Not Even Wrong

Despite my abusive treatment of his article Stringscape here recently, Matthew Chalmers was kind enough to send me a copy of the September issue of Physics World, which contains three shorter pieces about string theory (available on-line only to subscribers).

One of the articles is by Fred Goldhaber and entitled Scientific faith put to the test. It’s a scathing attack on the anthropic string theory landscape program, describing it as “antiscience” (rather than my favorite, “pseudo-science”). Goldhaber characterizes this sort of research as “antiscience of the left”, with its adherents promoting the idea that we can’t ever understand some things since they are due to chance. He contrasts this to the “antiscience of the right”, which promotes the idea that we can’t understand things because they come from supernatural origin, and finds both attitudes equally unscientific. As for where antiscience comes from, he has this to say:

On the left, I think that it stems from arrogance (“If I can’t figure it out, no-one ever will”). On the right, I think it comes from defensiveness (“If science is right, religion must be wrong, and that can’t be”). In the end, antiscience on both side boils down to vanity. While we need to stay alert for the vanity of those advocating antiscience, we also should guard against vanity in the name of science.

He ends on a more optimistic note, writing that he does see a difference in those on the “left”. They remain physicists, and if someone finds a “promising route to picking out the right solution to string theory”, they would leap to pursue it. He doesn’t speculate on what they would do if someone shows that string theory just inherently can’t ever predict anything…

Philosopher of science Steven Weinstein has a piece with the title Philosophy pulls strings, which tries to make the case that string theory is leading to some new interaction between physics and philosophy, since it “forces us to tackle issues that cross both disciplines.” As far as one of his topics goes, the anthropic pseudo-science, the main role I see for philosophers is to forcefully point out to the scientists involved that they are doing something intellectually highly disreputable and should stop. He also discusses a much more non-trivial and interesting topic, that of the philosphical questions about space and time raised by quantum gravity, a subject where philosophers may or may not end up having something quite useful to contribute.

Philosphers Nancy Cartwright and Roman Frigg contribute a very interesting article about how scientific theories are evaluated, entitled String theory under scrutiny [available here, thanks to commenter “R” for pointing this out]. The make the important point that immediate experimental testability of a theory is not all there is to deciding whether something is science or not. When scientific ideas are new, they often are not understood well enough to be able to extract definitive predictions from them. Theorists are generally engaged in research programs, the end result of which is supposed to be something experimentally testable. In order to evaluate a research program, you can’t just note that it isn’t predicting anything, you have to evaluate its prospects for reaching its stated goals. They describe good research programs as “progressive”:

Good research programmes are those that are progressive, i.e. those whose theories get better and better, even if individual theories face serious difficulties at certain times.

The fundamental problem with string theory is that, as far as its central goal of unifying physics goes, over the last nearly 25 years it has not only not made any progress toward explaining anything about particle physics, but, quite the opposite. Everything that has been learned about string theory makes it more and more clear that the original hopes for getting unification this way were just misguided and can’t work. The derivative here is the wrong sign.

There are areas in which string theory has had successes, notably in mathematics and in strongly-coupled gauge theories. But these are really different research programs, and the fact that progress has been made in them doesn’t change the facts about the colossal failure of the unification program. Cartwright and Frigg try and put various other “dimensions” on the string theory research program, including that of “elegance and simplicity”, writing that:

Radical string critics would then conclude that string theory is progressive only in the dimensions of elegance and simplicity (in the sense that the theory only contains one class of basic objects – strings – from which all the basic particles and forces follow), while being largely stagnant in the other dimensions.

As a “radical string critic”, I don’t see things this way. According to M-theory, “string theory” is not a theory of “one class of basic objects”. Strings are just part of a hugely complicated picture, one which at the moment is neither elegant nor simple. String theorists hope that there is some elegant and simple underlying theory, but they have not been able to come up with it despite a huge amount of work. Whatever underlies M-theory, it may be something very complicated. Perhaps M-theory is just a rather obscure corner of a story very different than what string theorists are hoping to find, one that may tell us some interesting things, but just doesn’t have anything to say about how to unify particle physics.

It seems that if you’re a Fields Medalist, you now have to have a blog. The latest of these is a new blog from Timothy Gowers. His blog will also function as a blog for the upcoming Princeton Companion to Mathematics that he is editing, and he has started a discussion about the possibility of a wiki devoted to “mathematical tricks”.

Rigorous Trivialities is another new mathematics blog, one of the rare ones not being run by a Fields Medalist.

Mathematics will now have its own “rumor mill” to gather information about job searches, to be called the Mathematics Job Wiki. It appears to have been set up by Greg Kuperberg, “who however recuses himself from handling confidential e-mail and is not the wiki moderator”. All we are told about the moderator is that “someone without a current tenure-track appointment will read e-mail sent to the Wiki Moderator.”

Gerard ‘t Hooft has translated his lecture notes on Lie Groups and Physics from Dutch into English, increasing by about two orders of magnitude the number of people who can read them.

Math and physics geeks are now certifiably cool, as the TV show Numb3rs goes into yet another season, and is joined by The Big Bang Theory. New York magazine got together a group of Columbia physics grad students to take a look at the show and discuss.

The early history of string theory is getting lots of attention these days, especially because of a conference on the subject last May. Some related articles have now appeared on the arXiv, from Di Vecchia and Schwimmer, Ramond and Schwarz. At Caltech, an Oral Histories project has made available the transcript of a long interview with Schwarz.

Hendrik, a commenter here, pointed out that there’s more of the latest string theory hype concerning results from the MAGIC telescope, originally discussed here. Now New Scientist has weighed in with an article entitled Finally, a MAGIC test for string theory? According to the article, Mavromatos and collaborators say that their (non-critical) string theory model “predicts the 4-minute delay exactly”. Polchinski is quoted to the effect that this would falsify (critical) string theory. LQG is completely cut out of the deal, with no mention of it at all. They really need to do a better marketing job. The way things are now, any supposed evidence of quantum gravitational effects is automatically evidence for string theory, in one version or another.

For the latest attempt to market string theory to astrophysicists, see this new article on astro-ph. The abstract begins not by acknowledging that string theory can’t make any predictions about cosmology, but by claiming instead that the problem is

Attempts to connect string theory with astrophysical observation are hampered by a jargon barrier, where an intimidating profusion of orientifolds, Kahler potentials, etc. dissuades cosmologists from attempting to work out the astrophysical observables of specific string theory solutions from the recent literature.

Update: Slashdot has a thoroughly worthless article about this last paper, based on the New Scientist article about it.

It appears that the release of the French edition of Lee Smolin’s book (entitled Rien ne va plus en physique ! : L’échec de la théorie des cordes) has stirred up quite a lot of attention to the string theory controversy over there. A correspondant wrote to tell me that this month’s edition of the French popular science magazine La Recherche has the controversy over string theory on the cover (La theorie des cordes dit-elle le vrai?) and four articles on the subject inside. Unfortunately I don’t have a copy of the magazine or on-line access to the articles, but just to an English language summary. It’s hard to tell from this exactly what’s in the articles. One of them is an interview with the historian of science Peter Galison, who seems to describe string theory as having “initiated a new way of seeing, crucial for the future of physics.” No idea what that is about, but I hope it’s not about the string theory landscape….

The string theorists of the Paris region have a web-page, which recently has acquired a defensive section about La faillite de la theorie des cordes? It encourages people to read Polchinski’s review of my book and Smolin’s (my response to this is here), as well as papers critical of LQG. The same web-page also has links to other information sources about string theory, including to two blogs. Personally I don’t think Jacques Distler’s blog is much of an advertisement for the subject, but sending people to Lubos Motl’s is a pretty funny thing to do….

Plagiarism Scandal

Today’s Nature has an article by Geoff Brumfiel with more details on the plagiarism scandal described here. At last count it involves 15 authors, 67 papers on the arXiv, of which about 35 were refereed and published, in 18 different journals. The arXiv has set up a special page with information about this. As far as I can tell from checking a few examples, most of the published papers are still available online at the journals, with no indication of their plagiarized nature. One exception is the plagiarized paper at JHEP, which has now been removed, with the notation

This paper has been removed because of plagiarism. We regret that the paper was published.

As far as I know, neither JHEP nor any of the journals has given any indication of an intent to change their refereeing procedures because of this scandal.

Journal of K-theory

The editors of the new Journal of K-theory have issued a public statement, explaining in detail their plans for how to handle papers submitted to the older journal, K-theory, where they had resigned as editors.

There are yet more hep-th articles on the anthropic principle this week, following recent ones devoted to the implications for fundamental physics of the heights of giraffes and sizes of brontosaurus brains. The TASI summer school designed to train particle theory graduate students this year featured talks by Raphael Bousso expounding the anthropic landscape pseudo-science as a “solution” to the CC problem. His lecture notes are now available. In them he does refer to one problem that plagues this subject, that of how to identify the intelligent observers whose probability of existence everything depends on:

The problem of characterizing observers, especially in vacua very different from ours, remains challenging.

Last night a new paper on this subject appeared on the arXiv, by Maor, Krauss and Starkman, making the point about anthropic arguments that:

arguments of these sort (see for example [3] [reference is to papers by Bousso]) strongly rely on the assertion that we must be typical observers, an assertion without sound fundamental scientific basis at the current time.

The authors end with a conclusion about what you can learn from anthropic arguments:

Finally, the correlations illuminated by anthropic reasoning imply that what we ultimately learn from anthropic arguments is that the existence of us and the existence of the observed value of Lambda do not contradict each other. That is nice, but hardly surprising.

In their acknowledgment section they thank Bousso for “lively discussions”. He thanks lots of people in his acknowledgments section, but not them. I don’t know about this question of intelligent life in other pocket universes, but the question of whether there’s intelligent life on hep-th these days seems to still be open.

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.