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Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

- "...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!)

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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

> hoarded Japanese chalk

What a rabbit hole this turned out to be...

That was an enjoyable 30 minutes. Thank you.

Ah.

and For the audience at home: https://duckduckgo.com/?hps=1&q=hoarded+Japanese+chalk&ia=we...

And for the audience here on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9723202 ("Mathematicians Are Hoarding a Type of Japanese Chalk", 109 comments)

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 ("The Chalk Market: Where Mathematicians Go to Get the Good Stuf", 118 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9770017 ("Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business", 110 comments)

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20237878 ("The Chalk Market: Where Mathematicians Go to Get the Good Stuf", 118 comments)

All the comments here attributing Japan's ability to have a chalk factory to basically Orientalist culture reasons are disappointing.

(In most of the reasons Japan and America are different here, America is the weird place, not Japan.)

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.

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.

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?

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?...

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.

Totally wild assertion. Most physics departments in the world have only one or two theorists and most of them are not in string theory. And most young physicists don't have the inclination to pursue string theory (even if they had the capability, which many do not).

Taking criticism of string theory hogging all the budget as "it's literally taking over the entirety of physics budgets" instead of "in the field of fundamental high-energy physics, there's no budget left over for alternative ideas to be developed to a similarly detailed level" is strawmanning.

> 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

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

Edit: Removed snark, add reference.

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)

- "(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.

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...

edit: How bonkers is it that another two decades have been pissed away on this?

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

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".

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

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.

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