Niels Bohr, my physics professor and Peter Woit

I like Peter Woit; he is a nice and honest man. Nevertheless I want to poke a little bit of fun at him.

My physics professor at university told me to read Niels Bohr. That is not easy. But I did it. Most of it I did not like. But I liked one idea of his: Bohr used to write that quantum mechanics is summarized in the statement that hbar is not zero. So did my teacher.

My prof told us that starting from a nonzero hbar value we can distinguish state and measurement. And then quantum mechanics appears. hbar is even at the origin of the term "quantum".

The world was ok - until modern mathematical physicists appeared. Peter Woit is one of them. These people refused this connection between hbar and quantum theory. They claim that is is not that simple, that quantum theory exists by itself, independently of hbar, and that hbar is not the reason for the Hilbert space. History and facts shows the opposite, but who cares? :-)

The ideology behind such mathematical opinions explains why mathematical physicists will *not* succeed in finding the unified theory - especially when male.

The conformal standard model from Berlin

The Conformal Standard Model - finally an attempt for a unified model in arixv! There have not been such speculations for years. Here it is: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.06149  by Lewandowski, Meissner, and Nicolai.

So, what should we think about it? The model fits experiments and makes predictions: (few) new particles, dark matter is one of them, and a few more details. So far so good. We will wait for the experimental tests and then see what happens.

But there are reasons to be unsure. A number of questions are not addressed:

- How does the particle spectrum arise? No real answer is given.
- What determines the gauge groups? Is there any answer?
- How exactly do the gauge couplings arise? The answer in the paper is not so clear.
- What about mixing matrices, electric dipole moments and neutrino masses? No numbers are predicted, but (indirectly) ranges of values; so this might be plausible.
- Why does space have three dimensions? No answer is given.
- What happens at the Planck scale? No answer.
- Does inflation occur? No answer - but then, no one is needed anyway.

So what shall we think of the paper? The nice side about it: No supersymmetry, no axions, no strings, no loop quantum gravity. The more questionable side: new particles are predicted that nobody has seen yet.

If they are flowers, they will blossom!