How Expert Is That Expert?

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The blog Astral Codex Ten had an interesting post a while back, about when to trust experts. Rather than thinking of some experts as “trustworthy” and some as “untrustworthy”, the post suggests an approach of “bounded distrust”. Even if an expert is biased or a news source sometimes lies, there are certain things you can still expect them to tell the truth about. If you are familiar enough with their work, you can get an idea of which kinds of claims you can trust and which you can’t, in a consistent and reliable way. Knowing how to do this is a skill, one you can learn to get better at.

In my corner of science, I can’t think of anyone who outright lies. Nonetheless, some claims are worth more trust than others. Sometimes experts have solid backing for what they say, direct experience that’s hard to contradict. Other times they’re speaking mostly from general impressions, and bias could easily creep in. Luckily, it’s not so hard to tell the difference. In this post, I’ll try to teach you how.

For an example, I’ll use something I saw at a conference last week. A speaker gave a talk describing the current state of cosmology: the new tools we have to map the early universe, and the challenges in using them to their full potential. After the talk, I remember her answering three questions. In each case, she seemed to know what she was talking about, but for different reasons. If she was contradicted by a different expert, I’d use these reasons to figure out which one to trust.

First, sometimes an expert gives what is an informed opinion, but just an informed opinion. As scientists, we are expected to know a fairly broad range of background behind our work, and be able to say something informed about it. We see overview talks and hear our colleagues’ takes, and get informed opinions about topics we otherwise don’t work on. This speaker fielded a question about quantum gravity, and her answer made it clear that the topic falls into this category for her. Her answer didn’t go into much detail, mentioning a few terms but no specific scientific results, and linked back in the end to a different question closer to her expertise. That’s generally how we speak on this kind of topic: vaguely enough to show what we know without overstepping.

The second question came from a different kind of knowledge, which I might call journal club knowledge. Many scientists have what are called “journal clubs”. We meet on a regular basis, read recent papers, and talk about them. The papers go beyond what we work on day-to-day, but not by that much, because the goal is to keep an eye open for future research topics. We read papers in close-by areas, watching for elements that could be useful, answers to questions we have or questions we know how to answer. The kind of “journal club knowledge” we have covers a fair amount of detail: these aren’t topics we are working on right now, but if we spent more time on it they could be. Here, the speaker answered a question about the Hubble tension, a discrepancy between two different ways of measuring the expansion of the universe. The way she answered focused on particular results: someone did X, there was a paper showing Y, this telescope is planning to measure Z. That kind of answer is a good way to tell that someone is answering from “journal club knowledge”. It’s clearly an area she could get involved in if she wanted to, one where she knows the important questions and which papers to read, with some of her own work close enough to the question to give an important advantage. But it was also clear that she hadn’t developed a full argument on one “side” or the other, and as such there are others I’d trust a bit more on that aspect of the question.

Finally, experts are the most trustworthy when we speak about our own work. In this speaker’s case, the questions about machine learning were where her expertise clearly shone through. Her answers there were detailed in a different way than her answers about the Hubble tension: not just papers, but personal experience. They were full of phrases like “I tried that, but it doesn’t work…” or “when we do this, we prefer to do it this way”. They also had the most technical terms of any of her answers, terms that clearly drew distinctions relevant to those who work in the field. In general, when an expert talks about what they do in their own work, and uses a lot of appropriate technical terms, you have especially good reason to trust them.

These cues can help a lot when evaluating experts. An expert who makes a generic claim, like “no evidence for X”, might not know as much as an expert who cites specific papers, and in turn they might not know as much as an expert who describes what they do in their own research. The cues aren’t perfect: one risk is that someone may be an expert on their own work, but that work may be irrelevant to the question you’re asking. But they help: rather than distrusting everyone, they help you towards “bounded distrust”, knowing which claims you can trust and which are riskier.

At the Bohr Centennial

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One hundred years ago, Niels Bohr received his Nobel prize. One hundred and one years ago, the Niels Bohr Institute opened its doors (it would have been one hundred and two, but pandemics are inconvenient things).

This year, also partly delayed by a pandemic, the Niels Bohr Institute is celebrating.

Using the fanciest hall the university has.

We’ve had a three-day conference, packed with Nobel prizewinners, people who don’t feel out of place among Nobel prizewinners, and for one morning’s ceremony the crown prince of Denmark. There were last-minute cancellations but also last-minute additions, including a moving speech by two Ukrainian PhD students. I don’t talk politics on this blog, so I won’t say much more about it (and you shouldn’t in the comments either, there are better venues), but I will say that was the only time I’ve seen a standing ovation at a scientific conference.

The other talks ran from reminiscences (Glashow struggled to get to the stage, but his talk was witty, even quoting Peter Woit apparently to try to rile David Gross in the front row (next to the Ukranian PhD students who must have found it very awkward)) to classic colloquium style talks (really interesting crisply described puzzles from astrochemistry to biophysics) to a few more “conference-ey” talks (t’Hooft, unfortunately). It’s been fun, but also exhausting, and as such that’s all I’m writing this week.

The Only Speed of Light That Matters

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A couple weeks back, someone asked me about a Veritasium video with the provocative title “Why No One Has Measured The Speed Of Light”. Veritasium is a science popularization youtube channel, and usually a fairly good one…so it was a bit surprising to see it make a claim usually reserved for crackpots. Many, many people have measured the speed of light, including Ole Rømer all the way back in 1676. To argue otherwise seems like it demands a massive conspiracy.

Veritasium wasn’t proposing a conspiracy, though, just a technical point. Yes, many experiments have measured the speed of light. However, the speed they measure is in fact a “two-way speed”, the speed that light takes to go somewhere and then come back. They leave open the possibility that light travels differently in different directions, and only has the measured speed on average: that there are different “one-way speeds” of light.

The loophole is clearest using some of the more vivid measurements of the speed of light, timing how long it takes to bounce off a mirror and return. It’s less clear using other measurements of the speed of light, like Rømer’s. Rømer measured the speed of light using the moons of Jupiter, noticing that the time they took to orbit appeared to change based on whether Jupiter was moving towards or away from the Earth. For this measurement Rømer didn’t send any light to Jupiter…but he did have to make assumptions about Jupiter’s rotation, using it like a distant clock. Those assumptions also leave the door open to a loophole, one where the different one-way speeds of light are compensated by different speeds for distant clocks. You can watch the Veritasium video for more details about how this works, or see the wikipedia page for the mathematical details.

When we think of the speed of light as the same in all directions, in some sense we’re making a choice. We’ve chosen a convention, called the Einstein synchronization convention, that lines up distant clocks in a particular way. We didn’t have to choose that convention, though we prefer to (the math gets quite a bit more complicated if we don’t). And crucially for any such choice, it is impossible for any experiment to tell the difference.

So far, Veritasium is doing fine here. But if the video was totally fine, I wouldn’t have written this post. The technical argument is fine, but the video screws up its implications.

Near the end of the video, the host speculates whether this ambiguity is a clue. What if a deeper theory of physics could explain why we can’t tell the difference between different synchronizations? Maybe that would hint at something important.

Well, it does hint at something important, but not something new. What it hints at is that “one-way speeds” don’t matter. Not for light, or really for anything else.

Think about measuring the speed of something, anything. There are two ways to do it. One is to time it against something else, like the signal in a wire, and assume we know that speed. Veritasium shows an example of this, measuring the speed of a baseball that hits a target and sends a signal back. The other way is to send it somewhere with a clock we trust, and compare it to our clock. Each of these requires that something goes back and forth, even if it’s not the same thing each time. We can’t measure the one-way speed of anything because we’re never in two places at once. Everything we measure, every conclusion we come to about the world, rests on something “two-way”: our actions go out, our perceptions go in. Even our depth perception is an inference from our ancestors, whose experience seeing food and traveling to it calibrated our notion of distance.

Synchronization of clocks is a convention because the external world is a convention. What we have really, objectively, truly, are our perceptions and our memories. Everything else is a model we build to fill the gaps in between. Some features of that model are essential: if you change them, you no longer match our perceptions. Other features, though, are just convenience: ways we arrange the model to make it easier to use, to make it not “sound dumb”, to tell a coherent story. Synchronization is one of those things: the notion that you can compare times in distant places is convenient, but as relativity already tells us in other contexts, not necessary. It’s part of our storytelling, not an essential part of our model.

Geometry and Geometry

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Last week, I gave the opening lectures for a course on scattering amplitudes, the things we compute to find probabilities in particle physics. After the first class, one of the students asked me if two different descriptions of these amplitudes, one called CHY and the other called the amplituhedron, were related. There does happen to be a connection, but it’s a bit subtle and indirect, not the sort of thing the student would have been thinking of. Why then, did he think they might be related? Well, he explained, both descriptions are geometric.

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ve seen me talk about misunderstandings. There are a lot of subtle ways a smart student can misunderstand something, ways that can be hard for a teacher to recognize. The right question, or the right explanation, can reveal what’s going on. Here, I think the problem was that there are multiple meanings of geometry.

One of the descriptions the student asked about, CHY, is related to string theory. It describes scattering particles in terms of the path of a length of string through space and time. That path draws out a surface called a world-sheet, showing all the places the string touches on its journey. And that picture, of a wiggly surface drawn in space and time, looks like what most people think of as geometry: a “shape” in a pretty normal sense, which here describes the physics of scattering particles.

The other description, the amplituhedron, also uses geometric objects to describe scattering particles. But the “geometric objects” here are much more abstract. A few of them are familiar: straight lines, the area between them forming shapes on a plane. Most of them, though are generalizations of this: instead of lines on a plane, they have higher dimensional planes in higher dimensional spaces. These too get described as geometry, even though they aren’t the “everyday” geometry you might be familiar with. Instead, they’re a “natural generalization”, something that, once you know the math, is close enough to that “everyday” geometry that it deserves the same name.

This week, two papers presented a totally different kind of geometric description of particle physics. In those papers, “geometric” has to do with differential geometry, the mathematics behind Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The descriptions are geometric because they use the same kinds of building-blocks of that theory, a metric that bends space and time. Once again, this kind of geometry is a natural generalization of the everyday notion, but now in once again a different way.

All of these notions of geometry do have some things in common, of course. Maybe you could even write down a definition of “geometry” that includes all of them. But they’re different enough that if I tell you that two descriptions are “geometric”, it doesn’t tell you all that much. It definitely doesn’t tell you the two descriptions are related.

It’s a reasonable misunderstanding, though. It comes from a place where, used to “everyday” geometry, you expect two “geometric descriptions” of something to be similar: shapes moving in everyday space, things you can directly compare. Instead, a geometric description can be many sorts of shape, in many sorts of spaces, emphasizing many sorts of properties. “Geometry” is just a really broad term.

Valentine’s Day Physics Poem 2022

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Monday is Valentine’s Day, so I’m following my yearly tradition and posting a poem about love and physics. If you like it, be sure to check out my poems from past years here.

Time Crystals

A physicist once dreamed
of a life like a crystal.
Each facet the same, again and again,
     effortlessly
         until the end of time.

This is, of course, impossible.

A physicist once dreamed
of a life like a crystal.
Each facet the same, again and again,
      not effortlessly,
	   but driven,
with reliable effort
input energy
(what the young physicists call work).

This, (you might say of course,) is possible.
It means more than you’d think.

A thing we model as a spring
(or: anyone and anything)
has a restoring force:
a force to pull it back
a force to keep it going.

A thing we model as a spring
(yes you and me and everything)
has a damping force, too:
this slows it down
and tires it out.
The dismal law
of finite life.

The driving force is another thing
no mere possession of the spring.
The driving force comes from

    o u t s i d e

and breaks the rules.

Your rude “of course”:
a sign you guess
a simple resolution.
That outside helpmeet,
doing work,
will be used up,
drained,
fueling that crystal life.

But no.

That was the discovery.

No net drain,
but back and forth,
each feeding the other.
With this alone
(and only this)
the system breaks the dismal law
and lives forever.

(As a child, did you ever sing,
of giving away, and giving away,
and only having more?)

A physicist dreamed,
alone, impossibly,
of a life like a crystal.

Collaboration made it real.

Book Review: The Joy of Insight

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There’s something endlessly fascinating about the early days of quantum physics. In a century, we went from a few odd, inexplicable experiments to a practically complete understanding of the fundamental constituents of matter. Along the way the new ideas ended a world war, almost fueled another, and touched almost every field of inquiry. The people lucky enough to be part of this went from familiarly dorky grad students to architects of a new reality. Victor Weisskopf was one of those people, and The Joy of Insight: Passions of a Physicist is his autobiography.

Less well-known today than his contemporaries, Weisskopf made up for it with a front-row seat to basically everything that happened in particle physics. In the late 20’s and early 30’s he went from studying in Göttingen (including a crush on Maria Göppert before a car-owning Joe Mayer snatched her up) to a series of postdoctoral positions that would exhaust even a modern-day physicist, working in Leipzig, Berlin, Copenhagen, Cambridge, Zurich, and Copenhagen again, before fleeing Europe for a faculty position in Rochester, New York. During that time he worked for, studied under, collaborated or partied with basically everyone you might have heard of from that period. As a result, this section of the autobiography was my favorite, chock-full of stories, from the well-known (Pauli’s rudeness and mythical tendency to break experimental equipment) to the less-well known (a lab in Milan planned to prank Pauli with a door that would trigger a fake explosion when opened, which worked every time they tested it…and failed when Pauli showed up), to the more personal (including an in retrospect terrifying visit to the Soviet Union, where they asked him to critique a farming collective!) That era also saw his “almost Nobel”, in his case almost discovering the Lamb Shift.

Despite an “almost Nobel”, Weisskopf was paid pretty poorly when he arrived in Rochester. His story there puts something I’d learned before about another refugee physicist, Hertha Sponer, in a new light. Sponer’s university also didn’t treat her well, and it seemed reminiscent of modern academia. Weisskopf, though, thinks his treatment was tied to his refugee status: that, aware that they had nowhere else to go, universities gave the scientists who fled Europe worse deals than they would have in a Nazi-less world, snapping up talent for cheap. I could imagine this was true for Sponer as well.

Like almost everyone with the relevant expertise, Weisskopf was swept up in the Manhattan project at Los Alamos. There he rose in importance, both in the scientific effort (becoming deputy leader of the theoretical division) and the local community (spending some time on and chairing the project’s “town council”). Like the first sections, this surreal time leads to a wealth of anecdotes, all fascinating. In his descriptions of the life there I can see the beginnings of the kinds of “hiking retreats” physicists would build in later years, like the one at Aspen, that almost seem like attempts to recreate that kind of intense collaboration in an isolated natural place.

After the war, Weisskopf worked at MIT before a stint as director of CERN. He shepherded the facility’s early days, when they were building their first accelerators and deciding what kinds of experiments to pursue. I’d always thought that the “nuclear” in CERN’s name was an artifact of the times, when “nuclear” and “particle” physics were thought of as the same field, but according to Weisskopf the fields were separate and it was already a misnomer when the place was founded. Here the book’s supply of anecdotes becomes a bit more thin, and instead he spends pages on glowing descriptions of people he befriended. The pattern continues after the directorship as his duties get more administrative, spending time as head of the physics department at MIT and working on arms control, some of the latter while a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (which apparently even a Jewish atheist can join). He does work on some science, though, collaborating on the “bag of quarks” model of protons and neutrons. He lives to see the fall of the Berlin wall, and the end of the book has a bit of 90’s optimism to it, the feeling that finally the conflicts of his life would be resolved. Finally, the last chapter abandons chronology altogether, and is mostly a list of his opinions of famous composers, capped off with a Bohr-inspired musing on the complementary nature of science and the arts, humanities, and religion.

One of the things I found most interesting in this book was actually something that went unsaid. Weisskopf’s most famous student was Murray Gell-Mann, a key player in the development of the theory of quarks (including coining the name). Gell-Mann was famously cultured (in contrast to the boorish-almost-as-affectation Feynman) with wide interests in the humanities, and he seems like exactly the sort of person Weisskopf would have gotten along with. Surprisingly though, he gets no anecdotes in this book, and no glowing descriptions: just a few paragraphs, mostly emphasizing how smart he was. I have to wonder if there was some coldness between them. Maybe Weisskopf had difficulty with a student who became so famous in his own right, or maybe they just never connected. Maybe Weisskopf was just trying to be generous: the other anecdotes in that part of the book are of much less famous people, and maybe Weisskopf wanted to prioritize promoting them, feeling that they were underappreciated.

Weisskopf keeps the physics light to try to reach a broad audience. This means he opts for short explanations, and often these are whatever is easiest to reach for. It creates some interesting contradictions: the way he describes his “almost Nobel” work in quantum electrodynamics is very much the way someone would have described it at the time, but very much not how it would be understood later, and by the time he talks about the bag of quarks model his more modern descriptions don’t cleanly link with what he said earlier. Overall, his goal isn’t really to explain the physics, but to explain the physicists. I enjoyed the book for that: people do it far too rarely, and the result was a really fun read.

Duality and Emergence: When Is Spacetime Not Spacetime?

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Spacetime is doomed! At least, so say some physicists. They don’t mean this as a warning, like some comic-book universe-destroying disaster, but rather as a research plan. These physicists believe that what we think of as space and time aren’t the full story, but that they emerge from something more fundamental, so that an ultimate theory of nature might not use space or time at all. Other, grumpier physicists are skeptical. Joined by a few philosophers, they think the “spacetime is doomed” crowd are over-excited and exaggerating the implications of their discoveries. At the heart of the argument is the distinction between two related concepts: duality and emergence.

In physics, sometimes we find that two theories are actually dual: despite seeming different, the patterns of observations they predict are the same. Some of the more popular examples are what we call holographic theories. In these situations, a theory of quantum gravity in some space-time is dual to a theory without gravity describing the edges of that space-time, sort of like how a hologram is a 2D image that looks 3D when you move it. For any question you can ask about the gravitational “bulk” space, there is a matching question on the “boundary”. No matter what you observe, neither description will fail.

If theories with gravity can be described by theories without gravity, does that mean gravity doesn’t really exist? If you’re asking that question, you’re asking whether gravity is emergent. An emergent theory is one that isn’t really fundamental, but instead a result of the interaction of more fundamental parts. For example, hydrodynamics, the theory of fluids like water, emerges from more fundamental theories that describe the motion of atoms and molecules.

(For the experts: I, like most physicists, am talking about “weak emergence” here, not “strong emergence”.)

The “spacetime is doomed” crowd think that not just gravity, but space-time itself is emergent. They expect that distances and times aren’t really fundamental, but a result of relationships that will turn out to be more fundamental, like entanglement between different parts of quantum fields. As evidence, they like to bring up dualities where the dual theories have different concepts of gravity, number of dimensions, or space-time. Using those theories, they argue that space and time might “break down”, and not be really fundamental.

(I’ve made arguments like that in the past too.)

The skeptics, though, bring up an important point. If two theories are really dual, then no observation can distinguish them: they make exactly the same predictions. In that case, say the skeptics, what right do you have to call one theory more fundamental than the other? You can say that gravity emerges from a boundary theory without gravity, but you could just as easily say that the boundary theory emerges from the gravity theory. The whole point of duality is that no theory is “more true” than the other: one might be more or less convenient, but both describe the same world. If you want to really argue for emergence, then your “more fundamental” theory needs to do something extra: to predict something that your emergent theory doesn’t predict.

Sometimes this is a fair objection. There are members of the “spacetime is doomed” crowd who are genuinely reckless about this, who’ll tell a journalist about emergence when they really mean duality. But many of these people are more careful, and have thought more deeply about the question. They tend to have some mix of these two perspectives:

First, if two descriptions give the same results, then do the descriptions matter? As physicists, we have a history of treating theories as the same if they make the same predictions. Space-time itself is a result of this policy: in the theory of relativity, two people might disagree on which one of two events happened first or second, but they will agree on the overall distance in space-time between the two. From this perspective, a duality between a bulk theory and a boundary theory isn’t evidence that the bulk theory emerges from the boundary, but it is evidence that both the bulk and boundary theories should be replaced by an “overall theory”, one that treats bulk and boundary as irrelevant descriptions of the same physical reality. This perspective is similar to an old philosophical theory called positivism: that statements are meaningless if they cannot be derived from something measurable. That theory wasn’t very useful for philosophers, which is probably part of why some philosophers are skeptics of “space-time is doomed”. The perspective has been quite useful to physicists, though, so we’re likely to stick with it.

Second, some will say that it’s true that a dual theory is not an emergent theory…but it can be the first step to discover one. In this perspective, dualities are suggestive evidence that a deeper theory is waiting in the wings. The idea would be that one would first discover a duality, then discover situations that break that duality: examples on one side that don’t correspond to anything sensible on the other. Maybe some patterns of quantum entanglement are dual to a picture of space-time, but some are not. (Closer to my sub-field, maybe there’s an object like the amplituhedron that doesn’t respect locality or unitarity.) If you’re lucky, maybe there are situations, or even experiments, that go from one to the other: where the space-time description works until a certain point, then stops working, and only the dual description survives. Some of the models of emergent space-time people study are genuinely of this type, where a dimension emerges in a theory that previously didn’t have one. (For those of you having a hard time imagining this, read my old post about “bubbles of nothing”, then think of one happening in reverse.)

It’s premature to say space-time is doomed, at least as a definite statement. But it is looking like, one way or another, space-time won’t be the right picture for fundamental physics. Maybe that’s because it’s equivalent to another description, redundant embellishment on an essential theoretical core. Maybe instead it breaks down, and a more fundamental theory could describe more situations. We don’t know yet. But physicists are trying to figure it out.

What Are Students? We Just Don’t Know

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I’m taking a pedagogy course at the moment, a term-long follow-up to the one-week intro course I took in the spring. The course begins with yet another pedagogical innovation, a “pre-project”. Before the course has really properly started, we get assembled into groups and told to investigate our students. We are supposed to do interviews on a few chosen themes, all with the objective of getting to know our students better. I’m guessing the point is to sharpen our goals, so that when we start learning pedagogy we’ll have a clearer idea of what problems we’d like to solve.

The more I think about this the more I’m looking forward to it. When I TAed in the past, some of the students were always a bit of a mystery. They sat in the back, skipped assignments, and gradually I saw less and less of them. They didn’t go to office hours or the help room, and I always wondered what happened. When in the course did they “turn off”, when did we lose them? They seemed like a kind of pedagogical dark matter, observable only by their presence on the rosters. I’m hoping to detect a little of that dark matter here.

As it’s a group project, we came up with a theme as a group, and questions to support that theme (in particular, we’re focusing on the different experiences between Danes and international students). Since the topic is on my mind in general though, I thought it would be fun to reach out to you guys. Educators in the comments: if you could ask your students one question, what would it be? Students, what is one thing you think your teachers are missing?

The Unpublishable Dirty Tricks of Theoretical Physics

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As the saying goes, it is better not to see laws or sausages being made. You’d prefer to see the clean package on the outside than the mess behind the scenes.

The same is true of science. A good paper tells a nice, clean story: a logical argument from beginning to end, with no extra baggage to slow it down. That story isn’t a lie: for any decent paper in theoretical physics, the conclusions will follow from the premises. Most of the time, though, it isn’t how the physicist actually did it.

The way we actually make discoveries is messy. It involves looking for inspiration in all the wrong places: pieces of old computer code and old problems, trying to reproduce this or that calculation with this or that method. In the end, once we find something interesting enough, we can reconstruct a clearer, cleaner, story, something actually fit to publish. We hide the original mess partly for career reasons (easier to get hired if you tell a clean, heroic story), partly to be understood (a paper that embraced the mess of discovery would be a mess to read), and partly just due to that deep human instinct to not let others see us that way.

The trouble is, some of that “mess” is useful, even essential. And because it’s never published or put into textbooks, the only way to learn it is word of mouth.

A lot of these messy tricks involve numerics. Many theoretical physics papers derive things analytically, writing out equations in symbols. It’s easy to make a mistake in that kind of calculation, either writing something wrong on paper or as a bug in computer code. To correct mistakes, many things are checked numerically: we plug in numbers to make sure everything still works. Sometimes this means using an approximation, trying to make sure two things cancel to some large enough number of decimal places. Sometimes instead it’s exact: we plug in prime numbers, and can much more easily see if two things are equal, or if something is rational or contains a square root. Sometimes numerics aren’t just used to check something, but to find a solution: exploring many options in an easier numerical calculation, finding one that works, and doing it again analytically.

“Ansatze” are also common: our fancy word for an educated guess. These we sometimes admit, when they’re at the core of a new scientific idea. But the more minor examples go un-mentioned. If a paper shows a nice clean formula and proves it’s correct, but doesn’t explain how the authors got it…probably, they used an ansatz. This trick can go hand-in-hand with numerics as well: make a guess, check it matches the right numbers, then try to see why it’s true.

The messy tricks can also involve the code itself. In my field we often use “computer algebra” systems, programs to do our calculations for us. These systems are programming languages in their own right, and we need to write computer code for them. That code gets passed around informally, but almost never standardized. Mathematical concepts that come up again and again can be implemented very differently by different people, some much more efficiently than others.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable that we leave “the mess” out of our papers. They would certainly be hard to understand otherwise! But it’s a shame we don’t publish our dirty tricks somewhere, even in special “dirty tricks” papers. Students often start out assuming everything is done the clean way, and start doubting themselves when they notice it’s much too slow to make progress. Learning the tricks is a big part of learning to be a physicist. We should find a better way to teach them.

The arXiv SciComm Challenge

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Fellow science communicators, think you can explain everything that goes on in your field? If so, I have a challenge for you. Pick a day, and go through all the new papers on arXiv.org in a single area. For each one, try to give a general-audience explanation of what the paper is about. To make it easier, you can ignore cross-listed papers. If your field doesn’t use arXiv, consider if you can do the challenge with another appropriate site.

I’ll start. I’m looking at papers in the “High Energy Physics – Theory” area, announced 6 Jan, 2022. I’ll warn you in advance that I haven’t read these papers, just their abstracts, so apologies if I get your paper wrong!

arXiv:2201.01303 : Holographic State Complexity from Group Cohomology

This paper says it is a contribution to a Proceedings. That means it is based on a talk given at a conference. In my field, a talk like this usually won’t be presenting new results, but instead summarizes results in a previous paper. So keep that in mind.

There is an idea in physics called holography, where two theories are secretly the same even though they describe the world with different numbers of dimensions. Usually this involves a gravitational theory in a “box”, and a theory without gravity that describes the sides of the box. The sides turn out to fully describe the inside of the box, much like a hologram looks 3D but can be printed on a flat sheet of paper. Using this idea, physicists have connected some properties of gravity to properties of the theory on the sides of the box. One of those properties is complexity: the complexity of the theory on the sides of the box says something about gravity inside the box, in particular about the size of wormholes. The trouble is, “complexity” is a bit subjective: it’s not clear how to give a good definition for it for this type of theory. In this paper, the author studies a theory with a precise mathematical definition, called a topological theory. This theory turns out to have mathematical properties that suggest a well-defined notion of complexity for it.

arXiv:2201.01393 : Nonrelativistic effective field theories with enhanced symmetries and soft behavior

We sometimes describe quantum field theory as quantum mechanics plus relativity. That’s not quite true though, because it is possible to define a quantum field theory that doesn’t obey special relativity, a non-relativistic theory. Physicists do this if they want to describe a system moving much slower than the speed of light: it gets used sometimes for nuclear physics, and sometimes for modeling colliding black holes.

In particle physics, a “soft” particle is one with almost no momentum. We can classify theories based on how they behave when a particle becomes more and more soft. In normal quantum field theories, if they have special behavior when a particle becomes soft it’s often due to a symmetry of the theory, where the theory looks the same even if something changes. This paper shows that this is not true for non-relativistic theories: they have more requirements to have special soft behavior, not just symmetry. They “bootstrap” a few theories, using some general restrictions to find them without first knowing how they work (“pulling them up by their own bootstraps”), and show that the theories they find are in a certain sense unique, the only theories of that kind.

arXiv:2201.01552 : Transmutation operators and expansions for 1-loop Feynman integrands

In recent years, physicists in my sub-field have found new ways to calculate the probability that particles collide. One of these methods describes ordinary particles in a way resembling string theory, and from this discovered a whole “web” of theories that were linked together by small modifications of the method. This method originally worked only for the simplest Feynman diagrams, the “tree” diagrams that correspond to classical physics, but was extended to the next-simplest diagrams, diagrams with one “loop” that start incorporating quantum effects.

This paper concerns a particular spinoff of this method, that can find relationships between certain one-loop calculations in a particularly efficient way. It lets you express calculations of particle collisions in a variety of theories in terms of collisions in a very simple theory. Unlike the original method, it doesn’t rely on any particular picture of how these collisions work, either Feynman diagrams or strings.

arXiv:2201.01624 : Moduli and Hidden Matter in Heterotic M-Theory with an Anomalous U(1) Hidden Sector

In string theory (and its more sophisticated cousin M theory), our four-dimensional world is described as a world with more dimensions, where the extra dimensions are twisted up so that they cannot be detected. The shape of the extra dimensions influences the kinds of particles we can observe in our world. That shape is described by variables called “moduli”. If those moduli are stable, then the properties of particles we observe would be fixed, otherwise they would not be. In general it is a challenge in string theory to stabilize these moduli and get a world like what we observe.

This paper discusses shapes that give rise to a “hidden sector”, a set of particles that are disconnected from the particles we know so that they are hard to observe. Such particles are often proposed as a possible explanation for dark matter. This paper calculates, for a particular kind of shape, what the masses of different particles are, as well as how different kinds of particles can decay into each other. For example, a particle that causes inflation (the accelerating expansion of the universe) can decay into effects on the moduli and dark matter. The paper also shows how some of the moduli are made stable in this picture.

arXiv:2201.01630 : Chaos in Celestial CFT

One variant of the holography idea I mentioned earlier is called “celestial” holography. In this picture, the sides of the box are an infinite distance away: a “celestial sphere” depicting the angles particles go after they collide, in the same way a star chart depicts the angles between stars. Recent work has shown that there is something like a sensible theory that describes physics on this celestial sphere, that contains all the information about what happens inside.

This paper shows that the celestial theory has a property called quantum chaos. In physics, a theory is said to be chaotic if it depends very precisely on its initial conditions, so that even a small change will result in a large change later (the usual metaphor is a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a hurricane). This kind of behavior appears to be present in this theory.

arXiv:2201.01657 : Calculations of Delbrück scattering to all orders in αZ

Delbrück scattering is an effect where the nuclei of heavy elements like lead can deflect high-energy photons, as a consequence of quantum field theory. This effect is apparently tricky to calculate, and previous calculations have involved approximations. This paper finds a way to calculate the effect without those approximations, which should let it match better with experiments.

(As an aside, I’m a little confused by the claim that they’re going to all orders in αZ when it looks like they just consider one-loop diagrams…but this is probably just my ignorance, this is a corner of the field quite distant from my own.)

arXiv:2201.01674 : On Unfolded Approach To Off-Shell Supersymmetric Models

Supersymmetry is a relationship between two types of particles: fermions, which typically make up matter, and bosons, which are usually associated with forces. In realistic theories this relationship is “broken” and the two types of particles have different properties, but theoretical physicists often study models where supersymmetry is “unbroken” and the two types of particles have the same mass and charge. This paper finds a new way of describing some theories of this kind that reorganizes them in an interesting way, using an “unfolded” approach in which aspects of the particles that would normally be combined are given their own separate variables.

(This is another one I don’t know much about, this is the first time I’d heard of the unfolded approach.)

arXiv:2201.01679 : Geometric Flow of Bubbles

String theorists have conjectured that only some types of theories can be consistently combined with a full theory of quantum gravity, others live in a “swampland” of non-viable theories. One set of conjectures characterizes this swampland in terms of “flows” in which theories with different geometry can flow in to each other. The properties of these flows are supposed to be related to which theories are or are not in the swampland.

This paper writes down equations describing these flows, and applies them to some toy model “bubble” universes.

arXiv:2201.01697 : Graviton scattering amplitudes in first quantisation

This paper is a pedagogical one, introducing graduate students to a topic rather than presenting new research.

Usually in quantum field theory we do something called “second quantization”, thinking about the world not in terms of particles but in terms of fields that fill all of space and time. However, sometimes one can instead use “first quantization”, which is much more similar to ordinary quantum mechanics. There you think of a single particle traveling along a “world-line”, and calculate the probability it interacts with other particles in particular ways. This approach has recently been used to calculate interactions of gravitons, particles related to the gravitational field in the same way photons are related to the electromagnetic field. The approach has some advantages in terms of simplifying the results, which are described in this paper.