Not Even Wrong

Well, it looks like I was right to not try and guess this year’s Nobel Prize, since it has been awarded for work in an area of physics I know nothing about. None of the commenters here managed to guess correctly either. The prize goes to Glauber, Hall and Hänsch for work in the field of optics.

Roy Glauber is 80 years old now, and taught the first quantum field theory course I ever took. At the time I was an undergraduate at Harvard and the course was way over my head. All I remember from it now is that it involved a lot of writing down and manipulating long formulas involving mode expansions and annihilation and creation operators. I did end up with some facility in doing this, but didn’t much understand what it all meant. Buried somewhere in my office should be notes for that course, perhaps I’ll try and dig them up and take a look at them, since I suspect I can probably now appreciate much better what Glauber was trying to teach than I could way back then.

Congratulations to Glauber, Hall and Hänsch!

Update: Hongbao Zhang didn’t guess the prize winner’s names, but he did correctly guess that it would go to physicists in the field of quantum optics. Congratulations!

When I first started thinking about using “Not Even Wrong” as the title of a book, I did some research to try and find out where the supposed Pauli quote came from. No one seemed to have any information about this, other than the attribution to Pauli, and various different stories existed about the context in which he had used the phrase. I started to worry that these stories, like many of the best ones about Pauli, might be apocryphal, so I contacted a few physicists who had some connection to Pauli to ask them about this. Prof. Karl von Meyenn, the editor of Pauli’s correspondence, wrote back to tell me that the phrase doesn’t occur in his correspondence. He pointed me to a biographical notice about Pauli written soon after his death by Rudolf Peierls as the best source for the story of Pauli using the phrase.

Peierls writes

No account of Pauli and his attitude to people would be complete without mention of his critical remarks, for which he was known and sometimes feared throughout the world of physics…

Quite recently, a friend showed him the paper of a young physicist which he suspected was not of great value but on which he wanted Pauli’s views. Pauli remarked sadly ‘It is not even wrong.’

The Peierls article is in

Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, Vol. 5 (Feb. 1960), 174-192.

It is on-line via JSTOR.

Just recently, Oliver Burkeman wrote a short piece for The Guardian about the Pauli phrase and its recent uses. I talked to him on the phone about this and his article contains some accurate quotes from me, together with a link to this weblog.

Some assorted things I’ve run across recently that may be of interest:

Talks from the annual meeting of the SLAC Users Organization.

A dialogue between Barry Mazur and Peter Pesic about imagination and mathematics.

An Op-Ed piece in today’s New York Times by my colleague Brian Greene called That Famous Equation and You.

Some sensible comments by John Baez about string theory.

A survey of the state of string field theory by Leonardo Rastelli.

A “description of some important issues in supersymmetry and string phenomenology” entitled Twenty-five Questions for String Theorists. The authors think these questions may have answers that will help connect string theory and phenomenology, although this seems to me unlikely. Serkan Cabi also has some comments on this paper.

An article about Feynman by Freeman Dyson in the latest New York Review of Books.

A talk about theoretical physics in the Netherlands.

Update: One more, a report by Paul Cook on an interesting talk by Roman Jackiw.

Zvi Bern gave a talk yesterday at the KITP in Santa Barbara entitled The S-Matrix Reloaded: Twistors, Unitarity, Gauge Theories and Gravity. He surveyed recent progress on computing perturbative amplitudes in QCD and N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills, some of which involves using twistor methods. The most striking thing though were his last few transparencies (here, here, and here). He notes that all previous studies of divergences in supergravity rely only on power-counting and supersymmetry, assuming that if these two principles allow a divergence to occur, it will. Actually doing the full computation to see if the divergences are there is too hard and no one has done it. Bern notes that in these arguments the extra structure seen by the recent twistor methods is not taken into account, and when one does this, so far all complete calculations show that N=8 supergravity has exactly the same degree of divergence as N=4 Yang-Mills, even though one would naively expect the supergravity amplitudes to have worse behavior. He ends by suggesting that “Serious re-examination of the UV properties of multi-loop N=8 supergravity using modern tools is needed.”

If N=8 supergravity turns out to be renormalizable, this raises an interesting question about string theory….

The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) takes place every four years and is the most important international conference in mathematics. The 2006 ICM will take place next August in Madrid. One thing that happens at each ICM is the announcement of the winners of the Fields Medal. This has traditionally been considered the most prestigious award in mathematics, and the closest analog to a Nobel prize in math, although the recently instituted Abel prize may now compete for this honor. The Fields medal is awarded to between two and four people at each ICM, and recipients must be under the age of 40 on Jan. 1 of the year of the ICM. I have no inside information about who will win this year, but in gossip with mathematicians two names that tend to come up are those of Grigori Perelman (for his work on the Poincare conjecture), and Terence Tao.

The other important thing about the ICM is the list of invited talks. The speakers are carefully chosen and are supposed to be people who have done the most important work in mathematics during the past four years. Looking over the list of speakers gives a good idea of who the most prominent names in the business are, as well as what are the hottest topics. It’s an especially great honor to be chosen as a plenary speaker, and the names of these have been recently announced. The invited speakers in the various sections have also been announced, one section covers mathematical physics.

Philip Anderson has a piece in the latest Nature entitled Thinking Big. It’s about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, and in it he claims that Fritz London was the first one to really have the right idea about the problem. Commenting on the Bohr-Einstein debates on the subject, Anderson says “In reading about these debates I have the sensation of being a small boy who spots not one, but two undressed emperors.” Instead of the Bohr or Einstein positions, Anderson promotes a point of view he attributes to London, who wrote a paper about it in 1939 with Edmond Bauer. He says “Taking London’s point of view, one immediately begins to realize that the real problem of quantum measurement is not in understanding the simple electron being measured, but the large and complicated apparatus used to measure it” and that “The message is that what is needed is an understanding of the macroscopic world in terms of quantum mechanics.”

I take Anderson’s point to be that the classical physics of a measuring apparatus is an “emergent phenomenon”, and understanding this is the real problem of interpreting quantum mechanics. He ends with his favorite slogan: “more is different!”.

The science magazine Seed is being relaunched, and the first issue of its new incarnation is now on the newsstands. Their motto is “Science is Culture”, and Clifford Johnson over at Cosmic Variance has an enthusiastic appreciation of what they are doing. The magazine is strikingly attractive, with impressive photography and graphics. One photo essay pairs photos with important equations.

There’s a piece by Lisa Randall promoting her recent work with Andreas Karch on what she calls the “relaxation principle”. I guess this is meant to be a sort of vacuum selection principle, contrasted to the “anthropic principle”. In her Seed article she describes what she is doing as follows :

The challenge for physicists, and the problem I tackle in my own work, is find all possible qualitatively different universes — and to search for principles that determine which of these universes is most likely to exist.

Unfortunately there seem to be an infinite variety of possible such universes, and examining them all could easily take up the efforts of all particle theorists for the next few centuries. There’s zero evidence for any sort of vacuum selection principle that will pick out the standard model from this infinite array of possibilities, so setting out on this path means probably abandoning any hope for ever explaining much of anything about particle physics. Karch and Randall try to give an argument for why there are 3 space dimensions, ending up with an argument for the survival of both 3 and 7 dimensional branes if one starts out with branes of all dimensions. This is a very, very long way from getting any non-trivial information about particle physics.

This issue of the magazine also has a short piece entitled “A New Force? How blogs are revolutionizing physics” by Joshua Roebke, an ex-string cosmology graduate student who now works at Seed. Joshua devotes a sizable part of his piece to telling about “Not Even Wrong” and some of the effects it has been having. Earlier this summer I had lunch with him here in New York and was encouraged to see that Seed has someone on staff with a good theoretical physics background.

Update: Lubos Motl also has a posting about the new Seed magazine. He comments on the Karch-Randall “relaxation principle”, saying that he “kind of worked on it”, but

frankly, I don’t really believe it – because of the devil hiding in the details that just don’t seem to work – much like many other proposals that have appeared in recent years.

Via For God, for Country and for Your Name Here, it seems that Alan Guth had the winning entry in a Boston contest for the messiest office. He won an office make-over, check out the before and after photographs.