168. Yoneya on gravity from strings
HEP-TH/PH — By Dmitry Podolsky on January 6, 2009 at 3:41 pm
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As you may remember, recently we’ve discussed the paper by Alexander Polyakov – essentially, his contribution into the forthcoming volume “The birth of string theory”. Tamiaki Yoneya has also recently submitted his contribution to ArXiv (on Dec 31! 
), which is definitely worth going through, too. Reading his paper allowed me to make a couple of sociological observations…
a) one important issue is that Yoneya has almost always worked alone – far away from the centers of mainstream string theory as it was in 70s-80s (was there such a thing in 70s as mainstream string theory, actually?). This allowed him to rethink, rederive and rediscover many results in string theory independently, this also gave his views on string theory absolutely unique focus and perspective. Is it very smart to try rederiving all interesting results yourself? Probably not, but it does make your understanding of the subject deeper. Another example of an independent person who kept pushing his line perpendicular to the main stream is Michael Green, who has worked on anomalies cancellation… It was the work of a single person which led to the first superstring revolution.
b) It seems that Japanese scientific community does prefer to solve problems in theoretical physics, thinking in terms of algebra and not geometry, if we follow classification proposed by Sir Michael Atiyah. (Is it a horrible non-politically correct statement? Probably it is. Sorry, if so.) Another example in favour of this statement is the way how CFT is treated in US and in Japan. I would say that there is no single strong CFT scientific school in US, while Japan has the second (or the first already?) strongest one in the world. Is there anything more algebraic in high energy physics than CFT and conformal bootstrap in general?
c) In 70s, HEP community was quite arrogant about general relativity. Well, this is well known fact. What is not so trivial and quite unexpected after 3 superstring revolutions is that HEP community still remains somewhat arrogant – read Lubos Motl’s post for example
d) It is actually nice to be brave.
Cheers,
Dmitry.
Update: TheoreticalMinimum has mentioned two textbooks on CFT in comments (he is studying CFT currently and prefers them): one is “A mathematical introduction in CFT” by M. Schottenloher and another one is T. Kohno’s “Conformal field theory and topology“. As for me, my all time favourite was and is di Francesco, Mathieu, Senechal (which is maybe too large for the first reading, but I really love it).
4 Comments
If I may:
Toshitake Kohno, if I rightly recall, has written a short book which provides a nice introduction to the geometrical aspects of CFT, and it also covers to some extent its application to topological invariants. One book which I recently came across while studying CFT (I’m currently taking Blumenhagen’s course in CFT in Munich) is Schottenloher’s (also from Munich) “A Mathematical Introduction to CFT”. This is a very nice textbook that opens up the mathematical core of CFT and exposes it to anyone’s liking.
Hi Dmitry, in my counting, there have only been 1 birth plus 2 superstring revolutions, not 3: well, I surely don’t count the re-emphasis of a large landscape of vacua (or even the fashionable degenerative anthropic lack of principles) to be a revolution in the conventional sense.
More importantly, I think that with every revolution, there are more reasons to dismiss those who ignore all of them, not fewer reasons, as you suggest. Or do I misunderstand something?
I am not talking about those who joined the revolutionary movement – e.g. the supergravity people in the M-theory revolution. They’re just not what I call “relativists” as classified by the “culture”.
Yes, the people who remain confined in the mental framework of the classical GR are 2-3 (or 3-4, because we must include a quantum field theory revolution) levels below us in the scientific evolutionary ladder! And even when the difference was close to 1 level, in the 1960s.
In 1962, Richard Feynman wrote to his wife from a relativistic conference he had to attend: “I am not getting anything out of the meeting. I am learning nothing. Because there are no experiments, this field is not an active one, so few of the best men are doing work in it. The result is that there are hosts of dopes here (126) and it is not good for my blood pressure. Remind me not to come to any more gravity conferences!”
It doesn’t look like top HEP physicists viewed relativists as real peers back in 1962 and the current discrepancy is larger by 3-5 revolutions.
Concerning Yoneya, I think he is a very deep person (and he would surely be in the same culture as I would be if either of us decided to merge with a culture), but the solitaire approach may be a bit exhausting. Japanese physicists may prefer algebra because they are trained to read and write hundreds or thousands of those crazy letters, so adding a couple of symbols for the algebra is trivial.
But the causal relationship may actually go in the opposite direction, namely that the Japanese brains are algebraically hard-wired which is why they developed (well, imported from the Chinese) a complicated alphabet rather than playing with nice geometric shapes of a few letters.
I agree that conformal bootstrap is an extremely algebraic portion of high-energy physics. After all, it’s connected with all the non-geometric perturbative stringy compactifications etc. so it is the opposite of non-geometry pretty much by definition. On the other hand, I don’t see that this bootstrap realm is fully dominated by the Japanese.
I see the Japanese at many other places that are arguably slightly more geometric. Well, the Kyoto group string field theory is still pretty algebraic because the whole concept of rewring string interactions in terms of new star-products is a kind of algebra, although the product has a lot of geometric substance beneath it.
But there are other things that don’t seem that algebraic – like the IKKT matrix model, to say a random Japanese thing – and on the other hand, there are many conventional stringy nations, especially the Jews, in non-geometric CFTs, too. That’s why we talk about Gepner models, among other things.
Moreover, Japan has always had geometry, although its focus was always a bit more oriented on numbers and analytical geometry than the synthetic geometry in Europe, see e.g. homework exercises from the 17th century Japan (geometry)
http://www.maths.liv.ac.uk/~ma...../Japanese/
But I am not sure whether the difference is so huge.
So I of course admit that there should be a signal distinguishing the nations’ capabilities but I don’t see it as sharply as you do. Of course, the general inclination of a nation to do mathematical physics is indisputable and the Jews are the clear kings, but whether sub-styles of string theory are significantly depending on genetics is a somewhat open question to me.
Dear TM
You don’t just may, you most certainly welcome! Thanks for sharing, I did not actually know about these textbooks. Personally, my favorite one is di Francesco, Mathieu, Senechal which you probably know about.
Cheers,
Dmitry.
Dear Lubos
I am glad that you are back
As you can probably imagine, I don’t think that genetics significantly influences styles of different nations in science; style is much more influenced by culture and language as you pointed out.
By the way, I even cited exactly same words of Feynman you that you present above in one of my papers
Cheers,
Dmitry.
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