Bad boys of physics

In the July issue, about Lenny Susskind Scientific American runs a bad boy or Physics story (see also here). Here is the "nut graph":

Physicists want to understand the deepest levels of reality now largely working within a framework of Susskind. But a funny thing happened along the way. Susskind wonder or physicists reality can understand.

In the interview, Susskind explains that he was a bad boy as a youth, but "just so much better than anyone else, including the professor." In recent years he is the most prominent promoter of the string theory multiverse, and now claims that this pseudo-science convincing the area dominates (SciAm seems agree ...), with the situation like in the early days of QCD:

A large part of the physics community has left trying to explain our world so unique, as the only mathematically possible world. Right now the multiverse is the only game in town. Not everyone is working, but there is no coherent, sharp discussion against it.

In 1974 I had an interesting experience on how scientific consensus forms. People worked on the as yet untested theory of hadrons [subatomic particles such as protons and neutrons], that Quantum Chromodynamics or QCD is called. At a Conference of physics I asked, "you people, I would like to know your belief about the likelihood of QCD the correct theory of hadrons." I took a poll. Nobody gave it more than 5 percent. Then I asked: "what are you working on?" QCD, QCD, QCD. They worked all on QCD. The consensus was formed, but for some strange reason, people wanted their skeptical side. They wanted to be hard-nosed. There is an element of the same thing around the multiverse idea. A lot of physicists don't want to just fess up and say, "look, we do not know another alternative."

Susskind had a DISTINGUISHED career as a theorist for many years, and has managed to do very well with his multiverse campaign for quite a while now. There's a lot of coverage of this story on this blog, for some high points, see here, here, here and here.

In other news, the media full of stories about another physicist who has been a bad boy, David Flory. He began his career as a HEP theorist back in the late 1960s, as a student at the Yeshiva University, and collaborator with Susskind. Just as a large number of other people, he got his permanent academic job in 1969, and has since then at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

How the Hippies stored physics

An outline that I wrote of how David Kaiser of the Hippies stored physics is now available from the American scientist. A short summary is that I think it's a wonderful book, tell in well researched and entertaining a story that I've always wanted to know more about fashion. I am not convinced by the main argument of the title, that this group of people "Physics saved", rescuing a suffocating ideology "shut up and calculate" by the road to the importance of the theorem of Bell's tones and help start the field of quantum information theory. Maybe emulates the author just his subjects, known for their playful outlandishness.

There are quite a few interesting things I learned from the book that didn't make it in the review. An example is the story of the (of EST fame) Werner Erhard theoretical physics conferences in the late 1970s and early 1980s, organised in collaboration with Sydney Coleman and Roman Jackiw. One of the factors that these events put an end to was the advent of string theory: it was felt that no string theory Conference without attending the whites would be taken seriously, and then nothing wanted to Whiten with EST and its founder (although he had attended, with the likes of Feynman and Weinberg, the earliest Conference in the series back in 1977).

If you do find interesting this topic, I highly recommend the book.

For a different take on the same subject, one of the main participants, is Jack Sarfatti memoirs Stargate free available these days in a pre-publication version here.

I'm afraid that my own description of where the physicists described in the Kaiser would not book ended the field of quantum information theory, but the much larger quagmire of dubious claims about quantum physics which is still very influential. For example, this week at the AAAS meeting in San Diego there is a session on Quantum Retrocausation is, see this listing from the world of parapsychology.

Update: I must also mention that Chad Orzel the book discusses here and here.

Mathematics and physics, in the summer 2011

This week in Philadelphia the String-Math 2011 Conference is underway, scheduled as the first of a series, with String-Math 2012 next summer in Bonn. Slides of the talks are listed here. There was also supposed to video, but the saved video seems to be a kind of UPenn login required, and I haven't been able to get the streaming video to work. Public talk by Cumrun Vafa crosses the classic message that strings have come to the rescue of physics, unifying QM and gravity, and which:

Flexible geometry of strings seems to explain all known interactions (at least in principle)

The techinical talks relate to a lot of ground, much of it having little to with string theory. Michael Douglas's talk surveys that related to find non-Perturbative formulations of quantum field theory hold that one could hope to have something to say about it exactly, but it contains many more questions than answers. I am most curious about David Ben-Zvi talk tomorrow, so hope that slides or video of that will be available.

The circle of ideas on gauge theory, geometric Langlands, TQFTs and representation theory gets even more attention than the mathematics of string theory this summer. In a few weeks will start with a two-part program on Luminy and then Cargese on double affine Hecke Algebras, the Langlands program, affine varieties of the flag, Conformal Field Theory, Super Yang-Mills theory. I do not know who the author is, but some person or group has written for the occasion a wonderful summary of the current activity in these and related areas of mathematics, see here. Next month, will be hosting a program KITP on non securities and dualities in QFT and Integrable systems that relate to some of the same topics will have.

In some other non-related news, if you understand French, you can listen to an interesting series of interviews with Pierre Cartier here. Finally, it was recently announced that $ 1 million this year is to share my colleague Richard Hamilton Shaw Prize for Mathematics with Demetrios Christodoulou. Richard Congratulations!