Braids vs strands

Braids are a model for elementary particles from 2005 (see hep-ph/0503213). One of the most vitriolic superstring physicists around says that the braid model is wrong because it does not explain SU(2) breaking. Strands, in contrast, do explain SU(2) breaking, but the explanation is quite bizarre (by knotting). Another of the most vitriolic physicists around says that strands are wrong, because the explanation of SU(3) cannot be true - he knows it in his guts.

Braids do not claim to be a theory of everything, so one cannot blame the model for not explaining everything. Strands do claim to be a theory of everything, so more fundamental arguments are needed. And we all know what guts contain... Ok, many men in fundamental physics are not gentlemen, but should they use such arguments?

I read that "theory of everything" is a term that Schiller, the author of the strand model, does not like at all. But we have to call a spade a spade. Strands claim to be a theory of everything, so they are a theory of everything. I dislike these unnecessary intellectual distinctions.

If I continue like this, I will become Schiller's bulldog. I have to try first whether life as a dog is worthwhile. Well, a female bulldog might be interesting.

Fukushima released at least 6 Hiroshima bombs

Following yesterdays announcement in Japan, Fukushima released between 370 000 and 630 000 Terabecquerel of radiation. Hiroshima released between 4000 and 60 000 Terabecquerel.

That is at least 6 Hiroshima bombs of radiation, but possibly much more. And TEPCO said, that the level of Chernobyl will probably be achieved, which was over 200 Hiroshima bombs. Scary numbers.

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Here is the satirical part: Despite this, we all agree that nuclear power is safe, because "in our country, ..., this cannot happen."

(You can insert your favourite country in the sentence, because all countries with nuclear power stations have made this statement, including a largish country that has built several nuclear power stations directly on an earth-quake producing fault near San Francisco.)

Czech communist dreams up a proof of string theory against evidence

A communist is a person that values his ideology more than the facts, and uses violence to spread it. A well-known czech communist  - and sadly also physicist, once researcher at Harvard - has now transformed the recent Fermilab error in their data evaluation first into a new force, then into a invented Z' particle and finally into a proof of string theory. These are not lies any more, but fraud.

So we see that in Czechia, at least one string theorist is so deranged that he needs to deceive others for a living. If belief in supersymmetry is only a delusion, belief in string theory is now definitely proven to be a mental condition.

Should I make fun of famous or of unkown physicists?

Schiller, the unknown physicist proposing the "strand model" is a source of many unconventional ideas. I already wrote that I like his strand model because it is incompatible with supersymmetry and with higher dimensions. For me, the strand model might be one of the few common-sense models in fundamental physics.

And here is the best part of it: not only does the model claim to agree with all experiments, it also pretends to reproduce the full Lagrangian of particle physics from scratch. Now, we all know that neither string theory nor loop quantum gravity are able to do that, despite of dozens of people trying to do so since 30 years.

These arguments intrigued me since I started reading about the model the first time. So, every now and then, in the last weeks, I asked people for an evaluation of the model. I also emailed Schiller. This was more fun than expected.

A few established researchers told me that the strand model is not useful because it makes no predictions. (If I count correctly, the model makes more than two dozen predictions.) Another researcher said that the model might be correct, but that all ideas were old. (According to Schiller, all ideas are new.) Another one told me that the model is not complete yet, so it is not worth looking at it. (According to Schiller, the model is indeed not complete, but the intermediate results are already better than those of string theory and loop quantum gravity combined.)

I have not decided yet about which side I should make more fun...

Fun about Motl

True, one should not waste energy about Motl. But he is so smart, rude and unreasonable that I cannot resist making fun of him. One of my male friends – yes, they do exist – has the right description for what guys like him are doing in physics research: mental masturbation.

It must be said that we speak about Motl's past: he is not a physicist any more. At present he converted to being a frustrated anti-global-warming activist. In his research past, the conjectures he explored – supersymmetry and strings – were only for his own enjoyment.  Nobody else cares about these conjectures, because they do not agree with experiment. But a few rare people do share the same hobby.

The best is that Motl recently told in his blog why he doesn't want to explain his past research to the general public: "it is like throwing pearls to swines." I had never seen this expression, which is from the bible, applied to this specific hobby.

Motl is much better than Sarah Palin. Thus there is only one conclusion: Motl for president!

Making fun of strands - April fool

The crazy strand model found here is the best April fool in a long time: a model that claims to be the theory of everything - with simple math.

All the famous string theorists with their incomprehensible concepts and their useless abstractions are left behind by an unknown guy who claims to have found the secret behind the three dimensions of space,  the three gauge interactions and the three generations. The model claims that you can describe quantum theory and general relativity with strands, using math that every 20-year old can understand.

It might be an April fool, but is such a good one that it is worth telling.

The tough times of high energy particle physicists

The LHC and the Tevatron, the two large accelerators, have not produced one shred of evidence for any proposed "theory of everything". This is a tough situation. After all, the theoreticians and experimentalists that lobbied for the billions that were spent on the LHC said:

• We will find the Higgs and understand mass.
• We will find supersymmetry and understand forces.
• We will understand dark matter and dark energy, and thus understand the universe.
• We will find hidden dimensions and discover new worlds.

You can read the CERN original here. As readers of this blog know, it seems more likely than not that the Higgs, supersymmetry, dark matter and higher dimensions are just figments of imagination. This means that the 30 years in which theoreticians have first convinced all the experimentalists, then all science lobbyists, then all politicians and then all tax payers can be summed up thus:

• We were wrong.

Of course, the last word in not spoken, but let us imagine that it is. How can it be that the smartest people on earth, the followers of Einstein, made such a mistake? How can it be that all these people, tens of thousands of them, were wrong? Wrong for 30 years? There is only one answer:

• High energy particle physicists are sycophants.

But a scientist must pursue facts, not try to please the mighty. But tens of thousands of the smartest people - mostly men - in the world did so for 30 years. Why did this happen?

It happened as a consequence of the curse of the 20th century: ideology. If you look at the history of Europe and North America, you find only one thing that they have in common: ideology. Communists, Nazis, Socialists, Conservatives, Atheists and Christians, Right and Left: all were completely blinded by ideology. When any of these people presents an opinion, it is never based on facts, it is based on the ideology of their group. Last century was the century of ideology and self-deception.

What is the specific ideology that drove the people lobbying for the LHC? It was "we know a lot, but there is even more that we do not know". This is the self-deception of scientists since 30 years, the self-deception that led them to build more and more theoretical castles in the air, and the self-deception that convinced the rest of society to put billions of dollars into the LHC.

And what is the most bizarre side of it? All this was done mostly by men. None of them asked the advice of their wife, it seems. Maybe men should listen to their wives more often, or to women in general: women do not like sycophants, even if they build castles in the air, or if they build castles below ground.

Hep-th at arxiv: a sad story

On the arxiv, the hep-th group was once the star. Posting a preprint there was a great honour. But now, the situation is different. Hypnotized by the LHC results, which are eliminating one theory after the other, theoreticians are in disarray. They do not post much any more, fearing that others make fun of their work. Theoreticians have basically stopped working.

For the first time in decades, high energy theoreticians see that experiment is checking what they wrote during their lifetime. For many theoreticians, this is the first time in their life that they have to care about experiment. And they are in panic.

Grand unification? No trace of it.
Supersymmetry? No trace of it.
Dark matter? No trace of it.
Higher dimensions? No trace of them.
Deviations from the standard model? No trace of them.
 
Whatever the outcome at the LHC, it is obvious that the majority of all theoretical high energy particle physicists have told nonsense in the past twenty years. (99% might be a better estimate.) So they are nervous now. Mind you, they always believed in what they were saying and writing. But it was nonsense nevertheless. Soon, they will find that they have lived in "fantasy land". For years. They have built their careers on fantastic nonsense. They have been proud of it. They have made fun of people who criticized them. And now these nasty experiments are not finding any trace of deviation from the standard model. How can nature be so cruel? How can nature destroy so many illustrious careers? How does nature dare to contradict Seiberg, the greatest theoretical physicist that the universe has ever seen?

Have a look at Seiberg's talks on his home page. There is not one talk that makes any sensible statement. In fact, he makes not one statement that has relation to experiment. That is the sign of a great scientist - isn't it?

No. The happiest moment of Einstein's life was when he discovered that general relativity agreed with experiment. Dirac was happy when antimatter was discovered, as he had predicted. But, you might argue, those were only the lesser scientists. Not the calibre of Seiberg. True. A truly great scientist, like Seiberg, does not care about the facts. He yells them away.

So researchers now have a dilemma. Should they follow experiment, or should they follow the yelling authorities? If they do not follow authorities, they will make no career. If they do not follow experiment, they don't either. The result is simple: researchers are keeping quiet. And arxiv/hep-th suffers.

The end of gr-qc? The end of gravitation research?

As a follower of arxiv, I am more and more astonished by the small number of preprints in the gr-qc category. Not only is the number small; on top of this, the topics are uninteresting and the ideas hollow or unrealistic.

Everybody into gravitation research says that the main problem of the field is to find a quantum theory of gravitation. But no attempts to solve the problem are appearing in gr-qc since years.

The researchers in the field collectively refuse to go for the biggest prize in the field! Gravity researchers seem to think that they have nothing to contribute.

Why have all these people given up? How can it be that there are no attempts to solve a problem that is clearly stated since almost a century? Here are some possibilities.

1. The problem is not important. After all, there is a million dollars for solving the mass gap problem, but not for this problem. So there is a - possibly hidden - consensus that the problem is not important. (But what do you care what others think?)
2. People are not eager to solve the problem. There is no way to advance your career if you solve it. After all, what is this little Nobel Prize nowadays? You will never be as rich and famous as Lady Gaga. (So what?)
3. Researchers fear working on the problem. After all, you might fail and everybody may laugh at you for years. (So what?)
4. The solution cannot be checked. Indeed, no prediction on quantum gravity has ever been confirmed or has a chance to be confirmed. (Of course not - those were the wrong attempts!)
5. People in the field have no clue. Really. (What? You're smart enough to understand general relativity and believe you are too stupid to solve the problem? Who told you this nonsense?)

But all this boil down to only one statement: "many past attempts failed - so will I".

No!

For every past attempt that fails, the next attempt gets easier. Researchers, get your act together!

No particles?

"Particles must be abolished!" said a friend. She continued: "If particles were fundamental, we cannot understand where they come from. So they cannot be fundamental. So we have to abolish them!"

But how?