Not Even Wrong

There’s a new paper out on the arXiv last night, Small gaps between primes, by James Maynard, which brings the bound on the size of gaps between primes down to 600. This uses some new methods, beating out the Polymath8 project, which has been improving Zhang’s original bound of 70,000,000, getting it down to 4680.

To follow the Polymath8 project, the place to look is Terence Tao’s blog, here. They’re working on a paper, with the current draft version available here. This is a remarkable collaborative project bringing together a sizable group of mathematicians in an unusual way.

For more about this, see this expository article by Andrew Granville, which is pre-Maynard. At Quanta magazine, Erica Klarreich has an excellent long popular article telling the story to date, including that of Maynard’s new result.

Philip Anderson’s 90th birthday is coming up next month, and Princeton will host a workshop commemorating the event. Witten and Wilczek will give talks on the Anderson-Higgs mechanism, for which Anderson recently was not awarded a Nobel Prize (for the history of this, more here).

Princeton condensed matter theorist Shivaji Sondhi has an article here about the role of Anderson in the Higgs story, rightly emphasizing “the remarkable intellectual unity of modern physics.”

Many have speculated that a reason for Anderson not getting a piece of this year’s Nobel Prize was his public opposition to the SSC project back in the 1980s. He was far from the only physicist opposing the project, since there was widespread concern that in the Reagan-era environment of budget-cutting, devoting large sums to an HEP project would mean reduced funding for the rest of physics. Anderson has a letter in the latest APS News about this. For a summary of his concerns about the SSC, see this opinion piece from 1987.

One thing that exacerbated conflict between HEP physicists and others at the time were claims about “spin-offs” from building large accelerators, with some people claiming that HEP physics was responsible for MRI machines. Anderson recalls:

As I was leaving the committee room behind Steve Weinberg, the particle physicist who had testified for the SSC, one of the senators accosted him and effusively thanked him for his role in the development of MRI, which had been instrumental in treatment of a relative. Since close friends and I had been responsible for most of the basic research underlying MRI’s superconductiing magnets, this was a bit of a bitter pill for me to swallow.

For Weinberg’s point of view on this, see here, where he writes:

The claim of elementary-particle physicists to be leading the exploration of the reductionist frontier has at times produced resentment among condensed-matter physicists. (This was not helped by a distinguished particle theorist, who was fond of referring to condensed-matter physics as “squalid state physics”.) This resentment surfaced during the debate over the funding of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). I remember that Phil Anderson and I testified in the same Senate committee hearing on the issue, he against the SSC and I for it. His testimony was so scrupulously honest that I think it helped the SSC more than it hurt it. What really did hurt was a statement opposing the SSC by a condensed-matter physicist who happened at the time to be the president of the American Physical Society.

In recent years the hot topic in the string theory end of HEP theory has become “AdS/CMT”, the attempt to apply AdS/CFT ideas to condensed matter theory models. Anderson at nearly 90 is still dealing with HEP hype, see this from the April issue of Physics Today.

• Mathematician Sasha Beilinson has a letter to the editor in this month’s AMS Notices calling on the AMS to sever all ties with the NSA (right now it manages NSA grants, and runs ads from the NSA in the Notices). Beilinson compares the NSA to the KGB of the former Soviet Union. For discussion of the Beilinson letter, see here.
• Beijing now has a Center for Future High Energy Physics, with Director the ubiquitous Nima Arkani-Hamed. The inaugural conference of the Center will be next month, on Future High Energy Circular Colliders. Nature has an article on the topic this week, Physicists plan to build a bigger LHC, about proposals to build a 100 TeV pp collider, with a possible electron-positron collider Higgs factory using the same tunnel. For the latest on TLEP, the proposal for such a Higgs factory at CERN, see here.
• I was in London a few days too early for this, but this week the Science Museum there celebrated the opening of its exhibition about the LHC with an event featuring Stephen Hawking. The Guardian has a report here. Hawking seems to think the LHC may see evidence for M-theory:
  

  “There is still hope that we see the first evidence for M-theory at the LHC particle accelerator in Geneva,” said Hawking. “From an M-theory perspective, the collider only probes low energies, but we might be lucky and see a weaker signal of fundamental theory, such as supersymmetry.

  “I think the discovery of supersymmetric partners for the known particles would revolutionise our understanding of the universe.”

  As is often the case in stories like this, the wording about evidence for string/M-theory is rather odd. We’re told:

  As yet there has been no incontrovertible experimental evidence to show that M-theory is correct.

  but “no incontrovertible experimental evidence” is a peculiar way of phrasing “absolutely zero experimental evidence of any kind whatsoever.”

• For an interview with Shiraz Minwalla, one of the winners of this year’s Milner prizes for young researchers, see here.
• Edward Frenkel’s new book, Love and Math, has been getting quite a few good reviews, with the latest from Jim Holt in the New York Review of Books.
• Finally, your best source of fascinating mathematically-related graphics is surely going to be John Baez’s new Visual Insight blog.

Update: One more. The Perimeter Institute announced yesterday the funding (half provided by the Krembil Foundation) of two new chairs in theoretical physics. These will be held by two young mathematical physicists: Kevin Costello and Davide Gaiotto. As far as I know, the hiring of Costello away from Northwestern is the first time Perimeter has hired someone with a pure mathematics background. It’s good to see them moving in this direction.

Update: More about the new Perimeter chairs here. The article discusses the fact that this is a change of direction towards mathematics:

The choice is a strategic shift and a gamble for the 12-year-old institute, which is in a global tug-of-war for talent and looking to grow its profile as a centre for high-level thinking on some of the deepest questions in the universe.

Although math is the working language of physics and equations cram every available blackboard at Perimeter, Dr. Costello’s hiring, to be announced Saturday, will mark the first time the institute has sought a pure mathematician for its faculty….

“There’s something about the situation in physics today which makes it especially important to bring in high-powered mathematics,” said Neil Turok, the institute’s director.

I’m now back to regular internet access, in London for a few days after a trip to East Africa, where I managed to see the November 3 total solar eclipse through light clouds from a location in Northern Uganda. From checking various news sources, it looks like the main pieces of HEP-related news that I missed weren’t very surprising:

• The LUX experiment reported stronger limits on WIMP dark matter, ruling out various claims for evidence of such dark matter particles at relatively low mass. For more about this, good sources are Resonaances, Matt Strassler, and Tommaso Dorigo.
• The $3 million Fundamental Physics Prize as usual identifies “Fundamental Physics” with string theory, with the announcement that the nominees for the 2014 prize are 5 string theorists (Polchinski, Green/Schwarz, and Strominger/Vafa). I confess that I can’t figure out exactly how this prize process is supposed to work. The announcement says that the nominees get a “Physics Frontiers Prize”, a shot at the $3 million, and
  

  Those who do not win it will each receive $300,000 and will automatically be re-nominated for the next 5 years.

  What I don’t understand is that Polchinski already got such a nomination and prize last year (and the $300,000 consolation prize for not getting the $3 million). It seems that he is getting another identical prize this year, with another $300,000 or $3 million. On the other hand, the only non-string theorists ever to win this prize (last year’s condensed matter group Kane/Molenkamp/Zhang) didn’t get a second one this year, and it’s unclear if they still have a possible $3 million payday in 2014. Perhaps the rules are different for string theorists, the idea being that you just can’t give too many prizes for string theory.

  I’ll bet that Green/Schwarz will be the 2014 winners, on the grounds that if you’re going to hand out lots of prizes for working on the superstring, its co-discoverers should be among the first in line. While this means that Polchinski will only get a second $300,000, it’s in his interest to lose as many times as possible before winning.

  As for the $100,000 prizes for young researchers, this year was different than last year. The winners (Cachazo/Minwalla/Rychkov) were two Princeton Ph.Ds and one ex-Princeton post-doc, whereas last year is was one Princeton Ph.D and all three were ex-Princeton post-docs.

• In other news, Max Tegmark, known for his work on the multiverse, is running a “Project Einstein”, which has found 400 theoretical physicists and mathematicians who have agreed to have their genes sequenced. The idea is that they are “math geniuses”, but no one seems to know what will be done with the genetic data for these geniuses. It’s unclear who these “geniuses” are, but we do know that one person who was asked and declined was Curt McMullen. His reaction to this project was what I suspect was a common one:
  

  “I thought it was strange that it was called ‘Project Einstein’, which seemed designed to appeal to the participants’ egos,” he says. He asked the project’s staff and the New England Institutional Review Board, which approved the study, to explain how results would be used. “The uniform answer to my questions was that ‘we are not responsible for how the information is used after the study is completed’,” he says.

  If Project Einstein identifies a common gene among its participants, and uses the knowledge to breed a race of übermenschen, they may find they have selected not for unusual mathematical genius, but for unusual ego.

Update: I realized there’s one other remarkable thing about the six winners of the “New Horizons in Physics Prize”. Besides all having a close Princeton connection, none of them has a job in the US. It seems US physics departments are not buying what Princeton is selling right now…

Well, maybe one more before I leave…

Tom Siegfried, last heard from telling us that Belief in multiverse requires exceptional vision, now has two new pieces at Science News (here and here) arguing that the failure of the LHC to see SUSY is not really a big problem for SUSY proponents. You see, it’s only a problem if you believe physics theories should be simple and if you believe in naturalness. According to Siegfried, what the LHC is telling us is that you just have to give up on one of these, with your choices now:

1. Give up on simplicity. Just announce that SUSY is fine and solves the naturalness problem, but we’re not seeing it because it’s not the MSSM (which adds more than a hundred parameters), but something really, really complicated, so complicated that it manages to show up in such a way that the LHC experiments can’t see any evidence of it. Believe this, and you can still believe in SUSY, no need to face the tragedy of an idea you’ve done so much to promote getting killed by heartless experimentalists.
2. Give up on naturalness and have the exceptional vision to believe in the multiverse. Then you can fine-tune your SUSY particles up to very high energies and make them unobservable. Again, you’re free to keep believing in SUSY, writing articles and books about it, etc., despite the negative experimental results. The advantage of this option is that you don’t need to make your SUSY complicated, it can just be the MSSM, so you keep simplicity. Of course, once you accept fine-tuning, you could get a whole lot more simplicity really easily: just throw out SUSY and stick to the SM….

In a few days I’m heading to East Africa for a couple-week long trip, planning to be in Uganda on November 3 for the (short) total solar eclipse that day. This will be followed by a few days in London, then back here with regular programming resuming around November 11. While away I’ll shut off the commenting system, since I’m hoping to not have internet access during most of the trip.

Here’s some short items that might be of interest:

• For the latest from CERN about SUSY, see this overview from ATLAS. The bottom line is quite simple: zilch, in every channel examined. Limits on a gluino mass are about 1.2 TeV, and there seems little prospect of much change until 2015, when results at 13 TeV start to come in. A naive extrapolation says that ultimately the LHC should be able to set limits on gluino masses of up to 2 TeV. Pre-LHC, the limits were about 300 GeV (from the Tevatron). I don’t know anyone who is optimistic that it will turn out that the 62.5% energy jump in 2015 will find something when the 400% energy jump didn’t (and the theoretical arguments for SUSY implied that it should have already been seen at the Tevatron).
• Steven Weinberg has an article about the current state of cosmology and particle physics, entitled Physics: What We Do and Don’t Know. About string theory he has this to say:
  

  String theory is attractive because it incorporates gravitation, it contains no infinities, and its structure is tightly constrained by conditions of mathematical consistency, so apparently there is just one string theory. Unfortunately, although we do not yet know the exact underlying equations of string theory, there are reasons to believe that whatever these equations are, they have a vast number of solutions. I have been a fan of string theory, but it is disappointing that no one so far has succeeded in finding a solution that corresponds to the world we observe.

  The main reason for disappointment about string theory is not that a solution corresponding to the SM hasn’t been found, but that the theory predicts nothing at all. All indications are that the dead end that string theory has hit is not that (if one could actually figure out what the theory is…) of no SM solution, but that of so many solutions that you can get anything you want. Unfortunately Weinberg seems to be of the “if a fundamental theory predicts nothing, that’s too bad, but maybe how the world works” camp, rather than the more standard “if a fundamental theory predicts nothing, it’s a bad fundamental theory” camp. He goes on to argue that we may have to just give up on fundamental physics and be content with this theory that predicts nothing:

  Such crude anthropic explanations are not what we have hoped for in physics, but they may have to content us. Physical science has historically progressed not only by finding precise explanations of natural phenomena, but also by discovering what sorts of things can be precisely explained. These may be fewer than we had thought.

  Back in 1977, in the wake of the great advances of the Standard Model, Weinberg famously made the statement that:

  The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

  Presumably the universe is still pointless, but now the argument seems to be that it’s also incomprehensible.

• Unlike Weinberg, Frank Wilczek hasn’t been a fan of string theory. From a recent interview:
  

  3. Is String Theory a dead end? Is there news coming, regarding scientific advances, or experimental confirmations?

  Many very smart people continue to work on string theory, and I expect that they’ll continue to do interesting work, in mathematics if nothing else. Whether they’d be more productive doing something else, is another question. It is unfortunate that in the early days people got carried away, and promised much more than the theory
  could reasonably be expected to deliver.

  and about anthropics:

  It is the scope of anthropic reasoning that’s debatable. I hope we can avoid appealing to it very much in fundamental physics, but time will tell.

• According to the Stony Brook newspaper though, based on information from Michael Douglas, all is well with string theory:
  

  String theory has done quite well so far in explaining all of the forces of the universe. The theory has matured, and so have the mathematical equations it has produced. An equation describing the universe is considered successful if it is symmetrical. What that means is if the equation is taken apart and its components rearranged, it should still produce the same conclusion. If the rearrangement of an equation does not yield the same result, it is deemed unstable and not a good descriptor of the universe or its forces.

  The equations that have stood up to the test of symmetry have predicted the existence of particles that help bridge the gap between general relativity and quantum field theory. For example, string theory predicts a particle called the graviton, thought to be a closed loop string that is responsible for the gravitational force…

  Gravity is weak.

  String theory not only predicts the particle that constitutes gravity, it also helps describe why it is so weak…

  Currently, the ability to test the predictions from string theory is very limited and some have said that this roadblock is impossible to overcome.

  Douglas thinks otherwise.

  The next phase of this theory will likely take a lot of hard work and fresh ideas. String theory has made enormous strides in the relatively short amount of time that it has been around, and it is thought by many to be the most promising of the so-called “theories of everything.”

  In a few more years, who knows what exciting advances could be in store?

  The article doesn’t mention Douglas’s decision to stop working on string theory and go to work for a hedge fund.

• The Financial Times has its own take on the current state of fundamental physics research, with an article on The new physics.
• Also at the Financial Times is a good survey of Physicists and the financial markets, describing various current activities of physicists now working in the financial industry.
• Harvard University Press has just released a new book by Steve Nadis and S.-T. Yau, a history of the Harvard math department entitled A History in Sum: 150 Years of Mathematics at Harvard. It concentrates on the period 1825-1975, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. It ends right about the time I arrived there as a student, so covered history that I never had known much about.

  Harvard’s role as a mathematics research institution began with Benjamin Peirce, who taught there from 1831-1880. It only started to become a world-class institution around 1900, with young faculty who had gone to Germany for their training. The book covers a fairly long list of great 20th-century Harvard mathematicians (including George David Birkhoff, Morse, Whitney, MacLane, Ahlfors, Gleason, Mackey, Zariski, Brauer and Bott), and makes a serious attempt to explain some of the mathematical ideas they developed. As a result, a large part of the book is not just history, but actual exposition at a popular level of a wide range of mathematics, together with quotes from many other prominent mathematicians about the significance of the ideas.

  If you’re interested at all in the history of mathematics, this book is well-worth finding a copy of.

• David Appell has an article about the SSC, the major disaster for US HEP research. Next year should see a book on the topic by Michael Riordan, Tunnel Visions: The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider.
• The Simons Foundation Quanta magazine continues to put out many high quality stories about science, with one of the latest an article by Natalie Wolchover about experiments searching for neutrinoless double beta decay, which would indicate a Majorana neutrino mass term.
• The SETI institute has a series of SETI Talks, available on YouTube, with the latest featuring Joe Polchinski on Black Holes and Firewalls.
• The Boston area Joint Math Colloquium this week with have Edward Frenkel speaking on The Langlands Program and Quantum Physics. Afterwards you can go up to Harvard Square and get him to sign a copy of his new book.

Congratulations to Francois Englert and Peter Higgs, awarded the 2013 physics Nobel prize this morning. Evidently the prize announcement was delayed because they were unable to reach Higgs by phone. Surely he wasn’t unaware that today was a day he might be getting an early morning phone call…

The Higgs discovery last year was one of the great milestones of fundamental physics research and it would have been very odd for the Nobel committee Swedish Academy of Sciences to not recognize it with a prize this year. I do think though that the way they chose to do this is not ideal, for a couple reasons.

The first is that this was foremost an experimental achievement, but the experimentalists and their work remains unrecognized. The thousands of physicists and engineers of CERN, LHC and ATLAS have accomplished something amazing by working together, but this makes them somehow ineligible for the Nobel. As far as the Nobel goes they make the mistake of running their collaborations relatively democratically, without a “great man” (or “great woman”) who could stand out and be awarded a prize.

Another issue with today’s choice is that if you do want to emphasize a model of scientific research where advances come from a specific “great man” theorist, in this case they’ve left out the greatest one involved. The specific model tested at the LHC was not that of Englert and Higgs, but the one that Weinberg and Salam already got a prize for. The new prize is for the general mechanism, but this is something that was first understood by Philip Anderson a couple years before Englert and Higgs. For some details of the history, see here. The argument is often made that Anderson’s model was not relativistic, but this is a phenomenon for which relativity is not relevant, something which Anderson understood.

The Nobel prize announcement comes with a detailed discussion of the history, which discusses extensively Anderson’s work. It makes the argument that relativity was a crucial issue, and summarizes the situation with:

This was a very important step forward showing that one could indeed have massive vector particles without having a massless mode, but it did now show how the same phenomenon would work in a relativistically invariant theory. Anderson concluded by saying “We conclude then, that the Goldstone zero-mass difficulty is not a serious one, because we can probably cancel it off against an equal Yang-Mills zero-mass problem.”

Weirdly, this paragraphs contains a crucial typo. I assume they meant to write “it did not show” instead of “it did now show”.

The authors refer to what is usually called the “Higgs mechanism” as the “BEH Mechanism”, but it seems to me that if you want to insist on adding more names to the usual terminology, “Anderson-Higgs” would be better.

As far as the Nobel goes, Anderson already has one, given for other work, and maybe this is one reason he was left out this time (although getting multiple Nobel prizes is not unprecedented). Congratulations to him and the LHC experimentalists today, as well as to Englert and Higgs.

Update: Jon Butterworth has some similar comments at the Guardian, especially about the “lone genius” model for progress in science.

Update: For more from Anderson about his work on this topic, see interviews by Chandra, Coleman and Sondhi at the AIP oral history site here. One of the things I find most surprising about this history is that Brout was in close contact with Anderson during this period, but does not refer to Anderson’s 1963 paper in the original Brout-Englert paper, or in later discussions of the history (see here). Here’s Anderson’s account:

during this period I was in fairly close contact with Bob Brout. Later on, one of the co-inventors of the Higgs mechanism is Brout with Francois Englert. Bob spent several summers with us down at Bell and I know that I talked many of these things over with him. So he was definitely one of my sources for knowledge about particle physics, along with John Ward to a much, much lesser extent. Therefore, when I was recently helping edit one of the accounts of the recent Nobel Prize and noticed that they ascribed the idea, they call it Higgs, Brout, Englert, which I’d never heard, I realized that actually Brout and Englert had a fairly considerable influence on the whole development(must have gotten their ideas from me). So I had thought that it just fell into a black hole and Higgs reinvented it and everybody called it the Higgs mechanism because of that, but in fact, it is in the linear chain of what eventually led to t’ Hooft and Veltman. So I was quite happy with that.

Update: John Preskill comments “The emphasis on finding a relativistic model may be misplaced, though. Anderson understood the mechanism well.”

Update: There’s an interesting story here about the final decision process and the delay in the announcement. Evidently the way things work is that the Nobel Committee (see here for members) proposes up to three candidates. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences meets at 9:30 am, debates the matter, makes a decision, with the announcement of the decision scheduled for 11:45 am. Earlier today though, something unusual happened, requiring delay by at least an hour (maybe two, one source says the announcement was at 13:45 it was at 12:45). Supposedly Higgs was not reachable by phone, but that seems unlikely to have been the cause of the delay since it was known in advance that this would be the case. The press story quotes the academy’s permanent secretary as giving as reason “There were many people who had a lot to say”.

Unfortunately the rule is that deliberations are kept secret for 50 years, so I’ll be long gone before it is known what happened at this meeting today.

Update: It took two days, but the Swedes finally fixed their typo. Now Anderson “did not show how the same phenomenon would work in a relativistically invariant theory.”

Update: C. R. Hagen, the “H” in “GHK”, sent me the following commentary on the document about the prize put out by the Swedish Academy.

It is difficult to take seriously the document put forth by the Swedish Academy which purports to explain the basis for their Nobel award.

“Scientific Background on the Nobel Prize in Physics 2013

The BEH-Mechanism, Interactions with Short Range Forces and Scalar Particles”

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2013/advanced-physicsprize2013.pdf

Plainly and simply stated its unnamed author(s) does not understand the mechanism which they are attempting to explain to the physics and world communities. The report in dealing with the Brout-Englert paper reads “The Goldstone theorem holds in the sense that that Nambu-Goldstone mode is there but it gets absorbed into the third component of a massive vector field.”

This assessment clearly demonstrates a total lack of understanding of the mass generation and Goldstone avoidance mechanisms associated with spontaneous broken symmetry. In fact as shown by Guralnik, Hagen, and Kibble (GHK) in 1964 the missing longitudinal mode of the vector meson comes from one of the two scalar particles in the model (the other being the so-called “God Particle” recently alleged to have been found at the LHC).

There is no way to explain this incredible blunder by the Swedish Academy. In their desire to marginalize the GHK paper they have failed to understand its real contribution and have certainly failed to comprehend that the Coulomb gauge analysis of that work makes totally credible and understandable the route whereby the expected Goldstone boson is eliminated from the physical sector.

-C.R. Hagen

• First a sad piece of news, via commenter Bob Jones. It seems that David Kazhdan, a well-known representation theorist, was hit by a truck Saturday morning while bicycling in Jerusalem. He’s in the hospital, with his condition described as “very serious”. I hope he manages to recover soon from this accident.
• On a much happier note, I spent Saturday at the Simons Foundation attending a day-long program celebrating the work of Pierre Deligne. More technical talks were in the morning, with Goncharov giving a talk on this material, and Illusie discussing the mathematical significance of several letters he had received from Deligne.

  Deligne’s contributions to mathematics are immense, and go way beyond his many published works. Quite a few mathematicians have received letters like the ones Illusie discussed, laying out all sorts of new ideas. Some of these ended up getting worked out in detail by students and others, with Deligne’s name not necessarily attached. To this day, Deligne continues to send highly helpful hand-written letters about mathematics to people, although I understand that these days they arrive not by snail mail, but as a scan sent by e-mail by a secretary. These letters make up a huge resource for mathematics, perhaps someday a way will be found to archive them and make them more widely available.

  In the afternoon, Brian Conrad and Ravi Vakil gave some very good more general talks, with one theme the Weil conjectures that Deligne was responsible for finishing the proof of. The day ended with reminiscences of Deligne from Illusie, Saint-Donat, and Dennis Sullivan (since Sullivan couldn’t be there, his contribution was read off a cell-phone by Jim Simons).

  Contemplating Deligne’s remarkable career is rather awe-inspiring. For more about him, a good place to start is this page at the Simons Foundation, which includes videos of an interview of Deligne by Robert MacPherson. See also this recent piece by Illusie, which makes the point that one of Deligne’s achievements was to bring together two great but disparate currents in mathematics, the abstract algebraic geometers around Grothendieck, and the representation theorists working on what is now called the Langlands program.

• For yet more unification of mathematics and physics, last week the Mathematical Institute at Oxford hosted a conference on Number Theory and Physics, associated with talks celebrating the Institute’s new building (see here and here). Witten’s slides are available here and here, a blog posting by Bruce Bartlett is here.

  Via Jordan Ellenberg and Mathbabe, there’s the news that Andrew Wiles took the occasion of the building opening ceremony to warn about the abuse of mathematics by the financial industry. By the way, the new building is described as housing 500 mathematicians and staff, which seems to me truly huge, quite a bit bigger than any other math institute I know of.

• A journalist at Science magazine got not just one, but 157 open access science journals to accept a bogus completely incompetent paper. One could take this as conclusive evidence for the problem with open access journals, except that he didn’t try this also on conventional journals, and many believe that they too would publish something just as bad.
• Brian Leiter has a discussion here of some data here about the fraction of philosophy Ph.Ds that are able to get tenure-track jobs. I had always thought that academic philosophy Ph.D.s were likely to have even worse job prospects than theoretical physicists. If you believe these numbers at all though, your job prospects as a philospher are dramatically better than similar numbers for physics theory Ph.D.s. My guess is that, at least in the US, theoretical physics Ph.D.s have very roughly a 20% chance of finding a permanent academic position, while the data here shows 60% of similar philosophy Ph.D.s with permanent positions. If you’re in a physics theory Ph.D. program, and at all interested in the philosophical side of the subject, perhaps you should immediately look into changing departments.
• As always, multiverse-mania shows no signs of slowing down. For the latest, see articles in the new issue of Nautilus here and here.
• Just a few short hours until the 2013 Physics Nobel announcements, with speculation raging about what the Nobel committee will do about the Higgs discovery.

Update: It’s Englert and Higgs for the Nobel. I still think that, for a prize recognizing the theorists who figured out the Anderson-Higgs mechanism, there’s a name missing in that list.