gravity

Wednesday: Sean Carroll & I Interviewed Again by Alan Boyle

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Today, Wednesday December 4th, at 8 pm Eastern/5 pm Pacific time, Sean Carroll and I will be interviewed again by Alan Boyle on “Virtually Speaking Science”.   The link where you can listen in (in real time or at your leisure) is http://www.blogtalkradio.com/virtually-speaking-science/2013/12/05/alan-boyle-matt-strassler-sean-carroll What is “Virtually Speaking Science“?  It is an online radio program that presents, … Read more

Did the LHC Just Rule Out String Theory?!

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Over the weekend, someone said to me, breathlessly, that they’d read that “Results from the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] have blown string theory out of the water.”

Good Heavens! I replied. Who fed you that line of rubbish?!

Well, I’m not sure how this silliness got started, but it’s completely wrong. Just in case some of you or your friends have heard the same thing, let me explain why it’s wrong.

First, a distinction — one that is rarely made, especially by the more rabid bloggers, both those who are string lovers and those that are string haters. [Both types mystify me.] String theory has several applications, and you need to keep them straight. Let me mention two.

  1. Application number 1: this is the one you’ve heard about. String theory is a candidate (and only a candidate) for a “theory of everything” — a silly term, if you ask me, for what it really means is “a theory of all of nature’s particles, forces and space-time”. It’s not a theory of genetics or a theory of cooking or a theory of how to write a good blog post. But it’s still a pretty cool thing. This is the theory (i.e. a set of consistent equations and methods that describes relativistic quantum strings) that’s supposed to explain quantum gravity and all of particle physics, and if it succeeded, that would be fantastic.
  2. Application number 2: String theory can serve as a tool. You can use its mathematics, and/or the physical insights that you can gain by thinking about and calculating how strings behave, to solve or partially solve problems in other subjects. (Here’s an example.) These subjects include quantum field theory and advanced mathematics, and if you work in these areas, you may really not care much about application number 1. Even if application number 1 were ruled out by data, we’d still continue to use string theory as a tool. Consider this: if you grew up learning that a hammer was a religious idol to be worshipped, and later you decided you didn’t believe that anymore, would you throw out all your hammers? No. They’re still useful even if you don’t worship them.

BUT: today we are talking about Application Number 1: string theory as a candidate theory of all particles, etc.

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A Quantum Gravity and Cosmology Conference

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I attended a conference this past week celebrating two great physicists (Steve Shenker and Renata Kallosh) whom I got to know pretty well during the early part of my career. Unlike most of the conferences I’ve attended in recent years, there were no talks at all about the Large Hadron Collider; the community of speakers was largely drawn from experts on quantum field theory, quantum gravity, string theory and cosmology.

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Any one of the talks would require an extensive article, especially since the required background material isn’t currently explained on this website. So rather than get bogged down in details, I thought I’d try to give you more of the general flavor — reflective, perhaps, of the tenor of the field at the moment. I’ll cover a couple of the talks later, if time permits (though I’m a bit under the gun at the moment…)

If you like to put labels on people, you’d probably call most of the speakers “string theorists.” This is a useful label if you’re in a hurry and not very interested, or if you want to abuse people, but not so useful if you want to actually understand their research. Indeed, out of about 21 talks, there were 3 on string theory.  That said, many of the speakers have in the past done some research in string theory, and many of the talks owe a debt to lessons that have been learned from string theory.

So what were the talks about?  What are these people actually doing?

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A Celebration of Two Careers

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This week I’m at Stanford University, where I went to graduate school, attending a conference celebrating the illustrious careers of two great physicists, Renata Kallosh and Steve Shenker. Kallosh is one of the world’s experts on black holes, supersymmetry,  cosmic inflation (that period, still conjectural but gaining acceptance, during which the universe is suspected to have expanded … Read more

Strings: History, Development, Impact

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Done: All three parts of my lecture for a general audience on String Theory are up now… Beyond the Hype: The Weird World of String Theory (Science on Tap, Seattle, WA, September 25, 2006). Though a few years old, this talk is still very topical; it covers the history, development, context and impact of string … Read more

Why You Can’t Easily Dismiss the Cosmological Constant Problem

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I’m still early on in my attempts to explain the “naturalness problem of the Standard Model” and its implications.  A couple of days ago I explained what particle physicists mean by the term “natural” — it means “typical” or “generic”.  And I described how, at least from one naive point of view, the Standard Model … Read more

Floating in Space … But Why?

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Have you perhaps wanted to go into space someday, so you could float around and do somersaults like the astronauts you see on TV? You know, out in space, where everything floats, because … because … … because there’s no gravity in outer space??? Hmm… If there were no gravity in space, what would keep … Read more

Courses, Forces, and (w)Einstein

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This week and next, I’m very busy preparing and delivering a new class (four lectures, 1.5 hours each), for a non-technical audience, on the importance of and the discovery of the Higgs particle.  I’ll be giving it in Western Massachusetts (my old stomping grounds).  If it goes well I may try to give these lectures elsewhere (and please let me know if you know of an institution that might be interested to host them.)   Teaching a new class for a non-technical audience requires a lot of concentration, so I probably won’t get too much writing in over that period.

Still, as many of you requested, I do hope soon to follow up last week’s article (on how particle physicists talk about the strength of the different forces) with an article explaining how both particles and forces arise from fields — a topic I already addressed to some extent in this article, which you may find useful.

Now — a few words on the flap over the suggestion that math Ph.D. and finance expert Eric Weinstein, in his mid-40s, may be the new Albert Einstein.  I’ve kept my mouth shut about this because, simply, how can I comment usefully on something I know absolutely nothing about?  (Admittedly, the modern media, blogosphere and Twitter seem to encourage people to make such comments. Not On This Blog.) There’s no scientific paper for me to read.  There’s no technical scientific talk for me to listen to.  I know nothing about this person’s research.  All I know so far is hearsay.  That’s all almost anyone knows, except for a few of my colleagues at Oxford — trustworthy and experienced physicists, who sound quite skeptical, and certainly asked questions that Weinstein couldn’t answer... which doesn’t mean Weinstein is necessarily wrong, only that his theory clearly isn’t finished yet.  (However, I must admit my expert eye is worried that he didn’t have ready answers to such basic questions.)

What I do know is that the probability that Weinstein is the new Einstein is very low.  Why?  Because I do know a lot about how very smart people with very good ideas fail to be Einstein.  It’s not because they’re dumb or foolish.

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