Anonym said:
“...Few readers will be surprised to learn that so many Nobel laureates were wrong. As they say on Wall Street, prior performance is no guarantee of future success. But now comes the interesting part—the three who were right are European, and the six who were wrong are American.”
Would you please to explain the relation between the Nobel Prize winners, Wall Street and the American physics establishment?
Sure, I will try. About Wall Street, there is no relation---it is just a joke. Advertisements for Mutual Funds, which show that the investment has performed well in the past, often say in small print "past performance doesn't guarantee future performance". It is a cliché, like advertisements for car with good gas mileage say "your mileage may differ", in small print. He is just pointing out that merely because someone wins Nobel for great past performance is no guarantee of being right in future.
About American physics establishment, he is talking specifically about THEORISTS and he is suggestings that a CULTURAL DIFFERENCE may have developed between US theorist and European et al.
He suggests that US theorists are more likely to lose touch with reality, more apt to go for Gee Whiz or attention-getting EXOTIC explanations, and get absorbed in a fantasy. He draws a parallel between two styles of approaching HTSC. The American theorists jumped to a radical new explanation while the European theorists stuck with the old explanation more persistently and finally they made it work. Eventually experiments showed the more conservative theory was right and the exotic one was wrong.
About Nobelists, he only mentions them because it is a good simple statistic that shows the CULTURAL DIFFERENCE. Nine Nobelists offered explanations of HTSC. Six advocated a radical attention-getting new explanation and they were wrong. Three advocated a less exciting traditional explanation with no pizzazz that you had to work hard on to make happen, and they turned out to be right. He says that is not surprising. What he says is surprising is that the six exotic wrong theorists were US and the three who were right were European.
Using Nobelists is just a way of taking an informal statistical sample. Probably what the Nobelists thought was representative of leading people throughout their respective establishments.
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Now he says, suppose there is this cultural difference. Maybe the American theorists today have too much bias towards the exotic, the fashionable, the fantastic, the attentiongetting. If that is true then it goes deeper than the string monopoly. The monopolization of fundamental theory by string, which is much more extreme in the US than in Europe could be just a symptom. It could be just a manifestation of this cultural tendency.
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If you want another example, for many years string theory has been supported by the premise that Einstein gravity is NOT RENORMALIZABLE and therefore must be replaced at highenergy smallscale by an entirely different "new physics" such as might come from string philosophy. The Einstein way of representing gravity by geometry could be replaced by some exotic new physics, even with many new space dimensions!
A more conservative traditional approach was followed by Reuter and Percacci who have patiently pursued the Asymptotic Safety program for some ten years 1997-2007 and have gradually accumulated a mass of evidence that the string theorists' premise is WRONG and that gravity is actually RENORMALIZABLE but in a different way first thought of by Steven Weinberg around 1976. So they seem to be making a very classical UN-exotic approach work. They have four dimensions and they have the usual Einstein metric tensor. And they just go ahead and quantize it as someone would have done in 1970! Just as Weinberg wanted to but tried and couldn't do it 30 years ago.
So now we can wait and see who is right. Just as with the High-Temperature Superconductor (HTSC) business.
Is it the people who took the old GR theory seriously and patiently worked on it? Or is it the people who got enthusiastic about fancy mathematics and a completely new theoretical philosophy or framework (not yet a theory).
The interesting thing about Jim Phillips letter is how he interprets the presentday situation (with theory more string-dominant in US and more diversified, with more nonstring QG, in Europe) as symptomatic of a cultural difference that has developed.
It could have to do with the US
media culture. I don't know. But it's interesting he points it out.
