Not Even Wrong

I’ve been thinking there’s too much politics on this blog recently, and yet I still think the political activities of well-known theorists are worth noting here. As commenter Arun pointed out, this Sunday’s New York Times has a letter to the editor criticizing the human rights violations at Guantanamo, signed by many prominent particle theorists, including Susskind (whose name comes first, perhaps he’s the organizer), Bjorken, Deser, Dyson, Gaillard, Gross, Polchinski, Schwarz, Wilczek, Witten and Zumino.

Over at the science policy blog Prometheus, Roger Pielke has a posting called A Very Bad Dream Indeed, in which he strongly criticizes the authors of this letter for writing such a letter that has nothing to do with science policy. He seems to be worried about these scientists “transforming their privilege in the scientific domains into authority in non-scientific domains.” Somehow, I just don’t see the possibility of theoretical physicists grabbing political power and ramrodding through policies they support as being something much worth worrying about. My reaction to this particular letter was not “who do these people think they are to do this?”, but rather “how come everyone else isn’t doing this?” The situation at Guantanamo is a disgrace to this country and that the courts allow it to continue is shocking.

More about this at No Se Nada, the blog of Kevin Vranes.

OK, now, no more about politics for a while. I promise….

The EPP2010 report by the Committee on Elementary Particle Physics in the 21st Century is out today, and it is entitled Revealing the Hidden Nature of Space and Time. This committee was convened to recommend priorities for high energy physics in the U.S. over the next 15 years. Its membership included non-physicists and it was chaired by economist and ex-president of Princeton Harold Shapiro. The inclusion of people from outside the field emphasized the need for wide support for funding of U.S. particle physics if it is to remain healthy. The latest issue of Nature contains an article about the report entitled US particle physics fights for survival, and an editorial Making collider endorsement count. A press release about the report is here.

At the press conference announcing the report (which was webcast), Shapiro emphasized that the non-physicists on the committee had not been fully aware of the difficult situation US particle physics was in. They were very sobered by the state of US HEP, which he described as facing a serious danger that it would be half its size in 4-5 years, as current programs ended without a compelling follow-on program. The most important recommendation of the committee was that construction of the ILC in the US, probably at Fermilab, be vigorously pursued and that:

The United States should announce its strong intent to become the host country for the ILC and should undertake the necessary work to provide a viable site and mount a compelling bid.

Constructing the ILC in the US would require an increase beyond the rate of inflation in HEP funding, and the committee considered a scenario of budget increases of 2-3%per year that would probably be required, although solid numbers for what the cost of the ILC would be are still not yet available. Emphasizing the ILC in this way was described as a “high-risk, high-reward” strategy, and that taking these risks was necessary for US HEP to retain any leadership role in the field.

More specifically, the committee recommended six action items, ranked by priority:

1. Realize the physics potential of the LHC experimental program.

2. Launch a major program of R and D for the ILC, significantly expanding current expenditures on this.

3. Announce US intent to become the host country for the ILC.

4. Increase the current share of the HEP budget devoted to studying dark matter, the CMB and dark energy.

5. Develop a staged program, with international cooperation, of neutrino experiments, with emphasis on neutrinoless double-beta decay, accelerator based experiments, and search for possible charge-parity violation. This last might involve large detectors that could also be used to search for proton decay.

6. Support (especially if they’re not very expensive) high-precision experiments that probe beyond the Standard Model physics, such as a future B factory, lepton-flavor violation and rare-decay studies, searches for electric dipole moments, and precision measurements of muon g-2.

The committee did a very good job of recognizing the difficult situation of US HEP, and coming up with a plausible strategy for how to make the best of it. I have my doubts about whether it’s really a good idea to sell this as “Revealing the Hidden Nature of Space and Time”, since it’s not especially likely that that is what is going to happen. There’s no particularly good reason to believe that extra dimensions will show up at the LHC or ILC energy scales, so over-selling this is dangerous. I do understand that it’s a lot harder to get people excited about the new physics that this is likely to really all be about: understanding the nature of electro-weak symmetry breaking.

This was a study of what to do about experimental HEP, so the problems of theoretical HEP were not addressed. Unfortunately, besides the usual arguments for supersymmetry, over-hyped ideas about string theory make an appearance as the committee calls for “Improved tests of general relativity to search for effects of extra dimensions or string theory” and “Measuring time variation of physical constants with spectroscopy of distant objects to search for effects of extra dimensions and string theory”, without noting that string theory makes no predictions about either of these. One other thing included in the report is new, improved verbiage about the status of string theory. In Witten’s biographical sketch, it is described as “one of the leading candidates for the grand unified theory of elementary particle physics”, which seems to me to be a downgrade from the phrase “the leading candidate” which until recently was often used to describe the status of the theory.

Update: More about this from Chad Orzel, Lubos, Clifford Johnson at Cosmic Variance, Tommaso Dorigo and The New York Times.

Update: Also from Alexey Petrov, who in a comment at Cosmic Variance links to a very different point of view about prospects for constructing the ILC in the near term: a recent resignation letter from Bill Foster, who was the Proton Driver project leader at Fermilab (the Proton Driver would be a high-luminosity, lower energy accelerator, useful for, among other things, producing a more intense neutrino beam).

Update: More from JoAnne Hewett at Cosmic Variance.

Dan Freed recently gave the Andrejewski Lectures at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig, and has put the slides from his first lecture on-line. These give a beautiful overview of his work with Hopkins and Teleman relating loop group representations and equivariant K-theory, and explain one aspect of the relation to topological quantum field theory. His second and third lectures aren’t available on-line. The second was supposed to cover the way they use Dirac operators, which is explained in their papers. The third lecture was evidently about the relation to Chern-Simons, which isn’t in their papers so far, and which I’d be quite curious to know more about.

This fall, Dan will be giving a graduate course on Loop Groups and Algebraic Topology, which should be quite interesting.

Michio Kaku has joined the Talk Radio Network, where he will have a new radio show called “Science Fantastic” that will appear on 90 radio stations around the country. Topics that will be covered include “black holes, higher dimensions, string theory, wormholes, search for extra-terrestial life, dark matter and dark energy, the future of space travel, genetic engineering, the aging process, the future of medicine, the human body shop, artificial intelligence, the future of computers and robots, as well as topics from science fiction.”

The blurb at Talk Radio Network describes Kaku as “one of the world’s leading experts in theoretical physics, and according to New York Magazine, one of the ‘100 Smartest People in New York.'” It goes on:

Dr. Kaku is the co-founder of string field theory, one of the main branches of string theory, the leading candidate for the unified field theory. Many in the scientific field call this “The new Copernican revolution.”

Kaku’s appearance on Talk Radio Network is rather remarkable, given that many of the other talk show hosts there are extremist purveyors of right-wing sewage like Michael Savage and Laura Ingraham. In the past, Kaku has been known for his left-wing politics, hosting a radio show entitled Explorations on New York lefty radio station WBAI, rebroadcast on other Pacifica stations such as KPFA in Berkeley.

OK, maybe they haven’t offered it to him yet, but over at the Edge web-site, in a comment about John Horgan’s recent piece about the Templeton Foundation, Susskind writes:

I don’t understand the idea that a convergence between science and religion is taking place. I don’t believe in any such convergence. Throwing huge amounts of money at scientists who claim to see such a convergence can only lead to a dangerous blurring of boundaries.

I hereby pledge to refuse any prize for advancing the so called convergence between science and religion.

I missed Susskind’s recent public talk here in New York, about his book which the New York Academy of Sciences describes as “revolutionizing the field of physics”. There is a podcast recorded just before his talk. He makes his usual points including claiming that the situation of the string theory anthropic landscape is similar to that of Darwin and the theory of evolution. He also claims that anyone who thinks it doesn’t have experimental implications is wrong, pointing to Weinberg’s “prediction” of the cosmological constant.

Bert Schroer has sent me some notes comparing the Lagrangian path integral and algebraic approaches to quantum field theory, which others may also find interesting. I have a very different perspective than he does, but have gone through the experience of at one time believing that basically all there is to QFT is to choose an action functional and then apply straightforward techniques to evaluate the path integrals you get. Non-perturbatively, this works beautifully for Yang-Mills theory, but runs into serious problems in many other cases, and it becomes clear that the path integral method, for all its virtues, does hide some very real problems.

Update: Some more notes from Schroer on AQFT.

Some other unrelated links:

There’s an extremely well-known story about the young Gauss, and it turns out that, as almost always with such stories, the truth of what actually happened is rather elusive. American Scientist has a wonderful article about this by Brian Hayes entitled Gauss’s Day of Reckoning.

The AMS has announced a Leonard Eisenbud Prize for Mathematics and Physics. It will be awarded every three years for a work published in the preceding six years that brings the two fields closer together. The first award will be made in January 2008. The prize was established by David Eisenbud (currently director of MSRI) and his wife in honor of Eisenbud’s father, who was a mathematical physicist.

While I was away the Museum of Natural History here in New York sponsored a debate on the Multiverse, entitled “Universe: One or Many?”. For some reports on the debate, see here, here and here. The last of these is from local blogger “mighty dasmoo”, who really, really, doesn’t like Michio Kaku.

The EPP 2010 Panel will release its final report to the public at a press conference in Washington on April 26.

Update: New Scientist also has some quotes from the “Universe: One or Many?” debate:

Kaku, of the City University of New York, spoke at one point of the possibility of tunnelling into other universes through space-time foam, harnessing the power of negative energy. “Genesis happens all the time,” he said. “Continuous genesis in an ocean of Nirvana, and the ocean is an 11-dimensional hyperspace.”

As Kaku spoke, Krauss, of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, looked as if he was about to have an aneurysm. He turned to Kaku. “If there are an infinite number of universes,” he declared, “I can’t imagine one in which I agree with what you just said.”

Update: Another report on the debate is here.