# Calculating the Hard Way, for Science!

I had a new paper out last week, with Jacob Bourjaily and Matthias Volk. We’re calculating the probability that particles bounce off each other in our favorite toy model, N=4 super Yang-Mills. And this time, we’re doing it the hard way.

The “easy way” we didn’t take is one I have a lot of experience with. Almost as long as I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve been calculating these particle probabilities by “guesswork”: starting with a plausible answer, then honing it down until I can be confident it’s right. This might sound reckless, but it works remarkably well, letting us calculate things we could never have hoped for with other methods. The catch is that “guessing” is much easier when we know what we’re looking for: in particular, it works much better in toy models than in the real world.

Over the last few years, though, I’ve been using a much more “normal” method, one that so far has a better track record in the real world. This method, too, works better than you would expect, and we’ve managed some quite complicated calculations.

So we have an “easy way”, and a “hard way”. Which one is better? Is the hard way actually harder?

To test that, you need to do the same calculation both ways, and see which is easier. You want it to be a fair test: if “guessing” only works in the toy model, then you should do the “hard” version in the toy model as well. And you don’t want to give “guessing” any unfair advantages. In particular, the “guess” method works best when we know a lot about the result we’re looking for: what it’s made of, what symmetries it has. In order to do a fair test, we must use that knowledge to its fullest to improve the “hard way” as well.

We picked an example in the middle: not too easy, and not too hard, a calculation that was done a few years back “the easy way” but not yet done “the hard way”. We plugged in all the modern tricks we could, trying to use as much of what we knew as possible. We trained a grad student: Matthias Volk, who did the lion’s share of the calculation and learned a lot in the process. We worked through the calculation, and did it properly the hard way.

Which method won?

In the end, the hard way was indeed harder…but not by that much! Most of the calculation went quite smoothly, with only a few difficulties at the end. Just five years ago, when the calculation was done “the easy way”, I doubt anyone would have expected the hard way to be viable. But with modern tricks it wasn’t actually that hard.

This is encouraging. It tells us that the “hard way” has potential, that it’s almost good enough to compete at this kind of calculation. It tells us that the “easy way” is still quite powerful. And it reminds us that the more we know, and the more we apply our knowledge, the more we can do.

# Life Cycle of an Academic Scientist

So you want to do science for a living. Some scientists work for companies, developing new products. Some work for governments. But if you want to do “pure science”, science just to learn about the world, then you’ll likely work at a university, as part of what we call academia.

The first step towards academia is graduate school. In the US, this means getting a PhD.

(Master’s degrees, at least in the US, have a different purpose. Most are “terminal Master’s”, designed to be your last degree. With a terminal Master’s, you can be a technician in a lab, but you won’t get farther down this path. In the US you don’t need a Master’s before you apply for a PhD program, and having one is usually a waste of time: PhD programs will make you re-take most of the same classes.)

Once you have a PhD, it’s time to get a job! Often, your first job after graduate school is a postdoc. Postdocs are short-term jobs, usually one to three years long. Some people are lucky enough to go to the next stage quickly, others have more postdoc jobs first. These jobs will take you all over the world, everywhere people with your specialty work. Sometimes these jobs involve teaching, but more often you just do scientific research.

In the US system, If everything goes well, eventually you get a tenure-track job. These jobs involve both teaching and research. You get to train PhD students, hire postdocs, and in general start acting like a proper professor. This stage lasts around seven years, while the university evaluates you. If they decide you’re not worth it then typically you’ll have to leave to apply for another job in another university. If they like you though, you get tenure.

Tenure is the first time as an academic scientist that you aren’t on a short-term contract. Your job is more permanent than most, you have extra protection from being fired that most people don’t. While you can’t just let everything slide, you have freedom to make more of your own decisions.

A tenured job can last until retirement, when you become an emeritus professor. Emeritus professors are retired but still do some of the work they did as professors. They’re paid out of their pension instead of a university salary, but they still sometimes teach or do research, and they usually still have an office. The university can hire someone new, and the cycle continues.

This isn’t the only path scientists take. Some work in a national lab instead. These don’t usually involve teaching duties, and the path to a permanent job is a bit different. Some get teaching jobs instead of research professorships. These teaching jobs are usually not permanent, instead universities are hiring more and more adjunct faculty who have to string together temporary contracts to make a precarious living.

I’ve mostly focused on the US system here. Europe is a bit different: Master’s degrees are a real part of the system, tenure-track doesn’t really exist, and adjunct faculty don’t always either. Some particular countries, like Germany, have their own quite complicated systems, other countries fall in between.

I have a new paper out today, with Jacob Bourjaily, Andrew McLeod, Matthias Wilhelm, Cristian Vergu and Matthias Volk.

There’s a story I’ve told before on this blog, about a kind of “alphabet” for particle physics predictions. When we try to make a prediction in particle physics, we need to do complicated integrals. Sometimes, these integrals simplify dramatically, in unexpected ways. It turns out we can understand these simplifications by writing the integrals in a sort of “alphabet”, breaking complicated mathematical “periods” into familiar logarithms. If we want to simplify an integral, we can use relations between logarithms like these:

$\log(a b)=\log(a)+\log(b),\quad \log(a^n)=n\log(a)$

to factor our “alphabet” into pieces as simple as possible.

The simpler the alphabet, the more progress you can make. And in the nice toy model theory we’re working with, the alphabets so far have been simple in one key way. Expressed in the right variables, they’re rational. For example, they contain no square roots.

Would that keep going? Would we keep finding rational alphabets? Or might the alphabets, instead, have square roots?

After some searching, we found a clean test case. There was a calculation we could do with just two Feynman diagrams. All we had to do was subtract one from the other. If they still had square roots in their alphabet, we’d have proven that the nice, rational alphabets eventually had to stop.

So we calculated these diagrams, doing the complicated integrals. And we found they did indeed have square roots in their alphabet, in fact many more than expected. They even had square roots of square roots!

You’d think that would be the end of the story. But square roots are trickier than you’d expect.

Remember that to simplify these integrals, we break them up into an alphabet, and factor the alphabet. What happens when we try to do that with an alphabet that has square roots?

Suppose we have letters in our alphabet with $\sqrt{-5}$. Suppose another letter is the number 9. You might want to factor it like this:

$9=3\times 3$

Simple, right? But what if instead you did this:

$9=(2+ \sqrt{-5} )\times(2- \sqrt{-5} )$

Once you allow $\sqrt{-5}$ in the game, you can factor 9 in two different ways. The central assumption, that you can always just factor your alphabet, breaks down. In mathematical terms, you no longer have a unique factorization domain.

Instead, we had to get a lot more mathematically sophisticated, factoring into something called prime ideals. We got that working and started crunching through the square roots in our alphabet. Things simplified beautifully: we started with a result that was ten million terms long, and reduced it to just five thousand. And at the end of the day, after subtracting one integral from the other…

We found no square roots!

After all of our simplifications, all the letters we found were rational. Our nice test case turned out much, much simpler than we expected.

It’s been a long road on this calculation, with a lot of false starts. We were kind of hoping to be the first to find square root letters in these alphabets; instead it looks like another group will beat us to the punch. But we developed a lot of interesting tricks along the way, and we thought it would be good to publish our “null result”. As always in our field, sometimes surprising simplifications are just around the corner.

# When to Trust the Contrarians

One of my colleagues at the NBI had an unusual experience: one of his papers took a full year to get through peer review. This happens often in math, where reviewers will diligently check proofs for errors, but it’s quite rare in physics: usually the path from writing to publication is much shorter. Then again, the delays shouldn’t have been too surprising for him, given what he was arguing.

My colleague Mohamed Rameez, along with Jacques Colin, Roya Mohayaee, and Subir Sarkar, wants to argue against one of the most famous astronomical discoveries of the last few decades: that the expansion of our universe is accelerating, and thus that an unknown “dark energy” fills the universe. They argue that one of the key pieces of evidence used to prove acceleration is mistaken: that a large region of the universe around us is in fact “flowing” in one direction, and that tricked astronomers into thinking its expansion was accelerating. You might remember a paper making a related argument back in 2016. I didn’t like the media reaction to that paper, and my post triggered a response by the authors, one of whom (Sarkar) is on this paper as well.

I’m not an astronomer or an astrophysicist. I’m not qualified to comment on their argument, and I won’t. I’d still like to know whether they’re right, though. And that means figuring out which experts to trust.

Pick anything we know in physics, and you’ll find at least one person who disagrees. I don’t mean a crackpot, though they exist too. I mean an actual expert who is convinced the rest of the field is wrong. A contrarian, if you will.

I used to be very unsympathetic to these people. I was convinced that the big results of a field are rarely wrong, because of how much is built off of them. I thought that even if a field was using dodgy methods or sloppy reasoning, the big results are used in so many different situations that if they were wrong they would have to be noticed. I’d argue that if you want to overturn one of these big claims you have to disprove not just the result itself, but every other success the field has ever made.

I still believe that, somewhat. But there are a lot of contrarians here at the Niels Bohr Institute. And I’ve started to appreciate what drives them.

The thing is, no scientific result is ever as clean as it ought to be. Everything we do is jury-rigged. We’re almost never experts in everything we’re trying to do, so we often don’t know the best method. Instead, we approximate and guess, we find rough shortcuts and don’t check if they make sense. This can take us far sometimes, sure…but it can also backfire spectacularly.

The contrarians I’ve known got their inspiration from one of those backfires. They saw a result, a respected mainstream result, and they found a glaring screw-up. Maybe it was an approximation that didn’t make any sense, or a statistical measure that was totally inappropriate. Whatever it was, it got them to dig deeper, and suddenly they saw screw-ups all over the place. When they pointed out these problems, at best the people they accused didn’t understand. At worst they got offended. Instead of cooperation, the contrarians are told they can’t possibly know what they’re talking about, and ignored. Eventually, they conclude the entire sub-field is broken.

Are they right?

Not always. They can’t be, for every claim you can find a contrarian, believing them all would be a contradiction.

But sometimes?

Often, they’re right about the screw-ups. They’re right that there’s a cleaner, more proper way to do that calculation, a statistical measure more suited to the problem. And often, doing things right raises subtleties, means that the big important result everyone believed looks a bit less impressive.

Still, that’s not the same as ruling out the result entirely. And despite all the screw-ups, the main result is still often correct. Often, it’s justified not by the original, screwed-up argument, but by newer evidence from a different direction. Often, the sub-field has grown to a point that the original screwed-up argument doesn’t really matter anymore.

Often, but again, not always.

I still don’t know whether to trust the contrarians. I still lean towards expecting fields to sort themselves out, to thinking that error alone can’t sustain long-term research. But I’m keeping a more open mind now. I’m waiting to see how far the contrarians go.

# Knowing When to Hold/Fold ‘Em in Science

The things one learns from Wikipedia. For example, today I learned that the country song “The Gambler” was selected for preservation by the US Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or artistically significant.”

You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em,

Know when to walk away, know when to run.

Knowing when to “hold ’em” or “fold ’em” is important in life in general, but it’s particularly important in science.

As scientists, we’re often trying to do something no-one else has done before. That’s exciting, but it’s risky too: sometimes whatever we’re trying simply doesn’t work. In those situations, it’s important to recognize when we aren’t making progress, and change tactics. The trick is, we can’t give up too early either: science is genuinely hard, and sometimes when we feel stuck we’re actually close to the finish line. Knowing which is which, when to “hold” and when to “fold”, is an essential skill, and a hard one to learn.

Sometimes, we can figure this out mathematically. Computational complexity theory classifies calculations by how difficult they are, including how long they take. If you can estimate how much time you should take to do a calculation, you can decide whether you’ll finish it in a reasonable amount of time. If you just want a rough guess, you can do a simpler version of the calculation, and see how long that takes, then estimate how much longer the full one will. If you figure out you’re doomed, then it’s time to switch to a more efficient algorithm, or a different question entirely.

Sometimes, we don’t just have to consider time, but money as well. If you’re doing an experiment, you have to estimate how much the equipment will cost, and how much it will cost to run it. Experimenters get pretty good at estimating these things, but they still screw up sometimes and run over budget. Occasionally this is fine: LIGO didn’t detect anything in its first eight-year run, but they upgraded the machines and tried again, and won a Nobel prize. Other times it’s a disaster, and money keeps being funneled into a project that never works. Telling the difference is crucial, and it’s something we as a community are still not so good at.

Sometimes we just have to follow our instincts. This is dangerous, because we have a bias (the “sunk cost fallacy”) to stick with something if we’ve already spent a lot of time or money on it. To counteract that, it’s good to cultivate a bias in the opposite direction, which you might call “scientific impatience”. Getting frustrated with slow progress may not seem productive, but it keeps you motivated to search for a better way. Experienced scientists get used to how long certain types of project take. Too little progress, and they look for another option. This can fail, killing a project that was going to succeed, but it can also prevent over-investment in a failing idea. Only a mix of instincts keeps the field moving.

In the end, science is a gamble. Like the song, we have to know when to hold ’em and fold ’em, when to walk away, and when to run an idea as far as it will go. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. That’s science.

# Calabi-Yaus in Feynman Diagrams: Harder and Easier Than Expected

I’ve got a new paper up, about the weird geometrical spaces we keep finding in Feynman diagrams.

With Jacob Bourjaily, Andrew McLeod, and Matthias Wilhelm, and most recently Cristian Vergu and Matthias Volk, I’ve been digging up odd mathematics in particle physics calculations. In several calculations, we’ve found that we need a type of space called a Calabi-Yau manifold. These spaces are often studied by string theorists, who hope they represent how “extra” dimensions of space are curled up. String theorists have found an absurdly large number of Calabi-Yau manifolds, so many that some are trying to sift through them with machine learning. We wanted to know if our situation was quite that ridiculous: how many Calabi-Yaus do we really need?

So we started asking around, trying to figure out how to classify our catch of Calabi-Yaus. And mostly, we just got confused.

It turns out there are a lot of different tools out there for understanding Calabi-Yaus, and most of them aren’t all that useful for what we’re doing. We went in circles for a while trying to understand how to desingularize toric varieties, and other things that will sound like gibberish to most of you. In the end, though, we noticed one small thing that made our lives a whole lot simpler.

It turns out that all of the Calabi-Yaus we’ve found are, in some sense, the same. While the details of the physics varies, the overall “space” is the same in each case. It’s a space we kept finding for our “Calabi-Yau bestiary”, but it turns out one of the “traintrack” diagrams we found earlier can be written in the same way. We found another example too, a “wheel” that seems to be the same type of Calabi-Yau.

We also found many examples that we don’t understand. Add another rung to our “traintrack” and we suddenly can’t write it in the same space. (Personally, I’m quite confused about this one.) Add another spoke to our wheel and we confuse ourselves in a different way.

So while our calculation turned out simpler than expected, we don’t think this is the full story. Our Calabi-Yaus might live in “the same space”, but there are also physics-related differences between them, and these we still don’t understand.

At some point, our abstract included the phrase “this paper raises more questions than it answers”. It doesn’t say that now, but it’s still true. We wrote this paper because, after getting very confused, we ended up able to say a few new things that hadn’t been said before. But the questions we raise are if anything more important. We want to inspire new interest in this field, toss out new examples, and get people thinking harder about the geometry of Feynman integrals.

# In Defense of the Streetlight

If you read physics blogs, you’ve probably heard this joke before:

A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, “this is where the light is”.

The drunk’s line of thinking has a name, the streetlight effect, and while it may seem ridiculous it’s a common error, even among experts. When it gets too tough to research something, scientists will often be tempted by an easier problem even if it has little to do with the original question. After all, it’s “where the light is”.

Physicists get accused of this all the time. Dark matter could be completely undetectable on Earth, but physicists still build experiments to search for it. Our universe appears to be curved one way, but string theory makes it much easier to study universes curved the other way, so physicists write a lot of nice proofs about a universe we don’t actually inhabit. In my own field, we spend most of our time studying a very nice theory that we know can’t describe the real world.

I’m not going to defend this behavior in general. There are real cases where scientists trick themselves into thinking they can solve an easy problem when they need to solve a hard one. But there is a crucial difference between scientists and drunkards looking for their keys, one that makes this behavior a lot more reasonable: scientists build technology.

As scientists, we can’t just grope around in the dark for our keys. The spaces we’re searching, from the space of all theories of gravity to actual outer space, are much too vast to search randomly. We need new ideas, new mathematics or new equipment, to do the search properly. If we were the drunkard of the story, we’d need to invent night-vision goggles.

Suppose you wanted to design new night-vision goggles, to search for your keys in the park. You could try to build them in the dark, but you wouldn’t be able to see what you were doing: you’d lose pieces, miss screws, and break lenses. Much better to build the goggles under that convenient streetlight.

Of course, if you build and test your prototype goggles under the streetlight, you risk that they aren’t good enough for the dark. You’ll have calibrated them in an unrealistic case. In all likelihood, you’ll have to go back and fix your goggles, tweaking them as you go, and you’ll run into the same problem: you can’t see what you’re doing in the dark.

At that point, though, you have an advantage: you now know how to build night-vision goggles. You’ve practiced building goggles in the light, and now even if the goggles aren’t good enough, you remember how you put them together. You can tweak the process, modify your goggles, and make something good enough to find your keys. You’re good enough at making goggles that you can modify them now, even in the dark.

Sometimes scientists really are like the drunk, searching under the most convenient streetlight. Sometimes, though, scientists are working where the light is for a reason. Instead of wasting their time lost in the dark, they’re building new technology and practicing new methods, getting better and better at searching until, when they’re ready, they can go back and find their keys. Sometimes, the streetlight is worth it.

# “X Meets Y” Conferences

Most conferences focus on a specific sub-field. If you call a conference “Strings” or “Amplitudes”, people know what to expect. Likewise if you focus on something more specific, say Elliptic Integrals. But what if your conference is named after two sub-fields?

These conferences, with names like “QCD Meets Gravity” and “Scattering Amplitudes and the Conformal Bootstrap”, try to connect two different sub-fields together. I’ll call them “X Meets Y” conferences.

The most successful “X Meets Y” conferences involve two sub-fields that have been working together for quite some time. At that point, you don’t just have “X” researchers and “Y” researchers, but “X and Y” researchers, people who work on the connection between both topics. These people can glue a conference together, showing the separate “X” and “Y” researchers what “X and Y” research looks like. At a conference like that speakers have a clear idea of what to talk about: the “X” researchers know how to talk to the “Y” researchers, and vice versa, and the organizers can invite speakers who they know can talk to both groups.

If the sub-fields have less history of collaboration, “X Meets Y” conferences become trickier. You need at least a few “X and Y” researchers (or at least aspiring “X and Y” researchers) to guide the way. Even if most of the “X” researchers don’t know how to talk to “Y” researchers, the “X and Y” researchers can give suggestions, telling “X” which topics would be most interesting to “Y” and vice versa. With that kind of guidance, “X Meets Y” conferences can inspire new directions of research, opening one field up to the tools of another.

The biggest risk in an “X Meets Y” conference, that becomes more likely the fewer “X and Y” researchers there are, is that everyone just gives their usual talks. The “X” researchers talk about their “X”, and the “Y” researchers talk about their “Y”, and both groups nod politely and go home with no new ideas whatsoever. Scientists are fundamentally lazy creatures. If we already have a talk written, we’re tempted to use it, even if it doesn’t quite fit the occasion. Counteracting that is a tough job, and one that isn’t always feasible.

“X Meets Y” conferences can be very productive, the beginning of new interdisciplinary ideas. But they’re certainly hard to get right. Overall, they’re one of the trickier parts of the social side of science.

# At Aspen

I’m at the Aspen Center for Physics this week, for a workshop on Scattering Amplitudes and the Conformal Bootstrap.

Aspen is part of a long and illustrious tradition of physics conference sites located next to ski resorts. It’s ten years younger than its closest European counterpart Les Houches School of Physics, but if anything its traditions are stricter: all blackboard talks, and a minimum two-week visit. Instead of the summer schools of Les Houches, Aspen’s goal is to inspire collaboration: to get physicists to spend time working and hiking around each other until inspiration strikes.

This workshop is a meeting between two communities: people who study the Conformal Bootstrap (nice popular description here) and my own field of Scattering Amplitudes. The Conformal Boostrap is one of our closest sister-fields, so there may be a lot of potential for collaboration. This week’s talks have been amplitudes-focused, I’m looking forward to the talks next week that will highlight connections between the two fields.

# Hexagon Functions VI: The Power Cosmic

I have a new paper out this week. It’s the long-awaited companion to a paper I blogged about a few months back, itself the latest step in a program that has made up a major chunk of my research.

The title is a bit of a mouthful, but I’ll walk you through it:

## The Cosmic Galois Group and Extended Steinmann Relations for Planar N = 4 SYM Amplitudes

I calculate scattering amplitudes (roughly, probabilities that elementary particles bounce off each other) in a (not realistic, and not meant to be) theory called planar N=4 super-Yang-Mills (SYM for short). I can’t summarize everything we’ve been doing here, but if you read the blog posts I linked above and some of the Handy Handbooks linked at the top of the page you’ll hopefully get a clearer picture.

We started using the Steinmann Relations a few years ago. Discovered in the 60’s, the Steinmann relations restrict the kind of equations we can use to describe particle physics. Essentially, they mean that particles can’t travel two ways at once. In this paper, we extend the Steinmann relations beyond Steinmann’s original idea. We don’t yet know if we can prove this extension works, but it seems to be true for the amplitudes we’re calculating. While we’ve presented this in talks before, this is the first time we’ve published it, and it’s one of the big results of this paper.

The other, more exotic-sounding result, has to do with something called the Cosmic Galois Group.

Évariste Galois, the famously duel-prone mathematician, figured out relations between algebraic numbers (that is, numbers you can get out of algebraic equations) in terms of a mathematical structure called a group. Today, mathematicians are interested not just in algebraic numbers, but in relations between transcendental numbers as well, specifically a kind of transcendental number called a period. These numbers show up a lot in physics, so mathematicians have been thinking about a Galois group for transcendental numbers that show up in physics, a so-called Cosmic Galois Group.

(Cosmic here doesn’t mean it has to do with cosmology. As far as I can tell, mathematicians just thought it sounded cool and physics-y. They also started out with rather ambitious ideas about it, if you want a laugh check out the last few paragraphs of this talk by Cartier.)

For us, Cosmic Galois Theory lets us study the unusual numbers that show up in our calculations. Doing this, we’ve noticed that certain numbers simply don’t show up. For example, the Riemann zeta function shows up often in our results, evaluated at many different numbers…but never evaluated at the number three. Nor does any number related to that one through the Cosmic Galois Group show up. It’s as if the theory only likes some numbers, and not others.

This weird behavior has been observed before. Mathematicians can prove it happens for some simple theories, but it even applies to the theories that describe the real world, for example to calculations of the way an electron’s path is bent by a magnetic field. Each theory seems to have its own preferred family of numbers.

For us, this has been enormously useful. We calculate our amplitudes by guesswork, starting with the right “alphabet” and then filling in different combinations, as if we’re trying all possible answers to a word jumble. Cosmic Galois Theory and Extended Steinmann have enabled us to narrow down our guess dramatically, making it much easier and faster to get to the right answer.

More generally though, we hope to contribute to mathematicians’ investigations of Cosmic Galois Theory. Our examples are more complicated than the simple theories where they currently prove things, and contain more data than the more limited results from electrons. Hopefully together we can figure out why certain numbers show up and others don’t, and find interesting mathematical principles behind the theories that govern fundamental physics.

For now, I’ll leave you with a preview of a talk I’m giving in a couple weeks’ time: