A few days ago, Ars Mathematica wrote :

Alain Connes and Mathilde Marcolli have posted a new survey paper on Arxiv A walk in the noncommutative garden. There are many contenders for the title of noncommutative geometry, but Connes’ flavor is the most successful.

Be that as it may, do not print this 106 page long paper! Browse through it if you have to, be dazzled by it if you are so inclined, but I doubt it is the eye-opener you were looking for if you gave up on reading Connes’ book Noncommutative Geometry…. Besides, there is much better Tehran-material on Connes to be found on the web : An interview with Alain Connes, still 45 pages long but by all means : print it out, read it in full and enjoy! Perhaps it may contain a lesson or two for you. To wet your appetite a few quotes

It is important that different approaches be developed and that one doesn‚Äôt try to merge them too fast. For instance in noncommutative geometry my approach is not the only one, there are other approaches and it‚Äôs quite important that for these approaches there is no social pressure to be the same so that they can develop independently. It‚Äôs too early to judge the situation for instance in quantum gravity. The only thing I resent in string theory is that they put in the mind of people that it is the only theory that can give the answer or they are very close to the answer. That I resent. For people who have enough background it is fine since they know all the problems that block the road like the cosmological constant, the supersymmetry breaking, etc etc…but if you take people who are beginners in physics programs and brainwash them from the very start it is really not fair. Young physicists should be completely free, but it is very hard with the actual system.

And here for some (moderate) Michael Douglas bashing :

Physicists tend to shift often and work on the last fad. I cannot complain because at some point around 98 that fad was NCG after my paper with Douglas and Schwarz. But after a while when I saw Michael Douglas and asked him if he had thought more about these problems the answer was no because it was no longer the last fad and he wanted to work on something else. In mathematics one sometimes works for several years on a problem but these young physicists have a very different type of working habit. The unit of time in mathematics is about 10 years. A paper in mathematics which is 10 years old is still a recent paper. In physics it is 3 months. So I find it very difficult to cope with constant zapping.

To the suggestion that he is the prophet (remember, it is a Tehran-interview) of noncommutative geometry he replies

It is flattering but I don’t think it is a good thing. In fact we are all human beings and it is a wrong idea to put a blind trust in a single person and believe in that person whatever happens. To give you an example I can tell you a story that happened to me. I went to Chicago in 1996, and gave a talk in the physics department. A well known physicist was there and he left the room before the talk was over. I didn’t meet this physicist for two years and then, two years later, I gave the same talk in the Dirac Forum in Rutherford laboratory near Oxford. This time the same physicist was attending, looking very open and convinced and when he gave his talk later he mentioned my talk quite positively. This was quite amazing because it was the same talk and I had not forgotten his previous reaction. So on the way back to Oxford, I was sitting next to him in the bus, and asked him openly how can it be that you attended the same talk in Chicago and you left before the end and now you really liked it. The guy was not a beginner and was in his forties, his answer was “Witten was seen reading your book in the library in Princeton”! So I don’t want to play that role of a prophet preventing people from thinking on their own and ruling the sub ject, ranking people and all that. I care a lot for ideas and about NCG because I love it as a branch of mathematics but I don’t want my name to be associated with it as a prophet.

and as if that was not convincing enough, he continues

Well, the point is that what matters are the ideas and they belong to nobody. To declare that some persons are on top of the ladder and can judge and rank the others is just nonsense mostly produced by the sociology (in fact by the system of recommendation letters). I don’t want that to be true in NCG. I want freedom, I welcome heretics.

But please, read it all for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

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arxiv, brain, Connes, geometry, Marcolli, noncommutative, symmetry

1 comment
Posted in geometry, rants
Written on Fri, 06 January 2006 at 2:53 pm
Tags: arxiv, brain, Connes, geometry, Marcolli, noncommutative, symmetry
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