Not Even Wrong

I won’t bother to write up something about the background of today’s MiniBooNE results, since Tommaso Dorigo has already done a better job than I ever could. He also provides a link to where the live feed of the seminar will be, starting at 11am CDT. I’ll be in class at that time, but an hour later will try and attend the local seminar here at Columbia featuring Mike Shaevitz discussing the results.

And the result is….

No mu-neutrino to electron-neutrino oscillations of the sort that would explain the LSND result and require an extension of the Standard Model (beyond giving masses to the 3 known neutrinos). MiniBooNE was designed specifically to look for this, and has successfully ruled it out at 98% confidence level. They do see something anomalous in their data at low energy, but it is not compatible with being due to the kind of neutrino oscillations they were looking for. It’s also true that they just first got a look at this data two weeks ago, still have a lot of work to do to see if there is some sort of background contamination they hadn’t expected at these energies, or something they didn’t know about low energy cross-sections. Maybe it will take them a while to sort this out, but the bottom line is that what they were looking for is definitely not there.

Press release here, paper to come soon.

Update: For an excellent description of the result from Heather Ray, one of the MiniBooNE experimenters, see this guest posting at Cosmic Variance.

Update:

Warning: serious people should stop reading now, the rest is a low form of entertainment.

For something truly hilarious, you really should be following Lubos’s continually evolving misunderstandings of this experimental result, which he has taken as a reason for launching into another bizarre rant about me and Lee Smolin. As near as I can figure out, Lee and I are responsible for the misguided idea of designing an experiment like MiniBooNE to check into the possibility that LSND was seeing evidence of a sterile neutrino. His posting keeps changing (its URL is miniboone-confirms-lsnd, title now “Miniboone Refutes LSND”), with the early versions saying:

Evidence for several types of neutrino oscillations have been known for a decade or more. That includes atmospheric neutrino oscillations, solar neutrino oscillations, and a lab experiment called LSND in Los Alamos.

Today, Fermilab’s MiniBooNE experiment has confirmed that the LSND results were correct and a more subtle explanation than the simple two-flavor oscillation is necessary. The result rules out the possibility that the observed oscillation is a two-flavor oscillation involving a new sterile neutrino. Their results indicate that there is something surprising that doesn’t fit the most obvious model.

He does seem to have more recently gotten a clue about this and noticed that it doesn’t confirm the LSND results, editing his posting and adding the standard obsessive rant. I see that in his previous posting (about a Harvard faculty meeting), according to him the proposed new Harvard core curriculum states that “All of science education must lead to increasing food production for the working class in the next 5 years [added to please Peter Woit]”.

It seems that I am not only determining the course of neutrino experiments, but also setting the Harvard core curriculum. My powers are truly immense…

Update: Lubos has now changed the file-name from “miniboone-confirms-lsnd.html” to miniboone-refutes-lsnd.html, and deleted the comments from people explaining to him that he was confused. The new version starts off with:

I have erased several comments that only increased the amount of confusion, changed the filename to break links from crackpots’ blogs, and hope that the text below is now more or less OK.

The latest “This Week’s Finds” by John Baez discusses Felix Klein and his “Erlanger Programm”, which essentially was the idea that geometry should be understood as the study of Lie groups G, their subgroups H, and coset spaces G/H. This, supplemented with Cartan’s notion of a connection, allowing things that only locally look like G/H, is very much at the heart of our modern view of geometry. John gives links to quite a few things worth reading by and about Klein here. Another very interesting document is Klein’s own history of 19th century mathematics “Development of mathematics in the 19th century”.

I’m very much looking forward to the next installment of TWF, where John promises some insights into Hecke algebras. He also has a wonderful posting that generated an interesting discussion at the n-category cafe on the topic of mathematical exposition, entitled Why Mathematics Is Boring.

For some more mathematics blogging of the highest possible quality, see Terry Tao’s postings on his Simons lectures at MIT, here, here and here.

I wrote a bit about the LHC Theory Initiative here last year. They have just announced the award of two graduate fellowships and say that they will be awarding postdoctoral fellowships in the future. Unclear from this if they were successful in their efforts to get NSF funding, the solicitation of applications for the fellowship just mentions an older grant to Johns Hopkins.

NPR has run a two part series on the LHC (here and here). The first part features CERN theorist Alvaro de Rujula. I had the great pleasure of taking a particle theory course from him when I was a student at Harvard a very long time ago. He cut an impressive figure, and provided a survey of the subject that was both enlightening and entertaining.

Scott Aaronson provides quotes from someone else (Gian-Carlo Rota) whose lectures I attended around the same time, including one that ends “You and I know that mathematics, by definition, is not and never will be flaky”. I kind of agree with the sentiment in the full quote, but my experience with Rota back then was a rather weird one. For some misguided reason I had decided that since category theory was the most abstract kind of mathematics I had heard of, it would be a good idea to take a course on it. The only course on the subject was a graduate course down at MIT offered by Rota, so I started going down there to sit in on it. A few lectures into the course Rota all of a sudden announced that he had decided that only those students actually enrolled for credit should be taking the course, and that the several of us who were just auditing should leave. So we did, somewhat mystified (it’s not like the room was over-packed or anything). To this day, I still don’t know what that was about. Perhaps Rota knew that he was doing me a favor by stopping me from thinking about category theory at that point in my education, when in retrospect it seems likely that it really would have been somewhat of a waste.

There’s a lot more about Rota at this web-site. His capsule reviews in the back of the journal he edited, Advances in Mathematics, provided outrageous entertainment for many years (although some might at times think that they were, well, flaky…).

This past weekend I was at the University of Central Florida, participating in a symposium organized by Costas Efthimiou of the physics department there. It was sponsored by two student organizations, the university’s Society of Physics Students and Campus Freethought Alliance. There were two speakers, Jim Gates and myself. I suspect that the organizers and many in the audience were hoping for some fireworks between Gates and myself, taking opposite sides on the controversy over string theory, but I fear that we disappointed them.

My talk was entitled The Challenge of Unifying Particle Physics, and my intention was to avoid spending much time going over the problems of string theory, since I’m pretty tired of that, and instead to try and explain to the audience some of the basic facts about symmetries, representations and quantum mechanics, together with an outline of the current state of efforts to unify physics. Gates gave a very general talk about particle physics, unification and string theory, featuring a lot of very impressive graphics he has developed as part of a multi-media course called Superstring Theory: The DNA of Reality.

In the end, there wasn’t that much for us to disagree about. My critique of string theory as a unified theory is based on the claim that the idea of using strings in 10d doesn’t work because the variety of possibilities for handling the extra 6 dimensions makes predictions impossible. Gates has always been skeptical about extra dimensions and wasn’t about to defend them, let alone the landscape. I take his general attitude to be similar to that of Warren Siegel, who he collaborated with in the past, and who explains his point of view here. Recently Gates has been very much interested in representation theory, in his case the representation theory of supersymmetry, where he and collaborators see fundamental problems still to be resolved, and have new ideas about using Clifford algebras to attack them. For one of their recent papers written from the more mathematical end of the problem, see here.

I very much enjoyed my time in Orlando; high points were getting to meet with and talk to some of the physics students there, meeting someone who sometimes comments here who came to the talk, and especially getting the chance to discuss things with Jim, who I found to be impressively knowledgeable and thoughtful about every topic that came up.

It seems that the MiniBooNE neutrino experiment at Fermilab is finally ready to announce results. A talk next Wednesday, 11am, at Fermilab by Janet Conrad and William Louis has been scheduled, with title Initial MiniBooNE Oscillation Results.

Via Alexey Petrov, who explains the significance and teases that there’s a rumor that MiniBooNE sees “something interesting”…

The list of speakers for Strings 2007 is now available. Titles of talks are not available, but as far as I can tell they’re not taking up Lee Smolin on his suggestion that they have someone there to talk about developments in the LQG approach to quantum gravity that string theorists might find interesting. Also, no mathematicians on the list and fewer mathematically inclined string theorists than at Strings 2006. One experimentalist from CERN (Rolandi), presumably to talk about the LHC. Lots and lots of people who work on the landscape and various string compactification schemes, with the Stanford group well-represented.

If you’re in Princeton tomorrow there are a couple of interesting math talks. The talk by Simons at the IAS on Some Results in Differential Cohomology (with Sullivan, presumably about this) should set some kind of historical record for the highest net worth of a speaker giving a technical math talk. Ed Frenkel is giving the colloquium at the math department on Langlands Correspondence for Loop Groups; I wish I had time to go down there to hear it.

The conference in Paris on non-commutative geometry in honor of Alain Connes is continuing this week. Fabien Besnard reports on the talk by Michael Atiyah, where evidently there was some commentary on the role of mathematical beauty in physics, and warning to the young that working on the kind of idea he was discussing would be dangerous for their careers. And no, in French “Physique Retardee” does not carry the same meaning as a naive translation to English would imply…

The web-site of representation theorist Ivan Mirkovic has lots of interesting things, including notes about geometric Langland and the recent work of Witten-Kapustin-Gukov. Another interesting representation theorist web-site is that of Alistair Savage, which includes various lecture notes and an overview about quivers and geometric representation theory.

See here for the program and some lecture notes from the recent spring school at Trieste. Especially interesting are the lectures by Martin Schmaltz about Physics Beyond the Standard Model and the LHC. The Resonaances blog also has a report about a recent talk by Schmaltz at CERN. The bottom line seems to be that, contrary to what was previously thought, in many of the kinds of supersymmetric models supposed to come from string theory, you can’t run the observed scalar superpartner masses back up to the unification scale, so, even if you see such things, you won’t get information about grand unification out of them. Schmaltz gives a graphical representation of the reaction of various people to this. I’m in category A.

Tommaso Dorigo has an excellent suggestion for experimental collaborations worried about the information that their blogging members are putting out. Don’t fight them, join them! He suggests that large experiments like CDF, D0, ATLAS, CMS should be putting out a collaboration-approved blog, getting their story out to the public through this medium.

Update: I realized there is another event I should mention. This Saturday I’ll be giving a talk at a symposium at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, organized by the Society of Physics Students and the Campus Freethought Alliance. Also speaking there will be Jim Gates, who presumably will be taking a somewhat more optimistic view of string theory. I’m still trying to figure out what to talk about, current plan is to cover some of the material in my book, emphasizing the parts everyone ignores that are not about string theory…

Bloggingheads.tv now has some video up with an interesting discussion between John Horgan and George Johnson on a range of topics. One segment is entitled String theory deemed load of crap!, and discusses the controversy over string theory. Both Horgan and Johnson agree that things are not look good for a physical theory when there start being public debates on the subject. Johnson also discusses his time at the KITP and mentions this blog. He seemed to be particularly struck by the behavior of the participants at the session he ran there which involved a lot of bashing of Lee Smolin, with Mark Srednicki raising his hand when Johnson said he didn’t think anyone would call Smolin a crackpot.

Johnson also described the “echo chamber” effect of blogs like this one. I guess I better keep this going by blogging about his commentary about my blogging…

Update: Sean Carroll has a posting about this over at Cosmic Variance entitled String Theory is Losing the Public Debate. Probably best if people join the discussion over there, which so far includes John Horgan and others.

Update: If you like this sort of thing, more blog discussions about string theory here, here, and here… and here and here.

This latest news from the LHC does not sound good. One hopes it won’t affect the LHC schedule.

Update: Also discussed at the Resonaances blog from CERN.

Update: Latest (4/3/07) news here.

Shelly Glashow is traveling around, giving talks bashing his childhood hero Isaac Newton (and noting that he was “surely one of the greatest intellects the world has known”). He’ll be at NYU tomorrow talking on The Errors and Animadversions of Sir Isaac Newton. For a copy of his talk, see here, (and here for a summary in Catalan).

Tonight is the Lawrence Krauss – Brian Greene string theory debate in DC, and next week in Berkeley Krauss is debating John Terning on the subject, at an event entitled Extra Dimensions and String Theory: Physics of the Future or Pure Mathematics? The event is organized by the FQXI funded organization Multiversal Journeys.

Krauss was at the cosmology conference that Tommaso Dorigo has been reporting on, giving a dinner talk dissing anthropic reasoning and pointing out that cosmology has a “miserable future”, since everything is receding from us. His main conference talk was evidently not very optimisitic about near-term prospects for learning more about dark energy or dark matter.

For more about non-commutative geometry and number theory, David Kazhdan is giving a talk at Harvard on April 18 with the following abstract:

Discussion of Alain Connes formulation of the Andre Weil’s theorem. [ the Riemann conjecture for the functional filed case]. Alain Connes found a very interesting way to interpret the results as a computation of an asymptotic of a family of operators of finite rank.

Lieven le Bruyn has a discussion of Plato’s cave and a recent paper Modular shadows and the Levy-Mellin infinity-adic transform, by Marcolli and Manin, who motivate their title by relating Plato’s cave and holography in AdS/CFT.

Update: The Washington Post’s publication Express has an article about Lawrence Krauss and the problems of string theory, entitled Frayed String.

Update: Science has a report on the debate. Also, there’s a report (with audio) from a blogger at the Hooded Hawk blog.

Last week Princeton hosted a workshop on Physics at LHC: From Experiment to Theory. Many of the slides of the talks are available here. The talks covered a wide range of ground, from theory not obviously relevant to the LHC to reports on the status of experiments. The talk by Michael Tuts of ATLAS reports that they may be roughly 5 weeks behind schedule, with nominal schedule setting the start of beam commissioning at 450 GeV late in November. 7 TeV beams won’t be available until summer 2008, with first physics run perhaps in July, and about 10-100 pb^-1 during 2008, giving similar statistics to what the Tevatron has today for some processes. It looks like it may be the 2009 run that will most likely produce data that will go beyond the Tevatron results, although if the Higgs mass is about 150 GeV, there may be evidence in the 2008 data. Plans for a luminosity upgrade in 2015 are already proceeding.

There was also a plan for a meeting of the String Vacuum Project at the workshop, with a discussion paper available here (via their Wiki).

This week, also down in Princeton, but at the IAS, there will be a Workshop on Homological Mirror Symmetry and Applications, mainly devoted to recent work on geometric Langlands and its relation to mirror symmetry. Since I had to teach I couldn’t make it down there today, so unfortunately missed the first talks by Kapustin and Witten, as well as that of Edward Frenkel, but I’m looking forward to going down tomorrow and maybe later in the week to hear some of the talks.

Warning: There’s not much science in this posting, just mostly people behaving badly. You would be well advised to skip this one, unless you find this kind of thing entertaining…

Long ago, as a public service, I set up a posting to hold comments censored by Lubos Motl, since his preferred way of dealing with people who make comments he finds hard to answer is to delete them. It appears that now a place for inconvenient comments censored by Clifford Johnson at his blog Asymptotia is also needed. If you have a copy of a substantive comment deleted from there or want to discuss one of these, you can use the comment section here.

Since the first thing censored was one of my comments, I’ll provide a little background, then reproduce the censored material I have access to.

This exchange began with this comment from Clifford, which seemed to me to be little more than an out-of-control personal attack and rant, so my only response to it was:

Clifford,

As time goes on and the failure of string theory becomes more apparent, you are starting to rant in a manner which is converging with that of your junior colleague at Harvard. You should get a grip.

Not very long after I wrote this comment, the following comment appeared from Lubos Motl:

Dear Mr Woit,

All the best
Lubos

This was followed by a similar comment attacking Smolin for what he had written about the black hole information paradox, and Smolin responded with a short and polite answer (I don’t have copies of these).

Clifford has edited my original comment, removing “in a manner which is converging with that of your junior colleague at Harvard”, and replacing it with “…snip … – personal reference deleted -cvj”. He has also removed the comments from Lubos and the response by Smolin, replacing them with this comment. Here he claims to have deleted these comments without reading them, since, for undisclosed reasons, he has a policy of deleting all comments from Lubos. Whatever the reason for this policy, he does want to make clear to everyone that he has a high opinion of Lubos as a scientist, and for his work at the Reference Frame “widening the discussion” about physics:

Since I have a great deal of respect for his ability as a physicist, however, if he was making a physics point in his comments, perhaps he might make it on his blog and link to this discussion via trackback. I thank him for his physics contributions and widening the discussion.