13 April 2013

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.

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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. 

12 April 2013

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.