Not Even Wrong

At Fermilab the Tevatron is producing record amounts of luminosity, see here for a story about a celebration of this. Things also appear to be going well at the LHC, as the cooldown remains on schedule, and only a tolerable number (12) of PIMs needed to be replaced in the sector recently warmed back up. See here and here for some discussion of current planning for the next year. The machine should be cool and ready for beam commissioning in late June, and if all goes well, by September an initial physics run with 5 TeV beams at relatively low luminosity may begin. At these luminosities and energies, the stored energy in the LHC beam will be no greater than at the Tevatron (although the important number for physics, the per-particle collision energy, will be 5 times higher). The plan is to run until December, with a heavy-ion run at the end, then shutdown until April 2009. During the shutdown the magnets will be trained, allowing beams at the full energy of 7 TeV during the 2009 run.

Particle theory, especially string theory, is not doing as well. Data recently compiled about top-cited particle physics papers from 2007 shows only one [note added: should specify string theory here, at 27 and 31 are phenomenology papers from 2002 and 2000] theory paper from this century making the list of 51 most heavily cited papers, and that was the KKLT paper which is referenced by all “landscape” and “multiverse” studies. The sad state of string theory has even made it deep into the popular consciousness. Last week’s episode of “The Big Bang” featured a brilliant young prodigy explaining to the particle theorist character that his work on string theory was a “dead-end”, due to the landscape problem. Even economists are dissing the subject:

Modern financial theory as applied ranks with string theory in physics as one of the greatest intellectual frauds of our time. Whereas the vacuous pretensions of string theory have finally been exposed (we now know that the theory never generated a single falsifiable prediction), those of “financial engineering” are just beginning to be exposed both in the press and in lawsuits alike.

At Santa Barbara, Jennifer Ouellette reports on a workshop about “how to come off better during TV appearances”:

Joe Polchinski (inventor of D branes in string theory, and one of the few permanent members at KITP) also agreed to be mock-interviewed, revealing a sly sense of humor in the process. For instance, asked if there was any controversy about string theory, he deadpanned, “Oh no. Everybody agrees that string theory is correct.” It cracked up the room.

This workshop unfortunately didn’t seem to include the advice to just say no when asked by TV producers to participate in a short stupid comedy skit making fun of science and scientists. See here, here and here, for reports on Wednesday’s “Root of All Evil” show from Comedy Central, which featured a mercifully short segment making fun of scientists as incomprehensible geeks. Participating in things like this does about as much to help the image of science and scientists as appearing on a Spike TV segment about the use of physics to determine whether women can crush beer cans with their breasts.

Given that things are going very well with the LHC, and badly with string theory, string theorists are doing the logical thing: advertising their activities with graphics of strings superimposed on a picture of the LHC. See here and here.

Update: Minutes from the LHC Installation and Commissioning Committee April 11 meeting are here. They include the exchange:

L.Evans asked if the cryogenics teams are still on track for having the whole machine at operating temperature in mid-June. S.Claudet replied that taking the figure of 6 weeks from room temperature to 2K, and allowing 2 weeks of cryo tuning, sector 45 would be ready for hardware commissioning in the first half of July.

This indicates that beam commissioning is likely to begin in July, not June.

Also discussed was what to do about possible stray plastic parts in the beam tube:

Any pieces of plastic would be vaporised by the beam so we should not delay start-up to search for these.

Update: Commentary on this posting from Lubos here, including

I am amazed by the people who deliberately keep on opening the pile of manure called Not Even Wrong – it must be due to a really nasty deviation of theirs that dwarves pedophilia.

I recently heard from David Goss, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Number Theory, that the journal is planning on introducing video abstracts for papers that they publish. Here’s his e-mail explaining this:

Dear Colleagues:

By now I believe that all of us have had the pleasure of watching a famous scientist or mathematician discuss their work on internet video. I have certainly done so myself and learned much. Indeed I can readily give a long list of mathematicians who I would very much like to view presenting the ideas behind their great works.

For example, it would be fabulous to watch a young Serre discussing the ideas behind FAC or GAGA; or a young Faltings discussing his solution on the Mordell Conjecture etc. I am sure that each of you can compile your own long list (and obviously not just papers on number theory!).

It is in this spirit that I suggested to Elsevier that all JNT authors be allowed to present a short (4 minutes max) “video abstract” of their accepted manuscript. Elsevier has kindly accepted this idea and is now quite excited about it.

The idea is very simple: When a paper is *finally accepted* for JNT, the author will be notified and given the option of putting up a video abstract — THIS IS ONLY FOR ACCEPTED PAPERS! The video will be watched to check for professionalism etc., and those videos deemed offensive will not be used (and the author sanctioned!). The video will then be linked next to the paper on the JNT website. Information on how to upload files, etc., will be on the JNT website by April 23, 2008.

Videoing virtually anything is now deeply a part of our culture as witness the rise of YouTube. In fact, we will be using YouTube itself temporarily until Science Direct is augmented to handle flash files (which I hope will be within a few months). The url is:

http://www.youtube.com/user/JournalNumberTheory

where there is a short video about these multimedia abstracts!

I expect the video to be very low key like the one on the above url. I also think that, frankly, it will be a fun thing to do after all the hard work producing an accepted manuscript! Certainly the technology to produce such videos is now ubiquitous worldwide.

It is important to note that ALL such videos will be archived by Elsevier and thus will be available for future scholars and mathematicians.

With a little thought one can see vast possibilities here: For instance a paper on the topology of elliptic curves could be proceeded by a short video of computer graphics narrated by the author etc.

Over at the Center for Science Writings, John Horgan has started an interesting project of posting copies of taped interviews with scientists that he has accumulated over the years, starting with an interview with Chandrashekar. In a blog entry about this, he points to a piece entitled Revenge of the Science Writer from 2001 by Robert Crease, a historian of science and co-author of what I think is the best history of the development of the Standard Model: The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth Century Physics. Crease describes Horgan as “a man who does not destroy his tapes”, and tells the following story:

I once interviewed a well known European physicist whom I had arranged to meet at a table in the noisy lunchroom at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. I pulled out a tape recorder and asked him about one of his experiments. The scientist could barely disguise his impatience. After five minutes we had a slight misunderstanding about where a certain event took place. I corrected him; he thought I hadn’t been listening.

“That’s it!” he fairly roared as he abruptly stood up, his chair shooting backwards. The background hubbub in the lunchroom suddenly plummeted and everyone turned to stare. He strode away, shouting, “This is a total waste of time! You’re an imbecile!” Or at least I think that’s what he shouted. I can’t be sure, because I destroyed the tape. I was too embarrassed to consider replaying it, or risk having others know my humiliation.

One tape I wonder if Horgan still has is that of his interview with Witten back in the mid-nineties. His chapter on string theory in The End of Science included a rather harsh portrayal of Witten, some of which I remember as being quite unfair. It’s also true that Horgan’s aggressive skepticism about the claims being made at the time for string theory has stood up very well in light of what has happened in the intervening fifteen years or so.

Via Steve Hsu, I ran across the cover article from Alpha magazine, a magazine for the hedge fund industry, entitled The New Math. It describes the role physicists are playing in several hedge funds, developing sophisticated trading strategies. One of the best known of the organizations doing this is Renaissance Capital run by Jim Simons, and its success is now responsible for funding the new Simons Center at Stony Brook.

Two of the theoretical physicists featured in the article were fellow graduate students at Princeton while I was there. One of them, Marek Fludzinski (who was a couple years ahead of me), quickly left academia and went on to a career in finance, ending up founding the Thales hedge fund, which he still runs. The other, John Moody (more about him here), was in my class and so I got to know him quite well, but I had lost track of him in recent years. He worked with Frank Wilczek on axions and left Princeton for Santa Barbara after Wilczek went there to the ITP.

In recent years quite a few mathematics Ph.D.s and a very large number of particle theory Ph.D.s have ended up in the finance industry, and the article describes the kinds of things that they are doing. The impact of the recent melt-down in the credit markets remains to be seen: maybe there will be fewer jobs available in this field, or maybe demand will increase for people with this kind of technical background as companies pursue ever more sophisticated strategies.

Last week I spent a day out at Stony Brook, attending the second day of a two-day symposium devoted to mathematics and physics, held in honor of C. N. Yang and Jim Simons. Peter Steinberg was there for the first day, and has a report about this on his blog. The symposium was in many ways also a celebration of the new Simons Center for Geometry and Physics, which is just getting off the ground with a $60 million donation from Simons. A new building will be constructed over the next couple years, and already one permanent member (Michael Douglas, who will not be the Director, as mistakenly reported in some press accounts and here) has been hired. In an era when string theory has caused a backlash against mathematical and formal research at many physics departments, the Simons Center may be one of very few places where a physicist working at the boundary of mathematics and physics will be able to find employment. To get some idea of how dramatic the situation is this year, with only “phenomenologists” and “cosmologists” getting hired into tenure-track positions, take a look at the Theoretical Particle Physics Rumor Mill.

Stony Brook played a very important role in the interaction of mathematicians and physicists around the topic of gauge theory, and many of the speakers at the symposium discussed this. Since his early work on Yang-Mills, Yang had been intrigued by the similarities between gauge theory and the Riemannian geometry of GR. He built up the ITP at Stony Brook, in the same building and at the same time as a great mathematics department focused on geometry was being built up by Simons. He discussed these similarities with Simons, who told him that gauge theory must be related to connections on fiber bundles and pointed him to Steenrod’s The Topology of Fibre Bundles. Yang didn’t get much out of that (not surprising, since Steenrod is purely topological, with nothing about connections and curvature), leading him to make the statement:

There exist only two kinds of modern mathematics books: ones which you cannot read beyond the first page and ones which you cannot read beyond the first sentence.

In early 1975 Simons gave a series of lectures to the physicists on differential forms, geometry and bundles, and some real communication between the two camps began. This led to Yang writing a paper that year with Wu, Concept of Nonintegrable Phase Factors and Global Formulation of Gauge Fields, Phys. Rev. D12, 3845, that included the famous “Wu-Yang dictionary” explaining how to translate back and forth between mathematician’s and physicist’s language. The crucial example was the Dirac monopole, where the bundle (for a sphere enclosing the monopole) is what a mathematician would call the Hopf fibration. This was already becoming a hot topic among physicists, with the ‘t Hooft-Polyakov monopole having been discovered in 1974.

Is Singer visited Stony Brook in the summer of 1976 and talked to the physicists about gauge theories and geometry. In early 1977 he traveled to Oxford, where he, Atiyah and Hitchin began working on instantons, i.e. solutions of the self-dual Yang-Mills equations. Again the physicists had started this, with the discovery of the BPST (Belavin, Schwarz, Polyakov and Tyupkin) solution in 1975, followed by its use by ‘t Hooft, Polyakov, Jackiw, Rebbi, Callan, Dashen, Gross and others soon thereafter. In his 1977 Erice lectures on The Uses of Instantons, Sidney Coleman refers to the “classic part of the theory”:

“Classic”, in this context, means work done more than six months ago.

Atiyah and collaborators were to devote much of the next decade to work on gauge theories. In 1977 he also met Witten, and this began a long and fruitful collaboration. During the years after 1977 Witten would become by far the dominant figure in the subject.

At Stony Brook last Friday, I arrived just in time to catch a morning talk by Dennis Sullivan about the classification of 3-manifolds (he was speaking in place of Iz Singer, who wasn’t able to come due to a respiratory infection, but an e-mail from him was read to the audience). Yang made some short comments about a problem in condensed-matter physics. The afternoon featured three hour-long talks. The first, by Dijkgraaf on The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Physics in Mathematics was a talk for a general audience advertising some of the high points of how ideas originating in string theory have had influence in mathematics. The main example was the computation of the number of rational curves on a quintic. The talk was extremely polished, featuring very impressive graphics. He described the current situation of string theorists as being very enthusiastic about “emergent geometry”, but struggling for the right mathematical language to express these ideas. This is an interesting research program, but as far as I can tell it is one that has to some extent ground to a halt, with little progress in recent years, and Dijkgraaf’s talk being essentially the same one he has given on other occasions during the last 5-6 years.

Michael Douglas, who is joining Stony Brook next year as the first permanent member of the Simons Center, spoke on Physics and Geometry: past, present and future. He emphasized ideas about “branes” and non-commutative geometry that have been popular since the late 1990s, like Dijkgraaf giving a take on the question of what new sort of geometry string theory might be pointing to. He ended his talk with a sentiment that I would heartily agree with, that he thought the time had come for a deeper investigation into quantum field theory. Unfortunately it was in a context I find not so promising: he has been thinking about how to count quantum field theories as part of anthropic landscape research, and has realized that this is a pretty ill-defined question. His final remarks seemed to be designed to answer skeptics who have noticed that string theory has stopped making progress, noting that physicists like himself are always moving on to something new, and this something new might soon not be string theory. In answer to a question from the audience about what the LHC might tell us about string theory, he gave a defensive set of remarks about the testability of string theory.

The last talk of the symposium was Witten on the topic of Electric-magnetic duality on a half-space, and this was a breath of fresh air and an extremely impressive performance. He was discussing joint work with Davide Gaiotto that I wrote a bit about here, based on his recent series of lectures at the IAS, which you can follow in lecture notes from David Ben-Zvi and Sergei Gukov here. The Stony Brook talk was an extended version of one he gave recently at the Linde-fest, available here.

The talk began with a motivational example from d=2, with a 1-d boundary, of a duality in the QFT of real scalars, taking Dirichlet boundary conditions on one side of the duality to Neumann boundary conditions on the other. The next example was 4d U(1) gauge theory, with its electro-magnetic duality, again relating by duality Dirichlet boundary conditions and Neumann boundary conditions for the field-strength F at the boundary. Most of the talk was about his new work on the surprising ways in which duality is reflected in choices of boundary conditions in N=4 super Yang-Mills. He claimed this to be a physicist’s way of understanding geometric Langlands and its duality between D-modules and coherent sheaves, but ended after an hour without having much to say about these mathematical implications, (although he jokingly threatened to go on for another hour on this topic if people were willing to stay).

In response to a question, he noted that unfortunately there seemed to be no useful relation between this S-duality and the AdS/CFT duality of the theory that is the reason for its central importance in modern string theory and particle theory.

Witten’s talk ended the symposium on a high note. This summer he’ll be temporarily moving to CERN as a visitor for the next academic year, so he may be on-site there as, if all goes well, the first results come in from experiments at the LHC.

The Tevatron has been performing well, producing record-high weekly luminosities. Fermilab director Oddone has announced that plans to shut-down the accelerator complex for yearly maintenance work are being canceled this year, instead the plan is to run the Tevatron straight through the year, with a shutdown not until spring 2009. The current proposal to DOE is to run through FY 2010 (i.e. until September 2010), by which time the expectation is that integrated luminosity would be more than double the current value of nearly 4 fb^-1.

The budget situation for US and British HEP continues to look rather grim. Durbin and several other senators sent a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee requesting that supplemental funds for FY2008 be found to stop lay-offs at Fermilab. Senators Clinton and Obama did not sign the letter, which seems especially remarkable in the case of Obama, since Fermilab is in the state he represents. For the latest in the sad story of UK physics funding cuts, see here.

As far as FY2009 goes, Congress is on more or less exactly the same path as last year. Attempts to rein in earmarking were defeated, and committee hearings, including those on the science budget, show no signs of interest in making any tough decisions (to cut military/Iraq war spending, domestic spending, raise revenues) now. See some commentary here. Presumably decisions will ultimately get made by the same mysterious staffers in the same mysterious way as last year. This year the betting is that there actually won’t be a budget until deep into the fiscal year, with Congress waiting for a new president rather than negotiate with Bush. This will leave US science programs operating under a continuing resolution, financed at FY 2008 levels into FY 2009.

The P5 committee is meeting in Washington today to put together recommendations for how US HEP should proceed, under various possible funding scenarios over the next few years. For more about their deliberations, see their web-site here. The last public meeting of the group was at Brookhaven, talks there are available here.

Some other recent or upcoming conferences include one at ICTP, one at Warwick on TQFT and string theory (see Marcos Marino’s notes here), and the Linde-fest at Stanford.

Talks at the Linde-fest included many serious and informative ones about current cosmology research, together with a large helping of Multiverse madness, since Stanford is ground-zero for this phenomenon. The string cosmology talks were mostly devoted to showing that some string compactification or other can reproduce any conceivable experimental result. Several speakers discussed Boltzmann brains, perhaps one of them was the one who so annoyed Lawrence Krauss recently. Max Tegmark promoted future measurements of the 21cm hydrogen line as being very promising for cosmology, the same point was made here by Scott Dodelson. Lance Dixon gave a talk on the finiteness of N=8 supergravity. He describes conversations with string theorists who would like to interpret this result as indicating that string theory would still be necessary to deal with the asymptotic nature of the perturbation series (not clear why the same problem in string theory doesn’t bother them). One problem with this is that string theory doesn’t have the same symmetries as N=8 supergravity. Witten gave a talk on his recent work, much the same as one he gave at Stony Brook last week. I hope to write about that in my next posting.

See here for an interesting talk at the KITP in Santa Barbara from Albert de Roeck about what to expect from the early stages of the physics run at the LHC.

Michio Kaku’s new book The Physics of the Impossible is getting some attention, especially in the UK. A Fox News story headed Physicist Says Time Travel Is Not Only Possible, but Likely claims that:

… in Blighty [that’s the UK], Kaku’s being treated as if he’s Doctor Who informing dim-witted humans about the wonders of the Universe, with front-page treatment Wednesday in both the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian. Even the normally staid Economist is chiming in.

while, in the US:

… outlandish claims in books are recognized as, well, a good way to sell books.

Here in New York, my colleague Brian Greene’s World Science Festival is getting off the ground, with a press conference held this week described here.

Sabine Hossenfelder, Michael Nielsen and Lee Smolin are organizing a conference at Perimeter this semester on Science in the 21st Century.