In October 1984, it was announced that the Nobel Prize for Physics had been awarded to Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer, for the discovery of the W and Z bosons at the UA1 experiment at CERN just the previous year. This was the capstone discovery in the establishment of the Standard Model of particle physics. The third generation of fermions had already been discovered (the tau lepton by Martin Perl in 1977, the bottom quark by Leon Lederman also in 1977), and the nature of the strong interactions had been elucidated by deep-inelastic scattering experiments at SLAC in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Unsuspected by many, particle physics was about to enter an extended period in which no truly surprising experimental results would emerge; subsequent particle experiments have only been able to confirm the Standard Model over and over again, including the eventual discovery of the top quark at Fermilab in 1995. (Astrophysics, of course, has provided substantial evidence for physics beyond the Standard Model, from neutrino oscillations to dark matter and dark energy.)
A month earlier, in September 1984, Michael Green and John Schwarz submitted a paper on anomaly cancellation in superstring theories. String theory had been around for a while, and it had been understood for ten years that it predicted gravity, and was a candidate “theory of everything.” But there were many such candidates, each of which had run into significant difficulties when taken seriously as a theory of quantum gravity. Most people who were paying attention had presumed that string theory would face the same fate, but the Green-Schwarz result convinced them otherwise. A brief article in Physics Today was entitled “Anomaly Cancellation Launches Superstring Bandwagon,” and theorists everywhere jumped to learn everything they could about the exciting new possibilities the theory offered.
So here we are, over twenty years later, still with no surprising new results from particle accelerators (although hopefully that will change soon), and still with strings dominating the landscape (if you will) of theoretical high-energy physics. And still, one hardly needs to mention, with no clear path to connecting string theory to low-energy phenomenology, nor indeed any likely experimental tests of any sort.
In the circumstances, it’s not surprising there would be something of a backlash against string theory. The latest manifestation of anti-stringy sentiment is in two new books aimed at popular audiences: Peter Woit‘s Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Continuing Challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics, and Lee Smolin’s The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. I haven’t read either book, so I won’t presume to review them, but I think we’ve heard the core arguments expressed on this blog and elsewhere. I’m a firm believer that it’s good to have such books out there; I’m happy to let the public in on our internecine squabbles, just as I’m happy to keep them updated on tentative experimental results and speculative theoretical ideas. It seems unduly patronizing to think that we can’t reveal anything to the wider world until everyone in the community agrees on it.
But I don’t actually agree with what the books are saying. Here is the main point I want to make with this post, trite though it may be: the reason why string theory is so popular in physics departments is because, in the considered judgment of a large number of smart people, it is the most promising route to quantizing gravity and moving physics beyond the Standard Model. I don’t necessarily want to rehash the reasons why people think string theory is promising — I’m not positing an objective measurement of the relative merits, but simply an empirical observation about people’s best judgments. Rather, I just want to emphasize that, when you get right down to it, people like string theory for intellectual reasons, not socio-psycho-political ones. It’s not a Vast String Theory Conspiracy, funded by shadowy billionaires who funnel money through Princeton and Santa Barbara to brainwash naive onlookers into believing the hype. It’s trained experts who think that this is the best way to go, based on the results they have seen thus far. And — here’s the punchline — such judgments could change, if new results (experimental or theoretical) came along to suggest that there were some better idea. The way to garner support for alternative approaches is not to complain about the dominance of string theory; it’s to make the substantive case that some specific alternative is more promising. (Which people are certainly trying to do, in addition to the socio-psycho-political commentating about which I am kvetching.)
That is, after all, the way string theory itself became popular. Green and Schwarz labored for years on a relatively lonely quest to understand the theory, before they were able to demonstrate anomaly cancellation. This one result got people psyched about the theory, and off it went. It’s not a matter of impressionable young physicists docilely obeying the dictates of their elders. Read Jacques Distler’s (absolutely typical) story about how he dived into string theory as a graduate student, despite the fact that his advisor Sidney Coleman wasn’t working on it. In a completely different field, listen to Nobel-winning economist Gary Becker on the response to his ideas (via Marginal Revolution):
“There was a sea change. I began to notice it in the 1970s and 1980s. A lot of the younger people coming out of Harvard, MIT and Stanford were very interested in what I was doing, even though their faculty were mainly – not entirely – opposed to the sort of stuff I was doing.”
This is just how academics act. They are stubborn and willful (even at a charmingly young age!), and ultimately more persuaded by ideas than by hectoring from their elders. And it’s not just the charmingly young — if good ideas come along, supported by exciting results, plenty of entrenched middle-aged fogeys like myself will be happy to join the party. If you build it, they will come.
There’s no question that academic fields are heavily influenced by fads and bandwagons, and physics is no exception. But there are also built-in mechanisms that work to protect a certain amount of diversity of ideas — tenure, of course, but also the basic decentralized nature of university hiring, in which different departments will be interested in varying degrees in hiring people in certain fields. Since the nature of science is that we don’t yet know the right answers to the questions we are currently asking, different people will have incompatible intuitions about what avenues are the most promising to pursue. Some people are impressed by finite scattering amplitudes, others like covariant-looking formulations, others don’t want to stray too far from the data. The thing is, these considered judgments are the best guide we have, even if they are not always right. Green and Schwarz were lonely, but they persevered. If you want to duplicate their success, find a surprising new result! You can’t ask a department to hire people in an area they don’t think is promising, just because it serves the greater goal of diversifying the field overall. Crypto-socialist pinko though I may be in the political arena, when it comes to intellectual life I’m a firm believer in the free market of ideas, and would tend to resist affirmative-action programs for underrepresented theories.
The bandwagons come and go, influenced by both data and new ideas. When I was in grad school in 1990, things were in a lull in fundamental physics generally, and students were escaping to Wall Street and elsewhere. The discovery by COBE of temperature anisotropies in the microwave background re-invigorated cosmology, and attracted a number of bright young theorists. The Second Superstring Revolution in the mid-90’s did the same for string theory. There’s every reason to believe that the LHC will do the same for phenomenology — the leading indicators are already easily visible.
The thing that has kept string theory alive is that interesting results have kept coming, from the 70’s (gravity!), to the 80’s (anomaly cancellation, five critical string theories), to the 90’s (branes, dualities, black hole entropy, AdS/CFT). The last few years haven’t witnessed their own “revolution” (unless you count the landscape), but it would seem a little impatient to give up on that basis alone. If nothing else, string theory is extraordinarily fruitful and robust. Indeed, the AdS/CFT correspondence says you can’t really separate field theory and string theory. Take an ordinary gauge theory in flat four-dimensional spacetime, and make it as supersymmetric as possible without adding gravity. Then make the coupling very strong, and the degrees of freedom rearrange themselves — just as the strong coupling in QCD makes the quarks and gluons rearrange themselves into pions and nucleons — into Type IIB superstrings living in a ten-dimensional spacetime. How amazing is that? It’s not proof that strings are connected to the real world (which, as people sometimes forget, is not manifestly maximally supersymmetric, and does in fact involve gravity), but it’s the kind of rich structure that keeps people optimistic that string theory is on the right track.
Of course, you do have to make the case that your personally favorite approach is a promising one, to the public and to colleagues in other specialties as well as to graduate students. This is not always a job that string theorists have done well. Some of them, I’ve heard rumors, can even occasionally be a mite arrogant. Let’s admit, this is something of an occupational hazard among academics; if universities fired all the arrogant people, the remaining faculty would be stuck teaching twenty courses a semester. And, while I think that an enormous landscape of stringy vacua might very well exist, I think that supporters of the idea have dramatically failed to take seriously the difficulty of actually calculating anything on that basis. Discussions about these crucial issues have all too often degenerated into sophomore-level philosophy-of-science debates, which haven’t done credit to either side. The truth is, we’re not doing science in a new way, it’s the same old way — trying to come up with the simplest possible consistent and coherent framework that explains the phenomena we observe.
And (to add one more “of course”), needless to say we need to keep our eyes on the prize, which really is explaining those phenomena. Sometimes people do get entranced with the math, which is fine, but as physicists the ultimate arbiter of interestingness is a connection to data. String theory hasn’t done that yet, and might not do it for a long while, but in the end will have to, one way or another. It’s hard! But string theory will either progress to the point where its connections to reality become increasingly manifest and specific, or people will lose interest and work on other things. That’s the way the system works.
Update: Interesting reports from the Strings 2006 meeting in Beijing from Victor Rivelles, Jonathan Shock, and Dennis Overbye.
I totally respect your being tired of thinking about quantum gravity, just as I respect those, like Howard, who believe that thinking about quantum gravity was waste of time from the ‘git go.
In fact, were string theory not providing striking insights about a diverse range of other things, I would seriously wonder whether so many people should be working on a niche subject like quantum gravity.
Hmmm. Thanks.
Doesn’t seem to have had a noticeable impact on the blogospheric food fight (coming soon in paperback!). But at least I can say that I tried.
Hackticus: Indeed, they have not kept such thoughts secret. However, they will be watching the fun from the sidelines!
as MoveOn says, about 20% of hep-ph is about speculative models that sometimes try mimicking stringy physics. In my opinion this kind of activity is not more interesting than counting the entropy of black holes. However, we expect that the speculative sector of hep-ph will become very interesting after LHC starts.
To make just one example of the remaining 80%, the twistor tecniques proposed by Witten turned out to be slower than less celebrated teniques that QCD experts had developed for doing collider computations in the real world.
Dear Sean,
The argument you address is not the main argument in my book, but if I may I will address it on the terms you raise.
Given your argument that string theory is worth doing because it is, in the considered judgment of a large number of smart people, thought to be promising, would you extend that to other research programs that large numbers of other smart people have decided, in their considered judgment, also hold promise? Given that there are a number of smart people who work on different approaches to quantum gravity and unification it becomes a question of how resources are to be divided up. How would you do it?
There are roughly 400-500 theorists at recent string meetings and 150 theorists at recent meetings on background independent approaches to quantum gravity. By your argument, shouldn’t positions and resources be distributed in roughly these proportions? If these are the proportions by which smart, knowledgeable people divide their interests, but 95 % of resources go to one direction, isn’t there a problem analogous to an investment bubble in which “the market” is behaving irrationally? Or do you believe that the 150 smart people are not as smart as the 400, or that their considered judgment is not as worthy?
The people who make investment decisions analogous to questions of which research programs to support, such as venture capitalists, do not believe in a simple “let the market decide” philosophy by which investments go only to the largest and most successful companies. If you talk with very successful venture capitalists and investment bankers you will find that they have quite sophisticated views and strategies about these kinds of questions. Among the things they talk about are distributing risk over a portfolio. They do not put all the investment in Microsoft, even if that is currently the most successful company, they make sure that there are healthy resources for competitors and start ups. Successful investment managers make sure to distribute their risks and investments because they acknowledge they are not able to predict the future. This is not because of moral principles, but because this has been shown to maximize rate of return. Even if you favor Microsoft you fund competitors and startups because this is in the long run essential for the success of Microsoft. Should we in science not also distribute our resources invested in very risky areas over the range of views that very smart, knowledge people have come to, so as to maximize the rate of progress in science?
The argument, at the level you discuss, is not about whether string theory is one area worth supporting. It is about whether string theory should be the only approach to quantum gravity that should be supported, while very smart people who have thought just as carefully about the problem and come to the conclusion that other directions are more promising are starved of resources. If the situation were reversed I would for sure be arguing to distribute the risks and fund some of those starving string theorists-as indeed I do to support people in the non-string quantum gravity world who are not working on LQG. The reason is not to be nice, it is because in a situation where we don’t know the answer the rational thing to do is to distribute the risk and invest in the whole range of ideas that smart, thoughtful people have invented.
Lee
Lee,
You have clarified perhaps the principal criticism that yourself and Peter have of the present situation with string theory. Your figures, 400, 150, 95% – could you tell us exactly what these figures are and where you obtained their values? I think that would help focus attention onto the specific irrational market behavior that you are concerned with.
PtQGT,
The 400-500 is the attendence at the last and current string meetings. The attendence at LOOPS 05 was 150. The 95% is a guess, here is one fact: to my knowledge, apart from one position at Penn State, the last time there was an assistant professor appointed to a US research university working in a non-string approach to quantum gravity was around 1990. Most likely there have been more than 20 assistant professorships in the US given to people who work on string theory since then.
Thanks, Lee
ps again, this is not my principle argument.
Aaron Bergman said:
Without the risk… but I still remember string theorists claiming that LQG researchers were “taking GR too seriously” when latter claimed that string theory would be not correct (for a full quantum gravity theory) because GR was not a 2-spin over a flat static background (in despite of many Witten efforts to claim that string theory predicts gravity).
Only after decades, string theorists changed the chip and now broadly agree that string theory is not sufficient and that loop theorists and GR comunity in general was correct. Now those basic ideas are introduced in future M-theory (which is NOT a string theory).
i remember that also from (stringy) talks was claimed that LQG was “obviously wrong” (without proof of the claim) now we can heard to people as B. Greene claiming that LQG could be partially correct whereas we heard to people as Vafa stating that LQG if true may be part of “string” theory.
Juan R.
Center for CANONICAL |SCIENCE)
dear AR, while being a post-doc I wanted to learn some new topic: the main options were cosmology and string theory. Without knowing these two subjects, I had to rely on “experts”. At that time there were no dissident voices such as Peter Woit, and I chose string theory. Only after one year I realized that its lack of contact with physics is a real problem.
Sean: There’s no question that academic fields are heavily influenced by fads and bandwagons, and physics is no exception. But there are also built-in mechanisms that work to protect a certain amount of diversity of ideas – tenure, of course, but also the basic decentralized nature of university hiring, in which different departments will be interested in varying degrees in hiring people in certain fields. Since the nature of science is that we don’t yet know the right answers to the questions we are currently asking, different people will have incompatible intuitions about what avenues are the most promising to pursue. […] The thing is, these considered judgments are the best guide we have, even if they are not always right. […] when it comes to intellectual life I’m a firm believer in the free market of ideas, and would tend to resist affirmative-action programs for underrepresented theories.
Sean,
you fail to realize how the situation in science has changed within the last decades. I totally agree with you on the build-in mechanisms that do protect science from getting completely stuck. These mechanisms however, might work better or worse. You, as many others, are talking about the individual search for truth of the single researcher. Theoretical physicist are, and have always been, driven by curiosity and the aim to understand nature, which seems to work with or without any method.
Now we are in a situation where large groups of people are working together on research projects. They get hired to do so. Work together internationally. Produce papers in amounts that nobody can really read them all. The single researcher in his search for truth is faced with the demands of a community that he has to survive in (or drop out).
The problem is that the ‘free market’ you praise is not protected by any means, and a community that grows larger runs in danger to loose its diversity by being heavily dominated through the most influential groups.
Capitalism, left on its own, tends to fail on the same grounds. Monopoles lead into a dead end – Though I would say, the build-in mechanism (hopefully) eventually leads to a ‘revolution’. This, however, might take quite some effort, wastes time, and does not protect us from repeating the same mistakes again.
Sean: But string theory will either progress to the point where its connections to reality become increasingly manifest and specific, or people will lose interest and work on other things. That’s the way the system works.
It could work much better than it currently does.
I too would say you should read Lee’s book.
Best, B.
PS: btw, I noticed repeatedly that it’s quite annoying I can’t copy and paste text from the posts.
Does anybody worry about the belief that any field theory is an effective theory (in the sense of being a non-fundamental approximation)? Perhaps this was the real argument driving these snart people to embrace strings. They believed in the non-fundamentality of quantum field theory (a dogma postulated already at undergraduate level) and then they were forced to reject the only theory that actually makes contact with the experiments.
MoveOn said… Let’s have a look at hep-ph for inspiration, where there is a whole crowd of particle phenomenologists busily at work doing non-stringy physics. In fact there is a whole sub-community of extra-dimensional model builders, who are proud not to be string theorists. All this started with Randall-Sundrum, and to my understanding their work really was meant to bypass/be an alternative to string theory. In a way, it’s quantum gravity and extra dimensions for the poor guy. Anyone can enter the field and produce new models right away, there are almost no consistency requirements (apart from anomalies) to be respected (yes! we are not doing string theory!) The art is to combine as many results as possible from other people in a new way, in order to create “better” models. Hence new models abount, all sorts of GUT groups being revived, but this not only in 4 (as in the past), but now in 5,6, you name it, dimensions. Branes are put here and there at will, and supersymmetry is split or not, etc. Then there are ex-nuclear physicists doing “phenomenological quantum gravity”.
In case the last sentence was not meant as a personal attack, I apologize in advance.
You might be interested to hear that I originally studied mathematics. Just that the maths department was broke, whereas the physics department offered me a position. So I became a nuclear physicist. Working on semi-theories like brane world models certainly was not my fist choice. Friends know that I actually worked on other stuff for some years, before I realized that would never get me anywhere, and I made my PhD about Extra Dimensional models. Which, for reasons that I found quite suspicions, were kind of interesting at this time.
I am very grateful to the nuclear physicist for their support, and their open mindedness, despite the fact that I never really understood what a pomeron is.
I totally agree on your criticism about the ‘production of new models’ without consistency requirements, see e.g. my post Paper Recipe. That does not mean though that everything done on the field is crap. The world is not just black and white.
Best, B.
I was going to comment generally on the market of ideas that Tony and Lee sees problems in – but B scooped me. I also think that in a market analogy we naturally have some concentration and that is not a sign of problems as such. (B, I can cut and paste from posts, at least in Reply mode.) Neither are the amount of time passed nor any changes in theory. Look at evolution – I believe it took many years before the correct among Darwins ideas were solidly validated, and they had to be subsumed with other evolutionary forces in the modern synthesis.
Tony,
Coming specifically back to your situation, perhaps the market analogy is that your product has been refused by the retailers before even being exposed on the shelves for regular customers. Now you are trying to sell over internet. The evaluation you ask for lies implicit in the lack of interest you seem to observe. This situation is a risk for any product, even ideas. It’s not uncommon or wrong. In short, I don’t see why the market of ideas is vacuous and not working generally and specifically for you.
Since it is “jump on Distler” day for some unfathomable reasion, I should take the opportunity to say that as a layman I have enjoyed Distler’s posts, including the ones he refered to.
They, together with some of Motl’s early posts IIRC gained me a sceptical view towards the LQG and similar efforts. I don’t think he especially succeeded in dispelling the ad hoc nature that string theory initially seemed for me to have. I think it was finding a historical review on the subject that did that for me. As a layman you have to find the simplest explanations in some murky waters. 🙂
Tobjorn Larsson wrote:
“Neither are the amount of time passed nor any changes in theory. Look at evolution – I believe it took many years before the correct among Darwins ideas were solidly validated…”
The refinements to evolution came from increasing accumulation of the working of organisms, including how inheritance works.
HEP is in a different situation today. The analogy with evolution would work if Darwin lived as a hermit on the moon, unable to get off its surface, and was theorizing about what happens on earth based purely on the seasonal changes in albedo.
Peter Woit, in “Not Even Wrong” (Cape, London, p259) you write:
“As long as the leadership of the particle theory community refuses to face up to what has happened [the failure of the superstring theory to connect to physics] and continues to train young theorists to work on a failed project, there is little likelihood of new ideas finding fertile ground in which to grow.”
This leads to the reason why string theory can proliferate without any facts or checkable evidence behind it. Judging by Clifford Johnson’s remarks elsewhere on this blog, string theory may be almost totally decentralized.
Edward Witten and Lisa Randall might actually make a case that they have just put forward some ideas, and that if others join their bandwaggon and follow them down into a dead end, that is unintentional. “Victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan” – J. F. Kennedy on responsibility for the “bay of pigs” failure in 1961.
I cleaned things up by deleting some comments that were either personal attacks or repsonses thereto. Can’t a guy get a little sleep without worrying about the internet misbehaving?
B, I have no idea why you’re having trouble cutting and pasting — it works fine for me.
As a one of the taxpayers that helps financing you guys I have three remarks:
1) At least nobody is accused of being lazy, so we are getting good value for our money. Also, we trust you that you will resolve your differences over time.
2) I like the NBA analogy. The best part is that compared to NBA players you guys work practically for free. Of course, watching you scribble away in your notebooks is way less entertaining. And – just as those NBA players – we like our theoretical physicists to behave themselves in public. You know, the kids are watching and we don’t want them to think superior intelligence is an excuse for bad manners.
3) Apparently, current blogging technology does not allow for hard physics (I don’t see any formulas with lots of integrals and subscripts). Therefore, physics blogs will always tend to be more about the sociological/psycohogical/historical/outreach aspects of the field.
Now go back to your notebooks.
Lee (and B, also) — no, I don’t think that taking ratios of the number of people at meetings and dividing up the resources that way makes much sense at all.
When we’re talking about “resources,” there are two very different main issues: grant money and jobs. Where grants are concerned, people who work at the funding agencies and serve on review panels do make an explicit effort to take into account diversity of what they are funding as well as pure intellectual merit; at least they did when I was serving on those panels. Obviously, some people will be more inclined to think that sending all the money to their own field is the best approach, but in my experience most people aren’t actually like that.
When it comes to jobs, I don’t see a better way to do it than the present system. Individual departments make decisions about who to hire, based on their own impressions and the advice of outside experts. If you think that more of them should be hiring people in a certain field, you have to convince them that the field you have in mind is interesting, and the best way to do that is to get exciting new physics results.
But I think both of you are overestimating the “stickiness” of one’s research specialty. String theorists are not created in specially-designed pods in the basement laboratories of other string theorists. They are just physicists who look at what is going on and decide that string theory is the most interesting thing to work on. (So it is not really like a monopoly — try as you might, you won’t convince the Microsoft corporation to switch to selling Apple software.) If you don’t agree, convince them otherwise! Get an exciting physics result that persuades people who are now working on string theory that they should switch to something else. That is the only way to ultimately make progress.
Sean,
I completely agree with you, except for one minor detail. Microsoft does sell software for Apple computers 😎 The free market (of ideas) works not only for physics …
What is so interesting to me about this entry is that commentators such as Sean, Peter, John, Lee, Jacques, and other professionals, as familiar, if not as prominent, are participating. Imagine a blog post where these people, along with the likes of Witten, Gross, Wilzeck, t’ Hooft, Gell-Mann, Weinberg, Atiyah, Penrose, Hawking, and other influential mathematicians/theoretical physicists, were inclined to participate in the discussion. How fascinating would that be?
If Sean, the cosmologist, were to bring together, on the web, the chief theorists of the world to discuss the fundamental physics that are the foundations of cosmology, it would have to be “news fit to print,” don’t you think? However, Sean, I think that if you are to write a well-articulated blog entry, on which more of the missing notables above cannot resist commenting, the discussion will undoubtedly have to be much more elevated. Nevertheless, just think of the possibilities! You are making blog history here, you know? How far can you take it? I hope you will give it a shot.
I think you could even build on the momentum here, by raising the level of the present discussion, from the “stringy theorists versus the particle theorists” debate, to the discussion of “inventive science versus inductive science.” You could even quote Lee’s statement to launch the discussion:
Isn’t this the real strategic challenge of venture capitalists? If the strength of our scientific/academic complex is to be based on free market principles, then the innovation and creativity that stems from the brightest intellectuals makes them the most valuable assets, right? If so, then certainly the task of the government and the philanthropists may indeed be to recognize that the “rational thing to do is to distribute the risk” and cover all bets, since no one knows, which inventor is going to be phenomenally successful. But then what would be even better, I think, is to motivate intellectual venture capitalists, with their uncanny intuition for finding the winning ideas, and link them to intellectual entrepreneurs! Surely, the same free market forces that have lead to the world’s astounding development of technology will likewise prove fruitful in developing the theories that unlock the mysteries of nature, don’t you agree?
Hmmm, this may or may not be a sound conclusion, though, depending on the chances that inventive science, as opposed to inductive science, works at all. Maybe we need to invite the world-class specialists on the philosophy of science to weigh in on this, before we place our bets. Usually, inventive science replaces inductive science, when the work of the experimenters/observers (ok, phenomenologists, grrrr!) out paces the work of theorists, and demonstrates that the past generalizations from experience are not working. Since this seems to be true in mathematics as well as physics, where the foundations of these two disciplines are so intimately and inextricably intertwined, and at the same time, inexplicable, perhaps we would be better off, if we were to seek new generalizations from experience that are derived from our ability to think and reason from first principles, instead of reaching into our fertile imaginations for those flashes of possibilities that might prove to be the key we seek.
For instance, we might start with a new look at imaginary numbers! Ha! Imagine the audacity of such a suggestion in this day of sophisticated string theory? In one recent instance, where I barely mentioned the suggestion on Peter’s blog, he evidently deleted my comment. I don’t know why, really, and I don’t have a copy of everything I wrote to help me figure it out, but think about it a minute. How bizarre sounding is it to suggest that “the biggest, single, invention of the human mind in history,” according to Atiyah, shows up as indispensable in quantum mechanics? The suggestion that the need for such an invention may be suspect is certainly more than enough to get you labeled as a crank these days. Since Peter has more than his share of these accusations to contend with on his blog, it may be the reason why he deleted my comment, I don’t know.
The point is, though, the suggestion is not a presentation of a crackpot invention, but a plea to the heavy weights to examine the bonafides of what may be the acceptance of the greatest crackpot invention in history. Ohh, the heresy here is palpable, but doesn’t it stand to reason that the pathology found in abstract algebra, where the so-called complex numbers, quaternions, and octonions, lose their algebraic properties, one by one, might be connected to the pathology of particle physics, where zero, the same zero at the origin of the complex plane that appears in the complexes, quaternions, and octonions, wreaks the havoc that string theory originally sought to address in physics?
Maybe, by returning to inductive reasoning, instead of resorting to inventions of the human mind, in desperation, John might even be persuaded to take another look at quantum gravity. Especially, if in doing so, he found a way to explain why the octonions are related to the concept of dimension through Bott periodicity! But, I don’t know many venture capitalists that are likely to be willing to fund John’s intellectual ventures, do you?
Dear Prof. Carroll,
I also have the problem Bee has. It seems that I can’t select or copy anything in every post. But I can do copy in the comments.
Best,Y.
My only guess is that you might be using Internet Explorer rather than Firefox. You can hardly blame us for that, can you?
Sean wrote:
B, I have no idea why you’re having trouble cutting and pasting — it works fine for me.
This really is strange… I’ve had the same problems as B in the past but now it works just fine for me too.
Tobjorn Larsson wrote:
I believe it took many years before the correct among Darwins ideas were solidly validated…
I believe that Lynn Margulis and others would tell you that they still don’t have it right.
@JoAnne:
“Speaking of hep-ph, there is much excitement there these days with alot of stimulating model building, breathtaking tour de force higher order calculations, collider physics is energized, there is a new level of precision in lattice calculations, and new effective theories being developed to describe heavy flavor interactions. All of this work is developed under the arduous constraints of being consistent with the full global data set – I can tell you that is not trivial. All of this work is also developed knowing that it will be tested and proved right or wrong soon. Very soon.”
I have a high respect of phenomenologists doing hard core collider physics etc. But my aim was the model builders who view themselves as doing “alternatives” to string theory; this is mostly ad hoc non-sensical guesswork without any deeper principles – as the models (like GUT groups, brane configurations) are chosen at will, there is no real prediction these guys can make either. Namely, if the data don’t fit, they change the model by putting in more Higgs, etc. This is much much worse than string theory’s lack of predicitivity, as that is at least a highly constrained framework with some underlying principles. And “excitement” is of no value to me – we are in here for science, not for entertainment.
So far, so good. Anybody is invited to do what it is within his/her capabilities. What bothers me is the attitude of those practitioners of “alternatives”, as they pretend to be morally on higher grounds. I don’t think there is a cheap way towards grand unification and quantum gravity, and getting into this field requires many years of hard work, but there seems to be some growing attitude that “string theory has failed” and so we ought to do “alternatives”, but without really intending/able to do any hard work (nor having any compelling, predictive, better idea than string theory). Summarily declaring failure without achievements on one’s own is a pretty cheap way to avoid going through the agony of trying to understand something and the pain of cumbersome calculations; and I find this quite arrogant.
Yes, there is a lot of arrogance on the other side. Or how would you call the behavior of people with little or zero knowledge who produce themselves to give advice and tips to “misguided” experts? It’s sometimes so absurd that I don’t know whether to laugh or cry – see B’s remarks a while ago on how string physicists should be slowly educated to “think different”.
And hype as well – wasn’t there even an embarassing press conference called by Lee Smolin a while ago, with the claim that certain observational data would support his theories? (As far as I know, all was within the error margins, ie, meaningless). The hype from this direction in form of books and Scientific American articles etc is at least as bad as string hype was during its high times.
As I said, I don’t see much of unduly hype from the string physicist’s side since quite a number of years (I mean the relevant leadership here and not ppl like Kaku who is in the media business). But on the other hand,the way things are twisted and doctored and misrepresented today on the web and in form of a book is not just a strong form of (anti-)hype in its own, but a really malevolent attack on a community of people trying to do their best and come to grips with really difficult problems.
Being arrogant and dismissing the work from people in other specialties is both counterproductive and a waste of time. At the same time, complaining about the arrogance and over-hyped nature of the work from people in other specialties is likewise counterproductive and a waste of time. Do good work, and then do your best to help other people understand the good work you’ve done. Despite occasional appearances, we are all on the same side here.