New Blog!

For the throngs of worldsheet fans who are still around, I now have a blog with a group of physicists, Imaginary Potential.

This Article Makes Me Angry

Slate.com is usually a great place to get news and slightly unorthodox and mostly left leaning commentary. Their big shtick seems to be semi-shocking headlines designed to lure the reader in. For example, a story on the movie "Casablanca," might be titled "Casablanca is not a very good movie," and so on. All of this is rather amusing, except for when it takes place in my house.

For your consideration: this idiotic piece of science writing . The writer's (a dude named James Owen Weatherall) main point seems to be that the discovery of the Higgs is bad because apart from it, we expect no new physics until the GUT scale (very high energies that our particle accelerators won't get to anytime soon). Let's go though it part by part. The author comments on a rumor that they may have discovered the Higgs at the Tevatron (something I have not heard anything about here at TASI, a summer school filled with many of the leading students and professors, surely if there were something to this rumor we'd be abuzz (?) ). Various comments:

1. First of all, the author claims that the standard model was "put forth by John Iliopoulos in 1974." Huh? I've never heard that one. After googling this, it seems the Iliopoulous was perhaps the first to use the term "standard model," but I would, by no means say that he "put it forth". The heavy liftiing for the SM was done by Glashow, Salaam and Weinberg for the electroweak (SU(2) X U(1)) part of the theory. For QCD (the SU(3) part), the work was done by many, but Wilczek, Gross, Politzer and maybe t'Hooft deserve the most credit. Iliopoulous? (Don't get me wrong, he's no slouch, he's done many important interesting things in physics.) Maybe he was going for technical correctness in that Iliopoulos first proposed the term, but either way it's either wrong or grossly misleading. Don't journalists have to do research?

2. "...if the rumor is true and the standard model Higgs has been found at the Tevatron, the LHC is in big trouble: Immediately, its "guaranteed" success—the final particle of the standard model, not to mention a couple of Nobel Prizes for European scientists—is gone." This is actually the author's only good point. Physicists are most confident about finding the Higgs "or something like it" (Nima Arkani-Hamed's words). I wouldn't say that the LHC is in "big trouble," though. This leads us to the rest of the article...

3. "Physicists have developed such a complete description of elementary particles that, once the final piece of the theory is in place, the chances that the LHC will find anything the standard model doesn't predict are almost negligible." What?! Where is Mr. Weatherall getting his information from? It's hardly surprising that he quotes no physicists in the article. Even if the Higgs is found, there is still very good reason to expect new physics at the TeV scale (the energy range probed by the LHC). In fact, the biggist indication that there is new physics is the unnatural fine tuning of the Higgs mass. Physicists have assumed for decades that the Higgs would be found. Once you believe in the Higgs, the numbers come out such that its mass has to be incredibly fine tuned in order to account for observed physics. Nobody studying particle physics finds this physically natural. There is a loophole out of this if there is new physics at precisely the energy scales that the LHC will be investigating. Let me repeat again: Everyone expects new physics (besides the Higgs) to be found at the LHC.

4. "But what happens if the Higgs turns out to be just right? Well, then the standard model predicts that you'd need a machine roughly a quadrillion times more powerful than the LHC to find anything new. " No, no it does not. Shmuck.

5. "That's why particle physicists, and the EU member states that have spent Nepal's annual GDP to build this accelerator, are hoping that no one, in Chicago or Switzerland, finds the Higgs." Not true either, champ. In fact all particle physics expect the Higgs or something like it. I, and I think most theory graduate students and researchers would be quite overjoyed at the Higgs discovery and the final test of the standard model. But even then, all signs point to there being more than the standard model, and that we will begin to find those signs soon after.

Mr. Weatherall, shame on you. Next time, you should talk to some actual physicists. Though I've complained about science journalism on this blog before, I'd take the frothy, meaningless musings of Dennis Overbye over James Owen Weatherall's just plain wrong reporting.

Crackpot of the Week #1

After a chat with various officemates today, we thought it would be amusing to highlight on a blog the various crackpot theories that make their way to our inboxes.

You might not know it, but there is a suprisingly large group of sociologically interesting people who think that while they have no formal training in math or science that they have discovered the next theory of everything in physics. These people (known by those in the biz as "crackpots") frequently try to contact actual scientists and even us graduate students to try and convince us of their crazy theories. They do not usually listen to reason. There are way more of these people than you'd might expect. Every year at the CTP, security has to actually escort a number of them from the building. Some of my favorite crackpot related resources on the web are:

John Baez's crackpot index
Great "This American Life" where crackpotisim is discussed. In particular the program follows around some dude who, while mostly sane, seems to think Einstein is all wrong (he has no formal training in physics). He seems to think that E=mc, not E=mc^2 (my favorite quote is "It's not that big a deal, Einstein wasn't too far off").

Anyway, I hope to, from now on highlight some of the crazy ass theories that we get here in our email. Now, some readers might question the taste of me posting crackpot theories in order to make fun of them. Those readers might have a point. However, some of these theories are quite funny, and their humor deserves not to be lost.

Our first crackpot of the week is the author of the new and groundbreaking gravity-spheres theory, which, as far as I can tell, depends on the very intimate relationship between gravity and spheres. In contrary to the old, dogmatic belief that the gravity of an object exists everywhere, the author informs us that, in fact, it only exists within (you guessed it) spheres. In fact, "The structure of the [gravitational] force field is simple: a bubble within a bubble within a bubble… Spheres." Niiiiice. This simple idea, evidently, also "answers just about ALL questions in astronomy and all relating questions in astrophysics, clearly and unambiguously." Sweet. For example, it answers why there are rings around Saturn. because "If you spin an object on a string, you will notice that the object and the string form a flat circle and that the object tends to remain in the plane of that circle called the plane of rotation. What happened around Saturn is something similar – with the debris as the object and Saturn’s gravity as the string."

Also, the author seems to have a vendetta against LIGO (the ground based aparatus for detecting gravitational waves that will be coming online soon). Though he conceeds the existence of gravitational waves, he thinks it exceedingly obvious that the waves won't radiate to us. Of course, instead, they will stay in their spheres!

Oh, and also Einstein was horribly wrong and the special and the general relativity are incorrect.

TASI

I found out yesterday that I was admitted to the TASI 2007 summer school in Boulder, Colorado. That was quite a pleasant surprised, I was not expecting to be admitted as there were a lot of MIT applicants. I'm excited, the topic this year is "string universe" (it is interesting I was admitted, as I know little to no string theory). The lecturers and topics can be found here . I am most excited about (the) Intriligator's lecture on SUSY breaking, and about David Tong's lectures on solitons and low dimesional gauge theories. MIT locals Barton Zwiebach and Hong Liu will also be speaking and they are always crowd pleasers (and the are 2/3 of my exam committee, so let's hope they read this complement).

Old Sick Lady

Dear Old Sick Lady,

Please leave the library. Why must you continue to cough absurdly loudly while I try to learn about pions? Why is it that you sound like you are possibly about to die, like your bronchial tubes are so full of phelgm that you have trouble sucking in air? See a doctor old sick lady. Also please leave. I am pretty sure you are going to give me a staph infection, whatever that is. Also, why must you systematically use every computer in the library, covering each with the germs that you almost certainly are spewing every time you open that foul mouth of yours to radiate your cough of death?

I am looking at you now as I type this. Don't you have places to be sick lady? How can you spend your entire day on various library computers. Don't you have young, healthy children or possibly grandchildren that can shower you with love, instead of you showering me with bacteria? Perhaps they died of a staph infection.

Open House

Well, the open house is over (finished on friday), and I took the weekend to recover and sleep (and of course, not to study). All in all, despite an unplanned blizzard, I think it went pretty well. The events started wednesday night at the Asgard with drinks and dinner with the prospectives. Not too many prospectives showed up, but more than enough currents did, I think giving the impression that we are a social bunch.

Thursday I gave a short welcome spiel which I think went alright. Then I tried to get some work done with the remainder of the day.

Friday a few of us gave a grad student info session. My presentation there went very well, though I am told that when I talk my face turns all red (this also happens when I drink, when it's cold, when I exercise, and most tuesdays). Also, the fly on my pants kept coming down, I hope that wasn't noticed. After that was the grad student poster session, then dinner at the local pool hall, flat top johnny's. Most prospectives turned up for a few beers, some conversation and pool, and, despite the blizzard most ventured out towards the grad student house party planned afterwards for them (what else were they going to do at 7:30 pm?). The party went expertly; tons showed up and many had a good play on my nintendo wii. There were even a few girls at the party.

Speaking of which there were two (dare I say cute?) prospective women for the CTP. Man, I hope they come. Our current total at the CTP will soon be two. I talked to one for a while. She had some reservations about coming to MIT such as "It seems like there are no girls here, while there are lots at Harvard." I couldn't really argue with that except to say that 1. That's why we need you, and 2. err, harvard sucks.

Crazy

I'm about to explode. The physics open house starts tomorrow, there is also a cookie hour that needs to be executed, plus possibly work that needs to get done (I spent all day uselessly (and not succesfully) tracking down minus signs and symmetry factors). PGSC also has an invited colloquim speaker, Bill Bialek, which would be cool were it not to fall next week, right in the midst of everything else. Evidently I'm meant to organize meetings between him and professors he wants to chat with. I just got his list of people he wants to meet and its huge! He also said he'd like to be surprised. I should set him up with one of the CTP crackpots.

I'd like to say that there are more interesting things going on, but that would be untrue. Until tomorrow...