Category Archives: Amateur Philosophy

Elegance, Not So Mysterious

2 Replies

You’ll often hear theoretical physicists in the media referring to one theory or another as “elegant”. String theory in particular seems to get this moniker fairly frequently.

It may often seem like mathematical elegance is some sort of mysterious sixth sense theorists possess, as inexplicable to the average person as color to a blind person. What’s “elegant” about string theory, after all?

Before explaining elegance, I should take a bit of time to say what it’s not. Elegance isn’t Occam’s razor. It isn’t naturalness, either. Both of those concepts have their own technical definitions.

Elegance, by contrast, is a much hazier, and yet much simpler, notion. It’s hazy enough that any definition could provoke arguments, but I can at least give you an approximate idea by telling you that an elegant theory is simple to describe, if you know the right terms. Often, it is simpler than the phenomenon that it explains.

How does this apply to something like string theory? String theory seems to be incredibly complicated: ten dimensions, curled up in a truly vast number of different ways, giving rise to whole spectrums of particles.

That said, the basic idea is quite simple. String theory asks the question: what if, in addition to fundamental point-particles (zero dimensional objects), there were fundamental objects of other dimensions? That idea leads to complicated consequences: if your theory is going to produce all the particles of the real world then you need the ten dimensions and the supersymmetry and yadda yadda. But the basic idea is simple to describe. An elegant theory can have very complicated consequences, but still be simple to describe.

This, broadly, is the sort of explanation theoretical physicists look for. Math is the kind of field where the same basic systems can describe very complex phenomena. Since theoretical physics is about describing the world in terms of math, the right explanation is usually the most elegant.

This can occasionally trip physicists up when they migrate to other careers. In biology, for example, the elegant solution is often not the right one, because evolution doesn’t care about elegance: evolution just grabs whatever is within reach. Financial systems and economics occasionally have similar problems. All this is to say that while elegance is an important thing for a physicist to strive for, sometimes we have to be careful about it.

In Defense of Pure Theory

3 Replies

I’d like to preface this by saying that this post will be a bit more controversial than usual. I have somewhat unconventional opinions about the nature and purpose of science, and what I say below shouldn’t be taken as representative of the field in general.

A bit more than a week ago, Not Even Wrong had a post on the Fundamental Physics Prize. Peter Woit is often…I’m going to say annoying…and this post was no exception.

The Fundamental Physics Prize, for those not in the know, is a fairly recently established prize for physicists, mostly theoretical physicists.  Clocking in at three million dollars, the prize is larger than the Nobel, and is currently the largest prize of its sort. Woit has several objections to the current choice of award recipient (Alexander Polyakov). I sympathize with some of these objections, in particular the snarky observation that a large number of the awardees are from Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. But there is one objection in particular that I feel the need to rebut, if only due to its wording: the gripe that “Viewers of the part I saw would have no idea that string theory is not tested, settled science.”

There are two problems with this statement. The first is something that Woit is likely aware of, but it probably isn’t obvious to everyone reading this. To be clear, the fact that a certain theory is not experimentally tested is not a barrier to its consideration for the Fundamental Physics Prize. Far from it, the purpose of the Fundamental Physics Prize is precisely to honor powerful insights in theoretical physics that have not yet been experimentally verified. The Fundamental Physics Prize was created, in part, to remedy what was perceived as unfairness in the awarding of the Nobel Prize, as the Nobel is only awarded to theorists after their theories have received experimental confirmation. Since the whole purpose of this prize is to honor theories that have not been experimentally tested, griping that the prizes are being awarded to untested theories is a bit like griping that Oscars aren’t awarded to scientists, or objecting that viewers of the Oscars would have no idea that the winners haven’t done anything especially amazing for humanity. If you’re watching the ceremony, you probably know what it’s for.

Has this been experimentally verified?

The other problem is a difference of philosophy. When Woit says that string theory is not “tested, settled science” he is implying that in order to be “settled science”, a theory must be tested, and while I can’t be sure of his intent I’m guessing he means tested experimentally. It is this latter implication I want to address: whether or not Woit is making it here, it serves to underscore an important point about the structure of physics as an institution.

Past readers will be aware that a theory can be valuable even if it doesn’t correspond to the real world because of what it can teach us about theories that do correspond to the real world. And while that is an important point, the point I’d like to make here is a bit more controversial. I would like to argue that pure theory, theory unconnected with experiment, can be important and valuable and “settled science” in and of itself.

First off, let’s talk about how such a theory can be science, and in particular how it can be physics. Plenty of people do work that doesn’t correspond to the experimentally accessible real world.  Mathematicians are the clearest example, but the point also arguably applies to fields like literary analysis. Physics is ostensibly supposed to be special, though: as part of science, we expect it to concern itself with the real world, otherwise one would argue that it is simply mathematics. However, as I have argued before, the difference between mathematics and physics is not one of subject matter, but of methods. This makes sense, provided you think of physics not as some sort of fixed school of thought, but as an institution. Physicists train new physicists, and as such physicists learn methods common to other physicists. That which physicists like to do, then, is physics, which means that physics is defined much more by the methods used to do it than by its object of study.

How can such a theory be settled, then? After all, if reality is out, what possible criteria could there be for deciding what is or is not a “good” theory?

The thing about physics as an institution is that physics is done by physicists, and physicists have careers. Over the course of those careers, those physicists need to publish papers, which need to catch the attention and approval of other physicists. They also need to have projects for grad students to do, so as to produce more physicists. Because of this, a “good” theory cannot be worked on alone. It has to be a theory with many implications, a theory that can be worked on and understood consistently by different people. It also needs to constrain further progress, to make sure that not just anyone can create novel results: this is what allows papers to catch the attention of other physicists! If you have all that, you have all of the relevant advantages of reality.

String theory has not been experimentally tested, but it meets all of these criteria. String theory has been a major force in theoretical physics for the past thirty years because it can fuel careers and lead to discussion in a way that nothing else on the table can. It has been tested mathematically in numerous ways, ways which demonstrate its robustness as a theory of quantum gravity. In this sense, string theory is a prime example of tested, settled science.

Breakthrough or Crackpot?

1 Reply

Suppose that you have an idea. Not necessarily a wonderful, awful idea, but an idea that seems like it could completely change science as we know it. And why not? It’s been done before.

My advice to you is to be very very careful. Because if you’re not careful, your revolutionary idea might force you to explain much much more than you expect.

Let’s consider an example. Suppose you believe that the universe is only six thousand years old, in contrast to the 13.772 ± 0.059 billion years that scientists who study the subject have calculated. And furthermore, imagine that you’ve gone one step further: you’ve found evidence!

Being no slouch at this sort of thing, you read the Wikipedia article linked above, and you figure you’ve got two problems to deal with: extrapolations from the expansion of the universe, and the cosmic microwave background. Let’s say your new theory is good enough that you can address both of these: you can explain why calculations based on both of these methods give 14 billion years, while you still assert that the universe is only six thousand years old. You’ve managed to explain away all of the tests that scientists used to establish the age of the universe. If you can manage that, you’re done, right?

Not quite. Explaining all the direct tests may seem like great progress, but it’s only the first step, because the age of the universe can show up indirectly as well. No stars have been observed that are 13.772 billion years old, but every star whose age has been calculated has been found to be older than six thousand years! And even if you can explain why every attempt to measure a star’s age turned out wrong, there’s more to it than that, because the age of stars is a very important part of how astronomers model stellar behavior. Every time astronomers make a prediction about a star, whether estimating its size, it’s brightness, its color, every time they make such a prediction and then the prediction turns out correct, they’re using the fact that the star is (some specific number) much much older than six thousand years. And because almost everything we can see in space either is made of stars, or orbits a star, or once was a star, changing the age of the universe means you have to explain all those results too. If you propose that the age of the universe is only six thousand, you need to explain not only the cosmic microwave background, not only the age of stars, but almost every single successful prediction made in the last fifty years of astronomy, none of which would have been successful if the age of the universe was only six thousand.

Daunting, isn’t it?

Oh, we’re not done yet!

See, it’s not just astronomy you have to contend with, because the age of the Earth specifically is also calculated to be much larger than six thousand years. And just as astronomers use the age of stars to make successful predictions about their other properties, geologists use the age of rock formations to make their own predictions. And the same is true for species of animals and plants, studied through genetic drift with known rates over time, or fossils with known ages. So in proposing that the universe is only six thousand years old, you need to explain not just two pieces of evidence, but the majority of successful predictions made in three distinct disciplines over the last fifty years. Is your evidence that the universe is only six thousand years old good enough to outweigh all of that?

This is one of the best ways to tell a genuine scientific breakthrough from ideas that can be indelicately described as crackpot. If your idea questions something that has been used to make successful predictions for decades, then it becomes your burden of proof to explain why all those results were successful, and chances are, you can’t fulfill that burden.

This test can be applied quite widely. As another example, homeopathic medicine relies on the idea that if you dilute a substance (medicine or poison) drastically then rather than getting weaker it will suddenly become stronger, sometimes with the reverse effect. While you might at first think this could be confirmed or denied merely by testing homeopathic medicines themselves, the principle would also have to apply to any other dilution, meaning that a homeopath needs to explain everything from the success of water treatment plants that wash out all but tiny traces of contaminants to high school chemistry experiments involving diluting acid to observe its pH.

This is why scientific revolutions are hard! If you want to change the way we look at the world, you need to make absolutely sure you aren’t invalidating the success of prior researchers. In fact, the successes of past research constrain new science so much, that it sometimes is possible to make predictions just from these constraints!

So whenever you think you’ve got a breakthrough, ask yourself: how much does this mean I have to explain? What is my burden of proof?

Why I Am Not A Mathematician

2 Replies

(No relation to Russel’s Why I Am Not A Christian. Well, not much.)

I am a theorist. I study theories. Not the well-supported theories of the AAAS definition, but simply potential lists of particles, and lists that, further, are almost certainly not “true”.

Most people find that disconcerting. Used to thinking of scientists as people who investigate the real world, people whose ideas are always tested in the fire of experiment, the idea of a scientist whose work has no direct connection to the real world is a major source of cognitive dissonance…for at least a few minutes. After that, a light dawns in most people’s heads, as they turn to me with a sigh of relief and say,

“Oh. So you’re a Mathematician.”

No.

No, I am not a Mathematician. There is a difference, subtle but vast, between what I do and a mathematician does.

An illustrative example: Quantum Electro-Dynamics, or QED, is the most successful theory in the entirety of science. Yes, I do mean the entirety of science. Quantum Electro-Dynamics, the theory of how electrons and light behave, agrees with experiments to ten decimal places. Ten digits of detail, predicted then observed. That’s more confirmed accuracy than anything else in physics, in science at all, has ever achieved.

And if you ask a mathematician who specializes in this sort of thing, they’ll tell you that QED probably doesn’t exist.

Now, by this they don’t mean that electrons don’t exist, or that light doesn’t exist. What they mean is that, if you follow the theory’s implications all the way, you get a contradiction. You can calculate each step of the way, getting reasonable results each time, results that keep agreeing perfectly with experiments…but if you were to go all the way, off to infinity, you get results that make your whole theory stop making any sort of reasonable sense.

But as physicists, we keep using it. Because before reaching infinity, for any real calculation, it works. Perfectly.

That’s the difference between a theoretical physicist and a mathematician: for a mathematician, everything must be completely rigorous, and every implication, out to infinity, has to be vetted. For a physicist, if a theory gives reasonable results, we don’t really care whether it is completely clear how it works mathematically. We use physical reasoning, using concepts that work in the physical world, even if we’re studying a theory that doesn’t actually exist in the physical world. And while that sounds like a poor way to study abstract ideas, it allows us to take risks mathematicians can’t, which sometimes means we can make discoveries that even the mathematicians find interesting.