Not Even Wrong

Last night ABC News ran a two-hour primetime special on The UFO Phenomenon — Seeing is Believing. As part of this special program, they interviewed “one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists”, who, according to Bob Park, “looked a lot like Michio Kaku.” This physicist told ABC that UFOs should be taken seriously since “You simply cannot dismiss the possibility that some of these UFO sightings are actually sightings from some object created by … a civilization perhaps millions of years ahead of us in technology.” He also explained how aliens could get here using wormholes.

Kaku appeared yesterday on the radio show “Coast to Coast” to discuss UFOs and the ABC special. He appeared on the same show (in different hours) as Al Bielek, who evidently had a job in California, but regularly traveled by secret underground subway to Montauk, Long Island to work on the “Montauk Project”. During the 1980s he traveled to Mars on several occasions, as well as to “a research station in 100,000 BC, other planets to get canisters filled with Light and Dark Energy, and to the year 6037.”

I recently acquired a copy of the new volume 6 of Atiyah’s collected works, which contains things he wrote from the late eighties until very recently (the latest article is his joint paper with Graeme Segal on twisted K-theory). Unfortunately the price of this book is very high (about $200). I’ve bought cars for less than what I paid for the book.

Even more expensive is the full six-volume set, which Oxford intends to sell for $1000. Luckily I bought the previous 5 volumes quite a few years ago at a somewhat more modest price. Atiyah is one of my great heroes among mathematicians. He’s up there among the top very few in any reasonable list of the greatest mathematicians of the second half of the twentieth century, and the extent of his influence in bringing together mathematics and physics is hard to overestimate. Witten’s great work on topological quantum field theory was done very much because of impetus from Atiyah. One of the articles in the new volume is the write-up of Atiyah’s amazing talk at the Weyl Symposium in 1987, where he first suggested that there should be a four-dimensional QFT whose observables were Donaldson invariants and whose Hilbert space was Floer homology.

Atiyah is also known as Sir Michael. Before I heard about this I had always thought that the British system of honorary knighthoods was pretty silly, but the fact that they chose him gave me some respect for the whole system.

It’s a shame the books are so expensive, since they are wonderful documents that deserve wide distribution. Atiyah has not only discovered wonderful new mathematics, but he writes about it in an elegant, inspiring and lucid way. The books contain many expository pieces he has written over the course of his career, and these are pretty much all well worth reading. I regard a large part of my mathematical education as having come from spending a lot of time with these volumes over the years.

In a Stanford University press release today, Susskind promotes the “Landscape”, calling each different vacuum state a “pocket universe”. Referring to people like David Gross who oppose the idea, Susskind says: “More and more as time goes on, the opponents of the idea admit that they are simply in a state of depression and desperation”.

I’m wondering exactly which string theorists have admitted to him their depression and desperation.

It seems that Susskind’s new book coming out in a couple months isn’t about the Landscape, but rather black holes and holography. He’s writing another one now, to be called “The Cosmic Landscape”.

In other news, Witten will be giving a Distinguished Lecture Series in April at the Fields Institute in Toronto as part of their year-long program on the geometry of string theory. Witten seems to have decided that there’s not much to say about string theory these days, since the topics of his talks are listed as “Relativistic Scattering Theory”, “Gauge Symmetry Breaking”, and “The Quantum Hall Effect”.

By far the most important event for particle physics during the next few years will be the beginning of operation of the LHC, now planned for 2007. Besides that, here are various sources of information about what else will be going on, especially in the U.S.:

A National Research Council committee called EPP 2010: Elementary Particle Physics in the 21st Century was formed last year, charged to:

“Identify, articulate, and prioritize the scientific questions and opportunities that define elementary-particle physics.”

and

“Recommend a 15-year implementation plan with realistic, ordered priorities to realize these opportunities.”

It has already had a couple meetings, and presentations to these meetings are available here. They plan to have more public meetings this year and produce a report by the end of the year.

If you want to follow the details of current and future funding for particle physics in the U.S., there’s a lot of information in the presentations to this week’s HEPAP meeting. The overall picture is for particle physics funding to decrease over the next few years, under the pressure of the huge U.S. budget deficits. Beyond a proposed 3.1% cut for particle physics next year, the DOE is planning for another 3.7% cut in its overall science budget over the following five years. In this environment it is very difficult to find funding for new projects. One proposed new one, called BTeV, which was to study B-physics at the Tevatron, is slated for cancellation. Another, RSVP, a search for rare decays at Brookhaven, is being reevaluated.

The DOE budget document points out that the future of Fermilab is a problematic issue. Tevatron operations are slated to wind down in FY 2009, when the LHC should start producing data. The new NuMI/MINOS neutrino beam and detectors will still be running then, but it is not clear for how long. Unless a major new machine (such as the ILC linear collider) is sited at Fermilab, it’s not clear what the laboratory will be doing after 2010. Such a major new machine would be expensive, so it’s not something that could be financed out of a DOE HEP budget that continues to decline. There’s a comment about this in Jochen Weller’s weblog.

There’s a conference this week in Aspen on The Highest Energy Physics and some of the talks are already on-line.

Finally, Serkan Cabi at MIT has put together a nice collection of links to videos of physics seminars, he also has a weblog.

The great French mathematician André Weil spent the months of February-May 1940 in a prison in Rouen, as a result of what he referred to as “a disagreement with the French authorities on the subject of my military obligations”. Others might have called this “draft evasion”, and the story has something to do with why one of the most famous French mathematicians spent his post-war career not in France, but in Chicago and Princeton.

Weil’s sister was Simone Weil, who could variously be described as a moral, political and religious philosopher, an activist and mystic. She died in 1943 in England, from some combination of tuberculosis and starving herself out of sympathy with her compatriots in occupied France. During her brother’s prison stay they exchanged letters which were later published. One of these letters is a remarkable mathematical document that André Weil wrote to his sister, although she would have had little chance of understanding what he was talking about. It is reproduced in his collected works, and an English translation has just appeared in the latest Notices of the AMS.

The focus of Weil’s letter is the analogy between number fields and the field of algebraic functions of a complex variable. He describes his ideas about studying this analogy using a third, intermediate subject, that of function fields over a finite field, which he thinks of as a “bridge” or “Rosetta stone”. For function fields over a finite field, the analogies with number fields are quite close and many facts one knows about one subject can be used to make conjectures about what is true for the other. Some examples include the Riemann-Roch theorem and the Riemann hypothesis. After getting out of prison and leaving for the U.S., in 1941 Weil was able to prove the Riemann hypothesis for the function field case; of course for the number field case it remains an open problem.

For much more detail about this analogy, there’s an interesting textbook by Dino Lorenzini called An Invitation to Arithmetic Geometry.

The FY 2006 budget requests to Congress are out today. In the parts relevant to funding for mathematics and physics, the information about the NSF request is here, and information about the DOE request is here.

One should really be a lot more expert on the details of government science funding than I am to be sure what these numbers mean, but here’s my interpretation:

NSF: Funding request for mathematics is precisely flat at about $200 million. The only real change from last year is that $3 million is being moved from “Enhancing the Mathematical Sciences Workforce” (which funded things like the VIGRE grant our department used to have) to fund things like summer schools, workshops, conferences, etc. One strange thing is that mathematics is listed as one of four NSF priority areas, but still gets a cut in real dollars. Some of the other “priority areas” have very large cuts. I guess this means the NSF is changing its priorities.

The NSF physics request is up 2.3% to about $230 million. $13.5 million of this is for operations of the LHC detectors (CMS and ATLAS), $14.7 million for CESR and $32 million for LIGO. The part of the budget that includes research grants in high energy physics increased by $6.4 million to $152.4 million and theoretical physics is listed as a priority. Maybe string theorists will get more money. “POU”, or Physics of the Universe, is listed as the highest priority, with emphasis on the question of “What about that dark matter and dark energy?”.

DOE: The high energy physics budget request contains a large cut, going from $735.4 million in FY 2005 to $713.9 million in FY 2006. Highest priorities are listed as the Tevatron and NuMI at Fermilab and the B-factory as SLAC, but overall experimental HEP funding is down. Theoretical physics funding gets a small increase, from $49.0 to $49.1 million, so at least the string theorists will be all right, even if the experiments aren’t.

More details on all of this should be available at the HEPAP meeting next week.

Of course this is just the request to Congress. Something very different may emerge later this year from the Congressional committees.

Update: A document with just the HEP part of the DOE budget is here.

Michael Douglas gave a colloquium at City College this afternoon, with the title “Are there testable predictions of string theory?” I went up there to the talk, figuring that I knew more or less what he would say, but he really surprised me. Douglas has given many talks over the last year or so about his program for trying to get predictions out of string theory by doing statistical analyses of string vacuum states. He has concentrated on what looks like the most promising case, trying to see whether vacua with low-energy supersymmetry breaking are favored over ones where supersymmetry is broken at much higher scales (e.g. the GUT or Planck scales). If he could make a prediction that the LHC will see supersymmetry, that would count as the first real prediction of string theory, and in 2008 or so we would see if it was right. I was expecting Douglas today to explain this whole program, report on what he had achieved so far, and offer hope that he and his collaborators would have a yes or no answer about supersymmetry sometime soon.

Instead he very much downplayed hopes for this kind of prediction, answering a question about it by Nair at the end of the talk by explaining some of the difficulties. Presumably he now agrees with recent claims by Dine that it is too difficult, even in principle, to decide whether or not the landscape predicts supersymmetry. Given this, in the conclusion of his talk, I was expecting him to answer the “Are there testable predictions” question in the negative. Instead, he did something very strange. He announced that string theory does make predictions, lots of them, adopting the Lubos Motl definition of a “prediction” of string theory as being anything consistent with string theory. Examples he gave included Polchinski’s cosmic string networks, where one could tell from the behavior of the network whether the strings were fundamental or not, and short distance modifications to GR. Of course these are not in any sense real predictions; all sorts of different modifications of GR at short distances are compatible with string theory, as are either no visible fundamental cosmic strings, or visible ones with a huge variety of possible different properties.

The weirdest part of his talk was when he explained what he considered the best prediction of string theory. This involved the negative prediction that the fine structure constant can’t have varied with time in the early universe, since effective field theory arguments would imply a corresponding variation in the vacuum energy, something inconsistent with observation. So his best prediction from string theory isn’t really a prediction of string theory at all, but actually a prediction of effective field theory. Furthermore this “prediction” is the purely negative one that something that hardly anyone expects to be true actually isn’t true.

In the question section, some obnoxious guy who has a weblog asked him whether it was really true that the best prediction string theory could come up with was the no variation of the fine structure constant one that was really an effective field theory prediction, and didn’t that mean there was no hope of string theory ever really predicting anything. For some reason this made him rather defensive, and he began by saying it depended on the meaning of the word “prediction”. After having it explained to him what most physicists consider a prediction to be, he launched into a sequence of analogies designed to explain why you can’t get real predictions out of string theory. They all were of the same genre: imagine some situation where you can only observe phenomena that are related in a very complicated and hard to calculate way to the underlying fundamental theory, and somebody tells you what the fundamental theory is. Shouldn’t you work on it and believe in it?

This argument makes it clear where the whole subject is going to end up. The standard scientific method of deciding whether a theory is true or not by figuring out its implications and comparing them to observations is no longer operative. In the case of string theory there’s a new method. You just believe because authorities tell you to, and from now on the activity of professional theorists will consist solely in the construction of elaborate scenarios designed to explain why you can’t ever predict anything. Feynman’s line that: “string theorists don’t make predictions, they make excuses” has been changed from a criticism into a new motto about how to do science.

Jacques Distler has a new posting about multi-loop string amplitudes. It’s mainly devoted to the Berkovits superstring formalism, and explains in some detail the possible problems with this formalism that one might worry about. I’d alluded to some of these in the comment section of my posting about this last week, responding to commenters claiming that Berkovits had a proof of finiteness of multi-loop amplitudes. At the time, all I got in response was abuse about how ignorant I was. Presumably the same people will be either showering Jacques with abuse, or apologizing to me. Funny, for some reason Distler doesn’t mention what I’d written about this. He also seems to have somehow neglected to put “Not Even Wrong” in his list of links to physics weblogs.

Slashdot today has something pointing to Larry Osterman’s weblog where he tells the story of my ex-roommate David Weise’s career, much of which has been spent at Microsoft. David is generally credited with almost single-handedly making Windows a viable product, when in 1988 he figured out how to get Windows to run on the 286 processor in “protected mode”, something people thought couldn’t be done. At the time Microsoft was planning on abandoning Windows and moving to IBM’s OS/2, but David’s work changed everything.

Osterman gets some things wrong. David, Chuck Whitmer and Nathan Myhrvold were fellow physics graduate students and my roommates at Princeton, not at MIT (for more about Nathan, see an earlier posting). David was in biophysics, Chuck was a student of Steve Adler’s doing lattice gauge theory, and Nathan worked with Malcolm Perry on quantum gravity. It is true that David and Chuck were associated with the MIT blackjack team (this was the early eighties, just after casinos opened in Atlantic City, not the 70s as Osterman has it). There was a lot of practicing of card counting techniques and computer simulation of non-randomness in shuffles going on in our apartment during those days, although I never got really involved in it myself.

After getting their Ph.Ds, Nathan, Chuck and David (together with Nathan’s brother Cameron) founded a software company called Dynamical Systems Research in Oakland, which they ended up selling (along with themselves) to Microsoft. They all ended up getting obscenely rich, with Chuck retiring quite a while ago, Nathan leaving more recently, and finally David is now leaving to work in molecular biology.