Lost car keys and dark matter

When my husband does not find his car keys, does he deduce that a supersymmetric particle must exist in nature? I assure you that he does not. But he is not a particle physicist or an astronomer. Particle physicists, astronomers and the media are fond of talking of the "dark matter mystery". It is repeated again and again that the universe has four or five times as much "dark matter" as it has "visible matter".

Also my apartment has more matter hidden in closets than visible matter. But I do not claim that my apartment contains any dark matter. Astronomers claim that they do not see all that there is. That is not crazy. But to build machines on Earth to search for what astronomers do not see in the sky definitely is.

Have you heard of projects to build better telescopes to clarify whether we REALLY are missing something? Or about telescopes to look more PRECISELY? Instead, the particle physics world is full of speculations claiming that dark matter is made of yet undiscovered particles. 

Ok, rotation curves of galaxies are not understood. I also do not understand my husband sometimes. Neither situation is a reason to deduce that supersymmetric particles exist or to search for them.

Ok, the cosmic background radiation measurements suggest that there is much more matter in the universe than matter that is visible. But why must the unseen matter be different from the matter we see and know? I read the arguments. None is compelling. Not one.

The idea that dark matter is different from ordinary matter is a fantasy invented to get funding. And the invention really worked well: researchers got billions to check the so-called "mystery". I wish I would get funds every time my husbands lost his car keys. I would be rich by now.

Money and the search for a TOE

The search for  the theory of everything, the TOE, intensifies. In the spaghetti model website, Schiller added new text:

To verify the strand model definitively, calculations of the standard model parameters are under way. The effort of these calculations is estimated to be a couple of person-years (about one or two PhDs). 

We are all looking forward to the results! Schiller writes that the spaghetti model has explained more about nature than any other competing model. He mentions the following result of his model:

Nature has three spatial dimensions, three gauge symmetry groups – namely U(1), SU(2) and SU(3) – and three generations of quarks and leptons.

I agree; no other theory explains these results yet. Quantum gravity and string theory failed.  And he says that he can calculate the parameters of the standard model. Wow!

We are all used to see, once something interesting happens, that many researchers run into the same direction and start searching in the same spot. But not in this case. A good friend, herself a particle researcher, told me why:

You cannot do research in a topic if there is no money available for this research. No money means that you are an outsider and that you will never get a job with that research. Not even if the topic is worthwhile.

I feel like Cassandra. A woman saying the truth, and no man believing it. Cassandra, you really are my alter ego. Dear men, learn to listen to women!

Fermat's last theorem and the TOE

When Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's last theorem after 300 years of attempts, the world did not change. Nobody fell over in amazement. Nothing special happened. The world continued to turn.

So what will happen when the TOE is available?

(A) - Will people say that we have found God? Will they say that the end is nigh? Will politics change? Will the financial crisis be solved? Will suffering disappear? Will the researcher be canonized? Will books have to be rewritten?

(B) - Will the same happen as has happened for Fermat's last theorem? A few newspaper articles, a few TV programs, and no fame or riches?

It is obvious that physicists have been indoctrinated that case A will occur. But case B is the realistic one! We see how men and women are led astray. Men above all.

There is a difference between the TOE and Fermat's last theorem though. In the case of Wiles, nobody laughed about those who failed, because they were few, and those who failed did not believe that they were on the right track. Instead, in the case of the TOE, the whole world will laugh about string theorists, about supersymmetry theorists, about collider people who wanted to build the ILC and the CLIC, about politicians, and about many other lobbyists.

The search for a TOE has a huge establishment behind it, moving billions of dollars. And one that fears being laughed at. Fermat's last theorem had neither.

The TOE establishment is corrupt, mathematics is much less so. Corruption is also the reason that the TOE has not yet been found: corruption forces people to search where the money is, not where the truth is. But I repeat myself.

From the holy grail to a plastic cup

Is the theory of everything really such a big deal? For decades, every physicist in the world has said so. But are they correct?

If the standard model is valid to almost the Planck energy, then there is nothing to be discovered any more. Maybe the only point remaining is the explanation of the standard model parameters.

If that is all, the TOE is not a holy grail, it is a paper cup. After all, who cares about solving mysteries? People want new mysteries, not solutions to old ones. People want drama, not peacefulness. People want to think that a TOE is like reading the mind of god, they do not want to think that a TOE is just reading formulas.

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.