Ed Witten
2009
Ed Witten has no Nobel Prize.
Now tell me again how this era's physics just feels different because we are too close to it.
So @orzelc the Quetion is: "Is this likely the first era of fundamental physics that could produce a 55+ Witten nonlaureate?"
My friend @orzelc asks: "do you consider Wheeler to be in Witten's class?" Short answer is no. But I never went 1-1 with a young Wheeler.
The nonphysicist disagrees w/ @orzelc. Wheeler lived through the whole build up of the Standard Model. Ed would have pounced repeatedly.
To @orzelc: in your life you'll see Paris and the Taj Mahal. Make sure you meet all the great minds. Go see Ed. He's part human.
And what about Jim Simons? Other than Chern Simons he did amazing stuff. Wu-Yang ...and that holonomy theorem of Berger was first rate.
Anyone else appreciate that Jim Simons redoing Berger's list of holonomy groups to prove intrinsic sphere transitivity? An artist's theorem.
Someone else I admire: Dan Freed at Austin. Dan never gets all the credit he deserves. Every paper nails some loose end for the community.
In Econ. Krugman is the master chef who can start with deadly pufferfish and dependably prepare elegant fugu thats safe to eat.
2010
Telomeres, Scientist Shortages, Seiberg Witten, Inflation (CPI), E8 TOE, Immigration, Neoclassical tastes all now have fictional narratives.
Open science, non-castrated science journalism, gonzo science, twitter, etc. are our best hedge about having science destroyed by narrative.
2011
Q: When will Ed Witten tell us what the M in M-Theory stands for? A: Mañana, amigo. Mañana....
Ed Witten turned 60 today. I closed my eyes & remembered him in his mid 30s with the excitement of string unification around the next bend.
Greenspan failed. Witten failed. Obama failed. McGwire failed. Goldman failed. Spitzer failed. AIG failed. Assange Failed. You? Lookin good!
2016
Ed Witten sums up his extraordinary career in physics. Ed is the most terrifying intellect I have ever encountered.
https://www.ias.edu/sns/ckfinder/userfiles/files/ComemorativeLecturePopular(1).pdf
2017
If I had but one paragraph to recommend as the most important in all of literature, it might well be this one. However, as you might imagine, unpacking it, could take up your entire life.
[There is a 'flaw' in the paragraph. The word 'gauge' should be replaced by 'structure'.]
1/ Interesting esoteric features:
i) refers to Einstein Field Equation for the gravitational force. (only implicitly).
ii) refers to the Yang-Mills-Maxwell Equation for the other forces (only implicitly).
iii) refers to the Dirac Equation for matter (yet again, only implicitly).
2/ The Quantum (e.g. quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, quantum measurement, etc...) is relegated to a *secondary* status below the key geometric insights. This was likely done very subtly when the paper was given in the 1980s, as it was, and remains, a revolutionary idea.
End/ An interpretation is that Witten, the greatest living mathematical physicist, was indicating to us that it was only these *abstractions* that were likely to survive, while the instantiations (i.e. the exact equations we still use) would likely perish.
A msg never recieived.
2018
1/ "Theories of Everything": A Taxonomy.
It is often said that "Theories-of-Everything are a dime a dozen" or that "All theoretical physicists worth their salt have several in a drawer." So far as I can tell, this is simply untrue. We've barely ever, if at all, seen candidates.
2/ The Escher Lithograph used in the first tweet points to the core of why TOEs are rare. A candidate TOE has to have some quality of "a fire that lights itself", which is difficult to think about beyond the equations that would instantiate it. Hence very few such theories exist.
3/ I'm going to lean on the following dictionary of analogies:
Physical Paper = Void Pictured Canvas = Manifold and/or Einsteinian Spacetime Ink=Matter & non-gravitational force fields Pencils = Pre-Conscious Lego (e.g. amino acids) Hands = Consciousness Paradox = Self-awareness
4/ In my taxonomy, Type I TOEs are our least ambitious but they best match our state of the world. They are distinguished by two *separate* sources of origin: one for the Canvas (General Relativity or Witten's point i) ) & one for the Ink (Standard Model or Witten's point ii) ).
5 Type II TOE's are more ambitious & seek to derive the Ink from the choice of a mathematically distinguished Canvas that is anything but blank. My arch-nemesis @garrettlisi's theory is Type II. E8 is his 248 dimensional canvas. The intricacy is there, but doesn't quite match up.
6/ In Type III TOEs the ink is to be derived from canvas, but the canvas is essentially blank; it simply permits mathematics to happen (e.g. calculus and linear algebra). In such theories the ink has to be bootstrapped into existence. My lectures on Geometric Unity were Type III.
7/ Type IV TOE's try to change the question from Einstein's "Unified Field Theory." In String Thy, "Quantizing Gravity" became substituted for "Unified Field." For this crowd, many are now betting that the canvas & ink are both *emergent* from some deeper fundamental quantum thy.
8/ Type V TOEs are of a type I've never been able to fully contemplate; they are without boundaries or origins. There is no "Why is there something rather than nothing" within them. That which is not forbidden is compelled into existence. Void creates canvas & canvas begets void.
9/ Type VI TOEs begin with the hands. Religions are of this type. I pass over this in silence as they aren't scientific.
I will leave open higher types, but I've really only seen attempts at I-IV & I wouldn't call String-Thy/M-Thy a full TOE try since events of the last 15 yrs.
10/ I believe fundamental physics is stalled out because we are finally at the doorstep of a TOE and we haven't really bothered to think about what that would actually mean because we've never been here before. A final step need not look like any previous one. In fact, it cannot.
END/ My bet is on Type III for a reason:
Type I is not unified.
Type II is possible, but appears to be unworkable in details.
Type IV appears to lack sufficient guidance from Quantum theory to actually 'ship' despite consuming resources for yrs.
Types V & VI lack any progress.
2019
One of the worldâs greatest men has died. Most of you will have no idea who this is. I just donât know how to bridge that gap yet to tell you what he did.
I was very close with his top collaborator. They were the Watson and Crick of mathematics to me. They rewrote my whole life.
Michael Atiyah OM FRS, President of the Royal Society 1990 -1995, died today. He was "a wonderful person who was a true internationalist and a fervent supporter for investing in talent â themes which resonate very clearly today." Read the full tribute https://royalsociety.org/news/2019/01/tribute-to-former-president-of-the-royal-society-sir-michael-atiyah/
There is a little known stone wall on Long Island. While flawed, it is a gift to all mankind that should be a pilgrimage site, as an understanding of the contents is nesessary to understand our world. Think of it as transcendent graffiti. Atiyahâs spray-paint is everywhere here.
Imagine watery planets with holes and twists. Knotted donut planets called base spaces. Crazy oceans called âVector bundlesâ and âPrincipal bundlesâ.
He told us about how the twists and holes determine what waves must live on them and which cannot.
He helped direct Ed Witten and Graeme Segal to truly tell us what Quantum Field Theory really was beyond being a physical theory. These men took a grab bag of techniques developed for calculation and showed us that they were a mellifluous whole of geometry, topology and physics.
If you want to know why I am so passionate about resisting the reign of terror against true scholarship it is this. Universities housed REAL scholarship beyond your wildest dreams. This kind of scholarship is not socially constructed. Almost no one can even do this level of work.
Very sad news indeed - I knew Michael from when I was at @TrinCollCam he was brilliant, warm & amazing. Was at a conference where he was supposed to speak on thursday #higgscentre - he cancelled at the last minute....
More recently we talked about dark matter and black holes (2 yrs ago now) he was very excited about astro... b4 when i was a student he was just very encouraging and warm
Haha, does anyone other than Ed Witten make you feel stupid?
Ed doesnât make me feel stupid. But he still terrifies me. There is smart and there is Witten-smart. Iâve only me one of his kind.
Edward Witten.
@EricRWeinstein who are you intellectually in awe of?
Iâm impressed by many many people. But I feel Iâm now getting too old to be in awe of anyone. I think Ed is the only remaining one I still just canât get rid of no matter how hard I try.
One of my less popular theories is that the Nobel Prize serves to rewrite the history of science to make it palatable to institutions.
Einstein gets it for the wrong thing.
Dirac & Schodinger split one.
Glashow/Weinberg/Salaam share.
Mdme Wu passed over
Vera Rubin -> nothing
Dyson Gets nothing.
Stuckelberg Gets nothing.
Sudarshan gets nothing
Feynman/Schwinger/Tomonaga diluted
No rules broken for Witten
Etc
So the Nobel prize just completely rewrites physics history for outsiders. Similarly in Peace, Physiology and Medicine, and economics (cough).
In reality:
Dirac was Einsteinâs true peer.
Gel-man is a genius but one who attracts credit from others.
Yang deserves more than one.
Mdme Wu and Dyson are inexplicable omissions.
Sudarshan should have more than one and not zero.
Etc..
The prize dilutes or buries our best.
In this theory we beat up our absolute top people to make it easier for the next group to live with the difference in impact & contribution. We have many constraints we can point to for how it is awarded. But it ends up telling a less interesting less terrifying story for us all.
FWIW, Iâd be interested in reading a longer post on this subject, and I suspect Iâm not alone.
It would upset (living) people to fill this out. Have to think about the ultimate goal helping this community.
Haskell Programmers.
Topos theorists.
King Crimson aficionados.
1980s String Theorists.
Pediatric Heart Surgeons.
BJJ practioners.
Oboe/Bassoon players.
Fans of Eva Cassidy, Shackleton, Coltrane and Witten.
And all for understandable reasons. Like the amazing French. đ«đ· https://x.com/PardesSeleh/st/PardesSeleh/status/1117430684476485640
As a language of signs and symbols, math is constructed. Its physical referents are not.
Am I missing something?
Today I learned mathematical truth is âsocially constructedâ from @mattyglesias at @voxdotcom.
Sad? This is great news actually! It just means that these confusing types simply mean âtimeless, universal & trueâ whenever they say anything is culturally constructed. #ProblemSolved
Yes Sean. There are problems of language here. But thereâs a bigger issue. Most of the important parts of mathematics are neither physical nor âsocially constructedâ. No one could dream them up. The conversation today is however made impossible by language & politics. To sum up:
2/ First there is a careful philosophical tradition that means something precise by âsocially constructedâ as well as an activist community that means something dismissive and sloppy by the same phrase. Genrerally, the math community has not been overly interested in either.
3/ Most research mathematicians traditionally (but not always) oversold the objective nature of the professionâs norms. This causes historians and philosophers of science agitation. I think thatâs fair, but I claim they have also oversold their contributions to pure mathematics.
4/ The feeling most solid research mathematicians have is that theyâre studying an abstract reality that is independent of the way in which we study it. They can find being called Platonists, intuitionists, mystics etc, kind of weird if labeled by outsiders. Then come activists..
5/ The activists can try to emphasize the part of mathematical culture, language and practice that are not fully objective in order to cast doubt on claims of universal knowable objective shared reality and primacy that scientists advance over, say, claims of âlived experienceâ.
6/ The biggest problem comes from people who go back and forth talking about say âdecolonizing STEMâ because âscience is socially constructedâ but who then retreat to âoh we just mean that philosophicallyâ and it is this move with which many of us have lost patience. A âdeepityâ.
End/ So to sum up. There is a mildly interesting issue w/ the cultural practice of math. There is a major issue with activists trying to emphasize a marginal issue to attack a functioning system of universal truth. And there is an acultural aspect to pure mathematical structures.
I understand what you are saying but this doesnât capture the issue.
Imagine you are pretty sure you know the worldâs smartest people well. And you know their work and yours. The problem is that it isnât constructable by any of you because it is well beyond all your abilities.
Imagine youâre in a desert and you start dusting off a sand dune to find something that looks like Petra. You are pretty sure that you didnât construct it. Only nobody else did either. Thatâs the feel of great mathematics. We just donât worry too much about philosophical labels.
Are gears culturally constructed? Are Platonic solids? Wheels? You might think so. But no. They are selected for Long before humans found them. Now please donât lecture me on the exact nature of âgearâ. Itâs not as interesting as the point: These are canonical acultural forms.
Itâs not all Feels. Look at E8 and tell me how you âfeelâ. Who came up with that? Killing? Freudenthal? Lie? No way. Not even Grothedieck and Witten with Feynman and Von Neumannâs help. None of us know what it is. Is hemoglobin socially constructed? Who asks this? No one I know.
@johncarlosbaez @skdh @brkthroughprize Hey John,
Why do you think the SUSY/SUGRA math was there to be found if the physical world isnât using it? Does it connect deeply elsewhere? The physics argument has always been that it must get used physically because it would be too weird to exist and not to be made use of.
E
@johncarlosbaez @skdh @brkthroughprize Iâm reading your & @skdhâs responses and donât think Tweets are the right place to argue this. But Iâm still impressed how neither math nor physics has fully naturally accommodated fractional spin to my thinking. We find it everywhere but we still give a semi-âmagicalâ treatment.
@johncarlosbaez @skdh @brkthroughprize As for Super-Gravity, I donât think you can make the argument that it is fully natural mathematics without a physical application. You can make that argument for SUSY after Kac/Witten/Etc..., but even that is not totally clear to me.
My personal & overly condensed view of mathematics and physics in the 20th century would be summarized like this.
Mathematics began as a stool on the three legs of Algebra, Calculus, and Geometry where the last appeared to many to be the weakest leg. It turned out otherwise.
Repeatedly we find that any important problem from math or physics which we consider to be outside geometry/topology has a hidden geometrical nature to it. And there are only so many times you fall for that before you start to see geometry absolutely everywhere.
As for Weinberg, he is one of three people I can make the case for as our âGreatest Living Physicistâ. Iâve met him. But he still has big bets which are undecided (e.g. asymptotic safety). Witten is somehow even smarter but less accomplished in standard predictive theory. But...
One of the greatest minds of our time, Michael Atiyah, eulogized by his true still-active peers including Witten & Donaldson. With all the confusion/hype of this moment in time, it's worth reminding ourselves of what achievement sounds like w/o inflation:
2020
The Portal Podcast just passed 4000 reviews! We have had amazing guests!
Yet, if you want to see an off-beat contender for the worldâs smartest guest list, it may be a podcast with only 6 reviews!!?! @grahamfarmelo is pushing the envelope pretty darn hard. Give him some love!
Itâs hard to imagine a more impressive line up of true heavy hitters. This is the best of what we humans are capable of at our peak.
If you want to be early on a discovery that shows markets are not efficient, hereâs your proof. Get in on the ground floor. These guests are tops.
Which episode would you say is most accessible, or just best?
@Mkouri @grahamfarmelo I donât want to approach it that way. I would say that Edward Witten and Michael Atiyah are the most impressive minds on this list. Like just shockingly impressive.
If I ever have Edward Witten on the program I will ask him how he manages this horrible aphorism.
Itâs like the ultimate Sisyphean troll of Ed: expecting him to instantly exit every room he encounters simply for the high crime of entering it....
"If you're the smartest person in the room you're in the wrong room." @EricRWeinstein's the portal podcast feels like the right room for me.
My colleague @RHDijkgraaf (who heads @the_IAS with the world's top physics department) has written a provocative argument attempting to refute the narrative of an End of Fundamental Physics. It would be terrific to have him on The Portal to make the case: https://www.quantamagazine.org/contemplating-the-end-of-physics-20201124/
Is physics facing a nightmare scenario? A desert scenario? Worry not, writes @the_IAS director @RHDijkgraaf. "What we currently know is an absolutely negligible fraction of the physics thatâs out there, waiting to be investigated." https://quantamagazine.org/the-end-of-physics-20201124/ via @QuantaMagazine
There's a follow on discussion over at the @notevenwrong physics blog w/ John @Horganism, @johncarlosbaez, Scott Aaronson, @peterwoit & others. @RHDijkgraaf & I have disagreed about this before, but either he or Ed Witten may be the best to make this case: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=12053#comments
2021
Isadore Singer & Raoul Bott worked in almost exactly the same area. They collaborated with exactly the same people. They worked in adjacent zip codes (02138 vs 02139). They both had claims to the "greatest topological theorem" of the 20th century.
They never co-authored a paper.
I've known only three minds personally who I'm convinced will be discussed 1000 years from now if humans survive: James Watson, Raoul Bott and Isadore Singer (I met Atiyah & Witten but did not know them).
Is & Raoul however both collaborated on my rescue in Graduate school.
Perhaps with both of these giants now gone it is time to tell my story. I'm not sure. I have never told it publicly in full. But they both are heroic men beyond being great minds.
Had they surmounted their personal difficulties their collaborations could have changed the world.
They worked down the same street. I was at times a ping pong ball they sent back & forth between Building 2 at MIT & Harvard Science Center rm 508 (I think) along a 45 minute walk. I very much respected that they chose not to air any difficulties. They had respect for each other.
One reason I largely kept quiet about my story is respect for both men. They both defended and believed in the system. But, in part they believed in it BECAUSE they were so powerful that they could act as an underground railroad when that system failed:
So, in part, I'm their collaboration. Raoul was not my advisor. He had no real idea what I was doing. But he was far more than that. Is was my shtarker. My ace in the hole. They worked as a team to help me; their failure to talk directly was the main clue I had of anything amiss.
Lastly, there is the matter of my wedding. Is came to our event but I didn't invite Raoul. I did not understand what he had done for me. It is one of the biggest mistakes of my life. When the internet tries to insist to me that I am his student, I want to tell them what happend.
The truth is that I would have been proud to be the student of Raoul Bott. I would have a storied lineage to claim.
The truth is Raoul gave me his name for a self-advised thesis. And like a fool I resented it. Yet how much greater is the man who lends his last name to a Bastard.
In any event. I miss Is very much, but never expected to see him again. And I'm wrestling w the idea that I'm now free to tell my own story after 25yrs of saying very little in public. One of the reasons I don't take kindly to internet warfare is that I have large debts to pay.
The more I subject myself to mindless politics, catfighting, shadowbanning & trolling, the harder it is to fight for others/myself and to pay the debts to the giants who rescued me along my way. I don't know how I'd have done w/o them.
But I needed to grow this voice to do it.
Lastly, I used to have a relationship to a very different @nytimes. Thus when I read Is' obituarty I was shocked to see @julierehmeyer's beautiful tribute including my own quotes on Is. It made me sad to think about how much has been lost. Sadly, those quotes came from long ago.
If you haven't read her piece, I think it is quite moving even though it is no more than a sketch. End.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/science/isadore-singer-dead.html
[Not to be crass: but I can usually tell within the 1st minute what is happening to the throttling of my tweets: this is not being widely seen. I'm trying to say something meaningful about a departed friend @jack. Could you please take a personal interest & stop the throttling?!]
Dear @michaelshermer,
Thanks for this. Very sober. I myself also donât find the authenticated videos so far released compelling. But I do find your challenge of âno isolated discontinuous innovationâ quite interesting!
Might I propose a friendly debate among friendly skeptics?
Dear @EricRWeinstein Please see my argument for why UAPs cannot be foreign assets capable of physics & aerodynamics attributed to UAPs that if true would be decades or centuries ahead of us. History shows no nations/companies of comp development so lag. https://quillette.com/2021/06/03/understanding-the-unidentified/
First of all, I am concerned that the paradigm of being scientifically or technologically âcenturies aheadâ is all wrong. This came up in a phone call with our buddy @SamHarrisOrg.
Q: How many centuries ahead is 1952-3 from 1900? Iâd have guessed âmanyâ (not .5) and been wrong.
Next challenge: doesnât your line of reasoning prove that âRenaissance Technologiesâ is either a fraud or a front? Their Medallion Fund is otherwise a long term unbreached secret, discontinuous from any other know investment fund seemingly thousands of years ahead of competitors.
Now Iâve had the odd question about Renaissance (front not fraud) for just this reason. But either way, itâs either a counter example to your claims on discontinuous innovation if it is merely a fund or a counter-example to your secrecy claims if it is our secret physics program.
Next: there are really two metrics on innovations.
Metric I: How big the incremental jump in difficulty.
Metric II: How big the jump in what is unlocked.
The great fear is that a small jump measured by 1 leading to an ENORMOUS jump in as measured by II.
You are, to me, arguing powerfully that certain people canât exist: Rodney Mullen, Edward Van Halen, Bob Beamon, Dick Fosbury, Hiroji Satoh, Satoshi Nakamoto, etc.
They all exhibited the âa little unlocks a lotâ paradigm with Zero-Day exploits that were each decisive.
And that brings us to theoretical physics. Beginning around 1982 , the son of the worldâs top employed anti-gravity researcher(?!) of the 1950s turned in what may be the most impressive 15yr output in the history of the subject by my estimation. How can I begin to explain this?
Itâs not physics exactly. But Edward Witten w support from a small number of folks rewrote Quantum Field Theory as geometry. If Einstein geometrized gravity, then Witten geometrized Quantum Field theory (everything else).
Now, all that change has so far unlocked exactly nothing.
But itâs not that nothing happened in physics. While we were pretending that string theory was working, Witten & Co revolutionized our mathematical framework. Think of it as an enormous amount of unrealized gains. Pent up genius & power looking for its 1st application to the đ.
Now let me show you how I could get discontinuous innovation if I were China or Russia. I donât know those systems as well so Iâll use the US example.
We know most of the top minds. We pretend that there is a lot of subjectivity about this for social reasons but China wouldnât.
If I thought like CCP, Iâd create a lavish secret theoretical physics program modeled on the Russian Sharashka system. The key would be to get it to look like something else. A boring Tech company or some weird Chinese fund to disguise the reason for the secretive lavish campus.
[Digression: If the US were smarter, weâd do it by setting up a mythic secret $B hedge fund that employs top differential geometers, theoretical physicists & ML experts by a national lab & an off brand university w/ inexplicably strong geometry & physics. But enough crazy talk..]
If CCP could today repeat what Witten (& friends) did building off Geometric Quantum Field Thy, the US would have Zero clue what it unlocks. Even by your own incrementalist theory. It might unlock absolutely nothing. Or passage to the stars via additional degrees of freedom. đ€·ââïž
One last point. I released such a theory. Could well be wrong.
But I can tell you I should have received a call from DOE. Because calls are cheap and relevant trained PhDs are *very* finite. The US should track every geometer, General Relativist, and Particle Theorist working.
You donât have to take a position on me or GU. You can ask Wolfram or Lisi or Barbour or Deutsche or anyone outside the system whether such calls are placed. They are not. No one *in* the system believes in wild discontinuous change from *outside* the system. As per your article.
Which is to say weâre not monitoring. Maybe we think thatâs a waste of taxpayer dollars. Maybe we think that a Grisha Perelman of physics is impossible.
How much does a phone call cost if a researcher is wrong vs not bothering if theyâre right? Price the Type I & II error. Nuts.
Discontinuous innovation is always unlikely. But never impossible.
We are both skeptics. But this UFO story is weird beyond belief Michael. I canât think of a single story to fit to these reports Iâm hearing about.
I welcome your thoughts. As always.
Warm regards,
Eric
There were three candidates for worldâs greatest living theoretical physicist as I saw it:
A) CN Yang
B) Steven Weinberg
C) Edward Witten
Weinberg was the favorite of many people I respect. I found his writing style to somehow be both clear and impenetrable at the same time.
But what we just lost is one of our few links back to fundamental physicists who didâŠ.words fail meâŠactual work on the physics of the đ we live within.
It is not much of an exaggeration to say that sometime in the last 20 years, we stopped even trying to do fundamental work.
I met Steven only once. It was an unremarkable interaction. My impression was that he was so smart that he knew to get out of High Energy Theory for the most part. He dutifully defended string theory at times but voted with his feet and his offbeat ideas like Asymptotic Safety.
I have a very strong emotional connection to Wittenâs work and Yangâs. Weinberg always struck me as immensely powerful, but I could never get the sense of âThatâs Weinbergianâ. That is stylistically rare.
A total genius. But one that I couldnât understand well enough. Alas. RIP
I get it. But can we *actually* build something that does post-relativistic physics? Asking for some friends.
fuck... we could do so much more... merch. gagh. Suspect Musk is being ironic. It's that time of the evening when he spits out bs. But ugh, i feel this frustration re meaningful pursuits like actual physics. Why does no one care?
No idea. But as brilliant & rich as he is, we canât afford to get sucked in.
Iâm actually up for the dick jokes. What Iâm not up for is the tease. He had the right idea (get off planet), the right resources, and the right background (physics). But it became just one more farce.
In what way has it become a farce?
@Burchoff @ellleighclarke The part of physics that might accomplish his stated dream is dying every month. Go to any physics department & attend a high energy physics or particle theory talk. Maybe 1/10 is still about physics. He is burning time like crazy when he could just endow the field. Donât ask me.
i blame witten and greene for making string sexy... And then the academia industrial complex for creating the gamification of publishing.
@ellleighclarke @Burchoff Maxwell, Eilenberg, Bayh-Dole, Mansfield, Immact90, SSC cancellation, etc. We are down to embers. Itâs not Witten and Greene. It was the lack of freedom to deviate from Witten and Company. To tell your failing elders that you wonât be signing on to their failed programs.
You know we all want to be loved. And we all want money. And we all want status.
But nothing compares to physics. And Iâll believe the best of him until we talk because that is a path of hope. And he may have a genius plan. I just donât happen to know it & itâs taking too long.
@Eluminat1 Witten? Dirac? Did they make the cut?
@skdh @WeLivetoServe QFT & cross-sections sound more like particle theory than Astrophysics, Cosmology or even GR.
Would we agree that the collision of Witten/Singer/Quillen/Seiberg/Freed/Bismut/Maldacena/Penrose/Atiyah/ Hitchin/Dijgraff/Vafa/Segal/Jackiw/Kontseivich/Alvarez-Gaume/etc has been magic?
There are a lot of string theorists who have done things that really matter to geometry, topology, analysis on manifolds, representation theory. And I donât want to misunderstand your point.
Said differently Iâve been bullish on positive externalities of mathematical physics. But a lot of great math that got done isnât string theory. Itâs claimed to be stringy but it is really mostly mathematical physics or geometric field theory that is claimed by string theorists.
2022
It really depends. Being totally honest:
âString Theoryâ has done a *tremendous* amount of good while âString Maximalismâ has done even more harm.
If the String Theorists who led the movement were to undo some of the damage by admitting what happened, itâd be a major positive.
Here is where I respectfully disagree with my colleague @skdh. You canât âget rid of string theoryâ. String-like objects are natural and have an unbelievably rich and beautiful interlocking mathematics. The beguiling beauty isnât the problem in my opinion. Beauty is the excuse.
The problem is that string theory on its own has taken the last 40years to PROVE it doesnât work as a stand alone path by gobbling up mind share, students, resources and (to be fair) most of the most brilliant brains. So much that no one dares say the full extent of the disaster.
During that time String Theory diverted the entire field into a magical never-land of âtoy physicsâ. Models that arenât in any way real. You now have âparticle physicistsâ at the end of their careers who have never worked with anything like a particle and canât remember them.
So, hereâs my analysis. In a world where David Gross, Ed Witten, Lenny Susskind, Cumrun Vafa, Michio Kaku had a public Come To Jesus moment where they admitted the disaster in front of the community faithful, Iâd be up for having ST as a major theory. But without that Iâm unsure.
The damage to the culture of High Energy Physics is more severe than the damage done by Geoffery Chew in a different era. And here I support @skdh, Peter Woit, Lee Smolin etc. These are brave people who paid with abuse to communicate that physics was diverting into pure fantasy.
So to sum up:
String Theory deserves to be a major branch. But it has already mostly given up on the â80s promises/lies it told us to gobble up all the resources of the community (brains, mind share, $$$). That was a crime which may prove fatal to our being able to do physics.
But it is also so thoroughly investigated and badly behaved relative to scientific norms that it deserved to be shrunk. And that happened to a large extent already. The most important thing to realize is that physics is still about the physical world. Not Calabi Yau. Not AdS/CFT.
And we need our brilliant failed string theorists to admit the disaster within a scientific paradigm.
Science is a culture. Perhaps the most fragile one. It wonât survive this suspension of collegiality, decency and self-critical behavior. We need to go back to real physics. đ
@martinmbauer String theory was a giant percentage of a tiny priesthood. That was the same tiny priesthood that brought us Thermo Nuclear devices. And if you want to pay for me to research the numbers Iâm willing to hire somebody to put together the data after 1984. Itâs not usually contested.
@DontsitDJ @martinmbauer I wasnât aware of it like that. I think he disagrees with me and has a bit of an edge. But maybe I missed a tweet or two. I havenât seen much interaction and he has written some things I liked.
@DontsitDJ @martinmbauer I love a good critique. Itâs hard to find. Most people out here develop a side hustle in interpersonal drama. I try not to.
@martinmbauer I donât know which version of âThe Fieldâ you mean.
Physics in total? Is a large field.
Beyond the standard model theory? Is a small field. Tiny. But hugely consequential. And the percentage and effect wasnât small. Do you really dispute this??? Look at the IAS professors.
@martinmbauer Seiberg/Witten/Dijkgraaf/Maldacena
All string folks.
Maybe get a string theorist to admit this to you. Brian Greene likely wouldnât disagree with me.
2023
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