Not Even Wrong

Part two of Gerald Alper’s piece at Smashpipe is now available there, with the title Who’s Winning the String Wars and Why Should You Care?, and some more substantive material than in part one. One of the great things about having a blog is that whenever anyone writes anything about you that you think might not be 100% correct, you can blog about it, and explain yourself ad nauseam. So, here are a few clarifications for readers of that article:

• About the “horrible sentence”
  

  The Hilbert space of the Wess-Zumino-Witten model is a representation not only of the Kac-Moody group, but the group of conformal representations [transformations] as well.

  I don’t think it’s a bad sentence, it succinctly conveys the main point about the close relationship of the WZW QFT to representation theory. Like a certain number of things in the book though, it’s not intended for everyone. There were certain things I wanted to explain, and the way I went about this was to try to as clearly write them down as possible, in a way accessible to as many people as possible, but well aware that not everyone would understand everything. Unlike writing “the WZW model is related to mathematics like X is to Y”, where X and Y are things most people would recognize, you’re not going to get fooled into believing you understand something you don’t by what I was writing. Those who do understand the sentence will understand a real idea.

• I AM VERY CONFIDENT that I AM RIGHT. No one has ever critiqued string theory with the level of detail that I have.

  Not sure exactly how I said this, but I suspect the “no one has ever” wasn’t intended to convey that this was a good thing. I’ve clearly spent too much of my life thinking about this. I also should specify that what I’m confident about is that current “string vacua” models don’t correspond to reality. They’re complicated, ugly, and don’t explain anything. My suspicion is that even Witten might not completely disagree with this, acknowledging that at our current understanding of string theory, there is no convincing model. I think a more accurate way of characterizing where Witten and I disagree here is with how promising it is to pursue this particular vision of unification. I am not at all confident that Witten or someone else pursuing it might not come up with something really new and successful some day. I just think it’s a relatively unpromising route to keep heading down, although I acknowledge it’s possible it might lead to finding a more interesting path. Doubtless Witten feels the same way about things I find more promising.

• The online magazine Smashpipe has the first part of a two-part article written by Gerald Alper, who recently came up here to Columbia to talk to me about string theory/etc. It was an interesting conversation, so I’m curious to see what he makes of the more substantive part, which is in part two, planned for next week.
• If instead you’d like to read about a conversation with my colleague Brian Greene, there’s a piece at Cosmos Magazine. Brian is taking his World Science Festival to Australia next month and will be on tour there.
• In other Columbia news, LHC experimentalist Emlyn Hughes has evidently
  baffled the students in Frontiers of Science again. Three years ago he undressed for the students, this year the performance somehow involved a student mistress (see here and here). No, I don’t understand any of this either.
• As a last Columbia story, this semester in the physics department Bill Zajc is teaching a string theory course for undergraduates, Physics W4012, based on the Zwiebach book. While Zajc isn’t a string theorist, he is a frequent commenter at Lubos Motl’s blog.
• There’s a new issue out of Inference, which has some interesting articles, including an essay by Pierre Schapira on category theory (French version here). Also there’s Jean-Pierre Luminet on holography.

  Inference is a bit of a mystery, unclear who is editing it (some speculation here). Whoever it is though, it’s quite worth paying attention to.

• The HEP Postdoc Project is collecting anonymously information aimed at helping potential postdocs (or even Ph.D students) find out more about what it’s like to work with various senior HEP theorists. No, like Inference, I have no idea who is behind this.

Since Grothendieck’s death somewhat more than a year ago, quite a lot of new material about him and his mathematics has become available. Visit the Grothendieck Circle to find a lot of this, with just one example some new chapters of the English translation of the third volume of Scharlau’s biography.

This month’s AMS Notices has the first of two parts of a long article with contributions from many mathematicians discussing Grothendieck’s work and their memories of him and his influence on their careers. Colin McLarty has an excellent expository article, maybe the best of attempts I’ve seen to explain some of the themes of Grothendieck’s mathematics in a relatively accessible manner.

While you’re there, this latest issue of the Notices has quite a bit else worth reading, from my colleague Ivan Corwin on KPZ universality to Beilinson on Gelfand’s seminar, and an amusing attempt by Jeremy Gray to guess not the next Fields medalist, but who would have gotten one in 1866.

I think I can confidently predict that tomorrow morning either one of two things will happen:

• The first observation of gravitational waves will be reported by the LIGO experiment.
• A large fraction of the scientific community will be really, really angry at members of the LIGO collaboration.

I’m betting on the first of these two alternatives, and like everyone else will be watching to see what happens tomorrow. If you want some informed commentary on what it all means though, this isn’t the place (what I know about gravitational radiation is basically the little that I learned in a GR course about 40 years ago…), so for now I’ll leave comments closed.

One place advertising a live feed is Nature. I’ll be happy to list better possibilities here if people let me know about them.

Update: Another place to try for the webcast is here.

Update: Big event here at Columbia. Roone Arledge auditorium packed.

Update: Quite amazing, just as predicted, observation of two black holes coalescing, a historic discovery. That stuff I was taught 40 years ago really works. More details many places as the embargo is lifted, with some good examples Natalie Wolchover at Quanta, Dennis Overbye at the New York Times, and Davide Castelvecchi and Alexandra Witze at Nature. The paper has been refereed and is here at PRL.

Update: Better info about the waves is available elsewhere, but I can report here on something pretty amazing: my graduate school roommate’s gravitational wave soup bowl.

Last night I got to attend a major event of the Manhattan social season, a party celebrating the fact that the Stacks Project has reached the milestone of 5000 pages. As far as anyone knows, no one has ever printed out the whole thing, but to give an idea of scale, the party featured a large stack of reams of paper totaling about 5000 pages.

I was going to include a party report, describing the various celebrities there, their outfits and conversations, but one of them (Mathematics Without Apologies) has its own blog, so I’ll just refer you there.

For some background about this amazing project, from when it was a mere 4000 pages, see here.

Slides from my talk at Rutgers are now available here. The idea was just to advertise to physicists there the point of view that is all too familiar to regular readers here. The final speculative comments about relations to mathematics shouldn’t be taken too seriously, these are things I hope to work on and write about much more in a few months once my current book project is completed.

Update: Interestingly, my Princeton advisor Curt Callan yesterday gave a talk at the KITP with a bit of a similar theme, starting off by arguing that the success of the standard model made future progress in HEP very difficult. His answer to the problem is quite different than mine (his involves trying to make contributions to biology). The first question at the end (from David Gross) is about the relation to new mathematics.

Not much time for blogging at the moment, with one reason that I’ll be giving a talk at Rutgers on Wednesday, and need to get that prepared. A few quick items:

• As some commenters have mentioned here, talks from the recent Munich conference (discussed here) are now available. From the little time I’ve found to look at them, I think Rovelli’s is the talk that makes the point about all of this most worth making, with Massimo Pigliucci good at explaining the wider implications.
  While interesting comments on the talks are encouraged, for reasons that I can’t explain publicly, discussion here of the Polchinski contribution is not welcome.
• Besides watching Gordon Kane in Munich on string theory predictions, he also has a paper about this out now.
• Congratulations to Bert Kostant on the award of the 2016 Wigner Medal. Kostant has been one of the major figures over the years in developing many deep ideas about the intersection of mathematics and physics, as well as a leading figure in the algebraic approach to Lie algebras and their representations.
• A lot of mathematicians and physicists want you to use TurboTax.
• Steven Weinberg’s sensible opposition to guns in UT Austin classrooms has gotten a lot of media attention (for instance here). Of the many obvious reasons why this is a bad idea, he correctly points out that it may well make it difficult for UT to recruit faculty.

Update: A commenter points out that more videos from the Munich conference are available here.

Update: John Horgan has a wonderful interview with the remarkable and ubiquitous Sabine Hossenfelder. Highly recommended.

Update: For news from the LHC, see last week’s Chamonix LHC performance Workshop. From the summary, the goal is about 30 inverse fb of pp collisions this year.