Steinhardt: The Anthropic Landscape Has Run Its Course

Posted on February 3, 2008 by woit

Over at John Horgan’s blog, he quotes an e-mail from Princeton cosmologist Paul Steinhardt, who corrects Horgan’s account of a recent conversation between them, writing

I said that I thought that the idea of a string landscape and the notion of anthropic selection had run its course. I think it is too early to give up on string theory.

While Steinhardt sees anthropic selection of our universe out of a multiverse as an idea that has run its course and is on its way out, it’s still quite popular in certain quarters. The Templeton Foundation, through the FQXI organization, is a major source of funding for anthropic multiverse research. FQXI’s web-site has a new story up entitled Philosophy of the Multiverse, which asks “On what side of the borderline between science and philosophy are multiverses?” The writer evidently couldn’t locate anyone to take the “it’s philosophy, not science” side of the argument, quoting Sean Carroll, Anthony Aguirre, Alexander Vilenkin and Aurelien Barrau as supporters of anthropics as science. Barrau suggests that we may need to change the definition of science to accomodate the multiverse.

Whatever Steinhardt says, at least the Mormons are getting on the multiverse bandwagon, with their journal Dialogue recently publishing a long article entitled Eternal Progression in a Multiverse: An Explorative Mormon Cosmology. The article begins:

This article is an examination of the Mormon doctrine of eternal progression within the context of big-bang cosmology, a description of a finite universe that appears to contradict that doctrine. I argue that a multiverse cosmology, a theory that posits a multiplicity of universes, resolves many of the problems posed by big-bang cosmology.

and goes on to explain how the multiverse agrees well with the doctriine of “eternal progression” in Mormon theology:

In a Mormon multiverse cosmology, God does indeed manifest his infinite creative prowess in the respect that God (any god along the infinite chain of gods) creates children, some of whom progress to become gods, who in turn create their own universes and children, some of whom progress to become gods, and so on, forever. Each universe in the ensemble of universes becomes an extension and continuation of the creativity of every “ancestral god” in an eternal family of deities. The creativity and glory of each god increases exponentially with the production of new universes. In this cosmology, the multiverse is a hallmark and witness of the infinite work and glory of God and the dwelling place for an infinite number of eternal progressing beings.

While solving the problem of justifying eternal progression, the multiverse idea leads to all sorts of new possible research directions:

In a Mormon multiverse cosmology, many questions remain open. Are there communication and movement of the gods and other premortal and postmortal beings between universes? When a universe experiences a big crunch or big freeze, does the god of that universe generate a new universe or “relocate” to another universe fit for carrying out the “great plan of happiness” for a new household of spirit children? Did God, our Father in Heaven, achieve godhood in this universe or a prior one? If God was exalted in a prior universe, how many universes has he governed? Jesus Christ is the redeemer for this universe, but is he the redeemer for others? Are some universes “stillborn” in the sense that they do not have the required values of the physical constants for a universe capable of sustaining life? Because the multiverse is infinite, are there replicas of us in other universes as postulated by the replication paradox? Cosmologists speculate whether the physical laws are the same across the ensemble of universes, but what about the spiritual laws? Are the spiritual laws “multiversal” or just “universal”? As multiverse cosmologies develop scientifically, these questions and others will stimulate much discussion.

The author ends the piece with a quote from Andrei Linde: “Universes can have babies — it’s nice.”

Posted in Uncategorized | 24 Comments

US HEP News

Posted on February 1, 2008 by woit

Today and yesterday at Fermilab there is an HEPAP meeting designed to gather information necessary to prioritize decisions on how to spend the US HEP budget over the next few years. Many of the talks there are on-line and give a good idea of what future possibilities look like. The main issues being discussed are:

  • Whether to go ahead with project X at Fermilab, a proposal for a high-intensity proton source.
  • The state of the ILC project, given that it was zeroed out in this year’s US and UK budgets. Barry Barish emphasizes the continuing goal of being ready to make a decision about whether to build such a thing soon after LHC results arrive, presumably starting in 2010. The state of CLIC and other multi-TeV lepton collider possibilities is reviewed by Tor Raubenheimer of SLAC, who puts a likely date for a multi-TeV electron collider at 2030-40, a muon collider after 2050. These things are a long ways away…
  • Whether to run the Tevatron in FY 2010, with presentations about how the Tevatron is currently performing, and from CDF and D0 advocating for a run past FY2009. Both experiments make the case that they are getting close to being able to either see evidence of the Higgs or rule out its existence over most of the expected mass range. More about this from Tommaso Dorigo of CDF here. Since the Tevatron is about the most successful and exciting thing going on in US HEP, I personally don’t see the case for planning on shutting it down until solid results are in from the LHC about the Higgs, which should be sometime in FY2010 at the earliest. Who knows, maybe the LHC will see something that the Tevatron is a good tool to study further. Seems more likely than that it will see black holes…

    • The involuntary furloughs of Fermilab employees begin today. No news regarding the supposed efforts by the Illinois Congressional delegation to lobby for a supplemental appropriation to keep Fermilab from having to layoff around 200 people. At least one of the relevant people is undoubtedly too busy with other things to pay attention to this. The Congress and the White House are negotiating an emergency bill to deal with the recession and job losses that have started recently. Since government spending is bad and tax cuts are good, their plan seems to be to continue to throw people out of their jobs with budget cuts in HEP and elsewhere, while handing out cash to as many voters as possible.

    For a presentation by DOE Undersecretary Orbach about the DOE budget problem, see here, and analysis from Richard Jones of the AIP here. The FY 2009 budget request from the White House will come out on Monday, and Orbach promises that

    The President’s request for FY 09 will be wonderful, again, for the physical sciences. While I can’t go into details here, I can say that it will continue the funding request consistent with the American Competitiveness Initiative and the America COMPETES Act. The problem for all of us is that, faced with essentially flat funding for the physical sciences in FY 08, the President’s Request for FY 09 will appear as a very large percentage increase for the three ACI agencies. The danger is that basic research in the physical sciences will again be ‘donors’ to other programs.

    meaning I guess that Congress will be tempted to strip these out in order to fund other things.

    Gordon Watts notices that in Bush’s State of the Union speech he explicitly advocated increased funding for basic physical science research, something which is extremely unusual in such a speech:

    Last year Congress passed legislation supporting the American Competitiveness Initiative, but never followed through with the funding. This funding is essential to keeping our scientific edge. So I ask Congress to double federal support for critical basic research in the physical sciences and ensure America remains the most dynamic nation on earth.

    The physics community seems to have done a great job of convincing the administration to support basic physics research in general and HEP in particular, which normally would be a very good thing. But the same was true last year, and it seems to just have had the effect of painting a big fat bullseye on HEP funding for someone in Congress looking for a place to cut. At least this year people are aware of what might be coming, and maybe something can be done to head off a repeat of this year’s disaster.

    The general budget politics don’t look favorable at all though, with the Bush Administration evidently proposing to heavily cut Medicare and Medicaid spending. Congress has very different priorities, and it seems all too likely that they will fund restoration of the health-care cuts by cutting things like the DOE basic research budget. This fall will be different though, with a new Congress and president elected at the beginning of November, but not taking office until January. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the government run on a continuing resolution at FY2008 levels until after a new president takes office.

    Update: The proposed FY2009 budget is out, DOE here, NSF here. The DOE budget contains a huge increase for HEP, from $688 million in FY2008 to $805 million in FY2009. The NSF budget doesn’t break out the HEP component, but the total budget for math and physics is supposed to go from $1167 million in FY2008 to $1403 million in FY2009. These are huge and very healthy proposed increases, but unfortunately it is not at all clear that they will actually make it into the final budget.

    Update: There’s a story today in the New York Times about this. Also a message from the Fermilab director, saying he has no choice but to go ahead with the plan to start laying off employees of the lab. In practical terms, the proposed budget increases appear to be meaningless, with the likely situation no increase at all in FY2009 of any kind until a budget gets passed, which most likely will not happen until already deep into the fiscal years. He writes:

    …every Washington expert tells me to prepare for a continuing resolution that might last into the new administration. Such a continuing resolution would extend the present difficult budgets well into FY09. At the same time, relief in FY08 in the form of a supplemental appropriation is not guaranteed and is at best several months away.

    Posted in Experimental HEP News | 5 Comments

    Today’s Hype

    Posted on January 31, 2008 by woit

    The rate of appearance of press releases hyping string theory has now passed the the one-per-week mark. Today’s example is from the press office of the University of Wisconsin, and again is based on the appearance of a paper in PRL. The preprint of the paper appeared 8 months ago on the arXiv. Since that time, it has been cited exactly once by later papers, in another paper by some of the same authors.

    Posted in This Week's Hype | 5 Comments

    Last Week’s Hype

    Posted on January 30, 2008 by woit

    I was concerned that my “this week’s hype” headlines might be less than accurate, counting only 3 separate over-hyped string theory stories during the past month rather than four. Turns out that I missed one (although a commenter here didn’t), involving yet another university press release based on a PRL-published paper about cosmic strings. To be fair to the authors, the press release and paper don’t contain that much hype, nothing about how they are “testing string theory”. What they do is fit the CMB data using an additional parameter they call f10, which has to do with the fractional contribution of cosmic strings to the temperature power spectrum at multipole l=10. They claim to get a slightly better fit to the data with a non-zero version of this parameter and power-law tilt ns=1, versus the usual fit with gives a ns less than one. When they also take into account non-CMB data, the effect goes away.

    This isn’t really convincing of anything, so it’s unclear why it deserves a press release. According to the New Scientist story on this, which is pretty reasonable and hype-free, the chief scientist for WMAP, Charles Bennett thinks it’s a statistical fluke:

    Calling it a detection is odd… I’d be very surprised if cosmologists were excited about this at this stage.

    For other press stories about this, featuring misleading headlines, see String Theory Gets A Boost at physorg.com, and String Theory slightly preferred… or at least, not disfavored! at Canada Free Press, where the author does note:

    To listen to people speak about string theory is a lesson in ambiguity. No one is willing to commit to a solid opinion, on either side of the coin, and they dance upon the fence as if they were auditioning for a Garfield strip.

    Posted in This Week's Hype | 3 Comments

    This Week’s Hype

    Posted on January 28, 2008 by woit

    This week’s press release trumpeting a bogus “test of string theory” comes from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which is headlined Scientists propose test of string theory based on neutral hydrogen absorption, and informs us that

    Ancient light absorbed by neutral hydrogen atoms could be used to test certain predictions of string theory, say cosmologists at the University of Illinois. Making the measurements, however, would require a gigantic array of radio telescopes to be built on Earth, in space or on the moon.

    String theory – a theory whose fundamental building blocks are tiny one-dimensional filaments called strings – is the leading contender for a “theory of everything.” Such a theory would unify all four fundamental forces of nature (the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity). But finding ways to test string theory has been difficult.

    Now, cosmologists at the U. of I. say absorption features in the 21-centimeter spectrum of neutral hydrogen atoms could be used for such a test.

    One peculiar aspect of this press release is that it seems that the relevant paper is not yet publicly available. Supposedly it has been submitted to PRL and accepted, but it has not yet appeared in PRL, and I don’t see a preprint on the arXiv (the authors do have a PRL paper with an arXiv preprint from last year on a different topic, one that also came with a press release, but this one didn’t mention string theory).

    As far as I can tell from the press release the idea behind this “test of string theory” is the same as lots of other similar ones that invoke cosmic strings. Among the huge variety of string theory backgrounds and the many possible ways to try and use such backgrounds to model the big bang, some will (just like some non-string theory GUT models) produce macroscopic “cosmic strings”. Astronomers have looked hard for evidence of such things and found none, but one can always imagine that, miraculously, such things exist, with characteristics exactly such that they wouldn’t have shown up so far, but would in some new, improved astronomical observations. In this case, I guess to come up with some new possible observation not already ruled out, the authors of the paper invoke a possible radio telescope with an area of a thousand km2.

    There seem to be at least a couple reasons for the recent flood of bogus “we’ve found a test of string theory” press releases. One is that PRL evidently encourages authors to issue press releases whenever they have a paper appearing in PRL. Another reason is that string theorists are on the defensive, and some of them have decided that finding some way to claim that string theory really is testable, no matter how dubious, is the way to fight back. Earlier this month, one such claim hyped in New Scientist carried the headline “slammed for their failure to explain how our particular universe came to exist, string theorists are fighting back.” In an interview with string theorist Thibault Damour in today’s edition of the Swiss paper le Temps, he promotes three possible tests of string theory. One is the possibility (which he describes as “very speculative”) that one might observe extra dimensions at the LHC, another is cosmic strings, and finally there are his claims that string theory leads to violations of the equivalence principle. Lubos Motl strongly disagrees. Lubos also has a posting about this latest hype, where he comments:

    Such possibilities highlight that creative people may often solve questions that look too difficult at the beginning. They also emphasize how incredibly idiotic are the aggressive crackpots’ proclamations that modern theoretical physics in general and string theory in particular is untestable.

    Not clear who it is who believes that “modern theoretical physics” is untestable. While at Lubos’s blog, you might want to see what you can make of his posting on his new book The Bogdanov Equation: the secret of the universe?

    Update: This story is appearing lots of places, including the UPI newswire, and at Wired, where the writer seems to realize that the bogosity level here may be problematic, including the unusual disclaimer:

    Disclosure: I have no idea whether this makes sense.

    Update: A correspondent points me to another recent “test of string theory”, one where for some reason the authors don’t seem to have issued a press release. The article is Toward a test of string theory using Rydberg atoms, and it begins by referencing my book and then claiming that

    … measurable effects are predicted by String Theory on normal quantum scales, which the current criticisms have apparently overlooked.

    What is discussed in the paper is actually not string theory, but just the idea of adding spatially non-commuting terms to the Heisenberg commutation relations. Certainly such terms should have experimentally observable effects. I suppose you can claim that such terms, of any size you want, come from a “string theory background”, but, as with all these “tests of string theory”, what is going on here just reflects the fact that you can pretty much get anything you want out of string theory, which is why it’s not testable…

    Posted in This Week's Hype | 65 Comments

    2007: Year of the Unparticle

    Posted on January 25, 2008 by woit

    One can get some idea of what progress there might have been in particle theory during 2007 by querying the SPIRES database for 2007 papers that already have lots of citations. Doing

    find topcite 50+ and date 2007

    turns up 20 papers of which 6 are experimental papers. Remarkably, the 14 other papers are all about one topic: unparticles. These all refer to Howard Georgi’s initial Unparticle Physics paper from March 2007, in which he describes a possible effective field theory that would be scale invariant and correspond to unusual phenomena potentially observable by collider experiments, phenomena he describes in terms of “unparticles”. In less than a year Georgi’s paper has accumulated 118 citations, with the blogger at Resonaances making fun of the phenomenon of “unpapers” with abstracts such as:

    We consider unparticles in whatever uncontext. You are encouraged to forget the paper as soon as soon as you add it to your citation list.

    but also making the very relevant comment that this does seem to be getting attention because it is a legitimately new idea:

    I must give the credit to Howard for drawing our attention to a whole wide class of collider signatures. Besides, I appreciate Howard’s writing style. He is probably the last man on Earth who truly enjoys particle physics.

    As far as I can tell, unparticles don’t solve any of the problems of the Standard Model, but they are theoretically possible phenomena of a different kind that experimentalists can look for, and having as many as possible of such phenomena is very worthwhile. The more different things people are looking for, the more likely they’ll find something unexpected that otherwise might not have been noticed.

    This week New Scientist has a long and quite good cover story about unparticles, and recent attempts to use them to explain dark matter, which ends with:

    Georgi reserves judgement on whether his unparticles really could be the key to solving the dark matter problem until more work is done, but he’s pleased that people are investigating the possibility. “All I knew was that I had found something cool and I wanted other people to take a look and see what kinds of weird things they might be capable of doing – what mysteries they might solve,” he says. “I’m happy because that’s exactly what people are now doing.”

    The story has also made it into the Telegraph.

    Besides the unparticle phenomenon, there appear to be very few 2007 theory papers that anyone is paying much attention to. I’ve tried to search around and come up with a list of 2007 papers that have so far gotten 25 citations or more, and a list follows. I’m probably missing some [Note added: additions welcome, and will be added to the list]. The main themes shared by most of these papers are AdS/CFT and attempts to construct metastable vacua as part of a study of the landscape [Note added: this characterization is of the hep-th papers, adding in lots of ones I missed from hep-ph shows that the hep-ph ones cover a much wider variety of topics] .

  • Metastable vacua and D-branes at the conifold (Argurio, Bertolini, Franco, Kachru) 54 citations.
  • Gluon scattering amplitudes at strong coupling, (Alday, Maldacena) 47 citations.
  • The Bulk RS KK-gluon at the LHC, (Lillie, Randall, Wang) 38 citations.
  • Supersymmetry breaking, R-symmetry breaking and metastable vacua, (Intrilligator, Seiberg, Shih) 35 citations.
  • Electroweak constraints on warped models with custodial symmetry, (Carena et al.) 33 citations.
  • The Supersymmetric Parameter Space in Light of B-physics Observables and Electroweak Precision Data, (Ellis et al) 31 citations.
  • Simple Scheme for Gauge Mediation, (Murayama, Nomura) 31 citations.
  • Non-perturbative and Flux superpotentials for Type I strings on the Z(3) orbifold, (Bianchi, Kiritsis) 31citations.
  • Phase Structure of a Brane/Anti-Brane System at Large N, (Heckman, Seo, Vafa) 30 citations.
  • Thermodynamics of the brane, (Mateos, Myers, Thomson) 30 citations.
  • On the Singularities of the Magnon S-matrix, (Dorey, Hofman, Maldacena) 29 citations.
  • On the Strong Coupling Scaling Dimension of High Spin Operators, (Alday et al.) 29 citations.
  • Charged Lepton Flavour Violation and (g-2)_mu in the Littlest Higgs Model with T-Parity, (Blanke et al.) 29 citations).
  • Split states, entropy enigmas, holes and halos, (Denef, Moore) 28 citations.
  • Computation of D-brane instanton induced superpotential couplings, (Cvetic, Richter, Weigand) 28 citations.
  • Towards an Explicit Model of D-brane Inflation (Bauman et al.) 27 citations.
  • MadGraph/MadEvent v4: The New Web Generation, (Alwall et al.) 26 citations.
  • Physics of String Flux Compactifications, (Denef, Douglas, Kachru) 25 citations.
  • A Measure of de Sitter entropy and eternal inflation, (Arkani-Hamed et al) 25 citations.
  • Explaining the Electroweak Scale and Stabilizing Moduli in M Theory, (Acharya et al.) 25 citations.

    • SPIRES has yet to compile a 2007 “topcites” list, but it looks like the pattern should be very much the same as the last few years:

  • increasing dominance of research into AdS/CFT (597 citations of Maldacena’s paper in 2007, versus 551 in 2006)
  • particle theory basically died at the end of the 20th century with the only post 1999 paper getting more than 150 citations the KKLT one reflecting the rise of landscape research.
    • Posted in Uncategorized | 31 Comments

    Science, and a Bit of Religion

    Posted on January 22, 2008 by woit

    Some things I’ve run across in the last few days:

    This month’s Scientific American is devoted to The Future of Physics, a special report made up of three excellent articles on the LHC machine, the standard model and its discontents, and plans for the ILC. The articles all avoid hyping string theory or other science fiction and instead stick to real, serious material about HEP. Congratulations to the people at SciAm, everyone should go out now and buy a copy of this month’s magazine to encourage them. Chad Orzel and other non-HEP physicists are peeved that the “Future of Physics” business is a misnomer, since it should have been titled the “Future of HEP Physics”. They’re right. Still, the articles are good, so they shouldn’t hold the headline business too much against the magazine.

    The LHC still has no up-to-date schedule available, but looking at the latest news about the commissioning and comparing to old schedules, it seems to me that if all goes well from now on, the machine should be cooled down and ready to be checked out in late summer, with beam commissioning during the fall, and, maybe, a short physics run late in the year.

    Witten and Kontsevich were awarded the Crafoord prize, for “for their important contributions to mathematics inspired by modern theoretical physics”. This is certainly well-deserved for both of them. One doesn’t know where to start in listing Witten’s contributions of this kind, and Kontsevich’s ideas about “homological mirror symmetry” have had dramatic impact on mathematics, leading to a whole new field of study. There’s an article about this at Science where Witten claims to be “totally startled” to be recognized for his achievements in mathematics. Not sure why a Fields medalist would get startled about this… Witten and Kontsevich get $125,000 each.

    The first Eisenbud prize for a paper written during the last 6 years that brings together mathematics and physics was awarded to Ooguri, Strominger and Vafa for their 2004 paper Black Hole Attractors and the Topological String. They share $5000.

    Last week there was a conference at the Fields Institute in Toronto on Mathematical Physics and Geometric Analysis, featuring series of talks by Victor Guillemin and Shlomo Sternberg, with lecture notes available online. Sternberg’s lectures give a careful discussion of some of the differences in conventions between physicists and mathematicians, the Higgs mechanism and Weinberg angle, various facts about spinors, and the models he worked out with Ne’eman that use superconnections to unify Higgs and fermions. In these models he gets a prediction of the Higgs mass, as twice the W-mass, about 160 Gev. Coincidentally, Tommaso Dorigo reports on the Higgs search at the Tevatron, which is getting close to being able to exclude the existence of a Higgs in a small energy range: around 160 GeV.

    From Dave Bacon, an odd story about a recent arXiv withdrawal. I have no idea what this is really about.

    The Templeton Foundation continues to spend a lot of money on a wide variety of projects, many having something to do with physics. At FQXI, the request for proposals to be funded in 2008 is now closed. Their community web-site includes several interesting articles on topics in theoretical physics. In “breaking news”, they report proudly that several of their members were in the recent NYT article on Boltzmann Brains.

    Also funded by Templeton is the CTNS STARS (Science and Transcendence Advanced Research Series) grant program, which recently announced $100,000 grants to five groups, one of which includes my Columbia colleagues Brian Greene and philosopher David Albert.

    Yet another Templeton-funded endeavor is a new science and religion library at Cambridge University, where, at a cost of $2 million or so, the International Society for Science and Religion will choose 250 books for the library, coming out to about $8000 each. I haven’t yet heard from them, but will be happy to provide a copy of my book at a modest fraction of that price.

    Posted in Uncategorized | 16 Comments

    Updates

    Posted on January 16, 2008 by woit
  • On the HEP budget problem front, Adrian Cho has an interview with Ray Orbach of the DOE. Orbach is not very encouraging on the prospects for a supplemental FY 2008 appropriation:

    … my assumption is that the last thing that Congress or the president wants is a decorated supplemental. Because, you come in for the Office of Science, and there will be somebody else coming in, and before you know it, the thing will be enormous. … My guess is that it would be very hard to single out a particular program for a supplemental.

    He does promise a very healthy FY 2009 proposed increase:

    Now, I can’t tell you, obviously, the details of the president’s budget for ’09, but I can tell you that it will be a wonderful budget request. And because ’08 has been difficult for us, the gap between ’08 and ’09 will be large.

    He notes that the DOE and the president are convinced of the importance of supporting HEP research, that the problem is with the Congress:

    I think now the high-energy physics community understands how Congress feels and has a job on its hands to explain why it should be supported at the level of the president’s request.

    He doesn’t shed any light on the continuing mystery of who exactly in Congress made the decision to target HEP for cuts or what their thinking was, leaving it still unclear who it is that the HEP community is supposed to be making its case to. It would be nice to know this before next Christmas, since if this person or person doesn’t change their minds before then, most of the US experimental HEP community may want to make permanent plans to either emigrate or go into a different line of work.

    I’ve heard nothing about the effects of the FY 2008 budget on particle theory or string theory funding. Perhaps the plan of whoever is responsible for this is that the US should shift out of supporting experimental HEP research, and concentrate on string theory and anthropic landscape research, where it continues to hold a leadership position.

  • Nature has an article entitled Experimental cosmology: cosmos in a bottle about condensed matter analogs of black holes and physics related to cosmology. One topic covered is the recent bogus claim to “test string theory” using interfaces in liquid helium to model branes. Paul Steinhardt notes one of many problems with this idea, that “string branes are flat and attract one another, whereas the helium-3 ‘branes’ are curved and have no attractive force.” Joe Polchinski on the other hand is more enthusiastic, since any prediction could have a big impact. “You never know what you might find” he says.
  • The string theory hype machine remains in overdrive, putting out nonsense press releases at an unparalleled rate. This week’s string theory hype is from Japan, where KEK has put out a press release claiming Interior Structure of a Black Hole Computed Using Superstrings, which tell us that:

    It is expected that superstring theory will develop further and play an important role in solving interesting problems such as the evaporation of black holes, the state of the early universe and the creation of everything.

    The actual calculation behind the hype is a numerical simulation of a supersymmetric quantum mechanics system, which is described here.

    • Posted in Experimental HEP News, This Week's Hype | 21 Comments

    Have Cosmologists Lost Their Brains?

    Posted on January 15, 2008 by woit

    There’s a peculiar long article in the New York Times science section today by Dennis Overbye, entitled Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs? It’s about the debate raging among a small number of cosmologists about “Boltzmann Brains”, and the article does a pretty good job of explaining what the debate is about.

    This seems to be a debate that is mostly taken seriously by people who live near the coast in California, with the article quoting Susskind and Linde (Palo Alto), Lisa Dyson and Raphael Bousso (Berkeley), Hartle and Srednicki (Santa Barbara), Albrecht and Sorbo (Davis), and Sean Carroll (Pasadena). One of the few from further inland who is quoted is Don Page (Edmonton), described as a “prominent voice in the Boltzmann debate” who argues with Hartle over the issue of whether to count humans differently than insects since we have consciousness. Page’s recent arguments that God may like having lots of universes around are not quoted. On the other hand , Andrei Linde has a lot to say about what all this has to do with reincarnation, with the article ending with this quote from him:

    “If you are reincarnated, why do you care about where you are reincarnated?” he asked. “It sounds crazy because here we are touching issues we are not supposed to be touching in ordinary science. Can we be reincarnated?”

    “People are not prepared for this discussion,” Dr. Linde said.

    Overbye does note that:

    If you are inclined to skepticism this debate might seem like further evidence that cosmologists, who gave us dark matter, dark energy and speak with apparent aplomb about gazillions of parallel universes, have finally lost their minds.

    and, while he doesn’t quote any such skeptics, I suspect the title of the piece and the way he quotes some of the sillier things respectable cosmologists are saying indicates some sympathy for skepticism about this.

    If you do take all this seriously, you might want to discuss it over at Cosmic Variance where Sean has a posting on the topic. In the NYT piece he is quoted as saying:

    When you break an egg and scramble it you are doing cosmology

    to which his ex-colleague Jeff Harvey from Chicago responds in the comment section:

    When I break an egg and scramble it I’m making breakfast. I guess that is the difference between cosmologists and particle physicists.

    Update: The New York Times is listing this article as the most popular article on their site (in terms of how many people are e-mailing it to others).

    Posted in Multiverse Mania | 24 Comments

    Update on Plagiarism Scandal

    Posted on January 10, 2008 by woit

    Last summer I wrote here about a plagiarism scandal involving more than 60 arXiv preprints, more than thirty of which were refereed and published in at least 18 different physics journals, some of them quite prestigious ones (see also the page at Eureka Journal Watch). At the time I wondered what action the journals involved in this scandal would take in response to it. Nearly six months later the answer to this question is now in: essentially none at all. As far as I can tell, almost uniformly the journals involved don’t seem to have a problem at all with being used to publish plagiarized material.

    Unlike the journals, the arXiv has taken action. It has withdrawn the papers, replaced their abstracts with lists of where they plagiarized from, and put up a web-page explaining all of this. After the scandal became public, one journal, JHEP, did withdraw the one rather egregious example of plagiarism it had published. This was only done after JHEP originally refused to do anything about this when first contacted last March, arguing that since the plagiarized articles were cited in the paper it was all right, and besides, they would only consider doing something if the plagiarized authors filed a formal complaint. Copies of the correspondence about this (and much else) are at this web-site.

    The nature of the plagiarism varied greatly among the papers withdrawn by the arXiv. Sometimes all that was involved was self-plagiarism (large parts of one paper were identical with others submitted by some of the same authors), but mostly what was being plagiarized was the contents of papers by others. Mustafa Salti, a graduate student at METU, had his name on 40 of the withdrawn papers, many of which have been published in well-known journals. I checked a few of the online published journal articles corresponding to the withdrawn papers and, besides the JHEP paper, I didn’t find any others where the online journal article gave any indication that the paper was known to be plagiarized.

    A more complicated case is that of Ihsan Yilmaz, where the arXiv lists three of his eight arXiv preprints as withdrawn due to plagiarism and one as withdrawn due to “excessive overlap” with two other papers of which he was co-author. Very recently one of his Physical Review D papers, a paper that was not one of the ones on the arXiv, was retracted with the notation:

    The author withdraws this article from publication because it copies text, totaling more than half of the article, from the articles listed below. The author apologizes to the authors of these papers and to the publishers whose copyright was violated.

    After the scandal broke, Yilmaz had a letter published in Nature where he justified the sort of plagiarism found in his articles, claiming “using beautiful sentences from other studies on the same subject in our introductions is not unusual.” Evidently the editors of the journal General Relativity and Gravitation agreed with Yilmaz. They decided not to do anything about the papers they had published that were withdrawn from the arXiv, writing an editorial in which they defended the papers, while noting that “we do not regard such word for word copying of introductory and descriptive material by others as acceptable.”

    I heard about the GRG editorial via an e-mail from a group of the faculty at METU, who write that:

    The note is clearly quite unacceptable and insufficient in the fight against plagiarism. We cannot help but ask whether the Editors seriously believe that those who cannot compose their own sentences are in fact capable of producing genuine research worthy of publishing in General Relativity and Gravitation.

    and note the retraction of the Physical Review D article, which they regard as a much more appropriate response

    Update: Someone helpfully sent me pdfs of the two GRG articles, marked up to identify the plagiarized passages. Looking at these, I find it hard to understand why any journal would not withdraw such papers if they made the mistake of publishing them.

  • Topological defect solutions in the spherically symmetric space-time admitting conformal motion, I.Yilmaz, M. Aygun and S. Aygun. This was gr-qc/0607104, published version Gen.Rel.Grav. 37 (2005) 2093-2104. The arXiv describes it as “having excessive overlap with the following papers also written by the authors or their collaborators: hep-th/0505013 and 0705.2930.”
  • Magnetized Quark and Strange Quark Matter in the Spherical Symmetric Space-Time Admitting Conformal Motion, C. Aktas and I. Yilmaz. This was arXiv:0705.2930, published version Gen.Rel.Grav. 39 (2007) 849-862. The arXiv describes it as “it plagiarizes astro-ph/0611537, astro-ph/0506256, astro-ph/0203033, astro-ph/0311128, gr-qc/0505144, astro-ph/0611460, and astro-ph/0610840.”

    • Update: The journal Astrophysics and Space Science is retracting four of the plagiarized papers, by putting up errata on-line which appeared today and are dated January 11, 2008, saying:

    After investigation and at the request of the President of the Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Turkey, the Editors of Astrophysics and Space Science have decided to retract this paper due to extensive plagiarism of work by others.

    The papers involved are gr-qc/0505079, gr-qc/0602012, gr-qc/0508018, gr-qc/0509022.

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