Various and Sundry

For the latest on the status of the LHC, see the July 2 talk of Steve Myers mentioned here earlier, and a July 8 talk (slides, video) that has some more recent news. The question of what to do about bad splices is still up in the air. The current plan is to make measurements at 80K during the next few weeks on the three sectors that have not been warmed up, then present options during the second week of August to the DG and the experiments. The decision to be made will be about how long to delay the start-up to fix more splices. If more splices get fixed, the machine can safely be run at higher energy. The optimistic scenario now seems to be that it will be possible to run at some energy in the range of 4-5 TeV/beam, without introducing further delays in the current draft schedule (the latest schedule has the machine ready to start circulating beams around the end of October). Gordon Watts has more detail in a recent post, including one of the relevant plots showing the energy vs splice resistance trade-off.

Two items on the multiverse front:

  • Lenny Susskind gives new depth and meaning to the word “chutzpah” with an article in Physics World on Darwin’s Legacy. It seems that Darwin’s legacy for physics is the field of string theory anthropic landscape pseudo-science. Luckily, I don’t think creationists normally read Physics World.
  • Sean Carroll’s book “From Eternity to Here” is now scheduled to appear next January. It has a Facebook page and a mission statement:

    You can turn an egg into an omelet, but not an omelet into an egg. This is good evidence that we live in a multiverse. Any questions?

  • String theorist Oswaldo Zapata has posted the third part of his essay on the history of superstring theory, dealing with the question of the “beauty” of string theory. Basically he argues that it was only in 1999, after it started to become clear that string theory unification wasn’t working out, that a publicity campaign about the “beauty of string theory” got started:

    During the late eighties and early nineties, and motivated by the relative success of the heterotic superstrings, string theorists were submerged in intricate and endless computations trying to recover the standard model using a ‘‘top-bottom’’ approach. At that time no one was talking publicly about a beautiful construct. In fact, the theory was in an ugly impasse and mathematical consistency was the only remote trace of beauty…

    In this section we have seen that, in contrast to what is currently claimed, string theory was not always considered to be a beautiful theory. The public recognition of the beauty of the theory is recent, dating from around 1999, and it was due mainly to the convergence of two factors: a favourable context, “internal” and “external,” and an acute sense of opportunism.

    From the Publisher’s Weekly review of Graham Farmelo’s life of Dirac:

    In 1955, Dirac came up with a primitive version of string theory, which today is the rock star branch of physics.

    The opera Hypermusic Prologue: A Projective Opera in seven Planes, libretto by Lisa Randall, had its first performance last month in Paris. It will be presented again in Barcelona in November.

    FQXI seems to like to have conferences for their members at scenic volcanic locations in the mid-Atlantic. This year it’s the Azores, here’s their schedule, talks to appear here, blogging here (Sabine Hossenfelder) and here.

    Strings 2009 finally got around to putting slides from most of the talks online here. The one talk that seemed to have something new wasn’t about strings, it was Arkani-Hamed’s talk on Holography in Flat Space: Algebraic Geometry and the S-matrix, based on work to appear with Cachazo, Cheung and Kaplan. It’s based on studying the structure of amplitudes in twistor space, and the talk includes many exclamation points, and the claim that “SOME POWERFUL MATHEMATICAL STRUCTURE IS AT WORK!”. More specifically:

    Very natural and beautiful mathematical structure – intersection theory and Schubert Calculus – seems to lie at the heart of tree and loop gluon scattering amps!

    From the slides it does appear that there’s some nice mathematics at work here, I look forward to seeing the paper.

    Posted in Experimental HEP News, Multiverse Mania, Uncategorized | 18 Comments

    This Week’s Hype

    A Leiden University press release headlined Physical Reality of String Theory Demonstrated is being picked up and used to generate news stories in the media.

    It starts off:

    String theory has come under fire in recent years. Promises have been made that have not been lived up to. Leiden theoretical physicists have now for the first time used string theory to describe a physical phenomenon.

    which follows the usual dishonest and misleading template for attempts to deal with string theory’s failure as a unified theory. The idea is to put out a press release announcing that string theory has finally lived up to its promise and shown its critics to be wrong, because of evidence it may work as an approximation method for some strongly coupled condensed matter or nuclear physics model. The fact that this has nothing to do with string theory’s continuing utter failure as a fundamental theory is carefully not mentioned, ensuring that non-expert readers of the press release will be misled.

    A common excuse for this is that it is being done by journalists, with the scientists involved having no responsibility for the misleading material. In a news media story, conceivably this could be the case, but a university press release is something different. University researchers have both the right and the responsibility to ask for the retraction of a university press release that mis-characterizes their work. When they don’t do this, they make themselves responsible for actively misleading the public about this subject.

    Posted in This Week's Hype | 25 Comments

    LHC Status

    If you want to keep up with the latest news on the LHC status, tomorrow at 3pm Geneva time there will be a webcast of a talk by Steve Myers. The abstract reads:

    The status of the LHC will be presented. This will include the repair of sector 34, the ongoing consolidation work in the other sectors, and the progress with the new Quench Protection System. The results of recent resistance measurements of the copper stabilizers will be presented.
    The plans for powering the LHC and the tunnel access restrictions will also be discussed. Finally the planning for the start-up and the programme for future operational consolidation work will be detailed.

    One crucial piece of news will be what was learned from the resistance measurements in the sector that was just warmed up, and whether warming up of the other sectors will be required.

    I’ll miss this since I’ll be on a plane.

    Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments

    Conferences

    In a couple days I’ll be leaving for a week-long trip to Riga and St. Petersburg. I’ll be in St. Petersburg from July 5-8, and will give a talk on BRST and Dirac Cohomology at a conference there. I’m finishing up a draft of a paper on the subject now, will try and write about it here after I get back from the conference.

    The Strings 2009 information blackout continues. Still no talks or blogging on-line, although a new twit has made it out, summarizing the conference:

    more effort being put into contact w experiment•hope for LHC•fundamental issues need more attention•much optimism

    although that could have functioned as a summary of pretty much every Strings XXXX conference held during the past 20 years.

    Even if no information about the Strings 2009 talks ever gets out, many of the same speakers are speaking at uncountably many other strings conferences scheduled before and after the big one, conferences that are likely to have web-sites that make the talks available. Here are some of them:

    Florence

    Warsaw

    Saclay

    Porto

    Lisbon

    Benasque

    Frascati

    Potsdam

    Wroclaw (Robert Helling will be blogging)

    Crete

    Santa Barbara

    For less technical and more audio-visual enlightenment, you might want to check out the following:

    A CBC podcast interview with Lee Smolin.

    A Bloggingheads diavlog with Sean Carroll and Mark Trodden.

    Posted in Uncategorized | 16 Comments

    Strings 2009 Out of Juice?

    I had a suspicion that Strings 2009 wasn’t going to be scientifically very active, since not much has been going on in that field recently, but I still found it surprising how little news from the conference was making its way out to the internet. The conference is nearly half over, no evidence of any activity has appeared on the conference web-site, and until now I couldn’t find anything at all on the internet discussing what is going on there.

    However, something did just turn up. Over at the Bad Astronomy and Universe Today Forum, under the topic heading “Off-Topic Babbling”, there have been two communications from Terry Giblin. In the first, written on Sunday, Terry writes that he’s on the road to Rome for the conference, and since it looks like he’ll be late, he’d like someone from the stage or audience to call him on Skype so he can ask the opening speaker (David Gross) a “strings question on quantum tunneling and singularities.”

    That doesn’t seem to have worked out. In his latest communication, he says that he finally did make it to Rome, where he reports:

    It would appear that I have not missed much over the past two days, yesterday the internet at the conference was only working slowly.

    Today they had a power outage, so the conference was cancelled.

    I hope I have more success tomorrow or the coming week.

    Its amazing to think you can change the outcome of a conference, without being physically present……….

    Update: A twitter from Marco Baumgartl has made it out to the internet, bringing more confirmation of problems:

    I’d loved to give you live updates from the Strings 2009 conference, but they have severe wifi problems there, can’t connect

    Update: An anonymous correspondent attending the conference reports that disorganization is a problem, and that there have been no major announcements. David Gross’s talk listed 8 fundamental problems for string theory and gave the string community a grade of A-F for progress on each problem (this sounds familiar, I vaguely recall him giving such a report card at some other talk a few years ago, I wonder if the grades have changed…)

    The atmosphere was much like in other recent years: some disillusionment in the air, but people continuing to work along similar lines. The talks were described as sketchy and mostly incomprehensible to much of the audience, with many of the younger string theorists rather bitter about the lack of much of an attempt on the part of the speakers to give clear explanations and put their work in any sort of context (the audience of 450 has widely varying backgrounds, this is not a specialist conference).

    Update: Well, the conference is over now, but still no slides of talks, or any blogging from anyone there, other than Jacques Distler’s attempt to find someone to go to dinner with a week ago. Reports I’ve gotten from the conference describe Vafa’s talk as “Good, in fact too good to be true”, and claim that Arkani-Hamed showed up two hours late for his talk, then went over time by 20 minutes.

    Update: Still nothing on the conference web-site about the talks, or on blogs. Physics World does have a report from Edwin Cartlidge, who noted that the scientific talks were appropriately held at the University of St. Thomas Aquinas, named after the great Scholastic philosopher. He also reports on the public talks held yesterday. Witten appears to have decided the best thing to do was to not talk about string theory, but instead talk about particle physics, the LHC, dark matter and supersymmetry. He left string theory to Brian Greene, who somehow convinced Cartlidge that what this is all about is “that 10500 is somewhat bigger than 10120, and that’s a measure of how much we don’t understand dark energy.”

    Greene pointed out that string theory requires an extra 6 (or 7) dimensions of space in addition to the three that we are aware of. Helpfully, these dimensions are so small that we can’t see them, but unhelpfully there are rather a lot of ways of curling these extra dimensions up – some 10500 different ways as it turns out. And we would have to study all 10500 if we want to find out whether or not string theory describes the real world.

    For Greene, all is not lost, however. He pointed out that 10500 is somewhat bigger than 10120, and that’s a measure of how much we don’t understand dark energy. In a nutshell he argued that if we happen to live in one of the few of the 10500 universes where conditions are just right for us to exist then there’s a damn good chance that we could have such an apparently statistically unlikely dark energy. For Greene, this suggests we might be on the right lines with string theory. Others may be less convinced.

    Update: The exponent problem has been fixed.

    Posted in Strings 2XXX | 33 Comments

    Gina Says

    At the height of the string wars a couple years ago, one of the participants was a mysterious anonymous commenter going under the name “Gina”. Earlier this year Gil Kalai wrote to me to reveal that he was the person behind “Gina”, and that he had put together a book based on these blog discussions, to be entitled “‘Gina Says,’ Adventures in the Blogosphere String War”. He has now put the first part of manuscript up on his blog, the posting is here.

    Back in January he sent me a copy of what he had written, I haven’t checked to see what changes might be in the version available now. Instead of writing something about this here now, I think I’ll just include part of my e-mail to him back in January, which gave my reaction to the project then:

    Hi Gil/Gina…

    Thanks for sending me the draft of the book. I read through it quickly, amused to relive again some battles of the string wars. When people ask me if I’ll write another book, often I’ve answered that I was considering just cutting and pasting together a lot of things from my blog, other blogs, and my e-mail, all of which told a rather amazing and often amusing tale. Funny to see that you’ve done something a bit like this yourself. During this period I also remember often telling people that I felt like I was living in a comic novel.

    Actually, I’ve no intention of publishing anything about the “String Wars”, although happy if other people want to. I’m rather glad that they have died down, and I’m trying to devote my time instead to a research project I’m quite excited about (the BRST stuff I’ve started writing about on the blog).

    Some comments about issues you raise, and some added context for some of these stories:

    In my book, I tried to avoid saying much at all personally critical about string theorists and their behavior, the sort of thing that Lee Smolin did more of. I generally agree with what Lee wrote, but, in the past my personal contacts with string theorists were mostly with quite reasonable people that I didn’t think it appropriate to criticize in this way. After my experiences in the “string wars” though, I ended up feeling that Lee actually didn’t go far enough; that, individually and as a community, there are very real behavioral and ethical problems in how all too many string theorists do business. My impression is that the “string wars” brought a lot of this out into the open, and have damaged the perception of string theory among physicists and the wider community, more so than anything Lee wrote. Like Lee, what I was hoping our books would lead to would be a serious discussion of the issues involved. There was some of this, but all too much name-calling and bad behavior.

    Some context about Clifford Johnson: independently of each other, both Lee and I wrote to him when our books were in draft form, asking if he would be willing to take a look at them, and let us know if there was anything we had wrong. He just ignored my e-mail, and I gather Lee got a similar response. He appears to be a rather nice guy, and I found this response kind of odd, it was one reason for my mistaken guess that he was the Cambridge referee. I still find his behavior exceedingly strange: how can you write long blog entries denouncing books you refuse to read? He seems to have an ability to refuse to acknowledge the existence of inconvenient realities that goes beyond anything I’ve seen before.

    In your fantasy of the future, you mention my book being translated into Czech. Funny, a publishing company there did buy the rights a year or so ago, and I think they will be bringing it out. Sometimes reality and fantasy are indistinguishable in this story…

    Update: There’s a posting about this over at Physics World.

    Posted in Uncategorized | 30 Comments

    Templeton Foundation Strategy and Planning

    Most physicists are rather dubious about whether “multiverse” research is deserving of any support since it’s not clear that it is even science. Because of this, such research has been finding financial support in recent years not from conventional sources like the NSF, but from the Templeton Foundation, a very wealthy organization devoted to the goal of bringing together science and religion. Some examples of this funding include the World Science Festival program mentioned in the last posting, and the Foundational Questions Institute, which provides grants, many of them for multiverse research.

    I’d always wondered if there was some kind of organized effort by Templeton to push this kind of research, and and got a partial answer to this question recently when I took a look at some of their web-pages. Last year they organized two days of conferences at the Royal Society in London, associated with their choice of cosmologist and Catholic priest Michael Heller for their 2008 Templeton Prize of a million pounds. The preparatory readings page of the second day’s conference provides a link to a document entitled Towards the Establishment of the Philosophy of Cosmology at Oxford. There’s also a link to “Password Protected Papers” on the topic of Toward a New Philosophy of Cosmology, but these papers aren’t really password protected since the password (“multiverse”) as well as the user name (“universe”) are given right next to the link.

    If you follow this link, you are taken to the web-site for “A Strategy and Planning Workshop of the John Templeton Foundation”, held in May 2007 at the Royal Society. The purpose of this workshop is described as:

    To bring cosmologists and philosophers together to review the ‘state of the field’ of the philosophy of cosmology and to explore the most effective ways of developing and enriching the philosophy of cosmology. How might the John Templeton Foundation contribute to field development?

    and here are some other extracts from that page:

    The John Templeton Foundation would like to help develop this field. We are considering the creation of substantial research support opportunities in the philosophy of cosmology. In addition, our expectation is that there is some need for infrastructure, and the Foundation would be interested in helping to support development of a suitable context for a flourishing field….

    …the afternoon session, a discussion of strategy for field development. The Foundation is serious about providing resources if we can find a strategically-effective plan to make a difference.

    This afternoon session was described in the program as follows:

    Goal: Finally, we explore what is needed to develop the field of philosophy of cosmology in a dramatic way over the next decade. Our initial thought is that the field needs some infrastructure development as well as basic research support. Because this work must bring together such disparate fields, it is not easy working through basic university structures. It may be that beyond core research projects, we need to support the creation of major long-term initiatives or centers, and help establish training for a new kind of scholar as well as faculty positions and perhaps other elements of infrastructure such as book series or a journal to take two common elements of the scholarly enterprise. Also needed, perhaps, are ways of making it more visible to the public in ways that improve on current popular presentations.

    The afternoon talks were by Priyamvada Natarajan, a Yale astrophysicist described as “currently a member of the advisory panel for the Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and has an abiding intellectual interest in understanding issues in spirituality and science”, and 2004 Templeton Prize winner George Ellis who is described as “co-author of On the Moral Nature of the Universe: Theology, Cosmology, and Ethics” and “editor of the Far Future Universe: Eschatology from a Cosmic Perspective.” The respondent was the Reverend Keith Ward, described as “his main work is a four-volume comparative theology from OUP”, and “His most recent book, published in 2006, is Pascal’s Fire – religious understanding and scientific faith.” The evening program was devoted to a celebration of Bernard Carr and the book based on three Templeton-funded conferences that he edited, Universe or Multiverse?

    In a whitepaper prepared for the strategy session, Carr argues not just for the anthropic principle, but for the necessity of a “new science”:

    In one sense the current debate today about the scientific status of M-theory and the multiverse proposal is nothing new. We’ve seen that progress on the outer and inner fronts has always been controversial, so perhaps history is just repeating itself. However, there is another sense in which the current situation is very special. This is because today — for the first time — the boundaries at the largest and smallest scales have connected. They are unified through quantum gravity and so the two science/philosophy frontiers have merged.

    One might argue that this merging represents the completion of the scientific process. This is why the symbol of cosmic uroborus is so powerful: it represents both the evolution of our knowledge of the universe and the triumph of physics in producing a unified view of the world. Have we therefore reached the endpoint of science just as the macroscopic and microscopic frontiers merge? I doubt it. Personally I believe this merely represents a transformation in the perceived nature of science.

    He then explains why Templeton money is needed:

    Whether one redefines science to include exotic new ideas is not just a semantic issue. It also has practical implications because research in topics deemed to be “unscientific” is unlikely to be funded through the usual channels. For example, even in my own field, I have sometimes found that I cannot obtain a grant for a research project because some funding council has changed the definition of what constitutes “astronomy”. There will always be research areas (especially cosmological ones) which straddle the border between science or philosophy and this is why JTF’s initiative to support such areas is so important. It can promote or nurture ideas which have not yet been accepted into the world of legitimate science.

    Carr is a past president of the Society for Psychical Research, and in its proceedings recently published a paper entitled Can Psychical Research Bridge the Gulf Between Matter and Mind?. In the white paper he advocates the idea that Consciousness is somehow part of this new science:

    Another feature of the new paradigm – and here I am definitely venturing beyond the boundaries of current science – is likely to be mind. One feature of the Universe which is noticeably absent in the current paradigm of physics is consciousness….

    …even the mention of the C word was taboo until recently. On the other hand, one might be sceptical of physicists’ claim to be close to a “Theory of Everything”, when such a conspicuous aspect of the world is neglected.

    Certainly physics in its classical form cannot incorporate consciousness….

    But what has this to do with cosmology? At first sight, developments in cosmology and particle physics might appear to have diminished the status of mind. The more we understand the Universe, from the vast expanses of the cosmos to the tiny world of particle physics, the more irrelevant humans (and hence minds) seem to become. Curiously, however, in recent decades cosmology has brought about a reversal in this trend, suggesting that mind may be a fundamental rather than incidental feature of the Universe. I’m referring here primarily to the Anthropic Principle…

    He ends with some comments on theology, beginning with:

    Of course, most scientists are even more uncomfortable straying into the domain of theology than philosophy, so the G word (God) is usually regarded as even more taboo than the C word. However, since science seems to be coming to terms with the A and C words, perhaps the same will happen with the G word. Maybe there is a gradual process of desensitization in which the A, C and G words become successively accepted!

    The whitepaper by Ellis deals with the crucial question of whether untestable speculation is science:

    There is also a reverse flow, whereby the development of the philosophy of cosmology – pushing the philosophy of science to its limits – may well have useful influences in wider realms of philosophy. Indeed it must be so, as cosmology helps us understand the nature of being human by clarifying the overall physical context through which we come to have our existence. So a useful part of the whole enterprise may be to try to develop that link: the different ways in which our understanding of the universe helps shape our views of humanity, and the ways that the philosophy of cosmology may help shape the philosophy of science. This may be particularly useful in terms of those aspects of physics which also face problems of testability for fundamental reasons, and so where some physicists are proposing to lessen the degree of rigour usually demanded in a scientific proof, decrying usual scientific criteria of testability as they do so (string theory comes to mind).

    The whitepaper of Simon Saunders is an earlier version of the proposal for a new Oxford program available on the 2008 conference site. It proposes a new masters level 2 year course in philosophy of cosmology, with Templeton funding 2 3-year postdocs, a 5-year research fellow, a visiting scholars program, buy out time for those teaching in or administering the program, and funding for fellowships for graduate students. He also proposes to spend about 20,000 pounds a year on an outreach program to promote “philosophy of cosmology” in schools.

    I haven’t seen any evidence that this planning and strategy session led to anything. For one thing, there does not seem to yet be a “Philosophy of Cosmology” program at Oxford, although perhaps Templeton will at some point fund such a thing. But, this session does give a good idea of where some people would like to take theoretical physics, and indicates Templeton’s interest in the idea of heavily funding ventures to promote such a “new science”.

    On a somewhat related note, see today’s PZ Myers posting entitled The name “Templeton Foundation” needs to become a mark of failure.

    Posted in Multiverse Mania | 31 Comments

    Manufacturing universes in a fractal multiverse

    I gather that the World Science Festival here in New York a week or so ago was a great success, although I was out of town for most of it. The one part of the program I was dubious about (Infinite Worlds) seems to have come off even more one-sided than planned, since David Gross couldn’t be there.

    There’s a report on this at Ars Technica from someone who was sitting near Cameron Diaz while watching the program. Philosopher of science Nick Bostrom did point out the obvious, that for the multiverse to be science it has to predict something. Someone seems to have convinced the author of the piece that there actually is such a prediction:

    Early in our Universe’s history (before the mulitiverse’s inflation pulled things apart), it was possible that the Universe bumped into a neighboring one. If that’s the case, there should be remnants of that event buried in the cosmic microwave background. Less than a month from now, the ESA’s Planck mission should arrive at the L2 Lagrange point with instruments sensitive enough to pick up this signal.

    So, I guess in a couple years from now, we’ll know if there is a multiverse or not…

    For another report, see here.

    Sean Carroll reports here on some other parts of the festival, including the panel on Time Since Einstein, where he explained to the audience that “the fact that an a splattered egg cannot turn back into a pristine unbroken egg is the best evidence we have that we live in a multiverse.”

    Posted in Multiverse Mania | 10 Comments

    News from CERN, Witten Interview

    The new CERN Bulletin is available, and it contains a link to a recent video interview of Witten, who has been visiting CERN during the past year.

    Some other things in this issue:

  • Bill Gates recently visited the LHC, bringing his son Rory. Gates announced:

    I just bought the rights to the Feynman ‘Messenger Lectures’ that he gave in Cornell [University] in the 1960s. The BBC filmed Feynman giving what I think are the best physics lectures I have ever seen. So we are going to make these lectures free for anyone to watch.

  • There’s news about the LHC restart here and here, including the warming up of sector 4-5 discussed in postings here recently. Here’s what Director General Heuer has to say:

    The bottom line is that we remain on course to restart the LHC safely this year, albeit at reduced energy.

    A tremendous amount of work has been done to fully understand the splices in the LHC’s superconducting cable, one of which was the root cause of the incident last September that brought the LHC to a standstill. We’ve learned a great deal. It’s mostly good news but there’s also plenty of food for thought. The good news is that all the measurements done so far indicate that we will be ready by September or October to run the LHC safely at around 4-5 TeV per beam. If new evidence appears in the meantime to suggest otherwise, we’ll modify the energy for this year’s run accordingly. The food for thought is that the same tests tell us that before we can run safely above 5 TeV, more work is needed, and this will be carried out in a shutdown starting in Autumn 2010.

    Many of you will have heard, or seen on the LHC web pages, that we’re warming up sector 4-5. This sector can be warmed and re-cooled within the time remaining before we inject the first beam of 2009 into the LHC, and doing so will give us increased confidence that we fully understand the splices. We’re warming up this sector because we have developed a new non-invasive technique for investigating the splices. The sector has been measured at a temperature of 80K, indicating a suspect splice or splices. By warming the sector, the results of the test can be checked at room temperature, thereby validating the procedure at 80K. If the 80K measurements are validated, any suspect splices in this sector will be repaired.

    From this, it sounds like the current plan is to not wam up the cold sectors, but reach a decision on what the highest energy they can safely run at in case of a quench, given their understanding of remaining problems with bad splices. This might mean running below the planned 5 TeV/beam.

  • On July 1 CERN will be providing training for its employees on how to deal with the press.
  • On July 2 there will be a talk by Steve Myers on the LHC status
  • Update: While the CERN DG indicates readiness of the LHC for start-up in “September or October”, the most up-to-date schedule (which somehow came into my possession this morning…) shows powering tests in sectors 4-5 and 8-1 going through the end of October, so machine checkout and first beam not until the beginning of November.

    Update: There’s now a press release. According to this, they are now planning to start up at some energy in the range 4-5 TeV, currently 2-3 weeks behind schedule (so start-up second half of October).

    Posted in Experimental HEP News | 4 Comments

    Summer Programming

    As far as academics are concerned, summer has started, which means that there are lots and lots of conferences going on. The past couple weeks we’ve had two here in the Columbia math department, one in algebraic geometry, and another covering various related topics in hyperbolic geometry and knot theory.

    Next week 450 or so physicists will gather for the big annual string theory conference, and a couple weeks ago there were more than 400 participants at the big annual SUSY conference, SUSY 2009. For more on this, see reports from Jester and Sabine. Jester’s take on the conference included:

    Over 400 participants, not counting squatters. 42 plenary speakers, most of whom witnessed the glorious days when supersymmetry was conceived. Seven parallel parallel sessions to cover every aspect of supersymmetry that has not yet been covered thoroughly enough. Royal coffee break menu fully adequate to the royal conference fee. And so on and on since 16 years and into the future.

    Meanwhile, there is no single hint from experiment that supersymmetry is realized in nature… but that should not upset anyone. As my fellow blogger skillfully put it, supersymmetry is the “shining beacon”, the “raison d’etre” and for this reason “the conundrum is how it will be discovered, not if”. That’s why every year we come together to enjoy old familiar faces and old familiar talks. The point is, while waiting for the inevitable, to maintain that kind of spirit that David Lodge praised in his books.

    At Santa Cruz this week, there was a conference in honor of the 60th birthdays of Tom Banks and Willy Fischler, blogging from David Berenstein.

    At Penn there’s a summer school on Geometry of Quantum Fields and Strings, blogging at Rigorous Trivialities.

    On the multiverse front, Thibault Damour has a survey article about constancy of physical constants, where he makes the reasonable argument that checking such constancy is one of our few ways of getting insight into the origin of these parameters of physical theory. Sometimes you see the claim made that string theory predicts time-dependence of constants (since they are moduli parameters), other times the claim is made that string theory does make one prediction, that such constants won’t change (due to energetics of the landscape). Damour summarizes this as

    However, there is no firm prediction for the observable level of EP violation. Actually, the current majority view about the “moduli stabilization” issue in String Theory is to assume that, in each string vacuum, the coupling constants are fixed by an energy-minimizing mechanism which is generically expected to forbid any long-range violation of the EP. This, however, makes EP tests quite important: indeed, they represent crucial tests of a widespread key assumption of string-theory model building. This exemplifies how EP tests are intimately connected with some of the basic aspects of modern attempts at unifying gravity with particle physics.
    Some phenomenological models (inspired by string-theory structures, or attempting to understand the cosmological-constant issue) give examples where the observable EP violations would (without fine-tuning parameters) be just below the currently tested level.

    The “string universality” principle discussed here recently is related to Leibniz’s “Principle of Plenitude”:

    all logically possible “things” (be they objects, beings or, even, worlds) have a tendency to (and therefore must, if one does not want contingency – be it God’s whim – to reign) exist.

    So, experimental measurements are important not because they can tell us whether string theory is right or wrong, but because they can tell us which kind of string theory is right….

    The latest Seminaire Bourbaki was last week, here’s a summary of the talks. Edward Frenkel has posted his survey of Gauge theory and Langlands duality on the arXiv.

    Earlier this week I learned from my colleagues one obscure piece of mathematical culture that I had been unaware of. Physicists have the famous story of how Alpher and Gamow brought in Bethe as co-author to improve the author list, but it turns out that mathematicians have a somewhat different story of this kind. At lunch one eminent algebraic geometer started snickering when someone (using standard terminology) brought up the well-known ring associated to an algebraic variety due to David Cox. At this, it was pointed out that Cox was co-author of a famous paper with Steven Zucker, and the story goes that this came about because Cox had decided once he heard of Zucker that a Cox-Zucker paper just was asking to be written. A supposedly authoritative source on the internet claims:

    Cox and Zucker were admitted as grad students to Princeton in precisely the hope that they would someday collaborate. This kind of forethought is why Princeton is Princeton.

    For a related mention of this, see the Journal of Improbable Research.

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