Sociology of Physics: comment and indices

[marcus]

Hmmm, are LQG spin networks still alive or have they been replaced by spin foams (sorry, am completely confused on by the whole state of LQG/spinfoams)?

They are essentially the same theory. As the theory appears to be coming together, a spinfoam is how a spin network evolves.
So it would be impossible for one to replace the other. Or maybe I should say unnecessary.

Thanks for mentioning the Vidal presentation. Do you have a link?
What you quote here is what it says in the conference program http://www.emergentgravity.org/index.php?main=main_EGIV_programme.php
(in case anyone wants to see source and context---there are a lot of other interesting looking talks)
But what about a link to the corresponding work by Vidal?

 

[marcus]

Actually Atyy one of the talks that I think interesting from a sociological point of view, at that Vancouver EG4 conference, is Matt Visser's. He's very influential and not allied to anyone approach.

I know it doesn't bear directly on your condensed-matter-related QG perspective but I'll copy the abstract as a kind of sociological straw in the wind. It might catch other people's attention as well:

Visser
Who's afraid of Lorentz symmetry breaking?
"Is Lorentz symmetry truly fundamental? Or is it just an "accidental" low-momentum emergent symmetry? Opinions on this issue have undergone a radical mutation over the last few years. Historically, Lorentz symmetry was considered absolutely fundamental --- not to be trifled with --- but for a number of independent reasons the modern viewpoint is more nuanced. What are the benefits of Lorentz symmetry breaking? What can we do with it? Why should we care?"

Here are some citation numbers to gauge Visser's prominence:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+A+VISSER%2C++M&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=citecount%28d%29

Here is a recent paper on "Phenomenologically viable Lorentz-violating quantum gravity"
submitted arxiv April 2009 and already published Physical Review Letters and cited 34 times (!)
http://arXiv.org/abs/0904.4464

Again here is "Quantum gravity without Lorentz invariance"
arxived May 2009 and already has 31 cites
http://arXiv.org/abs/0905.2798

He is talking about the situation where the bending of Lorentz invariance is only perceptible at ultra-high energies. Like TeV gamma photons, I guess.
So in a normal lower-energy regime, ordinary Lorentz invariance emerges. OK he seems to like this. And he is influential. It is sometimes these "loose cannon" senior people that by behaving unpredictably and carrying some weight can get things to happen. I'm not a fan of Visser but I am glad to see the cannon rolling around on the deck.

His co-author here Silke Weinfurtner is an attractive woman who played a prominent role at the Planck Scale conference in Wroclaw in June 2008. I'll have to check out her video lecture from that conference, may have something to do with Matt Visser's presentation at EG4.

 

[atyy]

I'm not a fan of Visser but I am glad to see the cannon rolling around on the deck.

His co-author here Silke Weinfurtner is an attractive woman who played a prominent role at the Planck Scale conference in Wroclaw in June 2008. I'll have to check out her video lecture from that conference, may have something to do with Matt Visser's presentation at EG4.

He, he - You are not a fan of Visser, while I'm a fan of Visser and not a fan of LQG (actually, just not a fan of "Trouble with Physics", and I like the tenor of Baez's and Freidel's work). Even more he, he - I suppose since this is sociology of physics you are allowed to mention that Silke Weinfurtner is an attractive woman. I shall have to watch her lecture now. Another recent surprise for me was that Zheng-Cheng Gu, Wen's collaborator, is a guy - I had assumed he was a lady until I saw his picture on Wen's Azores slides.

Here's a Vidal reference that seems relevant: http://arxiv.org/abs/0809.2393

 

[marcus]

These conferences are sociological machines that help define what constitutes a particular field of science and who the authorities are and what directions of research are considered interesting. We can study conferences to get sociological clues. Maybe I will get links to the main QG ones that happened recently. You already have the links, Atyy, but I mean post them here for convenience. How else can you find a video of Silke Weinfurtner in a hurry when you want? Certain isolated key talks are also important landmarks (Rovelli at Strings 2008, Weinberg at CERN 7 July 2009) in part because the video shows audience reaction and response. But I'll leave that for later. Here are some main QG conference links:

Black Holes and Loop Quantum Gravity (Valencia, March)
http://www.uv.es/bhlqg/
Planck Scale (Wroclaw, June)
http://www.ift.uni.wroc.pl/~planckscale/
http://www.ift.uni.wroc.pl/~rdurka/planckscale/index-video.php
Marcel Twelve (Paris, July)
http://www.icra.it/MG/mg12/en/
http://www.icra.it/MG/mg12/en/invited_speakers_details.htm
FQXi IV (Azores, July)
http://www.fqxi.org/conference/talks
Loops 2009 (Beijing, August)
http://www.mighty-security.com/loop/timetable1.htm
Emergent Gravity (Vancouver, August)
http://www.emergentgravity.org/
http://www.emergentgravity.org/index.php?main=main_EGIV_programme.php
Ellisfest (Cape Town, August)
http://www.mth.uct.ac.za/~jeff/Quantum_Gravity/About.html
Corfu QG School (Corfu, September)
http://www.physics.ntua.gr/corfu2009/qg.html
AsymSafe (Perimeter, November)
http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/Events/Asymptotic_Safety/Asymptotic_Safety_-_30_Years_Later/
http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/Events/Asymptotic_Safety/Invited_Speakers/
http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/en/Events/Asymptotic_Safety/Abstracts/

Silke's Wroclaw video has a bad audio track for the first 3 minutes and 30 seconds. So you have to wait until 3:30 before turning on the sound. Otherwise an annoying echo.
It's just a nice easy intro to Horava Lifschitz (and also the Visser-Weinfurtner modification or extension of it.)

 

[atyy]

http://www.ift.uni.wroc.pl/~rdurka/planckscale/index-video.php

Remigiusz Durka links to abstruse goose which I hadn't read in some time. I came across http://abstrusegoose.com/137

 

[marcus]

Great satire! I get a kick out of a lot of the Abstruse Goose comics. Thanks for linking to that stringy Xanadu.
I guess the appearance of satire is another aspect of the sociology scene. Please alert us if you see other goodies like that. I think that Peter Shor, a prof at MIT, produced a classic, in the form of an imaginary dialog.
====

String theorists: We've got the Standard Model, and it works great, but it doesn't include gravity, and it doesn't explain lots of other stuff, like why all the elementary particles have the masses they do. We need a new, broader theory.

Nature: Here's a great new theory I can sell you. It combines quantum field theory and gravity, and there's only one adjustable parameter in it, so all you have to do is find the right value of that parameter, and the Standard Model will pop right out.

String theorists: We'll take it.

String theorists (some time later): Wait a minute, Nature, our new theory won't fit into our driveway. String theory has ten dimensions, and our driveway only has four.

Nature: I can sell you a Calabi-Yau manifold. These are really neat gadgets, and they'll fold up string theory into four dimensions, no problem.

String theorists: We'll take one of those as well, please.

Nature: Happy to help.

String theorists (some time later): Wait a minute, Nature, there's too many different ways to fold our Calabi-Yao manifold up. And it keeps trying to come unfolded. And string theory is only compatible with a negative cosmological constant, and we own a positive one.

Nature: No problem. Just let me tie this Calabi-Yao manifold up with some strings and branes, and maybe a little duct tape, and you'll be all set.

String theorists: But our beautiful new theory is so ugly now!

Nature: Ah! But the Anthropic Principle says that all the best theories are ugly.

String theorists: It does?

Nature: It does. And once you make it the fashion to be ugly, you'll ensure that other theories will never beat you in beauty contests.

String theorists: Hooray! Hooray! Look at our beautiful new theory.
===
Shor is amazing:
Shor's algorithm in quantum computing, factoring exponentially faster than any known classical method.
As a kid he took second in International Math Olympiad. Putnam fellow at Caltech. Nevanlinna Prize.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Shor
http://www-math.mit.edu/~shor/

 

[Chaos' lil bro Order]

Hey Marcus,

Maybe you could provide a little summary post describing your trend-finding... I think earlier you mentioned string theory was losing favor, based on book sales. Do you have any other running conclusions to share? Its easy for us casual readers than to sift through your masses of data (appreciate your efforts).

 

[marcus]

Hey Marcus,
Maybe you could provide a little summary post describing your trend-finding... .

Did that a while back in this thread, Bro. Maybe it's time to elaborate, update. Booksales are the least of it, and the most lagging. The public takes the longest of anyone to become aware. Nevertheless it is a factor and I don't want to ignore it.

I would say that although public interest and perception is a factor, there are some more important sociological indicators of changes in the fundamental physics research picture. Loop and allied research publication rate going up (see earlier post) and string publication lapsing. More researchers getting into nonstring QG and QC (the application of quantum gravity to cosmology). Exodus of smart people from string.

One can see a major shift in focus in the work of leaders like Hermann Nicolai, Petr Horava, Edward Witten, Steve Gidding, Juan Maldacena, Arkani-Hamed. Physicists show recognizable herd behavior, so what the leaders do is important.

Besides this exodus or shift in focus there has this summer been a remarkable run of conferences which combine Loop-and-allied speakers with String and ex-String folks. There is apparently more interest and openness on the part of the String and ex-String community---more desire to listen and discuss.
To mention a few:

Planck Scale (Wroclaw, June)
Marcel Twelve (Paris, July)
FQXi IV (Azores, July)
Emergent Gravity (Vancouver, August)
Ellisfest (Cape Town, August)
AsymSafe (Perimeter, November)

Another indicator of a change in the mental climate was Steven Weinberg's 7 July talk at CERN. (Basic message: string not the only game in town, SW currently chooses to work on an alternative, undercutting string motivation.) Five years ago Weinberg was an influential and staunch supporter: string as "our one best hope" of unification. No longer.

 

[Chaos' lil bro Order]

Great summary, especially important to myself was Weinberg's change in favor. Ty sir.

 

[marcus]

You are most welcome, Bro sir! I was glad to get some feedback.
This booksale indicator may be the least important of the lot, but I still keep track of it sporadically---and around the first of every month, so as to have record in case anything interesting happens.

Trouble with Physics salesrank compared with string benchmark:

1 January 0.6 (2009)
1 February 0.7
1 March 0.5
1 April 0.6
1 May 0.6
1 June 0.7
1 July 1.9
1 August 0.6
...
8 August 0.89
9 August 1.49
10 August 0.39
...
21 August 0.67

At noon pacific on 21 August, Trouble ranked 13664 and the five most popular string books (elegant, parallel, fabric, black hole, hyperspace) averaged 9147.4 making the ratio 0.67.

Bro, if you want a link to the video of Weinberg's 7 July talk, or to the paper that goes with it, let me know.
I shouldn't give the impression of a complete shift of interest among those top people---more a moderation of interest in string and a spreading out. Some are still doing some string papers but their main effort seems marginal or unrelated. Horava has found his own approach to QG now (not stringy). Nicolai's recent research is nonstring---more about making the established QFT work better. These are kind of subtle changes. Weinberg's renewed interest in Asymptotic Safety was more pronouced and noticeable. This came out in the last 12 minutes of his talk.

 

[changeseeker]

It's called the "Matthew Effect" (Robert Merton). Those people who are high-status will gain more publications as a result of their status, while the inverse will be true for those of low status.

Interesting marc,

So you gauge the popularity of a niche of science based on how many of its papers are in the top citations list. This could be a good indicator of whether the niche (string theory) is gaining peer acceptance or losing it.

I must say there are some criticisms readily available of this technique's accuracy, as I'm sure you are well aware. It would be interesting to see a behavioral psychologists analysis of this technique. One results skewing effect would be the tendency of peers to cite papers written by physics 'celebrities', like Penrose, Wolfram, etc. This looks good for their own paper when they've quoted a top gun, and it adds credence to their paper. The less popular the niche is, the less cites it will naturally garner. String Theory has been relatively stale in the last 5 years and many physicists wonder if its reached an experimental impass, which means it is losing favor, even amongst some theoretical physicists. This could clearly effect citations, but it does nothing to prove whether the underlying theories in string theory are true or false.

So while you citation rankings, is a decent indicator of what papers are important, it may also be just as good an indicator of what niches are popular.

 

[marcus]

You are most welcome, Bro sir! I was glad to get some feedback.
This booksale indicator may be the least important of the lot, but I still keep track of it sporadically---and around the first of every month, so as to have record in case anything interesting happens.

Trouble with Physics salesrank compared with string benchmark:

1 January 0.6 (2009)
1 February 0.7
1 March 0.5
1 April 0.6
1 May 0.6
1 June 0.7
1 July 1.9
1 August 0.6
...
8 August 0.89
9 August 1.49
10 August 0.39
...
21 August 0.67

At noon pacific on 21 August, Trouble ranked 13664 and the five most popular string books (elegant, parallel, fabric, black hole, hyperspace) averaged 9147.4 making the ratio 0.67.

Bro, if you want a link to the video of Weinberg's 6 July talk, or to the paper that goes with it, let me know.
I shouldn't give the impression of a complete shift of interest among those top people---more a moderation of interest in string and a spreading out. Some are still doing some string papers but their main effort seems marginal or unrelated. Horava has found his own approach to QG now (not stringy). Nicolai's recent research is nonstring---more about making the established QFT work better. These are kind of subtle changes. Weinberg's renewed interest in Asymptotic Safety was more pronouced and noticeable. This came out in the last 12 minutes of his talk.

Smolin's most recent book, The Trouble with Physics, seems to be hanging on to a fairly constant market share, relative to the most popular string reading. It could be that interest in both string apologetics and critique is fading.
In any case at noon on 24 August, Trouble ranked 9831 and the five string books currently most popular (fabric, parallel, black hole, elegant, hyperspace) averaged 7726.2, making the ratio 0.79
Likewise on 25 August the ratio was 0.77. Trouble 13004 and string topfive average 9997.2.
The stringy top five were fabric, elegant, parallel, black hole, idiot guide.

 

[marcus]

Trouble with Physics salesrank compared with string benchmark:

1 January 0.6 (2009)
1 February 0.7
1 March 0.5
1 April 0.6
1 May 0.6
1 June 0.7
1 July 1.9
1 August 0.6
...
31 August 0.53
1 September 0.79

At noon pacific on 31 August, Trouble ranked 18585 and the five most popular string books (elegant, fabric, black hole, parallel, hyperspace) ranked 3576, 6345, 11308, 13652, 13946, averaging 9765.4 for a ratio 0.53.
At noon 1 September, Trouble 11322 and string top five (elegant, fabric, parallel, hyperspace, paperback elegant) 6057, 6823, 7635, 10015, 14147, averaging 8935.4 for a ratio of 0.79

I'll take a 3 day average around the first of the month, to eliminate some random fluctuation.

 

[marcus]

Another index we can occasionally check is raw string publication rate, using the Harvard abstracts database with keywords superstring, M-theory, brane, AdS/CFT, heterotic, compactification.

Here are the number of publications for the first seven months of three consecutive years:

2007: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

2008: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

2009: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

Currently (as of 1 September) the figures are 2986, 2936, 2742.

There may be a slight downtrend but the main thing to note is that the rate is approximately steady. By contrast research publication rates in several nonstring types of quantum gravity are growing.

The average of three ratios around 1 September
31 August 0.53
1 September 0.79
2 September 0.57
came to 0.63
so the record continues as follows:

Trouble with Physics salesrank compared with the string benchmark

1 January 0.6 (2009)
1 February 0.7
1 March 0.5
1 April 0.6
1 May 0.6
1 June 0.7
1 July 1.9
1 August 0.6
1 September 0.6
...
At the moment textbooks dominate the physics book market which pushes popular and general reading into the background. At noon 2 September Smolin's book ranked 22562 and the top five stringy books (parallel, elegant, fabric, hyperspace, black hole) averaged 12807.8, for a ratio of 0.57.

 

[Chaos' lil bro Order]

That would great Marcus, I gratiously accept your offer to post the Weinberg lecture video link. He's my favorite cosmologist, ever since I studied his equation and first 3 minute theorum, I've been a fan. Do post!

You are most welcome, Bro sir! I was glad to get some feedback.
This booksale indicator may be the least important of the lot, but I still keep track of it sporadically---and around the first of every month, so as to have record in case anything interesting happens.

Trouble with Physics salesrank compared with string benchmark:

1 January 0.6 (2009)
1 February 0.7
1 March 0.5
1 April 0.6
1 May 0.6
1 June 0.7
1 July 1.9
1 August 0.6
...
8 August 0.89
9 August 1.49
10 August 0.39
...
21 August 0.67

At noon pacific on 21 August, Trouble ranked 13664 and the five most popular string books (elegant, parallel, fabric, black hole, hyperspace) averaged 9147.4 making the ratio 0.67.

Bro, if you want a link to the video of Weinberg's 7 July talk, or to the paper that goes with it, let me know.
I shouldn't give the impression of a complete shift of interest among those top people---more a moderation of interest in string and a spreading out. Some are still doing some string papers but their main effort seems marginal or unrelated. Horava has found his own approach to QG now (not stringy). Nicolai's recent research is nonstring---more about making the established QFT work better. These are kind of subtle changes. Weinberg's renewed interest in Asymptotic Safety was more pronouced and noticeable. This came out in the last 12 minutes of his talk.

 

[marcus]

That would great Marcus, I gratiously accept your offer to post the Weinberg lecture video link. He's my favorite cosmologist, ever since I studied his equation and first 3 minute theorum, I've been a fan. Do post!

Steven Weinberg's 6 July talk, main CERN link:
http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=57283
Weinberg video:
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1188567/
To save time jump to minute 58, the last 12 minutes.

Last 12 minutes is where he starts talking about his recent research direction (asymptotic safety, making gravity renormalizable and unifiable with something akin to, or not drastically different from, what he calls "good old quantum field theory"). He expresses the opinion that string "might not be how the world is" and "might not be needed" although he doesn't want to discourage string theorists and supports their continuing to do string research if that's what they want to do. It does represent a marked change from how he was talking 4 or 5 years ago.

I recently updated the record of noon first-of-month salesrank readings:

Trouble with Physics salesrank compared with the string benchmark

1 January 0.6 (2009)
1 February 0.7
1 March 0.5
1 April 0.6
1 May 0.6
1 June 0.7
1 July 1.9
1 August 0.6
1 September 0.6
...

Smolin's book has now been out for 3 years. It came on the market September 2006. Most science books drop out of sight after a couple of years so it is somewhat remarkable how this one has made a place for itself, and retained market share.
I use the average salesrank of the five currently most popular string books as a benchmark for comparison.

 

[marcus]

A popular SciFi mag ran a review of Smolin's book in its September 2009 issue.
http://www.analogsf.com/0909/altview_09.shtml

Timewarp. The book came out in September 2006, so why is Analog reviewing it now? Well it's a rave review--the guy really liked it.
Maybe now is as good a time as any.

There it is at the top of the list on their ToC page for the September issue.
http://www.analogsf.com/0909/issue_09.shtml

=====

EDIT: I just learned that the September 2009 issue was delivered by mid-June in Canada, and by around 1 July in parts of the US:
http://www.analogsf.com/aspnet_forum/messages.aspx?TopicID=621
This finally explains the bizarre spike in sales during July. The reviewer clearly spotlighted the book's good points and his readers went out and bought the book in substantial numbers.
I commented on the spike in this 16 July post:

Kaboom! The big sales spike is over and TwP is back in the normal range. The unexplained excursion lasted just over 2 weeks.

Trouble with Physics salesrank compared with string benchmark:

1 January 0.6 (2009)
1 February 0.7
1 March 0.5
1 April 0.6
1 May 0.6
1 June 0.7
1 July 1.9

2 July 3.78
3 July 5.88
4 July 5.11
5 July 16.10
6 July 15.81
7 July 7.09
8 July 5.98
9 July 5.58
10 July 3.87
11 July 2.92
12 July 2.67
13 July 6.42
14 July 4.88
15 July 2.37
16 July 0.81

At noon pacific on 16 July TwP ranked 5350 and the stringy top five (elegant, fabric, black hole, parallel, hyperspace) ranked 2079, 3252, 4395, 4413, 7516 for an average of 4331.0 making the ratio 0.81.

 

[marcus]

The raw string publication rate (measured using the Harvard abstracts database with keywords superstring, M-theory, brane, AdS/CFT, heterotic, compactification) continues holding steady, or to show a slight decline.

Here are the number of publications for the first seven months of three consecutive years:

2007: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

2008: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

2009: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

As of 12 September the 7-month figures are 2986, 2936, 2745.

I should get some research publication rates in nonstring quantum gravity for comparison.

Today I took a noon reading of the TwP book's amazon salesrank. (The way I'm keeping track, only around the first of the month goes on the record, but we can check now and then at other times.)

Trouble with Physics salesrank compared with the string benchmark

1 January 0.6 (2009)
1 February 0.7
1 March 0.5
1 April 0.6
1 May 0.6
1 June 0.7
1 July 1.9
1 August 0.6
1 September 0.6
...
12 September 0.8
13 September 1.2

The rush on physics textbooks has eased and popular general reading has returned pretty much to normal. At noon 12 September Smolin's book ranked 10424 and the top five stringy books (elegant, parallel, fabric, black hole, elegant paperback) ranked 3462, 5381, 7969, 12077, 12927, averaging 8363.2 for a ratio of 0.80.

At noon 13 September TwP ranked 8739 and the string top five average rank was 10311.6, for a ratio of 1.18. The five most popular stringy books (elegant, fabric, parallel, black hole, hyperspace) ranked 5601, 7748, 11451, 12911, 13847.There's an index I mentioned earlier we could be keeping track of:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=k+spin%2Cfoam+or+%28dk+quantum+gravity+and+dk+loop+space%29+and+date+%3E+2006&FORMAT=WWW&SEQUENCE=citecount%28d%29
This is Loop/Spinfoam research published since 2006 (i.e. 2007-present) ranked by cites.

Here's the same thing but just for 2009:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+%28DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY+AND+DK+LOOP+SPACE%29+AND+DATE+%3D+2009&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=citecount%28d%29

Suppose we divide into two-year chunks and check for a trend:
[2003 2004]
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+%28DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY+AND+DK+LOOP+SPACE%29+AND+DATE+%3E+2002+and+date+%3C+2005&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=citecount%28d%29

[2005 2006]
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+%28DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY+AND+DK+LOOP+SPACE%29+AND+DATE+%3E+2004+and+date+%3C+2007&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=citecount%28d%29

[2007, 2008]
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+%28DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY+AND+DK+LOOP+SPACE%29+AND+DATE+%3E+2006+and+date+%3C+2009&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=citecount%28d%29

126
136
197

 

[marcus]

Here's a Spires list of the Loop/Spinfoam research which appeared in 2009 ranked by cites.

http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+%28DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY+AND+DK+LOOP+SPACE%29+AND+DATE+%3D+2009&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=citecount%28d%29

As of 15 September (nearly 3/4 of the way thru the year) the count is 67, so if you add a third of that to get an estimate for the whole year you get 100. I would guess that if publication continues at the current rate we will have 100 or more Loop papers this year. This agrees with what we saw earlier---197 papers for the two-year period [2007, 2008]

[2003 2004]
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+%28DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY+AND+DK+LOOP+SPACE%29+AND+DATE+%3E+2002+and+date+%3C+2005&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=citecount%28d%29

[2005 2006]
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+%28DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY+AND+DK+LOOP+SPACE%29+AND+DATE+%3E+2004+and+date+%3C+2007&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=citecount%28d%29

[2007, 2008]
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+%28DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY+AND+DK+LOOP+SPACE%29+AND+DATE+%3E+2006+and+date+%3C+2009&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=citecount%28d%29

126
136
197

Here's an update of noon readings of the TwP book's amazon salesrank. (The way I'm keeping track, only around the first of the month goes on the record, but we can check now and then at other times.)

Trouble with Physics salesrank compared with the string benchmark

1 January 0.6 (2009)
1 February 0.7
1 March 0.5
1 April 0.6
1 May 0.6
1 June 0.7
1 July 1.9
1 August 0.6
1 September 0.6
...
12 September 0.8
13 September 1.2
14 September 0.5
15 September 0.8
...

At noon 15 September Smolin's book ranked 11075 and the top five stringy books (parallel, fabric, hyperspace, elegant, elegant paperback) ranked 4323, 6625, 7865, 7900, averaging 8369.4 for a ratio of 0.76.

 

[marcus]

http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+%28DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY+AND+DK+LOOP+SPACE%29+AND+DATE+%3D+2009&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=citecount%28d%29

To correct something I said earlier, as of 19 September (nearly 3/4 of the way thru the year) the count is 67, so if you add a third of that to get an estimate for the whole year you get about 90. I would guess that if publication continues at the current rate we will have 90 papers listed for this year. This is down some 10% from what we saw earlier---197 papers for the two-year period [2007, 2008] an average of nearly 100 per year. But we'll have to see, there may be a bunch posted in the final quarter of 2009 that bring the rate for the year back up.

Trouble with Physics salesrank compared with the string benchmark

1 January 0.6 (2009)
1 February 0.7
1 March 0.5
1 April 0.6
1 May 0.6
1 June 0.7
1 July 1.9
1 August 0.6
1 September 0.6
...
12 September 0.8
13 September 1.2
14 September 0.5
15 September 0.8
...
17 September 0.8
18 September 0.8
19 September 0.6
20 September 0.3
...

At noon 19 September Smolin's book ranked 12792 and the top five stringy books (elegant, hyperspace, parallel, fabric, hyperspace, elegant paperback) ranked 3491, 3976, 4536, 12511, 12687, averaging 7440.2 for a ratio of 0.58.

We have been watching the raw string publication rate (measured using the Harvard abstracts database with keywords superstring, M-theory, brane, AdS/CFT, heterotic, compactification). These links are for the publications appearing in the first eight months of three consecutive years:

2007: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

2008: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

2009: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

As of 19 September (really too early to say much) the 8-month figures were 3307, 3303, 2991.
The 7-month figures (by now fairly stable) were 2989, 2942, 2745.

 

[marcus]

http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+%28DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY+AND+DK+LOOP+SPACE%29+AND+DATE+%3D+2009&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=citecount%28d%29

Loop/foam publications are currently 70 for the year, not too great. We still have 3 months to go, so it might get up into the 90s. In 2007 and 2008 loop/foam papers averaged close to 100 per year, may be down from that in 2009.

Of course there has been an increase in other kinds of 4D QG, especially Horava but also some other types. So if one could construct a collective measure for all kinds of 4D quantum gravity, it would be showing considerable growth right now.

Trouble with Physics salesrank compared with the string benchmark fluctuates quite a bit but stays more or less the same.

1 January 0.6 (2009)
1 February 0.7
1 March 0.5
1 April 0.6
1 May 0.6
1 June 0.7
1 July 1.9
1 August 0.6
1 September 0.6
...
...
17 September 0.8
18 September 0.8
19 September 0.6
20 September 0.3
...
23 September 0.7
24 September 0.5

As an illustration, at noon 19 September Smolin's book ranked 12792 and the top five stringy books (elegant, hyperspace, parallel, fabric, hyperspace, elegant paperback) ranked 3491, 3976, 4536, 12511, 12687, averaging 7440.2 for a ratio of 0.58.

Update on the string publication rate (measured using the Harvard abstracts database with keywords superstring, M-theory, brane, AdS/CFT, heterotic, compactification). These links are for the publications appearing in the first eight months of three consecutive years:

2007: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

2008: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

2009: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

As of 24 September the 8-month figures were 3318, 3306, 3080.

 

[marcus]

Time to start averaging for the smoothed 1 October index.

Trouble with Physics salesrank compared with the string benchmark

1 January 0.6 (2009)
1 February 0.7
1 March 0.5
1 April 0.6
1 May 0.6
1 June 0.7
1 July 1.9
1 August 0.6
1 September 0.6
...
...
29 September 0.48
30 September 0.36
1 October ?
2 October ?
3 October ?

As an illustration, at noon (pacific time) on 29 September, Smolin's book ranked 14632 and the top five stringy books (elegant, fabric, hyperspace, parallel, black hole) ranked 4320, 5472, 5531, 5769, 13871, averaging 6992.6 for a ratio of 0.48.

Surprising physics-sociology poll response:
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=2321&cpage=1#comment-50462
A poll was conducted of active physics researchers, to which over 1000 individuals responded. A reply rate of around 14%.

Of the respondents, 23% said good press helps funding!

==quote==

“In your experience, how important is it in obtaining funding that your project or research area is well covered in the media?”

Very important/somewhat important: 23.5%

Results of a survey conducted by UCSB survey center in April 2009 among active researchers in physics in North America. The final number of respondents amounted to 1816, which corresponds to response rate of 14.42%.
==endquote==

The blessèd and very nearly canonized Bee Hossenfelder, whose with-it-ness is beyond compare, reports this!

 

[marcus]

Ready to do the average for 1 October. (Five noon readings taken around the date, to smooth out some of the random fluctuation.)

Trouble with Physics salesrank compared with the string benchmark

1 January 0.6 (2009)
1 February 0.7
1 March 0.5
1 April 0.6
1 May 0.6
1 June 0.7
1 July 1.9
1 August 0.6
1 September 0.6
...
...
29 September 0.48
30 September 0.36
1 October 0.19
2 October 0.60
3 October 0.43

As an illustration, at noon (pacific time) on 29 September, Smolin's book ranked 14632 and the top five stringy books (elegant, fabric, hyperspace, parallel, black hole) ranked 4320, 5472, 5531, 5769, 13871, averaging 6992.6 for a ratio of 0.48.

Likewise at noon on 3 October, TwP ranked 12851 and the top five stringies (fabric, elegant, parallel, hyperspace, black hole) ranked 1956, 2528, 3642, 5980, 13313, for an average of 5483.8 making the ratio 0.43.

Taking the mean for the five days around the first of the month gives 0.41. So our updated record is

1 January 0.6 (2009)
1 February 0.7
1 March 0.5
1 April 0.6
1 May 0.6
1 June 0.7
1 July 1.9
1 August 0.6
1 September 0.6
1 October 0.4

=============
We have been tracking the string publication rate measured using the Harvard abstracts database with keywords superstring, M-theory, brane, AdS/CFT, heterotic, compactification. As of 2 October the 8-month figures (successive years, through the end of August) were 3318, 3306, 3081.

It is not yet time to check the 9-month figures since the 2009 entries for September won't have been completed, but I will set up the links.

2007: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

2008: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

2009: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

These are for the first 9 months of each year, using keywords superstring, brane, M-theory, AdS/CFT, compactification, heterotic.

 

[marcus]

String publication rate for the first 9 months, measured using the Harvard abstracts database with keywords superstring, M-theory, brane, AdS/CFT, heterotic, compactification. As of 21 October the 9-month figures (successive years, through the end of September) for 2007, 2008, 2009 were 3656, 3651, 3495.

2007: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

2008: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

2009: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

As a spot check to see how Smolin's book is doing, at noon (pacific time) on 21 October it ranked 11327 and the top five stringy books (fabric, elegant, parallel, hyperspace, black hole) ranked 3820, 4153, 4413, 11620, 14185, averaging 7638.2 for a ratio of 0.67.1 January 0.6 (2009)
1 February 0.7
1 March 0.5
1 April 0.6
1 May 0.6
1 June 0.7
1 July 1.9
1 August 0.6
1 September 0.6
1 October 0.4
...
...
21 October 0.7

Averaging the figures for the first of each month gives 0.72. Roughly speaking that means that judging by salesranks Trouble with Physics is doing about 70% as good as the average popular string top-fiver. That topfive string salesrank is what I've been using as a benchmark for comparison for several years.
==============

Here is loop/foam publication rate in two-year chunks.

[2003 2004]
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+%28DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY+AND+DK+LOOP+SPACE%29+AND+DATE+%3E+2002+and+date+%3C+2005&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=citecount%28d%29

[2005 2006]
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+%28DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY+AND+DK+LOOP+SPACE%29+AND+DATE+%3E+2004+and+date+%3C+2007&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=citecount%28d%29

[2007, 2008]
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+%28DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY+AND+DK+LOOP+SPACE%29+AND+DATE+%3E+2006+and+date+%3C+2009&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=citecount%28d%29

127, 136, 196

And here's publication for this year so far:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+%28DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY+AND+DK+LOOP+SPACE%29+AND+DATE+%3D+2009&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=citecount%28d%29

as of 21 October, 77

 

[marcus]

As noon spot checks to see how Smolin's book is doing,
on 21 October it ranked 11327 and the top five stringy books averaged 7638.2 for a ratio of 0.67.
On 24 October, it ranked 7501 compared with stringy benchmark 4978.4 for a ratio of 0.66.
On 25 October, it ranked 8927 compared with benchmark 8116.2 for a ratio of 0.91.
On 26 October, it ranked 13321 compared with 6271.6 for a ratio of 0.47.

The stringy top five on those four days happened to be
fabric, elegant, parallel, hyperspace, black hole, and then
elegant, parallel, fabric, hyperspace, idiot guide--- then
parallel, fabric, elegant, hyperspace, paperback elegant---and
parallel, hyperspace, fabric, elegant, paperback elegant.1 January 0.6 (2009)
1 February 0.7
1 March 0.5
1 April 0.6
1 May 0.6
1 June 0.7
1 July 1.9
1 August 0.6
1 September 0.6
1 October 0.4
...
...
21 October 0.7
...
24 October 0.7
25 October 0.9
26 October 0.5
...

Averaging the figures for the first of each month gives 0.72. Roughly speaking that means that judging by salesranks Trouble with Physics is doing about 70% as good as the average string top-fiver. That topfive string salesrank average is what I've been using as a benchmark for comparison for several years.
==============

As of 26 October, string publication rate for the first 9 months, measured using the Harvard abstracts database with keywords superstring, M-theory, brane, AdS/CFT, heterotic, compactification, through the end of September for 2007, 2008, 2009
were 3657, 3651, 3501.
Late listings can still raise the last figure, but so far it has not come up as much as I expected.

 

[marcus]

The risks associated with letting an academic discipline go "off the rails" and the damage to the discipline itself were highlighted in a post quoted on Brad DeLong's blog. It's so telling that I thought i would copy a portion of it here:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/10/the-state-of-economics-in-the-2000s-analogized.html
The poster quoted by DeLong (an economist at UC Berkeley) draws analogy between postmodern ("pomo") literary studies and Market-worship econ, referred to here as "freshwater" economics----the Chicago school.

==quote==
I've been watching the freshwater/saltwater economics wars with a kind of horrified fascination -- something like the way I feel on those rare occasions when I watch train wreck TV (Hoarders and the like.) One of the things I keep wondering is: how on Earth did this happen? How did large chunk of the economics profession come so completely unmoored that Larry Summers could say "There are idiots", and have that be a useful response to anything? How did it come about that Richard Posner could write this:

The dominant conception of economics today, and one that has guided my own academic work in the economics of law, is that economics is the study of rational choice. People are assumed to make rational decisions across the entire range of human choice, including but not limited to market transactions, by employing a form (usually truncated and informal) of cost-benefit analysis. The older view was that economics is the study of the economy, employing whatever assumptions seem realistic and whatever analytical methods come to hand.​

as though economics could just stop being "the study of the economy" using whatever methods seem useful and appropriate?

Plainly there has to be an intellectual explanation for this, which people like Paul Krugman have addressed. But I think there also has to be an explanation in terms of the sociology of academic disciplines. And in that light, it seems to me that if I were a journalist, I'd consider writing a piece comparing freshwater economics to the other major recent case in which an academic discipline went completely off the rails, namely English departments' swing into postmodernism in the '80s and early '90s. Offhand, there seem to be some real similarities, e.g.:

In both cases, the people involved maintained, credibly, that you couldn't really assess the work in question without putting a lot of effort into understanding it.

In both cases, that required mastering difficult stuff. (In econ, all the math and models; in pomo lit stuff, mastering the literally incomprehensible language in which a lot of that stuff was written.)

In both cases, that deterred a lot of people on the outside who were generally puzzled and skeptical, but didn't want to spend years getting into a position in which they could credibly say: yes, this is, in fact, nuts.

So in both cases practitioners were largely insulated from criticism they had to take seriously.
​

Relatedly, in both cases it took shocks from the outside to expose the problems in this (in the case of English, things like the Sokal hoax; in the case of econ, the near-collapse of the global economy.)

Both cases involved a lot of arrogance, and a generally dismissive attitude towards other approaches. Since, in both cases, practitioners were able to seize significant amounts of control over a discipline before their approach crashed and burned, this did real damage to the disciplines in question (leading to, e.g., large chunks of previous disciplinary history being forgotten.)
...
==endquote==

 

[marcus]

I'm trying a better search which explicitly includes loop cosmology. Earlier searches missed loop cosmology papers which didn't happen to be tagged LQG.
Here is loop/foam publication rate in two-year chunks.

[2003 2004]
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+DK+LOOP+SPACE+AND+%28DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY+OR+DK+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY%29AND+DATE+%3E+2002+AND+DATE+%3C+2005&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=

[2005 2006]
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+DK+LOOP+SPACE+AND+%28DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY+OR+DK+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY%29AND+DATE+%3E+2004+AND+DATE+%3C+2007&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=

[2007, 2008]
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+DK+LOOP+SPACE+AND+%28DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY+OR+DK+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY%29AND+DATE+%3E+2006+AND+DATE+%3C+2009&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=
144, 165, 242

And here's publication for this year so far:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+DK+LOOP+SPACE+AND+%28DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY+OR+DK+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY%29AND+DATE+%3D+2009&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=
93

Smolin book's performance compared with string top five benchmark

1 January 0.6 (2009)
1 February 0.7
1 March 0.5
1 April 0.6
1 May 0.6
1 June 0.7
1 July 1.9
1 August 0.6
1 September 0.6
1 October 0.4
...
...
31 October 0.59
1 November ?
2 November ?
...
...
To eliminate some random fluctuation I will average three noon readings around 1 November to determine the first-of-month figure.

At noon pacific on 31 October Trouble ranked 10125 and the five most popular string books (fabric, elegant, parallel, hyperspace, paperback elegant) ranked 3617, 3704, 6568, 6899, 9089 for an average of 5975.4 making the ratio 0.59.

 

[marcus]

Smolin book's performance compared with string top five benchmark

1 January 0.6 (2009)
1 February 0.7
1 March 0.5
1 April 0.6
1 May 0.6
1 June 0.7
1 July 1.9
1 August 0.6
1 September 0.6
1 October 0.4
...
...
31 October 0.59
1 November 0.30
2 November 0.68
...
...
To eliminate some random fluctuation I will average three noon readings around 1 November to determine the first-of-month figure.

At noon pacific on 31 October Trouble ranked 10125 and the five most popular string books (fabric, elegant, parallel, hyperspace, paperback elegant) ranked 3617, 3704, 6568, 6899, 9089 for an average of 5975.4 making the ratio 0.5902.
At noon 1 November it ranked 14296 and the stringy top five averaged 4302.4 making the ratio 0.3010.
At noon 2 November Trouble ranked 13091 and the stringy top five (fabric, elegant, hyperspace, parallel, paperback elegant) ranked 4607, 4942, 7920, 8098, 18892 for an average of 8891.8 making the ratio 0.6792. Averaging the three ratios around 1 November gives the smoothed figure of 0.523.

Smolin book's performance, updated:

1 January 0.6 (2009)
1 February 0.7
1 March 0.5
1 April 0.6
1 May 0.6
1 June 0.7
1 July 1.9
1 August 0.6
1 September 0.6
1 October 0.4
1 November 0.5

======================

Another popular book related to 4D quantum gravity/cosmology has come on the market---this time in Germany.
In the USA, Knopf has purchased the rights to publish an English version but the translation has not appeared.
What is remarkable is how well the book has been doing. It came out in January 2009, and yesterday (when I came across it for the first time) it was Amazon's #1 in cosmology and #2 in theoretical physics.
The book is Zurück vor den Urknall, by Martin Bojowald, published by Fischer.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/3100039106/?tag=pfamazon01-20
I just checked today and saw it was #4 in theoretical physics and #5 in cosmology.

Knall means bang, and Ur means original or primordial---Urknall is German for big bang. The title means "back before the big bang." Bojowald essentially initiated the field of Loop Quantum Cosmology (LQC) with his 2001 paper where he applied LQG ideas to the usual cosmology model---which assumes isotropy and homogeneity---and found that the classical singularity did not occur, but was replaced by a bounce.

 

[marcus]

Another popular book related to 4D quantum gravity/cosmology has come on the market---this time in Germany.
In the USA, Knopf has purchased the rights to publish an English version but the translation has not appeared.
What is remarkable is how well the book has been doing. It came out in [correction: April] 2009, and yesterday (when I came across it for the first time) it was Amazon's #1 in cosmology and #2 in theoretical physics.
The book is Zurück vor den Urknall, by Martin Bojowald, published by Fischer.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/3100039106/?tag=pfamazon01-20
I just checked today and saw it was #4 in theoretical physics and #5 in cosmology.

Knall means bang, and Ur means original or primordial---Urknall is German for big bang. The title means "back before the big bang." Bojowald essentially initiated the field of Loop Quantum Cosmology (LQC) with his 2001 paper where he applied LQG ideas to the usual cosmology model---which assumes isotropy and homogeneity---and found that the classical singularity did not occur, but was replaced by a bounce.

On 6 November, when I happened to look, Bojowald's book ranked 7117 and we can use Green's two books Das elegante Universum, and Der Stoff aus dem der Kosmos ist as a benchmark for comparison.

Zurück 7117
Elegante 5509
Stoff 11613
Benchmark average 8561.0
Ratio 1.2

That is, on a basis of salesranks, Bojowald's book was doing slightly better than par. It was better than the arbitrary benchmark by a factor of 1.2.

I'll be interested to see how this book does, in part because it is the first book of its kind. It is the first popular book that focuses on the Loop Quantum Gravity approach to modeling the universe. This approach first appeared in 2001 in a paper by Martin Bojowald (who founded Loop Quantum Cosmology as a research field when he was a 28 year old postdoc at Penn State.)

Other books have touched on Loop and on that theory's application to cosmology---to the extent of a chapter, or a part of a chapter. But no book that I know of has presented the theory as its main focus---and made that a window on quantum cosmology.

In some sense the benchmark I've chosen represents the "size of the problem" which a book like Bojowald's confronts. The public has been sold the idea that string promises a unified fundamental theory of nature. The perennially high salesrank of the two Greene books (now 5-10 years old) is an objective measure of the extent of that persistent illusion. So the benchmark is a simple way to compute and represent the "target". That's one reason I'm interested in seeing how Back before the Big Bang does in relation to it. Another is that it affords a convenient and fairly reliable benchmark just to give meaning to the numbers.

 

[marcus]

At noon pacific on 8 November, Bojowald's book (Zurück vor den Urknall) was doing about 90% as good as the stringy benchmark.
Zurück ranked 5198
while Elegante and Stoff ranked 7023 and 2463 for an average of 4743.0, making the ratio 0.9.

I think it is darned respectable. He's basically just a hardhead young physicist, and this is his first book. He's not a salesman word-artist in the same league as Greene. He simply created the current going field of quantum cosmology and is writing about it. I don't expect him to be able to write literary pop-sci, or to compete with Brian Greene. But he's doing OK.
The book is holding up. It stays at around #1 to #5 in the Amazon bestseller categories of Cosmology and of Theoretical Physics, which is where the Greene books have tended to be around #1 or #2 a lot of the time.

Smolin's book is not specifically focused on Loop (which Martin's book is). Smolin's is about the whole range of QG approaches, string and various non-string initiatives, and why it would be smarter to use a mixed strategy (in science research policy) rather than all the eggs in one dubious and over-sold basket.
So the books are quite different. Bojowald is a positive focused science book. Smolin is more a critique and policy overview book.

And Smolin's book is also hanging in there. We are into its third year on the market (first edition September 2006). As of noon pacific 8 November, Trouble ranked 5989 and the string top five (parallel, fabric, hyperspace, elegant, paperback elegant) ranked 3362, 4510, 7501, 8292, 11759, for an average of 7084.8 making the ratio 1.2.
So the Smolin book was actually doing better than the string benchmark, today.

========================

Today, 9 November, I decided to check Bojowald's standing at 6PM Berlin time, that is 9 AM in the morning here (Pacific time is the local time where I live.)
I found that there was another popular string book in the picture---Lisa Randall's Verborgene ("Warped")

The ranks on Deutsch Amazon were:
Zurück 5522

Stoff 3068
Verborgene 7958
Elegante 15739

I now think that in the German market I should take as benchmark the top two stringy books, whatever they happen to be. In the past, except for today, whenever I looked the top two stringies were always the Greene books, Stoff and Elegante---so it amounted to the same thing.
All one needs is some consistent benchmark for comparison that is always defined the same way---then one can see trends, if there are any.

So doing it that way we have the stringy top two benchmark (3068+7958)/2 = 5513.0
and the ratio 5513/5522 = 1.0.
Bojowald performance is right on par with the string benchmark we are using.
We'll see where this goes---I have no guess about it.

 

[marcus]

I'm experimenting with keeping track of the salesrank of Zurück vor den Urknall (ZvU) compared with a string benchmark. Based on the Amazon.de rank at 6PM Berlin time. The benchmark I'm currently trying out is the average rank of the 3 most popular string books

9 November 1.6
...
11 November 0.5

Today at 6 PM central europe time, the "back before primal bang" book's performance was only about 50% as good as the benchmark I have chosen for comparison---the average rank of the three stringy books which are currently most popular.
To illustrate, Zurück ranked 20726, and the three most popular stringies (which happened to be Stoff, Verborgene, and Elegante) ranked 5616, 8759, 16385 for an average 10253.3 and ratio 0.49.
===============

The Smolin book is surprisingly durable in the USA market. But the index jumps around a lot.
At noon pacific (the usual time to check) on 10 November it ranked 8065 and the top five stringies (fabric, parallel, elegant, hyperspace, paperback elegant) averaged 7559.4 for a ratio of 0.94.
On the other hand at noon on 11 November the ratio was 0.30! Trouble ranked 16820 and the five currently most popular string books (elegant, fabric, parallel, hyperspace, paper elegant) 2356, 3811, 5192, 5946, 7521, averaging 4965.2 for a ratio of 0.30. Partly because of this variability, the first-of-month figures recorded here are smoothed---averaged over a window of several days around the date in question. Here is how the book has done so far this year:

Trouble with Physcs, Amazon salesrank performance compared with five most popular string titles.

1 January 0.6 (2009)
1 February 0.7
1 March 0.5
1 April 0.6
1 May 0.6
1 June 0.7
1 July 1.9
1 August 0.6
1 September 0.6
1 October 0.4
1 November 0.5
================
Publications from Spires (keywords spin foam OR group field theory OR loop [quantum gravity or quantum cosmology])
2005:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+DK+field+theory%2C+group+OR+DK+LOOP+SPACE+AND+%28DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY+OR+DK+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY%29AND+DATE+%3D+2005&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=
2006:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+DK+field+theory%2C+group+OR+DK+LOOP+SPACE+AND+%28DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY+OR+DK+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY%29AND+DATE+%3D+2006&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=
2007:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+DK+field+theory%2C+group+OR+DK+LOOP+SPACE+AND+%28DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY+OR+DK+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY%29AND+DATE+%3D+2007&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=
2008:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+DK+field+theory%2C+group+OR+DK+LOOP+SPACE+AND+%28DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY+OR+DK+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY%29AND+DATE+%3D+2008&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=
2009:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+DK+field+theory%2C+group+OR+DK+LOOP+SPACE+AND+%28DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY+OR+DK+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY%29AND+DATE+%3D+2009&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=

 

[marcus]

Correction to above post (too late to edit)
2005:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+DK+FIELD+THEORY%2C+GROUP+OR+DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+OR+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+AND+DATE+%3D+2005&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=
2006:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+DK+FIELD+THEORY%2C+GROUP+OR+DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+OR+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+AND+DATE+%3D+2006&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=
2007:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+DK+FIELD+THEORY%2C+GROUP+OR+DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+OR+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+AND+DATE+%3D+2007&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=
2008:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+DK+FIELD+THEORY%2C+GROUP+OR+DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+OR+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+AND+DATE+%3D+2008&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=
2009:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+DK+FIELD+THEORY%2C+GROUP+OR+DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+OR+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+AND+DATE+%3D+2009&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=

As of 11 November 2009 the numbers of publications in successive years were 40, 82, 121, 129, 108.
To get the list ordered by citation count, use the above links and select citecount sequence from the menu.
The DESY keywords used here are "spin, foam", "field theory, group", "quantum gravity, loop space", and "quantum cosmology, loop space".

Continuing to keep track of the Bojowald book---the first popular book I know of that is specifically focused on the Loop approach to gravity. Here's the salesrank of Zurück vor den Urknall (ZvU) compared with a string benchmark. Based on the Amazon.de rank at 6PM Berlin time. The benchmark I'm currently trying out is the average rank of the 3 most popular string books

9 November 1.6
...
11 November 0.5
12 November 0.7To illustrate, at 6PM central European time on 11 November, Zurück ranked 20726, and the three most popular stringies (which happened to be Stoff, Verborgene, and Elegante) ranked 5616, 8759, 16385 for an average 10253.3 and ratio 0.49.

 

[marcus]

In terms of "Academic Sociology" we can see non-string QG, especially Loop, getting more established as new centers grow up. Today I got news of a new center at Erlangen. An email from Thomas Thiemann was circulated. Here's an excerpt:

"The successful candidate will be part of the new international centre for quantum gravity at the FAU which is currently in its building up phase. In the close future the centre will host one W3 professor position (chair),
three W2 (associate, tenured) professor positions
and at least three postdoc positions
plus guests, fellows, PhD and diploma students."

[so that means 4 tenured professors, and at least 3 postdocs, one hopes more]

"Altogether, there is space for up to 30 scientists. Current staff includes professors Michael Thies and Thomas Thiemann (chair), Emeriti Frieder Lenz (former chair) and Hartmut Hofmann, postdocs Emanuele Alesci, Enrique Ferandez Borja,
Jonathan Engle and Inaki Garay, as well as Phd and Diploma students."

Thiemann's name should be familiar. Prominent in the Loop research community for some 15 years. Most of that time divided between Perimeter Institute (at Waterloo) and the Albert Einstein Institute (AEI at Potsdam-Golm).

Engle was Ashtekar's PhD student, then postdoc with Rovelli at Marseille, then at the AEI with Thiemann. Alesci is a Rovelli PhD who postdoc'd at Marseille and AEI.

Until recently the AEI was the only center for Loop QG research in Germany. Today's news from Thiemann falls in line with a trend towards proliferation of centers. In France this process occurred earlier. The first center was set up at Marseille, when Rovelli moved there. Now there are researchers at Lyon and Tours, with related work also being done at Montpellier and Saclay.
One can see a similar process occurring in Poland, among other places. Also a proliferation of centers involved in QG research which is not Loop, but somewhat related like CDT (Triangulations QG)

======================

We now have what seems like a pretty good Loop publication index. It uses the Spires base with DESY keywords "spin, foam", "field theory, group", "quantum gravity, loop space", and "quantum cosmology, loop space".
As of 14 November the numbers of publications in successive years were:

2005 40
2006 82
2007 121
2008 129
2009 112 (incomplete)

2005:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+DK+FIELD+THEORY%2C+GROUP+OR+DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+OR+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+AND+DATE+%3D+2005&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=
2006:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+DK+FIELD+THEORY%2C+GROUP+OR+DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+OR+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+AND+DATE+%3D+2006&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=
2007:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+DK+FIELD+THEORY%2C+GROUP+OR+DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+OR+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+AND+DATE+%3D+2007&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=
2008:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+DK+FIELD+THEORY%2C+GROUP+OR+DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+OR+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+AND+DATE+%3D+2008&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=
2009:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+DK+FIELD+THEORY%2C+GROUP+OR+DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+OR+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+AND+DATE+%3D+2009&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=

Europe tends to be ahead of the USA in Quantum Gravity so it is not surprising that the first popular book specifically focused on the Loop approach should appear in Europe. Martin Bojowald's Zurück vor den Urknall ("Before the Big Bang", I abbreviate it ZvU). I've been checking its amazon.com rank at 6PM Berlin time. For a comparison I'm using a string benchmark---the average rank of the 3 currently most popular string books

9 November 1.6
...
11 November 0.5
12 November 0.7
...
14 November 0.9To illustrate, at 6PM central European time on 14 November, Zurück ranked 8253, and the three most popular stringies (which happened to be Stoff, Verborgene, and Elegante) ranked 6349, 6867, 8250 for an average 7155.3 and ratio 0.87.

 

[marcus]

It looks like our Loop publication index might be a bit down this year from last. But still roughly the same level as 2007 and 2008, keeping the gains made since 2005. The index uses the Spires base with DESY keywords "spin, foam", "field theory, group", "quantum gravity, loop space", and "quantum cosmology, loop space".
As of 17 November the numbers of publications in successive years were:

2005 40
2006 82
2007 121
2008 129
2009 115

Of course not all the 2009 papers are in, since we still have the remainder of the year to go. In case anyone would like to check out this year's papers, here is the link:2009:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+DK+FIELD+THEORY%2C+GROUP+OR+DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+OR+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+AND+DATE+%3D+2009&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=

==========
Martin Bojowald's book is still doing pretty well. I check sporadically---take its amazon.com rank at 6PM Berlin time and compare with a string benchmark,the average rank of the 3 currently most popular string books.

Salesrank performance of Zurück vor den Urknall ("Before the Big Bang").

9 November 1.6
...
11 November 0.5
12 November 0.7
...
14 November 0.9
...
16 November 0.3
17 November 1.4To illustrate, at 6PM central European time on 14 November, Zurück ranked 8253, and the three most popular stringies (which happened to be Stoff, Verborgene, and Elegante) ranked 6349, 6867, 8250 for an average 7155.3 and ratio 0.87.

Again, at 6PM central European time on 17 November, Bojowald's book ranked 8808 and the three most popular string books (Stoff, Elegante, Verborgene) ranked 8647, 13307, 14385 for an average of 12133, making the ratio 1.38.
=============

Yesterday I glanced at the noon standing of Smolin's book. It was at 40% of the string benchmark.
First of month figures this year have been:

Trouble with Physcs, Amazon salesrank performance compared with five most popular string titles.

1 January 0.6 (2009)
1 February 0.7
1 March 0.5
1 April 0.6
1 May 0.6
1 June 0.7
1 July 1.9
1 August 0.6
1 September 0.6
1 October 0.4
1 November 0.5
...
...
16 November 0.4

The figure yesterday, 16 November, was not especially good, but not terrible either. The five most popular stringies at noon today were parallel, elegant, hyperspace, fabric, black hole. Average salesrank 6510.0. Trouble with Physics ranked 15,958.

 

[marcus]

Updates on a few indices:
Loop publication index is roughly the same level as 2007 and 2008, keeping the gains made since 2005. The index uses the Spires base with DESY keywords "spin, foam", "field theory, group", "quantum gravity, loop space", and "quantum cosmology, loop space".2005 40
2006 82
2007 121
2008 129
2009 119 (as of 21 November)

In case anyone would like to check out this year's papers, here is the link:
2009:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+DK+FIELD+THEORY%2C+GROUP+OR+DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+OR+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+AND+DATE+%3D+2009&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=
The index has not yet registered several papers that came out around the 19th, primarily by Thomas Thiemann's group.
Nor has it registered the Krasnov-Gomez paper that appeared earlier. There can be lag and uncertainty in the classification but on the whole it is excellent and a great help.
==========

Salesrank performance of Zurück vor den Urknall ("Before the Big Bang")
at 6PM Berlin time, compared with the average rank of the 3 currently most popular string books

9 November 1.6
...
11 November 0.5
12 November 0.7
...
14 November 0.9
...
16 November 0.3
17 November 1.4
...
19 November 0.5
20 November 0.4To illustrate, at 6PM central European time on 17 November, Bojowald's book ranked 8808 and the three most popular string books (Stoff, Elegante, Verborgene) ranked 8647, 13307, 14385 for an average of 12133, making the ratio 1.38.

Again, at 6PM central European time on 19 November, Zurück ranked 13523, and the three most popular stringies (which happened to be Stoff, Verborgene, and Elegante) ranked 3616, 7117, 10605 for an average 7112.7 and a ratio of 0.53. In other words Bojowald's book was doing only about half as well as the stringy benchmark (since his rank was about twice the stringy average.)
=============

Trouble with Physcs, Amazon salesrank performance compared with five most popular string titles.

1 January 0.6 (2009)
1 February 0.7
1 March 0.5
1 April 0.6
1 May 0.6
1 June 0.7
1 July 1.9
1 August 0.6
1 September 0.6
1 October 0.4
1 November 0.5
...
16 November 0.4
...
19 November 0.3
20 November 0.4
21 November 0.5

To illustrate, at noon California time on 20 November, Trouble ranked 23668 and the five most popular stringies (parallel, hyperspace, elegant, fabric, black hole) ranked 5325, 6085, 6275, 6782 for an average of 9717.2 and a ratio of 0.40.
At noon on 21 November, Trouble ranked 12309 and the stringy top five averaged 5698.8, making the ratio 0.46.

 

[marcus]

Our Loop publication index uses the Spires base with DESY keywords "spin, foam", "field theory, group", "quantum gravity, loop space", and "quantum cosmology, loop space".

2005 40
2006 82
2007 121
2008 129
2009 121 (as of 22 November)

Here is the link for 2009 papers:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+DK+FIELD+THEORY%2C+GROUP+OR+DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+OR+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+AND+DATE+%3D+2009&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=
The index has not yet registered a few of the papers that came out around the 19th from Thomas Thiemann's group.
==========

Salesrank performance of Zurück vor den Urknall ("Before the Big Bang")
at 6PM Berlin time, compared with the average rank of the 3 currently most popular string books

9 November 1.6
...
11 November 0.5
12 November 0.7
...
14 November 0.9
...
16 November 0.3
17 November 1.4
...
19 November 0.5
20 November 0.4
...
22 November 0.4To illustrate how the index works, at 6PM central European time on 19 November, Zurück ranked 13523, and the three most popular stringies (which happened to be Stoff, Verborgene, and Elegante) ranked 3616, 7117, 10605 for an average 7112.7 and a ratio of 0.53. In other words Bojowald's book was doing about half as well as the stringy benchmark (since its rank was about twice the stringy average.)
=============

Trouble with Physcs, Amazon salesrank performance compared with five most popular string titles.

1 January 0.6 (2009)
1 February 0.7
1 March 0.5
1 April 0.6
1 May 0.6
1 June 0.7
1 July 1.9
1 August 0.6
1 September 0.6
1 October 0.4
1 November 0.5
...
16 November 0.4
...
19 November 0.3
20 November 0.4
21 November 0.5
22 November 0.6

E.g. at noon California time on 22 November, Trouble ranked 10450 and the five most popular stringies ( elegant, fabric, parallel, hyperspace, black hole) ranked 3289, 3609, 4731, 7749, 10243 for an average of 5924.2 and a ratio of 0.57.

 

[marcus]

Loop publication index using the Spires base with DESY keywords "spin, foam", "field theory, group", "quantum gravity, loop space", and "quantum cosmology, loop space".

2005 40
2006 82
2007 121
2008 129
2009 124 (as of 26 November)

Here is the link for 2009 papers:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+DK+FIELD+THEORY%2C+GROUP+OR+DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+OR+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+AND+DATE+%3D+2009&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=
The index has not yet registered a few Loop papers (e.g. from Thiemann's group) that came out this month. No matter, just an approximate index and we should allow for some imperfection. DESY basically has great librarians .
==========

Salesrank performance of Zurück vor den Urknall ("Before the Big Bang")
at 6PM Berlin time, compared with the average rank of the 3 currently most popular string books
This is the first popular wide audience book focused on regular 4D quantum gravity and quantum cosmology (QC). It is cosmology from a non-stringy direction--based on LQC. Will be interesting to see how it does. Came out April 2009.

9 November 1.6
...
11 November 0.5
12 November 0.7
...
14 November 0.9
...
16 November 0.3
17 November 1.4
...
19 November 0.5
20 November 0.4
...
22 November 0.4
...
26 November 1.0 (5 PM Berlin time, since was unable to check at 6PM)

=============

Trouble with Physcs, Amazon salesrank performance compared with five most popular string titles.

19 November 0.3
20 November 0.4
21 November 0.5
22 November 0.6
...
26 November 0.6 (busy day, had to check at 1PM local instead of noon)

 

[Fra]

But the index jumps around a lot. At noon pacific (the usual time to check) on 10 November it ranked 8065 and the top five stringies (fabric, parallel, elegant, hyperspace, paperback elegant) averaged 7559.4 for a ratio of 0.94.

I never ever read any of those books before, but all your posts made me curious, so I actually bought two of Greenes books in order to skim them (I skipped some chapters that seemed too blend). (Elegant and fabric). I'm in the end of fabric atm, and although I had no high expectations, for me the book was worse than I thought. I perceive it as making very speculative suggestions without providing any deep motivation, not even at philosophical or conceptual level. It's main motivator seems to be excitement about mathematical games, which in my world doesn't quite connect to reality in any deeper sense.

Even as a non-string fan, I see some hope in string theory, that could probably be conveyed in a popular form, but nothing of what I had "hoped for" was in thta book.

Anyway, now I at least konw what the "standard" is for Marcus ratings :)

/Fredrik

 

[marcus]

...
Anyway, now I at least know what the "standard" is for Marcus ratings :)

/Fredrik

YUK!



I think the Greene books give teenagers the wrong idea of theoretical physics. The fact that they continue to sell represents the size of the problem. That is why I use the popular string books as a benchmark for comparison.
What I'm wondering about, since I haven't seen the original German edition of Züruck, is the book's popularization style.
From what I've seen of the introduction, it doesn't raise false expectations and it is open and forthright about the limitations of present knowledge. (The title was presumably the publisher's choice--the common practice.) Does Martin Bojowald have some of the Carl Sagan talent---the common touch, the occasional memorable phrase---that makes for a longterm hit, or is his style on the heavy side, say a bit pedantic? That would be all right, I suppose, an honest informative book about an interesting subject doesn't have to have literary flair. But it would sure be nice if it did.

If you ever see Bojowald's book where you can browse it, Fra, I would really like to know your impressions. I assume you have a reading knowledge of German, at least enough to skim a chapter or two and get a sense of how it reads. I'd like to know either way, whether your impression is favorable or unfavorable.

 

[Fra]

I think the Greene books give teenagers the wrong idea of theoretical physics.

Yes, I agree. The impression is that the unquestionable future of theoretical physics IS string theory. Expressions like "researchers today think that..." like if it was established consensus in general.

I actually thought the book was going to be better, so it was an interesting read in that sense.

Of course I am quite familiar with this type of reasoning long before I read this book, since an old supervisor of mine was exactly like Greene, telling me to face that if I want a future in theoretical physics as a profession, string theory is my only choice or I should consider an alternative carrier... and so on. But those spells didn't work on me.

I think the Greene books give teenagers the wrong idea of theoretical physics.

For teens, I honestly think the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy beats the crap out of Greens book any day.

What I'm wondering about, since I haven't seen the original German edition of Züruck, is the book's popularization style.
...
If you ever see Bojowald's book where you can browse it, Fra, I would really like to know your impressions. I assume you have a reading knowledge of German

My german is very poor unfortunately even though I've been in german several times, they make the worlds best beer next to belgium :) Sure I know a few phrases, but I studied french in school as third language (due to my own ignorance at the time).

I am actually considering some book for xmas reading, since smolin hasn't finished his yet. I checked amazon and the swedish site I by from but found only the german version?

Do you have the full correct title of the translation? do you have a link? I cna't locate it.

/Fredrik

 

[marcus]

Fra, there is so far no English translation on the market!
I saw a notice that the US publisher Alfred Knopf has purchased rights to sell the translation.

But I didn't yet see any news about them getting a translation made, or about going to market with it.

My rough guess is that an English version of Bojowald's book is about 2 years away. One year to make the translation (if they are already working on it) and then one year for editing/revision and production.

Apologies. I didn't mean to give the impression that there was an English version. My only handle on the book is the amazon.com page.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/3100039106/?tag=pfamazon01-20
On this page, incidentally, there is a link to a sample from the introductory chapter. The link is in the "Product information" section about halfway down the page:
"...
Produktinformation
Leseprobe: Jetzt reinlesen [106kb PDF]
..."
The sample, as I recall, is a half-dozen pages more or less.

=======
EDIT
Just so I don't forget, on 29 November 6PM central Europe time, Bojowald book's ratio was 0.78 against the top three stringies.
(Stoff, Verborgene, Elegant ranked 3089, 8101, 9506 for average of 6898.7, Züruck ranked 8836)

 

[Fra]

Ah thanks Marcus for the clarification. I must have misunderstood you, I thought you had read the english book but not the german one.

Apologies. I didn't mean to give the impression that there was an English version. My only handle on the book is the amazon.com page.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/3100039106/?tag=pfamazon01-20
On this page, incidentally, there is a link to a sample from the introductory chapter. The link is in the "Product information" section about halfway down the page:
"...
Produktinformation
Leseprobe: Jetzt reinlesen [106kb PDF]
..."
The sample, as I recall, is a half-dozen pages more or less.

Thanks to my dictionary skills beeing better than man language skills, I could skim that sample :) However I wouldn't be able to read an entire book in german without large efforts. Also a lot of the subtle messages easily gets lost in translations.

I haven't read more than some random paper of Martin Bojowald but my impression is that he has a the constrained focus of quantum cosmology, whith cosmology referring to "convential cosmology", as opposed to a more abstract "cosmology" which one can imagine where an inside observers is crusiing a hypothesis space that is perhaps expanding and changing shape.

This form of quantum cosmology (wether LQC or something else) is not the area where I feel I have the best grip on things, so I can't even judge what a good conceptualization or popularisation of that would be like. Since my choice of conceptualization does start from this more abstract information theoretic angle.

My impression is that this "conventional quantum cosmology" somehow starts with some IMHO highly questionable assumptions of hilbert spaces and wave functions of the universe.

So my take on quantum cosmology would not be to try to actually do a regular quantum theory of some version of classical GR, my preferences would be to analyse the foundations of QM, and then argue that if you take the inside view seriously (which current theory do not), then an evolving perspective is the natural solution. And this indirectly leads also to a "kind of" cosmological models since it suggest that there is a large scale evolution (where "large" is referenced from an inside observer). ie. the conventional cosmology, and GR in particular, would be a result in this program - not an input. The form of GR, is very suggestive and it's too suggestive for me to not make me think it's a special case of a yet deeper formalism.

This is why, as far as I understand it, Bojowald is taking on a task of elaboration one possibility, and it seems from that exctrated paper that he is honest and raises a warning that most areas of this research is speculative, and that there are deeper aspects of this that are still very open. So in that sense it seems to be honest.

But the very fact that as I suspect, except these sound precautions, the bulk of the book would probably elaborate the implications of one idea. This might from start reject those readers that question his initial foundations. I fully accept the LQC possibility, but I find it so objectionable that the amount of elaborative energy I'm willing to put into that, in competition to other ideas is limited.

In this sense, I think Smolin for comparasion has managed to write a book with wider applicability - too wide maybe, but this is why I am look forward to this next book.

/Fredrik

 

[marcus]

I also look forward to seeing Smolin's next book. I think a preferred time for popular physics books to come out is early September. That way you get the college and university students, because they will be buying their textbooks for the Fall semester---and also then the reviews come out in September-November and prepare for the Christmas season buying. My guess is that if we see the Smolin Unger at all within the next 12 months, it will not be until September 2010.

Thanks for taking the trouble to sample the German edition of Züruck vor den Urknall! Eventually I hope to get an idea of the quality of style. Would a translation work in the US market? This is not a question you would want to (or be able to) help me answer.

I have a stereotype of the German market that they are willing to buy and read books that are more serious and academic sounding than what would sell in the US market. So it is possible that this book will do quite well in the German market, but not so well in the US.
This is my stereotype whether right or wrong---I think in the US market a popular science book needs to be in large part entertainment. It has to exploit the devices of personality and anecdote. And it needs to dovetail with the talk-show television format (a device that essentially sells the author's personality as a conversationalist).

=====================

EDIT
Again just so I don't forget at 18 hours Berlin time Bojowald's book was doing 0.67 as good as the stringy benchmark. It ranked 9080 and the top three stringies (Stoff, Verborgene, Elegante) ranked 4526, 5859, 7800 for an average of 6061.7 making the ratio 0.67.

 

[Fra]

Hmm... it would be quite interesting to see a distribution profile of what kind of reasons people have for reading these kinds of books.

There is similarly probably a variety of reason for why the authors writes these kinds of "non-text books" if such an expression makes sense (pop-sci, philosophy of science, biographies of important scientists etc).

Your entertainment idea never struck me before, but maybe that's a significant account of buyers? As far as entertainment goes I figure the line between sci-fi and pop-sci is fuzzy, since what's fact and what's fiction is quite irrelevant from the perspecive of entertainment value.

The other domain which I'm more interested in is the philosophy of science, partly history of science, and the logic of reasoning and how a specific choice of reasoning naturally leads to certain frameworks. It is in fact quite interesting that the logic of reasoning is sometimes more exposed when someone tries to convey something in non-mathematical terms, since the final mathematical construct often disguises it's origin. This is the kind of things that makes me read these books.

In text-books the aim is usually not in general to explain and motivate the theory in a context of reasoing. The aim is the as right to the point as possible, describe or teach the reader about what the theory is, says and howto apply it. Sometimes textbooks contains motivational introdoctory chapters, but it's author dependent and sometimes the real reasons aren't exposed.

Often a textbook is like a manual or technica description. A manual tells what the device does and howto operate it, it does not tell you how it's built, or why it was built this or that way - this strips some information out of it, that may be important when building onto it.

This is why I like Smolin's books. He presents questions that forces the reader to re-analyzer previous positions in a healthy way.

/Fredrik

 

[marcus]

I'll update the indices we watch, in the case of book sales averaging around the first of each month to eliminate some of the random fluctuation.
Our Loop publication index uses the Spires base with DESY keywords "spin, foam", "field theory, group", "quantum gravity, loop space", and "quantum cosmology, loop space".

2005 40
2006 82
2007 121
2008 129
2009 125 (as of 30 November)

Here is the link for 2009 papers:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+DK+FIELD+THEORY%2C+GROUP+OR+DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+OR+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+AND+DATE+%3D+2009&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=

==========

Salesrank performance of Zurück vor den Urknall ("Before the Big Bang")
at 6PM Berlin time, compared with the average rank of the 3 currently most popular string books

29 November 0.78
30 November 0.67
1 December 0.74
2 December ?
3 December ?To illustrate how the index works, at 6PM central European time on 30 November, Zurück ranked 9080, and the three most popular stringies (which happened to be Stoff, Verborgene, and Elegante) ranked 4526, 5859, 7800 for an average 6061.7 and a ratio of 0.67. In other words Bojowald's book was doing about two thirds as well as the stringy benchmark.
=============

Trouble with Physcs, Amazon salesrank performance compared with five most popular string titles.

1 January 0.6 (2009)
1 February 0.7
1 March 0.5
1 April 0.6
1 May 0.6
1 June 0.7
1 July 1.9
1 August 0.6
1 September 0.6
1 October 0.4
1 November 0.5
...
30 November 0.56
1 December 0.54
2 December ?

To illustrate, at noon California time on 30 November, Trouble ranked 13570 and the five most popular stringies (hyperspace, elegant, fabric, parallel, black hole) ranked 4054, 4759, 4914, 5811, 18300, for an average of 7567.6 and a ratio of 0.56.

String publication rate for the first 10 months, measured using the Harvard abstracts database with keywords superstring, M-theory, brane, AdS/CFT, heterotic, compactification. As of 30 November the 10-month figures (successive years, through the end of October) for 2007, 2008, 2009 were 4143, 4071, 4038.

2007: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

2008: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

2009: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

 

[marcus]

Some indices we watch:
Our Loop publication index uses the Spires base with DESY keywords "spin, foam", "field theory, group", "quantum gravity, loop space", and "quantum cosmology, loop space".

2005 40
2006 82
2007 121
2008 129
2009 126 (as of 2 December)

Here is the link for 2009 papers:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+DK+FIELD+THEORY%2C+GROUP+OR+DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+OR+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+AND+DATE+%3D+2009&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=

==========

Salesrank performance of Zurück vor den Urknall ("Before the Big Bang")
at 6PM Berlin time, compared with the average rank of the 3 currently most popular string books

29 November 0.78
30 November 0.67
1 December 0.74
2 December 0.51
3 December 1.85

The average of these comes out to 0.91

At 6PM central European time on 2 December, Zurück ranked 14811, and the three most popular stringies (which were Elegante, Stoff, Verborgene) ranked 3174, 7511, 11900 for an average 7528.3 and a ratio of 0.51. Bojowald's book was doing about half as well as the benchmark stringy average.
At 6PM central European time on 3 December, Zurück ranked 4379, and the three most popular stringies (which happened to be Elegante, Stoff, Verborgene) ranked 4033, 7557, 12792 for an average 8120.7 and a ratio of 1.85. In other words Bojowald's book was doing nearly twice as well as the stringy benchmark.

I'll keep the average of these readings around the first as a concise record and start a new chart:

Zurück vor den Urknall, Amazon.de salesrank relative to stringy benchmark.

1 December 0.9
​

The book came on the market in April 2009, we'll see how it goes over the next few months.

=============

Trouble with Physcs, Amazon salesrank performance compared with five most popular string titles.

1 January 0.6 (2009)
1 February 0.7
1 March 0.5
1 April 0.6
1 May 0.6
1 June 0.7
1 July 1.9
1 August 0.6
1 September 0.6
1 October 0.4
1 November 0.5
...
30 November 0.56
1 December 0.54
2 December 0.55
...
(averaged and rounded value 1 December 0.5)

To illustrate, at noon California time on 2 December, Trouble ranked 11209 and the five most popular stringies ( parallel, fabric, elegant, hyperspace, paperback elegant) ranked 3193, 4467, 4822, 5204, 12959, for an average of 6129.0 and a ratio of 0.55.
The smoothed and rounded value for the first of the month is therefore 0.5.

String publication rate for the first 10 months, measured using the Harvard abstracts database with keywords superstring, M-theory, brane, AdS/CFT, heterotic, compactification. As of 30 November the 10-month figures (successive years, through the end of October) for 2007, 2008, 2009 were 4143, 4071, 4038.

2007: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

2008: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

2009: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

 

[marcus]

Loop publication index uses the Spires base with DESY keywords "spin, foam", "field theory, group", "quantum gravity, loop space", and "quantum cosmology, loop space".

2005 40
2006 82
2007 121
2008 129
2009 128 (as of 6 December)

Link for 2009 papers:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+DK+FIELD+THEORY%2C+GROUP+OR+DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+OR+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+AND+DATE+%3D+2009&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=

==========

Zurück vor den Urknall Amazon.de salesrank relative to stringy benchmark at 6PM Berlin time.

1 December 0.9
...
6 December 0.8
7 December 0.5
...

To illustrate how the index is calculated, at 6PM central European time on 3 December, Zurück ranked 4379, and the three most popular stringies (which happened to be Elegante, Stoff, Verborgene) ranked 4033, 7557, 12792 for an average 8120.7 and a ratio of 1.85. In other words Bojowald's book was doing nearly twice as well as the stringy benchmark.

Züruck vor den Urknall ("Before the Big Bang") is the first popular book concentrating primarily on the Loop approach to modeling the universe.

=============

Trouble with Physcs, Amazon.com salesrank compared with five most popular string titles.

1 January 0.6 (2009)
1 February 0.7
1 March 0.5
1 April 0.6
1 May 0.6
1 June 0.7
1 July 1.9
1 August 0.6
1 September 0.6
1 October 0.4
1 November 0.5
1 December 0.5
...
6 December 0.7
7 December 0.6
...To illustrate, at noon California time on 2 December, Trouble ranked 11209 and the five most popular stringies ( parallel, fabric, elegant, hyperspace, paperback elegant) ranked 3193, 4467, 4822, 5204, 12959, for an average of 6129.0 and a ratio of 0.55.
========

String publication rate for the first 10 months of each year, measured using the Harvard abstracts database with keywords superstring, M-theory, brane, AdS/CFT, heterotic, compactification. As of 6 December the 10-month figures (successive years, through the end of October) for 2007, 2008, 2009 were 4143, 4071, 4038.

2007: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

2008: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

2009: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

 

[marcus]

To update a couple of our indices, in the popular book department we have:Zurück vor den Urknall Amazon.de salesrank relative to stringy benchmark at 6PM Berlin time.

1 December 0.9
...
6 December 0.8
7 December 0.5
...
9 December 0.9
10 December 0.8

To illustrate how the index is calculated, at 6PM central European time on 9 December, Zurück ranked 5383, and the three most popular stringies (which happened to be Stoff, Verborgene, Elegante) ranked 3496, 5656, 6126 for an average 5092.7 and a ratio of 0.95. In other words Bojowald's book was doing a bit over 90% as well as the stringy benchmark.

Züruck vor den Urknall ("Before the Big Bang") is the first popular book concentrating primarily on the Loop approach to modeling the universe.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/3100039106/?tag=pfamazon01-20
It's doing remarkably well, I think. Came out in April 2009, so what we are now seeing is apt to be evidence of sustained interest, not the initial kick-off emphasis resulting from reviews and publisher promotion.
===============
Turning to the academic side---peer-reviewed scientific papers---we have:

Loop publication index uses the Spires base with DESY keywords "spin, foam", "field theory, group", "quantum gravity, loop space", and "quantum cosmology, loop space".

2005 40
2006 82
2007 122
2008 134
2009 130 (as of 9 December)

Link for 2009 papers:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+DK+FIELD+THEORY%2C+GROUP+OR+DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+OR+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+AND+DATE+%3D+2009&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=

==========

 

[marcus]

Here are another couple of indices that we keep an eye on and occasionally update.It's time we set up links to check the string publication rate for the first 11 months.

This is measured using the Harvard abstracts database with keywords superstring, M-theory, brane, AdS/CFT, heterotic, compactification. Successive years through the end of November. Figures aren't final.

2007: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

2008: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

2009: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

Trouble with Physics, Amazon.com salesrank compared with five most popular string titles.

1 January 0.6 (2009)
1 February 0.7
1 March 0.5
1 April 0.6
1 May 0.6
1 June 0.7
1 July 1.9
1 August 0.6
1 September 0.6
1 October 0.4
1 November 0.5
1 December 0.5
...
6 December 0.7
7 December 0.6
...
11 December 0.6To illustrate, at noon Pacific on 11 December, Trouble ranked 8875 and the five most popular stringies ( parallel, elegant, fabric, hyperspace, black hole) ranked 2142, 2816, 4215, 4449, 14472 for an average of 5618.8 and a ratio of 0.63.
========

 

[marcus]

Zurück vor den Urknall Amazon.de salesrank relative to stringy benchmark at 6PM Berlin time.

1 December 0.9
...
6 December 0.8
7 December 0.5
...
9 December 0.9
10 December 0.8
...
14 December 0.9
15 December 1.0

To illustrate how the index is calculated, at 6PM central European time on 15 December, Zurück ranked 6664, and the three most popular stringies (which happened to be Elegante, Stoff, Verborgene) ranked 2624, 8484, 8750 for an average 6619.3 and a ratio of 0.99. In other words Bojowald's book was performing on par with the stringy top three.
I'm interested in how Züruck vor den Urknall ("Before the Big Bang") does, because it is the world's first popular book concentrating primarily on the Loop approach to modeling the universe. Nothing comparable has so far appeared in the US market.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/3100039106/?tag=pfamazon01-20

===============

Loop publication index uses the Spires base with DESY keywords "spin, foam", "field theory, group", "quantum gravity, loop space", and "quantum cosmology, loop space".

2005 40
2006 82
2007 122
2008 134
2009 132 (as of 15 December)

Link for 2009 papers:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+K+SPIN%2CFOAM+OR+DK+FIELD+THEORY%2C+GROUP+OR+DK+QUANTUM+GRAVITY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+OR+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY%2C+LOOP+SPACE+AND+DATE+%3D+2009&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=