3 ms·

- "...and is promoted with public money despite its failures..." The amusing thing for me* is this is just coffee budgets for pen-and-paper theorists. What the

- "...and is promoted with public money despite its failures..." The amusing thing for me* is this is just coffee budgets for pen-and-paper theorists. What they say about academic disputes: the lower the stakes, the more intense the politics. *(Observing from a safe distance!)

pbmonster 3y ago
> The amusing thing for me* is this is just coffee budgets for pen-and-paper theorists Unfortunately not. From his website [0], the extent of the grant funding involved is much more than just coffee budget: > The Black Hole Initiative that features this on its website: $16 million from the Templeton Foundation, $3.6 million from the Moore Foundation. > The Simons Collaboration on Celestial Holography: $8 million from the Simons Foundation. > NSF Grant: $400,000 from the NSF. > DOE Grant: $3.5 million from the DOE. This kind of money could fund a whole lot of other theory. Hell, it even could fund a lot of experiments (albeit not in high energy physics). [0] https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13770 https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13770
- smokel 3y ago
  The funding mentioned does not go directly to string theory research. Investments in quantum computing research are orders of magnitude larger, even in Europe alone. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Flagship https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Flagship Edit: Removed snark, add reference.
- perihelions 3y ago
  In my view, those are very trivial amounts, for an entire subfield of research. I can think of individual federal grants no one on HN has heard of or cares about that are are larger than all of those put together, which are outright fraudulent—those are dime-a-dozen. Also, note that your first three examples aren't public money, rather private philanthropy. No one can speak against where Jim Simons gifts his billions (and in point of fact Simons is an expert in quantum field theory himself—no one's scammed him, if he's decided string theorists are worth donating to. He reads and understands the papers they write). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons_(mathematician) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons_(mathematician) - "(albeit not in high energy physics)" It's a fair anchoring point, isn't it? It's the theory and experiment side of the same field. We're just spending 0.01% of the experimental budget on some (possibly wrong and possibly dead-end) theory ideas, and the coffee that produced them.
- theobeers 3y ago
  In context, those are not shockingly high sums. The real problem seems to be what Woit summarizes in this 2004 (!!) comment on his blog: > It takes a non-trivial amount of time and effort to absorb new mathematical ideas and by so dominating the mathematical end of particle theory for twenty years, string theory has monopolized the time of the mathematically sophisticated members of the community. It has also quite literally driven out of the field a lot of people who were interested in other sorts of ideas about how to apply mathematics to questions in particle theory. https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=119&cpage=2#comment-1629 https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=119&cpage=2... edit: How bonkers is it that another two decades have been pissed away on this?
  - SiempreViernes 3y ago
    Well, its not true that people only worked on string theory during these last 20 years: notably Woit himself didn't. That there's loads of people in Brazil, Russia (or frankly any place except Princeton and IAS) trying weird approaches sums up to nothing in his telling. Honestly, I get the impression that what Woit is really upset about is that people like his idol Witten didn't switch to work on his ideas, because only the genius of "towering intellects" like Witten's could solve this very hard problem. 0
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  The sad thing about that funding is how small it is. To billionaires and governments this is pocket change. Simons (personally, not the foundation) could spend ten times that to fund research into alternative models and not even notice. A global anything-goes-if-you're-qualified frontiers research program would cost a few hundred million dollars. The odds of it finding some game changers are likely pretty good. Instead we're getting a $17bn revamp of the LHC to turn it into a "Higgs factory".
sega_sai 3y ago
That is not correct IMO. When a faculty is hired specifically in a given field the cost of the salary line is a few tens of million dollars.
sn41 3y ago
There's also a hidden component in these budget calculations: it is hard for people doing more "traditional" physics to find tenured positions, since many faculty hires went to string theory. So the salary that went to string theorists at the expense of other subareas of physics is quite a large hidden component. Crushed academic ambition is as real-world as it gets, since it involves years of extremely hard toil, wasted.
- SiempreViernes 3y ago
  This is just false, string theory only competes in the theoretical physics sub-area; condensed matter, astrophysics, lasers, all that stuff have their own pots of money.
  - vixen99 3y ago
    True or false, that's an assertion. Does anyone have any stats so that those outside the field (mostly taxpayers?) can assess all of this?
    - SiempreViernes 3y ago
      That research budgets are split by subjects many times before arriving to a node where "string theory" is a possible leaf is not a controversial statement, it is reflected in basically all budget documents you will find. For example, string theory funded by the NSF that "steals" money from laser research is plausibly only found in the "elementary particle physics - theory" program, which is part of the Physics division, which is part of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate. You can find all NFS awards in the physics division, so about one step above where string theory could plausibly show up here: https://tableau.external.nsf.gov/views/NSFbyNumbers/Details?%3AisGuestRedirectFromVizportal=y&%3Aembed=y&%3Alinktarget=_blank&%3Atoolbar=top https://tableau.external.nsf.gov/views/NSFbyNumbers/Details?... sadly the page is pretty shit so the filter selection is probably reset, and they don't label by division program so you'll have to mouse over each one and categorise yourself. As a guide to how much work it is, there was 350 awards in the physics division and about 30 of those in the theory program.
andrepd 3y ago
Sure, it's just coffee, pens, paper, and 50,000,000,000€ particle accelerators! :)
benreesman 3y ago
Not a physicist, just a fan. It’s not just coffee and blackboards and hoarded Japanese chalk: the goalpost slalom around supersymmetry drives discussions about what colliders to build and how to operate them [1]. Before scalar field excitation at 125 GeV it was predicted by many that the power and luminosity of that run would show weak bosonic superpartners in the first run. With Higgs at 125 GeV it gets really tortured as an argument. This is also the subtext with the really aggressive public branding of “dark matter”, when it should really be called something like “large scale apparent gravitational anomaly” or some dry thing like that, it’s not an MCU franchise: positing a bunch of mass that has none of the other properties of matter is a perfectly fine line of inquiry, but the verbal capitalization of Matter is because weakly-interacting massive particles are another way to argue that maybe, just maybe maybe, this is indirect evidence for supersymmetry. But most of all the damage is in attacking the definition of science: if you envelope-math metastable vacua consistent with compactified Calabai-Yau dimensions at (last I checked) order of 10^250 what you’re left with is “it’s strong anthropic, there’s no explanation”, which is exactly where Susskind and that lot have ended up. It’s time for these people to retire. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.08642.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.08642.pdf
- baobabKoodaa 3y ago
  > hoarded Japanese chalk What a rabbit hole this turned out to be... That was an enjoyable 30 minutes. Thank you.
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    Ah. and For the audience at home: https://duckduckgo.com/?hps=1&q=hoarded+Japanese+chalk&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?hps=1&q=hoarded+Japanese+chalk&ia=we...
    - perihelions 3y ago
      And for the audience here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9723202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9723202 ("Mathematicians Are Hoarding a Type of Japanese Chalk", 109 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19718287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19718287 ("Mathematicians are hoarding a type of Japanese chalk (2015)", 123 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20237878 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20237878 ("The Chalk Market: Where Mathematicians Go to Get the Good Stuf", 118 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9770017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9770017 ("Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business", 110 comments)

pbmonster 3y ago

> The amusing thing for me* is this is just coffee budgets for pen-and-paper theorists Unfortunately not. From his website [0], the extent of the grant funding involved is much more than just coffee budget: > The Black Hole Initiative that features this on its website: $16 million from the Templeton Foundation, $3.6 million from the Moore Foundation. > The Simons Collaboration on Celestial Holography: $8 million from the Simons Foundation. > NSF Grant: $400,000 from the NSF. > DOE Grant: $3.5 million from the DOE. This kind of money could fund a whole lot of other theory. Hell, it even could fund a lot of experiments (albeit not in high energy physics). [0] https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13770 https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13770

smokel 3y ago
The funding mentioned does not go directly to string theory research. Investments in quantum computing research are orders of magnitude larger, even in Europe alone. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Flagship https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Flagship Edit: Removed snark, add reference.
perihelions 3y ago
In my view, those are very trivial amounts, for an entire subfield of research. I can think of individual federal grants no one on HN has heard of or cares about that are are larger than all of those put together, which are outright fraudulent—those are dime-a-dozen. Also, note that your first three examples aren't public money, rather private philanthropy. No one can speak against where Jim Simons gifts his billions (and in point of fact Simons is an expert in quantum field theory himself—no one's scammed him, if he's decided string theorists are worth donating to. He reads and understands the papers they write). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons_(mathematician) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons_(mathematician) - "(albeit not in high energy physics)" It's a fair anchoring point, isn't it? It's the theory and experiment side of the same field. We're just spending 0.01% of the experimental budget on some (possibly wrong and possibly dead-end) theory ideas, and the coffee that produced them.
theobeers 3y ago
In context, those are not shockingly high sums. The real problem seems to be what Woit summarizes in this 2004 (!!) comment on his blog: > It takes a non-trivial amount of time and effort to absorb new mathematical ideas and by so dominating the mathematical end of particle theory for twenty years, string theory has monopolized the time of the mathematically sophisticated members of the community. It has also quite literally driven out of the field a lot of people who were interested in other sorts of ideas about how to apply mathematics to questions in particle theory. https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=119&cpage=2#comment-1629 https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=119&cpage=2... edit: How bonkers is it that another two decades have been pissed away on this?
- SiempreViernes 3y ago
  Well, its not true that people only worked on string theory during these last 20 years: notably Woit himself didn't. That there's loads of people in Brazil, Russia (or frankly any place except Princeton and IAS) trying weird approaches sums up to nothing in his telling. Honestly, I get the impression that what Woit is really upset about is that people like his idol Witten didn't switch to work on his ideas, because only the genius of "towering intellects" like Witten's could solve this very hard problem. 0
TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
The sad thing about that funding is how small it is. To billionaires and governments this is pocket change. Simons (personally, not the foundation) could spend ten times that to fund research into alternative models and not even notice. A global anything-goes-if-you're-qualified frontiers research program would cost a few hundred million dollars. The odds of it finding some game changers are likely pretty good. Instead we're getting a $17bn revamp of the LHC to turn it into a "Higgs factory".

sega_sai 3y ago

That is not correct IMO. When a faculty is hired specifically in a given field the cost of the salary line is a few tens of million dollars.

sn41 3y ago

There's also a hidden component in these budget calculations: it is hard for people doing more "traditional" physics to find tenured positions, since many faculty hires went to string theory. So the salary that went to string theorists at the expense of other subareas of physics is quite a large hidden component. Crushed academic ambition is as real-world as it gets, since it involves years of extremely hard toil, wasted.

SiempreViernes 3y ago
This is just false, string theory only competes in the theoretical physics sub-area; condensed matter, astrophysics, lasers, all that stuff have their own pots of money.
- vixen99 3y ago
  True or false, that's an assertion. Does anyone have any stats so that those outside the field (mostly taxpayers?) can assess all of this?
  - SiempreViernes 3y ago
    That research budgets are split by subjects many times before arriving to a node where "string theory" is a possible leaf is not a controversial statement, it is reflected in basically all budget documents you will find. For example, string theory funded by the NSF that "steals" money from laser research is plausibly only found in the "elementary particle physics - theory" program, which is part of the Physics division, which is part of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate. You can find all NFS awards in the physics division, so about one step above where string theory could plausibly show up here: https://tableau.external.nsf.gov/views/NSFbyNumbers/Details?%3AisGuestRedirectFromVizportal=y&%3Aembed=y&%3Alinktarget=_blank&%3Atoolbar=top https://tableau.external.nsf.gov/views/NSFbyNumbers/Details?... sadly the page is pretty shit so the filter selection is probably reset, and they don't label by division program so you'll have to mouse over each one and categorise yourself. As a guide to how much work it is, there was 350 awards in the physics division and about 30 of those in the theory program.

andrepd 3y ago

Sure, it's just coffee, pens, paper, and 50,000,000,000€ particle accelerators! :)

benreesman 3y ago

Not a physicist, just a fan. It’s not just coffee and blackboards and hoarded Japanese chalk: the goalpost slalom around supersymmetry drives discussions about what colliders to build and how to operate them [1]. Before scalar field excitation at 125 GeV it was predicted by many that the power and luminosity of that run would show weak bosonic superpartners in the first run. With Higgs at 125 GeV it gets really tortured as an argument. This is also the subtext with the really aggressive public branding of “dark matter”, when it should really be called something like “large scale apparent gravitational anomaly” or some dry thing like that, it’s not an MCU franchise: positing a bunch of mass that has none of the other properties of matter is a perfectly fine line of inquiry, but the verbal capitalization of Matter is because weakly-interacting massive particles are another way to argue that maybe, just maybe maybe, this is indirect evidence for supersymmetry. But most of all the damage is in attacking the definition of science: if you envelope-math metastable vacua consistent with compactified Calabai-Yau dimensions at (last I checked) order of 10^250 what you’re left with is “it’s strong anthropic, there’s no explanation”, which is exactly where Susskind and that lot have ended up. It’s time for these people to retire. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.08642.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.08642.pdf

baobabKoodaa 3y ago
> hoarded Japanese chalk What a rabbit hole this turned out to be... That was an enjoyable 30 minutes. Thank you.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  Ah. and For the audience at home: https://duckduckgo.com/?hps=1&q=hoarded+Japanese+chalk&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?hps=1&q=hoarded+Japanese+chalk&ia=we...
  - perihelions 3y ago
    And for the audience here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9723202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9723202 ("Mathematicians Are Hoarding a Type of Japanese Chalk", 109 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19718287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19718287 ("Mathematicians are hoarding a type of Japanese chalk (2015)", 123 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20237878 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20237878 ("The Chalk Market: Where Mathematicians Go to Get the Good Stuf", 118 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9770017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9770017 ("Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business", 110 comments)