Not Even Wrong

The Economist today reports that New theories and experiments should shine light on string theory. This is more of the promotional campaign for Cumrun Vafa’s “dark dimension”. We’re told that a torsion balance experiment in Austria will “according to Dr. Vafa’s calculations” possibly detect the “dark dimension”. Vafa has convinced The Economist that in the dark dimension, string theory has made a testable prediction. And for a topic that has been stuck in the mud for half a century, that should…

I’ve been talking to people and seeing a lot of discussion about the effects of AI agents on math research, but haven’t found much serious discussion of what is happening in hep-th research. I’m curious to hear from those involved about exactly what is happening as researchers try and exploit these new tools. Back in February I tried to generate some data about trends in hep-th submissions, initially got this wrong by using “recently modified”, rather than “initial submission” dates. I’ve…

Kevin Hartnett posted the following Friday: My profile of @Jacob_Tsimerman, published the morning he won the Fields Medal, and hours before he announced he’s going to @OpenAI, reads like a requiem for a field. While I’m trying to not spend too much time thinking about the ongoing story of the effect of AI agents on math, the story of Jacob Tsimerman’s Fields medal award coinciding with his announcement that he’s leaving research math to go work of OpenAI is hard to ignore. If you do want to…

Some things that might be of interest: The ICM is starting next week in Philadelphia. One traditional aspect of the ICM is the announcement of the Fields Medal winners. This year there won’t be much surprise, since evidently someone found the names of the winners hidden in the website code (see here, English language news story here). It’s Yu Deng, John Pardon, Jacob Tsimerman, and Hong Wang. At least all science journalists who want to write about this now know the names, no controversies…

A few months ago I decided to try and sort out the two dimensional spacetime case of the Wick rotation issues that have been bothering me for years now. It took me a while to understand what goes on in two dimensions, but when I did, this clarified a lot for me the underlying problems with Wick rotation that I’ve been confused about. I’ve just finished writing something up about this, which you can find here. Instead of writing more about this tonight, I’ll leave that for tomorrow. Will either…

I’ve been working recently on trying to understand exactly how Wick rotation works in two-dimensional conformal field theory. There is an analog there of some of the issues with Wick rotation of spinors and twistors in four dimensions that I’ve been struggling with. One of the few times I’ve tried to get help from an AI agent, I asked it to point me to discussions of this topic in the literature. It gave me a bunch of suggestions I already knew about, then emphasized that the two best places…

The first surprise of this afternoon was finally finding an informed and sensible discussion of the implications of AI agents for hep-th research, in the form of a twitter thread by stringking42069. The second was learning from the twitter thread about Xi Yin’s ongoing project to have GPT 5.5 write a QFT textbook under his supervision. The past week there had been rumors that he was hired by OpenAI. If he’s now on their payroll, what he’s getting paid to do presumably is this textbook, which is…

Warning: if you follow this blog, you’ve heard this many times before, so can move on to something more interesting now. There’s a video conversation between Brian Greene and Lenny Susskind from last week here. At 44:02, Susskind has this to say: One of the chief critics is a colleague of yours, I believe. And he is rather forcefully maintaining that string theory, until it can produce a success of the kind where you actually can produce a number and that number can be checked with experiment,…

There’s a remarkable new book out about the life and work of Andreas Floer, entitled The Floer Jungle, co-written by writer Siobhan Roberts (author of some great biographies of mathematicians) and mathematician Helmut Hofer. Hofer has also given talks recently covering the material in the book, see for instance video here and slides here. The story of Floer’s career and his work is a fascinating one. The book is written at a mixture of levels, starting out with some chapters explaining…

The big AI/math news is the release today of the Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics. It’s an excellent attempt to identify the new threats to the intellectual culture of the mathematics community and begin a discussion of what to do about them. For some discussion, see Siobhan Roberts at the New York Times, and Michael Harris at his substack. There are some endorsements from prominent mathematicians included. From Peter Scholze there’s This is a wonderful declaration,…

The usual string theory hype machine in action: to celebrate a PRL publication, a university press office puts out a press release full of hype with a highly misleading title (“string theory is uniquely derived from basic assumptions about the universe”), it’s then picked up and distributed at sites like this, soon to make its way into news stories like this. I’ve been writing for over twenty years about the endless examples of this campaign to promote a failed theory, warning about the danger…

This posting is mainly intended to provide some links to material about AI in math and physics that I’ve found interesting. I confess that to a large degree I’m trying to avoid seriously learning about exactly what is going on, so my own opinions and thoughts about this topic aren’t grounded in any expertise. If you have interesting things about this topic to point to in the comments, please do so, but for general discussion, try some other venue managed by someone better informed. A Future of…

A couple weeks ago I gave at talk in Marseille on the general topic of Wick Rotating Spinors and Twistors. I’ll make a few comments here on the content of the slides. The idea of the talk was to explain … Continue reading →

Yesterday I was at Peter Scholze’s Seminaire Bourbaki talk, his write-up is available here. It was advertised as an exposition of the recent proof of the geometric Langlands conjecture, but Pierre Colmez accurately describes it as something much more: the … Continue reading →

Natalie Wolchover at Quanta has an article about a campaign by string theorists to argue that we have to accept string theory as our theory of fundamental physics even though there is no evidence for it because it is “unique”, … Continue reading →

There’s a new paper out on the Formalization of QFT, purporting to formalize a QFT using Lean/Mathlib. I’ve been trying to avoid spending time on the hot topics of AI and theorem proving, but in this case there’s a lot … Continue reading →