Not Even Wrong

Blah, blah, more anthropic pseudo-science on hep-th, blah, blah, blah,

On the basis of a static support condition depending on the tensile strength of flesh rather than bone, it is reasoned here that our size should be subject to a limit inversely proportional to the terrestrial gravitation field g, which is itself found to be proportional (with a factor given by the 5/2 power of the fine structure constant) to the gravitational coupling constant. The upshot, via the (strong) anthropic principle, is that the need for big brains may be what explains the weakness of gravity.

blah, blah, blah, this pseudo-science is on hep-th because of blah, blah, blah.

Blah, blah, blah written for Templeton-funded conference, blah, blah, Science-Religion Interaction in the 21st Century. Usual blah, blah, turn science into religion, blah, blah Institute for Interdisciplinary Research in Science, Philosophy and Religion.

Apologies for the repetitive nature of some recent postings. I can’t even stand to write them any more, but still think someone should be documenting the descent of particle theory into pseudo-science and complaining about it.

As reported here last week, the editors of the Springer journal K-theory have announced that they (or at least most of them) are resigning and starting up a new journal to be published by Cambridge University Press. Earlier this week, an announcement was made (in the comment section here, and on Andrew Ranicki’s web-site) that Ranicki and Wolfgang Lueck would be acting as interim managing editors for Springer, in the first instance to deal with papers submitted to the journal since April 2006 but not forwarded to Springer.

Here’s the latest e-mail about this from Anthony Bak (via the K-theory announcement list run by Dan Grayson):

Springer: Large backlogs, poor production of manuscripts and high prices

Professors Lueck and Ranicki reported correctly in their article of August 13 that we did not deliver manuscripts to Springer for K-Theory since April 2006. However, since April 2006 Springer published issues 35/1 – 37/4 (beginning in June 2006). This proves that in April 2006 Springer had a backlog of more than 1200 pages. This backlog contained papers delivered to Springer as early as December 2004. Moreover, as of now Springer has not exhausted its backlog.

The majority of the former editors of K-Theory felt that Springer was handling manuscript production and publication in an unprofessional way over several years while, nevertheless, charging much too high a price.

Authors of accepted papers which have not been delivered to Springer were informed that their papers can be accepted for the new Journal of K-theory. Authors of papers in the refereeing process were told that they could resubmit to the new journal and the refereeing of their papers would not be interrupted.

Anthony Bak
a.bak@gmx.net

While what Ranicki and Bak have to say is consistent (no papers were sent to Springer by the editorial board after April 2006, Bak explains what happened to them), there are some odd things going on. One oddity is that the issues Bak refers to (35/1-37/4) as being published since April 2006 carry dates before or at April 2006. No issue of the journal dated after April 2006 has appeared on-line (and presumably not in print, I can’t check since it appears that Columbia is now getting this journal on-line only).

Over at EUREKA Science Journal Watch, some rumors about this have been posted (Update: these rumors have been removed due to concerns about their accuracy) , including one that claims that Bak made over 1 million dollars in the process of switching the journal to Cambridge. Maybe there’s something I don’t understand about the economics of journal publishing, but this seems like a very unlikely number.

Update: From the same source (Grayson), a statement responding to Bak from Lueck and Ranicki. They say they do not want to keep the Springer K-theory journal going, but do want papers already accepted to it to appear in a final issue of the journal if the authors agree. It appears that the rumor about Bak and a million dollars probably refers to a lawsuit that Bak is pursuing against Springer.

K-theory – statement
====================

In this statement we, Wolfgang Lueck and Andrew Ranicki, want to give some explanations to the mathematical community concerning the journal “K-theory” published by Springer and the anouncement of a new “Journal of K-theory” to be published by Cambridge University Press.

Three weeks ago we were asked by Springer to do two things.

1.) Can we take care of the submissions to K-Theory which were delayed by the former managing editor Tony Bak?

2.) Are we willing to try to reconstitute the board for K-Theory so that the journal can be continued?

1.) We agreed to do this without really knowing how urgent and unpleasant the problem was. On August 13th we issued a statement on the internet to ask authors of papers submitted to “K-theory” whose papers had not yet been published to contact us, so that we could take care of them. From the answers we have received so far it is clear that not only had Bak deliberately withheld papers from Springer, but he also withheld information about the papers from editors and (worst of all) the authors themselves. By contrast, when the entire editorial board of Topology resigned from Elsevier in 2006 they made sure that all submitted papers were handled correctly, and to our knowledge no author suffered any delay.

We were also informed that Bak has started a legal proceedings against Springer, demanding a certain of amount of money for himself. The editorial board of “K-theory” were not informed of the lawsuit. The details will only be revealed once the lawsuit is finished. Although we do not know the details, we dislike the idea of an editor starting a legal proceedings against a publisher. There are more elegant ways of handling conflicts.

2.) When Springer asked us to relaunch K-theory, we requested that the price should be reduced to 50 cents per page. Springer readily agreed. Incidentally, Bak never discussed the price of “K-theory”, either with Springer or the editors. However, since it seems to be clear that the new “Journal of K-Theory” will be launched anyway, we have decided not to try to continue “K-Theory”, but simply to make certain that all the papers which have been delayed by Bak can be published in a final issue of “K-Theory”. Authors of such papers are free to publish their papers anywhere they choose.

We think that this is the best solution for the community, which would not be best served by two journals in the field.

In view of the mess we are encountering and trying to clean up, we ask the question whether the new “Journal of K-Theory” can be launched with Bak as Managing Editor? This should not detract from the excellent work Bak did in setting up “K-theory” in 1988.

We want to emphasize that we have no personal gain from our actions.

Wolfgang Lueck (Editor Topology 2002–2006, Journal of Topology since 2006, Math. Annalen since 1998 (Managing Editor since 2004), Comment. Math. Helv. since 2003, Geometry and Topology since 2005, Groups, Geometry and Dynamics since 2006)

Andrew Ranicki (Editor K-theory, 1990-2007, Forum Mathematicum since 1998, Algebraic and Geometric Topology since 2000)

17th August, 2007

Update: More from Ranicki:

The resignation of the editors of “K-theory” in January 2007
=======================================

by Andrew Ranicki

On 29th January 2007 the managing editor of “K-theory” Tony Bak circulated an e-mail to all the editors asking us to resign, and included a suggested form of words. The reasons for the resignation were to be dissatisfaction with the technical aspects of the publication of the journal, and the high price of the journal.

The problems with the publication did not seem to me sufficiently major to warrant such a mass resignation, especially as Catriona Byrne of Springer had written to the editors on 17th January 2007 carefully explaining the Springer side. She stated that the technical problems would be resolved by transferring the production of the journal to Heidelberg, but the problem was that the managing editor had not passed on any papers to Springer since April 2006 — see my statements with Wolfgang Lueck for some further details:
http//www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~aar/editor/state1.txt and
http//www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~aar/editor/state2.txt

The journal price had never been discussed by the editors collectively. (I was told later that it was not an issue raised by Tony Bak with Springer.) So I found the suggested form of words in the proposed resignation letter

I assume you continue being dissatisfied with the price Springer charges for K-Theory.

distinctly odd. I resigned on 30th January, having first made sure that the one paper I was handling for K-theory was taken care of, only writing to Tony Bak that:

I am writing to inform you that I am resigning my position as an editor of the journal K-theory, effective immediately.

In an addendum to the actual letter of resignation I wrote

As it happens, I was never particularly dissatisfied with the price Springer charges for K-theory. Since practically all interesting work is available on the internet and there are so many journals anyway, the price of journals is not such a big issue for me. Tuition fees, the interest of students in mathematics, and workloads/salaries of professors are much bigger issues! The received dates business seemed a minor (if annoying) technical problem: the submission date to the arxive is a much better way of establishing priority for those that care about such things.

Tony Bak’s email of 29 January 2007 concluded with

Please keep the matter strictly confidential, till Springer is notified. I shall let you know when this is.

In retrospect, I should not have gone along with this, and should have sent a copy of my resignation letter to Springer at the time. When Tony Bak circulated the announcement of the founding of the new “Journal of K-theory” on 27th July 2007, I had learnt my lesson, and immediately replied with a copy to all the editors and to Springer

Dear Tony
Thank you for the announcement of the new “Journal of K-theory”, and the invitation to join the editorial board. However, for a variety of reasons, I cannot accept this invitation.
Best regards
Andrew

PS I am copying this message to Joachim Heinze of Springer.

At the time, none of the editorial board expressed an interest in my reasons. They know the reasons now.

18th August, 2007

Over at Uncertain Principles Chad Orzel is taking a break and turning over his blog temporarily to, among others, string theorist Aaron Bergman, who has started things off with a posting called Ask a String Theorist. In my experience, Aaron is significantly more reasonable than other string theorists who have been active bloggers, so his postings should be worth paying attention to.

So far though, his response to a question about the testability of string theory has been

I think I’d like to avoid that subject for now (and possibly for a long time more)

and he promises some advertising for AdS/CFT, as well as a three-part series of postings on the multiverse. For better or worse, I think he’ll do a good job of reflecting mainstream thinking among string theorists.

Update: Unfortunately, so far the person answering questions about string theory at Uncertain Principles is not Aaron but Lubos Motl. The problem for string theorists is that he represents all too accurately their views, so they can’t justify censoring him. Not even when he calls them “sissies” for not vigorously defending string theory the way he does…

On the pseudo-science front, the Resonaances blog describes a talk at CERN by string theory enthusiast Jim Cline, about a variant of the anthropic principle called the “Entropic Principle” as “pushing the idea to the edge of absurd.” For beyond the edge of absurd, there’s today’s NYT Science Times section, which features a piece by John Tierney about the ideas of philosopher of science Nick Bostrom. Bostrom runs a web-site called anthropic-principle.com and has made a career for himself in the anthropic principle business which now has him running a Templeton Foundation-funded [actually this is not accurate, see here] Institute at Oxford called the Future of Humanity Institute. The New York Times article is about Bostrom’s idea that there’s a significant probability that our universe is just a simulation being conducted by a more advanced civilization, an idea that he considers to be one of the “interesting applications” of the anthropic principle. He has yet another web-site, simulation-argument.com, where he propounds this argument. Tierney supplements the NYT article with an on-line discussion of how we should we all behave, given that we are just simulated creatures. Maybe we should be trying to entertain our creators so they will not turn off the simulation? Anyone who thinks it is a good idea to discuss these questions seriously is encouraged to do so at Tierney’s site, not here.

Today’s Science Times also has an interview with Gino Segre, who has a new book called Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics, about the 1932 conference in Copenhagen hosted by Neils Bohr at the time of the beginnings of modern nuclear physics. Segre says that he became a physicist for an unusual reason. His father was an historian, brother of Emilio Segre, the co-discoverer of the antiproton, and the two siblings were estranged. When he was 15, Segre’s father told him “I think you should become a theoretical physicist, and I want you to surpass your uncle”, and he did as he was told.

American Scientist has a review of the Segre book, together with David Lindley’s recent Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science.

American Scientist also has an interview with Frank Wilczek about books he is reading and that have influenced him. He strongly recommends a book by an author I’d never heard of, Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker.

Unfortunately two well-known scientists, mathematician Atle Selberg, and physicist Julius Wess, are no longer with us.

Victor Kac is giving a series of lectures on vertex algebras in Brazil, with video to be available here.

A Turkish mathematician, Ali Nesin, ran into trouble with the authorities for running a mathematics summer school without permission. Alexandre Borovik has set up a web-site with a petition about this. Latest news is that the summer school has been re-opened, although Nesin still may face charges of “education without permission”.

As anthropic pseudo-science spreads through the particle theory community, I’m finding it harder and harder to tell what’s a joke and what isn’t. Maybe I’m wrong, but I fear that recent examples from hep-th contributors and prominent physics bloggers aren’t actually jokes, largely because if they are, they’re not funny.

The book Universe or Multiverse?, based on a series of Templeton Foundation supported conferences, and published by Cambridge University Press, is finally out. It’s edited by Bernard Carr, whose ventures into pseudo-science include not just this, but a stint as director of the Society for Psychical Research. He’s also on the board of directors of the Scientific and Medical Network, where his blurb tells us that:

My interests span science, religion and psychical research (which I see as forming a bridge between them)… My approach to the subject is mainly theoretical: I’m particularly keen to extend physics to incorporate consciousness and associated mental and spiritual phenomena.

The memoir by Jane Hawking that I recently wrote about contains her recollections of both Don Page and Bernard Carr (since they worked with Hawking).

I just ran into my editor at Cambridge University Press, who found that opposition from string theorists made it impossible for Cambridge to publish my book a few years ago, with one of their arguments being that doing so would damage the reputation of the Press. Publishing pseudo-science like this however seems to be fine. Yes, I’m aware that this book also contains criticism of anthropic arguments, and probably has some of the most intelligent and informed writing on the subject, but still… I suppose I should get a copy of the book and write a review (I’ve already read many of the articles, they’re available as preprints on-line), but the thing costs $85, the Columbia library doesn’t have a copy, and I’m not sure I should encourage them to buy one.

This week’s string theory hype: Universe’s Stringy Birth Revealed by Young Czech Physicist, which is not about Lubos Motl, but about an award to Martin Schnabl. Schnabl’s work on string field theory is one of the more interesting recent results in string theory, but the title of the article is, well, complete bullshit.

There will be an opening celebration in October for the Berkeley CTP, which was founded a few years ago and recently moved into renovated quarters. The BCTP is just one of a bunch of other CTPs that have been founded in recent years, including the MCTP and the PCTP (and one dead one, the CIT-USC CTP). The center’s web-site and opening conference appear to be heavily dominated by string theory, quite a change from a few years ago, when Berkeley was one of the leading US physics departments where string theory was not so dominant.

The PCTP has begun construction of its new home in Jadwin, the physics building at Princeton. Artist’s renderings are here. An art historian friend once told me that the proper technical name for the architectural style of Jadwin was “brutalist”. The new construction will add lots of glass, perhaps mitigating the “brutalism”. The large Calder featured in front of the building is called “Five Disks: One Empty”, and it has its own rather brutal history. It collapsed during construction, killing two of the men working on it. According to a local Princeton web-site:

The steel structure has four disks, one of which was originally painted orange, in a fervor of enthusiasm for the school’s colors. The structure was named “Many Disks: One Orange,” but then all of them were painted orange in anticipation of the artist’s visit in 1971. Upon seeing the structure, he asked that all the disks be painted black, and renamed it to its current title.

Over at SciTalks August is String Theory Month, and they’ll have Jonathan Shock as guest blogger later in the month.

At the Stony Brook YITP, the fifth of a series of workshops funded by Jim Simons on mathematics and physics, but mainly devoted to string theory, is now going on. Talks are online here.

Some online conference summary talks that one might want to take a look at are those of Michael Dine at the IAS PITP summer school, and John Ellis at SUSY 07. Both Dine and Ellis discuss prospects for observing supersymmetry at the LHC. Dine lists some of the reasons one might be skeptical that this will happen, including string theory anthropic landcape arguments (he avoids using the term “anthropic principle”, insteard referring to it as “NBN, that principle which cannot be named”). Ellis recalls his own role in the “discovery” of supersymmetry by UA1 back in 1984, indicating it’s likely that there will be such premature claims again at the LHC if anything at all anomalous is seen by the experiments. He also discusses the possibility of searching for long-lived particles produced at the LHC by using the muon system to locate where they left the detector, and then taking core samples of the surrounding rock to look for them.

For some excellent detailed postings about recent experimental HEP results from Tommaso Dorigo, see here and here. For blogging from CHARM 07 by Alexey Petrov, see here.

David Vogan has a wonderful expository piece about the recent heavily publicized results on the representation theory of E₈; it’s intended for a future issue of the Notices of the AMS.

The September issue of the AMS Notices is now available. It includes an article about “Higgs Bundles”, a version of the Higgs that physicists won’t really recognize, and a book review of Lee Smolin’s The Trouble With Physics. The review is quite positive about the book and mostly a straight-forward summary of what it is in it. The reviewer, like many mathematicians, had been misled by a lot of the hype about string theory, and so found Smolin’s book quite enlightening. In particular, about M-theory, he writes:

This explanation [that M-theory is not a complete theory] was, to me personally, a great shock since I had always believed M-theory was a complete theory.

Last year about this time the entire editorial board of the Elsevier journal Topology resigned, this August it’s the turn of the Springer journal K-theory. The editors of this journal have all resigned, issuing the following statement:

Dear fellow mathematicians,

The Editorial Board of ‘K-Theory’ has resigned. A new journal titled ‘Journal of K-theory’ has been formed, with essentially the same Board of Editors. The members are A.Bak, P.Balmer, S.J.Bloch, G.E.Carlsson, A.Connes, E.Friedlander, M.Hopkins, B.Kahn, M.Karoubi, G.G.Kasparov, A.S.Merkurjev, A.Neeman, T.Porter, D.Quillen, J.Rosenberg, A.A.Suslin, G.Tang, B.Totaro, V.Voevodsky, C.Weibel, and Guoliang Yu.

The new journal is to be distributed by Cambridge University Press. The price is 380 British pounds, which is significantly less than half that of the old journal. Publication will begin in January 2008. We ask for your continued support, in particular at the current time. Your submissions are welcome and may be sent to any of the editors.

Board of Editors
Journal of K-theory

The subscription cost for the Springer journal had been $1590, $1325 for electronic-only access.

I notice that while the editorial board of Topology has resigned, that hasn’t caused Elsevier to stop publishing and selling the journal. While I’m sure that a recent paper copy of the journal that I saw did not carry the names of the editors that resigned, the online version of the journal appears to still carry the names of the old editors, giving no indication that they have resigned. As far as I know, Elsevier has not been able to recruit a replacement editorial board, but they are still selling the journal, at a yearly subscription price of $1665.

Update: Via the comment section, there’s the related news that

Update: It turns out that there may be more to this story. See in particular the comment posted here by Andrew Ranicki, who says that no papers submitted to K-theory since April 2006 have been forwarded to Springer, and that he and Wolfgang Lueck will be acting as interim managing editors for the Springer journal to sort out this situation.

The Fermilab Steering Group is about to come out with its report. Their roadmap for Fermilab proposes that if the ILC project is delayed “Fermilab should pursue additional neutrino and flavor physics opportunities”, in particular with “Project X”, a high-intensity proton linac. One of their remaining tasks is to pick a name for Project X.

In the category of magazine articles that I hear have just come out, but I don’t have a copy of, and aren’t available on-line, there’s

The talks at the recent Imperial College event in honor of Abdus Salam are now on-line. This is the event Steven Weinberg boycotted, but Gerard ‘t Hooft was there to talk about Salam and the state of theoretical physics. His talk was entitled “The Grand View of Physics”, and is available here.

Among the recent large “’07” conferences with talks available on-line are:

The HEPAP University Grants Program Subpanel has just issued a report, concerning the “University Grants Program” in US HEP, that part of the DOE and NSF high energy physics budget which supports research based mainly at universities (as opposed to government laboratories such as Fermilab). Obviously this is the part of the HEP budget that is of most direct concern to university researchers, especially theorists, who receive most of their government funding this way (a small number of theorists are supported by national labs, not universities).

On the experimental side much of the report is concerned with how to manage what will happen over the next few years as many researchers move from working on experiments in the US to the LHC, in particular how to deal with the higher travel and living expenses this will require. I’ll concentrate here on some comments on the extensive parts of the report that deal with theoretical particle physics.

The report is surprisingly light on actual budget data, with few specific numbers about past budget trends, current budget levels or future budget plans. 2006 NSF university grant funding is given as $19 million for experimental particle physics, and $11.8 million for particle theory, astrophysics and cosmology. DOE university grant funding is described as about $110 million per year, with no breakdown between experiment and theory. The only historical data given is that this kind of DOE funding peaked in 1992, at a level of $150 million in current dollars, supporting a total of 1685 people back then, as opposed to 1495 in 2005. The main budgetary recommendation of the report is that 1 % of the total US HEP budget (about $8 million) be redirected to the university grants program as the SLAC and Fermilab collider programs wind down over the next few years.

The recommendations for theoretical particle physics mostly concern funding for graduate students, calling for increasing the number of graduate students in particle theory, especially students working on calculations directly relevant to LHC experiments:

Funding directed at university-based theoretical particle physics for the purpose of increasing the number of HEP-grant-supported graduate students should be given a higher priority in the overall HEP program. Support for students and postdocs doing calculations related to upcoming experiments is particularly urgent.

Though the universities are strong in formal theory, there has been a decline over the years in conventional particle theory (phenomenology), for a variety of reasons. Phenomenology embraces a number of different areas, including data analysis, collider physics, computational physics, perturbative QCD, lattice field theory, model building, flavor physics, and neutrinos; it overlaps with such areas as strings, astrophysics, and cosmology. All these areas are important; but those directly connected with the LHC are increasingly critical. The entire LHC experimental program requires a strong theoretical component involving calculating Standard Model backgrounds and new physics processes, together with interpreting the experimental results and teasing out their implications. However, the number of theorists working on such topics in the United States, especially at the universities, is inadequate. For example, there are only a handful of people in the U.S. working on computational physics, such as event generators. Many more will be needed to fully utilize the physics potential of the LHC. It is important that much of this effort be centered at universities because (a) much of the experimental analysis will be done at
universities, and (b) a university presence is needed to attract graduate students. A general concern is the overall decline in the agencies’ support of graduate students in theory, both formal theory and phenomenology. This decline makes it difficult to train a sufficient number of students. The problem is aggravated by increasing competition for the limited number of available teaching assistantships (TAs) from students in other subfields of physics.

A key component of a strong Terascale physics program (at the LHC and the ILC) is a strong theoretical program involving the calculation of Standard Model backgrounds and new physics processes, together with interpretation of the experimental results. However, as pointed out in this report, the number of theorists working on such topics in the United States, especially at the universities, is inadequate. Addressing this vital need requires an additional level of effort.

Overall, the field of high energy physics faces several critical manpower and infrastructure problems. Declining graduate student support affects the intake of new physicists and therefore the future of particle physics overall.

The report gives no actual numbers (which, presumably are available, since the DOE and NSF should have counts of how many students they support each year), but, based on responses from a survey of university grant PIs, it says that the number of grant-funded RAs for HEP grad students has been decreasing, with, especially for theorists, student support having to come from TAs:

The overwhelming response stressed that the level of (NSF and DOE) grant support for RAs for graduate students is insufficient and has indeed been declining over the last decade. At the same time, respondents noted that the cost of supporting a graduate student on a grant has increased, especially because of stricter university requirements regarding tuition remission and fringe benefits.

As a result, particle physics groups routinely rely on other sources of funds for all or part of their graduate student support. One major resource is TA positions for particle physics students, addressed in more detail below. Some respondents noted that their universities have limited fellowship support for some students. A handful also mentioned seeking outside support from other federal agencies. Many said that they had been forced to turn away qualified students due to a lack of grant support. Some also indicated that students had turned down the chance to join a particle physics research group because other departmental areas could promise steadier RA support, rather than a mixture of TA and RA support…

Survey respondents brought up several difficulties caused by this reliance on TA support. First, spending time as a TA slows senior students’ research progress (increasing their time to graduation) and hampers experimental students’ ability to travel to particle physics labs. Second, TA support is also currently a declining resource for particle physics at many institutions, because university administrations are providing less overall TA money to physics departments, departments are reducing the number of semesters any student may spend as a TA, or other physics subfields are requesting more TA slots. Third, if a particular research group (usually particle physics theory) makes unusually large demands on the available TA slots, this creates friction and resentment within the department as a whole.

The report has no mention at all of what the desirable level of particle theory Ph.D.s might be from a larger perspective. There is zero discussion of the relationship between how many such Ph.Ds are produced, and how many jobs doing particle theory research are likely to be available in the future. This is presumably because the authors are well aware that there remains a huge imbalance between the number of smart people getting Ph.D.s in this subject, and the number of opportunities for them to make a career in the subject. The reference to “friction and resentment within the department as a whole” over TAs makes clear what one of the main concerns driving this recommendation is. The amount of power and influence one’s group has in an academic department, including prospects for being allowed to hire more people, is heavily influenced by how much grant money one brings in, especially how much funding for the graduate program one can provide. This is made even more explicit at another point in the report:

Because of eroding support, more and more theoretical graduate students are being required to teach more and more of the time. This is unfortunate for at least two reasons: first, it lengthens the time to degree; and second, it signals to physics departments a hint of declining support for HEP research, exacerbating hiring worries.

While the report mentions the need to find some more money for postdocs (since those working on experiments will need to travel to Europe more often), it emphasizes support for grad students, not postdocs. It does this even though it is postdocs who are doing much of the most original work in the field, and the small number of postdocs (and junior faculty positions) is what makes career prospects for particle theory students extremely problematic. I can’t even really make sense of this one paragraph from the report that deals with this:

Given the choice between hiring more graduate students and taking on a postdoc, many faculty members will opt for the latter when faced with limited available funding. However, while this may seem be the best solution in terms of immediate research workload, the long-term negative effects of this choice on the field as a whole are clear.

One of the most interesting things in the report is the set of numbers from survey responses about how many grant-supported theory researcher are working in which areas, and what hiring plans by area are for the next 5 years. Figure 3 on page 43 divides theory researchers into six categories, and gives counts for how many are working in each category now, how many expected in 2012. The number of string theorists is supposed to drop from 103 to 84, “field theorists” from 91 to 77, “model builders” from 88 to 70, and “QCD/Lattice QCD” from 50 to 41. “Particle phenomenologists” are supposed to increase from 188 to 194, and “astrophysicists and cosmologists” from 136 to 176. Obviously boundaries of these fields are unclear, especially since string theory in recent years has to some extent moved away from formal theory, with more people describing themselves as “string cosmologists”, “string phenomenologists”, “string-inspired model-builders”, and much of the attention of the field devoted to trying to do QCD calculations with string theory.

If you take these numbers seriously, a grad student would be nuts to work on anything except cosmology or phenomenology, since all other subfields show about as many people leaving them as would be accounted for by retirements, so essentially no new hiring. My suspicion though is that these numbers reflect what departments say they would like to do, not what they will do. Most departments now say they want to hire in the areas of cosmology and phenomenology. But faced with the fact that competition for the best people in those areas is tough, and finding it much easier to get good people in other subfields, I suspect there will continue to be quite a lot of hiring in these other subfields, in string theory especially, which seems to be what looking at the latest data from the Rumor Mill shows.

Given the huge and supposedly increasing dominance of these numbers by the “particle phenomenology” category, the report’s call for an urgent increase in funding to produce more phenomenologists is not so easy to understand. However, the authors make clear that what they want to see is more of a very specific sort of phenomenology: people working on things like event generators to precisely calculate standard model backgrounds for the LHC experiments, something which has always been more popular in the Europe than in the US. The recent NSF-funded “LHC Theory Initiative” is specifically designed to address this, and is being promoted with nationalistic calls to fight the “outsourcing” of these calculations to European theorists. The authors of the report are calling for more Ph.D.s in conventional, experiment-based phenomenology, not more Ph.D.s in string theory or “string phenomenology”. They choose to do so, for obvious political reasons, not by calling for a reallocation of resources within the field of particle theory, but for new resources for this purpose, even if it will lead to a smaller fraction of particle theory Ph.D.s being able to find jobs doing the research they have been trained to do.

The New York Times has an article this morning by Dennis Overbye in its Science Times section about the hunt for the Higgs and the various rumors that were circulating earlier this year. It does a good job of accurately summarizing and reviewing the situation (although of course the blogs were and remain the place to go for breaking news, up-to-date and accurate information…). Steven Weinberg recalls the time back in 1977 when he quickly wrote up a paper with Ben Lee about a model concocted to explain rumored “trimuon” events (which turned out not to be there). There are quotes from bloggers Tommaso Dorigo, Gordon Watts and John Conway, and, in a new posting on his blog, Gordon is now trying to deny that he uses the term “Dude” in actual conversation. Unfortunately, anyone at D0 who knows anything seems to have clammed up, no more rumors that I’m aware of about whether they’re seeing anything exciting.

The 2007 Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics is going on in Manchester, England, and many of the talks are already on-line. This is a conference more aimed at experimentalists than theorists, so there doesn’t seem to be much new in the theory talks. There are so many experimental talks that I think I’ll have to wait for the summary talk to appear to figure out what to pay attention to.

There’s a long list of things I was going to write about, but Sabine and Stefan at Backreaction got there first (here, here and here):

There’s a new chapter out of the particle physics novel The Newtonian Legacy (blogged about here) by Nick Evans. Not often that the Cern Courier carries material about Higgsless models and lingerie in its pages…