31 July 2013

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.

5 comments:

  1. Corrections------------
    --The said Nobel Prizer did not fall--he was there all the time
    --The said Nobel Prizer is not necessarily a smart man.Why?Serious studies show that on the average Nobel Prizers are definitely NOT extremely bright and definitely not stupid.Of course there are exceptions (both ways...).E.g. Einstein's IQ was a mere 130.Main traits of most Nobel Prizers are:curiosity,stubborness (near obsession)and strong survival instincts.This is why Nobel Prizers ,in their activities following the Award ceremony,quite often may cause more damage than benefits.





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    1. No! Wilczek is a smart man. Just read his research articles. He is a very smart man.

      Besides, most Nobel Prize winners are really smart and do a lot of good. Take it easy, man!

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    2. I started reading Wilczek's paper, but I didn't finish it. To his credit, he did seem to be proposing a way to test the multiverse idea, but I didn't read far enough to see if that was the case (and I doubt I was up to the task of judging anyway).

      The Strand Model seems far more interesting. As far as I can tell, the inspiration for it has been two ideas in particular:

      1. The current physical theories can be deduced from limit laws (there's a minimum action, a maximum speed, a maximum force, and a minimum entropy).

      2. The symmetry groups of quantum field theory result from the three Reidemeister moves of knot theory (the twist, the poke, and the slide).

      Then I think (but I could be wrong) that the rest of the Strand Model was crafted to fit these two inspirations. And then (I think) the bits that Christoph Schiller invented worked far more successfully than one would expect if the ideas that inspired them were on the wrong track. For instance, when he made knots (well tangles) out of one, two, or three strands (the number of strands that, respectively, the first, second, and third Reidemeister moves apply to), he ended up with tangles that corresponded with all of the elementary particles, but no others.

      Now come on! How would you feel if you discovered that?

      Of course he could have made a mistake -- how would I know. But who would expect such a potential bombshell to go ignored? You have got to feel sympathy. Frustrating must not seem like a big enough word for the experience.

      Maybe it is because they already chased an idea for thirty years, and it didn't lead where they hoped. Perhaps they just need a little breather before they begin a new hunt. (But they better not take too long because I don't think it will take thirty years this time.)

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    3. My guess is that Schiller is still working on the topic.

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  2. ok-Nobel Prizers are smart but only in their narrow fields of expertise
    They are no any better than anybody else in other fields but they think and write and talk as if they were,nonsense being the inevitable result

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