Not Even Wrong

A couple years ago two French brothers, Igor and Grichka Bogdanov, managed to get Ph.Ds in France and publish several nonsensical papers about quantum gravity in refereed physics journals, several of them rather well-known and prestigious ones. John Baez has a useful web-page about this story.

This whole thing seemed to me strong evidence of how in recent years there has been a collapse of any real intellectual standards in this part of theoretical physics, and I ended up being quoted about this in various places. The “Affaire Bogdanov” died down fairly quickly, and the scandal doesn’t seem to have lead to much in the way of higher standards.

I recently heard from Fabien Besnard, who wrote to tell me that the Bogdanovs have a new book out, called “Avant le Big-bang” (Before the Big Bang), in which they quote me as endorsing their work. Besnard has a web-page (in French) on the latest developments in the L’affaire Bogdanoff.

The Bogdanovs wrote me last year, here’s a copy of their e-mail. I made the mistake of thinking “maybe these guys aren’t so bad, just overly-enthusiastic sorts who could use a little helpful advice”, and wrote this back to them. In their book they use part of my e-mail, mis-translating:

“It’s certainly possible that you have some new worthwhile results on quantum groups..” (I was being too polite here; while possible, it is unlikely)

as

“Il est tout a fait certain que vous avez obtenu des resultats nouveaux et utiles dans les groupe quantiques” (It is completely certain that you have obtained new worthwhile results on quantum groups).

One lesson from this is not to write back to crackpots. Another strange part of this story: late last year I received an e-mail purporting to be from a “Prof. L. Yang” at the “International Institute of Mathematical Physics” at Hong Kong University. It appeared to come from

th-phys.edu.hk

a domain name that is registered with the Hong Kong DNS, supposedly by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. I connected to the web-site at this address, which at the time contained an official-looking web-page for this Insitute. It now contains just a listing of directories, one of which is full of .pdf files of the papers of Arkadiusz Jadczyk.

This web-site is hosted by a US web-hosting company “Everyone’s Internet, Inc.” If you look carefully at the header for this e-mail you see that while it purports to be from

“liu-yang.imp@th-phys.edu.hk”

it really comes from

th-phys.edu.hk (ATuileries-117-1-27-138.w193-253.abo.wanadoo.fr [193.253.192.138])

which appears to be a machine connecting to the internet from Paris, set to claim to be “th-phys.edu.hk”.

It’s looking more and more like the original idea that the Bogdanovs were hoaxers, putting on the physics community, was closer to the truth than the idea that they are serious, just not very good, researchers.

Update: The comment section received a message from a supposed mathematician named “Roland Schwartz” defending the Bogdanov’s work on quantum groups. The source of the comment was
IP number 217.128.255.129. The DNS shows

nslookup 217.128.255.129

Name: ATuileries-117-1-29-129.w217-128.abo.wanadoo.fr
Address: 217.128.255.129

Funny, this seems to be a very close neighbor in Paris of Prof. L. Yang…..

I also just noticed that Jacques Distler has posted an account of his experiences with “Prof. L. Yang” et. al.

I was visiting the math department at Dartmouth the past couple days, and gave a colloquium talk there. It’s now available online.

Witten has contributed an essay to the latest issue of Nature about electroweak symmetry breaking. He describes the main conventional ideas about this, ending with the latest anthropic ones. Here are his comments about those:

“One approach is the anthropic principle, according to which the dark energy and the Higgs particle mass take different values in different parts of the Universe, and we inevitably live in a region in which they are small enough to make life possible. If so, many other properties of the Universe that we usually consider fundamental — such as the mass and charge of the electron — are probably also environmental accidents. Although I hope that this line of thought is not correct, it will inevitably become more popular if experiment shows that electroweak-symmetry breaking is governed by the textbook standard model with a Higgs particle and nothing else.”

He ends with the eminently reasonable summary:

“As yet, none of these theoretical proposals about electroweak-symmetry breaking are entirely satisfying. Hopefully, by the end of this decade, experimental findings at the Tevatron and the LHC will set us on the right track. But the diversity and scope of ideas on electroweak-symmetry breaking suggests that the solution to this riddle will determine the future direction of particle physics.”

Sean Carroll has some comments about the anti-big bang petition. He also points to Ned Wright’s explanation of what is wrong with various proposed alternatives to the big bang scenario. In particular this explains in detail what the problems with Irving Segal’s “Chronometric Cosmology” are, something I’d always wondered about.

Segal was a very good mathematician, who did serious work on quantum field theory in the 50s and 60s. He’s the “Segal” in what is sometimes called the “Segal-Shale-Weil” representation. Segal is a counter-example to Carroll’s observation that, for the most part, opponents of the big bang are not very smart. Unfortunately, it seems that quite smart and otherwise reasonable people can have unshakable faith in ideas that don’t work. Segal’s student John Baez wrote up some of his memories of his advisor and his cosmological research.

Slides used by many of the lecturers at the recent Davis mathematical physics conference in honor of Albert Schwarz are now online.

It’s always a little worrying when this happens, but sometimes I find myself very much agreeing with at least parts of what Lubos Motl has to say. For example see this recent posting to sci.physics.strings. In it Motl argues that

“I think it is premature to try to construct this major framework that would explain the character of vacuum selection and very early cosmology in string theory”

and

“So my belief is that we will have to understand the nonperturbative structure of the stringy arena using some new universal definition of string theory – a definition that is both non-perturbative (reaches the strongly coupled regions) as well as background-universal (reaches the geometries and non-geometries that are different from the starting one), and only afterwards, we will be able to start answering the stringy cosmological questions in a better context. Without this new tool, everything is just vague guesswork.

In my opinion, the research of string cosmology; stringy inflation; de Sitter space in string theory; scattering in backgrounds with non-standard causal diagrams; and all similar things that have essentially be started by the observation of accelerating Universe back in 1998 – has led to a very small number of intriguing results. There is almost nothing non-trivial and mathematically intriguing going on here; there is as much output as much input we insert. It remains a combination of phenomenology and speculations where conjectures can rarely be clearly ruled out.”

I’ve never really understood why there are fields of “string phenomenology” and “string cosmology” when the theory is still in a state that it can’t reliably calculate anything. While I think it is wishful thinking to believe that if you understood string theory better it would reproduce the real world, at least Motl’s is a consistent scientific position.

Motl is also a fierce opponent of the “anthropic” arguments that have become popular among string theorists. For the latest example of anthropic argumentation, see this posting at Jacques Distler’s weblog.

For many years now the SPIRES database at SLAC has been used to produce a list of the most frequently cited papers during each year. Since 1997 Michael Peskin has been doing this, while at the same time writing up a description of what is in the 40 or so most popular papers, together with comments on what this data shows about trends in particle physics. The 2003 edition of Peskin’s review has recently appeared.

Peskin notes that SPIRES has begun indexing more astrophysical papers during the last two years, and many particle physicists have turned their attention to cosmology. He has expanded the number of top papers he reviews from 40 to 50 to take into account the greater coverage of the database.

The most frequently cited article, this year and every year, is the Particle Data Group’s “Review of Particle Physics” compilation of experimental particle physics data. It is conventional for experimental papers to often refer to this instead of to the original papers. This year the number two and three positions are held by papers from the WMAP experiment, with number four the original results on high redshift supernovae that indicated a non-zero cosmological constant.

The first particle theory paper is the Randall-Sundrum one at number five, and Maldacena’s AdS/CFT paper is at number seven. For many years the top part of this list was heavily dominated by relatively new string theory papers, but the situation is now dramatically different. The highest-ranked post-1999 paper is one about PP-waves at number 18, the next is one at number 37 by Ashoke Sen about time-dependent backgrounds. The only other post-1999 paper in the top 50 is the Dijkgraaf-Vafa paper about supersymmetric gauge theories, which is at number 39.

This list provides pretty conclusive evidence that the field of particle theory more or less flat-lined about 5 years ago, with only a small number of minor blips of brain activity since then.

There’s also a cumulative list of the most highly cited papers of all time. Here the dramatic movement one can watch is the speed with which Maldacena’s paper accumulates citations. At the end of last year it was at number 6 on the list of all-time most frequently cited papers; it has now moved to number 5 and soon will overtake number 4. Within a couple of years it should be at number three, only outranked by the Review of Particle Properties and Weinberg’s original paper on the Weinberg-Salam model.

The hundreds of expository articles about supersymmetry written over the last twenty years or more tend to begin by giving one of two arguments to motivate the idea of supersymmetry in particle physics. The first of these goes something like “supersymmetry unifies bosons and fermions, isn’t that great?” This argument doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense since none of the observed bosons or fermions can be related to each other by supersymmetry (basically because there are no observed boson-fermion pairs with the same internal quantum numbers). So supersymmetry relates observed bosons and fermions to unobserved, conjectural fermions and bosons for which there is no experimental evidence.

Smarter people avoid this first argument since it is clearly kind of silly, and use a second one: the “fine-tuning” argument first forcefully put forward by Witten in lectures about supersymmetry at Erice in 1981. This argument says that in a grand unified theory extension of the standard model, there is no symmetry that can explain why the Higgs mass (or electroweak symmetry breaking scale) is so much smaller than the grand unification scale. The fact that the ratio of these two scales is so small is “unnatural” in a technical sense, and its small size must be “fine-tuned” into the theory.

This argument has had a huge impact over the last twenty years or so. Most surveys of supersymmetry begin with it and it justifies the belief that supersymmetric particles with masses accessible at the LHC must exist. Much of the experimental program at the Tevatron and the LHC revolve around looking for such particles. If you believe the fine-tuning argument, the energy scale of supersymmetry breaking can’t be too much larger than the electroweak symmetry breaking scale, i.e. it should be in the range of 100s of Gev- 1 Tev or so. Experiments at LEP and the Tevatron have ruled out much of the energy range in which one expects to see something and the fine-tuning argument is already at the point of starting to be in conflict with experiment, for more about this, see a recent posting by Jacques Distler.

Last week at Davis I was suprised to hear Lenny Susskind attacking the fine-tuning argument, claiming that the distribution of possible supersymmetry breaking scales in the landscape was probably pretty uniform, so there was no reason to expect it to be small. He believes that the anthropic explanation of the cosmological constant shows that the “naturalness” paradigm that particle theorists have been invoking is misguided, so there is no valid argument for the supersymmetry breaking scale to be low.

I had thought this point of view was just Susskind being provocative, but today a new preprint appeared by Nima Arkani-Hamed and Savas Dimopoulos entitled “Supersymmetric Unification Without Low Energy Supersymmetry and Signatures for Fine-Tuning at the LHC“. In this article the authors go over all the problems with the standard picture of supersymmetry and describe the last twenty-five years or so of attempts to address them as “epicyclic model-building”. They claim that all these problems can be solved by adopting the anthopic principle (which they rename the “structure” or “galactic” or “atomic” principle to try and throw off those who think the “anthropic” principle is not science) to explain the electroweak breaking scale, and assuming the supersymmetry breaking scale is very large.

It’s not suprising you can solve all the well-known problems of supersymmetric extensions of the standard model by claiming that all effects of supersymmetry only occur at unobservably large energy scales, so all we ever will see is the non-supersymmetric standard model. By itself this idea is as silly as it sounds, but they do have one twist on it. They claim that even if the supersymmetry breaking scale is very high, one can find models where chiral symmetries keep the masses of the fermionic superpartners small, perhaps at observably low energies. They also claim that in this case the standard calculation of running coupling constants still more or less works.

The main experimental argument for supersymmetry has always been that the running of the three gauge coupling constants is such that they meet more or less at a point corresponding to a unification energy not too much below the Planck scale, in a way that works much better with than without supersymmetry. It turns out that this calculation works very well at one-loop, but is a lot less impressive when you go to two-loops. Read as a prediction of the strong coupling constant in terms of the two others, it comes out 10-15% different than the observed value.

I don’t think the argument for the light fermionic superpartners is particularly compelling and the bottom line here is that two of the most prominent particle theorists around have abandoned the main argument for supersymmetry. Without the pillar of this argument, the case for supersymmetry is exceedingly weak and my guess is that the whole idea of the supersymmetric extension of the standard model is now on its way out.

One other thing of note: in the abstract the authors refer to “Weinberg’s successful prediction of the cosmological constant”. The standard definition of what a prediction of a physical theory is has now been redefined down to include “predictions” one makes by announcing that one has no idea what is causing the phenomenon under study.