Schwarz's history of string theory

Have a look at http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.0981, where John Schwarz tells about "The Early History of String Theory and Supersymmetry". Read is as if you never had read anything on the topic before. Try.

The results is astonishing. Schwarz tells how string theory arose from a wrong description of the strong interaction and mesons and baryons. He tells how it arose from playing with the mathematics of the strong interactions. Then he tells how he and others generalized it to a framework for the description of all interaction and particles. He never says why this generalization makes sense, which problems it solves, which questions it answers.

The report sound like a man completely lost together with his research colleagues in a world of fantasy Lagrangians, fantasy dimensions, fantasy symmetries and fantasy dualities. There is no attempt to clarify ideas, to clarify the structure of what is being done, to clarify the goals, to present the progress in understanding or to present the advantages of the approach. It is a man running around in a forest of abstract mathematics, telling how pretty it is, but not explaining what he is doing or why. And Schwarz is an old man: he is 70 years old.

When we read texts by the old masters, like Einstein, Schroedinger, Heisenberg, they tell us what they did, why they did it, what dreams drove them, what motivations they had, what discoveries triggered them and why the enjoyed what they did. Schwarz is the opposite. He tells nothing of all this. It is obvious from his account that he is not a master of his field and that he does not know what he is doing. He keeps his motivations for himself. He obviously knows that they are not worth sharing. What a disappointment.

Indoctrination

In a recent blog there was a deep comment: the strand model cannot be correct because is contradicts string theory, which is the correct approach.

Obviously, nobody with a normal sense of logic would ever say something like that. But it shows how effective the string indoctrination has been. String theory is not physics any more, its a religion.

Academic honesty

Which string theorist can honestly say that string theory is correct? Or that supersymmetry is correct?

Most universities require from their students "honesty in the search for truth". But universities are tricky beasts: they rarely apply to themselves what they require from others. If they did, university researchers and professors working on string theory would need to resign. Why don't they? Because of the money.

These researchers do not pursue truth. They pursue money.

CERN is holding back data

CERN has collected about 5.7 fb^-1 data. But the December announcements by ATLAS and CMS only use 4.76 or 4.9 of them. The December announcements also do not analyze a number of other decay channels. Why?

Maybe the Higgs bumps would disappear with the larger number of data? Would the hint of a Higgs disappear if all data and all channels would be used? Did CERN tweak the data in such a way that it looks like a hint of Higgs, in order to keep optimism in the media?

Since many months (almost a year), CERN also did not update the sheet which summarizes all its (negative) BSM (beyond the standard model) search results.

My prediction from some time ago in this blog came true: CERN is holding back data that proves that there is no physics beyond the standard model, and is feeding the media with selected data that shows "hints" of new physics. And they are doing it so well that nobody seems to notice.

Multiverse and Professor Doktor Dietmar Lüst

A friend sent me a new book about string theory by Dietmar Lüst (or Luest). Do not read it.

There is no original or interesting idea in the book. All is copied from other popularizing string theory books. He even manages to copy - copying text is a hobby in his country - only the worst ideas across the field: a lot about the book is on the multiverse.

I think every time a professor uses the word `multiverse', his salary should be cut by 20%. Lüst would be sleeping under bridges. He is an example of what happens when a smart man gets too much influence and no control (as most German professors): he goes bonkers.

No Higgs found yet

Look at the data collected at CERN. The plot with the strongest evidence is the one in the digamma channels. The two curves by ATLAS and CMS (see the links in the post by Woit) are extremely disappointing: no sober person will see any signal in those curves.

The rest is hype.

Pregnancy and the Higgs

These are exciting times - for me and for particle physics.

The prospects for a Higgs are remote though. The LHC obviously has not found anything.

Update on December 14th: a handful of events without statistical importance seen at the LHC have put the world press into a frenzy. We are living in crazy times. Fact: no Higgs has been found, the mass window is even smaller.

G does not run

A new paper argues convincingly that Newton's constant G does not run with energy. This is a criticism of many papers that claim that such a running exists.

But one moment: the strand model also makes this point. (And Schiller does not even mention it, I think.) So his model is vindicated again.

How will CERN manage the lack of discoveries?

CERN management is nervous. After having spent 5 billion euros to build the LHC, the lack of discoveries, unanimously predicted by all physicists in the world, is embarassing. The latest internal CERN proposal on how to deal with the situation makes two statements.

- No discovery is even more interesting than the discovery of the Higgs. It would be "revolutionary".

- CERN needs to take more data to say more.

What a weak report! Since the report is so weak, I bet that:

- CERN will NOT publish the Higgs results for the first 5 inverse femtobarns this year.

- CERN will SPREAD the results (say for 3 fb^-1, then for 4, then for 5) over various months in 2012, to stay in the press, even though the results will be available long before those dates.

There will be a distressingly long waiting time ahead, due to bad politics only.

In the meantime, CERN people should read Schiller's strand model. He predicted the lack of any new discoveries a few years ago. He also proposes a consistent solution for all open problems of the standard model. And he did not need 5 billion euros to do so.

Motl will give back his PhD if the Higgs is not found

I just read Motl's comment on this blog, where he writes "If there’s a proof that there doesn’t exist any Higgs boson below a TeV, you may remind me to return my PhD."

He made this comment in a discussion where he stated that nobody who denies the Higgs should be allowed to work for a PhD in particle physics. This statement is not respectful, but at least he is consistent.

But the question remains: Why such a drastic, self-imposed punishment? If there is no Higgs, then 99.9% of all particle physicists were wrong in the past 40 years. So what? A punishment is only acceptable if people were *aware* that they were wrong.