More Prizes

Posted on March 26, 2010 by woit

As far as I can tell, it’s still unclear if Perelman will accept the $1 million Millennium prize awarded to him last week. This week brings news of two more million dollar prizes:

  • John Tate is this year’s winner of the Abel Prize, worth 6 million Norwegian Kroner, which is a bit more than $1 million. Tate is now 85, recently retired from UT Austin (he spent much of his career at Harvard). He is a major figure in the development of algebraic geometry and number theory during the second half of the last century. His Princeton Ph. D. thesis, which pioneered the use of Fourier analysis on the adele group in the study of number theory, could easily be the most widely read and used doctoral thesis in mathematics.
  • The 2010 Templeton Prize, worth 1 million British pounds, or about $1.5 million, was awarded to biologist Francisco Ayala. Remarkably, the Templeton Foundation describes the prize-winner as someone who has “vigorously opposed the entanglement of science and religion”. I had thought that the main goal of the Templeton Foundation WAS “the entanglement of science and religion”, so this is a bit surprising. Ayala has done admirable work over the years refuting creationism and intelligent design.

    There was a bit of a kerfuffle over the fact that the announcement was made at the National Academy of Science (Ayala is a member), with Sean Carroll quoted as:

    Templeton has a fairly overt agenda that some scientists are comfortable with, but very many are not. In my opinion, for a prestigious scientific organization to work with them sends the wrong message.

    Science magazine has an article here about the award and about what some scientists think of Templeton’s activities, including the following:

    Even those who are put off by Templeton’s mission agree that the foundation does not attempt to influence the outcomes of the research and discussions it sponsors. “I am not enthusiastic about the message they seem to be selling to the public—that science and religion are not incompatible; I think there is real tension between the two,” says Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist at the University of Texas, Austin, who has been an outspoken critic of religion. “But for an organization with a message, they are pretty good at not being intrusive in the activities they fund. I don’t wish them well, but I don’t think they are particularly insidious or dangerous.”

    • Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

    High Energy Beams at the LHC

    Posted on March 19, 2010 by woit

    At 5:23 am in Geneva this morning, for the first time the two LHC beams were ramped up to high energy, the 3.5 TeV/beam that they plan to run at for the next two years. These are the highest energy (per particle) beams ever created by human beings, significantly surpassing the value at which the Tevatron operates (.98 TeV/beam) as well as the record achieved last fall (1.18 TeV/beam) during the early stages of beam commissioning.

    From now on, work will continue on preparing the machine to operate at higher intensity (for now they are using low-intensity pilot beams). For the next week or two, one of the challenges will be to carefully avoid any interesting collisions between particles in the two beams, since a major media event is being organized around the first collisions, and the event is tentatively scheduled for March 30.

    Update: CERN press release is here.

    Update: CERN has confirmed in a press release that first collisions will be attempted on March 30.

    Posted in Experimental HEP News | 10 Comments

    Millennium Prize to Perelman

    Posted on March 18, 2010 by woit

    The Clay Mathematics Institute announced today the award of the Millennium Prize to Perelman for the proof of the Poincare Conjecture. The award was made based on the rules set up when the prize was created: a Special Advisory Board (Donaldson, Gabai, Gromov, Tao and Wiles) made a recommendation to the CMI Scientific Advisory Board (Carlson, Donaldson, Margulis, Melrose, Siu and Wiles) that was accepted.

    On June 8 and 9 Clay will host a conference to celebrate at the Institut Henri Poincare.

    The initial press release says nothing about the question many have been wondering about for years: who will get the million dollars? Does all of it go to Perelman? Did he accept it?

    Update: According to alexbellos on Twitter, Carlson says that Perelman has been informed of the award of the prize, but there has been no response yet from him about whether he will accept it.

    Posted in Uncategorized | 38 Comments

    HEPAP Meeting

    Posted on March 12, 2010 by woit

    HEPAP is now meeting in Washington, presentations available here. Like the rest of science, HEP has been doing very well in the federal budget, including a temporary increase due to the stimulus program. Excluding stimulus money, the president’s FY2011 request has total DOE HEP funding up 2.3% (theory is up 3.8%) over FY2010. This is about 10% over the FY2007 level. At the NSF, the proposal is for a 2.8% increase in physics research spending in FY2011, up 20% since FY 2007.

    The NSF will be funding several “Physics Frontier Centers”, with five-year renewable awards of 1-5.5 million $. Pre-proposals are due in August.

    The DOE has been emphasizing Early Career Programs, with 14 “Early Career Awards” to tenure-track physicists made in HEP in FY1010. Six of these went to HEP theorists, pretty much all in phenomenology, with funding for string theorists not popular these days it seems.

    With the particle theory job market a complete disaster, particle theorists somehow managed to convince the DOE that the answer to the problem is to produce more particle theory Ph.Ds. There is a new program of HEP Theory Fellowships funding (with two-year fellowships) an additional five students this year, five more each year in the future. So I guess, steady-state, the idea is to add 10 more theory Ph.D.s/year, into a job market where the total number of permanent jobs/year is about 10.

    Update: Science magazine has a story here about budgetary problems of the DUSEL project.

    Posted in Experimental HEP News | 15 Comments

    LHC Update

    Posted on March 12, 2010 by woit

    There’s now a tentative date set for first high energy (3.5 TeV/beam) collisions at the LHC: it’s March 30th.

    Posted in Experimental HEP News | 3 Comments

    Strings 2010

    Posted on March 11, 2010 by woit

    Strings 2010, this year’s version of the big annual string theory conference, will be held next week in College Station, Texas. There’s a university press release about this here. Normally the conference is held in the summer at places like Rome, Madrid, Paris, Kyoto, etc. and attracts about 4-500 string theorists. This year’s time and location may keep attendance down (although College Station is a lot cheaper place to stay than Rome…).

    Unlike most years, there have been no promotional public lectures arranged. It also appears that there is no summary talk scheduled. In recent years, these have often been given by David Gross (who won’t be talking this year) or by Robbert Dijkgraaf (who is busy with another project, video here, for which he might want to recruit help from fellow string theorist Lubos Motl). Many of the talk titles are now available. In the past, sometimes the hot topic was mathematical and mathematicians were in attendance, but this has no longer been true for a while now. This year the hot topic is condensed matter physics, with several talks scheduled on attempts to apply AdS/CFT techniques to superconductors.

    It turns out I’m going to be relatively nearby, but a week later, giving a talk for the public the evening of March 24th at Collin College in Plano.

    Starting up this week and continuing through May, the KITP is hosting a string phenomenology program entitled Strings at the LHC and in the Early Universe. The program blurb somehow neglects to mention that string theory doesn’t actually predict anything at all about LHC physics or cosmology. To get a good idea of the topics that researchers in this field are discussing, online talks are here, starting with two rather general discussion sessions, one led by Blumenhagen, the second by Ovrut. As far as connecting to real physics goes, the state of the art seems to be much like it was a quarter century ago, with people struggling to find ways to come up with string theory-motivated constructions that are not in obvious disagreement with experiment. To achieve this requires going to ever more complicated models, which often contain various particles not in the Standard Model. In terms of making LHC predictions, one has no idea if this is a good or bad thing.

    Update: The Strings 2010 talks will be web-cast. There’s now a participant list. With 192 participants, this will be the smallest Strings XXXX conference in many years.

    Posted in Strings 2XXX | 5 Comments

    Short Items

    Posted on March 9, 2010 by woit
  • Bill Thurston teams up with Issey Miyake for their fall ready-to-wear collection based on the Geometrization Conjecture (via Quomodocumque). Youtube video here.
  • Why String Theorists Should Switch Fields to Quantum Computing.
  • This month’s AMS Notices has an interview with last year’s Abel Prize winner, Mikhail Gromov. This year’s Abel prize will be announced March 24, see here for the committee making the choice. Also to be announced soon is the winner of another million dollar prize, the Templeton Prize.
  • Yet more string theory in popular culture.
  • From UT Austin, various interesting new lectures in their GRASP series. These include a nice expository talk by David Ben-Zvi on the Fundamental Lemma. Ngo is lecturing about this weekly here at Columbia. In the fall he will move to Chicago and take up a permanent position there.
  • This year’s Talbot workshop will be on one of my favorite topics, Twisted K-theory and Loop Groups. At MIT there’s a preparatory seminar here, and a page for the workshop here.
  • This has been mentioned here before, but one can’t stop marveling at the Math Overflow phenomenon.
  • There’s an interesting interview with Alan Sokal here.

    • Update: Some helpfully just pointed me to this review of a new novel by Ian McEwan in which

    characters mention M-theory, Nambu Lie 3-algebra and coincident M2-branes

    Looks like something I’ll have to read when it comes out here in a couple weeks.

    Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments

    Top Cites 2009

    Posted on March 8, 2010 by woit

    Travis Brooks of SLAC’s SPIRES database has a blog posting today announcing the availability of various lists of the high energy physics papers most heavily cited during 2009. A full matrix of links to this data is here, data broken out by arXiv subfield is here.

    It’s hard to over-emphasize how much the particle theory parts of these lists are dominated by classic papers on AdS/CFT, in particular Maldacena’s original 1997 paper. It now has over 6600 citations and during the next year or so should pass Weinberg’s 1967 paper as the most heavily cited particle physics paper of all time. One remarkable thing about this paper is that in recent years the number of citations of it has increased to new highs, reaching 731/year in 2008. Even at the height of theoretical activity surrounding the Standard Model back during the late 1970s, none of the classic papers of that subject (such as Weinberg’s) reached even half the citation rate of the Maldacena paper. Similarly, during the explosion of interest in string theory after 1984, none of the papers from the first superstring revolution reached half the Maldacena rate.

    Among the top 25 entries in the 2009 overall top-cite list, the leading theory papers are 97-98 AdS/CFT classics at positions 3, 8 and 9, as well as Randall-Sundrum extra dimension papers from 1999 at 14 and 20. Among the top 50 entries, there are only two hep-th papers that are not from the last millennium: at number 33 one of the papers on superconformal Chern-Simons/supergravity duality, and Horava’s Lorentz-breaking gravity proposal at number 38 (there’s a very recent article about this at FQXI).

    Looking just at the articles cited in hep-th during 2009, gauge-gravity duality is again completely dominant. The top 3 are AdS(5)/CFT(4) classics , the rest of the top 9 are about the lower dimensional AdS(4)/CFT(3) case (except for an AdS/CFT review article). To find something not about gauge-gravity duality, one has to go down to number 10, the KKLT paper that set off the landscape craze.

    Taking a look at recent hep-th lists of postings, there seems to be no let-up in the AdS/CFT dominance. The only recent paper on another topic that seems likely to make the top ten of the 2010 listings is Erik Verlinde’s January paper on entropic gravity, which two months later already has 40 citations.

    Posted in Uncategorized | 16 Comments

    First Hint That the Multiverse Really Exists

    Posted on March 3, 2010 by woit

    Multiverse mania rolls along, with New Scientist this week running a cover story entitled Touching the Multiverse. They advertise the story by claiming that “we reveal the first hint that the multiverse really exists”.

    It turns out that this is a promotional effort for the work of Raphael Bousso, with the first hint that multiverse really exists a paper of his from more than 3 years ago that purports to “predict” the observed value of the cosmological constant. This in some way improves on Weinberg’s 1987 anthropic argument, which to this day remains about the only piece of evidence backing up multiverse mania. The New Scientist article also reports on his more recent attempts to better justify the 3 year-old calculation with this decade’s buzz-word (“entropic principle”) as well as that of the last decade (“holographic”).

    Posted in Multiverse Mania | 30 Comments

    LHC Update

    Posted on February 27, 2010 by woit

    Beam commissioning has started for 2010, with beam back in the LHC starting early Sunday morning. The plan is for roughly a month until colliding beams at 3.5 TeV/beam.

    For the latest news, see here and here.

    Update: Please, everyone, stop e-mailing me and posting comments here with the “news” (e.g. here or here) that the LHC will shutdown for a year or more in the future to fix bad splices. This is not news, it was announced by CERN back in January (see here).

    Posted in Experimental HEP News | 5 Comments