Not Even Wrong

As the date for announcement of the 2010 Fields Medals approaches, gossip about who the winners might be has been circulating. Math Overflow is by far the best internet site for authoritative discussion between knowledgeable mathematicians, but, unlike this site, they have a “no gossip” rule, leading to the closing of discussion threads like this one.

You can bet on who the Fields Medalists might be here. I assume there’s no bet possible for Ngo since he’s a sure thing…

Update: It’s Ngo and Villani, also Elon Lindenstrauss and Stanislav Smirnov. For the announcement and information about the work of the prize winners, see here. Accurate rumors about this don’t seem to have started circulating until the ICM announced the winners to the press late Tuesday. This information was embargoed until today, breaking the embargo didn’t seem sporting…

Update: Best blog by far for following this is that of Timothy Gowers, who was on the committee that picked the Fields medal winners, and promises to tell us about Cedric Villani’s outfit.

Update: One more. There’s a very informative long piece by Stephen Hawking here about his scientific career.

Update: See Resonaances for more about the “It’s On” paper.

In conjunction with his receipt of the Newton Medal, Edward Witten gave a public talk in London (now available on-line here), and an interview (available as part of a pod-cast here).

Witten’s talk was a rather polemical argument for string theory, in which he laid out his reasons for still feeling that string theory is on the right track. The video is in two parts, with the first part not especially interesting since it is pretty much word-for-word the standard arguments for string theory that he and others have been making since the mid-eighties. The second part has some more interesting content, including Witten’s comments on the evolution of his own personal relationship to the subject. This started in the early eighties, before the 1984 “First Superstring Revolution”, when he began studying string theory, feeling that it was an approach to unification that deserved more attention than it was getting.

A recurring theme in his talk is that “string theory” has gone through unexpected changes in perspective over the 30 years he has been working on it, with the unspoken argument being that some new change in perspective may yet make the current deadly problems of string unification go away. He takes an ambiguous attitude towards attempts in recent years to argue for a change in perspective to the pseudo-scientific “landscape”, explaining the arguments of proponents while not signing on to them. In the podcast he says “I don’t know if this is the right picture of the universe”, in the talk it’s “to my thinking we still need more clues to have a better picture whether that is the right interpretation.”

It’s interesting to compare Witten’s pro-string theory arguments to the somewhat similar ones of his much less mild-mannered thesis advisor David Gross (see here for a posting about a recent talk by Gross). Unlike Witten, Gross is clear where he stands on the anthropic landscape, denouncing it as pseudo-science. One other crucial difference has to do with their discussion of upcoming LHC results. Here, Gross argues strongly that the LHC will see supersymmetry, and is willing to put money on the table to back this up. Witten’s talk barely refers to the LHC, and while he argues that a point in string theory’s favor is its relation to supersymmetry, all he’s willing to say about supersymmetry or extra dimensions at the LHC is “it might happen if we’re fortunate enough.” The next interesting part of the string theory story may very well be what happens in 2013-4 when it becomes clear that supersymmetry and extra dimensions are not going to be seen at LHC energies. After paying off his debts, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Gross take this as an opportunity to back off from the idea of string theory unification. On the other hand, in his talk Witten seems to be positioning himself for carrying on as before, by now making arguments for string theory that don’t at all involve low-energy supersymmetry.

Witten ends his talk with the argument that we still know very little about what string theory is, and this implies that it remains an excellent subject for young physicists to start to work on. I suspect he sees all too well that among physicists the tide has changed, with students turning to other subjects as jobs in string theory dry up and prospects for progress on string theory unification look increasingly dismal. He’s trying to counter this by restating the arguments that have continued to keep him interested in the subject.

Update: Clifford Johnson has some very interesting and accurate comments on Witten and on how others react to him here.

The Clay Mathematics Institute today announced that Perelman has turned down the one million dollar Millennium prize:

On June 8-9 CMI held a conference in Paris to celebrate the resolution of the Poincaré conjecture by Grigoriy Perelman. Dr. Perelman has subsequently informed us that he has decided not to accept the one million dollar prize. In the fall of 2010, CMI will make an announcement of how the prize money will be used to benefit mathematics.

There are various media stories appearing about this, based on an AP report, with a bit more detail:

Jim Carlson, institute president, said Perelman’s decision was not a complete surprise, since he had declined some previous math prizes.

Carlson said Perelman had told him by telephone last week of his decision and gave no reason. But the Interfax news agency quoted Perelman as saying he believed the prize was unfair. Perelman told Interfax he considered his contribution to solving the Poincare conjecture no greater than that of Columbia University mathematician Richard Hamilton.

“To put it short, the main reason is my disagreement with the organized mathematical community,” Perelman, 43, told Interfax. “I don’t like their decisions, I consider them unjust.”

…

Carlson said institute officials will meet this fall to decide what to do with the prize money. “We have some ideas in mind,” he said. “We want to consider that carefully and make the best use possible of the money for the benefit of mathematics.”

This is the time of the year when young particle physicists usually want to go to school, more precisely, a “summer school” held in some pleasant location. These typically have a series of survey lectures on the hot topics of the subject, aimed at the level of advanced graduate students and postdocs. These days, the lectures are often available on-line in some form, so anyone interested in learning some more about currently active research topics can do so, even if they have to miss the summer travel aspect of the school.

Here’s a partial list of some of the larger such programs:

Theoretical Advanced Studies Institute in Elementary Particle Physics: String theory and its applications, Boulder, Colorado June 1-25

Summer school on structures in local quantum field theory, Les Houches, June 7-25

50th Cracow School of Theoretical Physics, Zakopane, Poland June 9-19

2010 European School of High-Energy Physics, Raseborg, Finland June 20 -July 3

Summer School on Mathematical String Theory, Blacksburg June 21-July 2

Cargese Summer School on String Theory: Formal Developments and Applications, Cargese, Corsica June 21-July 3

PASI School on Quantum Gravity, Morelia, Mexico June 23-July 3

Prospects in Theoretical Physics: Aspects of Supersymmetry, Princeton July 19 – July 30 (why Princeton as a location to travel to for the summer is a bit of a mystery…)

Cargese Summer School on Physics at TeV Colliders, Cargese, Corsica July 19-July 30

International School on Strings and Fundamental Physics, Munich July 25-August 6

PSI Summer School on Particle Physics: Gearing up for LHC Physics, Zuoz, Switzerland, August 1-7

SLAC Summer Institute on Neutrinos, Stanford, August 2-13

Clifford Johnson is blogging from the quantum gravity school in Morelia, where he’s shocked to find the “totally bizarre” situation that the students there aren’t very enthusiastic about string theory. He attributes this to their ignorance:

Here’s the really odd thing about all this … : While this is a school on Quantum Gravity, after talking with the students for a while one learns that in most cases the little they’ve heard about string theory is often essentially over 20 years out of date and almost always totally skewed to the negative, to the extent that many of them are under the impression that string theory has nothing to do with quantum gravity at all! It is totally bizarre, and I suspect it is largely a result of things that are said and passed around within their research community.. So there are a few students here and there who have some familiarity with strings, huddling together at times for warmth in a sea of miscommunication, misinformation, and strange preconceptions.

I find it extremely hard to believe that the students at this school are ignorant of claims that string theory is a unified theory including quantum gravity, more likely they’re just unconvinced and more interested in other approaches.

Lubos reacts to this by noting that Clifford is finally encountering reality:

Clifford Johnson seems to be surprised that almost all the students have been brainwashed by various anti-stringy misconceptions. Clifford has clearly been living outside the reality at least for 4 years, and so have many other serious high-energy physicists.

and then goes beyond Clifford, arguing that the problem is not just ignorance, but sub-normal intelligence:

There’s no string theory group in Mexico – another fact that shouldn’t be shocking given Mexico’s average IQ around 85. The IQ increment needed to go from non-stringy quantum gravity to string theory is around 20.

One of the weirder battles of the String Theory wars became known to some as “trackbackgate”, referring to arguments over the arXiv’s policy of not allowing trackbacks to this blog. I’ve mercifully forgotten the details of the story, other than that I wasted a lot of time arguing the issue with the authorities at the arXiv and Cornell, an argument that I finally lost. If you’re interested in the history, a couple blog entries you could start looking at would be this and this.

At some point the arXiv’s policy changed, and some trackbacks to blog entries here started to appear, as well as trackbacks to all sorts of media stories that linked to the arXiv. A little bit of checking seemed to indicate that trackbacks would appear if I linked to papers not in hep-th, but wouldn’t appear when I linked to hep-th papers. A recent example would be this blog entry, which linked to and discussed this paper. This made me a bit curious about what the arXiv current trackback policy might be, but from past experience I figured that trying to contact them to find this out was unlikely to get me anywhere.

One day recently it occurred to me that a way to find out something about this would be to start up another blog, write a posting linking to an hep-th paper and see what happened. It’s quite remarkable how little time it takes to start up a blog, so an hour or so later String Theory Fan was on the web, with an About section:

This blog will be devoted to discussing the latest exciting developments in string theory, our best hope for a fundamental unified theory of particle physics and quantum gravity.

The author is an academic actively studying this fascinating subject.

a first blog entry spouting hype about string theory, the multiverse and how uninformed critics were, and a second one linking to and superficially summarizing a randomly chosen recent multiverse paper.

Well, I still don’t know what the arXiv’s policy is about trackbacks to hep-th papers, but the data shows that while Not Even Wrong doesn’t seem to qualify, String Theory Fan does: