Not Even Wrong

Steve Hsu has a recent posting Survivor: theoretical physics, which links to data about the theoretical particle physics job market compiled by Erich Poppitz from listings on the Theoretical Particle Physics Rumor Mill web-site.

Back in 2001-2 I also spent some time looking at this data, and estimated that in recent years there had been typically about 15 tenure-track hires each year in particle theory, of which roughly half were going to string theorists. Starting around 2000, the number of hires started to increase, as it has increased throughout academia during a period of reasonably healthy university budgets and an increasing number of retirements (of those hired during the 60s when many universities expanded dramatically). Since 2000 the number of hires has typically been more like 20, anomalously high at 28 in 2007. The anomalously low number of 15 for this past year’s hiring may be a fluctuation, but it also may be an indication of either university budget cutbacks or increasing unpopularity of particle physics in US physics departments. The fraction of string theory hires has gone down dramatically, to more like 25% over the last 5 years.

I don’t have any data at hand about the recent total number of people getting particle physics Ph.D.s, and whether this number has grown with the number of faculty hires. I did find at one point a number of 78 for particle theory Ph.D.s in 1997, but I don’t know if this included degrees in cosmology, which increasingly has become mixed with particle theory. Poppitz also lists numbers of hires by institution. Princeton comes out significantly ahead with 23 people getting jobs over 15 years. I’d guess there are typically about 3-4 people/year getting theory Ph.D.s there. So, traditionally, if you want to maximize your chance at a job, Princeton is the place to go. Not clear how this will work out in the future, given the very small number of string theorists getting hired.

To get some idea of the imbalance between Ph.D.s being produced and tenure-track jobs, in 2007 one institution, Harvard, produced 8 theory Ph.D.s. That’s more than half the total number of tenure-track hires this past year. In the past a large number of these Ph.D.s ended up working in finance, but prospects in that industry are not looking so good either.

I’ve heard reports from Harvard that yesterday and today Heisuke Hironaka has been giving talks in the math department there, claiming to have a proof that singularities of algebraic varieties can be resolved for any dimension in characteristic p. This would be a major advance in the field of algebraic geometry. I don’t know any details of the proof, but Hironaka is, at 77, an extremely well-respected mathematician, not known for making claims unless they are very solid.

Hironaka won the Fields Medal in 1970, largely based on his 1964 proof of the resolution of singularities, in the characteristic zero case. For an introduction to that proof, see this article from the Bulletin of the AMS.

Update: From comments here it seems that the source of my information about Hironaka’s talk was most likely overly optimistic about exactly what Hironaka was claiming. The current situation seems to be that several groups are working on this, with promising ideas of how to get to a proof, but with no definitive proof yet done. There will be a workshop at RIMS in December, with the goal of sorting out the current situation:

The aim of the workshop is to review recent advances in the resolution of singularities of algebraic varieties with special emphasis on the positive characteristic case. After many years of slow progress, this is now a rapidly developing area with several promising new approaches. Our aim is to keep the program flexible, in order to give the maximum opportunity to discuss and explore new developments. We expect a joint effort to understand characteristic p, and that the purpose is not that everybody exposes his/her own results.

Besides the meltdown in the financial markets, perhaps of more concern to physicists is a meltdown at CERN, specifically in the connection between two magnets during powering tests being conducted at 11:17 last Friday the 19th. Here’s the daily report from that day on the LHC beam commissioning site. By the next day it had become clear that it would be necessary to warm back up the sector to deal with the problem, leading to this press release. It was immediately clear that doing this would take at least a couple months, and make it impossible to have physics collisions at the LHC this fall. Today, a new press release confirms this:

The time necessary for the investigation and repairs precludes a restart before CERN’s obligatory winter maintenance period, bringing the date for restart of the accelerator complex to early spring 2009. LHC beams will then follow.

The press releases refer only to a “large helium leak” and the failure of an electrical connection, making the problem sound rather minor. I tried contacting a physicist at CERN to find out if they had any more information, but was told that he or she was under instructions not to discuss anything about what had happened beyond what was in the press releases, and that CERN was specifically concerned that information might show up in blogs. This policy seems to be being unevenly enforced, since today the Everything Blog carries the following report:

I was in a meeting at CERN when someone ran to the front of the room with a computer, then after letting the speaker finish and setting up the computer to project the press release/e-mail (agonizing moments: it was a Mac), they let us know. I was worried that the sector with the helium explosion had collapsed like an old mine— there were rumors going around that this is a weak point in the tunnel. (Of course there would be such rumors.)

I have learned a few more graphic details about the event in the last few days. First off, it was two tonnes of helium, not one. But I’ve also learned that this was a more explosive and dramatic event than I had imagined— helium is fortunately an inert gas, but the temperature gradient caused it to explode violently, probably causing physical damage to the nearby components. And now that section of the LHC is an ice tunnel, maybe with stalagtites hanging down and a Yeti moaning in the distance.

Up until now, the policy at the LHC has been to be quite open about the commissioning process, with detailed technical information provided on web-sites that were freely accessible. For instance, there’s detailed news about how beam commissioning was going up until the accident available here. Going forward, it will be interesting to see how CERN deals with the problem of letting not-so-good news out to the public. Just about one year ago, I wrote about some earlier LHC problems, and it has always worried me a bit that having a huge LHC publicity onslaught before the machine was actually ready and working might not have been a good idea. Going through the often painful process of solving the problems likely to show up in a project of this scale may provide a different education of the public than the one people were hoping for.

Update: Yesterday there was a LHCC meeting at CERN, broken up into an open and closed session. The slides from the talks are available here, and give a wealth of information about the state of the machine and detectors, and what they were able to accomplish during the short period that they had a beam. There’s no info about the accident in the slides, but video of the talks is here, and at the end of the talk by Lyn Evans (9-18min into the video) he gave a report on the accident and answered questions. The problem has been traced to an electrical fault in the magnet busbar, and bizarrely occurred during the test of the last circuit of the last sector that was being commissioned for 5 TeV operation.

Evans says that the machine will be down until “early spring”. Before the accident, the plan had been to bring the LHC back up in early June, after various work needed on the injection system. The current plan is to try and get this work done instead this fall, so that they can start up more quickly in the spring.

This posting will quickly veer far off the usual topics of this blog into political issues that I normally avoid like the plague. For once, the issues involved seem important enough to interrupt your regularly-scheduled programming. I hope to not ever repeat this in future postings.

Over the last 20 years I’ve seen an increasingly large number of colleagues, students and friends leave academia to go to work in the financial industry. Many were hired as “quants”, working on mathematically sophisticated models for valuing various financial instruments. During the same period, I’ve watched New York City change in dramatic ways, driven by the vast wealth flowing into the financial industry here. I’ve seen recent estimates that half the personal income on the island of Manhattan has been going to the 20 percent or so of the population that work in finance-related jobs. The effects of this wealth include something like a five-fold increase in apartment prices, with a modest two-bedroom apartment now selling for a million dollars. In many neighborhoods, a majority of the people on the sidewalks have a net worth above a million, and annual incomes of many hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not surprisingly, the streets are clean, buildings shiny and beautifully renovated, restaurants excellent and street crime non-existent. Banks have opened huge branches on every street corner.

For many years I couldn’t figure out where all this money was coming from. When I’d ask people about this, I’d get a list of some of the things generating investment banking fees, but none of these seemed to add up to something that could provide the profits necessary to pay million-dollar bonuses to tens of thousands of people. Over the last year or so, the so-callled “credit crisis” has started to make clear what has been going on, and I (like many others, I suspect) have spent more time than is healthy following the story as it has unfolded.

It’s a very complicated subject, but the most important part of it is relatively easy to understand, and there’s not much disagreement about this. Starting about 10 years ago, housing prices in the United States began to increase dramatically, fed by low interest rates, and easy credit. A classic financial bubble developed as people borrowed ever-increasing amounts of money to invest in housing, sure that prices would keep going up. You can make a lot of money very fast this way. In 2006, housing prices nationwide had increased by a factor of 2.5 over the past ten years. This was the peak of the bubble and since then prices are off by 25%. They will still have to come down another 25% or so to get back to pre-bubble levels (inflation-adjusted).

The fall in prices has made a lot of housing worth less than the loans secured by it. More and more people have mortgages that cannot be refinanced and that they sometimes cannot afford, leading to foreclosure, or to a strong incentive to just leave and give the housing back to the bank. It turns out that one of the things the quants had been doing was developing pricing models for complex ways to market the risk associated with these loans. One of the sources of the huge income coming into Manhattan was the fees that this generated. The models being used turned out to be highly flawed, dramatically underestimating the fall-out from the all-too likely end to the bubble.

Since more than a couple ex-string theorists were involved in this, there’s a temptation to make an analogy with the complicated failed models that they were trained in working on during their years in academia, but that would be highly unfair. Most of the flawed models were developed by people whose training had nothing to do with string theory, with the flaws coming from certain built-in assumptions. These assumptions were chosen because they allowed a lot of money to be made in the short-term, making many Manhattanites quite wealthy.

Now that the bubble has burst and it has become clear that the financial instruments created are worth far less than anyone had expected, the fundamental problem is that, absent some optimism about a turn-around in prices, it is likely that many US financial institutions are insolvent. Their assets may be worth less than their liabilities (depending on exactly how low housing prices go). As a result, their stock prices have collapsed, and no one is much interested in investing more money in them. The situation has gotten so bad in recent weeks that the normal operation of the credit markets is in danger of coming to a halt, as institutions stop trading with others out of fear that they will soon be bankrupt.

Today the Bush administration put out draft legislation to deal with the problem (see here). The solution proposed is strikingly simple: the Secretary of the Treasury will be given $700 billion to hand over to financial institutions in return for mortgage-related financial assets, as he sees fit. On news of this possibility the stocks of these institutions rose dramatically late Thursday and yesterday. Assuming that this is enough to make most of the insolvent institutions solvent again, this will allow them to return to business as usual and get the credit markets working smoothly again. If it’s not enough, presumably Congress will just be asked to increase the amount.

Of course the devil is in the details, especially those concerning how Secretary Paulson will distribute the $700 billion. The plan seems to be to bring this legislation to a vote within days, unlinked to anything that would change the way the finance industry operates, or change the incentives that led to the current disaster.

Personally I think that, as economic policy, this is a really bad idea, for a host of reasons I won’t go on about. But I’m no expert on these issues, so that opinion isn’t worth very much and it’s besides the point of this no-business-as-usual posting, which is the following:

The response to this that I have seen from Obama and the Democrats is extremely disturbing. Obama seems to be inclined to go along with this, as long as some aid to people who can’t afford their mortgages is tacked on. This also appears to be the attitude of the Democratic congressional leadership, which includes senators Schumer and Clinton, acting in their roles as representatives of the largest industry in New York City. On the other hand, McCain appears to be choosing to take the populist position of ranting against Wall Street. It is now a few short weeks until the election, and I believe this will be the defining issue that decides it. If Obama and the Democrats support this bailout of the financial industry and McCain resists it in populist terms, I think we’re in for four more years of irresponsible leadership. McCain has already done a good job of painting his opponent as an Eastern “elitist”, and I can’t believe he’s too stupid to take advantage of the opportunity the Democrats will hand him if they vote for this legislation.

So, call and write your congressional representatives and the Obama campaign now.

For good sources to follow this story, there are some excellent blogs, including Calculated Risk and Naked Capitalism. This is also the kind of story on which some of the mainstream media shines, so read the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Financial Times.

Update: I hope Obama is reading not the Sunday New York Times which seems to indicate that this bailout of New York’s main industry is essential, but Krugman’s blog instead.

Update: Maybe Krugman is reading Not Even Wrong….

My reading now of what is going on is that Obama and the Democrats are starting to get a clue, based on seeing a firestorm of oppostion to the bail-out. The danger that they would go along with it seems to be receding. They can read polls too….

There are two new particle theory blogs that I’ve noticed recently: Shores of the Dirac Sea, where David Berenstein and Moshe Rozali are blogging and the Physics Anti-Crackpot Blog, by an anonymous author at CERN. I don’t know who this last blogger is, but he joins his (or her) colleague Jester at Resonaances (who is anonymous, but not hard to figure out) in skepticism about supersymmetry. Maybe things at CERN-TH are such that anonymity is a good idea if you hold such opinions….

Also at CERN, news of progress on the LHC commissioning is here. It seems that after some initial quick successes, there’s no beam at the moment as they fix various problems with the machine.

Frank Wilczek doesn’t have a blog (although his wife Betsy Devine does), but he does now have a web-site, as well as another web-site for his new book The Lightness of Being. Here’s a summary of the book, and a sample chapter, which gives you an idea what he’s trying to do with the book.

The IAS has started to put some lectures on-line, including the latest summer school on string theory and the memorial for Selberg.

The Harvard physics department now is running a video archive. It includes video of their recent Colloquia, Loeb lectures, and Sydney Coleman’s quantum field theory course.

For the latest on INSPIRE, SCOAP³, and potential changes in how the on-line physics literature works, see this interview with DESY’s Annette Holkamp (via Travis Brooks at Symmetry Breaking).

Update: There seems to have been some sort of problem in Sector 34 triggered by powering tests for operation at 5 TeV. This caused a large helium leak in the tunnel, an investigation is under way. More here.

Update: The news from the LHC is pretty bad. A failure during a powering test will require warming up the entire sector to fix the problem, then cooling it back down. This means that it will be another two months before beam commissioning efforts can start again, likely pushing physics collisions off until next spring, after the winter shutdown. There’s a press release here.

Some wag at the Wall Street Journal put the headline Don’t Buy Into the Supercollider Hype on today’s Op-Ed piece by Michio Kaku about the LHC, which describes its significance as follows:

The LHC might shed light on the “theory of everything,” a single theory which can explain all fundamental forces of the universe, a theory which eluded Albert Einstein for the last 30 years of his life. This is the Holy Grail of physics. Einstein hoped it would allow us to “read the Mind of God.”

Today, the leading (and only) candidate for this fabled theory of everything is called “string theory,” which is what I do for for a living. Our visible universe, according to this theory, represents only the lowest vibration of tiny vibrating strings. The LHC might find something called “sparticles,” or super particles, which represent higher vibrations of the string. If so, the LHC might even verify the existence of higher dimensions of space-time, which would truly be an earth-shaking discovery.

If I were an experimentalist or accelerator scientist working on the LHC, I might have a problem with the fact that the biggest media outlets are having theorists, often string theorists, be the ones to tell the public about the LHC (yesterday was Brian Greene’s turn, in the New York Times). Many such stories imply that the LHC will somehow tell us something about string theory, while even one of the blogosphere’s most enthusiastic string theory supporters puts the probability of this at about half of one-percent.

For some hype-free LHC predictions based on serious science that I fully endorse, see Resonaances, where the probability of seeing anything relevant to string theory isn’t even listed, and supersymmetry is given a one-tenth of one percent chance, on the grounds:

1% is a typical fine-tuning of susy models, and the additional factor of .1 is because it makes me puke.

which seems about right. The probability of the LHC producing black holes is given as something exponentially small, somewhat less than the probability of producing dragons.

This week the Perimeter Institute is hosting an unusual conference on Science in the 21st Century. One of the organizers is Sabine Hossenfelder, who has a posting discussing the conference here, and may have some more about it at her blog later.

Many of the talks are now available on-line here. I’ve only had time to watch a couple of them, but one that I found worth paying attention to was Lee Smolin’s. He covered some of the same issues discussed in his book, including the question of what science is, the ethics of how it is pursued, and the difficulties of encouraging new ideas. The discussion with the audience was also quite fascinating, including an exchange about differences between the American and British academic systems, with a British participant describing his shock at seeing how much the “American academic system is a training in sycophancy”.

The topic of blogs came up mainly in a section where Smolin discussed the ethical importance of scientists putting their name and reputation behind what they have to say about their science. He characterized anonymous criticism as one of the main reasons for the low signal/noise ratio and nasty environment of the comment sections of many blogs, describing this as far worse than anything he had encountered in his professional career, and something that is giving science a bad name. The theoretical physics group at Harvard in the 1970s was given as an example of about the worst it could get in academia. At the end of the discussion session, Paul Ginsparg took him to task about this, saying that he had been there too and it wasn’t that bad. I was there at the same time as both of them, and remember it as a rather unfriendly environment with a quite high arrogance level. But, with faculty like Coleman, Weinberg, Glashow, and postdocs like Witten, the talent and accomplishments of the people involved seemed to justify quite a bit of arrogance.

Ginsparg went on to agree with Smolin about anonymity on blogs, comparing trying to have a serious discussion in such an environment to trying to do so in a Fellini movie, being attacked by dwarves wearing masks.

Update: One talk I highly recommend is that of Eric Weinstein, with the title Sheldon Glashow Owes me a Dollar (and 17 years of interest): What happens in the marketplace of ideas when the endless frontier meets the efficient frontier? Eric’s talk includes a wide variety of thought-provoking and entertaining attempts to bring ideas from economics and finance into thinking about how science gets done and whether it can be done more efficiently.

There’s a media storm about the LHC building up as CERN makes last minute preparations to circulate a first beam in the machine. Cosmic Variance has live-blogging about this by a group of theorists, and Tommaso Dorigo will be in the CMS control room. He just might blog about this. For up-to-the-minute news, try the LHC beam commissioning site. Here’s the plan for tomorrow, and the latest news: they’re ready to get started at 6am tomorrow Geneva time. I’ll be asleep.

Starting tomorrow, daily news reports about progress should appear here. They’ve got a very detailed plan for steps to go through, here’s where they are now, here’s where they hope to be Thursday and Friday.

Roger Highfield has gone out and asked several theorists for LHC predictions, with the following results.

About supersymmetry:

About the Higgs:

(anyone know who took the other side of that bet?)

John March-Russell goes all-out:

…our quest for a source of almost unlimited climate-friendly energy might be answered by the creation of exotic unstable, but long-lived, charged particles… It might also turn out that the number of space and time dimensions is ambiguous…

The first attempt to circulate a beam in the LHC is still set for next Wednesday, and the media is already full of LHC stories, with a lot more to come next week. Events are being organized all over the world to celebrate the day, including a 1:30 am pajama party at Fermilab (see here). Today’s Wall Street Journal carries a page one story about preparations at CERN that focus on improvisational comedy training for physicists to help them communicate.

For more serious news from the LHC, you can try following progress at CERN’s startup site for the public, or at the technical LHC commissioning site. Latest available minutes from the Installation and Commissioning Committee are here, including a timeline and objectives for the next few days and for September 10. The “also going on” column for September 10 lists just “chaos”.

Science magazine has some excellent LHC-related stories in this week’s issue. In this one, various people explain what the LHC is looking for and why it will take a while to get results. Gordy Kane is having none of that though, predicting discovery of supersymmetry next month:

“We predict a signature that they could see with five events,” says Michigan’s Kane. “They could see it in the first week of running in October.”

Another article, Researchers, Place Your Bets!, features bloggers Tommaso Dorigo and Jacques Distler. Tommaso has bet that the LHC will see no deviations from the standard model, although from what I remember, he did this just because if this happens it will be so depressing that at least some cash will cheer him up. Gordy Kane and Stuart Raby claim supersymmetry is such a sure thing that they can’t find anyone who will bet against it. Distler’s comment on this is:

I wonder how hard they tried.

The same article gives links to sites where you can bet on the Higgs boson discovery date.

Nature magazine is running an LHC-related editorial Cool Philosophies in this week’s issue. It is inspired by an interesting recent preprint by philosopher of science Alexei Grinbaum: On the eve of the LHC: conceptual questions in high-energy physics. Grinbaum gives an extensive discussion of the current state of particle theory and its societal context. He ends with a philosophical section on fine-tuning and currently popular anthropic arguments, arguing that these often invoke an invalid use of counterfactuals.