Finally: Motl advises to leave the race for a TOE

Motl is the physics blogger who likes to play the victim. All violent people do so.  Therefore he started to claim to be ill in order to hope that people are not as nasty to him as he is to others.

But now he sees that the job market for theoretical physicists is getting tight, because experiment contradicts 99.9% of all theories developed in the last 30 years. He now wrote that theorists should stop working on "wishful thinking and speculative belief".

Motl thus not only states that theorists should not work on supersymmetry or string theory. Because there is no particle theorist working on anything else than "wishful thinking", he thinks ALL particle theorists should stop working.

Yes, Motl has now joined Woit and Smolin, the people he has fought for so long, in his assessment of particle physics! The universe has a lot of humour.

Fringe physicists and Clay's mass gap Problem

I found something to laugh about. The two fringe physicists Alexander Dynin and Christoph Schiller both claim to have solved the mass gap problem posed by the Clay Institute (which offers a million US$ for a solution). But the two proposed solutions contradict each other.

Dynin claims to have proven Witten's statement

Prove that for any compact simple global gauge group, a nontrivial quantum Yang-Mills theory exists on Minkowski time-space and has a positive mass gap.

In fact, his paper has no summary about his conclusion. Instead, Schiller, in his book, claims that YM only exists for SU(2) and SU(3), if I understand correctly.

I guess that the million dollar will still remain at the Clay Institute for a while.

Xiao-Gang Wen drops out of the race for a TOE

In his latest paper, Wen still is prisoner of the shortcomings of his ideas. He still uses the term "topological orders" with a plural "s", where there is no such plural neither in the English language nor in any abstract way; he still is fascinated by phase transitions instead of the real, inhomogeneous world; he still only talks about fermions and bosons, but never about quarks and leptons; he still talks about many dimensions, but avoids the issue of spin.

Wen is smart and driven, but he is on the wrong path. He has missionary zeal - for the wrong religion.

What a pity for such a smart man.

The difference between Lust and Sokal

Read this paper, please. Read the abstract. Read the paper. Enjoy the first page. This is the kind of papers showing that string theorists have departed in another world and lost touch with reality.

Nobody in his right mind would ever write such a text. This is a Sokal hoax in a physics journal. And it is ongoing. Sokal performed a hoax, he was healthy. Lust is convinced, he is sick.

String theory is not about nature, not about reality, and not about a theory of everything. It is about a group of people in a shared fantasy world. What a tremendous suffering for all those involved. Who can help them?

Randall has given up

This news hurts me a lot. One of the few women in particle research, Lisa Randall, has given up, as this recent interview shows:

Doesn't every physicist dream of one neat theory of everything?
There are lots of physicists! I don't think about a theory of everything when I do my research. And even if we knew the ultimate underlying theory, how are you going to explain the fact that we're sitting here? Solving string theory won't tell us how humanity was born.

So is a theory of everything a myth?
It's not that it's a fallacy. It's one objective that will inspire progress. I just think the idea that we will ever get there is a little bit challenging.

But isn't beautiful mathematics supposed to lead us to the truth?
You have to be careful when you use beauty as a guide. There are many theories people didn't think were beautiful at the time, but did find beautiful later - and vice versa. I think simplicity is a good guide: the more economical a theory, the better.

Is it a problem, then, that our best theories of particle physics and cosmology are so messy?
We're trying to describe the universe from 10²⁷ metres down to 10^-35 metres, so it's not surprising there are lots of ingredients. The idea that the stuff we're made of should be everything seems quite preposterous. Dark matter and dark energy - these are not crazy ingredients we're adding.

Did the discovery of the Higgs boson - the "missing ingredient" of particle physics - take you by surprise last July?
I was surprised that the Large Hadron Collider experiments reached that landmark. I thought the teams would say something very affirming but the announcement of the discovery was amazing. It was a feat of engineering that they got the collision rate up to what it had to be, and the experiments did a better job at analysing the data.

Are you worried that the Higgs is the only discovery so far at the LHC?
I'm not worried that nothing else exists. But I am worried that the LHC might have too low an energy. Had the Superconducting Super Collider been built in Texas, it would have had almost three times the energy. There is a distinct possibility we'll discover things when the LHC's energy is nearly doubled next year. But it's too early to see signs of warped extra dimensions - they will take longer to find.

What would an extra dimension look like?
The best signature of the warped extra dimensions would be seeing a so-called Kaluza-Klein particle. These are partners of the particles that we know about but they get their momentum from extra dimensions. They would look to us like heavy particles with properties similar to the ones we know, but with bigger masses.

What if we don't see one? Some argue that seeing nothing else at the LHC would be best, as it would motivate new ideas.
I don't know what dream world they are living in. It would be very hard to make the argument to build a higher energy machine based on the fact that you didn't see something.

What a depressing interview. A TOE is not important, maybe it does not exists, but additional dimensions do. Recall that additional dimensions are inspired by TOE attempts and by nothing else. Recall also that no experiment has any evidence for additional dimensions.

Yes, unfortunately, Randall has left reality for her own dream world.

Religion and noodles as a TOE

Many Indians claim that quantum theory was part of religion in India. Now it turns out that the same happened to the spaghetti model. The spaghetti model as a theory of everything has not been invented by physics research. Long before that, a religion proposed it.

Wikipedia provides a summary of the religion claiming that spaghetti are at the basis of the universe. This religion, pastafarianism, proves and precedes the spaghetti model. Pastafarianism is firmly based in 3 dimensions. Thus it also proves that string theory is wrong and shows that the spaghetti model is correct.

Of course, like all religions it has its flaws. Nobody in China or Italy eats noodles with meatballs. This fundamental mistake shows that the religion is an invention of American missionaries. Still, pastafarianism is clearly more exact, moral and serious than other American religions such as scientology, intelligent design or christians for assault rifles in private homes.

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.

Cycling and supersymmetry

Once it became evident that Lance Armstrong doped from the time he was a teenager up to the present, it became clear that his whole professional life was built on a lie. So was that of many riders that competed with him. But for years he was protected by the UCI, US and French presidents, businessmen etc.

Once it became clear that supersymmetry is wrong, it became clear that it was a lie from its beginning.  So was the professional life of all competing supersymmetry researchers. But for years, supersymmetry researchers were protected by governments, CERN, physics societies, universities, businessmen, etc.

Armstrong is a liar and a bully and made a career only because he was both.

Seiberg and many other supersymmetry researchers are liars and bullies, and made a career only because they were both. (You can find blog entries were some of these people state that lying and bullying is ok.)

A wise man once said: "Lance Armstrong deserves to be forgotten."

We should take the same stance and say: "Supersymmetry researchers deserve to be forgotten."