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.