Not Even Wrong

No, I don’t have any idea who will win this year, but the announcement will be a week from today, on Tuesday October 3. After my initial success in Nobel Prize prognostication, I’ve now retired from that game, but encourage others to play.

Well, no, I’m not going to start putting up here the really interesting gossip that people tell me. If I did so they’d stop telling me such things.

The Theoretical Particle Physics Jobs Rumor Mill has moved yet again. First it was hosted at the University of Washington, then the College of William and Mary, now it’s at UC Davis. No idea why it moved this last time, but earlier this year some gossip told me the entertaining story of why it was booted out of Washington. To be honest, I’ve now completely forgotten all the details, so even if I wanted to violate their confidence, I couldn’t.

The new Rumor Mill site confirms previous gossip I had heard that shows UC Santa Barbara having great success in hiring people in mathematical physics. Is Singer has been a regular visitor there in recent years, spending part of the year in Santa Barbara, part at MIT. This year they’ve hired two very good people: Dave Morrison and Sergei Gukov. Morrison has a mathematics background (algebraic geometry), and Gukov was educated as a physicist (a student of Witten’s), but they both do interesting things at the interface of the two subjects.

Also at UCSB, Michael Freedman has moved his Microsoft Research group down from Redmond, and it is now temporarily in residence at the KITP, waiting to move into offices in the building next door when it is finished and will house the California Nanosystems Institute. Freedman is a topologist and Fields medalist, who was hired away from UC San Diego by my ex-grad school roommate Nathan Myhrvold when he was running Microsoft Research. From what I remember, at the time Nathan told me some mildly entertaining gossip about this, but, again, I’ve forgotten the details, so can’t violate his confidence even if I wanted to.

Also on the move is John Horgan’s blog. His Scientific Curmudgeon blog is being shut down, re-opened as a blog hosted by Discover magazine (which has its own blog). The new blog is called Horganism, and he has some advice which I don’t endorse for would-be scientists;

Also, don’t go into particle physics! Especially don’t waste your time on string theory, or loop-space theory, or multi-universe theories, or any of the other pseudo-scientific crap in physics and cosmology that we science journalists love so much.

Seed magazine has some interesting new articles: one by mathematician Jordan Ellenberg about Fields Medalist and MacArthur winner Terry Tao, another by Joshua Roebke about Jim Simons and his Math for America project, the inspiration for which came over a poker game (OK, it was a poker game to raise money for charity).

The Cern Council Strategy Group has put out a briefing book that gives an excellent survey of the prospects for particle physics and particle physics experiments, especially in Europe, during the new few decades. Very much worth reading.

John Baez is encouraging people to join in a campaign to “save New Scientist” from itself, i.e. to get them to stop publishing so much scientific nonsense. This seems to me like a worthwhile goal; maybe if they stop writing articles about crackpots and their “electromagnetic drives”, they’ll also stop promoting bogus over-hyped claims from prominent theorists about cosmology, string theory, etc….

Shing-Tung Yau is fighting back against the New Yorker article “Manifold Destiny”, which was very critical of him, essentially claiming he was trying to steal credit for the proof of the Poincare Conjecture from Perelman. He has hired a lawyer and set-up a web-site. The web-site includes a long letter from his lawyer to the New Yorker, making his case that the article has many inaccuracies. There will be a webcast tomorrow at noon giving his side of this story. Many other blogs and newspapers are discussing this, see here, here, here, here, and here. Unfortunately for Yau, he has strong support from Lubos Motl, who seems a tad obsessed, ranting about how the quality of the New Yorker article:

resembled the style and ethical standards of many jerks in the blogosphere, including a colleague of Sylvia Nasar at Columbia University.

[Note: this has been edited by Lubos, now I’m not a “jerk”, but instead a “despicable writer”]

People who want to engage in bashing of Yau or of his opponents are warned that they should do it elsewhere. Only comment on this here if you have something to say that is substantive and respectful of all parties involved.

Besides Yau’s webcast, tomorrow you can also listen to me on the SETI Radio Network program, broadcast on Discovery Channel Radio. This will also be on their web-site, more info here.

The Harvard Crimson has an article about Nima Arkani-Hamed, who evidently made Popular Science’s “Brilliant 10” list for

his research on the idea that our universe may be only one of many “multiverses” and that additional dimensions may exist.

(many “multiverses”???) Arkani Hamed promotes the anthropic landscape and split supersymmetry as a test for it:

He recently proposed a model for new physics, called split supersymmetry—which theorizes that half of all particles in the universe have partner particles. He said that if the results of the LHC experiment reveal split supersymmetry, “it would be a tremendous push in the direction of a multiverse.”

“Right now a lot of people are on the fence,” about the theory of a multiverse, Arkani-Hamed said. “I think if the LHC sees split super symmetry it’s over.”

Also on the multiverse front, Gibbons and Turok have a new paper out on The Measure Problem in Cosmology. They claim to have a way of determining a measure on the “multiverse”. Only problem is that with their measure, the probability of having inflation work out the way it is supposed to is about e^-180.

Update: Another radio appearance today, on the program This Week in Science.

Update: To view today’s webcast, go to www.premierewebcast.com, get your software working, and enter room 150144. I’ll be skipping this myself, partly because I’ll be in a faculty meeting.

Update: If you want to read a lot of incredibly ill-informed and worthless comments on the Yau story, there’s always Slashdot.

Frank Wilczek, besides his other accomplishments, is also the star of an opera, entitled Atom and Eve. More commentary on this from Betsy Devine, and Jennifer Ouellette, as well as a report here, and a review here.

Paul Cook has a report on the Templeton-sponsored panel discussion at Cambridge on The Nature of Space and Time.

In October 2004 the French magazine Ciel et Espace published an article about the Bogdanovs entitled The Bogdanov Mystification (English version here). They sued the magzine in December 2004 for defamation. Evidently a French court has now decided the case against the Bogdanovs, fining them 2500 Euros for frivolous litigation and requiring them to pay the magazine’s costs.

[Note: Igor Bogdanoff claims that the case was dropped about one year ago, that according to the judgement there was no trial, and the 2500 euro fine was a simple consequence of their not showing up for the last meeting with the judge.]

The Institute for Advanced Study has been famous in recent years for the emphasis of its theoretical group on string theory. They seem to be moving a bit more towards phenomenology these days, and there will be a workshop on axions there next month.

The Tevatron is performing well, recently achieving new record luminosities. You can keep track of their progress here.

LBL will soon be hosting a conference to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Particle Data Group.

Chad Orzel has a perceptive review of Not Even Wrong at his blog, Uncertain Principles.

Update: There’s a tradition among bloggers of “carnivals”, collections of the more interesting recent blog postings in a certain area. The physical sciences now have one of their own, the first edition is now available, and it’s called Philosophia Naturalis.

Update: Note added about the Bogdanov court case, giving claims about this by Igor Bogdanoff.

Seems like everyone is getting a MySpace site, first Michio Kaku, now GLAST.

There was a conference this past week in Madrid honoring Nigel Hitchin’s 60th birthday. The program is here.

The latest issue of Nature has an article by Barry Mazur about recent progress on the Sato-Tate conjecture due to Mazur’s Harvard colleague Richard Taylor and collaborators. My meager understanding of this result is that it involves extending the Taniyama-Shimura-Weil conjecture from the case of the two-dimensional representation of GL(2) to symmetric powers of this representation.

Mark Trodden and Christine Dantas both have well-done reviews of Alex Vilenkin’s Many Worlds in One, which I wrote about here. Mark implicitly compares the book very favorably to Susskind’s recent one promoting similar ideas. I kind of disagree with him about the book, feeling that, no matter how well done, promoting to the general public science consisting of highly speculative ideas that seem to be untestable is not a good idea. It’s true that the multiverse cannot be simply dismissed on the grounds that one can’t directly observe it, but if the idea is to be considered part of science one has to come up with some way to test it. So far no one has been able to come up with a plausible proposal for how to do so, and there are solid arguments that this is inherently impossible.

[In the comment section Mark writes in to correct me, saying that he just contrasts Vilenkin’s attitude to that of others, and was not referring to Susskind’s book, which he hasn’t read.]

Update: A commenter points out that on his MySpace site Kaku has posted a copy of a forthcoming article by him that is supposed to appear in New Scientist. It is about the controversy over string theory, but doesn’t at all deal with the criticisms of the theory contained in my book and Smolin’s. It does contain a thoroughly dishonest paragraph about me, misrepresenting my position at Columbia (Kaku is well aware than I am a faculty member and teach graduate courses here, as well as administering the department computer system), and describing me as a “former particle physicist” (he’s well aware I have recently written a book on the subject of particle physics and continue to conduct research on the subject; then again, many people consider him to be a “former particle physicist”). He ascribes my criticism of string theory to jealousy over having been turned down for tenured positions at prestigious universities in favor of string theorists, and misquotes something I wrote about string theory:

String theory has only a “poetic relationship” to reality.

I never have said or written anything like this. He is misrepresenting a point I made in the book that string theory is a quite complex mathematical structure that only has a very distant relationship to musical notes and vibrating physical strings:

Once one starts learning the details of ten-dimensional superstring theory, anomaly cancellation, Calabi-Yau spaces, etc., one realizes that a vibrating string and its musical notes have only a poetic relationship to the real thing at issue.

The paragraph about me is dishonest and misleading, and so is much of the rest of the article. Kaku claims that string theory is being criticized because it cannot be directly tested by observing vibrating string modes. Critics of string theory are well aware that many theories can only be indirectly tested, and the arguments we are giving are about lack of any predictions at all. He describes five “indirect tests of string theory”, neglecting to mention that string theory makes no definite predictions about what the five kinds of experiments being described will actually see. In particular, his claim that “string theory makes specific, testable predictions about the physical properties of dark matter” is simply untrue.

Some of the article is devoted to criticizing “media hype”, and a “spoiled society, always demanding immediate results”. Given his own role over the last twenty years in over-hyping and over-promising results from string theory, this is kind of funny to read. In the end, his response to the critics is similar to that of Susskind: less than honest ad hominem attacks, misrepresentation of criticism, and insistence that any evaluation of the success or failure of string theory be postponed to the far distant future, at a time when he will no longer be around.

[Note: Michio Kaku has had this article removed from his web-site, explaining to me that it was a very preliminary draft, without any fact checking, which was never meant to see the light of day]

Update: From Stanley Deser, perhaps the shortest arXiv theory paper ever.

There’s a big debate within the scientific community in general about how and whether to move away from the conventional model of scientific publishing (journals supported by subscriptions paid by libraries, only available to subscribers) to a model where access to the papers in scientific journals is free to all (“Open Access”). The main problem with this is figuring out how to pay for it.

In his latest This Week’s Finds, John Baez gives a link to some information about the Open Access movement. One of the main actors here is SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). There’s an associated SPARC Open Access Newsletter and a blog, Open Access News.

Inside Higher Ed has a recent article about this, and last week’s Science magazine also has an article. The Science article discusses a new proposal put out by a task force from CERN that can be found here. The CERN task force has gathered a lot of interesting data about the particle physics literature, counting roughly 6000 papers/year, of which about 80% are theoretical. They found that about half of the journals publishing most particle physics papers are willing to move to an open-access model, with a cost per paper of between \$1-3000. These included APS and IOP journals, but did not include Elsevier journals like Nuclear Physics B. The APS has announced a program that would make papers in its journals open access at a cost of \$975-1300 per paper, and Elsevier has announced something similar at around $3000/paper. The CERN task force proposes raising \$6-8 million/year over the next few years to start supporting the half of the journals (not including Elsevier ones) that it has identified as ready for Open Access.

What is being proposed here is basically to give up on what a lot of people have hoped would develop: a model of free journals, whose cost would be small since they would be all-electronic, small enough to be supported by universities and research grants. Instead the idea here is to keep the current journals and their publishers in place, just changing the funding mechanism from library subscriptions to something else, some form that would fund access for all. The CERN task force suggests various sources for funds over the next few years, in a transition period, but doesn’t address the long term funding problem. If you fund these things out of, say, NSF grants, when Congress decides to cut the NSF budget, there’s a serious danger of the plug getting pulled on a field’s entire scientific literature. One popular idea is that researchers themselves should pay the cost. The problem with this is that the bulk of the literature is theory papers, mostly from people who can’t afford this. When there is a mixture of journals that require authors to pay the cost and those that don’t, authors abandon the ones they have to pay for. The Elsevier journals like Nuclear Physics B achieved dominance over the APS journals during the 70s when the APS journals were financed by “page charges” paid by authors, but Nuclear Physics B cost nothing to publish in.

The CERN task force doesn’t seem to me to be providing a viable long-term plan for moving to the kind of open access model they are supporting. It doesn’t address the fundamental problem of keeping a system where physicists hand over the scientific literature to Elsevier, then have to figure out how to buy it back. Even if a willing organization is found that will give \$3000/paper to Elsevier, what will keep Elsevier from deciding to keep publishing more papers? What if the organization in question gets tired of this and decides to stop paying?

The CERN report also contains a lot of highly debatable arguments. It claims that the current refereeing process is extremely important, valuable, and must be maintained at all costs, ignoring the fact that virtually everyone accesses papers at the arXiv, not at the journal. It’s true that the refereed version in a journal may be improved and have errors fixed, but authors are generally free to replace the original preprint version by a corrected one on the arXiv. The description given in the report of the “high standards of peer review” doesn’t agree with the reality of what is going on (see the Bogdanov affair). The mathematics literature still has a functional peer-reviewing system and it plays a very important role of keeping the number of incorrect proofs and unreliable results to a minimum, but the particle physics literature is very different. The report does continually make the point that the refereed journal system is crucial to the ways institutions evaluate people and decide whether to hire or promote them, but it doesn’t address the issue of whether this is a good thing.

The report also tries to claim that the advent of LHC data will somehow make the refereed particle physics literature and open access to it much more important. I don’t see this at all. The experimental results from the big LHC detectors will come out only after very careful vetting by the groups themselves, and I don’t see how a referee is likely to have much of a useful role there. If surprising experimental results are found, there will be a frantic battle among theorists to get a preprint out that explains the new data, and everyone will be following this on the arXiv. By the time such papers get through refereeing and are published, few people will still be paying attention to them.

Update: Nature Physics also has a recent article about peer review and open access.

This week the Newton Institute in Cambridge is running (with funding from the Templeton Foundation) a workshop on the topic of Noncommutative Geometry and Physics: Fundamental Structure of Space and Time. The program is here, some of the talks are online here, and Paul Cook is blogging here (with truly scary pictures of a Newton Institute restroom). Thursday evening they will be having a public panel discussion, entitled The Nature of Space and Time: An Evening of Speculation.

For someone interested not in quantum gravity but in particle physics, the most interesting of these talks is doubtless that of Alain Connes, entitled Noncommutative Geometry and the standard model with neutrino mixing. He has a new paper out, with the same title, with more details promised in a forthcoming paper with Chamseddine. I’ve been carrying the paper around for a while now, hoping to understand exactly what he’s doing, but it’s rather dense and some of the calculations are involved and don’t carry much of an explanation. I really wish I’d been at the talk to hear his exposition of what he’s up to here.

Among the other talks at the conference I would like to have heard would be that of Samson Shatashvili, who is doing some very interesting things with 2d gauge theories. He has a new paper out (with Gerasimov) which looks quite readable, entitled Higgs Bundles, Gauge Theories and Quantum Groups.

Another conference going on that is finishing up this week is the Erice “International School of Subnuclear Physics”, this year entitled The Logic of Nature, Complexity and New Physics, and dedicated to Richard Dalitz. Back during the sixties, seventies and eighties, the Erice School was an important yearly event, featuring the best theorists around giving expository lectures on the latest ideas, often including spectacularly beautiful lectures by Sidney Coleman. This year’s school just looks profoundly weird, with an interesting and reasonable set of lectures on the experimental side, but the theoretical side mostly devoted to “complexity and the Landscape”, featuring an opening lecture and mini-course about the Landscape by Susskind, a mini-course about the Landscape and its computational complexity (i.e. why it is hopeless to ever use it to predict anything) by Denef and Douglas, and more complexity from Zichichi, Beck, Gell-Mann and Tsallis. Many of the lectures are available here. Steve Hsu is blogging from the conference, and he reports that Susskind says the Landscape program is science since it now gives exactly one bit of information about the universe (the sign of the spatial curvature k), although he expects Andrei Linde to be able to make that bit disappear if he wants to.

Update: Urs Schreiber has an excellent discussion of the Connes program here and here.