Not Even Wrong

Last week both SLAC and Fermilab hosted “Users Meetings”, providing a forum to discuss the current status and future plans of the two laboratories. The SLAC agenda is here, and talks from previous years are available here, with this year’s perhaps available later.

The Fermilab meeting was also celebrating the 40th anniversary of its first Users Meeting, which was held back in 1967 at a time when Fermilab was under construction, with plans for a 200 GeV fixed-target machine underway, led by director Robert Wilson. This year’s talks are available here. The status of the Tevatron is described in Roger Dixon’s talk. Already the machine has delivered nearly 3 fb^-1 of luminosity to the two experiments there, half of this over the last year. They are projecting to have 6-7 fb^-1 by the end of FY 2009 (a bit more than two years from now). The current plan calls for operation of the Tevatron only until the end of FY 2009, and a year or so ago there was even some discussion of shutting it down before then. With the machine operating well, a healthy US HEP budget, the LHC startup now not until 2008, and some cautious optimism that that the Tevatron might be able to accumulate enough data to see the Higgs under some scenarios, it looks like no one is about to shut the Tevatron down early, rather the question will be how much extra time to give it. There seems little point to shutting it down as long as the LHC is not producing results that make it obsolete, and no one knows yet how long that is going to take. While those running Fermilab would like to know what they will be doing several years in advance so that they can plan and budget, it may be difficult to do this since no one knows what will happen with the LHC.

Fermilab is in the middle of a long-range planning exercise, with a Steering Group meeting trying to put together a plan by August 1. They have many of their materials available on-line. Some of the discussion revolves around the question of the ILC, with talks showing that in principle it would be possible to start construction of the ILC in 2012 and have it built by 2019, but few people believe that things will happen this fast. Whether building the machine makes sense will depend on what is seen at the LHC. Other scenarios are under discussion, for example see here. Other than the LHC, the main things one could conceive of building at Fermilab would be a more intense proton beam (proton driver), or accelerating muons to provide a “neutrino factory” and perhaps ultimately a muon collider.

While US HEP has a difficult task ahead to figure out what to do after the Tevatron shuts down and the energy frontier moves to CERN, at least the budget situation is looking a lot better than it was a few years ago. At the Users Meeting, there was a presentation by the DOE’s Robin Staffin showing budget figures that included a 6.8% increase planned for FY2008, after a 5.9% increase from FY2006 to FY2007. For some reason the federal government seems to have decided to put significantly more money into fundamental physics research, and HEP is benefiting from this. For more about the general situation with the Federal science research budget, see this recent talk by John Marburger, the director of Office of Science and Technology Policy.

For the budget situation in mathematics, see this report in the latest Notices of the AMS about the NSF budget numbers. After flat budget numbers for the past couple years, there was a 3.3% increase for mathematics research in FY2007, and the proposal for FY2008 has a 8.5% increase. Math is cheap compared to HEP, with the NSF spending on math (which is the bulk of federal math research funding) only about a quarter the size of the HEP budget. The AMS Notices article also computes numbers for what fraction of the NSF budget goes to different fields, noting that in FY2004 18.3% was for math, 20.9% for physics, while the FY2008 proposal goes 17.8% to math, 23.6% to physics.

Update: Also at SLAC, this week the DOE is there to review the lab. Presentations prepared for the DOE are on-line. Michael Peskin gave a presentation about the work of the theory group. He highlighted (besides hopes about the LHC) the work of SLAC’s Lance Dixon on computing perturbative QCD amplitudes, including its relation to N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills and to the conjectural finiteness of N=8 supergravity.

Yesterday evening there was a public debate about string theory held in Paris, between Lee Smolin and Thibault Damour. So far, accounts of the debate have appeared in Le Monde and at Fabien Besnard’s blog Mathephysique.

The Le Monde article is not very informative, but indicates that Damour defended string theory against charges that it was not testable by claiming that it predicted “possible classes of experimentally testable phenomena” at the LHC. Besnard gives a more detailed account, describing how Damour answered these charges of lack of testability with: “Lee, a subtle thinker, surely doesn’t believe himself the naive Popperian position he is defending”. He also evidently claimed that string theory was testable because it would be confirmed if a violation of the equivalence principle was found (he really should talk to Lubos, see here). Remarkably, he also claimed that observation of the kind of DSR dispersion relations that Smolin thinks LQG leads to would not be a problem for string theory, since one could also get them out of string theory (here I think he needs to talk to both Lubos and Jacques Distler).

Update: I hear that the event was recorded, and audio should be available by the end of the week at the web-site linked to above.

In recent years many people in the particle theory community have been wondering what’s going on with the Stanford theory group, as it has become dominated by work on things like the anthropic landscape. It turns out that, for a while now, there was someone there who even they were wondering about. Her name is Elizabeth Okazaki, and evidently for the last four years she has

attended graduate physics seminars, used the offices reserved for doctoral and post-doctoral physics students and — for all intents and purposes made the Varian Physics Lab her home

this despite the fact that she has no formal affiliation with the university. Some press stories about this are available from The Stanford Daily (more here) and the San Francisco Chronicle.

According to the Stanford paper, students interviewed said that Okazaki:

claimed to be a visiting scholar in the humanities, looking to provide an interdisciplinary perspective on string theory. On several instances, she has said that she was working with Physics Prof. Leonard Susskind, one of the world’s most respected string theorists.

but

Susskind told The Daily that Okazaki was not officially associated with him or his lab in any way.

“As far as I know, she has no official connection with anyone in the physics department,” Susskind said. “In fact, as far as I can tell, she has a very limited knowledge of physics itself.”

The story in The Stanford Daily on-line has a long associated comment thread, containing (besides a lot of nonsense) some comments from people in the Stanford physics department that provide more insight into the situation.

The San Francisco Chronicle article quotes Stanford graduate student Surjeet Rajendran about the situation as follows:

A university has a lot of weird people… Some of the faculty are weird, some of the grad students are weird. So you don’t really know who’s who. And you feel rather, I guess, rude asking them, ‘What the hell are you doing?’

For another perspective on this, see Scott Aaronson’s posting on The Groupies of Science, where he makes the point that “Science Needs More Groupies, Not Less”, and argues that:

When we discover a stowaway on the great Ship of Science, why throw her overboard when we could make her swab the decks?

There seems to be a peculiar trend going on in the particle theory community. Just about all theorists I talk to, correspond with, argue with on blogs, etc. claim to be quite unhappy with the Landscape, and insist that most of their colleagues share this view. On the other hand, all evidence is that Landscape research is becoming increasingly influential at the highest levels of the string theory community. The most prominent yearly string theory conference, Strings 07, will soon be taking place in Madrid, and titles of many of the talks there have just been announced. The largest contingent of speakers is from Stanford, and it appears likely that landscape studies will be the most popular topic at the conference, with various aspects of AdS/CFT running a close second. Just counting the number of times “Landscape” appears in the title of a talk, so far there are 4 such talks out of 31 with announced titles. Last year at Strings 06, out of about 50 talks, 2 had “Landscape” in the title. Naively extrapolating this eternally inflationary trend to the future, pretty much all Strings 1X talks should be about the Landscape…

Another indication of where the field is going is the yearly TASI summer school aimed at training graduate students in particle theory. This year the topic is “String Universe”, and several of the lecture series are about the Landscape, with two having “Landscape” in the title. Videos of the talks are being made available now, even as the summer school is going on. I learned about this from Clifford Johnson, who writes that the talk he most wanted to look at and recommends to everyone is Raphael Bousso’s on “Cosmology and the Landscape”.

Harvard’s Lubos Motl traditionally has been a landscape skeptic, but in recent months he has been writing more and more positive things about this subject. His latest posting advertises a new paper by Raby and Wingertner calculating statistics on (an extremely small piece of) the heterotic landscape.

Update: Lubos has written a posting entitled Landscape 2007 in response to this one. His point of view seems to be that although he doesn’t like the Landscape, he doesn’t have a workable vacuum selection principle, and as time goes on and no such principle is found, this makes the Landscape more and more likely to be correct. He doesn’t seem to even consider the possibility that the existence of the Landscape and the lack of a vacuum selection principle means that string-based 10/11d unification is just a failed idea. I suspect his point of view may be widely shared among string theorists, explaining the simultaneous unhappiness with the Landscape and its increasingly widespread adoption as a research program.

Here are various things of interest that accumulated while I was away:

Last week there was a conference in Florence on the early history of string theory, some of the talks are available here.

Lots of blogging activity among Fields Medalists: there’s a lot worth reading in Terry Tao’s reporting on a series of lectures by Yau at UCLA here, here and here. At the blog of fellow Fields Medalist Alain Connes, there’s mention of on a recent conference at Vanderbilt (slides here), as well as a report from Connes about a recent conference on the philosphical ideas of Wolfgang Pauli. Finally, yet another Fields Medalist, Richard Borcherds, has a blog. Not only do Fields Medalists like to have blogs it seems, but they also like to use them to discuss physics…

Some other blogs I’ve run across include A Strange Universe, from gravitational wave physicist Warren Anderson, which includes his Dire Straits inspired Papers For Nothing. Also John Armstrong’s The Unapologetic Mathematician, which has a lot of expository material, and Julie Rehmeyer’s MathTrek, a blog at the Science News web-site.

Steven Weinberg has canceled a planned public talk at an event to be held in conjunction with PASCOS 2007 at Imperial College in London in July, an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of the arrival of Abdus Salam at Imperial. In a letter to Mike Duff (available here), Weinberg says that he is boycotting the event in response to news of a boycott of Israel by the British National Union of Journalists, due to his belief that there is no possible explanation of this other than widespread anti-Semitism in Britain “especially in the intellectual establishment” or “a desire to pander to the growing Muslim minority in Britain.” Note: any attempts to use mention of this news to justify attempts to carry on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the comment section of my blog will be ruthlessly suppressed.

As usual, Tommaso Dorigo is doing a great job of making current collider physics actually seem exciting and interesting. He’s now spreading rumors of a 4-5 sigma excess of multi-b-jet events being seen by D0. What does CDF data show? He’s keeping his mouth shut about that… Maybe there will be some excitement at the upcoming summer conferences…

There’s a new Harvard College magazine about math, run by undergraduates called The Harvard College Mathematics Review. The first issue contains an article by Noam Elkies about the abc conjecture, and one by Dennis Gaitsgory about how not to teach linear algebra.

Via Mathephysique, here’s an interview with theorist Edouard Brezin.

I keep running across more and more web-sites of theory groups that are putting up material from their theory seminar talks. The latest is the HEFTI Seminar Archive at Davis.

Mike Hopkins gave a Distinguished Lecture Series in Toronto recently. Only audio from the talks is available on-line, and I can attest that forcing someone to try and follow a talk they are interested in like Mike’s The Topological WZW Space of Conformal Blocks just by listening to the audio without always being able to tell what he is writing on the board is just cruel.

Via the n-Category Cafe, notes from a recent conference in Kyoto on Link (also known as Khovanov) homology and categorification. Lots of interesting talks to read, but I’m especially fond of the abstract of Dror Bar-Natan’s talk, which begins:

I’m over forty, I’m a full professor, and it’s time that I come out of the closet. I don’t understand quantum groups and I never did.

Now I don’t feel so bad. Also, for inspiration, check out his Dream Map.

Update: A Chicago network news show has a recent segment about Fermilab and the hunt for the Higgs.

Update: The D0 rumor has made it to Slate.

After last month’s posting at Cosmic Variance about how String Theory is Losing the Public Debate, Sean Carroll seems to have decided to go on the offensive (or defensive…), with a piece in New Scientist entitled String theory: it’s not dead yet, which he reproduces and has a posting about here.

I can’t really disagree with Sean about either title. Yes, string theory is losing the public debate, and no, it’s not dead yet. Some of Sean’s claims in the New Scientist piece are descriptive claims about the behavior of theoretical physicists:

String theorists are still being hired by universities in substantial numbers; new graduate students are still flocking to string theory to do their Ph.D. work…

Ideas about higher-dimensional branes have re-invigorated model-building in more conventional particle physics… Cosmologists thinking about the early universe increasingly turn to ideas from string theory.

All of these are true enough (although the word “re-invigorated” might not be the most appropriate one), but don’t address the value judgment of whether any of this activity is a good thing or not. One could also come up with other evidence for continuing activity in string theory, such as the large number of press releases being issued claiming to have found new ways to “test string theory”, but the fact that these have all been bogus is relevant to evaluating whether this activity is a good thing or not.

Sean’s positive case for string theory is mostly about its role as a quantum gravity theory, acknowledging that the Landscape is a problem, and that progress has slowed since the mid-90s (although more accurate would be “come to a dead halt, now moving backwards..”). He describes that period as “it seemed as if there was a revolution every month”, displaying the predilection for over-the-top hype that has characterized much string theory salesmanship over the years. His claims about the achievements of string theory vary from relatively modest exaggerations (“The theory has provided numerous deep insights into pure mathematics”) to standard misleading propaganda:

“a promising new approach has connected string theory to the dynamics of the quark-gluon plasma observed at particle accelerators” (connected? wonder how strong the connection is…)

“it is compatible with everything we know about particle physics” (and also compatible with just about everything we know to not be true about particle physics…)

“Michael Green and John Schwarz demonstrated that string theory was a consistent framework” (there’s a lot more to consistency than canceling that anomaly…)

“It was realized that those five versions of the theory were different manifestations of a single underlying structure, M-theory” (would be nice if we knew what M-theory actually was…)

In the comment section Sean explains how string theorists have no intention of standing behind what used to be considered the main “prediction” of the theory, TeV-scale supersymmetry:

If the LHC discovers supersymmetry, string theorists will be happy, but if it doesn’t there’s no reason to give up on string theory — the superpartners might just be too heavy.

So, prospects for string theory remain bright, since with each new experiment the situation is: heads they win, tails doesn’t count.

Also at Cosmic Variance is the latest in an exchange between Joe Polchinski and Lee Smolin, entitled Science or Sociology? (some earlier parts of the exchange are here). I’m mostly resisting the impulse to get involved in various parts of that argument since Smolin doesn’t need my help: the points at issue don’t seem to me central to the claims of his book, and his positions and what he wrote in the book are perfectly defensible.

While I don’t see the point of arguing about things like how conjectural the AdS/CFT duality conjecture is (pretty damn conjectural I’d think though, since no one even knows what the definition of one side of the duality is…), it is interesting to see what it is that Polchinski finds most objectionable about Smolin’s criticisms. In the context of an argument about how much of a problem the positive CC was considered to be by string theorists in the late 90s, he strong objects to Smolin’s description of “a group of experts doing what they can to save a cherished theory in the face of data that seem to contradict it”, going on to describe the work on moduli stabilization that led to the landscape as “a major success” which Smolin is trying to paint as a “crisis”. Ignoring the argument about who thought what back then (although if you really care about this, for some relevant evidence, see the Witten quote), in a larger sense “a group of experts doing what they can to save a cherished theory in the face of data that seem to contradict it” describes precisely the behavior of Polchinski, Susskind, Arkani-Hamed, and many others in the face of the disastrous situation created by the “major success” of moduli stabilization.

The “anthropic landscape” philosophy is nothing more than an attempt to evade failure, and it is an failure of scientific ethics of a dramatic kind. Once one understands a speculative idea dear to one’s heart well enough to see that one can’t make any conventional scientific predictions using it, ethics demands that one admit failure. Instead we’ve seen scientists announcing a new way of doing science, even writing popular books and magazine articles promoting this. Most physicists (including even a sizable fraction of string theorists) are appalled by this behavior. If you don’t believe me, consult a random sampling of the faculty in your nearest physics department, or watch Susskind’s recent talk in Israel where he describes himself as at the center of a circular firing squad.

Polchinski ends by claiming that Smolin’s case for “group-think” and for a “sociological” problem with string theory is “quite weak”. This problem is obviously hard to quantify and a matter of perspective. While I don’t doubt that Polchinski sees himself as not suffering from “group-think”, if he were, he obviously wouldn’t think so. One thing I think is undeniable about the “sociology” of all this is that the blog phenomenon has put a lot of evidence out there for any unbiased observer to judge for themselves, and this is one of the main reasons for what even a fervent string theory proponent like Sean Carroll has noticed: string theorists are losing this debate.

Anyone who regularly follows the most well-known blogs run by string theorists pretty soon becomes convinced that they have a real problem. Lubos Motl is the Id of string theory on uncensored display. The fact that his colleagues promoted him and show signs of only having a problem with his politics, not his behavior as a scientist (if they have any problem with his calls for my death or other attacks on me, I’ve never seen evidence of it) is truly remarkable. Two out of three recent string theory textbooks prominently carry his endorsement. All another prominent string theorist blogger, Clifford Johnson, has to say about Lubos is “I thank him for his physics contributions and for widening the discussion.” This was in the context of an eight-part personal attack on Lee Smolin and me for having written books that Clifford steadfastly refuses to read. The other of the three prominent string theory bloggers is renowned for his sneering attacks on the competence of anyone who dares to criticize string theory, issues press releases claiming tests for string theory that other physicists describe as “hilarious”, while misusing his position of responsibility at the arXiv to stop links to criticism of string theory articles from appearing there. Among those string theorists without their own blogs who choose to participate in the comment sections of others, a surprising number seem to think that it is an ethical thing to do to post often personal attacks on string theory critics from behind the cover of anonymity. Less anonymously, a large group of string theorists at the KITP seem to have thought it was an intelligent idea to act like a bunch of jeering baboons, on video, for distribution on the web.

This kind of public behavior and the lack of any condemnation of it by other string theorists is what has convinced many physicists and others that, yes, string theory does have a “sociological” problem. I have to confess that my experience over the last couple years has caused me to come to the conclusion that the string theory community has a much greater problem with personal and professional ethics than I thought when I wrote my book. The fact that so many string theorists have decided to respond to my book and Smolin’s not with scientific arguments, but with unprofessional behavior I think speaks volumes for the strength of their scientific case, and this has been noticed by their colleagues, science journalists, and the general public. While I applaud Polchinski for behaving professionally in his response to the two books, I suggest that he should take a look at the behavior of many of his colleagues and ask himself again whether or not there might be a sociological problem here.

Still traveling, but will be back soon. This week’s bogus “test of string theory” is described in a NASA press release about three satellite-based experiments that would look for violations of the equivalence principle. From the press release:

…it [a violation of the equivalence principle] could provide the first real evidence for string theory. String theory elegantly explains fundamental particles as different vibrations of infinitesimal strings, and in doing so solves many lingering problems of modern physics… The equivalence principle could offer one way to test string theory…

…string theory makes a range of predictions about how strong this new force would be, so it’s possible that the effect would be too small for even these space-borne instruments to detect.

Does string theory predict violations of the equivalence principle? From a posting on Lubos Motl’s blog:

In reality, it will probably be impossible to falsify string theory because string theory is probably correct and you can’t ever falsify correct theories. 😉 But if string theory were wrong, there would be thousands of ways to falsify it, even in the very near future. Although string theory predicts many new phenomena whose details are not uniquely known, it also implies that many old principles are exactly valid. If string theory is correct, the superposition principle of quantum mechanics, Lorentz invariance, unitarity, crossing symmetry, equivalence principle etc. are valid to much higher accuracy than the accuracy with which they have been tested as of 2006.

If you believe that string theory is wrong, just prove any of the theories predicting all the bizarre phenomena like Lorentz symmetry breaking, breaking of unitarity, locality, rotational invariance, and so on. I think that all these things are badly motivated – but it’s mostly because I know that it seems that they can’t be embedded in string theory. If you don’t believe string theory, you should believe that anything can occur and every new test of Lorentz invariance has a potential to falsify special relativity. Every new test has a potential to falsify the equivalence principle. And there are dozens of such examples. Without string theory, all these laws are approximate accidental laws and symmetries. I assure you that string theory will pass every new test of this type and its foes will always lose. String theory allows us to redefine what proposals about new physics are reasonable and what proposals are not, even without the exact knowledge of the vacuum.

I guess it’s all right that I don’t have time to comment on this, since no comment seems necessary…

The LHC media blitz is in full swing, with last week’s long New Yorker article now followed by an unusually long and detailed New York Times piece titled A Giant Takes On Physics’ Biggest Questions. Dennis Overbye does an excellent job of covering the story. Besides the experimentalists actually involved in building the machines, he quotes theorists John Ellis, Joe Lykken, Nima Arkani-Hamed and Michelangelo Mangano. To distinguish this piece from the New Yorker one, here it’s Mangano who is the one who consumes a lot of espresso. There are side-bars about the recent problem with the Fermilab magnets and about the implications for string theory (not much). There’s a multimedia component to the Times coverage, with interactive graphics, a slide show, a podcast (an interview with Arkani-Hamed, described as “one of the physicists at the center of the project”), and a video.

I do fear all this LHC coverage is peaking too early. With still probably at least a year to go before the machine even starts taking data, the coverage may already be generating an LHC overexposure problem: see Chad Orzel’s new posting Tired of the LHC. If Chad is already complaining about this, boy is he going to be grumpy about it by a year from now…

The New Yorker keeps its physics theme going this week with cover art that includes a blackboard full of basic equations from quantum mechanics.

The NY Times article includes the usual not very cogent explanation of the role of the Higgs. For something much better aimed at explaining Higgs-hunting to the general public, see the online interactive presentation Hunt for Higgs, part of a web-site about the LHC called Big Bang.

Blogging may be light the next week or so since I’ll be traveling. First stop is Trieste, where I’ll be speaking at 5pm on Friday as part of a large event there called FEST. From there I’ll make brief visits to Geneva, Paris and London, back here in New York late next week.