Not Even Wrong

The September issue of Physics World is out, featuring a 13 page advertising supplement for string theory which is pretty much unadulterated hype. The same issue includes an editorial which takes the point of view that the only problem with string theory is that:

String theorists need to do much more to explain their field’s genuine links to experiment

String theory’s lack of falsifiability is minimized as a problem, and the fact that it “raises several philosophical issues, such as the role of anthropic reasoning” is listed as a point in its favor. As for those who complain that string theory predicts nothing, in particular nothing about what will happen at the LHC, they are told to just shut up:

With CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) due to switch on next year, now is the wrong time to slam string theory for its lack of predictive power. While not able to prove string theory is right, the discovery of supersymmetric particles at the LHC would give it a major boost…

The fact that string theory doesn’t predict supersymmetry visible at LHC scales is actually acknowledged in the advertising supplement by Kachru and Susskind.

The few quotes from string theory skeptics allowed seem chosen to be those that put string theory in the most favorable possible light (except for Phil Anderson, who is reduced to hostile spluttering by Polchinski’s claims that string theory may explain high T_c superconductivity). This allows the editorialist to conclude:

However, the richness of string theory that has become apparent in the last decade, and its increasing contact with the real world, gives theorists something to shout about. This is why our main feature on the subject, which started with fairly modest intentions, has ballooned into the longest ever to appear in Physics World. As the views of even many non-string theorists in the article make clear, the theory still holds all the potential it ever did to revolutionize our understanding of the universe.

The critique of string theory by Smolin and myself is pretty much completely ignored or dismissed, with Susskind quoted as having come up with a new insulting term for us (to him we’re “Smoit”, evidently he likes that better than the “Swolin” favored by those in Santa Barbara). The claim is made that

few string theorists think that the sometimes negative portrayal of string theory in the popular arena recently has had much of an effect other than to irritate people.

Amidst the endless misleading hype contained in the Physics World piece, there’s some that simply is demonstrably completely untrue. The most egregious example might be the discussion of Witten’s Fields Medal which claims that it was awarded him due to his work on string theory compactification spaces:

.. with the study of 6D “Calabi–Yau” spaces making Witten in 1990 the first physicist to be awarded the prestigious Fields Medal

The quotes from Witten himself don’t include any of the hype about connections to experiment. He describes string theory as something very poorly understood, with even the fundamental equations of the theory unknown, and no good ideas about how to find them, leading to the danger that even if his vision is correct, realizing it may just be too hard:

It’s incredibly rich and mostly buried underground. People just know bits and pieces at the surface or that they’ve found by a little bit of digging, even though this so far amounts to an enormous body of knowledge… There is an incredible amount that is understood, an unfathomable number of details. I can’t think of any simple way of summarizing this that will help your readers. But despite that, what’s understood is a tiny, tiny amount of the full picture.. One of the greatest worries we face is that the theory may turn out to be too difficult to understand… [about the search for equations for string theory] This is certainly a question that interests me… but if I don’t work on it all the time, it’s because it’s difficult to know how to make progress.

Unlike Witten, many of the other string theorists quoted seem to have no problem with issuing streams of highly misleading hype claiming “predictions” of string theory. For instance, from David Gross:

String theory is full of qualitative predictions, such as the production of black holes at the LHC or cosmic strings in the sky, and this level of prediction is perfectly acceptable in almost every other field of science,” he says. “It’s only in particle physics that a theory can be thrown out if the 10th decimal place of a prediction doesn’t agree with experiment.

I don’t know how to characterize this kind of claim that string theory is as predictive as other scientific theories, just not able to get accuracy to 10 decimal places, as anything other than out-and-out dishonesty. If someone could come up with a legitimate, distinctive, testable prediction of string theory that gave even the correct order of magnitude for some experimental result, that would be a huge breakthrough.

Michael Green, while describing the landscape and its potential to allow for a small CC as “an enormous success” for string theory, is one of several string theorists characterizing the status of string theory as being just as good as that of QFT, with the landscape not a real problem at all, just a “supposed” one:

This supposed problem with a theory having many solutions has never been a problem before in science.

Several people promote the anthropic point of view, with Susskind describing it as the third superstring revolution, one that is even more of a revolution than the others. Polchinski adds

In terms of changing the way we think about the world, the anthropic landscape is certainly as big as the other revolutions

while Susskind’s colleague Shamit Kachru is described as “in the middle”, sensibly pointing out that it would have been a stupid thing for people to do, once they realized that the ratios of sizes of planetary orbits were environmental, to start claiming that “there is a deep anthropic lesson to be learned from Newtonian gravity.”

All in all, I think that the picture the Physics World article presents of the reaction of leading string theorists to the failure of the superstring unification project is a depressing one. Instead of acknowledging in any way this failure and considering what can be learned from it, on the whole they seem to prefer to abandon science for anthropic pseudo-science, to spout misleading claims of bogus “predictions” of string theory, and make indefensible claims that the lack of predictivity of string theory is not unusual for a science.

On the other hand, among string theory skeptics, I fear that the attitude of Howard Georgi is all too common:

I have been critical in the past of some of the rhetoric used by string-theory enthusiasts,” says Howard Georgi of Harvard University, who coinvented the supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model in 1981. “But I think that this problem has largely corrected itself as string theorists learned how complicated string theory really is. I am concerned about the focus of young theorists on mathematical details, rather than what I would consider the real-world physics of scattering experiments, but with any luck the LHC will take care of that by reminding people how interesting the real world can be.”

The problem with string theory is not too much mathematics and a lack of effort towards making connection to real world experiments, but that it is a wrong idea about unification, and thus cannot ever explain the standard model or predict what lies beyond it. The recent move among string theorists to hype bogus claims about connections to experiment, abandoning the search for greater mathematical insight into string theory as just “too hard”, retooling themselves as more salable “string phenomenologists” and “string cosmologists” is not a healthy trend. It is based on adopting the Susskind-Polchinski “multiverse” revolution in the received wisdom about how to do fundamental physics, slowly turning a once great subject from a science into a pseudo-science.

Update: Lubos is beside himself with glee over the Physics World article, see here and here (don’t miss the photo-shopped “Smoit” graphic of me and Lee Smolin). For something more reasoned, there’s a short piece at Wired.

All sorts of schools and workshops occurring this summer have been putting up materials from the talks on-line. Sometimes this is just an audio recording of the talk, which can be very frustrating if you’re interested in the details of a subject, leaving you desperately trying to guess what symbols on the blackboard correspond to the scratching noises and words from the speaker that you are hearing. Best is a set of slides used by the speaker, together with audio or video of the full talk. Some examples worth looking at include:

Today Slashdot brings us the news that Gamma Ray Anomaly Could Test String Theory. As usual with such media claims about the testability of string theory, this is complete nonsense. The story is based on this Scientific American blog posting, which in turn is based on this paper by the MAGIC gamma ray telescope collaboration.

The claims about testing string theory aren’t in the paper, but appear to come from string theorist Dimitri Nanopoulos who claims that he predicted (or, more accurately, “suggested”) the kind of effect seen by MAGIC using string theory. As far as I can tell though, just about no string theorists except Nanopoulos and his collaborators Nick Mavromatos and John Ellis actually believe this. Mavromatos and Nanopoulos also believe that string theory is responsible for the way that our brains work, here’s the abstract of one of their papers on this:

Microtubule (MT) networks, subneural paracrystalline cytosceletal structures, seem to play a fundamental role in the neurons. We cast here the complicated MT dynamics in the form of a 1+1-dimensional non-critical string theory, thus enabling us to provide a consistent quantum treatment of MTs, including enviromental friction effects. We suggest, thus, that the MTs are the microsites, in the brain, for the emergence of stable, macroscopic quantum coherent states, identifiable with the preconscious states. Quantum space-time effects, as described by non-critical string theory, trigger then an organized collapse of the coherent states down to a specific or conscious state.

Claims have been made by many string theorists that not only does string theory not predict this kind of violation of Lorentz invariance, but exactly the opposite: string theory predicts no such violation. String theorist Jacques Distler earlier this year even went so far as to have the University of Texas issue a press release trumpeting his claims to have shown that string theory is falsifiable, using a calculation based on the assumption that string theory preserves Lorentz invariance (either his colleagues or a PRL referee wouldn’t let him make this claim in the paper the press release was based on, but that’s another story…).

Claims have been made (although there is controversy about this), that the main competing quantum gravity research program, Loop Quantum Gravity, predicts this sort of violation of Lorentz invariance, and this would be one way of distinguishing it from string theory. Lubos Motl has a new posting about the MAGIC result, mainly concerned with knocking it down since he fears that it will be used as evidence for LQG and against string theory.

It seems to me that in any case, the actual experimental evidence here is far too weak to support any claim that a violation of Lorentz invariance has been shown. Among the usual nonsense on Slashdot, there was the following sensible comment about the MAGIC result from an astrophysicist:

What they are saying is that there are still details we don’t understand about AGN [active galactic nuclei] like Markarian 501. So, while this effect could be a first sign of quantum gravity (*not* string theory in particular, as others have pointed out), it could also simply be something going on in the intrinsic spectrum of the flares themselves. I’d personally consider the second explanation more likely at this stage.

As they also point out, one approach to sort out the ambiguity would be to observe other flary AGN at different redshifts (distances). One could then, for example, see if the delay gets shorter or longer as the distance changes, as one would expect with a quantum gravity effect due to propagation to Earth.

Utterly Off-topic, But How Can I Resist Mentioning: According to this blog entry by a USC student, not only am I the “archnemesis” of string theorist blogger Clifford Johnson, but also

If string theory were a vampire, he’d be Buffy.

I’ll have to consult my friends and colleagues on the resemblance to Buffy question, personally I don’t see it.

I don’t know about vampires, but these “tests of string theory” are kind of like the living dead, staggering around trying to get their teeth into people and turn them into string theory partisans. No matter how often you blow their heads off with a shotgun, more keep coming…

Update: Lubos and I seem to be in complete agreement about this experimental result and the Nanopoulos et. al. explanation of it. This situation appears to have driven him over the edge.

Update: See Backreaction for a more detailed posting about the MAGIC result.

From Ars Mathematica I learned about an article at Ars Technica describing a scandal involving plagiarism of theoretical physics papers by about 20 different people, some of them students at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. Many of the papers were refereed and published in well-known journals, and one made it into what is now perhaps the most well-known particle theory journal, the Journal of High Energy Physics.

According to Dr. Sarioglu, [faculty member at METU] two of the authors of this paper were graduate students with a prodigious track record of publication: over 40 papers in a 22-month span. Dr. Karasu, who sat on the panel that evaluated their oral exams, became suspicious when their knowledge of physics didn’t appear to be consistent with this level of output. Discussions with Dr. Tekin revealed that the students also did not appear to possess the language skills necessary for this level of output in English-language journals (METU conducts its instruction in English).

This caused these faculty members to go back and examine their publications in detail, at which point the plagiarism became clear. “All they had done was literally take big chunks of others’ work using the ‘copy and paste’ technique,” Dr. Sarioglu said, “steal from here and there to cook up an Intro which is basically the same stuff in all their manuscripts, carry out some really trivial calculations such as taking derivatives of some simple functions, and write up the results in the format of a paper.” The department chair was informed and started an internal investigation; the university’s Ethics Committee has since become involved.

In the mean time, the faculty and administration at METU are attempting to do some damage control. The university’s president personally sent a letter to the Journal of High Energy Physics requesting that the paper be withdrawn—a request that, as noted above, has yet to be acted upon. Meanwhile, the faculty members mentioned above are working with the arXiv administrators to ensure that any plagiarized work is removed.

The Ars Technica article emphasizes the role of the arXiv in this, since the plagiarized papers first appeared there and are still available there, although arXiv administrators have replaced the latest versions of the papers with a notation “withdrawn by arXiv administrators due to plagiarism”. I don’t actually think the arXiv is the real scandal here, rather the fact that refereeing standards in theoretical physics are now so low that obviously plagiarized papers don’t seem to have much trouble getting into even the best journals in the field. Some of the other journals that published plagiarized papers from this same group of people include:

There are also other papers by some of the same authors which the arXiv does not list as plagiarized (published in Nuclear Physics B, here, Classical and Quantum Gravity, here, International Journal of Modern Physics, here and here) .

Remind me again, why is it that universities are paying large sums to get these journals?

Update: My guess is that most theorists are just going to ignore this and pretend it didn’t happen. As far as I can tell, the journals involved haven’t even bothered to add a notation to the articles still available on-line to note that they are plagiarisms, much less do anything to stop this from happening again. But at least Lubos agrees with me:

The journals and arXiv are clearly flooded with papers that no one cares about which is why this thing can happen.

Nature has an article this week by Jenny Hogan about the K-theory journal situation reported on here, under the heading Strife proves hard to solve for K-theory. The article does show how real journalists do some things much better than bloggers, like calling up and interviewing the relevant people to sort out what happened. Hogan talked to Catriona Byrne, the mathematics editor at Springer, who claims that the managing editor of the journal, Anthony Bak, was sacked in January 2007, since he had stopped forwarding papers to them since April 2006. Also in January, Bak asked the editorial board to resign, which they did, although Byrne claims that Springer didn’t find out about this until May.

Much of the controversy about this has to do with the question of how papers accepted after April 2006 were handled, with claims being made that some editors and authors were unaware that they were not being forwarded to Springer for publication. One of the editors who is unhappy about this is Eric Friedlander:

Eric Friedlander at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, a former editor at K-Theory, is in principle sympathetic to the switch. “There is a lot of concern in the mathematics community about the cost of journals,” he says. But on 17 August, Friedlander wrote to Bak to say that despite being named as a member of the editorial board of the new journal, he was not willing to serve “because I cannot endorse the process by which you have withheld manuscripts submitted to K-Theory and proceeded without consultation with authors and the editorial board”…
Friedlander is uncomfortable that papers were held up: “Our responsibility is to review mathematics that is submitted to us and disseminate it.”

Update: For the perspective of one of the authors affected, see here.

Update: For a letter to the editors of K-theory from Matthias Kreck, see this comment.

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…