Not Even Wrong

The Simons Foundation will be funding new postdoctoral positions at various institutions starting next fall. Details of one of these, at the University of Texas, have been announced, with more to follow in coming weeks. These are three-year postdocs, with a first-year salary of $70K/year.

A presentation at a recent SLAC Users Group meeting included some of the following data about NSF support for HEP theory:

Theory funding (including cosmology and astro-particle physics) for FY 2008: \$11.68 million. For FY 2009, \$11.31 million + \$2.3 million from the stimulus legislation.

In FY 2008, these grants supported 128 senior personnel, 84 postdocs and 104 graduate students. For FY 2009 the numbers were 184 senior personnel, 50 postdocs and 70 graduate students.

During FY 2008, 24 out of 57 new submitted proposals were funded, 17 out 21 renewals were funded.

Group grants were categorized as 11 phenomenology, 11 strings, 2 cosmology, 1 general.

Individual grants were categorized as 17 cosmology, 12 strings, 9 phenomenology, 3 astrophysics, 2 lattice QCD, 3 general.

So, as far as NSF HEP grants go these days, if you’re not doing cosmology, string theory, or phenomenology, basically you’re out of luck…

NSF THY has a new program manager who started Oct. 1. It’s Keith Dienes of the University of Arizona, whose research in recent years has focused on the “string vacuum project”. He’ll be giving a colloquium at Fermilab next month on Probing the String Landscape, which is advertised with the abstract:

We are currently in the throes of a potentially huge paradigm shift in physics. Motivated by recent developments in string theory and the discovery of the so-called “string landscape”, physicists are beginning to question the uniqueness of fundamental theories of physics and the methods by which such theories might be understood and investigated.

Since the late eighties, the two institutions in the US most heavily invested in string theory have been Princeton and Rutgers. Recently they have been moving aggressively to try and diversify, especially in the direction of LHC phenomenology, with the hiring of Nima Arkani-Hamed at the IAS and Matt Strassler at Rutgers. Last year the two institutions collaborated on a proposal for a new Physics Frontier Center with a budget of \$1 million or so per year. This would be called the PARTICLE Center (Princeton And Rutgers Theory Institute for Collaboration with LHC Experiments) and would aim to be the main US center for LHC phenomenology. The proposal promoted the possibility of experimental anomalies to be discovered by the LHC in fall 2009, quickly followed by PARTICLE physicists inventing a model that would explain the data and predict a subtle effect that would require a new triggering strategy to see. The result of this would be a surprising measurement that would explain supersymmetry breaking.

Anyway, that proposal doesn’t appear to have been funded, with reviewers rather dubious about the idea of retraining Princeton and Rutgers string theorists as LHC phenomenologists, as well as the idea of devoting significant new resources to funding the Princeton and Rutgers theory groups, centralizing LHC phenomenology efforts there. However, two new year-long grants for \$130,000 each were awarded to Strassler and Arkani-Hamed, who promise to use them to “create the nucleus of an LHC center on the East Coast” at Princeton and Rutgers. One of the goals of these grants is listed as “to help in the process of … retraining postdocs from more formal areas of high-energy theory”, since the job market for young string theorists has more or less collapsed.

A couple days ago I got an odd phone call, from a reporter at the Guardian, asking me to comment on the appointment of Michael Green as Lucasian Professor at Cambridge. I told the reporter that I wasn’t a really appropriate person to be asking; for one thing I’ve never met him personally. I did say that from what I knew of his scientific career, he was a quite good choice. He and John Schwarz made great progress in understanding string theory, working on it at a time that this was a very unpopular thing to do. In my view much of the problem with particle theory the past 25 years has to do with the lack of sufficient talented people willing and able to work on the kind of unpopular research that Green and Schwarz took up.

Several people have now pointed out to me the new story in the Guardian, Michael Green: Master of the Universe, which makes clear the reason for that phone call (although none of my comments made it into the story). There’s the usual hype about string theory: “the subject’s thriving”, and the latest news is that it may lead to better understanding of high temperature superconductors and thus help solve the world’s energy problems. In a sidebar, the claim is made that:

The Large Hadron Collider, at Cern, could provide evidence for the theory by analysing the collisions of fundamental particles at high energies.

although Green admits:

…that really is wildly optimistic, and I suspect that’s not going to happen.

Green deals with criticism of string theory with a laugh and ad hominem attacks on Lee Smolin and me as “two particular people who don’t have any particular reason to be knowledgeable about the subject.” As for the idea that it might be a good idea for people to look for alternatives to string theory (much the way he and Schwarz worked in the early 80s), his comment is “But there is nothing else.”

Green seems to be not completely sure I have a Ph.D. For those interested in the question of my qualifications, there’s an old blog entry here. It should perhaps be updated to note that, while I’m still responsible for the Math department computer system, I no longer have the odd title of “Director of Instruction”, but was moved to a non-tenured faculty position as “Lecturer”. Recently I was promoted to the position of “Senior Lecturer”, still non-tenured, but with a long-term contract.

I wish Green the best with his promotion.

The Council for the Advancement of Science Writing is holding a New Horizons in Science conference right now in Austin. This morning Steven Weinberg gave a talk, now available online, with the title Higgs, dark matter and supersymmetry, what the Large Hadron Collider will tell us. He described the Higgs as something definitely expected, supersymmetry as a much more speculative possibility, but had nothing to say about string theory during the talk. In the question session, Tom Siegfried of Science News asked him about why he hadn’t mentioned string theory, and what its prospects now were, 25 years after first being heavily promoted to the press. Weinberg answered:

It’s developed mathematically, but not to the point where there is any one theory, or to the point that even if we had one theory we would know how to do calculations to predict things like the mass of the electron, or the masses of the quarks. So, I would say, although there has been theoretical progress it’s been, I find it disappointing. One of the hopes would be that the LHC would provide a clue to something we’re missing in superstring theory and I think there supersymmetry is the most likely place to look.

One of the troubles with superstring theory is that although in a sense the theorists think there is only one theory, there are an infinite number of approximate solutions of it and we don’t know which one corresponds to our world. But at least in a large variety of the solutions of superstring theory there is supersymmetry visible at low energies, and if we see supersymmetry at low energies, superstring theorists may be able to derive from it some kind of clue as to how to solve these theories. But I haven’t talked about it in this lecture because I don’t see how that would work, it would be.. I mean I couldn’t say that that was likely with any degree of sincerity, and certainly the LHC and any other accelerator that we can imagine being built will not get up to energies which are high enough so that we can directly see the structures that are described by superstring theory, the strings or the D-branes or whatever it is. Those will not be accessible at the LHC, so any clue we get will be very indirect.

I myself, well I was working on superstring theory in the 80s and gave it up because I… I moved into cosmology, which in the last couple of decades has had the excitement that elementary particle physics had in the 60s and 70s, a wonderful coming together of theory and observation. Cosmology now reminds me of the excitement that I felt when I was younger and doing particle physics.. and it’s a pity that superstring hasn’t developed better. I still think it’s the best hope we have, I don’t know of anything else. My own work very recently has been trying to develop an alternative to superstring theory as a way of making sense out of quantum gravity at very high energies. But even though I’m working on this I still find superstring theory more attractive, but not attractive enough…

Siegfried gives an account of the talk here. It includes a new remarkably convoluted and misleading way of referring to the fact that string theory predicts nothing at all about observable physics:

But despite a quarter century of intense effort, superstring theory has not produced a cohesive and clear guide to testing its fit with all the observable features of physical existence.