Not Even Wrong

Caltech has just announced the establishment of the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, with Hirosi Ooguri as director. It will have a permanent endowment of around \$74 million, with \$30 million of that new funds from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

To get some idea of the scale of this, the recent worries about HEP theory funding in the US have been due to a drop in funding by the DOE of university research from around \$27.5 million/year to \$24 million/year. So, a few million/year from this endowment should help make up for that, while continuing the trend of changing over theoretical physics funding from government support to philanthropy by the .01%.

Update: In other developments from the .01%, Physics World has the news that nominations are now open for the \$3 million Milner prize in physics. You can submit nominations here. Nominations close June 30, announcement of winners will be November 9.

There’s also now a website for the Milner/Zuckerberg $3 million mathematics prize. Not much info there except that it will reward “significant discoveries across the many branches of the subject.” I’m guessing that, like the other prizes, initial picks will be from Milner/Zuckerberg themselves, with those people going on to form the committee to pick future winners.

Recall that this past March results from BICEP2 were announced, claiming a greater than 5 sigma detection of a primordial B-mode signal in the CMB polarization. This result received a huge amount of world-wide attention (and see some commentary here). Yesterday saw a very curious situation, with Adam Falkowski at the Resonaances blog claiming that the BICEP2 foreground analysis was flawed, and that “Various rumors place the significance of the corrected signal between 0 and 2 sigma.” Adrian Cho at Science magazine has a story about this, quoting Clement Pryke, co-PI of BICEP as saying “We stand by our paper”, while acknowledging that, with respect to a plot of Planck data they used to estimate the foreground “It is unclear what that plot shows”.

The controversy surrounds slide 6 of this presentation, with the BICEP foreground analysis evidently relying on scraping data from this slide. The claim at Resonaances is that they didn’t take into account the “Not CIB subtracted” notation on the slide:

However, it seems they misinterpreted the Planck results: that map shows the polarization fraction for all foregrounds, not for the galactic dust only (see the “not CIB subtracted” caveat in the slide). Once you correct for that and rescale the Planck results appropriately, some experts claim that the polarized galactic dust emission can account for most of the BICEP signal.

This is backed up by David Hogg’s report of a talk by Raphael Flauger at NYU yesterday:

At lunch, Raphael Flauger (NYU) gave a beautiful talk on foreground uncertainties related to the BICEP2 results. He built his foreground models as did the BICEP2 team by scraping data out of Keynote ™ presentations posted on the web! I have to say that again: The Planck team showed some maps of foregrounds in some Keynote presentations and posted them on the web. Flauger (and also the BICEP2 team before him) grabbed those presentations, scraped them for the all-sky maps, calibrated them using the scale bars, and worked from there. The coolest thing is that Flauger also simulated this whole process to account in his analysis for the digitization (scraping?) noise. Awesome! He concludes that the significance of the BICEP2 results is much lower than stated in the paper, which makes him (and many others) sad: He has been working on inflation models that produce large signals.

It sounds like this issue is not going to get resolved until there is something more substantial from Planck about this than a slide suitable for data scraping. In the meantime, blogs are your best source of information. Or maybe Twitter, where Erik Verlinde tweets from the Princeton PCTS workshop Searching for Simplicity that:

News from Princeton: BICEP2 polarization data are due to dust foreground and not caused by primordial gravity waves.

Update: There’s also a New Scientist story here. It should be emphasized that the BICEP team are denying that there is any need to revise what is in their paper, with New Scientist quoting John Kovac of BICEP as follows:

Kovac says no one has admitted anything. “We tried to do a careful job in the paper of addressing what public information there was, and also being upfront about the uncertainties. We are quite comfortable with the approach we have taken.”

See comments in the comment section here from Sesh Nadathur and Shaun Hotchkiss explaining why there may not be very much significance to this issue.

Update: Sesh Nadathur has a detailed post up now about this, New BICEP rumours, nothing to see here. Bottom line is:

The BICEP result is exciting, but because it is only at one frequency, it cannot rule out foreground contamination. Other observations at other frequencies are required to confirm whether the signal is indeed cosmological. One scenario is that Planck, operating on the whole sky at many frequencies but with a lower sensitivity than BICEP, confirms a gravitational wave signal, in which case pop the champagne corks and prepare for Stockholm. The other scenario is that Planck can’t confirm a detection, but also can’t definitively say that BICEP’s detection was due to foregrounds (this is still reasonably likely!), in which case we wait for other very sensitive ground-based telescopes pointed at that same region of sky but operating at different frequencies to confirm whether or not dust foregrounds are actually important in that region, and if so, how much they change the inferred value of r.

Until then I would say ignore the rumours.

Peter Coles also has a blog post here, with bottom line

I repeat what I’ve said before in response to the BICEP2 analysis, namely that the discussion of foregrounds in their paper is disappointing. I’d also say that I think the foreground emission at these frequencies is so complicated that none of the simple approaches that were available to the BICEP2 team are reliable enough to be convincing. My opinion on the analysis hasn’t therefore changed at all as a result of this rumour. I think BICEP2 has definitely detected something at 150 GHz but we simply have no firm evidence at the moment that it is primordial. That will change shortly, with the possibility of other experiments (specifically Planck, but also possibly SPTPol) supplying the missing evidence.

I’m not particularly keen on the rumour-mongering that has gone on, but then I’m not very keen either on the way the BICEP2 result has been presented in some quarters as being beyond reasonable doubt when it clearly doesn’t have that status. Yet.

Update: There will be a talk about this issue in Princeton tomorrow morning, see here.

Update: Slides from the Flauger talk at Princeton are here. I’ll leave discussion of the results presented to the better-informed, but will comment that this work appears to definitely involve new heights in the technology of data-scraping from Keynote presentations.

Update: Video of the Flauger talk is here. Quite interesting are the introductory remarks of Paul Steinhardt, and the concluding remarks of Lyman Page. See also new blog posts from Jester and Sesh Nadathur. Sesh (via Eiichiro Komatsu at Facebook) includes a transcription of part of Page’s comments on the situation:

This is, this is a really, peculiar situation. In that, the best evidence for this not being a foreground, and the best evidence for foregrounds being a possible contaminant, both come from digitizing maps from power point presentations that were not intended to be used this way by teams just sharing the data. So this is not – we all know, this is not sound methodology. You can’t bank on this, you shouldn’t. And I may be whining, but if I were an editor I wouldn’t allow anything based on this in a journal. Just this particular thing, you know. You just can’t, you can’t do science by digitizing other people’s images.

From looking at all this, and seeing what the people in Princeton are saying, my non-expert opinion is that the BICEP2 result should be interpreted as an observation of B-mode polarization, but there’s no convincing data yet about the crucial question of whether this is foreground or cosmological. The BICEP2 data could not address this, and the relevant Planck data is not yet available (other experiments will soon also provide the data needed to resolve this question). The BICEP2 press release claiming “the first direct evidence for cosmic inflation” now looks like it may have been a highly premature claim.

Update: Talks ongoing at Caltech today about this at a workshop, videos later here. On Twitter, you can follow the BICEP/Planck fight via Sean Carroll:

At Caltech CMB workshop. #BICEP2 folks seem completely unconcerned about recent worries about galactic foregrounds. Wait for Planck paper…

Zaldarriaga on CMB grav waves vs. dust: sane answer is “let’s just wait.” On the other hand… we just can’t. No scientist is that patient…

MZ: Planck hasn’t measured dust in #BICEP2 region. But extrapolating from where they did measure, apparently can fit B-mode signal.

MZ: “I’m not happy this is on Facebook and Twitter.”

Seems to me we’re now stuck with Planck saying they think this is dust, BICEP saying they think it’s not. Planck is the side that has data about dust, BICEP is the side that has something they scraped off a slide of a Keynote presentation…

Update: Excellent article about this in the Washington Post from Joel Achenbach: Big Bang backlash.

Update: Zaldarriaga: I believe the case in favor of a detection of primordial B modes is not convincing (hopefully just temporarily). See more here and here.

Daniel Quillen, one of the greatest mathematicians of the latter part of the twentieth century, passed away in 2011 after suffering from Alzheimer’s. For an appreciation of his work and an explanation of its significance, a good place to start is Graeme Segal’s obituary notice, and there’s also quite a bit of material in the AMS Notices.

It’s very exciting to see that the Clay Math Institute now has a project to make available Quillen’s research notebooks. Segal and Glenys Luke have been working on cataloging the set, producing lists of contents of the notebooks, so far from the earliest ones in 1970 up to 1977. Quillen’s work ranged very widely, and for much of the 1980s he was very much involved in what was going on at the boundary of mathematics and quantum field theory. His work on the Mathai-Quillen form provided a beautiful expression for the Thom class of a vector bundle using exactly ingredients that formally generalize to the infinite-dimensional case, where this provides a wonderful way of understanding certain topological quantum field theories. The Mathai-Quillen paper is here, see here for a long expository account of the uses of this in TQFT.

I’ve just started to take a look through the notebooks, and this is pretty mind-blowing. The Mathai-Quillen paper is not the most readable thing in the world; it’s dense with ideas, with motivation and details often getting little attention. Reading the Quillen notebooks is quite the opposite, with details and motivation at the forefront. I just started with Quillen’s notes from Oct. 15 – Nov. 13, 1984, in which he is working out some parts of what appeared later in Mathai-Quillen. This is just wonderful material.

Besides his own ideas, there are notes taken based on other people’s talks. See for instance these notes from a private talk by Witten in Raoul Bott’s office on Dec. 15, 1983.

I was already having trouble getting done a long list of things I am supposed to be doing. Having these notebooks available is going to make this a lot worse….

If you’re looking for something to do next Tuesday evening here in New York, an event called Raising the Bar has recruited 50 people to give talks at bars around the city. There are some quite interesting talks on the list, but I’ll have to miss them, since I’m scheduled to talk about What We Don’t Know About Fundamental Physics at the Blind Tiger on Bleecker Street at 8:30pm. Not sure yet exactly what I’ll talk about, but the general idea is to start by explaining that the current situation is that we have a fundamental theory (SM + GR) that is frustratingly good in terms of agreement with experiment, but also frustratingly incomplete. I’ll see what I can do to explain the ways in which the SM and GR are incomplete, and what current prospects are for doing better.

The May issue of Scientific American has a very good cover story by Joe Lykken and Maria Spiropulu, entitled Supersymmetry and the Crisis in Physics (the article is now behind their subscriber paywall, but for those with access to Nature, it will soon be here).

Here are some excerpts:

It is not an exaggeration to say that most of the world’s particle physicists believe that supersymmetry must be true—the theory is that compelling. These physicists’ long-term hope has been that the LHC would finally discover these superpartners, providing hard evidence that supersymmetry is a real description of the universe…

Indeed, results from the first run of the LHC have ruled out almost all the best-studied versions of supersymmetry. The negative results are beginning to produce if not a full-blown crisis in particle physics, then at least a widespread panic. The LHC will be starting its next run in early 2015, at the highest energies it was designed for, allowing researchers at the ATLAS and CMS experiments to uncover (or rule out) even more massive superpartners. If at the end of that run nothing new shows up, fundamental physics will face a crossroads: either abandon the work of a generation for want of evidence that na­­ture plays by our rules, or press on and hope that an even larger collider will someday, somewhere, find evidence that we were right all along…

During a talk at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Nima Arkani-Hamed, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., paced to and fro in front of the blackboard, addressing a packed room about the future of supersymmetry. What if supersymmetry is not found at the LHC, he asked, before answering his own question: then we will make new supersymmetry models that put the superpartners just beyond the reach of the experiments. But wouldn’t that mean that we would be changing our story? That’s okay; theorists don’t need to be consistent—only their theories do.

This unshakable fidelity to supersymmetry is widely shared. Particle theorists do admit, however, that the idea of natural supersymmetry is already in trouble and is headed for the dustbin of history unless superpartners are discovered soon…

The authors go on to describe possible responses to this crisis. One is the multiverse, which they contrast to supersymmetry as not providing an answer to why the SM parameters are what they are, although this isn’t something that supersymmetry ever was able to do. Another is large extra dimensions as in Randall-Sundrum, but that’s also something the LHC is not finding, with few ever thinking it would. Finally there’s the “dimensional transmutation” idea about the Higgs, which I wrote about here last year. About this, the authors write:

If this approach is to keep the useful virtual particle effects while avoiding the disastrous ones—a role otherwise played by supersymmetry—we will have to abandon popular speculations about how the laws of physics may become unified at superhigh energies. It also makes the long-sought connection between quantum mechanics and general relativity even more mysterious. Yet the approach has other advantages. Such models can generate mass for dark matter particles. They also predict that dark matter interacts with ordinary matter via a force mediated by the Higgs boson. This dramatic prediction will be tested over the next few years both at the LHC and in underground dark matter detection experiments.

It’s great to see such a high-profile public discussion of the implications of the collapse of the paradigm long-dominant in some circles which sees SUSY extensions of the Standard Model as the way forward for the field. One place where I disagree with Lykken and Spiropulu is their claim that “It is not an exaggeration to say that most of the world’s particle physicists believe that supersymmetry must be true.” Actually I think that is an exaggeration, with a large group of theorists always skeptical about SUSY models. For some evidence of this, take a look at this document from 2000, which shows a majority skeptical about SUSY at the LHC. By the way, I hear those on the right side of that bet haven’t yet gotten their cognac, with the bet renegotiated to wait for results from the next LHC run.

Update: I hear that the 2000 bet was revised in 2011, with a copy displayed publicly at the Niels Bohr Institute. The new bet is about whether a superpartner will be found by June 16, 2016, and the losers must come up with a bottle of good cognac. There are 22 on the yes side (including Arkani-Hamed and Quigg), and 22 on the no side (including ‘t Hooft, Komargodski, Bern). Also, 3 abstentions. It explicitly is an addendum to the 2000 wager, with those who lost the last one given the option of signing again, forfeiting two bottles of cognac, or accepting that “they have suffered ignominious defeat.”

Update: This report from the APS spring meeting includes the following about Spiropulu’s talk there:

Supersymmetry and dark matter have become so important to particle physicists that “we have cornered ourselves experimentally,” said Spiropulu. If neither is detected in the next few years, radical new ideas will be required. Spiropulu compared the situation to the era before 1905, when the concept of ether as the medium for all electromagnetic waves could not be verified.

You can watch the talk and see for yourself here.

Just time at the moment for some quick links. I’ll start with some math news, since there hasn’t been much of that here recently:

• Matt Baker has the sad news here of the death of Berkeley mathematician Robert Coleman recently, at the age of 59. Coleman was a leader in the field of p-adic geometry, and managed to continuously do important research work despite a long struggle with MS. He was both highly influential and well-loved, be sure to read the comments which contain appreciations from many different mathematicians.
• Also at Matt Baker’s blog is a summary of recent work by Manjul Bhargava and collaborators on the average ranks of elliptic curves. This work shows
  

  at least 20.6% of elliptic curves over Q have rank 0, at least 83.75% have rank at most 1, and the average rank is at most 0.885…

  and

  at least 66.48% of elliptic curves overQ satisfy the (rank part of the) Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer (BSD) Conjecture (and have finite Shafarevich-Tate group)

  Conjecturally

  50% of elliptic curves have rank 0, 50% have rank 1, and 0% have rank bigger than 1, and thus the average rank should be 0.5. (And conjecturally, 100% of elliptic curves satisfy the BSD conjecture. :))

  Until recently

  the best known unconditional results in this direction were that at least 0% of elliptic curves have rank 0, at least 0% have rank 1, the average rank is at most infinity, and at least 0% of curves satisfy the BSD conjecture.

  so this is dramatic progress.

• I’ve yet to hear any solid rumors about who will win the 2014 Fields Medals, to be announced at the ICM in August. To my mind, Bhargava is a leading candidate. Others one hears discussed are Jacob Lurie (a question is whether he has a big enough theorem, the one he’s talking about here may not be finished). Often mentioned names whose work I know nothing about are Artur Avila and Maryam Mirzakhani.
• Another area of huge progress in mathematics over the past year or so has been work of Peter Scholze, who is another excellent Fields Medal candidate, but one young enough that this might get put off until 2018. I’ve been hoping to understand his results on torsion classes in Langlands theory well enough to say something sensible here, but I’m definitely not there yet, maybe some day in the future. In the meantime, watch his extremely clear lectures at the IAS (here, here and here) as well as the talks at this recent MSRI workshop.
• The math community award structure is for some reason prejudiced against the middle-aged, with the high-profile prizes going to the young (Fields Medals) and the old (Abel Prize). This year’s Abel Prize went to Yakov Sinai, and again, I’m in no position to explain his work. However Jordan Ellenberg was, and there’s video here of the prize announcement, including Ellenberg’s talk about Sinai’s work. In the past Timothy Gowers gave such talks, with not everyone happy about this. No news yet on whether Sowa will change his blog name to Stop Jordan Ellenberg! !!!.
• Leila Schneps is trying to raise funds for an English translation of the 3rd volume of Winfried Scharlau’s German language biography of Grothendieck. Go here to contribute, I just did.

Turning to physics news:

• the recent BICEP2 data is still attracting a lot of attention. Initial news stories were often dominated by nonsense about the multiverse, more recent ones are more sensible, including Adrian Cho at Science Magazine, Clara Moskowitz at Scientific American, and a George Musser interview with Gabriele Veneziano.Yesterday Perimeter hosted a workshop on implications of BICEP2. The theory talks I looked at didn’t seem to me to have much convincing in them, except that Neil Turok acknowledges that this kills off the Ekpyrotic (bouncing brane) Universe and he’s paying off a $200 bet. For some reason, Nima Arkani-Hamed now seems to speak at every single fundamental physics meeting, so was also at this one. More interesting were the experimental talks, with new data soon on its way, including Planck results planned for October, possibly measuring r to +/-.01 (BICEP2 says r=.20).
• For some perspective on inflationary theory, CU Phil in recent comment section points to a new volume on the Philosophy of Cosmology. It includes some great articles putting multiverse mania in context by George Ellis and Helge Kragh, as well as an enlightening discussion of the issues surrounding inflationary theory, especially “Eternal Inflation”, from Chris Smeenk.
• For the latest news about LHC results coming in from the Run 1 dataset, see this report from the Moriond conference.
• Finally, physics continues to inspire frightening movie projects, see here.