Last month I made the following prediction:
String theory doesn’t make any predictions, but I can make one: Lubos will be among the first reviewers of my book on Amazon, and I’ll get two stars.
This prediction was confirmed today, with a certain Harvard faculty member acting exactly the way you would expect. The reason for the two stars is that Lubos is well aware that Amazon usually deletes one star reviews.
His Amazon review is nutty in so many ways it’s hard to know where to start. It begins with:
I have read a different edition of the book than one offered here, and I apologize in advance for any inaccuracies in my review that this fact could cause. In fact, if any errors from the list below have been corrected, it was because of my feedback, so I think it is fair to list them anyway.
I have no idea what “different edition” of the book he is referring to, perhaps it is the earlier version that Cambridge considered a couple years ago, which was circulated by them and by me to various people. Whatever it was he was reading, I never received any feedback from him correcting supposed errors. Besides this weird delusion, pretty much everything else he quotes as an error in the book is something he has made up out of whole cloth. He doesn’t directly quote a single word of mine or give page numbers, so I can’t even figure out where he is getting this nonsense.
I’ll just ignore the ranting and ad hominem attacks, trademarks of someone on the losing side of an argument, and address the very few substantive errors he claims I make where I can actually locate the exact place in the book he claims an error is being made:
Woit writes that the energy of the LHC beam will be 14 GeV, instead of 14 TeV
Page 31: “[the LHC] is a proton-proton collider with a total energy of 14 Tev”
Note that the original is correct, his correction is wrong (the beam energy is 7 TeV).
In his description of the history of supersymmetry, he forgets Pierre Ramond.
Actually I explain carefully in the preface of the book that the history is quite sketchy and many people are left out. One of my main fears after writing this book was realizing how many enemies I would make by not putting their names in. In this case however, Pierre Ramond is in the index and I write:
Page 154: “The first string theory with fermions was constructed by Pierre Ramond late in 1970”
Page 155: “Early string theorists discovered that string theories with fermions involved a version of supersymmetry…”
He misunderstands how SU(2) can be embedded to SO(4)
There’s nothing in the book about embeddings of SU(2) in SO(4). Presumably this is a reference to a mistaken statement I made once on this weblog. Yes, dear reader, among the by now probably thousands of pages of material I have written on this blog, I have sometimes said something incorrect. The book is written a lot more carefully than my blog postings.
Even more seriously, he builds his case upon e-mail messages from undetermined sources that supported Woit’s viewpoint. Most of these e-mails were obviously written by crackpots.
In the book I’m quite careful to attribute things I quote and there are very few e-mails quoted. There’s only one unattributed e-mail that I can think of, it was written by someone visiting the Harvard string theory group at the time of the Bogdanov scandal, who wrote:
“So no one in the string group at Harvard can tell if these papers are real or fraudulent. This morning told that they were frauds, everyone was laughing at how obvious it is. This afternoon, told they are real professors and that this is not a fraud, everyone here says, well, maybe it is real stuff.”
This is unattributed since I don’t know who wrote it. Maybe they were a crackpot, one visiting the Harvard string theory group.
The problematic statement that string theory makes no prediction is repeated hundreds of times, and in many particular contexts, such a statement becomes not only boring but also patently false.
I doubt it’s actually in the hundreds, but sure, I do repeatedly claim that string theory makes no predictions, and this is not “patently false”, but completely accurate.
he never mentions names like Weinberg, Gell-Mann, Hawking, Randall, Arkani-Hamed
Weinberg, Gell-Mann, and Hawking are each mentioned many times in the book, and I list Lisa Randall’s book as the suggested place to learn more about brane-world scenarios. It’s true that Arkani-Hamed is not in the book.
I could go on about the rest of the review, but really, what’s the point?
I would like to think that Lubos is a huge embarrassment to the string theory community, but the sad thing is that there’s little evidence that they’re embarrassed.
Jonathan Vos Post, Bert Schroer, and anon have commented here about Richard Feynman’s view that “… all this superstring stuff is crazy and is in the wrong direction …”.
Another physicist well-known to be both brilliant and practical is Sidney Coleman. Although I have not read an advance copy of Peter’s book and so cannot quote it, I can quote from Peter’s blog entry of March 2005:
“… Sadly, Coleman is in poor health, suffering from Parkinson’s disease … his great Erice lectures … were collected in 1985 in the book “Aspects of Symmetry” … The fact that Coleman stopped giving these lectures after 1979 was to me one of the first indications that particle theory was entering a much less promising phase of its history. Coleman never really warmed to the topics of supersymmetry and string theory. …”.
An even more telling account of Sidney Coleman’s view of superstrings comes from a March 2005 entry in the blog of superstring guru Jacques Distler, which said in part:
“… Sidney was my PhD thesis advisor. Truth be told, his direct influence on my thesis was negligible. Midway through my graduate career, string theory swept through high energy physics. As a sensible young man, I dropped everything I’d been doing and rode the wave. Sidney was not interested in string theory; he wasn’t even particularly interested in supersymmetry. …
No one thought more clearly about quantum field theory. And no one has ever lectured or written more lucidly about the subject. If you haven’t read his Erice Lectures, you don’t know the heights that scientific writing can attain. …”.
Among those Erice Lectures were “Classical lumps and their quantum descendants”, in which he described the sine-Gordon equation, its doublet breather solutions, and its equivalence to the massive Thirring equation. At the end of those lectures, he wrote:
“… This has been a long series of physics lectures with no reference whatsoever to experiment. This is embarrassing. …”.
Sidney Coleman’s embarassment at physics stuff with “no reference whatsoever to experiment” reminds me of Richard Feynman’s feelings about superstrings.
With respect to “Classical lumps and their quantum descendants”, Sidney Coleman went on to ask “… Is there any chance that the lump will be more than a theoretical toy in our field? …”, and mentioned a couple of possibilities, one of which was “… that there will appear a theory of strong-intereaction dynamics in which hadrons are thought of as lumps …”. My effort at trying to fulfill that possibility is at http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/sGmTqqbarPion.pdf
Whether or not Sidney Coleman’s lumps become “more than a theoretical toy”,
Sidney Coleman’s basic instinct that “… physics … with no reference whatsoever to experiment … is embarrassing …”
is consistent with
superstring guru Jacques Distler’s statement “Sidney was not interested in string theory; he wasn’t even particularly interested in supersymmetry.,
and
is also consistent with Richard Feynman’s view of superstrings.
Tony Smith
http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/
Thanks, Jonathan, this time I saved your information.
My superficial impression is that at the time of Feynman this was within the usual antagonisms and rivalries in those days. We should not forget this was before the days when this area of particle physics turned into the direction of hegemony and when certain physicists turned salesman (i.e. in particular nicking away the jobs which you are supposed to be doing Jonathan). In the present “Weltmacht oder Tod” (using Chris Oklay’s Endsieg terminology) or in my less radical “hegemony and death to the others” characterization one is inclined to see such ealier aphorisms of Feynman slightly distorted.
A review from the Financial times (subscription required):
Nothing gained in search for ‘theory of everything’
By Robert Matthews
Published: June 2 2006 19:45 | Last updated: June 2 2006 19:45
They call their leader The Pope, insist theirs is the only path to enlightenment and attract a steady stream of young acolytes to their cause. A crackpot religious cult? No, something far scarier: a scientific community that has completely lost touch with reality and is robbing us of some of our most brilliant minds.
…….
Those who have show signs of having fallen prey to the “sunk-cost fallacy”, the huge intellectual effort needed to enter the field compelling them to plough on regardless of the prospects of success. It is time they were put out of their misery by being told to either give up or find funding from elsewhere (charities supporting faith-based pursuits have been suggested as one alternative).
Academic institutions find it hard enough to fund fields with records of solid achievement. After 20-odd years, they are surely justified in pulling the plug on one that has disappeared up its Calabi-Yau manifold.
The writer is visiting reader in science at Aston University, Birmingham
The link to the FT review:
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/a482e470-f264-11da-b78e-0000779e2340.html
A word of caution about all this. When the SSC was cancelled, some people expected that the funding would go to other fields, e.g. condensed matter physics, etc. Instead there was a general cut across the board ~ “if the HEP community can lose 8B funding, other fields can survive a hit too”. Do not think that if funding for string theory is cut, that the money will go to “other” HEP theory. It will simply disappear. Funding is not a zero sum game where the money must go “to someone”.
Sunderpeeche,
Consider the speculation and hype a bit like a cancer. If you delay treatment, you can avoid the unpleasant side effects a short while.
However, you are then increasing long-term problem. Far better to straighted out problems before it is too late.
The funding of bigoted, close-minded string theorists may or may not need to be cut to preserve the integrity of physics as a whole.
If they would only cease to be such a dictatorial menace to physics, such drastic treatment would be unnecessary.
“I find it totally pathetic that those people who imposed on others for decades the story about the fundamental aspects of “the gauge principle” in QFT when QFTists with a bit higher developed conceptual power knew that this is one of those metaphoric description did not want to spend their energies removing holy cows (nothing intrinsic, since there was never any autonomous structural property which could reveal that allegedly gauge invariant observables where coming from a “gauge” theory) now have to ram into our throats (via their jester) that after all this was not so (a kind of April fool’s joke of very long duration).”
Dear Bert,
the gauge principle concisely summarizes the interactions even if it is not quite unique. This clear organizing principle allowed us to nail down the standard model. Later on we learned, in the context of SUSY gauge theories, that there can be serious ambiguities in such a description. Seiberg duality is the standard example of this. If you “knew” this all along, why did you leave it to Seiberg to give a convincing example? I dare to guess that it’s because you weren’t able to do it.
Please tone it down a notch or two. You sound like an angry teenager when you write your rambling complaints.
Best wishes,
Dan
Believe what you will about string theory and funding, and about the integrity of physics as a whole. I presume that “physics” once again means the equating of HEP theory to all of physics. The solution lies in expt HEP finding something beyond SM. And only Mother Nature has the answer to that.
Dan,
Can you explain in a couple of sentences how Seiberg duality is an example of the ambiguity of gauge theories?
Thanks in advance.
Dear MathPhys,
For a factual statement of what Seiberg duality is, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seiberg_duality
The point is that theories with different gauge groups are dual to one another, that is, they provide different descriptions of the same physics. In other words, the gauge symmetry may not be uniquely determined by the underlying physics.
I’m not Dan, and this is only one sentence, and I’m being a busybody, but try this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seiberg_duality
Thanks to both of you. I’m (a bit) familiar with S duality. I’m just not so sure that allowing for dual descriptions is the same thing as an ambiguity.
But thanks again.
Two theories are dual if, despite different formal content, they describe the same physics. A duality between theories with different gauge groups *is* therefore an ambiguity in the gauge group — you can equivalently choose either theory, and hence either gauge group, to describe the same physics.
Agreed.
Even if there is an ambiguity, the gauge group is pinned down up to a discrete, and small, number of choices. Besides, I think that Seiberg duality only works for SUSY QCD, so for e.g. the SM the gauge group is unique, and in fact fixed by its global part, the charge assignment.
Woit,
I notice that Lubos Motl’s Amazon review claims:
“The book contains a lot of very embarassing errors.”
So both you and Lubos use spell embarrassing with a single “r”. Do you share an entangled mental state? That would be real reason for embarrassment.
Or did you write the nonsense review yourself and bribe Lubos to put it on Amazon to stir up some controversy and boost sales?
If you seriously want to drop a letter r from a particular word, string. “Sting theory” sounds really cool.
It should be pointed out, in all fairness, that Seiberg duality is a duality of the infrared (long-distance) physics. At short distances (high energies), the Seiberg-dual gauge theories are clearly distinguishable. This is in contrast to the S-duality of N=4 supersymmetric gauge theories, which is an exact duality at all length scales.
The difference, really, is the difference between asymptotically-free theories and conformal ones.
So you are saying that Seiberg duality is *not* S duality.
anon,
Peter is obviously way ahead of all of us. Lubos Motl does not really exist, being a persona that Peter has created in order to boost sales of his book (I wonder … maybe I could do something … let me think …)
Lubos exists. He is an alien bot, constructed to probe human reactions.
ZZRRRFKLG (Lubos’s controller): Give me one reason, one reason why I should not bust you back down to teaching arithmetic to pre-school kids? I sent you to Earth to set back their science fifty years or more, and it looks like they’ve rumbled you already!
LUBOS (grovelling): But master, surely you appreciate the ingeniousness of my feigned opposition to the Anthropic Landscape?
ZZRRRFKLG: It’s not enough, Skrrzlgk [NB: his real name]. You did not take account of that asshole Peter Woit! It looks like people are going to take his book seriously! And what if the best mathematical brains on that pathetic planet start doing science again? Then where will we be?
SKRRZLGK: It was your fault! You would not let me use the Quantum Entanglement Ray on him! I told you he was dangerous!
ZZRRRFKLG: Do not question my wisdom, fool! You know nothing. And what’s with all this political crap on your web site? Stick to the primary mission or your next assignment will be in the Kindergarten!
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Chris,
If you look closely at Lubos Motl’s blog you can see he is now saying even Dr Matthews is
“Robert Matthews: science-hater par excellence”
Dr Matthews has done possibly more to support science than any other journalist in the UK.
Motl states: “A senior physicist has sent me a piece of text that he or she called ‘ tendentious, malicious attack on scientists and through that on science itself’.”
Who is a senior physicist to Dr Motl? Someone deluded, that’s for sure. People who hate Feynman’s objectivity so much as Dr Motl and try to mix gibberish with personal attacks while standing behind the cover of Dr Motl are very respectable IMHO.
Or perhaps nobody warped is hiding behind Dr Motl, and he is attacking British SCIENCE reporters off his own back. I think this is the case. Ed Witten and Lisa Randall would NEVER be so cowardly, they have more integrity than that, and don’t behave this way.
Well, I suppose that with the prospect of teaching arithmetic to alien infants, he is getting desperate.
I have complete great respect for Dr Matthews scientific reporting. He has easily done more for science in the UK than the entire stringy brigade put together. That’s a real accomplishment.
So Lumos is being silly or paranoid as usual. Remember the article which Lumo wrote about Quantoken, painting him as a clown?
http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/01/meeting-quantoken.html
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Methinks another set of posts are going to get deleted.
I must say, this post is a welcome distraction from my stuying for exams. Besides being again enlightening as to the way some high ranking academics interact socially, it has given me quite a laugh.
Unbelievable.
Dear Dan,
This is clear ever since Schwinger argued that there is a massive version of QED (he thought of what would be called in modern terminology composite Higgs). Of course he knew that he had no mathematical control over 4-dimensional gauge theories (and nobody has up to this date) and in order to be somewhat convincing he invented the Schwinger model. Somewhat later Lowenstein and Swieca came up with quite an ingenious paper in which they showed by a very balanced conceptual-mathematical presentation that the physical content is nothing else than a two-dimensional massive free scalar field. And lo and behold the situation can be inverted, the free massive scalar field really reproduces asymptotic freedom; it is the only free field which does this (look up my long paper from last year on two-dimensional QFT… in AOP or hep-th where this cute conceptually quite nontrivial point point is explained in detail). There are many more controllable model where this can be rigorously established.
If you only understand things in a much less controllable 4-dim. Euclidean settings, good for you, but allow me to say that I have difficulties to follow Euclidean consistency arguments which are so far away from conceptional+mathematical control. But please do not claim that mathematical physicists got to know about the metaphorical meaning of the gauge theory setting through the Seiberg-Witten duality. But as I said, if you need a Seiberg-Witten Nanny do become aware this is o.k. with me but don´t complain that before there were no Nannys around.
By the way, the Schwinger-Higgs mechanism is (differen from the Goldstone spontaneous breaking of continuous symmetries) valid also in low spacetime dimension.
Thomas Larson,
there is no contradition between the metaphoric QFT aspect of the word “gauge” and the extreme usefulness of the calculational gauge theoretic scheme which allows us to extract all the rich information from the action for the standard model. But I think it is a commonplace by know to expect that this whole present setting will change in the future and probably not just by additional modification here and there, but rather by a very radical reformulation on the conceptual side. In the meantime we should be very very satisfied of having the present rather powerful recipe.
To enhance my point, I direct your attention to the surprizing (in retrospect) efficiency of the old Bohr-Sommerfeld theory. It is very beneficial that we already can agree on the metaphorical aspects of “gauge” because that gives us the conviction to look for a different description where (as outside of gauge theory) the principle: something which looks like an elephant really is an elephant is re-established.
Sunderpeeche,
Everything surrounding Lubos is so surreal I can’t figure out how to separate sense from nonsense here and moderate this. Someone recently wrote to me that the string theory story would make a great comic novel in the vein of David Lodge. I feel like I’m already living in a comic novel….
Dan, Lubos,
Back from a trip and just deleted a bunch of comments, including yours. I really insist that this is my weblog so you have to stick to insulting me and not others.
Sure, Peter Woit. [Attack on someone else deleted]. You are a pathetic loser.
Dear Peter Woit,
I noticed that you have erased the only meaningful comments on this page – especially those of Dan (and mine), including the comments of Dan that Bert Schroer “responds” to.
You’re like one gigantic KGB that protects the leading role of aggressive crackpots with IQ around 75 in the society. You’re a good reason to vomit. Incidentally, my lawyer is telling me that we should sue you for all the lies that you are writing about me. I am telling her that it does not matter because your comments are only taken semi-seriously by the human junk that dominates your blog, but she insists that we should act. So be ready.
All the best
Lubos
Actually Lubos is right most of the time. The only problem is his abrasive and arrogant attitude. It’s so ironic and puzzling that someone as smart as him could be so arrogant. Usually, people as arrogant as Lubos are really just fools. I guess Lubos is the odd exception to the rule.
His attitude doesn’t reflect his intelligence, and reading his rants, you’d never know he was a harvard professor (ok, assistant professor, whatever), you’d think he was some random retard. I think his attitude can be traced back to his childhood. Some lack of validation that he tries to make up for as an adult, who knows ?
Lubos,
If you have any specific complaint that something I wrote about you is a lie, do let me know. Has your lawyer taken a look at your own weblog and what you write in comments here before providing you legal advice?
Dan (formerly Michael),
Please stop anonymously submitting the same insult repetitively here. If you don’t stop behavior like this I’m going to complain to your colleagues at UMass and Brandeis about this.
It would be very surreal to see the validity of string theory being fought in the legal court system. It sounds almost just as amusing as somebody suing McDonalds for spilling hot coffee on themself.
Re legal matters, perhaps Dan/Michael should ponder this:
“Annoying someone via the Internet is now a federal crime.
It’s no joke. Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.
In other words, it’s OK to flame someone on a mailing list or in a blog as long as you do it under your real name. Thank Congress for small favors, I guess.”
Thomas,
A new “law” of that sort has to survive the legal process, particularly on constitutional grounds, if it’s to become the law of the land in America. Otherwise it’s just something that’s written on a piece of paper with very little to no legal meaning.
MathPhys asked:
“So you are saying that Seiberg duality is *not* S duality.”
S-duality is an exchange of weak- and strong-coupling regimes of two theories.
For a conformally-invariant theory (like N=4 SYM), such a notion makes direct sense because the gauge coupling constant is really a constant.
In an aymptotically-free theory, what you have is a scale-dependent running coupling constant. So, if I said to you, “the Seiberg-dual theories are related by an exchange of weak and strong coupling,” you should retort, “The couplings defined at what scale?”
The answer is, “the couplings in the far-infrared.”
In the UV, both theories are weakly-coupled, and clearly have different weakly-coupled degrees of freedom.
A better name for Seiberg duality is “universality.” Two different gauge theories have the same infrared physics. But, since it is closely related to S-duality (which I’d like to reserve for theories that are dual at all length scales), “duality” is the name that has stuck.
When will it be decided whether Lubos gets tenure at Harvard? I hope he gets it. Let’s give credit where credit is due. No man (sorry Peter Woit, but you are not even close) has done so much to sink the reputation of String Theory than Lubos Motl.
You’ve got to be kidding me, I was just about to comment on Peter’s stinky feet.
And somebody needs to warn Uncle Al, ASAP… 😉
Delete the entire thread, except perhaps the ones about duality.
Peter, I plugged your book and Lee’s on SPResearch, but Phillip is sleeping-in…
String theory (“cancer”) ~ threat to HEP theory ~ threat to all physics ~ threat to civilization itself.
Mon Dieu im Himmel.
Toss the lot.
No, there is a clear and critical difference …
…between understanding that every unproven and projected assumption that has ever been “carried” is always up for review at any time given new physics, until a true ToE or at least a “hard” theory of quantum gravity is produced… then maybe…
…and between taking assumptions and projections for granted to the point of the kind of fanaticism that embraces the ensuing world-view that this entails as if it were real!
Nothing need be tossed when the “hype” isn’t passed-off as something greater via a rallying of the masses and politics, over new physics.
I think that it’s sad though that it may take the collapse of quantum gravity physics to wake people up to the fact that the conservative approach to resolving old unfinished issues isn’t the fringe, rather, the cutting-edge which is OUT THERE.
I think that the whole career commital thing is critical to all of this, and not in a good way for science.
what I think is interesting on Lubos is that his behaviour is similar to what’s under psychiatrists called Aspergers Syndrome:
http://www.udel.edu/bkirby/asperger/
Individuals with AS can exhibit a variety of characteristics and the disorder can range from mild to severe. Persons with AS show marked deficiencies in social skills, have difficulties with transitions or changes and prefer sameness. They often have obsessive routines and may be preoccupied with a particular subject of interest.
it’s important to remember that the person with AS perceives the world very differently. Therefore, many behaviors that seem odd or unusual are due to those neurological differences and not the result of intentional rudeness or bad behavior, and most certainly not the result of “improper parenting”.
By definition, those with AS have a normal IQ and many individuals (although not all), exhibit exceptional skill or talent in a specific area. Because of their high degree of functionality and their naiveté, those with AS are often viewed as eccentric or odd and can easily become victims of teasing and bullying. While language development seems, on the surface, normal, individuals with AS often have deficits in pragmatics and prosody. Vocabularies may be extraordinarily rich and some children sound like “little professors.” However, persons with AS can be extremely literal and have difficulty using language in a social context.
Asperger called them “little professors”. It is likely that Dirac was for example a classic case.
This here is about a fields medaillist (Richard Borcherds) with Aspergers:
http://leitl.org/docs/a-professor-of-mathematics.pdf
Please, enough about Lubos’s eccentric personality. For the record, it seems to me to have nothing to do with Asperger’s.
not to focus on Lubos, but does anyone think that string theorists out there (the reasonable kind) see the arrogant, obnoxious and “below the belt” attacks of Lubos as helpful to their cause? Do they even know/care? It seems like as far as blogs and internet is concerned Lubos is some sort of self-appointed strings guru, at least to regular masses. I wonder how many new graduate students reading blogs, including this one, want nothing to do with string theory – not because of Peter Woit’s or Lee Smolin’s critisism of the strings, but because of folks like Lubos.
So you would base your career decisions on the content of Peter Woit and Lubos Motl’s blogs?
Wow.
Ponderer,
I doubt that most string theorists see Lubos as helpful to the cause of string theory, quite the opposite. However I continue to find it remarkable that essentially none of them (Aaron Bergman is one exception) are willing to be seen criticizing him and his behavior. I’ll avoid speculating here about why this is.
Mentos,
He explicitly said that graduate students like him aren’t much influenced by me, but are influenced by seeing the behavior of Lubos (and folks like him, try the next most well-known string theory blogger, Jacques Distler). Would you want to enter a field that appeared to be happy to be represented by people like this? (Going back to previous point, that the rest of the string theory community gives no indication of having a problem with Lubos or Distler).