Not Even Wrong

There’s a very interesting new paper on the arXiv by Joe Polchinski, a survey article for Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, entitled just Dualities. It’s an unusually lucid summary of the story of dualities in quantum field theory and string theory. This is a very complex subject which has been a central one in theoretical physics for the last few decades, but most expository writing on the subject has tended to be either superficial promotional material or mired in technical detail obscuring fundamental issues.

One reason for this is that, as Polchinski does an admirable job of making clear, in a very real sense we still do not understand at all the fundamental issues raised by these dualities. He notes that “we are still missing some big idea”, and points to the same comments from Nati Seiberg last month that I blogged about here. For most of the dualities at issue, our current standard technology for dealing with QFTs (the Lagrangian and the path integral over classical fields) is capable of capturing the two QFTs that are in some sense “dual”, but we lack a viable larger framework that would give the two QFTs in two different limits and explain the duality relationship.

For an example of the problem, probably the oldest and most well-studied case where we are missing something is Montonen-Olive duality, a non-abelian duality between electric and magnetic charges and fields. A currently popular idea is to find the explanation of this in “Theory X”, a 6d superconformal QFT, with duality coming from compactifying the theory on a torus (for more about this, see talks last week in Berkeley). The problem with this is that we don’t have a definition of the “Theory X”.

Polchinski places this problem in the context of a conjectural “M-theory” with various string theory limits. This has been the dominant idea in the subject for nearly 20 years now, but we seem no closer now to finding an actual realization of this conjectural picture than we were back in the mid-90s. Twenty years and thousands of papers have just given better understanding that various possible ideas about this don’t work.

One place where I think Polchinski’s survey is weak is in the treatment of this conjecture, where at times he takes as solid result something highly conjectural. For instance he starts off at one point with:

String-string dualities imply that there is a unique string/M-theory.

and moves on to the conjecture that

In this sense it may be that every QFT can be understood as a vacuum state of string/M-theory.

The problem here is that he’s built a speculative view of the unification of physics, constructed on an assumption about a “unique” theory, when we don’t know at all that such a thing exists. One basic lesson of mathematical research is that you need to keep very clear the distinction between what you really understand and what is speculation, because your speculation is often wrong and if so will lead you in the wrong direction. I think particle theory of recent decades likely suffers from people forgetting that some ideas are speculative, not firmly grounded, and may be pointing in the wrong direction.

One wrong direction this takes Polchinski is to the non-predictive, pseudo-scientific landscape of supposed string theory solutions and the multiverse, which he blithely invokes as our best fundamental explanation of physics. Tellingly, unlike the clear explanations of other topics, here he makes no attempt to describe these ideas other than to note that

they rest on multiple approximations and no exact theory.

In a final section, Polchinski addresses the question of what all this tells us about what is “fundamental” and what is the role of symmetries. This is the crucial question, and I’d argue that our lack of understanding of where these dualities come from likely is due to our missing some understanding of how symmetries are realized in QFT or string theory. This has been the lesson of history, with the Standard Model only coming into being when people better understood how symmetries, especially gauge symmetries, could act in QFT. Polchinski largely takes the opposite point of view, arguing that the fundamental theory maybe has no symmetries, local or global. He quotes Susskind as suggesting that symmetries have nothing to do with fundamental equations, are just calculational tools for finding solutions. I think this is completely misguided, that a strong case can be made (and I do it here) that “symmetry” (in the sense of the mathematics of groups and their representations) lies at the very foundation of quantum mechanics, and thus any quantum mechanical theory, even string/M-theory, whatever it might be.

Wondering whether there will be an arXiv trackback to this, and whether Polchinski has something to say about it…

Update: The arXiv Monday evening has a large collection of excellent review articles entitled “Exact results on N=2 supersymmetric gauge theories”, edited by J.Teschner (first is arXiv:1412.7118, last arXiv:1412.7145). Some of the results reviewed are based on deriving implications of the existence of the 6d (2,0) models discussed here and in the comment section.

Update: I’ve put this blog posting in the Multiverse Mania category, not because of the posting content, but because of comments in the comment section from Polchinski and Bousso.

This week’s Nature features a call to arms from George Ellis and Joe Silk, entitled Scientific method: Defend the integrity of physics. I’m very glad to see well-known physicists highlighting the serious problem for the credibility of science raised by the string theory multiverse and the associated ongoing campaign to justify the failures of string theory by attacking the scientific method. Acknowledging evidence that an idea you cherished doesn’t work is at the core of what science is and physics now has a major problem with prominent theorists refusing to abide by this principle. Ellis and Silk do a great job of identifying and characterizing an important challenge the scientific community is facing.

The issue is however complicated, and while the Nature piece carefully and clearly addresses some of the complexities, there are places where things get over-simplified. In particular, the introduction frames the issue as whether a theory being “sufficiently elegant and explanatory” allows it to not need experimental testing. The problem with the string theory multiverse though is not this, since such a theory is the antithesis of “elegant and explanatory”. There’s just about nothing in science as inelegant as the various attempts (e.g. the KKLT mechanism) to make string theory fit with known physics, and “the multiverse did it” is no more an actual explanation of anything than “a big omnipotent turtle did it”.

Trying to cut through the complexities, Ellis and Silk write:

In our view, the issue boils down to clarifying one question: what potential observational or experimental evidence is there that would persuade you that the theory is wrong and lead you to abandoning it? If there is none, it is not a scientific theory.

This is at the heart of the matter, but there are subtleties. A common recent move among some prominent string theorists has been to argue that string theory is falsifiable: it is based on quantum mechanics, so if experiments falsify quantum mechanics, they falsify string theory. This just makes clear that the question of falsifiability can be slippery. Philosophers of science are experts at the intricacies of such questions and Ellis and Silk are right to call for help from them.

They also make the interesting call for the convening of a conference to address these issues. How such a thing would work and how it might be helpful seem well worth thinking about. As for one of their other recommendations though:

In the meantime, journal editors and publishers could assign speculative work to other research categories — such as mathematical rather than physical cosmology — according to its potential testability.

I’m leery of the impulse among physicists to solve their problem of how to deal with bad physics by calling it mathematics. Yes, there is good mathematics that has come out of untestable ideas about string theory, but no, this doesn’t include the string landscape/multiverse cop-out, which physicists need to face up to themselves.

For the specific arguments from Sean Carroll and Richard Dawid that Ellis and Silk address, I’ve written about them elsewhere, see for instance here, where I discussed in some detail Dawid’s arguments.

Update: Sabine Hossenfelder has commentary on this here.

Update: Taking the opposite side of the argument in January’s Smithsonian magazine is by colleague Brian Greene, with an article entitled Is String Theory About to Unravel?. As you might expect, Brian’s answer is “No”, and he gives a good account of the point of view Ellis and Silk are warning against. He mentions the possibility of encouraging news for string theory from the next LHC run, but says that “I now hold only modest hope that the theory will confront data during my lifetime.”

Update: Sean Carroll responds to the criticism from Ellis and Silk with a tweet characterizing them as belonging to the “falsifiability police”:

My real problem with the falsifiability police is: we don’t get to demand ahead of time what kind of theory correctly describes the world.

Update: Gordon Kane joins the fight in a comment at Nature, claiming that, before the LHC, string theory predicted a gluino mass of 1.5 TeV.

The literature contains clear and easily understood predictions published before LHC from compactified string theories that gluinos, for example, should have been too heavy to find in Run 1 but will be found in Run 2 (gluino mass of about 1.5 TeV).

As far as I can tell, this is utter nonsense, with Kane publicly claiming string theory predictions of a gluino mass of around 600 GeV (see page 22 of this) back in 2011, then moving the “prediction” up as Run 1 data falsified his earlier predictions. Kane at least makes falsifiable predictions, the problem with him only comes when they get falsified…

Update: Chad Orzel has his take here.

Update: Adam Frank has an essay on this here.

The Guardian has a podcast up today featuring Robert Trotta and David Wallace called The Multiverse in a Nutshell. It’s largely more of the usual uncritical multiverse hype that has been flooding the public expositions of fundamental physics for years now. Trotta gives the usual promotion of the cosmological multiverse, with no indication there is any problem with it. He assures us that this is being tested (by looking for “bruises” in CMB collisions). As far as I can tell, the Planck results released today, like all CMB data, show no evidence for anything like this. It appears that the Planck people don’t even think this is worth mentioning. The public channels used for this hype will never report the fact that there’s nothing there, instead they will just endlessly talk about this as something “scientists are looking for.”

Wallace talks about something completely different, many-worlds, with nobody telling listeners that this has nothing at all to do with the cosmological material. Instead we’re told that it’s all related, because “most theories” “tell us there must be a multiverse”. When challenged about the splitting universe business in QM, Wallace admits that at the fundamental level there is no splitting, there’s just one theory and one universe, that “many worlds” is just a way of talking about the emergent behavior of the classical approximation. His book about this, The Emergent Multiverse, is quite good and makes clear what the “Multiverse” there really is. It’s a real shame that he chooses to involve himself in this kind of attempt to muddy the waters and promote pseudo-science to the public.

Thankfully at least the physics community has one physicist trying to do something about this nonsense: Paul Steinhardt. In an interview with John Horgan, here’s his “Multiverse in a Nutshell”:

Unfortunately, what has happened since is that all attempts to resolve the multiverse problem have failed and, in the process, it has become clear that the problem is much stickier than originally imagined. In fact, at this point, some proponents of inflation have suggested that there can be no solution. We should cease bothering to look for one. Instead, we should simply take inflation and the multiverse as fact and accept the notion that the features of the observable universe are accidental: consequences of living in this particular region of the multiverse rather than another.

To me, the accidental universe idea is scientifically meaningless because it explains nothing and predicts nothing. Also, it misses the most salient fact we have learned about large-scale structure of the universe: its extraordinary simplicity when averaged over large scales. In order to explain the one simple universe we can see, the inflationary multiverse and accidental universe hypotheses posit an infinite variety of universes with arbitrary amounts of complexity that we cannot see. Variations on the accidental universe, such as those employing the anthropic principle, do nothing to help the situation.

Scientific ideas should be simple, explanatory, predictive. The inflationary multiverse as currently understood appears to have none of those properties.