Gee, I wonder why people think particle theory is an unhealthy subject in a bad way these days….

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Because it’s running out of money, at least here in the US.

Lawrence B. Crowell

So, your (anonymous) advice, based on recounting what an (anonymous) senior person says, is that junior people should only blog anonymously.

Blogging anonymously in an academic field like this is not a real possibility. It’s just too small, so I don’t believe anyone in it could write about topics they were expert in or share news they learn without it quickly becoming apparent who they were.

So, it looks like an ugly atmosphere of intimidation mostly carried out from behind internet-enabled anonymity explains why there are so few bloggers in particle physics. In mathematics on the other hand, there’s a thriving culture of good blogs written by young and not-so-young mathematicians, with the people involved behaving professionally and putting their names to what they have to say. Gee, I wonder why people think particle theory is an unhealthy subject in a bad way these days….

Either way, a senior person with whom I have discussed this declared that he would oppose hiring any of the physics bloggers whose blogs he has read, with the exception of SC. So if you are going to blog, particularly non-anonymously, better follow the example of our host…..who, on the rare occasions when he criticizes anyone’s work, [a] does it politely and [b] does it with a technical discussion, ie using physics and not just sneering.

As an outsider, physics reminds me of those Escher drawings of stairs and waterfalls that go around in circles.

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That happens when you have the wrong holonomy group, on the base manifold or are projecting down from a principal fiber.

Peter Woit on Feb 23rd, 2008 at 4:43 pm

I first started publicly criticizing string theory back in 2001 was that there was a really ugly atmosphere of intimidation surrounding string theory, with many people telling me that while they agreed with me, they were too afraid of retribution to say so publicly. This continues to this day.

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This is in part a problem with professionalizing something. Once an endevour becomes a matter of professional status something which was once done for fun becomes something of dreadful seriousness.

String theory, LQG and the rest are not something anyone should ever regard as concrete. These are not really theories, but more hypotheses. They are fun to work with, to compare against each other. Yet it is silly to cling to these things like barnacles on a boat hull, as if any of this is about religious creeds.

When it comes to anonymity on blogs, my sense is that it is best if people did not do this. I remember a Dilbert cartoon where one of the characters grinned manically as they pounded out an email. Then afterwards with a withering look pondered their regrets after hitting “send.” Hiding behind a pseudonym or a shield gives one greater license to “throw barbs.” If anyone really wants to make a point, if your point is well reasoned and you are willing to stand by it then put your real name on it.

Lawrence B. Crowell

I don’t enforce non-anonymity or infringe on anyone’s freedom of opinion. I also don’t provide an outlet for scientists to anonymously engage in shameful and unprofessional behavior.

Things are the way they are. If you decide to post here, you are expected to follow the rules HERE. Not the rules of some utopia you wish the world followed.

You are of course free to enforce any rule you want on YOUR blog. Not everybody is getting an advantage out of the publicity as you do. Quite the contrary, in fact.

So, the only thing you get by enforcing non-anonymity is a lack of freedom of opinion. The posts above by “string theorist” for instance, above could not have happened if you enforced “non-anonymity”.

There are a lot of difficult issues about how to deal with blog comment sections, this isn’t one of them. If Sean thinks anonymous personal attacks are unprofessional behavior and his blog should not be used to allow people to make them, he can announce such a policy and delete such comments. This would not be especially time-consuming since their number is relatively small and would decrease if such a policy was instituted.

This blog posting notes that untenured scientists may need anonymity in order to avoid having a problem with their senior colleagues who read what they write. Few blogging junior physicists seem to be doing this, deciding instead to accept the consequences of what they write publicly. The remarkable thing is that there’s evidence that instead it is some senior people who have decided to hide themselves and refuse to take responsibility for their actions.

The most surprising thing I learned when I first started publicly criticizing string theory back in 2001 was that there was a really ugly atmosphere of intimidation surrounding string theory, with many people telling me that while they agreed with me, they were too afraid of retribution to say so publicly. This continues to this day. Say you’re a young particle theorist who reads blogs, and notes the anonymous attacks on me and my blog in the comment section here, as well as noting that they might be coming from a senior person, but there is no way to know which one . Do you think this might have an intimidating effect on discussions with all senior people, since there is no way of knowing who might be, say “Required”?

Describing a reference to “stale Popperianism” as a “vicious attack” was an attempt at humor. Guess it didn’t work for some people…

I guess one could have predicted that mentioning the problem of unprofessional behavior by people like you here would just lead to more of it. No one knows who you are, so you can write whatever you want here, without having to take any responsibility for it at all. You know very well that if your colleagues find out that you are doing this they will think much less of you. You’re just a gutless coward, behaving in a way that you know very well is unprofessional and shameful.

Most serious blogs actually realize this is a problem and don’t allow themselves to be used for anonymous attacks. For some reason the proprietor of this one thinks it’s all right to provide a forum for this kind of thing. I think it’s a mistake, and will keep pointing this out.

I’ll also keep pointing out the problem of pseudoscience and hype in theoretical physics, anonymous attacks aren’t going to stop this.

How did you guess that I was referring to you? And “stale Popperianism” is “vicious”? Not by your “standards”.

Your obsession with anonymity is just another of your old techniques for avoiding the issues. It is boring and also pointless. The real reason for anonymity is to avoid being personally attacked on blogs like yours, which basically serve no other purpose.

Advice to aspiring physics bloggers: if you want to be taken seriously, adopt the following rules: if you are going to attack somebody’s professional ethics as a physicist, eg by suggesting [as PW regularly does] that people write papers in which they don’t believe, then you must expect to gain a reputation as a twerp. If you are going to attack somebody’s *work*, then you really had better be prepared to invest some work in really understanding it, and you should be prepared to *give technical details* showing exactly why that work is wrong. Warning: doing so will expose you to the risk of looking like an incompetent. But that is still better than getting a reputation for writing posts of the form “look at this idiot posting science fiction on the arxiv, hur hur hur!” Though of course that kind of comment is so much easier to write, it will just lead people to deduce your incompetence indirectly instead of directly. Further warning: a willingness to *give technical details* of your criticism is only a necessary condition for a good blog reputation. Explaining technically why somebody is wrong may be useful, but you will *still* look like a twerp if you do it in an obnoxious way.

In view of all the above, maybe you would be better off avoiding criticizing other people’s work altogether, and instead work on drawing attention to *good* work, especially good work that might otherwise go unnoticed?

I am up to my keester in this matter. Dister does not like the theory because it frames bosons and fermions with clifford basis elements instead of with Grassmannians that @ which act with the supergenerators Q in the superalgebra

I have been working to extend Lisi’s theory so that it functions on E_8(C) ~ E_8xE_8 and is “SUSY.”

It is all an interesting business. I think Lisi’s model is a good first start to this effort.

Lawrence B. Crowell

If string theory is in trouble, it’s not because string theorists are slavishly following Witten now, or the fault of a couple opportunists, or due to the lack of new data from experimenters. Maybe it is because some ideas are just not working out…
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I has to be pointed out that string theory suffers from the same problem that any quantum gravity theory suffers from. It is not easy to obtain experimental data about the world at

This Planck scale at ~ 10^{-33}cm is hard to probe, independent of what ever theory we might have about physics there.

The main theoretical problem with string theory is that it fails to be constrained properly, with some 10^{500} possible vacua. This might still be telling us something, such as quantum gravity probably involves inequivalent vacuum states in a way similar to what happens with the Unruh-Hawking effects and black hole radiance.

Loop quantum gravity is a bit more honest with general relativity in some ways, whereas string theory tends to impose a graviton field on scales longer than the string length. This gives rise to bimetric theory of gravity with various abuses of general covariance in relativity. Yet LQG has its troubles with particle physics and I find the “slice and dice” approach to spacetime somewhat questionable.

I think that both these theories, and I will lump twistor theory in as well for I am finding some “twistor-like” stuff in what I am doing, amount to looking at a general problem through various keyholes, but where the doors are not yet opened into the “big room.”

Lawrence B. Crowell

I’m still honestly curious about why you see “fear” of Witten as influencing string theorists in how they decide what to work on. My own perception is that there is a huge problem of fear among particle theorists, fear that working on anything other than string theory, cosmology, or LHC phenomenology will cause one’s colleagues to think of one as just not bright enough to handle cutting-edge research. For more than twenty years now, there has been a strong culture in particle theory at the highest level of looking down on anyone working on QFT problems not related to string theory as just too dumb to have understood the QFT textbook and not up to learning string theory. Witten may very well be part of that problem, but it’s a more general problem with the culture of the field, not specific to him.

Getting back to the topic of the posting, I think it would be great for the subject if more particle physicists took up blogging and wonder what can be done to encourage this. Quite a few good young mathematicians have started blogging recently, but there seem to be far fewer particle theorists willing to try their hand. If it’s because they’re afraid of harming their careers, that’s a shame. I hope they’ll reconsider, keeping in mind that a life spent not doing worthwhile things because they might hurt one’s career often leads to a career not worth having.

Of course one reason people don’t blog is that doing so makes one the target of vicious anonymous accusations of things like “stale Popperianism” here in the comment section of CV…

During his war against the Copenhagen interpretation of QMs, quite a number of people were swayed by his opinions and realizing they couldn’t best him intellectually thought it prudent to be silent. Ultimately, Einsteins efforts had the net effect of being but a ripple against the tsunami that was QM.

All that to say, one man, no matter how powerful an intellect and persuasive an arguer, ultimately can not singlehandedly change how the community as a whole moves. Only ideas can.