Re: Lie algebra cohomology

[Peter Woit <woit@math.columbia.edu>]

"Paul D. Shocklee" wrote:

> The Woit paper seems more than a bit naive.  He waxes eloquent about gauge
> theory, the Dirac operator, the Atiyah-Singer index theorem, and K-theory,
> but he doesn't seem to know that supersymmetry and string theory have given
> unique insights into and applications of all of these topics.
>
> His strongest argument seems to be that string theory remains incompletely
> undefined at present, but no one has disputed that.

"incompletely undefined ?  I guess that's accurate, although with a little
more work M-theory should be completely undefined....

The response via e-mail to the article I posted has been roughly as follows:

30 enthusiastic responses, several from ex-string theorists, mostly of the
form "Bravo, thanks for having the guts to say something I have been thinking
for years"

3 people who wanted to tell me about their own TOEs

2 string theory graduate students who wanted to explain to me (at length)
that I was an ignorant idiot and and a dangerous disgrace to the
profession. I'll add Mr. Shocklee to this count, although he is briefer and
more polite than the other two.

Note one thing I still haven't seen: a serious response from any string
theorist actually addressing what I was saying and not my qualifications
for saying it.

As for Mr. Shocklee's specific accusations of ignorance:
I specifically left out any discussion of supersymmetry in my article.
It has had important applications in mathematics and its relationship
to modern mathematics is a complex, fascinating and still evolving story.
String theory has certainly led to a lot of interesting mathematics. A lot of
this is because it has caused people to seriously study conformal field theory

and two dimensional quantum field theories in general, these have led to
huge progress in mathematics. I don't think one can say the same for
M-theory or non-perturbative string theory or whatever you want to call
this non-existent subject. It's a mathematically complicated enough
business that it certainly has led to people asking questions that
mathematicians hadn't thought about before and this has led to some modest
progress of various kinds.

I used to feel that string theorists were doing bad physics, but often good
mathematics. The "M-theory" craze of the last 5 years or so is (in my
humble and ignorant opinion) still bad physics (except for the possibility
of getting new insight into strongly coupled gauge theory) and has led to
very little good mathematics. This is why I wrote the article at this time.

Some reactions to other comments, apologies for not knowing the proper way
to include sections of different posts:

"A.J. Tolland" wrote:
"        Just so you know, "not even wrong" was one of Wolfgang Pauli's
signature phrases.  I leave it up to you to decide whether Woit's use of
this phrase in discussing his own opinions smacks of arrogance."

String theorists (at least at the graduate and undergraduate level) seem to
have a mania for accusing others of ignorance and
arrogance.  If Tolland had read my article he would have noted that the
"not even wrong" phrase was properly attributed to Pauli. I wasn't using
the phrase to discuss my own opinions, to quote myself:
"The experimental situation is best described with Pauli's phrase "it's not
even wrong""
I don't think this is a matter of opinion.  String theory makes no
predictions,
not even wrong ones. Actually in this regard I was being rather kind, string
theory does make one prediction, the absurdly wrong one about the
cosmological constant. OK, I take it back, string theory IS wrong.


"Jacques Distler" wrote:
"I found Woit's paper hilariously funny.  But, as any joke is diminished
an attempt at explication, I will refrain from trying to explain *why*
it was so funny. Paul Shockley makes some relevant comments elsewhere in
this thread. You can probably figure it out from there."

This is an infinitely more clever insult than those of the others, it
clearly shows why Distler is a tenured faculty member and the others are
students.  Part of its cleverness is the way it avoids in any way dealing with

the specifics of my article.

If any string theorists are interested in seriously discussing any of the
issues raised in my article,  I'll be glad to respond, here or anywhere else.
The response so far indicates to me that "string theory" is even
more intellectually bankrupt than I thought.

Peter


[Moderator's note:  This thread has heated up already; lest it become an
 outright flamewar, respondents are urged to confine responses to physics
 issues and keep them somewhat civil, or take it to e-mail. -MM]