Peter Woit

Worth reading Woit's "Not Even Wrong" blog on this (he's there), he has a series of posts on "The Situation at Columbia ..." https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/

Scientific American's reputation is in the toilet: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13152 I don't recommend wasting your time.

"All known theories of physics - from classical mechanics all the way to general relativity quantum field theory - can be written in this way: a collection of objects and a recipe to build a Lagrangian from those objects, with the movement of those objects determined by a path that minimizes the Lagrangian." I think Quantum Mechanics doesn't reduce to this, it's a probabilistic theory. A similar take from Peter Woit: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/laguardia.pdf

Discussion about this on Woit's blog ("Not Even Wrong"), including a response from Hossenfelder: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13070 I've never really followed Sabine Hossenfelder but I think I prefer Peter Woit's skeptical takes over hers. It is kind of weird how they both agree more than disagree about the current state of high energy physics, but she seems to see the need to attack him over the details (and where I think Woit gets it more right than she does).

> The probabilistic aspect only comes into play when you cast a quantum state down to a classical observable quantity like position or momentum. That's also part of quantum mechanics. At least if you are trying to do physics. https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=10533&cpage=2#com…

As a long-time antagonist of Kaku and string theory / supersymmetry, Peter Woit naturally has a blog entry[1] on this that's worth a look. He points out Prof Gordon Kane upped[2] the ante: > By 2020 there will be a Nobel Prize for a string- or unification- or supersymmetry-based theory or explanation or experimental discovery. And goes on to give us some insight into Kaku's current point of view. Spoiler: he thinks string theory will give us the "God Equation" when it reaches its final form! 1: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/ 2: http://longbets.org/12/#comment-166313625

Hossenfelder's actual argument about beauty has definitely gotten lost somewhere along the way. According to [0], she ends her book with > The next breakthrough in physics will occur in this century. It will be beautiful. She's objecting to a very narrow interpretation of "beauty" driving physics, not elegance in general, a distinction this article's author seems unable to see. Anyone who publicly makes an argument dependent on a distinction between ideas that aren't distinct in the mainstream is going to have an uphill battle at best. [0] http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=10314

A collection of responses can be found at https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=10768 I agree along the lines of Peter's comment: "These hard-won null results are not a failure of the experimental program, but a great success of it. The only failure here is that of the theorists who came up with bad theory and ran a hugely successful hype campaign for it. I don’t see how the lesson from seeing an experimental program successfully shoot down bad theory is that we should stop funding further such experiments. I also don’t see how finding out that theorists were wrong in their predictions of new phenomena at the few hundred GeV scale means that new predictions by (often the same) theorists of no new phenomena at the multiple TeV scale should be used as a reason not to fund experimentalists who want to see if this is true."

Here's a follow-up on why Mandacena could be wrong, and his work is not the only one: "The problem here is that of what is an “interesting region of theory space”. At this point the failures of string theory unification strongly indicate that it’s not such an interesting region. It seems likely that we’d be better off if most theorists focusing on phenomenology of this failed program were to pick something else to work on." And as far as I could follow his work and attempts to explain symmetry with economics analogies, I think my concerns are valid. https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=9375

I wish I had good recommendations for you. Quanta can be quite good, but it misses sometimes. Most coverage of fundamental physics, especially theory, fails (for obvious reasons) to provide the key context that progress in the field is very slow and getting slower. There are a few excellent specialist blogs, like Resonaances for particle physics, http://resonaances.blogspot.com/ but they are not very accessible to outsiders. Sean Carroll, Sabine Hossenfelder, and Peter Woit are pretty good and accessible http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/ http://backreaction.blogspot.com/ http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/ but they aren't neutral; that's fine since they are personal blogs, but it can be difficult for laymen to get an objective picture of the field.

It's worth checking out Peter Woit's homepage at http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/ and looking beyond the blog and his role as a string theory skeptic. He teaches a number of classes and has a book about quantum mechanics and representation theory that has gotten a lot of favorable reviews. Not sure I'd classify this guy as your average helpdesk guy ;)

For those like me who are not too happy with this kind of "science" (for one, the title is worded in a way that makes this highly controversial view of reality sound like state of art in physics), "Not Even Wrong" [1] by Peter Woit is a great read for multiverse skepticism (mostly centered on "string multiverse", not quantum "many worlds"). [1] https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/

Relevant: https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160607-new-boson-claim-faces-scrutiny… Basically, take this claim with a huge dose of salt. For general physics related news, you can't go wrong with Peter Woit's blog, and the other blog recommendations there: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/

Useful links here: http://profmattstrassler.com/2012/11/12/first-news-from-kyoto-conferen… http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=5264 Talk is here (follow password instructions): http://kds.kek.jp/getFile.py/access?contribId=61&sessionId=25&…

For a writeup of this that includes some gasp! physics, see the excellent Résonaances blog http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2011/11/lhcb-has-evidence-of-new-physi… For something slightly more comprehensible than that, but a lot more useful than bloody wired, try Sean Carroll: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/11/14/new-physic… For more LHC/higgs gossip see this recent article from Not Even Wrong http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4136

Unfortunately I have not found this to be true (though it is in this case). There are quite a number of articles that are misleading or flat out false. The best example is the quantum wormhole article and video[0,1], because it is egregious and doesn't take much nuance or expertise see the issues. I'm glad they made a note and wrote a follow-up[2], but all this illustrates what is wrong with the picture. For one, the article and video were published the same day as it was published in Nature[3]. Sure, they are getting wind of the preprints, but in this case there was none! They're often acting as a PR firm for many of the big universities and companies, unfortunately so is Nature. The article was published Nov 30th, but the note didn't come till March 29th![4] You might think, oh it took that much time to figure out that there were problems, but no, only a few days after the publication (Dec 2nd) even Ars Technica was posting about the misinformation. They even waited over a month after Kobrin, Schuster, and Yao placed their comment on ArXiv[6]. Scott Aaronson had already written about it[7]. There was so much dissent in that time frame that it is hard to explain it as an accident. A week or two and it wouldn't be an issue. But I think Peter Woit explains it best[8] (published, yes, Nov 30th). This work is getting the full-press promotional package: no preprint on the arXiv, embargoed info to journalists, with reveal at a press conference, a cover story in Nature,…

Not sure if it's clickbait, but there is good reason to believe in a deep connection between 4d gauge field theories (i.e. of the standard model) and number theory through representation theory. This involves other work than mentioned in this article though it's still inscrutable for most at this point (motivic cohomology/Hilbert–Pólya in RH, supersymmetry in YM mass gap, cosmic galois in renormalization). From Peter Woit's blog: > It’s worth noting that while there are many connections to the ideas originating with Langlands, this new work shows that the “Langlands program” has expanded into a striking vision relating different areas of mathematics, with a strong connection to deep ideas about quantization and quantum field theory. The way in which these ideas bring together number theory and quantum field theory provide new evidence for the deep unity of fundamental ideas about mathematics and physics. https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13578

A more sober take on this story can be found here: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13181 summary: The claim that “Physicists Create a Wormhole” is just complete bullshit, with the huge campaign to mislead the public about this a disgrace, highly unhelpful for the credibility of physics research in particular and science in general. … As far as I can tell, all they did was perform elaborate SYK calculations on a classical computer, together with simulations of noise on the Google quantum computer, trying to find a possible calculation on the quantum computer that would have signal, not just noise. Once such an N=7 SYK calculation was identified, they used a 9 qubit quantum computer and the noisy result matched the simulation result from the classical computer, exactly as expected. Seeing the completely expected match between results from a 9 bit noisy quantum computer and the results of the simulation of this on a classical computer caused Maria Spiropulu to say that “I was shaken” and “It was nuts. It was nuts”, while Joe Lykken felt that the moment was on a par with discovery of the Higgs particle.

Okey, let me quote another post by Peter Woit from 2016: "One thing that strikes me about these things is that the situation with the physics prize has changed dramatically since the first three years, when they went mostly to string theorists. Having a heavily promoted much larger cash prize than the Nobel, given largely to theorists for ideas many of which haven’t worked out, raised obvious questions about the wisdom of the whole thing. The last two years have seen a 180 degree turn, with the prizes going to experimentalists for successful experimental results. Even better, there has been an unusual emphasis on making an award to entire experimental collaborations, not just a small number of “great men” identified as collaboration leaders or spokespersons. I don’t know of any other major prizes that do this. The lack of an experimental Nobel for the Higgs discovery is one reflection of that problem, it’s great that the Breakthrough Prize people are doing something about it."[0] Basically, we have two criticized recent physics awards (2019 special and 2017) and several in the very beginning. That still doesn't qualify as 'mostly'. [0] http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=8088

I highly recommend reading Edward Frenkel's memoir, Love and Math, which is more or less an up close and personal popular account of the author's involvement with the Langlands Program: Perhaps the most remarkable part of the book though is the way it makes a serious attempt to tackle the problem of explaining one of the deepest sets of ideas in mathematics, those which go under the name of the “Langlands program”. These ideas have fascinated me for years, and much of what I have learned about them has come from reading some of Frenkel’s great expository articles on the subject. To anyone who wants to learn more about this subject, the best advice for how to proceed is to read the overview in “Love and Math” (which you likely won’t fully understand, but which will give you a general picture and glimpses of what is really going on), and then try reading some of his more technical surveys [...] http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6266

I remember having a total "WTF?!?" moment when I heard Turok, of all people, had been chosen as Perimeter's new director. At the time, Perimeter's reputation was not unlike that of SpaceX or Tesla - a daring, unconventional outfit trying to shake things up with a new approach, and unusually enough endowed with the resources to actually do it. "Things" being very much quantum gravity. Then, out of the blue, Turok parachutes in, a hum-drum theoretical cosmologist who built his career on straightforward computer simulations of classical field-theoretic toy models, quite unrelated to quantum gravity. What?!? If he can say he didn't want the institute "to be center for alternative physicists", it is because the people who put him in place decided they didn't want that. But that was very much the origin story of the place. I still wonder what really happened. Maybe Lazaridis (an engineer, not a physicist) finally realized how far we are from any kind of experimental test of quantum gravity and decided that he wanted some kind of tangible return on his investment. Howard Burton, the founding director who was replaced by Turok, wrote a book [1] about the early years which may shed some light on events [2]. Maybe some day I'll read it. [1] https://www.amazon.ca/First-Principles-Business-Serious-Science/dp/155… [2] http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=1805/

If you read some of the links in the first paragraph you'll get a feel for the intent of the article. Aaronson probably expects his audience to follow traditional physics sources. See for example: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6260 Yesterday in QFT class the professor [0] explained the name by saying that the guy who came up with it was a "very good salesman". The reality is that probabilities can in a great deal of cases be expressed as the volume of something in some phase space, for a trivial example, consider the area under the curve between two x-values on the normal distribution's probability density function -- it's the 2-volume of a section of the Gaussiohedron. So after branding quantum information science as the study of the "unitarihedron", Aaronson dragged out one of his more miraculous results, which is that PP is closed under union and intersection as a direct result of PP = PostBQP, where PostBQP is a complexity class derived from BQP using an idea called postselection. That proof was actually in his dissertation (if I recall correctly), written in 2006, and it was an extremely impressive proof which did not use a word like "unitarihedron" to describe its methods. So, while it was a joke, if you read the article in the context of the physics community's reaction to the amplituhedron story, the included proof really just helps to drive the point home. The methods now called "amplituhedron" have been under continuous development for the…

Tao doesn't know exactly what Mochizuki is talking about because it is not in any of the (many) areas that Tao is an expert in. Even Fields medalists have their limits. The people that do work in his area don't know exactly what he's talking about because he's been going in a very deep and difficult direction. No one has been following, because they've been waiting to see if he finds anything in there. There was a good description at "Not Even Wrong": ----------- What Mochizuki is claiming is that he has a new set of techniques, which he calls “inter-universal geometry”, generalizing the foundations of algebraic geometry in terms of schemes first envisioned by Grothendieck. In essence, he has created a new world of mathematical objects, and now claims that he understands them well enough to work with them consistently and show that their properties imply the abc conjecture. What experts tell me is that, very much unlike the case of Szpiro’s proof, here it may take a very long time to see if this is really a proof. They can’t just rely on their familiarity with the usual scheme-theoretic world, but need to invest some serious time and effort into becoming familiar with Mochizuki’s new world. Only then can they hope to see how his proof is supposed to work, and be able to check carefully that a proof is really there, not just a mirage. It’s important to realize that this is being taken seriously because such experts have a high opinion of Mochizuki and his past work. If…

Fields medalist Terence Tao writes about earlier Fields medalist William Thurston, "In addition to his direct mathematical research contributions, Thurston was also an amazing mathematical expositor, having the rare knack of being able to describe the process of mathematical thinking in addition to the results of that process and the intuition underlying it. His wonderful essay “On proof and progress in mathematics“, which I highly recommend, is the quintessential instance of this; more recent examples include his many insightful questions and answers on MathOverflow." Besides "On proof and progress in mathematics," http://arxiv.org/abs/math.HO/9404236 which I also highly recommend, I especially like Thurston's article "Mathematical Education," http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0503081 which is full of good advice about thorough development of budding mathematicians. From Tao's blog, another link to a remembrance of Thurston: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=5059

it doesn't overturn much. For example, here is a post from 2004 https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=105 it is about a purported (though incorrect) positive proof of the Jacobian conjecture in 2 dimemnsions. It is true in 1 dimension. The Fable proof is that it is false in >= 3 dimensions. 2 dimensions is still open. Anyway, in that post it says > It now seems that a proof has been found by Carolyn Dean of the University of Michigan, for the case of polynomials in two complex variables *(for more variables, many people believe it is not even true)* so the resolution of this is a "surprise" in that it is a very long open with many failed proof attempts. But the direction it resolved was not surprising.

See Columbia article (it was slashdotted yesterday) [0] Leiden Declaration [1] [0] https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=15705 [1] https://leidendeclaration.ai/

Peter Woit (https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/) has occasionally posted about Grothendieck's life and work. E.g. Articles on his life: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=7335 Two Titans (Grothendieck and Witten) - https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=12868 AMS Math articles on Grothendieck - https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=78

It is not only the the peanut gallery that is skeptical: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=15362 Let's wait a couple of days whether there has been a similar result in the literature.

Actually I'm 6-7 between Oppenheim & Hsu. Woit should promote his own research instead of amplifying stuff from physics social media, might be less of a fool's errand :) https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=12319

Peter Woit's opinion: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=15348