journalists as well as beginners need to be aware of that d) ‘it just pushes those buttons’: online communication isn’t as easy as it looks like. There are many aspects to it that don’t work in the way we are used to them from face-to-face discussions and it would help a lot if people were aware of that. One is eg that many writers seem to believe their message is evidently clear and perfectly obvious, whereas for somebody who just stumbles across a blog for the first time it is very hard to extract without knowing the writer, his story, or just the vocabulary used. Such kind of misunderstanding is easy to detect from frowned foreheads but not from blog comments that can easily heat up. (There are other complications to online communication but I’ll stop here, I think you get the point.) Best,
B.
Hi Bee,
just a few random comments on your remarks:
Are you sure the polarization is caused by the blog? I certainly know that I had communication in blogs with lots of people (some of them in some camps some not) which I would never ever had otherwise, and I keep seeing some (little, though) cross-camp communication exclusively in blogs. It never happens elsewhere because these camps don’t attend each other’s conferences.
Yes, because if they were, they’d be called peer reviewed papers or textbooks. Seriously: also discussion in the conference coffee break is “not peer-reviewed” in this sense and yet it tends to be the most useful discussion there is (and often even the most useful peer-review, actually!).
That’s of course true. Journalists should even be aware of the fact that even peer-reviewed published journal articles may be contain nonsense. Generally, journalists should be very aware that the truth™ is hard to come by.
I guess we agree on the main point: mistaking blogs for peer-reviewed journals is a problem of the “media competence” of the one doing so, not of the communication channel “blog”. Do we? 🙂
Serious question, Woit. I realize you may be offended, but I want to know what you have to say. It may be that what you have to say about string theory is right… but is the primary motivator for your intense desire to bring down string theory your own lack of success at becoming a physicist? Are you just trying to drag them down so you can think that you didn’t fail, that instead the establishment was flawed? Or just to see the ones who did succeed fail too?
George,
If you actually knew me personally, I think you’d find out that the idea that I’m an embittered failure striking back at my betters doesn’t have much to do with reality.
Actually, as far as my career goes, I’ve done far better than I ever expected, I’m extremely pleased with how it has turned out, and consider myself to be someone who has been both extremely lucky in life, and extremely well treated by the powers-that-be in academia. Columbia has recently promoted me to the position of “Senior Lecturer”, with a large pay increase. I like pretty much everything about my work, my colleagues, my department, and life in general. I’m a very happy camper. When I went into this business, I figured I’d end up working under very difficult circumstances at a community college (or maybe quit and try Garrett Lisi’s route…).
My criticisms of string theory and what has been going on in physics have nothing at all to do with resentment about how I have been treated. Sorry, this is about science.
Ok, ok. One other (less serious) question of this general category. Have you ever met your arch-nemesis Lubos Motl in person? If so, how did it go? 🙂
George,
Pay attention at the following pic, and try to deduce who took it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:PeterWoit.JPG
George,
Lubos and I have only met in person once, at Harvard at the conference in Sidney Coleman’s honor. The picture of me on Wikipedia was taken by Lubos at the time. I think we both were smiling…
He and I over the years have had many often friendly exchanges by e-mail, since the time he was a graduate student. In recent years less so, as he has come to the opinion that I’m the anti-Christ, out to destroy physics.
I haven’t been able to read the article yet (the local BN was sold out because of the cover), but I’m not really sure I see that Lisi got caught up in the “string wars”, except to the extent that most of the people involved in talking about hep-th on the internet have been unavoidably involved in such to some extent or the other. I don’t recall anyone (with perhaps an obvious exception) attacking Lisi in a string theoretic context. Instead, the arguments were all about field theory and representation theory, and one of the more vocal participants was “amused” who’s not a string theorist. If anyone brought string theory into the subject, it was Lisi who made the rejection of string theory part of his “origin story”. What got people going about Lisi’s paper was the extravagant title, a certain comment by someone in Canada, and, by far most importantly, the ridiculous media coverage. That you (PW) were cited in the acknowledgments isn’t even a minor perturbation on that (again, except perhaps with the obvious exception.)
I’ll see if I can find the article elsewhere, but it sucks being in a one bookstore town.
Aaron,
The writer of the article also writes about politics, and I think got interested in the role of the blogs, and the “politics” of string theory, so that colors the story. He certainly noticed Lubos, quotes him about Lisi as follows:
“Every high school senior excited about physics should be able to see that the paper is just a long sequence of childish misunderstandings… I understood these things when I was 14”
There were quite a few blog comments posted by people attacking Lisi, often explicitly bringing string theory into it, e.g. see the first comment at Jacques’s first posting on the topic, from “Moveon”. True, these are pretty uniformly from people who don’t put their names to what they write, hard to tell whether they’re serious string theorists, juvenile string-theory partisans, or physicists with no stake one way or another as far as string theory goes.
It’s an interesting intellectual exercise to think about what would have happened if Garrett hadn’t brought string theory/LQG into it, or if he had embedded his E8 stuff into some kind of string theoretical context. If the latter had happened, and he had ended up getting a lot of attention because of his attractive “surfer-dude” story, I think what you would have seen would be Lubos and many others taking a very different and much more polite attitude, along the lines of “nice try, glad to see Lisi is working on this, even outside academia, but this particular idea doesn’t work because of X, Y, Z, too bad.”
Hi Urs,
As I said above, new technologies are a priori neither good nor evil. Blogs do not necessarily polarize people, I never said that must be the case, but it just often is the case. Many people just prefer to be among others who share similar interests. I certainly see that blogs have the potential to foster cross-camp communication, and I certainly wish that potential was used better. What I am saying is that this can also go into the wrong direction if one doesn’t pay some attention to it. Social networks that are created online enable us to select our `neighbors’ according to our liking much easier than was the case with actual neighbors.
Further, I never said what is written on blogs is useless because it is sometimes sloppy. I just said one has to be aware of that. I don’t think this is an issue in the community, but for many non-experts what the expert (or the person thought to be an expert) says is taken very seriously. I therefore think writing a blog brings some responsibility on the one hand, on the other hand journalists as well as beginners should be aware that the level of accuracy is often not on a very high scientific standard. Again, this is a priori neither good nor bad, it is just a matter of how one deals with it. Best,
B.
The only problem with blogs atm in particle physics at least, is that there are only about 6-7 that are around and putting out serious physics content and being actively updated.
Meanwhile you have about 10,000 crackpot sites.
When a layman looks on the internet to find physics related discussions, he invariably gets a horribly jilted view of what academics really think and are doing.
OF COURSE blogs are not inherently good or bad. But the essential point is that blogs give a lot of visibility to opinions (on things which require expertise) from non-experts. They give the impression that democracy and public relations are more important than scientific judgement/truth.
Popular opinion is often reactionary and emotional. Emotional appeal has NOTHING to do with science, and that crucial point is often lost in the popularity contest.
Case in point: real or imagined “controversy” is more interesting to the public than the actual science that Urs blogs about, so the New Yorker does not even think about Urs as a science blogger. (I am assuming this – I haven’t read the New yorker article, but I would be surprised if Urs got as much attention as Lubos or Peter. I would not be surprised at all if he was not even mentioned.)
Put another way, the more popular “science” blogs deal mostly with the sociology of science and not science itself. There is nothing wrong with this (I personally enjoy talking ABOUT science and scientists almost as much as I enjoy talking science), but the distinction is a very important one that is often blurred over in the discussions about “science” blogs.
As Haelfix points out, there are only a relatively small number of blogs that are regularly updated with serious physics content. The interesting thing to me is that they’re pretty much all quite different, reflecting different interests, points of view and goals of different bloggers. I think anyone who starts reading the things quickly realizes this, and also quickly gets a feel for who the people writing the blogs are, what their point of view is, how reliable their information is likely to be, etc. It’s not really different than the situation with blogs in other subjects. People reading blogs know very well that they have to sift through them to find the ones that seem reliable. Stupid people will gravitate to stupid blogs, smarter people can be trusted to recognize smarter ones. The thing that is different here is that the blogs are operating outside of the usual credentialing system: anyone can start a blog, the things don’t come with the sorts of institutional imprimatur that people are used to.
What the physics blogs don’t necessarily do is reflect either the median point of view (the statistics are too low), or the point of view of leaders of the field (because they’re not writing blogs, I wish they were). The one highly peculiar aspect of theoretical physics blogging is that we’ve had one Harvard faculty member doing it, and his blog continues to claim (with some justice) to reflect the point of view of leaders in the string theory commmunity. Unfortunately, he’s kind of obviously out of his mind. If members of the mainstream string theory community feel that their point of view is not reflected by blogs, so that the general public is not getting their message, or is getting it from someone who makes them look bad, the solution is simple: start a blog. It’s not hard, and, depending on how one does it, not necessarily highly time-consuming. I think it would be a wonderful thing to see one of the many sensible people I know working on string theory blogging about it, and putting out a reasoned view of what is going on in the subject.
“If members of the mainstream string theory community feel that their point of view is not reflected by blogs, so that the general public is not getting their message, or is getting it from someone who makes them look bad, the solution is simple: start a blog. It’s not hard, and, depending on how one does it, not necessarily highly time-consuming.”
I would in fact LOVE to see a blog on string theory which addresses things at a level like that of Lubos’s but without the “Lubos-ness”. But I am really sceptical about your optimistic expectation that it is NOT going to be a time-sink.
I also have one comment to make about intelligent people being drawn to intelligent blogs. I would in general agree with this, but I do think that the disagreement about (for example) string theory happens at such a rarefied and sophisticated level, that there is no way for an intelligent layman to judge who is talking sense, just based on the general “smartness” of the blogger. You, Carroll, Motl, Distler are all smart people. Is it going to be easy for the layman to distinguish whose scientific judgement is the most sound? I doubt it. This is where the emotional appeal of string theory being the “establishment” etc. come into play.
In fact, because I know some physics, I find Lubos’s posts on scientific things reasonable even though he is psychotic otherwise. I suspect that this is in general going to be a tough call for an average left-of-center intelligent layman. The real problem is that even though he posts some good stuff, it is impossible for a layman to tell what is well-established and what is merely opinion because he states both with equal vehemence.
Interesting discussion. I think that the concerns over the “level of accuracy” of scientific information offered in physics blogs are ill-posed. I often write inaccurate explanations, but their purpose is to bridge the gap with people that do not have the means to understand more precise descriptions. The inaccuracy has no harmful effect, on the contrary it helps!
One of the things I learned in over three years of blogging is that by getting down the pedestal is the way to go to get people interested. If I write something sloppy and an informed commenter points it out, I do not rush to correct it, but actually publicize my ignorance. This makes it clear to everybody that there is nothing scary in being ignorant, if one is willing to try changing that status.
Cheers,
T.
somebody,
Well, I hope you start up a blog!
It would be better if there were better string theory blogs, but I think any smart person looking at the blogs dealing with the subject is going to get the accurate idea that, while they can’t decide about the technical issues themselves, what is going on is that there are some wide disagreements among knowledgeable people about certain issues. Some think that multiverse and anthropic studies are nonsense, some don’t. Some think string phenomenology and string cosmology are going nowhere, some don’t, etc. String theorists who believe, like Lubos, that those who think there is a serious problem with string theory must just be ignorant and ill-informed are as delusional as he is.
All in all, I think the perception of the educated public about string theory is much closer to reality now than it was 5-10 years ago. At that time, the only information sources available to the public were pretty uniformly unrealistically optimistic about string theory’s prospects, these days the other side of the story has become widely known.
Garett Lisi is a marketing genius:) We can add being featured in what will likely be the best selling New Yorker of all time to his already impressive achievements!
Peter,
Have you seen the art work on
http://lubos.motl.googlepages.com/crackpot-not-even-wrong.html
Lubos goes from high to higher.
MathPhys,
Yes, I’ve seen that. The guy is endlessly entertaining…
I think he used the same pot already for Lee.
Anyway, regarding the question of scientists and the Web 2.0, I’ve recently had a post about this. Time and incentives are an important factor generally. If it is unclear to people what writing a blog is good for they will regard it a waste of time. Then there is (unfortunately) the fact that the reputation of the blogosphere is at best so-so. This is something that can change though. Another factor that Michael Nielsen pointed out to me which I found very interesting is that public discussions require an atmosphere of openness which might not work well in a community where people are protective about their insights (that’s not exactly what Michael said, but how I understood it). E.g. consider there’s a discussion about a paper on the arxiv. Will you just go and read what others say, or will you offer your own opinion? I am afraid most people would rather collect other’s insights than offering their own. Of course that can’t work.
Hi Tommaso,
Just to clarify, I didn’t mean to say I find inaccuracies on blogs problematic, I was just trying to summarize that paragraph Peter quoted. You know that my writings also are often not overly accurate to make them more readable. It has happened then however, that people come and nitpick around on single sentences which I admittedly find extremely annoying. I find myself repeating again and again: if I had wanted to write a paper I had written a paper, this is a blogpost, and yes it’s sloppy and it’s inaccurate and it’s full of believes and speculations and subjective opinions – live with it, or go read peer reviewed journals.
And yes, then there’s the inaccuracies arising from lacking knowledge. I have certainly learned a lot from our commenters. The problem is however that I am afraid the barrier to publicly admit lacking knowledge can be quite high, esp. if it results in insults of the kind ‘you’re so stupid and know nothing’. I suspect that comments of this kind (which I keep getting in many instances when I do not write about a field I have worked in myself but would like to know more about) are very obstructive to a fruitful exchange.
Best,
B.
Peter
I have been reading your book. I have to ask whether you wrote it with the scientific underclass in mind?
I think that the real danger in physics populism (and Title IX in science as well), is that real math and physics will be less and less accessible to the public in general. Those who have the talent and the motivation will continue to pursue math and physics regardless of the social and governmental constraints imposed to make physics “fair and balanced”.
Some of the great minds in history did their work in math and physics on their personal time (or rather, many had day jobs). Intelligent people who want to learn with an attention to truth will tend to seek each other out. The real loss is to the general public, who in their ignorance, will eventually tear down and destroy institutions of learning to achieve political ends (just look at the early christians and their destruction of any school of philosophy or knowledge that contradicted their world view).
These forces are ever present in the world, and yet their are those who would feed them for personal gain.
So I ask again, who was the intended audience of your book?
‘I think that the real danger in physics populism (and Title IX in science as well), is that real math and physics will be less and less accessible to the public in general.’ – mathandphysics1
Clearly, ‘Not Even Wrong’ caters for a wide audience of people interested in physics, a similar audience to those who read Feynman’s book QED. E.g., students, physicists in other areas than quantum fields, and the lay public who want a readable introduction to the key concepts and problems. It’s neither popularist hype for speculations, nor a heavy-going textbook of extremely advanced mathematics. Once you read these books, you get interested enough to start looking into the mathematics.
George, Dave, and others of the Motl-ite end of the string pool:
That exact tendency you’re showing, right here, above, to try to settle abstract physics issues by personal attacks, bizarre political tacks, and so on is exactly WHY people sometimes don’t respond, and never should respond. Or not to the alleged specifics – but to the paradigm that says this is any way at all to deal with science. Ever.
There’s a saying at law – when the facts (data) are on your side, hammer on the facts. When the law is on your side, hammer on the laws. When neither the facts nor the laws are on your side, hammer on the table.
You’re hammering on the table.
If you were representative of some “partisan” facet of physics, which you aren’t, properly, your posts would represent an admission of how bankrupt it was.
Well the blog master seems to be very content with his career which is according to him way more than bashing people who do devote most of their time to science. I encourage anyone to check up on PW on Web of Science (you could get criticized when using Spires as Spires mostly focusses on hep). Quite interesting… 10 entries to be found. First scientific paper in 1983, eighth and last one in 1989, two more papers hitting on people who do actually work in 2002 and 2007, both papers completely void of any scientific content. He is 184 times cited in total, during the past 10 years he got a grand total of 18 citations. So a few questions pop up: how can a non scientist attack a whole field where – according to his own words – some of the best young minds of our time work? Here above he mentioned his promotion to “Senior Lecturer”. How is it possible that a person makes promotion at one of the world’s foremost universities without a single tracable sign of scientific activity in nearly two decades? Do we miss something? Or is a senior lecturer somehow disconnected from the regular body of professors doing science? I am pretty sick of this endless ranting against part of elementary particle theory by someone who has certainly not deserved his right to speak and who is not able to present any valuable or even just interesting alternative… Please keep us updated on conferences, talks, other blogs etc. but stop this incredible petty nonsense.
mathandphysics1,
Despite what you might read some places, I’m not at all a physics “populist”. As far as progress in theoretical particle physics goes, it is an extremely demanding subject, and requires talented people working in the right sort of environment. The health of our elite institutions in this area is something I’m quite concerned about. But I don’t see the threats as coming from “populism” or the general public. Most people’s attitude towards these institutions seems to me to range from complete lack of interest to moderate degrees of respect. The more serious threat comes from within: if things get to the point where pseudo-science like the multiverse dominates and this is what you have to work on if you want a job, then these institutions are doomed as serious places.
The book was intentionally written to be readable by a wide range of people. One audience is mathematicians and physicists with a serious interest in the subject. I’ve been very pleased to hear from some colleagues I respect enormously that they enjoyed reading the book and learned some things from it. At the other end of the spectrum, much of the book tries to be a readable history and overview of the current state of the subject, accessible to any serious reader willing to deal with the fact that they won’t understand some of the more technical things I try and explain about.
While writing the book, I didn’t think much about who I was writing for, just trying to get down a story I wanted to tell as clearly and accessibly as possible. Later on, at some point I realized that there was one ideal reader that I had been writing for. In some sense it was aimed at myself, 35 years ago, explaining to a teenager just starting to get curious about this subject everything that I had learned about it. In that respect, it is intended as an introduction into the subject, hopefully a guide for someone who wants to learn more. It’s not a technical textbook, but I hope it can be useful when read in conjunction with books that do explain the actual technical tools needed to seriously understand the subject.
“Lucy”
I think Marion says it well. When people are on the losing side of an argument, they descend to the ad hominem attack and start pounding the table in a desperate attempt to draw attention away from the question at hand.
Doing this while hiding behind anonymity is just pathetic beyond words.
Some active researchers do agree with Woit’s views, so Lucy in the sky’s comments aren’t that pertinent in my mind. If anything, the fact that someone who isn’t an active researcher can make this sort of attack on the physics establishment, whatever his motives, and have their response be so ineffective, is more evidence there’s something wrong with the way physics is today.
Also, to “Marion Delgado” above, I am not a Motlite by any stretch, or even a physicist for that matter. I don’t really know who’s right about this controversy. My comments above were mainly just curiosity if there were some personal motives behind his opposition to string theory. Clearly, looking at the two blogs, Motl’s and Woit’s, Motl’s definitely comes across as being more political and less professional. And if he is an active researcher, it doesn’t look like he will be much longer 😉
Peter et al:
I think Peter’s blog attracts lay people like myself (retired engineer) because they want to understand the issues (that’s right issues) that HEP and cosmology are attempting to address. The point that Peter has made repeatedly is that string theory makes no verifiable predictions and that ideas like the multiverse are untestable. The general response is typical: “Woit is not a researcher so ignore him.” Or these are research programs in progress.
After a while someone like me begins to think that fundamental physics research is starting to look more and more like a religion. Physicists start worshiping their equations, holding meetings to discuss their equations and claiming how the equations are the answer to all that is knowable and unknowable. No measurements that validate the equations are available but no problem. It is the beauty of the equations.
I have absolute no problem with individual doing this as long as it is not at the taxpayer’s expense. The lay public is in no position to question the technical details of any particular research but the lay public can certainly recognize when there is no connection to the real physical world. I think that has been a big advantage of the internet and particular blogs. More and more information is available to the lay public.
People like Peter are just trying to inform the public as they see physics research it. If others different then they should go all out to correct any misperceptions that Peter or anyone else is fostering. String theory and the multiverse idea are just two examples where the advocates are not presenting convincing (at least to me) arguments for their positions. So I would certainly welcome more dialogue from the other side. I am opened minded but very skeptical as of now.
Since I just spent the morning trying to figure out what to do about a section of a paper I’ve been writing that has me confused, I kind of take exception to the “not an active researcher” characterization. I’m not someone who has ever been an active researcher in string theory, and my research work does move embarrassingly slowly, but it does take up a lot of time right now that I could otherwise be using to enjoy a restful summer vacation…
It is discouraging to see the String propaganda mount such vicious attacks against any form of serious criticism and against whistle-blowers like Peter. It is quite clear that all these personal attacks are nothing short of attempts for character assasination and, at the end of the day, reinforce the very failure of the String Theory program.
‘..but I do think that the disagreement about (for example) string theory happens at such a rarefied and sophisticated level, that there is no way for an intelligent layman to judge who is talking sense,..”
The actual interesting point is that this is, at least concerning the current state of fundamental physics, in fact in a certain sense wrong. The essential ‘disagreement’ about (for example) string theory, as it seems, cannot be decided on any ‘positive’ level, as it would be sufficient for the constitution of an exact science, the disagreement about string theory takes place on a normative level, a level which couldn’t be more distant to the techniques and results which should actually discriminate valid reasoning from ‘nonsense’ in the exact sciences. This is the actual fate which fundamental physics seems to face at the moment: the unabilty to construct itself beyond normative ‘knowledge’ and methods. What could be a positive disagreement about string theory today is almost completely resolved by mathematicians, it is, to cut it short, the physical discourse itself, being not able to produce ‘positive statements’ and methods anymore that produced the ‘scientific subclass’ that initiated the threat to the ‘truths’ and ‘standards’ of physical reasoning, not some external program or entity as the internet, especially not the phenomenon ‘blog’.
George:
Regardless of what you now say is your actual position, which cannot be otherwise derived from your posts and hence would have to be obtained by mind-reading, the fact is your “question” is a very typical ad hominem attack disguised as an attempt to elicit information. You do not, let me say this emphatically, deserve the benefit of the doubt when you resort to such tactics. Indeed, it’s discernibly worse than simply saying what you’re asking about.
Moreover, you are decidedly being part of the effort to shift the ground from the only real issue – the current state of theoretical physics as it relates to string/brane/M theory – to picking out one person raising issues and asking completely irrelevant and ad hominem questions – making the theorist or challenger the issue instead of the theory or challenge.
And whether you are a string theory partisan or not, you are explicitly resorting to tactics that Motl and his supporters have endorsed by using them. If you posted something about how the LHC will be a valid test of a major swatch of string theory, for instance, and I or Peter Woit or anyone asked you if you were saying that only because you were a drug addict or had a crush on Lubos or something, that would be an ad hominem attack disguised as a question. I hope this clarifies the issue.
Because the point is, Woit’s history is simply not germane to the issues raised with string theory. The “theory”, if i can unfairly dignify it with that term, that you are referencing – that only academic failures attack string theory – does not hold very well when you consider the many fine physicists (penrose and feynman are just the tip of the iceberg) who have raised identical issues.
There is no OBJECTIVE reason for you to probe into someone raising issues that have been raised by probably at least a hundred other physicists, including some string theorists, asking if they’re MERELY raising those issues, again, but in a systematic way, out of spite because they are personally an academic failure.
It still boggles my mind and is very disheartening to think that something as abstract as particle physics could be subject to this level of tendentious and unsound discussion.
Let me add that Garrett Lisi’s kewl surfer dewd persona is also not at all germane. He gets publicity for it, but I hope he neither gets dismissed nor respected for it.
Marion,
Enough, the point has been made. As far as I can tell, George, like probably lots of other people who see Lubos’s blog, was just curious to hear what I had to say in response to the way Lubos describes me. Fair enough. Lubos is so far out there it’s hard to even get annoyed with him, and he at least puts his name to what he writes and takes responsibility for it. What’s much more creepy are string theorists like “Lucy” who think anonymous character assassination is a good tactic. Undoubtedly this kind of thing works to some extent with people who don’t know much about me, but on the whole I think it does much more damage to the reputation of string theory and string theorists than it does to mine. Go right ahead…
Marion, you really have me all wrong. I prefer to stay anonymous on these blogs, but I guarantee I have nothing vested in the string theory debates one way or the other. I’ve been around the academia block a few times, and I have seen the lowest motivations. I don’t know Woit, Motl, or any of these people, and I’m not secretly on anyone’s side.
I even bought with my own money the Smolin book, and probably would have bought Not Even Wrong if I had seen it in the bookstore first. Anyhow, I’m not going to argue this anymore, it’s not like I am in a position to prove anything.
I find it remarkable, and a bit scary, that the social and political context of the excellent “Surfing the Universe” article in the current New Yorker has only been mentioned here in passing. I am referring, of course, to the scandalous cover for the issue, depicting Michelle and Barak Obama as Black Panther revolutionaries and Islamic terrorists. Motl, who features an image of the cover on his blog, could not possibly have done worse.
The New Yorker’s claim is that they were simply trying to parody the attitudes of some of Obama’s opponents. If so, certainly a lot of the country misunderstood their intention. To relate this to the discussion here on Peter’s blog, the misunderstandings that may arise from this misplaced imagery in a thoroughly mainstream and conventional medium are likely to eclipse by far those from blogs. So while Bee is correct to point out the perils of being misunderstood on a blog, there is really nothing new about this. For as long as there have been printing presses, there have been things written (or drawn) which would not have been misunderstood in personal, face to face communication.
“…just look at the early christians and their destruction of any school of philosophy or knowledge that contradicted their world view…”
Every once in a while, someone just has to inject surreptitiously an unfair attack on Christians that has nothing to do with the topic of this blog.
I find it remarkable, and a bit scary, that the social and political context of the excellent “Surfing the Universe” article in the current New Yorker has only been mentioned here in passing.
Peter has a long-standing habit of discouraging political discussion here. I wouldn’t read too much into the absence of discussion of the New Yorker cover.
Peter:
Sorry, and I agree the point’s hammered in. By the time I’d responded there were another few posts I hadn’t seen.
George:
That is fair enough, and when I say “you” I should rather say, “one” or “anyone who…”
Thanks A.J.,
Yes, once people start discussions of politics or religion, they then drown out everything else. Please don’t do this, it’s not like there aren’t plenty of other places on the internet for such discussions…
To Haelfix:
I’m a rank amateur math and physics groupie – no physics or mathematics degree – hell I can barely count. And yet I ended up at this blog and I don’t see any crackpots around here…
Here is a partial list of blogs this amateur follows:
Ars mathematica, Cosmic Variance, God Plays Dice, Good Math-Bad math,Low Dimensional Topology,MathTrek,NonCommutativegeometry,Rigorous Trivialities,The n-Category Cafe (my favorite), The Unapologetic Mathematician, Not Even Wrong ( I come here a good bit even though I’m more partial to string theory) and ZeroDivides. I sometimes go to Lubos’s blog too – he’s a bit of a crack pot though ( just kidding Lubos! It’s a joke, yes really)
“Yes, once people start discussions of politics or religion, they then drown out everything else. Please don’t do this, it’s not like there aren’t plenty of other places on the internet for such discussions…”
Peter
I will swallow my pride and humble myself. My last comment was removed and must have been in violation of the policy.
I will even confess to being a trickster, a physics underclass wonk.