Not Even Wrong

Joe Lykken just finished giving a series of talks at the SLAC summer school, now entitled “String Theory for Physicists”. This was changed from the original title, “String Theory for Dummies” (still on the poster). Presumably somebody realized that the title could be taken the wrong way, giving the impression that string theorists think non-string theorists are stupid.

Lykken’s talks are actually unusual for this kind of exercise in expounding string theory to non-string theorists. They begin with a long list of the pros and cons of string theory. I’d disagree with him about some of the “pros” he lists, but it is remarkable that he gives a detailed discussion of the problems with string theory. I’ve never seen a string theorist do that before. During the last few months I’ve been sensing a definite change in the atmosphere surrounding string theory. String theorists are on the defensive, and many science journalists and members of the general public are starting to get the idea that there might be something funny going on. For the first time there was open pessimism and defensiveness expressed at the panel discussion at Strings 2005 and the recent New York Times article about it had a somewhat mocking tone.

There’s a posting at cosmicvariance.com by JoAnne Hewett about the panel discussion and Times article, and many comments, including some from yours truly. Jacques Distler proves that he thinks anyone who doesn’t agree with him about string theory is just ignorant (OK, maybe he just thinks that I’m the only one who is ignorant) with his trademark tactic when he’s on the losing side of an argument: take something perfectly accurate that your opponent writes, change the wording to something else that can be interpreted as inaccurate, then use this as evidence to back up a sneering put-down of your opponent. Jacques seemingly can’t help himself from doing this. For an all-time classic, check out his contribution to one of the first postings here, where he attacks me for saying that the standard model is a chiral gauge theory.

Unfortunately, Jacques isn’t the only string theorist who thinks that this is an intelligent way to behave. Besides another well-known string theory blogger I could mention, at one point I had a remarkable experience with an unknown “prominent string theorist” (I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Jacques) who was asked to referee something I’d written about string theory. This referee wrote a report saying that I was just so wrong it wasn’t worth explaining why, but that they would give one example. Their example was constructed by taking a sentence out of context, then changing a singular to a plural to allow the sentence to be construed as saying something inaccurate. Some string theorists seem to be willing to go to any lengths to preserve their belief that any criticism of the theory is based on ignorance. My impression is that a lot more criticism is coming their way, and it will be interesting to see how long they try and keep claiming that their critics are just dummies.

Update: Lubos Motl is back from vacation, with a posting about the Toronto panel discussion.

Since I accidentally deleted a post, so had to spend some time fixing things, I decided to go ahead with a long-planned project to try and change around the software here. The old Movable Type software is gone, replaced by Word Press. It seems to be working, but I still need to add in the old links, and fiddle with the configuration a bit. Let me know if anything seems to be broken.

Lots of conferences are going on right around now, here’s some of them, many with on-line versions of the talks.

Lattice 2005 in Dublin, with blogging from Matthew Nobes.

SUSY 2005 at Durham. See some comments by Clifford Johnson. There was also a Pre-SUSY 2005 workshop aimed at graduate students.

Also at Durham, a workshop on Geometry, Conformal Field Theory and String Theory, blogging from Paul Cook.

Introduction to Collider Physics, a summer program aimed at graduate students, taking place at the Institute in Princeton.

This year’s SLAC summer institute is on Gravity in the Quantum World and the Cosmos. Sean Carroll is lecturing there and may have more to say about it over at Cosmic Variance.

There’s a Summer Institute going on in Taipei, and a summer school in Dubna.

The summer meeting in Oporto has taken place. I’d love to hear from anyone who was there about Graeme Segal’s lectures.

The Simons Workshop in Stony Brook has started, leading off with a talk by Cumrun Vafa on The Swamp Surrounding the Landscape. He seems to be suggesting that theorists should be spending their time investigating the “swamp” of possible effective field theories for which it is unknown whether they can be the low energy limit of a string theory. Why he thinks its a good idea to try and lead the field into a “swamp” is very unclear to me, although one could argue it is already there anyway….

Update: A commenter properly takes me to task for ignoring what’s going on down under. There’s been a Conference in honor of Ross Street’s 60th birthday, together with one workshop on categorical methods and another one on noncommutative geometry and index theory, all covered extensively by bloggers over at the String Coffee Table.

This week I’m in Seattle, among other things attending a Summer Institute in Algebraic Geometry sponsored by the AMS. This is the latest in a series of large summer conferences on algebraic geometry that have taken place about every ten years. The last one was in Santa Cruz in the mid 90s, the one before that at Bowdoin in the mid 80s. This one is being billed as “the largest algebraic geometry meeting in the history of the world”, with about 320 mathematicians here this week, and a total of around 600 planning on showing up for at least part of the three weeks during which the conference is taking place. The full schedule of talks is on-line, and copies of speaker’s notes and transparencies should soon be appearing there.

The main topic of the first week is billed as “interactions with physics”, but there’s actually not a whole lot of that going on here. The organizers originally hoped that Robbert Dijkgraaf would be lecturing this week, but that didn’t work out. Kentaro Hori of Toronto is giving a series of three talks on mirror symmetry, and some of his lecture notes are already on-line. Rahul Pandharipande started off the conference with the first in what looks like it will be a very interesting series of lectures on Gromov-Witten invariants. This has now become a huge subfield of algebraic geometry, with many ramifications, some of which have been inspired by physics, and there continues to be active interaction between math and physics around this subject. Many of the talks in the afternoon parallel sessions are also related to this topic.

An unrelated note: Lee Smolin has a rather philosophical, but interesting, new preprint out entitled The case for background independence

Several months ago Erick Weinberg had told me that his recollections of the story of the calculation of the Yang-Mills beta function were different than David Politzer’s. Erick actually did independently do the beta function calculation (for the case with scalars). At the time we talked he thought he had gotten the sign right, but the coefficient wrong, but now he has checked it and says the coefficient is right. He has posted his thesis on the arXiv, equation 6.68 is the beta-function. From the comments after this equation, you can see that he was aware that this meant that perturbation theory would break down in the infrared. Like ‘t Hooft though, who also did this kind of calculation, he wasn’t aware of the significance of asymptotic freedom in the ultraviolet for explaining the SLAC deep-inelastic scattering results.

Fabien Besnard has a new blog (in French), which is quite interesting. His latest post is a report from a Paris conference celebrating the Einstein centenary. He’s shocked by the comments of string cosmologist Thibault Damour that Popper was wrong, scientific theories don’t need to be falsifiable.

The New York Times has an article about the actress Danica McKellar and her work in mathematical physics. She was working with Lincoln Chayes while an undergraduate at UCLA. Lincoln and his then-wife Jennifer (also a mathematical physicist, now at Microsoft Research) were graduate students with me at Princeton. I have many happy memories of them and their impressive leather outfits, and our joint trips down to the punk-rock club City Gardens in Trenton.

Over at the new Cosmic Variance blog, Sean Carroll has posted a defense of string theory against what he sees as disdain, resentment and disparaging remarks from other physicists, a defense he entitles Two Cheers for String Theory. I’ve written a couple of comments over there, and maybe this will lead to an interesting discussion. But I’ll be traveling a lot of the time during the next week and a half, so my ability to participate in such a discussion, here or over there, may sometimes be limited. We’ll see what happens….

It has been almost exactly a year since Hawking gave a talk in Dublin claiming to have found a resolution of the black hole information paradox. Tonight a preprint giving some details of his argument has appeared.

I’ll leave to the quantum gravity experts the evaluation of exactly how convincing Hawking’s argument is. It is based on using the Euclidean quantum gravity framework, which Hawking refers to as “the only sane way to do quantum gravity non-perturbatively”. I’ve always been fond of the idea that you have to think about QFTs using a Euclidean signature for the background, so I wouldn’t argue with him about this point, but I assume others will.

Sean Carroll, of Preposterous Universe, has joined forces with Mark Trodden (of Orange Quark), and new bloggers SLAC particle phenomenologist JoAnne Hewett, USC string/brane theorist Clifford Johnson, and Chicago cosmologist Risa Wechsler. They’ll be collaborating on a new weblog entitled Cosmic Variance, and I’m looking forward to following what they do with it.

This may be part of a new trend of consolidation in the physics weblogging industry, following the lead of the String Coffee Table and the massive, multi-national, government-subsidized Quantum Diaries site. Will small, independent, artisanal producers like myself be able to compete with huge combines like Cosmic Variance, with their professional software and expensive ($6.95/month!) web-hosting services? Or will we be driven out of business as our profit margins are squeezed to the vanishing point? Wait a minute, I’m not making a profit at this anyway…

Actually, today I’m in Austin, Texas on personal business. I suppose I should be looking up Jacques to see if he, Lubos and I can organize an even bigger competing organization.

A colleague informs me that the latest New York Review of Books contains a letter from one of the most well-known mathematicians in the U.S.