Tag Archives: string theory

Thoughts on Polchinski’s Memoir

I didn’t get a chance to meet Joseph Polchinski when I was visiting Santa Barbara last spring. At the time, I heard his health was a bit better, but he still wasn’t feeling well enough to come in to campus. Now that I’ve read his memoir, I almost feel like I have met him. There’s a sense of humor, a diffidence, and a passion for physics that shines through the pages.

The following are some scattered thoughts inspired by the memoir:

A friend of mine once complained to me that in her field grad students all brag about the colleges they went to. I mentioned that in my field your undergrad never comes up…unless it was Caltech. For some reason, everyone I’ve met who went to Caltech is full of stories about the place, and Polchinski is no exception. Speaking as someone who didn’t go there, it seems like Caltech has a profound effect on its students that other places don’t.

Polchinski mentions hearing stories about geniuses of the past, and how those stories helped temper some of his youthful arrogance. There’s an opposite effect that’s also valuable: hearing stories like Polchinski’s, his descriptions of struggling with anxiety and barely publishing and “not really accomplishing anything” till age 40, can be a major comfort to those of us who worry we’ve fallen behind in the academic race. That said, it’s important not to take these things too far: times have changed, you’re not Polchinski, and much like his door-stealing trick at Caltech getting a postdoc without any publications is something you shouldn’t try at home. Even Witten’s students need at least one.

Last week I was a bit puzzled by nueww’s comment, a quote from Polchinski’s memoir which distinguishes “math of the equations” from “math of the solutions”, attributing the former to physicists and the latter to mathematicians. Reading the context in the memoir and the phrase’s origin in a remark by Susskind cleared up a bit, but still left me uneasy. I only figured out why after Lubos Motl posted about it: it doesn’t match my experience of mathematicians at all!

If anything, I think physicists usually care more about the “solutions” than mathematicians do. In my field, often a mathematician will construct some handy basis of functions and then frustrate everyone by providing no examples of how to use them. In the wider math community I’ve met graph theorists who are happy to prove something is true for all graphs of size $10^{10^10}$ and larger, not worrying about the vast number of graphs where it fails because it’s just a finite number of special cases. And I don’t think this is just my experience: a common genre of jokes revolve around mathematicians proving a solution exists and then not bothering to do anything with it (for example, see the joke with the hotel fire here).

I do think there’s a meaningful sense in which mathematicians care about details that we’re happy to ignore, but “solutions” versus “equations” isn’t really the right axis. It’s something more like “rigor” versus “principles”. Mathematicians will often begin a talk by defining a series of maps between different spaces, carefully describing where they are and aren’t valid. A physicist might just write down a function. That sort of thing is dangerous in mathematics: there are always special, pathological cases that make careful definitions necessary. In physics, those cases rarely come up, and when they do there’s often a clear physical problem that brings them to the forefront. We have a pretty good sense of when we need rigor, and when we don’t we’re happy to lay things out without filling in the details, putting a higher priority on moving forward and figuring out the basic principles underlying reality.

Polchinski talks a fair bit about his role in the idea of the multiverse, from hearing about Weinberg’s anthropic argument to coming to terms with the string landscape. One thing his account makes clear is how horrifying the concept seemed at first: how the idea that the parameters of our universe might just be random could kill science and discourage experimentalists. This touches on something that I think gets lost in arguments about the multiverse: even the people most involved in promoting the multiverse in public aren’t happy about it.

It also sharpened my thinking about the multiverse a bit. I’ve talked before about how I don’t think the popularity of the multiverse is actually going to hurt theoretical physics as a field. Polchinski’s worries made me think about the experimental side of the equation: why do experiments if the world might just be random? I think I have a clearer answer to this now, but it’s a bit long, so I’ll save it for a future post.

One nice thing about these long-term accounts is you get to see how much people shift between fields over time. Polchinski didn’t start out working in string theory, and most of the big names in my field, like Lance Dixon and David Kosower, didn’t start out in scattering amplitudes. Academic careers are long, and however specialized we feel at any one time we can still get swept off in a new direction.

I’m grateful for this opportunity to “meet” Polchinski, if only through his writing. His is a window on the world of theoretical physics that is all too rare, and valuable as a result.

More Travel

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I’m visiting the Niels Bohr Institute this week, on my way back from Amplitudes.

You might recognize the place from old conference photos.

Amplitudes itself was nice. There weren’t any surprising new developments, but a lot of little “aha” moments when one of the speakers explained something I’d heard vague rumors about. I figured I’d mention a few of the things that stood out. Be warned, this is going to be long and comparatively jargon-heavy.

The conference organizers were rather daring in scheduling Nima Arkani-Hamed for the first talk, as Nima has a tendency to arrive at the last minute and talk for twice as long as you ask him to. Miraculously, though, things worked out, if only barely: Nima arrived at the wrong campus and ran most of the way back, showing up within five minutes of the start of the conference. He also stuck to his allotted time, possibly out of courtesy to his student, Yuntao Bai, who was speaking next.

Between the two of them, Nima and Yuntao covered an interesting development, tying the Amplituhedron together with the string theory-esque picture of scattering amplitudes pioneered by Freddy Cachazo, Song He, and Ellis Ye Yuan (or CHY). There’s a simpler (and older) Amplituhedron-like object called the associahedron that can be thought of as what the Amplituhedron looks like on the surface of a string, and CHY’s setup can be thought of as a sophisticated map that takes this object and turns it into the Amplituhedron. It was nice to hear from both Nima and his student on this topic, because Nima’s talks are often high on motivation but low on detail, so it was great that Yuntao was up next to fill in the blanks.

Anastasia Volovich talked about Landau singularities, a topic I’ve mentioned before. What I hadn’t appreciated was how much they can do with them at this point. Originally, Juan Maldacena had suggested that these singularities, mathematical points that determine the behavior of amplitudes first investigated by Landau in the 60’s, might explain some of the simplicity we’ve observed in N=4 super Yang-Mills. They ended up not being enough by themselves, but what Volovich and collaborators are discovering is that with a bit of help from the Amplithedron they explain quite a lot. In particular, if they start with the Amplituhedron and do a procedure similar to Landau’s, they can find the simpler set of singularities allowed by N=4 super Yang-Mills, at least for the examples they’ve calculated. It’s still a bit unclear how this links to their previous investigations of these things in terms of cluster algebras, but it sounds like they’re making progress.

Dmitry Chicherin gave me one of those minor “aha” moments. One big useful fact about scattering amplitudes in N=4 super Yang-Mills is that they’re “dual” to different mathematical objects called Wilson loops, a fact which allows us to compare to the “POPE” approach of Basso, Sever, and Vieira. Chicherin asks the question: “What if you’re not calculating a scattering amplitude or a Wilson loop, but something halfway in between?” Interestingly, this has an answer, with the “halfway between” objects having a similar duality among themselves.

Yorgos Papathansiou talked about work I’ve been involved with. I’ll probably cover it in detail in another post, so now I’ll just mention that we’re up to six loops!

Andy Strominger talked about soft theorems. It’s always interesting seeing people who don’t traditionally work on amplitudes giving talks at Amplitudes. There’s a range of responses, from integrability people (who are basically welcomed like family) to work on fairly unrelated areas that have some “amplitudes” connection (met with yawns except from the few people interested in the connection). The response to Strominger was neither welcome nor boredom, but lively debate. He’s clearly doing something interesting, but many specialists worried he was ignorant of important no-go results in the field that could hamstring some of his bolder conjectures.

The second day focused on methods for more practical calculations, and had the overall effect of making me really want to clean up my code. Tiziano Peraro’s finite field methods in particular look like they could be quite useful. There were two competing bases of integrals on display, Von Manteuffel’s finite integrals and Rutger Boels’s uniform transcendental integrals later in the conference. Both seem to have their own virtues, and I ended up asking Rob Schabinger if it was possible to combine the two, with the result that he’s apparently now looking into it.

The more practical talks that day had a clear focus on calculations with two loops, which are becoming increasingly viable for LHC-relevant calculations. From talking to people who work on this, I get the impression that the goal of these calculations isn’t so much to find new physics as to confirm and investigate new physics found via other methods. Things are complicated enough at two loops that for the moment it isn’t feasible to describe what all the possible new particles might do at that order, and instead the goal is to understand the standard model well enough that if new physics is noticed (likely based on one-loop calculations) then the details can be pinned down by two-loop data. But this picture could conceivably change as methods improve.

Wednesday was math-focused. We had a talk by Francis Brown on his conjecture of a cosmic Galois group. This is a topic I knew a bit about already, since it’s involved in something I’ve been working on. Brown’s talk cleared up some things, but also shed light on the vagueness of the proposal. As with Yorgos’s talk, I’ll probably cover more about this in a future post, so I’ll skip the details for now.

There was also a talk by Samuel Abreu on a much more physical picture of the “symbols” we calculate with. This is something I’ve seen presented before by Ruth Britto, and it’s a setup I haven’t looked into as much as I ought to. It does seem at the moment that they’re limited to one loop, which is a definite downside. Other talks discussed elliptic integrals, the bogeyman that we still can’t deal with by our favored means but that people are at least understanding better.

The last talk on Wednesday before the hike was by David Broadhurst, who’s quite a character in his own right. Broadhurst sat in the front row and asked a question after nearly every talk, usually bringing up papers at least fifty years old, if not one hundred and fifty. At the conference dinner he was exactly the right person to read the Address to the Haggis, resurrecting a thick Scottish accent from his youth. Broadhurst’s techniques for handling high-loop elliptic integrals are quite impressively powerful, leaving me wondering if the approach can be generalized.

Thursday focused on gravity. Radu Roiban gave a better idea of where he and his collaborators are on the road to seven-loop supergravity and what the next bottlenecks are along the way. Oliver Schlotterer’s talk was another one of those “aha” moments, helping me understand a key difference between two senses in which gravity is Yang-Mills squared ( the Kawai-Lewellen-Tye relations and BCJ). In particular, the latter is much more dependent on specifics of how you write the scattering amplitude, so to the extent that you can prove something more like the former at higher loops (the original was only for trees, unlike BCJ) it’s quite valuable. Schlotterer has managed to do this at one loop, using the “Q-cut” method I’ve (briefly) mentioned before. The next day’s talk by Emil Bjerrum-Bohr focused more heavily on these Q-cuts, including a more detailed example at two loops than I’d seen that group present before.

There was also a talk by Walter Goldberger about using amplitudes methods for classical gravity, a subject I’ve looked into before. It was nice to see a more thorough presentation of those ideas, including a more honest appraisal of which amplitudes techniques are really helpful there.

There were other interesting topics, but I’m already way over my usual post length, so I’ll sign off for now. Videos from all but a few of the talks are now online, so if you’re interested you should watch them on the conference page.

The Way You Think Everything Is Connected Isn’t the Way Everything Is Connected

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I hear it from older people, mostly.

“Oh, I know about quantum physics, it’s about how everything is connected!”

“String theory: that’s the one that says everything is connected, right?”

“Carl Sagan said we are all stardust. So really, everything is connected.”

It makes Connect Four a lot easier anyway

I always cringe a little when I hear this. There’s a misunderstanding here, but it’s not a nice clean one I can clear up in a few sentences. It’s a bunch of interconnected misunderstandings, mixing some real science with a lot of confusion.

To get it out of the way first, no, string theory is not about how “everything is connected”. String theory describes the world in terms of strings, yes, but don’t picture those strings as links connecting distant places: string theory’s proposed strings are very, very short, much smaller than the scales we can investigate with today’s experiments. The reason they’re thought to be strings isn’t because they connect distant things, it’s because it lets them wiggle (counteracting some troublesome wiggles in quantum gravity) and wind (curling up in six extra dimensions in a multitude of ways, giving us what looks like a lot of different particles).

(Also, for technical readers: yes, strings also connect branes, but that’s not the sort of connection these people are talking about.)

What about quantum mechanics?

Here’s where it gets trickier. In quantum mechanics, there’s a phenomenon called entanglement. Entanglement really does connect things in different places…for a very specific definition of “connect”. And there’s a real (but complicated) sense in which these connections end up connecting everything, which you can read about here. There’s even speculation that these sorts of “connections” in some sense give rise to space and time.

You really have to be careful here, though. These are connections of a very specific sort. Specifically, they’re the sort that you can’t do anything through.

Connect two cans with a length of string, and you can send messages between them. Connect two particles with entanglement, though, and you can’t send messages between them…at least not any faster than between two non-entangled particles. Even in a quantum world, physics still respects locality: the principle that you can only affect the world where you are, and that any changes you make can’t travel faster than the speed of light. Ansibles, science-fiction devices that communicate faster than light, can’t actually exist according to our current knowledge.

What kind of connection is entanglement, then? That’s a bit tricky to describe in a short post. One way to think about entanglement is as a connection of logic.

Imagine someone takes a coin and cuts it along the rim into a heads half and a tails half. They put the two halves in two envelopes, and randomly give you one. You don’t know whether you have heads or tails…but you know that if you open your envelope and it shows heads, the other envelope must have tails.

Unless they’re a spy. Then it could contain something else.

Entanglement starts out with connections like that. Instead of a coin, take a particle that isn’t spinning and “split” it into two particles spinning in different directions, “spin up” and “spin down”. Like the coin, the two particles are “logically connected”: you know if one of them is “spin up” the other is “spin down”.

What makes a quantum coin different from a classical coin is that there’s no way to figure out the result in advance. If you watch carefully, you can see which coin gets put in to which envelope, but no matter how carefully you look you can’t predict which particle will be spin up and which will be spin down. There’s no “hidden information” in the quantum case, nowhere nearby you can look to figure it out.

That makes the connection seem a lot weirder than a regular logical connection. It also has slightly different implications, weirdness in how it interacts with the rest of quantum mechanics, things you can exploit in various ways. But none of those ways, none of those connections, allow you to change the world faster than the speed of light. In a way, they’re connecting things in the same sense that “we are all stardust” is connecting things: tied together by logic and cause.

So as long as this is all you mean by “everything is connected” then sure, everything is connected. But often, people seem to mean something else.

Sometimes, they mean something explicitly mystical. They’re people who believe in dowsing rods and astrology, in sympathetic magic, rituals you can do in one place to affect another. There is no support for any of this in physics. Nothing in quantum mechanics, in string theory, or in big bang cosmology has any support for altering the world with the power of your mind alone, or the stars influencing your day to day life. That’s just not the sort of connection we’re talking about.

Sometimes, “everything is connected” means something a bit more loose, the idea that someone’s desires guide their fate, that you could “know” something happened to your kids the instant it happens from miles away. This has the same problem, though, in that it’s imagining connections that let you act faster than light, where people play a special role. And once again, these just aren’t that sort of connection.

Sometimes, finally, it’s entirely poetic. “Everything is connected” might just mean a sense of awe at the deep physics in mundane matter, or a feeling that everyone in the world should get along. That’s fine: if you find inspiration in physics then I’m glad it brings you happiness. But poetry is personal, so don’t expect others to find the same inspiration. Your “everyone is connected” might not be someone else’s.

An Amplitudes Flurry

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Now that we’re finally done with flurries of snow here in Canada, in the last week arXiv has been hit with a flurry of amplitudes papers.

We’re also seeing a flurry of construction, but that’s less welcome.

Andrea Guerrieri, Yu-tin Huang, Zhizhong Li, and Congkao Wen have a paper on what are known as soft theorems. Most famously studied by Weinberg, soft theorems are proofs about what happens when a particle in an amplitude becomes “soft”, or when its momentum becomes very small. Recently, these theorems have gained renewed interest, as new amplitudes techniques have allowed researchers to go beyond Weinberg’s initial results (to “sub-leading” order) in a variety of theories.

Guerrieri, Huang, Li, and Wen’s contribution to the topic looks like it clarifies things quite a bit. Previously, most of the papers I’d seen about this had been isolated examples. This paper ties the various cases together in a very clean way, and does important work in making some older observations more rigorous.

Vittorio Del Duca, Claude Duhr, Robin Marzucca, and Bram Verbeek wrote about transcendental weight in something known as the multi-Regge limit. I’ve talked about transcendental weight before: loosely, it’s counting the power of pi that shows up in formulas. The multi-Regge limit concerns amplitudes with very high energies, in which we have a much better understanding of how the amplitudes should behave. I’ve used this limit before, to calculate amplitudes in N=4 super Yang-Mills.

One slogan I love to repeat is that N=4 super Yang-Mills isn’t just a toy model, it’s the most transcendental part of QCD. I’m usually fairly vague about this, because it’s not always true: while often a calculation in N=4 super Yang-Mills will give the part of the same calculation in QCD with the highest power of pi, this isn’t always the case, and it’s hard to propose a systematic principle for when it should happen. Del Duca, Duhr, Marzucca, and Verbeek’s work is a big step in that direction. While some descriptions of the multi-Regge limit obey this property, others don’t, and in looking at the ones that don’t the authors gain a better understanding of what sorts of theories only have a “maximally transcendental part”. What they find is that even when such theories aren’t restricted to N=4 super Yang-Mills, they have shared properties, like supersymmetry and conformal symmetry. Somehow these properties are tied to the transcendentality of functions in the amplitude, in a way that’s still not fully understood.

My colleagues at Perimeter released two papers over the last week: one, by Freddy Cachazo and Alfredo Guevara, uses amplitudes techniques to look at classical gravity, while the other, by Sebastian Mizera and Guojun Zhang, looks at one of the “pieces” inside string theory amplitudes.

I worked with Freddy and Alfredo on an early version of their result, back at the PSI Winter School. While I was off lazing about in Santa Barbara, they were hard at work trying to understand how the quantum-looking “loops” one can use to make predictions for potential energy in classical gravity are secretly classical. What they ended up finding was a trick to figure out whether a given amplitude was going to have a classical part or be purely quantum. So far, the trick works for amplitudes with one loop, and a few special cases at higher loops. It’s still not clear if it works for the general case, and there’s a lot of work still to do to understand what it means, but it definitely seems like an idea with potential. (Pun mostly not intended.)

I’ve talked before about “Z theory”, the weird thing you get when you isolate the “stringy” part of string theory amplitudes. What Sebastian and Guojun have carved out isn’t quite the same piece, but it’s related. I’m still not sure of the significance of cutting string amplitudes up in this way, I’ll have to read the paper more thoroughly (or chat with the authors) to find out.

The Many Worlds of Condensed Matter

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Physics is the science of the very big and the very small. We study the smallest scales, the fundamental particles that make up the universe, and the largest, stars on up to the universe as a whole.

We also study the world in between, though.

That’s the domain of condensed matter, the study of solids, liquids, and other medium-sized arrangements of stuff. And while it doesn’t make the news as often, it’s arguably the biggest field in physics today.

(In case you’d like some numbers, the American Physical Society has divisions dedicated to different sub-fields. Condensed Matter Physics is almost twice the size of the next biggest division, Particles & Fields. Add in other sub-fields that focus on medium-sized-stuff, like those who work on solid state physics, optics, or biophysics, and you get a majority of physicists focused on the middle of the distance scale.)

When I started grad school, I didn’t pay much attention to condensed matter and related fields. Beyond the courses in quantum field theory and string theory, my “breadth” courses were on astrophysics and particle physics. But over and over again, from people in every sub-field, I kept hearing the same recommendation:

“You should take Solid State Physics. It’s a really great course!”

At the time, I never understood why. It was only later, once I had some research under my belt, that I realized:

Condensed matter uses quantum field theory!

The same basic framework, describing the world in terms of rippling quantum fields, doesn’t just work for fundamental particles. It also works for materials. Rather than describing the material in terms of its fundamental parts, condensed matter physicists “zoom out” and talk about overall properties, like sound waves and electric currents, treating them as if they were the particles of quantum field theory.

This tends to confuse the heck out of journalists. Not used to covering condensed matter (and sometimes egged on by hype from the physicists), they mix up the metaphorical particles of these systems with the sort of particles made by the LHC, with predictably dumb results.

Once you get past the clumsy journalism, though, this kind of analogy has a lot of value.

Occasionally, you’ll see an article about string theory providing useful tools for condensed matter. This happens, but it’s less widespread than some of the articles make it out to be: condensed matter is a huge and varied field, and string theory applications tend to be of interest to only a small piece of it.

It doesn’t get talked about much, but the dominant trend is actually in the other direction: increasingly, string theorists need to have at least a basic background in condensed matter.

String theory’s curse/triumph is that it can give rise not just to one quantum field theory, but many: a vast array of different worlds obtained by twisting extra dimensions in different ways. Particle physicists tend to study a fairly small range of such theories, looking for worlds close enough to ours that they still fit the evidence.

Condensed matter, in contrast, creates its own worlds. Pick the right material, take the right slice, and you get quantum field theories of almost any sort you like. While you can’t go to higher dimensions than our usual four, you can certainly look at lower ones, at the behavior of currents on a sheet of metal or atoms arranged in a line. This has led some condensed matter theorists to examine a wide range of quantum field theories with one strange behavior or another, theories that wouldn’t have occurred to particle physicists but that, in many cases, are part of the cornucopia of theories you can get out of string theory.

So if you want to explore the many worlds of string theory, the many worlds of condensed matter offer a useful guide. Increasingly, tools from that community, like integrability and tensor networks, are migrating over to ours.

It’s gotten to the point where I genuinely regret ignoring condensed matter in grad school. Parts of it are ubiquitous enough, and useful enough, that some of it is an expected part of a string theorist’s background. The many worlds of condensed matter, as it turned out, were well worth a look.

Pop Goes the Universe and Other Cosmic Microwave Background Games

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(With apologies to whoever came up with this “book”.)

Back in February, Ijjas, Steinhardt, and Loeb wrote an article for Scientific American titled “Pop Goes the Universe” criticizing cosmic inflation, the proposal that the universe underwent a period of rapid expansion early in its life, smoothing it out to achieve the (mostly) uniform universe we see today. Recently, Scientific American published a response by Guth, Kaiser, Linde, Nomura, and 29 co-signers. This was followed by a counter–response, which is the usual number of steps for this sort of thing before it dissipates harmlessly into the blogosphere.

In general, string theory, supersymmetry, and inflation tend to be criticized in very similar ways. Each gets accused of being unverifiable, able to be tuned to match any possible experimental result. Each has been claimed to be unfairly dominant, its position as “default answer” more due to the bandwagon effect than the idea’s merits. All three tend to get discussed in association with the multiverse, and blamed for dooming physics as a result. And all are frequently defended with one refrain: “If you have a better idea, what is it?”

It’s probably tempting (on both sides) to view this as just another example of that argument. In reality, though, string theory, supersymmetry, and inflation are all in very different situations. The details matter. And I worry that in this case both sides are too ready to assume the other is just making the “standard argument”, and ended up talking past each other.

When people say that string theory makes no predictions, they’re correct in a sense, but off topic: the majority of string theorists aren’t making the sort of claims that require successful predictions. When people say that inflation makes no predictions, if you assume they mean the same thing that people mean when they accuse string theory of making no predictions, then they’re flat-out wrong. Unlike string theorists, most people who work on inflation care a lot about experiment. They write papers filled with predictions, consequences for this or that model if this or that telescope sees something in the near future.

I don’t think Ijjas, Steinhardt, and Loeb were making that kind of argument.

When people say that supersymmetry makes no predictions, there’s some confusion of scope. (Low-energy) supersymmetry isn’t one specific proposal that needs defending on its own. It’s a class of different models, each with its own predictions. Given a specific proposal, one can see if it’s been ruled out by experiment, and predict what future experiments might say about it. Ruling out one model doesn’t rule out supersymmetry as a whole, but it doesn’t need to, because any given researcher isn’t arguing for supersymmetry as a whole: they’re arguing for their particular setup. The right “scope” is between specific supersymmetric models and specific non-supersymmetric models, not both as general principles.

Guth, Kaiser, Linde, and Nomura’s response follows similar lines in defending inflation. They point out that the wide variety of models are subject to being ruled out in the face of observation, and compare to the construction of the Standard Model in particle physics, with many possible parameters under the overall framework of Quantum Field Theory.

Ijjas, Steinhardt, and Loeb’s article certainly looked like it was making this sort of mistake. But as they clarify in the FAQ of their counter-response, they’ve got a more serious objection. They’re arguing that, unlike in the case of supersymmetry or the Standard Model, specific inflation models do not lead to specific predictions. They’re arguing that, because inflation typically leads to a multiverse, any specific model will in fact lead to a wide variety of possible observations. In effect, they’re arguing that the multitude of people busily making predictions based on inflationary models are missing a step in their calculations, underestimating their errors by a huge margin.

This is where I really regret that these arguments usually end after three steps (article, response, counter-response). Here Ijjas, Steinhardt, and Loeb are making what is essentially a technical claim, one that Guth, Kaiser, Linde, and Nomura could presumably respond to with a technical response, after which the rest of us would actually learn something. As-is, I certainly don’t have the background in inflation to know whether or not this point makes sense, and I’d love to hear from someone who does.

One aspect of this exchange that baffled me was the “accusation” that Ijjas, Steinhardt, and Loeb were just promoting their own work on bouncing cosmologies. (I put “accusation” in quotes because while Ijjas, Steinhardt, and Loeb seem to treat it as if it were an accusation, Guth, Kaiser, Linde, and Nomura don’t obviously mean it as one.)

“Bouncing cosmology” is Ijjas, Steinhardt, and Loeb’s answer to the standard “If you have a better idea, what is it?” response. It wasn’t the focus of their article, but while they seem to think this speaks well of them (hence their treatment of “promoting their own work” as if it were an accusation), I don’t. I read a lot of Scientific American growing up, and the best articles focused on explaining a positive vision: some cool new idea, mainstream or not, that could capture the public’s interest. That kind of article could still have included criticism of inflation, you’d want it in there to justify the use of a bouncing cosmology. But by going beyond that, it would have avoided falling into the standard back and forth that these arguments tend to, and maybe we would have actually learned from the exchange.

KITP Conference Retrospective

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I’m back from the conference in Santa Barbara, and I thought I’d share a few things I found interesting. (For my non-physicist readers: I know it’s been a bit more technical than usual recently, I promise I’ll get back to some general audience stuff soon!)

James Drummond talked about efforts to extend the hexagon function method I work on to amplitudes with seven (or more) particles. In general, the method involves starting with a guess for what an amplitude should look like, and honing that guess based on behavior in special cases where it’s easier to calculate. In one of those special cases (called the multi-Regge limit), I had thought it would be quite difficult to calculate for more than six particles, but James clarified for me that there’s really only one additional piece needed, and they’re pretty close to having a complete understanding of it.

There were a few talks about ways to think about amplitudes in quantum field theory as the output of a string theory-like setup. There’s been progress pushing to higher quantum-ness, and in understanding the weird web of interconnected theories this setup gives rise to. In the comments, Thoglu asked about one part of this web of theories called Z theory.

Z theory is weird. Most of the theories that come out of this “web” come from a consistent sort of logic: just like you can “square” Yang-Mills to get gravity, you can “square” other theories to get more unusual things. In possibly the oldest known example, you can “square” the part of string theory that looks like Yang-Mills at low energy (open strings) to get the part that looks like gravity (closed strings). Z theory asks: could the open string also come from “multiplying” two theories together? Weirdly enough, the answer is yes: it comes from “multiplying” normal Yang-Mills with a part that takes care of the “stringiness”, a part which Oliver Schlotterer is calling “Z theory”. It’s not clear whether this Z theory makes sense as a theory on its own (for the experts: it may not even be unitary) but it is somewhat surprising that you can isolate a “building block” that just takes care of stringiness.

Peter Young in the comments asked about the Correlahedron. Scattering amplitudes ask a specific sort of question: if some particles come in from very far away, what’s the chance they scatter off each other and some other particles end up very far away? Correlators ask a more general question, about the relationships of quantum fields at different places and times, of which amplitudes are a special case. Just as the Amplituhedron is a geometrical object that specifies scattering amplitudes (in a particular theory), the Correlahedron is supposed to represent correlators (in the same theory). In some sense (different from the sense above) it’s the “square” of the Amplituhedron, and the process that gets you from it to the Amplituhedron is a geometrical version of the process that gets you from the correlator to the amplitude.

For the Amplituhedron, there’s a reasonably smooth story of how to get the amplitude. News articles tended to say the amplitude was the “volume” of the Amplituhedron, but that’s not quite correct. In fact, to find the amplitude you need to add up, not the inside of the Amplituhedron, but something that goes infinite at the Amplituhedron’s boundaries. Finding this “something” can be done on a case by case basis, but it get tricky in more complicated cases.

For the Correlahedron, this part of the story is missing: they don’t know how to define this “something”, the old recipe doesn’t work. Oddly enough, this actually makes me optimistic. This part of the story is something that people working on the Amplituhedron have been trying to avoid for a while, to find a shape where they can more honestly just take the volume. The fact that the old story doesn’t work for the Correlahedron suggests that it might provide some insight into how to build the Amplituhedron in a different way, that bypasses this problem.

There were several more talks by mathematicians trying to understand various aspects of the Amplituhedron. One of them was by Hugh Thomas, who as a fun coincidence actually went to high school with Nima Arkani-Hamed, one of the Amplituhedron’s inventors. He’s now teamed up with Nima and Jaroslav Trnka to try to understand what it means to be inside the Amplituhedron. In the original setup, they had a recipe to generate points inside the Amplituhedron, but they didn’t have a fully geometrical picture of what put them “inside”. Unlike with a normal shape, with the Amplituhedron you can’t just check which side of the wall you’re on. Instead, they can flatten the Amplituhedron, and observe that for points “inside” the Amplituhedron winds around them a specific number of times (hence “Unwinding the Amplituhedron“). Flatten it down to a line and you can read this off from the list of flips over your point, an on-off sequence like binary. If you’ve ever heard the buzzword “scattering amplitudes as binary code”, this is where that comes from.

They also have a better understanding of how supersymmetry shows up in the Amplituhedron, which Song He talked about in his talk. Previously, supersymmetry looked to be quite central, part of the basic geometric shape. Now, they can instead understand it in a different way, with the supersymmetric part coming from derivatives (for the specialists: differential forms) of the part in normal space and time. The encouraging thing is that you can include these sorts of derivatives even if your theory isn’t supersymmetric, to keep track of the various types of particles, and Song provided a few examples in his talk. This is important, because it opens up the possibility that something Amplituhedron-like could be found for a non-supersymmetric theory. Along those lines, Nima talked about ways that aspects of the “nice” description of space and time we use for the Amplituhedron can be generalized to other messier theories.

While he didn’t talk about it at the conference, Jake Bourjaily has a new paper out about a refinement of the generalized unitarity technique I talked about a few weeks back. Generalized unitarity involves matching a “cut up” version of an amplitude to a guess. What Jake is proposing is that in at least some cases you can start with a guess that’s as easy to work with as possible, where each piece of the guess matches up to just one of the “cuts” that you’re checking. Think about it like a game of twenty questions where you’ve divided all possible answers into twenty individual boxes: for each box, you can just ask “is it in this box”?

Finally, I’ve already talked about the highlight of the conference, so I can direct you to that post for more details. I’ll just mention here that there’s still a fair bit of work to do for Zvi Bern and collaborators to get their result into a form they can check, since the initial output of their setup is quite messy. It’s led to worries about whether they’ll have enough computer power at higher loops, but I’m confident that they still have a few tricks up their sleeves.

Scattering Amplitudes at KITP

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I’ve been visiting the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara for a program on scattering amplitudes. This week they’re having a conference, so I don’t have time to say very much.

The conference logo, on the other hand, seems to be saying quite a lot

We’ve had talks from a variety of corners of amplitudes, with major themes including the web of theories that can sort of be described by string theory-esque models, the amplituhedron, and theories you can “square” to get other theories. I’m excited about Zvi Bern’s talk at the end of the conference, which will describe the progress I talked about last week. There’s also been recent progress on understanding the amplituhedron, which I will likely post about in the near future.

We also got an early look at Whispers of String Theory, a cute short documentary filmed at the IGST conference.

The Road to Seven-Loop Supergravity

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There’s an obvious way to put together a theory of quantum gravity. And it doesn’t work.

Do the same thing you would with any other theory, and you get infinity. You get repeated infinities, an infinity of infinities. And while you could fix one or two infinities, fixing an infinite number requires giving up an infinity of possible predictions, so in the end your theory predicts nothing.

String theory fixes this with its own infinity, the infinite number of ways a string can vibrate. Because this infinity is organized and structured and well-understood, you’re left with a theory that is still at least capable of making predictions.

(Note that this is an independent question from whether string theory can make predictions for experiments in the real world. This is a much more “in-principle” statement: if we knew everything we might want to about physics, all the fields and particles and shapes of the extra dimensions, we could use string theory to make predictions. Even if we knew all of that, we still couldn’t make predictions from naive quantum gravity.)

Are there ways to fix the problem that don’t involve an infinity of vibrations? Or at least, to fix part of the problem?

That’s what Zvi Bern, John Joseph Carrasco, Henrik Johansson, and a growing cast of collaborators have been trying to find out.

They’re investigating N=8 supergravity, a theory that takes gravity and adds on a host of related particles. It’s one of the easiest theories to get from string theory, by curling up extra dimensions in a particularly simple way and ignoring higher-energy vibrations.

Bern, along with Lance Dixon and David Kosower, invented the generalized unitarity technique I talked about last week. Along with Carrasco and Johansson, he figured out another important trick: the idea that you can do calculations in gravity by squaring the appropriate part of calculations in Yang-Mills theory. For N=8 supergravity, the theory you need to square is my favorite theory, N=4 super Yang-Mills.

Using this, they started pushing forward, calculating approximations to greater and greater precision (more and more loops).

What they found, at each step, was that N=8 supergravity behaved better than expected. In fact, it behaved like N=4 super Yang-Mills.

N=4 super Yang-Mills is special, because in four dimensions (three space and one time, the dimensions we’re used to in daily life) there are no infinities to fix. In a world with more dimensions, though, you start getting infinities, and with more and more loops you need fewer and fewer dimensions to see them.

N=8 supergravity, unexpectedly, was giving infinities in the same dimensions that N=4 super Yang-Mills did (and no earlier). If it kept doing that, you might guess that it also had no infinities in four dimensions. You might wonder if, at least loop by loop, N=8 supergravity could be a way to fix quantum gravity without string theory.

Of course, you’d only really know if you could check in four dimensions.

If you want to check in four dimensions, though, you run into a problem. The fewer dimensions you’re looking at, the more loops you need before N=8 supergravity could possibly give infinity. In four dimensions, you need a forbidding seven loops of precision.

(To compare, the highest precision of things we’ve actually tested in the real world is four loops.)

Still, Bern, Carrasco, and Johansson were up to the challenge. Along with Lance Dixon, David Kosower, and Radu Roiban, they looked at three loops, calculating an interaction of four gravitons, and the pattern continued. Four loops, and it was still going strong.

At around this time, I had just started grad school. My first project was a cumbersome numerical calculation. To keep me motivated, my advisor mentioned that the work I was doing would be good preparation for a much grander project: the calculation of whether the four-graviton interaction in N=8 supergravity diverges at seven loops. All I’d have to do was wait for Bern and collaborators to get there.

I named this blog “4 gravitons and a grad student”, and hoped I would get a chance to contribute.

And then something unexpected happened. They got stuck at five loops.

The method they were using, generalized unitarity, is an ansatz-based method. You start with a guess, then refine it. As such, the method is ultimately only as good as your guess.

Their guesses, in general, were pretty good. The trick they were using, squaring N=4 to get N=8, requires a certain type of guess: one in which the pieces they square have similar relationships to the different types of charge in Yang-Mills theory. There’s still an infinite number of guesses that can obey this, so they applied more restrictions, expectations based on other calculations, to get something more manageable. This worked at three loops, and worked (with a little extra thought) at four loops.

But at five loops they were stuck. They couldn’t find anything, with their restrictions, that gave the correct answer when “cut up” by generalized unitarity. And while they could drop some restrictions, if they dropped too many they’d end up with far too general a guess, something that could take months of computer time to solve.

So they stopped.

They did quite a bit of interesting work in the meantime. They found more theories they could square to get gravity theories, of more and more unusual types. They calculated infinities in other theories, and found surprises there too, other cases where infinities didn’t show up when they were “supposed” to. But for some time, the N=8 supergravity calculation was stalled.

And in the meantime, I went off in another direction, which long-time readers of this blog already know about.

Recently, though, they’ve broken the stall.

What they realized is that the condition on their guess, that the parts they square be related like Yang-Mills charges, wasn’t entirely necessary. Instead, they could start with a “bad” guess, and modify it, using the failure of those relations to fill in the missing pieces.

It looks like this is going to work.

We’re all at an amplitudes program right now in Santa Barbara. Walking through the halls of the KITP, I overhear conversations about five loops. They’re paring things down, honing their code, getting rid of the last few bugs, and checking their results.

They’re almost there, and it’s exciting. It looks like finally things are moving again, like the train to seven loops has once again left the station.

Increasingly, they’re beginning to understand the absent infinities, to see that they really are due to something unexpected and new.

N=8 supergravity isn’t going to be the next theory of everything. (For one, you can’t get chiral fermions out of it.) But if it really has no infinities at any loop, that tells us something about what a theory of quantum gravity is allowed to be, about the minimum necessary to at least make sense on a loop-by-loop level.

And that, I think, is worth being excited about.

What’s in a Conjecture? An ER=EPR Example

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A few weeks back, Caltech’s Institute of Quantum Information and Matter released a short film titled Quantum is Calling. It’s the second in what looks like will become a series of pieces featuring Hollywood actors popularizing ideas in physics. The first used the game of Quantum Chess to talk about superposition and entanglement. This one, featuring Zoe Saldana, is about a conjecture by Juan Maldacena and Leonard Susskind called ER=EPR. The conjecture speculates that pairs of entangled particles (as investigated by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen) are in some sense secretly connected by wormholes (or Einstein-Rosen bridges).

The film is fun, but I’m not sure ER=EPR is established well enough to deserve this kind of treatment.

At this point, some of you are nodding your heads for the wrong reason. You’re thinking I’m saying this because ER=EPR is a conjecture.

I’m not saying that.

The fact of the matter is, conjectures play a very important role in theoretical physics, and “conjecture” covers a wide range. Some conjectures are supported by incredibly strong evidence, just short of mathematical proof. Others are wild speculations, “wouldn’t it be convenient if…” ER=EPR is, well…somewhere in the middle.

Most popularizers don’t spend much effort distinguishing things in this middle ground. I’d like to talk a bit about the different sorts of evidence conjectures can have, using ER=EPR as an example.

Our friendly neighborhood space octopus

The first level of evidence is motivation.

At its weakest, motivation is the “wouldn’t it be convenient if…” line of reasoning. Some conjectures never get past this point. Hawking’s chronology protection conjecture, for instance, points out that physics (and to some extent logic) has a hard time dealing with time travel, and wouldn’t it be convenient if time travel was impossible?

For ER=EPR, this kind of motivation comes from the black hole firewall paradox. Without going into it in detail, arguments suggested that the event horizons of older black holes would resemble walls of fire, incinerating anything that fell in, in contrast with Einstein’s picture in which passing the horizon has no obvious effect at the time. ER=EPR provides one way to avoid this argument, making event horizons subtle and smooth once more.

Motivation isn’t just “wouldn’t it be convenient if…” though. It can also include stronger arguments: suggestive comparisons that, while they could be coincidental, when put together draw a stronger picture.

In ER=EPR, this comes from certain similarities between the type of wormhole Maldacena and Susskind were considering, and pairs of entangled particles. Both connect two different places, but both do so in an unusually limited way. The wormholes of ER=EPR are non-traversable: you cannot travel through them. Entangled particles can’t be traveled through (as you would expect), but more generally can’t be communicated through: there are theorems to prove it. This is the kind of suggestive similarity that can begin to motivate a conjecture.

(Amusingly, the plot of the film breaks this in both directions. Keanu Reeves can neither steal your cat through a wormhole, nor send you coded messages with entangled particles.)

Nor live forever as the portrait in his attic withers away

Motivation is a good reason to investigate something, but a bad reason to believe it. Luckily, conjectures can have stronger forms of evidence. Many of the strongest conjectures are correspondences, supported by a wealth of non-trivial examples.

In science, the gold standard has always been experimental evidence. There’s a reason for that: when you do an experiment, you’re taking a risk. Doing an experiment gives reality a chance to prove you wrong. In a good experiment (a non-trivial one) the result isn’t obvious from the beginning, so that success or failure tells you something new about the universe.

In theoretical physics, there are things we can’t test with experiments, either because they’re far beyond our capabilities or because the claims are mathematical. Despite this, the overall philosophy of experiments is still relevant, especially when we’re studying a correspondence.

“Correspondence” is a word we use to refer to situations where two different theories are unexpectedly computing the same thing. Often, these are very different theories, living in different dimensions with different sorts of particles. With the right “dictionary”, though, you can translate between them, doing a calculation in one theory that matches a calculation in the other one.

Even when we can’t do non-trivial experiments, then, we can still have non-trivial examples. When the result of a calculation isn’t obvious from the beginning, showing that it matches on both sides of a correspondence takes the same sort of risk as doing an experiment, and gives the same sort of evidence.

Some of the best-supported conjectures in theoretical physics have this form. AdS/CFT is technically a conjecture: a correspondence between string theory in a hyperbola-shaped space and my favorite theory, N=4 super Yang-Mills. Despite being a conjecture, the wealth of nontrivial examples is so strong that it would be extremely surprising if it turned out to be false.

ER=EPR is also a correspondence, between entangled particles on the one hand and wormholes on the other. Does it have nontrivial examples?

Some, but not enough. Originally, it was based on one core example, an entangled state that could be cleanly matched to the simplest wormhole. Now, new examples have been added, covering wormholes with electric fields and higher spins. The full “dictionary” is still unclear, with some pairs of entangled particles being harder to describe in terms of wormholes. So while this kind of evidence is being built, it isn’t as solid as our best conjectures yet.

I’m fine with people popularizing this kind of conjecture. It deserves blog posts and press articles, and it’s a fine idea to have fun with. I wouldn’t be uncomfortable with the Bohemian Gravity guy doing a piece on it, for example. But for the second installment of a star-studded series like the one Caltech is doing…it’s not really there yet, and putting it there gives people the wrong idea.

I hope I’ve given you a better idea of the different types of conjectures, from the most fuzzy to those just shy of certain. I’d like to do this kind of piece more often, though in future I’ll probably stick with topics in my sub-field (where I actually know what I’m talking about 😉 ). If there’s a particular conjecture you’re curious about, ask in the comments!