Not Even Wrong

Follow-Ups to two recent postings:

Michael Duff has written a letter to New Scientist complaining about their recent editorial Physics’ greatest endeavour is grinding to a halt. Duff begins by claiming:

History has shown that rapid confirmation by experiment is a poor guide to the eventual value of a physical theory

but backs this up in a rather bizarre way. You might think he would list some physical theories whose experimental confirmation took awhile, instead he lists various theoretical ideas that have been around for a long time, still haven’t been experimentally confirmed, although lots of people are still working on them. Evidently for Duff the value of a physical theory is how many people are working on it (he also points out that about 500 people go to Strings 200X), not whether there is any experimental evidence for it. The examples he gives range from cases where there is zero experimental evidence, and probably never will be any (extra dimensions, supersymmetry) to ones that it is very plausible we will soon see evidence of (Higgs boson, gravitational waves) to ones that arguably we already have some evidence for (cosmological constant).

He notes that gravitational waves were predicted in 1916 and have yet to be confirmed, that string theory is more ambitious than GR so it should take longer to confirm, and that one should only really start counting in 1995, when M-theory came along. So I guess his prediction is that by 2074, we still won’t yet be anywhere near confirming string theory. Like many string theorists, he make highly tendentious claims about the relation of the standard model to experiment, writing:

decades [were] required to knock the standard model into a shape that could be confirmed by experiment

I assume he’s not talking about the QCD part of the standard model, which was born in 1973, already making verifiable predictions, and within ten years had accumulated a huge amount of evidence in its favor. The electroweak theory was first written down by Weinberg and Salam in 1967, and by ten years later the evidence for it was overwhelming. I suppose you could try and argue that the history of attempts to put together the standard model go back to Glashow in 1960 or Yang-Mills in 1954. Even using 1954, it was 19 years later that the full standard model was in place with a lot of experimental evidence already there and more pouring in. And that period would quite likely have been shorter if most of the theory community hadn’t given up on QFT and been working on the bootstrap, dual models or string theory during that time. In the case of string theory, taking Veneziano in 1968 as a starting point, nearly 4 decades later there is not a glimmer of a piece of experimental evidence for string theory. Comparing the history of the standard model to the history of string theory is just absurd.

On another recent topic, the New York Times finally today carried an obituary for Raoul Bott.

An assortment of interesting things I’ve run across recently:

There’s something called Multiversal Journeys that seems to organize lecture series on theoretical physics, with a special interest in the multiverse (at least to the extent of using it as an inspiration for the organization’s name).

UC Davis particle physicist John Terning has a weblog. Also a new graduate-level text book on supersymmetric field theories, entitled Modern Supersymmetry: Dynamics and Duality, soon to be published by Oxford.

Ever since 2001, the physicists in Paris have been running a Seminaire Poincare, modeled after the mathematicians famous Seminaire Bourbaki. The latest Seminaire Poincare was on the topic of Quantum Decoherence, and texts from the older meetings are available.

Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam has an updated version of his 1965 article “A Philosopher Looks at Quantum Mechanics” in the latest issue of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. It is entitled A Philosopher Looks at Quantum Mechanics (Again). Part of my misspent youth involved taking several philosophy courses as an undergraduate at Harvard, including ones from Quine and Putnam.

In November, Joe Lykken gave a particle physics seminar at Princeton entitled Is particle physics ready for the LHC? His talk explains some of the challenges particle physics will face at the LHC. The next-to-last slide is a none too subtle dig at the lack of any particle phenomenology going on at my alma mater. It is entitled “is Princeton ready for the LHC?”, and lists the titles of the particle theory seminars going on at Princeton during the period before his talk.

The International Committe for Future Accelerators (ICFA) has a new web-site.

The Tevatron has recently achieved new luminosity records, both for peak luminosity and integrated luminosity over a week. You can follow the status of the Tevatron here.

A beautiful new paper by Greg Landweber and Megumi Harada has just appeared. It is entitled A comparison of abelian and non-abelian symplectic quotients and uses equivariant K-theory methods to get the relation between the K-theories of the symplectic quotients M//G and M//T, here T is the maximal torus of a compact Lie group G.

Update: One more. Slate today is advertising Meaning of Life TV, where various people, including some physicists, do things like promote the idea that the anthropic principle shows religion has a lot to do with science. This site has been around for a while, but just now has affiliated with Slate. Looking at it I thought “funny, this is the only thing like this trying to inject religion into science that doesn’t seem to be a Templeton Foundation project.” Then I saw the About Us link.

There’s an article in this week’s Nature by Geoff Brumfiel entitled Outrageous Fortune about the anthropic Landscape debate. The particle physicists quoted are ones whose views are well-known: Susskind, Weinberg, Polchinski, Arkani-Hamed and Maldacena all line up in favor of the anthropic Landscape (with a caveat from Maldacena: “I really hope we have a better idea in the future”). Lisa Randall thinks accepting it is premature, that a better understanding of string theory will get rid of the Landscape, saying “You really need to explore alternatives before taking such radical leaps of faith.” All in all, Brumfiel finds “… in the overlapping circles of cosmology and string theory, the concept of a landscape of universes is becoming the dominant view.”

The only physicist quoted who recognizes that the Landscape is pseudo-science is David Gross. “It’s impossible to disprove” he says, and notes that because we can’t falsify the idea it’s not science. He sees the origin of this nonsense in string theorist’s inability to predict anything despite huge efforts over more than 20 years: “‘People in string theory are very frustrated, as am I, by our inability to be more predictive after all these years,’ he says. But that’s no excuse for using such ‘bizarre science’, he warns. ‘It is a dangerous business.'”

I continue to find it shocking that the many journalists who have been writing stories like this don’t seem to be able to locate any leading particle theorist other than Gross willing to publicly say that this is just not science.

For more about this controversy, take a look at the talks by Nima Arkani-Hamed given today at the Jerusalem Winter School on the topic of “The Landscape and the LHC”. The first of these was nearly an hour and a half of general anthropic landscape philosophy without any real content. It was repeatedly interrupted by challenges from a couple people in the audience, I think David Gross and Nati Seiberg. Unfortunately one couldn’t really hear the questions they were asking, just Arkani-Hamed’s responses. I only had time today to look at the beginning part of the second talk, which was about the idea of split supersymmetry.

Update: One of the more unusual aspects of this story is that, while much of the particle theory establishment is giving in to irrationality, Lubos Motl is here the voice of reason. I completely agree with his recent comments on this article. For some discussion of the relation of this to the Intelligent Design debate, see remarks by David Heddle and by Jonathan Witt of the Discovery Institute.

Nikita Nekrasov is giving a very interesting series of talks at the Jerusalem Winter School on the topic of “Introduction to modern covariant superstring theory.” The first of his talks was yesterday and is now on-line. In it he outlined the two main formalisms for superstring theory and discussed their advantages and drawbacks, while also giving a beautiful discussion of the quantization of the superparticle, and the use of twistor and pure-spinor methods in 10d super-Yang-Mills.

One of these two formalisms, the NSR formalism, uses supersymmetry on the world-sheet, with target space a usual (bosonic) space (i.e. 10d space-time). The advantage of this is that amplitudes are computed using a linear theory, supergravity on the worldsheet. One disadvantage of this is that spacetime supersymmetry is not manifest, only recovered after GSO projection. A very serious technical problem is that, while one ultimately wants to construct amplitudes by summing over spin structures and integrating over the moduli space, the formalism gives one for each spin structure an amplitude on the super-moduli space, not the moduli space (and these super-moduli spaces are different for different spin structures). In recent years D’Hoker and Phong have been able to deal with this problem for genus 2 (and they have some results for genus 3), but for higher genus how to consistently get amplitudes on moduli space remains an open problem. Note that the problem with these multi-loop amplitudes is not only that you aren’t sure they are finite, but you aren’t sure that they are even well-defined. Presumably this is purely a technical problem, not evidence of an inherent inconsistency problem with such amplitudes, but one can’t be sure of this until someone finds a way of resolving the problem.

The other formalism, the so-called Green-Schwarz formalism, uses a bosonic worldsheet, but takes the target space to be a supermanifold. This has the advantage of making space-time supersymmetry manifest, and avoiding the problem of integrating over super-moduli space, but it carries its own disadvantages. The world-sheet theory is now a highly non-linear, constrained theory, with both first-class and second-class constraints, constraints that Nekrasov describes as “hard to separate in a covariant way”. No one knows how to quantize this theory preserving super-Poincare invariance, so one typically uses a non-covariant gauge-fixing like light-cone gauge, something that runs into trouble at genus 2 or higher.

In recent years, Berkovits has been developing an improved version of the Green-Schwarz formalism, sometimes called the Berkovits formalism, and this is the main topic of Nekrasov’s lectures. Presumably Nekrasov will be discussing in his next two lectures how this works and some of the interesting problems with it, problems that he wrote a paper about a couple months ago, one which was discussed here. In his talk, Nekrasov seemed rather nervous that he would get into trouble because people might think he was raising the possibility of superstring perturbation theory being inconsistent. At one point he said that his “policy statement” was that he hoped that things could be made to work at any genus. He also seemed concerned in his talk yesterday about how his remarks might be reported today, saying:

There are really conc… well… I don’t want to call them conceptual problems because these days everything is recorded. If I say something is a conceptual problem, tomorrow there will be a blog on that, or a paper. So, there are some technical difficulties….

John Brockman’s Edge web-site has an annual feature where he asks a wide array of scientists and others how they would answer a hopefully thought-provoking question. Last year the question was What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It? This year it’s What Is Your Dangerous Idea?

There are responses to this question from 117 different people, a large fraction of them psychologists or cognitive scientists. Among the responses from physicists, several deal with the Landscape as a dangerous idea. Susskind takes credit for it, noting “I have been accused of advocating an extremely dangerous idea”, and that some of his colleagues believe it will lead to the end of science, leaving no way to defend physics as a truer path to knowledge than religion. He proudly describes the anthropic Landscape idea as “spreading like a cancer.”

On the opposite side of the issue, Brian Greene emphasizes the dangers of the Landscape philosophy:

When faced with seemingly inexplicable observations, researchers may invoke the framework of the multiverse prematurely — proclaiming some or other phenomenon to merely reflect conditions in our bubble universe — thereby failing to discover the deeper understanding that awaits us.

Paul Steinhardt is more emphatic about these dangers:

I think it leads inevitably to a depressing end to science. What is the point of exploring further the randomly chosen physical properties in our tiny corner of the multiverse if most of the multiverse is so different. I think it is far too early to be so desperate. This is a dangerous idea that I am simply unwilling to contemplate.

He also has his own “dangerous idea”, about a cyclic model of the universe explaining the small size of the cosmological constant. Lawrence Krauss gives his own version of an explanation of the danger that the Landscape will lead to an end-point for theoretical physics:

… all so-called fundamental theories that might describe nature would be purely “phenomenological”, that is, they would be derivable from observational phenomena, but would not reflect any underlying grand mathematical structure of the universe that would allow a basic understanding of why the universe is the way it is.

Some other interesting contributions from physicists come from Philip Anderson, who has some speculative comments about dark matter and dark energy, Lee Smolin, who discusses the possibility of natural selection having something to do with fundamental laws, and Carlo Rovelli, who remarks that we have still not completely absorbed the revolutionary ideas of 20th century physics:

I think that seen from 200 years in the future, the dangerous scientific idea that was around at the beginning of the 20th century, and that everybody was afraid to accept, will simply be that the world is completely different from our simple minded picture of it. As the physics of the 20th century had already shown.

What makes me smile is that even many of todays “audacious scientific speculations” about things like extra-dimensions, multi-universes, and the likely, are not only completely unsupported experimentally, but are even always formulated within world view that, at a close look, has not yet digested quantum mechanics and relativity!

The 23rd Jerusalem Winter School in Theoretical Physics started yesterday. The topic is “String Theory: Symmetries and Dynamics”, and it is organized by David Gross and Eliezer Rabinovici.

Some of the talks are already available on-line, with the quality of the video and audio very good, although you need the latest version of Apple’s Quicktime player. In his opening talk, Gross mentioned the recent New Scientist article quoting him as admitting string theory was in trouble, saying that the article misrepresented what he said. At the recent Solvay conference he had said something like “In string theory we don’t know what we are talking about”, and the New Scientist reporter interpreted that as meaning there was trouble, an interpretation Gross disagreed with. He was annoyed by the New Scientist editorial about the sorry state of string theory, and says he has been offered the opportunity to write a rebuttal and may do so. Gross went on to claim that really string theory is a vital subject and that it is in a wonderful period. He didn’t mention the Landscape.

Update: Another recent particle theory conference was the Christmas Meeting at Durham. There’s a report from the conference by blogger Paul Cook. Evidently Herman Verlinde is taking bets that string theory is the correct unified theory. Those who want to make some easy money might want to contact him. Then again, it’s unclear when you would get paid.

Update: The lectures by my Princeton classmate Igor Klebanov on using string theory to study strongly coupled gauge theories are particularly clear and interesting. Near the beginning he mentions this blog quoting it as saying “String theory is not good for anything.” I’d like to emphasize that that is not something I wrote or something that I think, I assume he is referring to one of my commenters.

Eckhard Meinrenken has been teaching a course at Toronto on Lie groups and Clifford algebras, and he has lecture notes available. This is beautiful mathematics and brings together several of my favorite mathematical topics: Clifford algebras, spinors, and representation theory of Lie groups. Some of this material is quite new, and very possibly has interesting applications in physics.

Dennis Gaitsgory, a new young tenured member of the Harvard math department, has been teaching a course on Geometric Representation Theory, and also has lecture notes available. These explain the “D-module” point of view on the subject.

My Columbia math department colleague D. H. Phong and fellow ex-Princeton grad student Eric D’ Hoker have a new paper on the arXiv called Complex Geometry and Supergeometry. It is based on Phong’s recent lecture at this year’s Current Developments in Mathematics conference at Harvard last month. D’ Hoker and Phong have been able to explicitly write down and show finiteness of superstring amplitudes at two loops, with the problem still remaining open at higher loops.

The arXiv web-site has a new look today. Gone are Paul Ginsparg’s “skull and cross-bones” icons like this.

Over the last month or so I’ve sent repeated requests to the arXiv to have trackbacks posted for several of my weblog postings. The first of these requests, back in early November, was answered positively by “mjf”, and the trackback (to a paper by Nekrasov) soon appeared. Since then I have sent repeated requests to the arXiv that they list trackbacks to my postings about papers by Weinberg, Baez, Freed-Hopkins-Teleman, and Tegmark et. al.. I’ve received no response whatsover to these requests, including to requests that they inform me of what the arXiv policy on trackbacks is and why my postings don’t seem to qualify.

Of the four postings involved, two of them (about the papers of Baez and Tegmark et. al.) led to discussions here involving some of the authors of the papers themselves, and I think seeing this discussion could be valuable to people interested in those two papers. I can think of no legitimate reason why trackbacks to those postings should not be allowed. The posting about Freed-Hopkins-Teleman was intended to point physicists to some very interesting new work in mathematics; I also believe some people might find that valuable. Finally, the posting about Weinberg’s article was perhaps more controversial, but I believe it raises legitimate issues that the particle theory community needs to allow public discussion of, and censorship of this is inappropriate.

I’ve looked a few times at the list of recent trackbacks to see if I can figure out from that what the arXiv policy about this is. Today’s list of trackbacks from the period December 20-23 has 6 listings, one from cs.unm.edu and five from golem.ph.utexas.edu. As far as I can tell, at least as far as particle theory is concerned, the arXiv trackback system is being run mainly for the benefit of the owner of golem.ph.utexas.edu, who sits on the arXiv advisory board, and may or may not have something to do with the censoring of trackbacks to my postings. Of course I have no way of actually knowing what is going on here or who is responsible. This situation seems to me to raise questions which the arXiv advisory board needs to address, and I am simultaneously contacting them about this.

Update: I still don’t know exactly what is going on at the arXiv, but from what I’ve heard so far, it is clear that the problem is not a technical or administrative one, so I’m removing the question mark that used to be there in the title of this posting.

Time now to ignore this for a while and start celebrating the holiday with family and friends. Happy holidays to all!

Update: Still no word from the arXiv. Commenter Jose notes that trackbacks to comments at physcomments.org do generally appear on the arXiv. There are instructions at physcomments.org that say:

If and only if a blog annotation starts with an identification paragraph “A Comment by …”, and its subject line starts with the preprint it is commenting about, then it is submited to the ArXiV for consideration. Note that currently the ArXiV reserves its right to reject the trackback ping.

Evidently Alejandro, who runs physcomments.org, has been successful in not only communicating with the arXiv, but getting them to post his trackbacks. He comments here that “It is only via Distler that it has been finally incorporated, and it is partial, experimental etc.” From this I take it that the key to getting arXiv trackbacks posted is, as commenter Chris Oakley suggests, to not have pissed off Jacques Distler, something I seem to have done long ago with my criticisms of string theory.

I’m more and more convinced that what is going on here is all due to the simple fact that Distler doesn’t like me. I was surprised and saddened to note that in his recent posting about Raoul Bott, he links to other postings about Bott by Sean Carroll (who credits my blog as where he learned of Bott’s death) and Lubos Motl, but not mine. I also didn’t realize that Distler was a couple years behind me at Dunster House, an experience that perhaps he has yet to get over.

Update: While I was writing the above, Alejandro submitted a comment noting that, after initial problems getting his trackbacks accepted “now it seems I am allowed to send trackbacks. Of course, one never knows when this permission can change again.”

This week’s issue of Nature has short articles by Atiyah and Witten, both addressing the issue of the current state of string theory.

Atiyah’s piece is an interesting review of Lawrence Krauss’s new book Hiding in the Mirror entitled Pulling the strings, and it concentrates on what Krauss has to say about the relation of mathematics and physics. Krauss ends his book quoting the mathematician Hermann Weyl as choosing beauty over truth, remarking that physicists don’t have this luxury. Atiyah points out the story of Weyl’s work on gauge theory, which Weyl published over Einstein’s strong argument that it was physically wrong. The idea was just so beautiful that Weyl felt there had to be something to it, an opinion that turned out to be amply justified as the concept of a gauge theory has turned out to be among the most fundamental ideas in theoretical physics.

Witten’s piece is entitled Unravelling string theory and it tells the story of how he got interested in string theory and offers a defense of its continued study despite the lack of progress during the past 21 years in using it to come up with a unified theory. His defense consists of three points:

1. It appears to be a consistent generalization of QFT, and is worth study on that grounds alone.

2. It incorporates general relativity and provides a “rough draft” of particle physics.

3. Research on string theory has led to all sorts of spin-offs: insights into confinement, black-holes, mathematics.

Those are certainly the strongest arguments for working on string theory, but I find it disappointing that Witten chooses to ignore much of what has been happening in string theory over the last few years. He addresses only by indirect allusion the whole issue of the landscape and the strong possibility that the string theory framework for unification is inherently incapable of predicting anything. Witten would do particle theory a huge favor by at least acknowledging that if the string theory landscape really exists, it is not, as many seem to think, a new paradigm for how to pursue theoretical physics, but instead the end of hopes for this idea about how to achieve unification.