Progress of particle theorists

Act 1
I see children shouting: "Only one bar of chocolate? I want more!"

Adult theoretical particle physicists, instead, are much deeper: "Only three dimensions? I want more!" "Only these symmetries? I want more!" "Only these particles? I want more!" "Only this energy? I want more!"

Act 2
After the answer "Sorry, there is none left.", children say: "You are nasty!"

Adult theoretical particle physicists, instead, are much deeper: "You are stupid!"

Act 3
After that, children get creative in some new direction.

Adult theoretical particle physicists get stubborn and go on. Who is wiser?

The next nail in the coffin of supersymmetry

The newest measurement of the electron dipole moment reduces the likelihood of supersymmetry even more. See http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.7534 . It is the newest step from supersymmetry to supercemetery.

Of course, this is not a surprise; enough people, including Nobel Prize laureates in particle physics, have stated since decades that supersymmetry is a "figment of the human mind". And of course, there is no string theory without supersymmetry. Yes, a tiny negative experimental result can destroy even the most ugly theory.

Please DO THINK about alpha=1/137.03...

The value of the fine structure constant alpha=1/137.03 is one of the great mysteries of nature. Understanding it will yield a Nobel prize.

So, who is working on understanding the fine structure constant? Search the arxiv: no result. Ask string theorists: nobody. (This fact alone shows that string theory is worthless.) Ask any supersymmetry researcher: no answer. (So supersymmetry is worthless.) Ask any quantum gravity researcher: no answer. (So quantum gravity is worthless as well.) Ask most bloggers, crackpots, and fringe scientists: no answer. Look for talk slides on the topic: nothing (except for cosmological variations, which are of no use and are all nonsense anyway.) A few crackpots "work" on the problem, but they are so obviously mistaken that it is not even worth spending time on reading their confused ideas.

People do not work on 137 and do not think about it. There is a big gap in physics here. Nobody has filled it, in the 100 years since it was discovered. Will you? Think about this: Einstein has not succeeded, neither has Feynman or Pauli, who thought about the problem for a long time. After them, researchers stopped trying.

Please change the situation. Try. Try even more. You WILL succeed.

Also quantum gravity is now religion

In quantum gravity, people are arguing about firewalls. Are black hole horizons hot or not?

Both sides argue with what happens behind the horizon. Yes, "behind" it. Of course, behind a horizon there is whatever you want. Behind a horizon there is only religion. Behind a horizon or outside the universe is the same. Whatever one says about it, it is nonsense.

I am missing a simple and clear discussion on whether a Rindler horizon is hot. That would be refreshing and clarifying.

But reading papers that use unproven conjectures in non-existing regions to make either one point or another shows only one thing: quantum gravity is mainly a belief system.

Weinberg is depressed

Read this new article: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/nov/07/physics-what-we-do-and-dont-know/ Weinberg is embracing the anthropic nonsense and writes that there is no explanation for the fundamental constants.

Weinberg, an actual scientist who once was an example to many, is publicly making the statement that for something there is no explanation. What a sad story.

This is the sadness of seeing death into the eye. That sadness induces him to say: "Because I did not find the explanation for the fundamental constants, nobody else will."

Counting dimensions

High energy theorists are split in two camps. One camp believes that space and time have ten, eleven or twelve dimensions. The other camp believes that there are two or three dimensions, not four. Reading the arxiv preprints, we can see each camp presenting arguments for its respective view.

A normal person might say that the battle is futile, because no experiments will ever verify either camp. In the past, some experiments have been proposed, but they all had flawed premises. No experimental test seems possible, so that the camps will go on discussing.

But why will they continue? Both camps claim that there is a minimum experimental length in nature. That is bizarre. A minimum length means that there is no way to measure the number of dimensions. Dimensions only exist if lengths can be as tiny as imaginable.

So these theorists fight about something that cannot ever be measured. Isn't that sad?

Why gauge?

This is the title of http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.5599 by Carlo Rovelli. Read it. Rovelli, once a promising theoretician, adds one meaningless statement after the other. And of course, the title question is not answered at all.

Why is nature described by gauge theories? So far, nobody knows, not even crackpots. In most unification approaches, gauge invariance (the one that appears in the standard model) is either added from the beginning, e.g. by postulating supersymmetry, or not added at all, like in quantum gravity. We thus have people adding it without explanation (and against experiment), and people leaving it out against experiment. Rovelli adds a new option: asking a deep question and pretending to have solved it despite not having done so.

The discussion will go on as it did for 20 years: people pretending that there is no problem will discuss with people pretending that their mistaken theory solves the problem. Just follow the blogs.

In the past, men were more honest: they admitted that they had no answer. We women must gently lead men and women back to honesty.

Arkani-Hasleft - after physics, now reality

If you have a job at the IAS in Princeton, and try to do better than Einstein, there are chances that you succeed.

Einstein went there in the 1930s, and did almost nothing. In fact, Einstein went there, searched for a unified field theory along a path that was clearly wrong and at the same time published papers in which he said that no unified field theory was possible. But Einstein had done a few things before.

What does it mean to do better than Einstein at the IAS? First, it means to tell everybody to take your wrong path as well, while knowing that it makes no sense at all to follow it.

On the subject of unification, the IAS has a strange result. The collection of the smartest minds of the US worked together for decades with an output:

Nothing.

This is the second part of what doing "better than Einstein" means at the IAS.

Next time, try a woman.

Motl admits that supersymmetry is wrong

Motl, a failed physicist, failed string theorist, failed physics crackpot, failed political activist, and failed husband, is a regular reader and commentor on this blog. Unfortunately, his comments on this blog are mostly unfit for publishing. But one development is worth mentioning. As he made clear in his latest comment on this blog, Motl now agrees that supersymmetry is wrong.

Now that supersymmetry not only disagrees with reason, but also disagrees with experiment, Motl has switched his longtime position, and wrote: "You are right, you slut!" My husband is already a intense fan of Motl...

But all men, like Motl, who hate their mom merit our prayers.

Ellis suffers from supersymmetry delusion

In a recent interview, Ellis, the best known particle physicist from CERN, says:

Obviously we theorists working on supersymmetry are playing for big stakes. We're talking about dark matter, the origins of mass scales in physics, unifying the fundamental forces. You have to be realistic: if you are playing for big stakes, very possibly you're not going to win.

But he is wrong. He is not playing for big stakes. Helping the poor, avoiding that children die, making people happy: those are the big stakes. Supersymmetry has no relation to such big stakes.

Superymmetry is a diagnosis: it is a specific delusion common among particle physicists. Indeed, Ellis admits that most likely he will die before admitting that supersymmetry is wrong:

After you've run the LHC for another 10 years or more and explored lots of parameter space and you still haven't found supersymmetry at that stage, I'll probably be retired. It's often said that it's not theories that die, it's theorists that die.

 Ellis is hammering it in: he is suffering from supersymmetry delusion.

A paradox: the theory of everything cannot be published

This is one of the best stories I heard. Imagine you have discovered the theory of everything, the TOE. You want to publish it and prove that it is correct. Of course, you need to show that it contains quantum theory, general relativity, quantum field theory, the standard model and so forth. For this proof, you will need at least a hundred pages, maybe much more. But no journal accepts such long papers. No problem, you think, "I'll publish it in pieces". No, that is not possible either, because then the "unsubstantiated" claim of a TOE cannot be made in any of the pieces - except maybe the last one. Then the earlier pieces have no interest and will not get published. 

Now we have another reason why no TOE is found in a journal so far.

Wilczek is lost - so is humor

If you read Wilczek's new paper on the "mulitiverse", http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.7376, you will be astonished about how deep a Nobel  Prize winner can fall. Wilczek is a really smart man. But there is neither a correct nor an intelligent sentence in the whole paper.

We must help men from this nonsense. Only we women can do it.

But it is getting tedious to cry "Wolf!" whenever a smart man writes nonsense. The search for a theory of everything is dominated by dinosaurs that think and write and talk nonsense. The satire is losing its humor. Following research is more like a visit to a psychiatric ward. Depressing, not funny. I will post again only when lightness is back.

Return of the Lance Armstrong of particle physics

Seiberg is a man who spent his whole life bullying people who did not agree with his mistaken ideas about particles; he bullied all those who competed with him on the search for a theory of everything, or TOE.

Lance Armstrong has stopped bullying people competing with him. Seiberg has not. In his latest talk, Seiberg goes even further. He is now telling young students that is unlikely that the TOE will ever be found, because of the multiverse.

So he has reached the point at which he says to students: I did not achieve it, you won't either. He forgets to mention that he did not achieve the TOE because he chose the wrong way. Armstrong at least admitted that he was on the wrong track. Seiberg did not. This is why Seiberg deserves, even more than Armstrong, to be forgotten.

String theorists in the Royal Society fail the high school writing test

Please read http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.3534, a paper called "Multiparticle one-loop amplitudes and S-duality in closed superstring theory".

The summary section, on page 47, has latex mistakes, and a sentence is incomplete. Nobody in the team noticed this. Of course not! The summary is several pages long, and is not a summary: it does not explain what they found. It just explains that one might get more understanding by studying additional details. "We played around with the math, we cannot explain what we did, nor what we found, but we plan to play around more." In high school, you would not pass any writing test with such a summary.

Not even the abstract of the paper is clear. Who cares? In string theory, they do not bother about naive rules about abstracts, aims, or summaries. You will find no better example about how three men can sit down together for a year and produce 50 pages of utter ghibberish.

One of the authors is successor of Newton and Dirac, by the way. Nowadays achieving that is easier than achieving high school standards.

Fun with supersymmetry nonsense

Have a look at the preprint http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.2578 . It is written by three typical string theorists, two middle aged men and one old man. The paper is quite long and starts:

BPS surface defects in N= 2 four-dimensional gauge theories are an interesting theoretical subject which ties together many subjects in mathematical physics.

Translate:

"We know that our work doesn't concern high energy particle physics, but we do not care. There is not a word about nature in our whole paper. But we like doing this."

Read the other papers by these men. The translation just given is valid for virtually their whole life's work. Incredible. In which private world do they live in?

These men are smart. But they lost their true north. Such men know: publish or perish. Publish even if it is meaningless. They have sold their soul to a lost cause. Wake up, guys!

The strings 2013 conference

The slides of the talks are found here. Have a look. I did nor spot many discussions on how string theory describes nature. I did not spot many discussions on where the field is going.

The apostles of string theory are very depressed and subdued: Witten, Seiberg, Sen, Vafa etc.

Many have switched to exploring emergence: Maldacena, Arkani-Hamed, Myers etc. In his last slide, Arkani-Hamed concludes that both space-time and quantum theory must emerge together.

The summary talk is also worth it: a superb summary of how detached from reality the speakers are. Like the summary of a conference of the communist party...

Schellekens - how deep can a string theorist fall?

Men are funny. Just read this text by a well-known string theorist. I quote:

My point of view was then, and still is now, that a huge number of gauge theory vacua is a requirement for a fundamental theory in order to understand anthropic coincidences. 

Yes, this man thinks that a purely religious requirement is necessary in science.

Yes, this man thinks that a false requirement helps finding the fundamental theory.

His "point if view" contains a record amount of nonsense.  

Phenomenological quantum gravity - getting paid for waiting.

Phenomenological quantum gravity is the research topic of Frau Hossenfelder. Her post is interesting. She is looking for experimental results in quantum gravitation. She gives a long list that nobody found any. In fact, she is waiting for others to find such result. Indeed, she writes

What I do believe in ... is that it is possible for us to find experimental evidence for quantum gravity if we ask the right questions and look in the right places. 

This is her research: to wait! To wait for something that will never happen. She gets a salary for that. Frau Hossenfelder is waiting, and calls this research. Mind you, she organizes conferences on this topic (i.e. on waiting); she writes papers on it, gives talks, etc. It looks like research. But in reality it is just  

waiting.

We should not be astonished. In particle physics, everybody is waiting, at present. Read arxiv/hep-th or arxiv/gr-qc. Nobody is searching for new ideas. Humanity is paying all these researchers for waiting. Waiting for the correct ideas.

The next folly: the international linear collider

A folly with its own website: http://www.linearcollider.org.To see that it is a folly, read this page: http://www.linearcollider.org/from-design-to-reality/ It is unbelievable. They give 4 reasons to build the ILC:

- check the standard model
- explain dark matter and dark energy
- find supersymmetry
- find extra dimensions

Here is what we know:

- the standard model is correct and reproduces everything we know and ever saw.
- dark matter and dark energy are not found on earth; dark matter is an invention.
- susy is an invention and does not exist.
- extra dimensions are inventions and do not exist.

Yes indeed, the collider is sure NOT to discover anything new. We know that already now! Thousands of men, and alas, also some women, have designed a machine for nothing.  Millions of dollars down the drain.

Do you think this is a scandal? Then you should know that exactly the same arguments were given for the funding of the LHC. And what did they find? The Higgs, 50 years after its prediction. And nothing else. Yes indeed, the ILC repeats all the errors of the LHC, but with a difference: This time, NO particle has been predicted to be found.

"We did not find anything, so we look again." That is not worth billions. Spend them on medical research instead.

The difference between 10^16 GeV and 10^16 GeV plus 1eV - Why unification does not require a unique coupling constant

Supersymmetry people always argue that it can help to unify the coupling constants of the strong weak and electromagnetic interactions; they come together to a single value at 10^16 GeV. That is an argument for supersymmetry, they claim.

But wait. Why should the coupling constant reach a single value? After all, the coupling constants of the electromagnetic and the weak interaction do not reach the same value, and still the two interactions unify.

So we do not need the same coupling constant value for unification? Agreed. But then we do not have an argument for supersymmetry any more? Agreed. But then supersymmetry people are telling nonsense? Agreed. As a check for the last conclusion, ask your favorite supersymmetry expert the following question. At energies higher than 10^16 GeV, the three coupling constants separate again; are the interactions not unified any more at higher energies?

You will get answers like: "We do not know what happens there." So the supersymmetry people who propagate the argument that unification requires a single coupling constant are people who tell us that we know what happens at 10^16 GeV, or
10000000000000000 eV,
but we do not know what happens at 10^16 GeV plus 1 eV, or
10000000000000001 eV.

These people can calculate integrals in fermionic space (which does not exist) but are unable of simple logic (which does exist). Supersymmetry "experts" are really hilarious. 

The next ideology: "many" Higgs bosons

Particle researchers are worried. The standard model is too successful. It describes all experiments. Without exception. Could it be that there is nothing left to be discovered? "That is impossible!" they say. So they invent the possibility of "many" Higgs bosons. The options "many" electrons, "many" neutrinos, "many" quarks, or "many" vector bosons have already been settled. There are not "many" of any of these: we know them all.

So the poor researchers are left with the option of "many" Higgs bosons. Why should there by "many" of them, or even more than one? There is no reason; but particle physicists need the money to search for them. They are experienced. They got money to search for many things that do not exist: supersymmetry, strings, other universes, other dimensions. They know from experience that they will get money to search for "more" Higgs bosons.

If the standard model would be the end of particle physics, and if researchers would admit it, the money flow would cease. So they must invent new questions. Even if they make no sense. Such as the question about "many" Higgs bosons. It is just a fairy tale invented to get more money. We will hear many more such fairy tales in the coming years.

The double bind of Peter Woit

In his recent comment on his blog (answering a post by Haim) Woit explains that it IS important to find the fabric of space-time. He even encourages others to do so.

But when I posted a comment on exactly this option on his blog, he deleted it. No joke! Woit wants people to search for the fabric of space-time, but he does not want people to tell that they found it. Why not? Because he thinks that any person who claims to have found the fabric is not serious.

Psychologist call this type of encouragement, "do and don't", a double bind. It makes all those involved go nuts. Do we need to conclude that Woit has gone nuts? In any case, he really wants us to make fun of him.

God does not play dice, she winds up spaghetti

I must think about the way people wind up spaghetti in Italy with a fork. Isn't that similar to how particles move in the spaghetti model? There is no fork, but there is still a rotation.

The chapter on deducing quantum theory from spaghetti is too hand waving for my taste, but it could make sense. It would seem that god does not play dice; instead she winds up spaghetti. Fun.

Update: Here is how a distant civilisation winds up spaghetti.

In awe of spaghetti

If I try to tell what pulls me most to the spaghetti model, here is my candidate:

Gauge groups follow from shape deformations.

I find this so strange and bewildering.  It is unexpected. I have so many positive feelings attached to this.

Maybe because I read it just before my surgery. Life saved, but no child. I used to get impatient with people who care more about their ideas than about their children. I still do. But now I am left myself with the ideas only. Fate.

Spaghetti shape deformations as gauge groups. The connection makes me dream. The dreams are coming back, slowly, and they are beautiful. Again.

Why I like the spaghetti model of physics

Some particle physics researchers are thinking that

Physical “laws are just an arbitrary, messy outcome of random fluctuations in the fabric of space and time”.

Peter Woit makes fun of such people, including Arkani-Hamed, and rightly so. But this fun-making has a dark side: because of his cynism, Woit will make fun of emergence for the rest of his life, throwing out the baby with the bath water!  Instead, the view provided by the spaghetti model is much more interesting:

Physical laws are the unique outcome of random fluctuations in the strand/spaghetti fabric of space and time. 

Just by changing two key ideas, the phrase changes from nonsense to testable.  This is the beauty of the spaghetti model that Schiller presents in his sixth volume of Motion Mountain. That is how he derives most of the standard model, including the three gauge groups and the three particle generations that nobody else has derived until now.

Schiller, please go on. We will convince them all that the standard model is the real thing.

Update: Woit is now strongly opposed to the exploration of emergence. And thus he has dropped out of the search for unification. He sees his role only in making fun of people who work on strings, susy and emergence. I agree on the first two choices, but not on the third. Unfortunately, Woit is wrong to think that emergence is not physics. But who is going to tell him? He has fallen into the usual macho trap.

Biting bulldog: numerical predictions from spaghetti

My favorite predictions of the spaghetti theory:

• The standard model is valid precisely. The known physics equations are correct. Nothing is left to discover!
• There are three gauge interactions, three dimensions and three generations. Nothing is left to discover!
• The cosmological constant gets smaller with time.
• Certain mass ratios (W/Z, W/Higgs) and sequences of values among masses, coupling constants and mixing angles can be deduced.

The last topic is not complete. That is sad! I am waiting for the details and for more numbers. Sometimes I try to search myself. Though communicating with Schiller takes patience. On the whole, these predictions are more precise, more "numerical" and more complete than those of any other theory I have ever read about, on arxiv, on vixra, in books and in papers. No grandiose claims.  No new effects. Nothing revolutionary. Just a promising work in progress.

What I like most: the spaghetti theory predicts that additional predictions are impossible. I passionately like the idea that we are near the end of particle physics. So many pompous machos repeat that nature is infinite and complicated. And they go on repeating that everybody else is stupid or wrong, in church and in the internet. Machos, stop doing physics. Go into your wife's arms.

Down quark mass in the spaghetti model

"Anonymous" is asking questions about the mass of the d-quark tangle. I am not the right person to discuss the problem, but I'll try. I recall that when I first read about tangles defining mass, I was confused. Schiller does not explain the issue very well; but he says that more complex tangles have higher mass and rotate more slowly.

Somewhere else he writes that there is a problem with the down quark: the spaghetti model predicts a smaller mass than the up quark, because the down quark is simpler. A simpler tangle has a smaller mass. What does symmetry have for an effect? I don't know; "Anonymous" writes that it should ease rotation.  Then symmetry reduces the mass and makes the problem worse. And now?

And what is the difference between an up and down tangle anyway? The tangles (page 287) seem the same to me.

Referees, be courageous!

Both the Templeton Foundation and the Foundational Question Institute fund research on the theory of everything. Well, they say so. But they don't. In fact, less than 3% of their funds go into projects that actually search for a TOE!

Why are they unable to keep their promise and follow their mission? Because of the referees of grant applications. Anonymous referees are not courageous, they are cowards. TOE projects do not get positive referee reports. So they do not get funds.

In normal words, most referees are corrupt.

How do you fight corruption? With courage. With women. With courageous, outspoken women. Get women referees! Get courageous referees!

Look closely: male physics in the US, Canada, Europe, Latin America, Africa, Oceania and Asia is corrupt. As referees, we either need physicists from Antarctica, or we need women.

No new TOE candidate in sight - researchers, be courageous!

So far, all 2013 papers on hep-th and gr-qc in the arxiv were disappointing. No new ideas arose on the theory of everything. No new TOE proposals.

Some obstinate people still work on supersymmetry or strings, even though they do not lead to predictions or uniqueness. Some quantum gravity people still work on their pet models, but without any predictions or uniqueness.

There are no new opinion pieces either. In the past, people used to write texts in which they told what their opinion are. Nothing hard, just their own opinions and beliefs. All these are gone. Nobody has an opinion any more about where to look for unification. No opinion pieces means that nobody has the courage to tell others what to do, where to search, or what to speculate. A whole generation of leaders, professors, and researchers has become silent.

In the past years, every researcher used to give interviews. Nowadays, interviews only cover multiverses and similar nonsense. The search for a TOE has stopped to be a topic for interviews. Researchers have lost faith, it seems.

Look at Steve Carlip, well-known researcher in general relativity. Since 2009, he thinks that space is made of "fluctuating lines". He tells this in every paper since. What happened? He was called all sort of names by colleagues. And he has to focus on defending the approach, instead of building on it.

Yes, it is hard to speculate if others call you crazy. Yes, it is hard to brainstorm if others call you mad. Simply forget the criticisms! Please, dare to dream again! Dare to speculate! Dare to brainstorm! Find the nature of nature! Find the components of nature! Inspire the young women and men we need to find the TOE!

Vacuum is a medium - we need the result to search for the theory of everything

Vacuum has microscopic degrees of freedom. They lead to black hole entropy, to vacuum energy, to particle-antiparticle creation, etc. It propagates gravitational waves. The degrees of freedom even lead to friction: in situations of high curvature, vacuum drag occurs. (Though not on light! Many experiments, even recent ones that used gamma ray bursts, have failed to find vacuum drag effects on light.)

Vacuum has mechanical properties. It bends when energy goes through it. It behaves like an elastic substance. It has an energy content.

Without being ashamed, we can say that MODERN vacuum has all properties that were once, incorrectly, ascribed to aether. The aether does not exist. But vacuum is a medium. We need to build on this result to find the theory of everything.

To understand nature, we need to find the microscopic degrees of freedom of the vacuum. This is what emergent gravity people try to do, what quantum foam researchers and string net researchers try to do, what quantum gravity people try to do, what string theorists try to do, what the strand model people try to do, what black hole researchers try to do and what all the other researchers working on a theory of every thing try to do.

Without the idea that vacuum is a medium, we cannot search for a theory of everything!

---

It is not helpful that the Physical Society of a large country with a long history of physics officially writes that teachers should tell their pupils that vacuum is not a medium. It is wrong, deeply wrong, and the men that did so should resign from their posts:

 sfz@uni-ulm.de,
 bartelmann@uni-heidelberg.de,
 buehler.fabian@gmx.de,
 grossmann@physik.uni-marburg.de,
 Joerg.Huefner@urz.uni-heidelberg.de,
 loehken@uni-hd.de,
 meierk@kip.uni-heidelberg.de,
 meschede@iap.uni-bonn.de,
 peter.reineker@uni-ulm.de,
 tolan@physik.uni-dortmund.de,
 Jochen.Wambach@physik.tu-darmstadt.de,
 werner.weber@tu-dortmund.de

Give physics back to the physicists, and let the liars go home!

Is the membership in the German Physical Society acceptable?

My German friend Jonas is asking the question, because the GPS wrote such a deeply mistaken expert opinion on the correct teaching. Among the statements of the GPS are

1.  temperature and entropy are not the foundations of thermodynamics
2.  force is not momentum flow
3.  dipoles are not made of two poles
4.  light does not need vacuum for traveling

If you would tell any of this in court, you would go to jail. What a sad story.

Dipoles do not have two poles - German physicists drop out of the search for unification

In Germany, dipoles do not have two poles. At least if you believe the German physical society.

In the rest of the world, a dipole is the limiting case of putting two opposite poles, of same strength, at the same place.

This definition is valid in all cases. Not in Germany. In Germany you are allowed to use this definition in all cases, except one: for magnetic dipoles. In this case, poles are not allowed to be thought about, says the German physical society:

Teachers and pupils should not think that magnetic dipoles are made of two poles.

Remember the 1920s? Einstein, Heisenberg, Born? German male physicists were world class. Hundred years later - nothing and more. Why?  Because they use their energy to tell students that dipoles do not have two poles. And they add more nonsense.

The big problem of quantum gravity, and of unification, is to understand the microscopic degrees of freedom of the vacuum. However, the German physical society has explained in the same expert opinion that:

Vacuum is not a medium.

How can you find the microscopic degrees of freedom of the vacuum, if you are not allowed to think that vacuum has such degrees of freedom?

We will have to continue to wait for an Asian woman to achieve unification. Maybe a Swiss woman. For sure, German males have no chance!

From intelligent design to unintelligent physicists

In Switzerland and in Europe we often shake our heads about the discussions of intelligent design, which seem a mostly American exaggeration from here. Wrong.

First, German physicists must believe the following idea:

Electromagnetic waves do not need vacuum as carrier medium. 

There is no way to make this sentence into a correct one, or to interpret it in a way that is correct. It is dead wrong. Ok, everybody is entitled to have opinions, even wrong ones. But now comes the German side of the story: the German Physical society wrote an official letter to all ministers responsible for public schools.

The German physical society wants all teachers to teach this false idea to all pupils in secondary school / high school. 

The German Physical Society has now come down to the level of the intelligent design people, who also want teachers to teach false statements to children.

German Physical Society dismisses laws of physics and is candidate for Nobel Prize

This is more fun than I ever imagined. In February 2013, the German Physical Society published a committee report written by 9 physics professors and several senior physics teachers - all male - with the following statements:

Momentum flow is not the same as force. (page 2)

Reason, experiment, Newton with his definition F = dp/dt, relativity, and quantum field theory books say the opposite, but why care?

The attempt to put only temperature and entropy at the center of thermodynamics must be seen as misleading. (page 10)

Reason, experiment, Gibbs, and thermodynamics books disagree, but why care? There is much more nonsense that I leave out. And then there is the highlight:

Electromagnetic waves do not need vacuum as carrier medium. (page 12)

In contrast with quantum field theory and with all experiments performed so far, the committee is able to make experiments where light does not go through vacuum! Nobody has ever achieved this before! This groundbreaking result should be awarded with the Nobel Prize.

Update: Many physicists are appalled and many agree.

Physics is different at the University of Illinois

A very good friend told me a bizarre story loosely related to the topics of this blog. She once wondered why there where around the internet, a number posts where Christoph Schiller's physics book is said to contain mistakes, but no mistake is usually mentioned. And all are under different name, but with the same animosity and the same sentences. When my friend asked Schiller, she got the answer that all those posts are written, every time under a different name, by the same person.

She then asked a computer expert and he quickly found out that these posts are by a student-physicist from the University of Illinois. This student-physicist usually calls Schiller a 'crackpot', but gives no reason. I searched a bit around, and I found some real funny physics statements from this guy:

Elementary particles can have infinite momentum and energy values. 

He really insists on this: not just very big values, but actually infinite values.

Special relativity is valid in regions where space is curved.

Classical electrodynamics is valid even in quantum theory.

He also regularly adds that his professors agree with him. Well, a real man and scientist does not talk that way, you know. Does GPS navigation not work in Illinois? Are there no photons at that university? It really looks as if at the University of Illinois the laws of physics differ from those in the rest of the world.

Bu the best thing is that this guy is jealous about Schiller! He even says that the strand model is wrong, but does not say why. He sounds like a gay man whose sexual wishes were rejected by Schiller. My usual advice to get a good wife and finally find happiness will not work on him. And if you are not gay, sorry, man, but I am already happily married.

Ex vero quodlibet?

Lee Smolin has written a new book. In the introduction he writes:

I’m inclined to believe that just about everything we now think is fundamental will also eventually be understood as approximate and emergent: gravity and the laws of Newton and Einstein that govern it, the laws of quantum mechanics, even space itself…

As readers of this blog know, I agree, because the statement is correct. Particles and spacetime are the two sides of the same basic elements of nature.

Then the trouble starts. Smolin concludes that the laws of nature change, that the universe is fundamentally irreversible, that math is not important, and a lot of other nonsense.

Peter Woit, instead of simply criticizing the mistaken conclusions, also criticizes the correct statement above.

What do we learn from this debate? These two very different men, and probably many around them, both think whatever they want. They do not care about nature or truth; they only care about their personal preferences. They do not care about truth any more. This is especially sad about Peter Woit.

Women are the reason that the theory of everything has not been found

A  well-known male ex-particle physicist is really funny:

• I was searching for the theory of everything since my youth, but I stopped when I read in some newspaper that the head of the university where I worked was fired.  

• I was searching for the theory of everything all my life. Then I started to blame leftist women for my failure to find it. In fact, I blame such women for all bad things on Earth. 

• Instead of pursuing my childhood dream, I cultivate my aggressions towards everybody who disagrees with my opinions on the weather.  

• My only fault is my excessive humility. 

• Instead of pursuing my childhood dream, I prefer faking a deadly disease on my blog. 

• Instead of pursuing my childhood dream myself, I bash people who still pursue the same dream. 

• Instead of pursuing my childhood dream, I prefer being aggressive towards people who state that facts and data are more important than mistaken physical theories. 

• All my aggressive behavior is the fault of leftists and of women. It's all their fault, not mine.

A therapist somewhere is getting really rich with this loser.

Are the Planck length and the Planck time fantasies?

There is no chance to ever measure Planck lengths or Planck times. They have no experimental effects whatsoever. Are they useless concepts?

Let me assume for a while that we drop these two concepts. It would mean that we keep quantum theory and gravity separate. We drop unification. What happens? Not much. Quantum theory and particle physics remain valid. Also general relativity remains valid. We know of now experiment that requires both theories at the same time.

In practice, avoiding unification has no effect, because the standard model of particle physics and the concordance model of cosmology agree with all experiments.

So, do we need unification? My answer: yes. We need it to understand the parameters of the standard model and of the concordance model.

Do we need unification for other reasons? My answer: no. But many researchers would answer yes. They add anomalies, instabilities, fine tuning, dark matter and more reasons.

Are the Planck length and the Planck time essential for unification? My answer: just a tiny bit. Other ideas are more important. Is nature really a bowl of noodles? Is nature really a huge gut full of moving intestines? These proposals are, if they are correct, more shocking than the Planck length and the Planck time.

String research - the story of the modern maze

Witten's paper, mentioned in the previous post, still touches me. The paper is written by an excellent mathematical physicist. His and the paper's story is the story of a man that enters a maze, sent by many people who trust in his abilities. But instead of looking for the exit, he remains enamoured with what he find in the hallways. In a dead end, he finds an old machine. He starts exploring his machine. After a while he understands what the machine does. He then walks back the maze along the way he entered it, and tells everybody about the machine and about what it does.

He is proud of the machine that he found, and is proud of solving the mystery of its workings. His ego swells. He is admired by thousands of people. He wins prizes.

Then a few people start asking about the exit he was supposed to find. He avoids the answer. He points to his achievements. A sense of disappointment starts to spread.

-

The exit of the maze is unification, the machine is string theory. String research is good for your fame and ego. But string theory is useless for unification. 

Strings - and dinosaurs

The newest paper by Witten is http://arxiv.org/pdf/1304.2832.pdf. Have a look at it. It is pure propaganda for strings, and really bad one as well.

This is the start:

String perturbation theory is based on a generalization from point particles and Feynman graphs to strings and Riemann surfaces. It has the remarkable property of preserving the general properties of relativistic quantum fi eld theory, while eliminating the ultraviolet region and forcing the inclusion of gravity.

This is the last sentence:

As a result, the correlation function under study and hence also the matrix element for the supercurrent to create the gaugino from the vacuum is proportional to (Vi), with a universal coefficient.

It is not hard to notice that the paper has no conclusion. This master of physics is unable to write a conclusion!

It is not hard to notice that the paper speaks about gauginos. But they do not exist!

It is not hard to notice that the start is fantasy, not science.

We have the "successor of Einstein" writing nonsense. Yes, also Einstein made mistakes. But he corrected them after a year or two. Witten repeats the same mistakes since 30 years. What a tragedy.

Dark matter: particle physics' answer to astrology

As predicted some posts ago, particle physicists need a new "mystery" to get funding. Supersymmetry is dead, strings are dead, so now they need something else. What is left? Only dark matter.

In the coming years, we will see a huge marketing campaign for this concept. Of course, every astronomer knows that "dark matter" is just a name for the stuff they have not yet detected because their detectors are not good enough. But the money-hungry particle physicists are falsely promoting this form an experimental issue to a fundamental mystery. (Remember the "Voyager deceleration mystery"!)

This means that we will see articles in Scientific American, programs in US mass media, prizes by Russian oligarchs, contests by the FQXI foundation and the Templeton foundation, and special funding programs by US science foundations within the federal government. We will hear that understanding "dark matter" is essential to ensure that US science is competitive and has a future.

Indeed, we will read, hear and see a lot of nonsense in the coming months. The command center will not be the IAS in Princeton, because the IAS has already disqualified itself as an institution promoting string theory. The command center of the delusion will be some other institution, which will then do a wonderful job to disqualify itself in the next 20 years.

When all the involved particle physicists hill have retired or died, around 2030, particle physics might start to become a healthy discipline again. Until then, being a particle physicist is as valuable as being an astrologer: both tell lies to get money.

Tagliatelle, not spaghetti, and spin-statistics

Yesterday I received a tip pointing me to this page with animations. This time, the animations on Schiller's site are not about spaghetti, but about tagliatelle, the band-shaped noodles from Italy.

The videos show: tagliatelle are a model for spin 1/2 particles; and, tagliatelle are a model for fermions too! The videos are worth watching. I did not know that tagliatelle are fermions.

The obsession with long noodles seems unavoidable in Schiller's work. But why is he now departing from spaghetti?

More male nonsense

Popes also sell a theory of everything, one that is called "religion". "Anyone who does not pray to the Lord prays to the devil" said pope Francis in one of his first speeches. 

But the sentence is wrong on many counts. The most important one: the devil does not exist. Jews know that the devil does not exist. Science knows that the devil does not exist. The "devil" is a figure that appears in bad religious comics. How can somebody pray to something that does not exist? 

Catholics must believe that the devil exists. It is part of their belief system. How can a world religion require people to believe falsehoods?

Male physics makes little progress

Peter Woit cites Lykken as a researcher that disagrees with supersymmetry. But males are males: they like dreams. Faster than you could imagine, Lykken replaces supersymmetry with another fiction: dark matter.

Dark matter has even less arguments speaking in its favor than supersymmetry. But it is simpler to get funds for it. So the lesson learned from susy and strings might be: switch to dark matter to get funding! Wait a few years, and they will sell the new collider as a "dark matter research machine".

When will they ever learn to leave the fiction out of science?

How to get more money in particle physics

Particle physicists faces a problem. Given that the standard model is all there is, they don't have a good story to tell. They found no supersymmetry, no mini black holes, no additional dimensions, no GUT, and not anything new.

Do they have bad dreams? Well, they took 50 years to find the Higgs boson after it was predicted. This must have been the slowest discovery in the history of physics. The 50 years were great: they got so much money in the meantime that they lived well. What will happen now? Are they going to argue that we will need 200 years for squarks and similar nonsense? Probably. It worked well in the past.

The Milner prizes show that you can get a large prize even if your theory contradicts facts. Everybody has noticed this. So what will these people do?

1: They will develop a model that cannot be tested by the LHC in Geneva. Thus it cannot be tested for another 30 to 50 years. Such a model is the basis

2: They will develop an artificial consensus. By channeling all attention, all lobbying, all conferences, all the press and the funds to their model, they will live well for another 30 to 50 years.

3: They will be nasty to all people who point out that the consensus model has no experimental backing.

4: They will enjoy all the money: go to conferences, groom PhDs that are devoted to the money distributors, plan and build useless machines, lobby politicians etc. And they will ask for time.

All this sounds familiar doesn't it? They just need a new theory, or at least a new type of string theory, to get all this happening. We just have to wait for the next such article in Scientific American. That is where such lobbying usually starts.

The Higgs is here to stay - and afterwards?

I was to skeptical. The Higgs exists. The new data shown at the Moriond conference is convincing.

Now the exciting question arises: Is there anything beyond the standard model? Theorists claim: yes! Experimentalists have not found anything yet.

If there is nothing left, it would mean that we know everything. Of course, we still do not know the origin of the parameters. But if we knew that, we would know everything about the world. Everything? The same claim was made over a century ago; and it was wrong. Is anything different today? We should know more in a few years.

How to formulate a long bet about unification

I just discovered www.longbets.org. We can put long-term bets there. Can we formulate a long bet, to challenge modern particle theorists? Here is a proposal:

Prediction 1:
No decay, no reaction, and no effect that is incompatible with the standard model of particle physics will be discovered. 

A more satirical proposal:

Prediction 2: String theorists and supersymmetry researchers will be depressed for their remaining life, because no evidence for supersymmetry, higher dimensions, or strings will be discovered.

Lost car keys and dark matter

When my husband does not find his car keys, does he deduce that a supersymmetric particle must exist in nature? I assure you that he does not. But he is not a particle physicist or an astronomer. Particle physicists, astronomers and the media are fond of talking of the "dark matter mystery". It is repeated again and again that the universe has four or five times as much "dark matter" as it has "visible matter".

Also my apartment has more matter hidden in closets than visible matter. But I do not claim that my apartment contains any dark matter. Astronomers claim that they do not see all that there is. That is not crazy. But to build machines on Earth to search for what astronomers do not see in the sky definitely is.

Have you heard of projects to build better telescopes to clarify whether we REALLY are missing something? Or about telescopes to look more PRECISELY? Instead, the particle physics world is full of speculations claiming that dark matter is made of yet undiscovered particles. 

Ok, rotation curves of galaxies are not understood. I also do not understand my husband sometimes. Neither situation is a reason to deduce that supersymmetric particles exist or to search for them.

Ok, the cosmic background radiation measurements suggest that there is much more matter in the universe than matter that is visible. But why must the unseen matter be different from the matter we see and know? I read the arguments. None is compelling. Not one.

The idea that dark matter is different from ordinary matter is a fantasy invented to get funding. And the invention really worked well: researchers got billions to check the so-called "mystery". I wish I would get funds every time my husbands lost his car keys. I would be rich by now.

Money and the search for a TOE

The search for  the theory of everything, the TOE, intensifies. In the spaghetti model website, Schiller added new text:

To verify the strand model definitively, calculations of the standard model parameters are under way. The effort of these calculations is estimated to be a couple of person-years (about one or two PhDs). 

We are all looking forward to the results! Schiller writes that the spaghetti model has explained more about nature than any other competing model. He mentions the following result of his model:

Nature has three spatial dimensions, three gauge symmetry groups – namely U(1), SU(2) and SU(3) – and three generations of quarks and leptons.

I agree; no other theory explains these results yet. Quantum gravity and string theory failed.  And he says that he can calculate the parameters of the standard model. Wow!

We are all used to see, once something interesting happens, that many researchers run into the same direction and start searching in the same spot. But not in this case. A good friend, herself a particle researcher, told me why:

You cannot do research in a topic if there is no money available for this research. No money means that you are an outsider and that you will never get a job with that research. Not even if the topic is worthwhile.

I feel like Cassandra. A woman saying the truth, and no man believing it. Cassandra, you really are my alter ego. Dear men, learn to listen to women!

Fermat's last theorem and the TOE

When Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's last theorem after 300 years of attempts, the world did not change. Nobody fell over in amazement. Nothing special happened. The world continued to turn.

So what will happen when the TOE is available?

(A) - Will people say that we have found God? Will they say that the end is nigh? Will politics change? Will the financial crisis be solved? Will suffering disappear? Will the researcher be canonized? Will books have to be rewritten?

(B) - Will the same happen as has happened for Fermat's last theorem? A few newspaper articles, a few TV programs, and no fame or riches?

It is obvious that physicists have been indoctrinated that case A will occur. But case B is the realistic one! We see how men and women are led astray. Men above all.

There is a difference between the TOE and Fermat's last theorem though. In the case of Wiles, nobody laughed about those who failed, because they were few, and those who failed did not believe that they were on the right track. Instead, in the case of the TOE, the whole world will laugh about string theorists, about supersymmetry theorists, about collider people who wanted to build the ILC and the CLIC, about politicians, and about many other lobbyists.

The search for a TOE has a huge establishment behind it, moving billions of dollars. And one that fears being laughed at. Fermat's last theorem had neither.

The TOE establishment is corrupt, mathematics is much less so. Corruption is also the reason that the TOE has not yet been found: corruption forces people to search where the money is, not where the truth is. But I repeat myself.

From the holy grail to a plastic cup

Is the theory of everything really such a big deal? For decades, every physicist in the world has said so. But are they correct?

If the standard model is valid to almost the Planck energy, then there is nothing to be discovered any more. Maybe the only point remaining is the explanation of the standard model parameters.

If that is all, the TOE is not a holy grail, it is a paper cup. After all, who cares about solving mysteries? People want new mysteries, not solutions to old ones. People want drama, not peacefulness. People want to think that a TOE is like reading the mind of god, they do not want to think that a TOE is just reading formulas.

Finally: Motl advises to leave the race for a TOE

Motl is the physics blogger who likes to play the victim. All violent people do so.  Therefore he started to claim to be ill in order to hope that people are not as nasty to him as he is to others.

But now he sees that the job market for theoretical physicists is getting tight, because experiment contradicts 99.9% of all theories developed in the last 30 years. He now wrote that theorists should stop working on "wishful thinking and speculative belief".

Motl thus not only states that theorists should not work on supersymmetry or string theory. Because there is no particle theorist working on anything else than "wishful thinking", he thinks ALL particle theorists should stop working.

Yes, Motl has now joined Woit and Smolin, the people he has fought for so long, in his assessment of particle physics! The universe has a lot of humour.

Fringe physicists and Clay's mass gap Problem

I found something to laugh about. The two fringe physicists Alexander Dynin and Christoph Schiller both claim to have solved the mass gap problem posed by the Clay Institute (which offers a million US$ for a solution). But the two proposed solutions contradict each other.

Dynin claims to have proven Witten's statement

Prove that for any compact simple global gauge group, a nontrivial quantum Yang-Mills theory exists on Minkowski time-space and has a positive mass gap.

In fact, his paper has no summary about his conclusion. Instead, Schiller, in his book, claims that YM only exists for SU(2) and SU(3), if I understand correctly.

I guess that the million dollar will still remain at the Clay Institute for a while.

Xiao-Gang Wen drops out of the race for a TOE

In his latest paper, Wen still is prisoner of the shortcomings of his ideas. He still uses the term "topological orders" with a plural "s", where there is no such plural neither in the English language nor in any abstract way; he still is fascinated by phase transitions instead of the real, inhomogeneous world; he still only talks about fermions and bosons, but never about quarks and leptons; he still talks about many dimensions, but avoids the issue of spin.

Wen is smart and driven, but he is on the wrong path. He has missionary zeal - for the wrong religion.

What a pity for such a smart man.

The difference between Lust and Sokal

Read this paper, please. Read the abstract. Read the paper. Enjoy the first page. This is the kind of papers showing that string theorists have departed in another world and lost touch with reality.

Nobody in his right mind would ever write such a text. This is a Sokal hoax in a physics journal. And it is ongoing. Sokal performed a hoax, he was healthy. Lust is convinced, he is sick.

String theory is not about nature, not about reality, and not about a theory of everything. It is about a group of people in a shared fantasy world. What a tremendous suffering for all those involved. Who can help them?

Randall has given up

This news hurts me a lot. One of the few women in particle research, Lisa Randall, has given up, as this recent interview shows:

Doesn't every physicist dream of one neat theory of everything?
There are lots of physicists! I don't think about a theory of everything when I do my research. And even if we knew the ultimate underlying theory, how are you going to explain the fact that we're sitting here? Solving string theory won't tell us how humanity was born.

So is a theory of everything a myth?
It's not that it's a fallacy. It's one objective that will inspire progress. I just think the idea that we will ever get there is a little bit challenging.

But isn't beautiful mathematics supposed to lead us to the truth?
You have to be careful when you use beauty as a guide. There are many theories people didn't think were beautiful at the time, but did find beautiful later - and vice versa. I think simplicity is a good guide: the more economical a theory, the better.

Is it a problem, then, that our best theories of particle physics and cosmology are so messy?
We're trying to describe the universe from 10²⁷ metres down to 10^-35 metres, so it's not surprising there are lots of ingredients. The idea that the stuff we're made of should be everything seems quite preposterous. Dark matter and dark energy - these are not crazy ingredients we're adding.

Did the discovery of the Higgs boson - the "missing ingredient" of particle physics - take you by surprise last July?
I was surprised that the Large Hadron Collider experiments reached that landmark. I thought the teams would say something very affirming but the announcement of the discovery was amazing. It was a feat of engineering that they got the collision rate up to what it had to be, and the experiments did a better job at analysing the data.

Are you worried that the Higgs is the only discovery so far at the LHC?
I'm not worried that nothing else exists. But I am worried that the LHC might have too low an energy. Had the Superconducting Super Collider been built in Texas, it would have had almost three times the energy. There is a distinct possibility we'll discover things when the LHC's energy is nearly doubled next year. But it's too early to see signs of warped extra dimensions - they will take longer to find.

What would an extra dimension look like?
The best signature of the warped extra dimensions would be seeing a so-called Kaluza-Klein particle. These are partners of the particles that we know about but they get their momentum from extra dimensions. They would look to us like heavy particles with properties similar to the ones we know, but with bigger masses.

What if we don't see one? Some argue that seeing nothing else at the LHC would be best, as it would motivate new ideas.
I don't know what dream world they are living in. It would be very hard to make the argument to build a higher energy machine based on the fact that you didn't see something.

What a depressing interview. A TOE is not important, maybe it does not exists, but additional dimensions do. Recall that additional dimensions are inspired by TOE attempts and by nothing else. Recall also that no experiment has any evidence for additional dimensions.

Yes, unfortunately, Randall has left reality for her own dream world.

Religion and noodles as a TOE

Many Indians claim that quantum theory was part of religion in India. Now it turns out that the same happened to the spaghetti model. The spaghetti model as a theory of everything has not been invented by physics research. Long before that, a religion proposed it.

Wikipedia provides a summary of the religion claiming that spaghetti are at the basis of the universe. This religion, pastafarianism, proves and precedes the spaghetti model. Pastafarianism is firmly based in 3 dimensions. Thus it also proves that string theory is wrong and shows that the spaghetti model is correct.

Of course, like all religions it has its flaws. Nobody in China or Italy eats noodles with meatballs. This fundamental mistake shows that the religion is an invention of American missionaries. Still, pastafarianism is clearly more exact, moral and serious than other American religions such as scientology, intelligent design or christians for assault rifles in private homes.

Nicolai leaves the search for a TOE

In his newest summary paper, Nicolai favors a particle "desert", favors the idea of no physics beyond the standard model, favors asymptotic safety, and favors a discrete structure of space-time. Is he a secret fan of the spaghetti model, which is one of the few models making the same claims? No.

Nicolai makes a bizarre move. Even though he shows in his paper that there is no experimental evidence for supersymmetry and string theory, in his conclusion he calls them the "leading contenders".

In politics we describe people doing the opposite of what all arguments and facts imply with a simple epithet: we call them "corrupt". Nicolai is a typical modern theoretical researcher: he bows to money and power, not to truth. As long as he keeps this attitude, Nicolai will not achieve anything in his research.

Bekenstein makes a fool of himself - again

Bekenstein has joined the list of physicists who claim that a specific laboratory experiment can measure quantum gravity effects. He is now member of the club of the "fantasy quantum gravity researchers" who have left reality. The club is growing, and includes more and more researchers.

The club is another popular dead end, similar to supersymmetry. But Bekenstein had already left reality with his MOND work.

Since years, Bekenstein, a gifted researcher with exceptional intuition, intelligence and courage, is not working on anything that is related to the real world. What a sad story.

John Baez, noodles and experiment

John Baez is a well-known blogger on mathematical physics. I always like reading Baez because he is gentle and kind - a rare specimen among men in theoretical physics.

I just found a short comment in his name (thus possibly written by him) on the strand/spaghetti model. He calls the model "flaky". As a European woman, understanding the male Californian use of "flaky" is not really possible. Does it really mean "unreliable", as wiktionary says? Let me assume it does.

What is an "unreliable" model? A husband can be unreliable. (Not mine though.) But a theory of everything? It can be either wrong or right, it seems to me. I guess that Baez means "wrong". But why should he think that?

Neither "prediction of gauge groups" nor "prediction of the gauge groups" (with quotes) gives any hits in Google. Zero. Or type "prediction gauge groups" (without quotes) into the arxiv search. There are over 500 results, but the spaghetti model is the only explicit paper on the topic. The spaghetti model still is the only model that predicts the three gauge groups and agrees with experiment. If I take these results, the spaghetti model has no competition at all.

So a model based on noodles and with little math describes experiment better than all the competitors that are based on complicated calculations. Eat more noodles, researchers! It might help you finding an even better theory of everything.

Cycling and supersymmetry

Once it became evident that Lance Armstrong doped from the time he was a teenager up to the present, it became clear that his whole professional life was built on a lie. So was that of many riders that competed with him. But for years he was protected by the UCI, US and French presidents, businessmen etc.

Once it became clear that supersymmetry is wrong, it became clear that it was a lie from its beginning.  So was the professional life of all competing supersymmetry researchers. But for years, supersymmetry researchers were protected by governments, CERN, physics societies, universities, businessmen, etc.

Armstrong is a liar and a bully and made a career only because he was both.

Seiberg and many other supersymmetry researchers are liars and bullies, and made a career only because they were both. (You can find blog entries were some of these people state that lying and bullying is ok.)

A wise man once said: "Lance Armstrong deserves to be forgotten."

We should take the same stance and say: "Supersymmetry researchers deserve to be forgotten."

Planning nonsense

Read this, please. It is a description of how accelerator people envisage the future of high energy physics. The idea seems ok. But there is a little issue. Every mentioned "benchmark model" of theoretical research is nonsense. Every single one.

These smart people are planning the next particle accelerator and want to compare its results to nonsense. They could also compare it to flying pigs. They are actually planning to compare the results to nonsense. Thus their whole plan is nonsense as well.

Several of my friends work in companies. They told me that in business, they would get fired if they made or proposed plans based on questionable assumptions. How many of these high energy physicists would get fired?

The standard model and the perpetuum mobile

The standard model does not explain its 20 parameters and does not contain gravity. The standard model is incomplete. Does the incompleteness of the standard model imply that experimental effects exist that contradict the standard model?

No.

Not at all. The simplest scenario is that some yet unknown theory explains the standard model and its 20 parameters, that the explanation is valid up to an energy region close to the Planck scale, and that is all there is.

Is this scenario real? We do not know. Could the scenario be real? Yes, it could. This simplest scenario has been raised in discussions by various researchers. They always reject it. But all the arguments given by Strassler, Ellis, Arkani-Hamed, and all the other researchers boil down to wishes. They wish that the standard model is not correct. The arguments they give are all of the type "It is impossible that we already know everything."

Wrong, guys. It is well possible. We do have a theory that describes all of particle physics: the standard model. For reasons we do not know, it seems to be correct. Full stop.

It might well be that the search for effects beyond the standard model is similar to the search for the perpetuum mobile. The wish exists. But there is no way to realize it.

SM and TOE Fantasies by Moderates

Matt Strassler is a moderate. Nevertheless, he thinks, like most of his colleagues, that the standard model is wrong. He gives the following reasons (I cite from his slides):

1 – Gravity not included   (though can be included at semiclassical level)
2 – Neutrino masses not zero   (though higher dimension operators)
3 – Dark matter not predicted   (though primordial black holes?)
4 – Strong CP problem not addressed
5 – Cosmological constant (“dark `energy’”) not predicted/explained
6 – Specific choices of particles and interactions
7 – Mass ratios and mixings, strengths of forces all put in by hand

The problem: all seven arguments are correct statements, but none of them implies that the standard model is wrong!

This shows: even moderate physicists are brainwashed. They cannot distinguish between reality and wishes. The reality is that the standard model works without a glitch. The wish is that it is wrong. This might well be one reason why all the researchers searching for a theory of everything (TOE) are not successful. They are led too much by their wishes, and not by reality.

Black hole entropy in 2013

Did you ever look at the calculation of black hole entropy with the spaghetti model?  It is on the pages 256 to 258 of the pdf on the strand/spaghetti model.  Schiller starts with a drawing of a horizon and the definition of entropy from spaghetti.  The first approximation of black hole entropy he gets is one bit per Planck area.  Then he improves the calculation, until the final approximation yields the usual formula, with the correct factor 1/4.  The calculation is simple and can can be understood by anybody who knows the definition of the number e=2.71828... No hard math is needed.  All other calculations are either complicated, like those from string theory, or need fudge factors, like those from loop quantum gravity.  So I asked a few experts for an assessment.

Male expert 1: "The assumed microscopic degrees of freedom are wrong - I tell you. I do not know the correct ones, but these are wrong.  I do not like them."

Female expert 2 and male expert 3: "The calculation is much too simple to be true. It is nonsense."

Male expert 4: "The calculation does not work for more than 3+1 dimensions,  thus it is wrong."

Expert 1 says that in quantum gravity, male authority counts more than results. Experts 2 and 3 say that personal wishes decide about true or false.  And expert 4 says that personal fantasy can be used to criticize reality.

And such reactions are typical.  Quantum gravity, a field without experiments, has become the playing ground for people that pretend to do research but in fact run in circles, without any results.  A friend told me once that quantum gravity is a field with only one important issue: "What are the microscopic degrees of freedom of space-time"?  Triggered by her remark I went through the past five years of research in arxiv/gr-qc.  I found four papers adressing the issue.  Over 99% of all researchers avoid it.

In a previous post I mentioned that almost nobody in high energy physics is actually working on a theory of everything.  Something similar holds for quantum gravity: researchers are avoiding the most important issue.  They are a group of people searching for a solution, all pointing to a specific spot, and whispering to each other: "Do not look there!  Look elsewhere!"

So, if somebody claims to have searched the forbidden spot, despite all the whispering, instead of shouting "Wrong!", we should look carefully. The question is this: "Are spaghetti the microscopic degrees of freedom of space or not?"  If they are, the calculation of black hole entropy follows.

Space made of spaghetti?  How can this crazy idea be tested?  Schiller claims that it implies the entropy of black holes, and thus indirectly, also general relativity.  He even says that quantum gravity effects cannot be detected.  This is dangerous: there are no possible gravitational tests for the spaghetti claim!

So spaghetti are similar to strings: both predict gravity (curved space) and both do not allow any gravitational tests.  Gravity experiments cannot be used to check whether space is made of strings or of spaghetti. And this holds for any other proposal of microscopic degrees of freedom. That is why quantum gravity is an ideal field for theoreticians: tests are next to impossible! But not completely: experiments in particle physics can be used to check whether any proposed microscopic degrees of freedom are correct or not. What will 2013 bring us?