At the big AAAS conference held in San Francisco the past few days there was a session on “A New Frontier in Particle Physics”, about the LHC and the promise of physics at the TeV scale. Burton Richter’s talk there on Charting the Course for Elementary Particle Physics is now available at the arXiv.
Richter uses the “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times” line from Dickens to characterize the current state of particle physics. He expects the LHC to begin operations at full energy in summer 2008, with physics results beginning to appear in 2009. As for the ILC, at the earliest it would be completed in 2019, and he sees no chance of it being built if the LHC doesn’t find something new by 2012. He also sees a luminosity upgrade of the LHC being considered next year, one which would take place after the machine had been running for 5 years or so.
He also discusses the MiniBooNE experiment at Fermilab, a neutrino experiment that is late in reporting results. They are doing a “blind analysis”, not “opening the box” and looking at the final answer from their data until the last moment. Richter is dubious about this, saying: “I never did like blind analyses”, claiming that they prevent experimenters from seeing problems in the data, and he worries that the MiniBooNE result (which is trying to check results from the LSND experiment that disagree with the standard picture of neutrino physics) will be inconclusive.
We should know soon, I see that on March 1 there is a colloquium scheduled at Princeton by one of the MiniBooNE experimenters on “New Neutrino Oscillation Results from the MiniBooNE Experiment”. For a recent talk about MiniBooNE given at Columbia, see here. This talk did also definitely mention the possibility of an inconclusive result, requiring a more sensitive experiment that might take place at the SNS (Spallation Neutron Source) in Oak Ridge.
Also at the AAAS meeting was yet another session on the wonders of the multiverse called “Multiverses, Dark Energy and Physics as an Environmental Science,” featuring the usual Stanford team of Linde and Susskind, with Lawrence Krauss brought in to provide a little bit of reality. Stanford has put out a press release promoting Andrei Linde’s talk at the meeting. Linde goes on about what he calls 101000 vacua, and how they are “an unexpected gift from string theory… an eternal feast where all possible dishes are served.” He seems to be positively gleeful about the “Alice’s Restaurant” aspect of this pseudo-science, where “you can get anything you want…”
Update: For the YouTube generation, Stanford has a video here.
Update: Jon Bagger’s talk at the AAAS is available here.
Update: Various reports on the AAAS multiverse session including here, here (Wired blog, couldn’t get in the room, too full), and here (New Scientist blog, describes the session as “you might have mistaken the proceedings inside for a stand-up comedy act”).
Linde goes on about what he calls 10^1000 vacua, and how they are “an unexpected gift from string theory… an eternal feast where all possible dishes are served.”
A string miracle, hallelujah! Regarding the eternal feast, Christians should be impressed with this blessing, for it way exceeds the miracle of Jesus feeding the four thousand (Mark 8:1-9),
In those days the multitude being very great … they did eat, and were filled … And they that had eaten were about four thousand: and he sent them away.’
Christians, as a web search shows, use the phrase “eternal feast” to refer, not to an earthly repast, but to Heaven. Few of them are likely to find the Heaven of string theory more appealing.
Interesting reporting about MiniBoone. You may already know this but the co-spokesfolk for this experiment, Janet Conrad and Mike Shaevitz, are both at Columbia.
Christians should be impressed with this blessing, for it way exceeds the miracle of Jesus feeding the four thousand.
Christians use the phrase “eternal feast” to refer, not to an earthly repast, but to Heaven
Then the joy must be because the number of the beast, 10^666, has been finally beaten. This makes all the difference between a Universe expanding into the eternal Heavens or one collapsing back into Hell fire. :^)
Regards, Hans
A string miracle, hallelujah! Well, you don’t actually need to turn water into wine, you just have to convince everybody that it is wine.
“Well, you don’t actually need to turn water into wine, you just have to convince everybody that it is wine.”
Does this have to do with the question – what is reality?
Or “What is Kool-Aid”?
It sounds like Andrei Linde has irrevocably jumped the shark.
You would have enjoyed hearing Larry Krauss’ intro to the AAAS session: “Why scientists have gone mad.” He said that supernova data “naively implied” that the universe was accelerating. Introducing Lenny Susskind, Krauss asked rhetorically if strings were a sinking ship. The room was very crowded!
“Well, you don’t actually need to turn water into wine, you just have to convince everybody that it is wine.”
Does this have to do with the question – what is reality?
Well. Everything has to do with the questions what is reality, no? But in this case I was more thinking about ‘marketplace’ tactics. Like, you don’t need to actually produce the best pizza, you just need to convince everybody it IS the best pizza (alternatively, you can make sure all competitors go broke, then you have the one-and-only best-and-worst pizza).
PS: I don’t want to get spam-filtered, so I won’t include a link, but check Lubos for a 2007 edition of the landscape, I had to laugh quite a lot.
PPS: And make sure to turn down the volume before you do.
By 2012, the upgrade of the LHC (SLHC) will probably be almost completed. So we will have many years to delve in Standard Model boredom, undisturbed by new R&D for the suppressed ILC…
T.
So we will have many years to delve in Standard Model boredom,
If the SM is boring to you, why not switching to some other area of physics? Astrophysics and nanophysics for example are currently very active, with lots of experimental/observational results to feed theory.
I just read on a google group:
Lubos Motl (a Czech national) pressured to resign from Harvard’s physics department
because of his vicious shotgun public polemical attacks on Woit, Smolin,
Penrose and even Susskind!
Is it true?
Thomas,
That’s from Jack Sarfatti, and I think he’s about as reliable a source of information as Lubos, and in this case the origin of this claim is some comment from Lubos about resigning from Harvard. No idea whether he is leaving Harvard, in the last few years he has repeatedly talked about it.
As far as I’ve ever been able to tell, the theorists at Harvard are fine with Lubos’s attacks on people who criticize string theory (or his much more mild criticism of Susskind). On the other hand, his spending all his time on a blog devoted mainly to global warming and other right-wing causes, while not doing much in the way of physics research, may make their decision about whether to keep reappointing him much more difficult.
Sarfatti also has been distributing a description of the AAAS talk, which evidently he and Sean Carroll both attended. He claims that Susskind called his talk “Rats Leaving the Sinking Ship”, in this case the sinking ship of the “reductionist” view of string theory, that it is based on simple mathematical principles and makes unique predictions.
Newton delayed the publication of his gravity law for many years in order to get a quantitative confirmation. Other scientists who proposed religion-sensible theories similarly waited for scientific evidence.
Now, we have no evidence for the String Anthropic Eternal Fest, no tests, no ideas about how to devise a test, a few years of attempts resulted into interesting papers but no physics, all this could end up with a failure. But we have some guys who publicly promote this new religion.
This is more dangerous than the old-fashioned string hype, that only irritated people within the physics community. Suppose that LHC will find nothing new: this would support anthropic views, but are we going to tell “we are the new pope, give us 10Giga$ for new experiments”?
“But in this case I was more thinking about ‘marketplace’ tactics. Like, you don’t need to actually produce the best pizza, you just need to convince everybody it IS the best pizza”
Wouldnt that make it the BEST pizza anyhow? 😉
There seems to be some degree of objectivness around these sentence which might not apply to the REAL world….
G
I want to echo Vogelsang’s song. There is a lot of interesting physics to do. So why do so many people stay in string theory?
I think one reason is that string theory is a field in which it is relatively easy to come up with a tractable problem. Some of
these problems have more intrinsic value than others, but in any case, writing papers, getting grants, etc. is much easier if you
know exactly what to do. Some of the work done is very
interesting and most of it isn’t.
It is also interesting that string theory appears to be a bigger
field than it is. You can do almost anything formal and call
yourself a string theorist. This isn’t a joke. I haven’t published anything string-theoretic in a while, but when I attended a
lattice-gauge theory workshop at the KITP a few years ago, a postdoc there said, “but you aren’t a lattice-gauge theorist.
You’re a string theorist”. My experience suggests that in some eyes , almost any high-energy theorist not doing phenomenolgy or numerics is a string theorist.
Dr. Woit,
Your book is good, but too technical for a mass audience and not technical enough for specialists. Maybe if you really want to do damage to string theory, you should write a more academic book. I did get a sense you were trying to do that with this book, but ran into too many referees.
Phil,
The book as published is pretty much as originally written. Referee problems kept Cambridge University Press from publishing it, but commercial publishers agreed to publish it in the form I wrote it. It’s not for everyone, and was intended to be more the sort of thing an academic press would publish than something really commercial. Given that, I did try to make it as readable as possible, and have been pleasantly surprised at how many different kinds of people have told me they enjoyed it and got something out of it. I think there is a market out there for things that are more intellectually challenging than a lot of the standard popular science fare.
As for more technical discussions, the blog is aimed at a narrower audience and I’ve probably beaten to death here the question of what the technical problems of string theory are. Many of them are not anything abstruse: you don’t need to have a lot of technical knowledge to see what the problems are with the anthropic landscape, for instance. I certainly hope in the future to write some much more technical things, but they won’t be about string theory…
Stanford’s video http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2007/february21/videos/180_flash.html only has a few seconds of Andrei Linde talking, about three-quarters of the way through, about the failure of string to accommodate observed cosmology. The eternal feast is edited out.
th+ed,
I believe Newton delayed publication because he was just disgusted with Hooke and the environment he represented, and generally a sour and suspicious person, and basically quit and went home with his football. He already knew he was right.
-drl
as far as I know, Newton wanted to check that the gravitational field that explains the orbit of the Moon is quantitatively the same that explains the fall of apples. So, Newton had to do a difficult integral over the volume of the Earth, and (without knowing the Gauss theorem) this computation needed years.
Anyhow “Hypotheses non fingo” is a better slogan than “Hooke is a jerk”.
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the+ed – re this last comment..
This illustrates in stark terms the real problem with physics. A lot of (supposedly) smart people have taken over, with no knowledge of either history or, really, the real world.
Ah! now i get it. You rotated the real world by pi/2, and made it imaginary.
-drl