Are the Planck length and the Planck time fantasies?

There is no chance to ever measure Planck lengths or Planck times. They have no experimental effects whatsoever. Are they useless concepts?

Let me assume for a while that we drop these two concepts. It would mean that we keep quantum theory and gravity separate. We drop unification. What happens? Not much. Quantum theory and particle physics remain valid. Also general relativity remains valid. We know of now experiment that requires both theories at the same time.

In practice, avoiding unification has no effect, because the standard model of particle physics and the concordance model of cosmology agree with all experiments.

So, do we need unification? My answer: yes. We need it to understand the parameters of the standard model and of the concordance model.

Do we need unification for other reasons? My answer: no. But many researchers would answer yes. They add anomalies, instabilities, fine tuning, dark matter and more reasons.

Are the Planck length and the Planck time essential for unification? My answer: just a tiny bit. Other ideas are more important. Is nature really a bowl of noodles? Is nature really a huge gut full of moving intestines? These proposals are, if they are correct, more shocking than the Planck length and the Planck time.

String research - the story of the modern maze

Witten's paper, mentioned in the previous post, still touches me. The paper is written by an excellent mathematical physicist. His and the paper's story is the story of a man that enters a maze, sent by many people who trust in his abilities. But instead of looking for the exit, he remains enamoured with what he find in the hallways. In a dead end, he finds an old machine. He starts exploring his machine. After a while he understands what the machine does. He then walks back the maze along the way he entered it, and tells everybody about the machine and about what it does.

He is proud of the machine that he found, and is proud of solving the mystery of its workings. His ego swells. He is admired by thousands of people. He wins prizes.

Then a few people start asking about the exit he was supposed to find. He avoids the answer. He points to his achievements. A sense of disappointment starts to spread.

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The exit of the maze is unification, the machine is string theory. String research is good for your fame and ego. But string theory is useless for unification. 

Strings - and dinosaurs

The newest paper by Witten is http://arxiv.org/pdf/1304.2832.pdf. Have a look at it. It is pure propaganda for strings, and really bad one as well.

This is the start:

String perturbation theory is based on a generalization from point particles and Feynman graphs to strings and Riemann surfaces. It has the remarkable property of preserving the general properties of relativistic quantum fi eld theory, while eliminating the ultraviolet region and forcing the inclusion of gravity.

This is the last sentence:

As a result, the correlation function under study and hence also the matrix element for the supercurrent to create the gaugino from the vacuum is proportional to (Vi), with a universal coefficient.

It is not hard to notice that the paper has no conclusion. This master of physics is unable to write a conclusion!

It is not hard to notice that the paper speaks about gauginos. But they do not exist!

It is not hard to notice that the start is fantasy, not science.

We have the "successor of Einstein" writing nonsense. Yes, also Einstein made mistakes. But he corrected them after a year or two. Witten repeats the same mistakes since 30 years. What a tragedy.

Dark matter: particle physics' answer to astrology

As predicted some posts ago, particle physicists need a new "mystery" to get funding. Supersymmetry is dead, strings are dead, so now they need something else. What is left? Only dark matter.

In the coming years, we will see a huge marketing campaign for this concept. Of course, every astronomer knows that "dark matter" is just a name for the stuff they have not yet detected because their detectors are not good enough. But the money-hungry particle physicists are falsely promoting this form an experimental issue to a fundamental mystery. (Remember the "Voyager deceleration mystery"!)

This means that we will see articles in Scientific American, programs in US mass media, prizes by Russian oligarchs, contests by the FQXI foundation and the Templeton foundation, and special funding programs by US science foundations within the federal government. We will hear that understanding "dark matter" is essential to ensure that US science is competitive and has a future.

Indeed, we will read, hear and see a lot of nonsense in the coming months. The command center will not be the IAS in Princeton, because the IAS has already disqualified itself as an institution promoting string theory. The command center of the delusion will be some other institution, which will then do a wonderful job to disqualify itself in the next 20 years.

When all the involved particle physicists hill have retired or died, around 2030, particle physics might start to become a healthy discipline again. Until then, being a particle physicist is as valuable as being an astrologer: both tell lies to get money.

Tagliatelle, not spaghetti, and spin-statistics

Yesterday I received a tip pointing me to this page with animations. This time, the animations on Schiller's site are not about spaghetti, but about tagliatelle, the band-shaped noodles from Italy.

The videos show: tagliatelle are a model for spin 1/2 particles; and, tagliatelle are a model for fermions too! The videos are worth watching. I did not know that tagliatelle are fermions.

The obsession with long noodles seems unavoidable in Schiller's work. But why is he now departing from spaghetti?

More male nonsense

Popes also sell a theory of everything, one that is called "religion". "Anyone who does not pray to the Lord prays to the devil" said pope Francis in one of his first speeches. 

But the sentence is wrong on many counts. The most important one: the devil does not exist. Jews know that the devil does not exist. Science knows that the devil does not exist. The "devil" is a figure that appears in bad religious comics. How can somebody pray to something that does not exist? 

Catholics must believe that the devil exists. It is part of their belief system. How can a world religion require people to believe falsehoods?

Male physics makes little progress

Peter Woit cites Lykken as a researcher that disagrees with supersymmetry. But males are males: they like dreams. Faster than you could imagine, Lykken replaces supersymmetry with another fiction: dark matter.

Dark matter has even less arguments speaking in its favor than supersymmetry. But it is simpler to get funds for it. So the lesson learned from susy and strings might be: switch to dark matter to get funding! Wait a few years, and they will sell the new collider as a "dark matter research machine".

When will they ever learn to leave the fiction out of science?

How to get more money in particle physics

Particle physicists faces a problem. Given that the standard model is all there is, they don't have a good story to tell. They found no supersymmetry, no mini black holes, no additional dimensions, no GUT, and not anything new.

Do they have bad dreams? Well, they took 50 years to find the Higgs boson after it was predicted. This must have been the slowest discovery in the history of physics. The 50 years were great: they got so much money in the meantime that they lived well. What will happen now? Are they going to argue that we will need 200 years for squarks and similar nonsense? Probably. It worked well in the past.

The Milner prizes show that you can get a large prize even if your theory contradicts facts. Everybody has noticed this. So what will these people do?

1: They will develop a model that cannot be tested by the LHC in Geneva. Thus it cannot be tested for another 30 to 50 years. Such a model is the basis

2: They will develop an artificial consensus. By channeling all attention, all lobbying, all conferences, all the press and the funds to their model, they will live well for another 30 to 50 years.

3: They will be nasty to all people who point out that the consensus model has no experimental backing.

4: They will enjoy all the money: go to conferences, groom PhDs that are devoted to the money distributors, plan and build useless machines, lobby politicians etc. And they will ask for time.

All this sounds familiar doesn't it? They just need a new theory, or at least a new type of string theory, to get all this happening. We just have to wait for the next such article in Scientific American. That is where such lobbying usually starts.

The Higgs is here to stay - and afterwards?

I was to skeptical. The Higgs exists. The new data shown at the Moriond conference is convincing.

Now the exciting question arises: Is there anything beyond the standard model? Theorists claim: yes! Experimentalists have not found anything yet.

If there is nothing left, it would mean that we know everything. Of course, we still do not know the origin of the parameters. But if we knew that, we would know everything about the world. Everything? The same claim was made over a century ago; and it was wrong. Is anything different today? We should know more in a few years.

How to formulate a long bet about unification

I just discovered www.longbets.org. We can put long-term bets there. Can we formulate a long bet, to challenge modern particle theorists? Here is a proposal:

Prediction 1:
No decay, no reaction, and no effect that is incompatible with the standard model of particle physics will be discovered. 

A more satirical proposal:

Prediction 2: String theorists and supersymmetry researchers will be depressed for their remaining life, because no evidence for supersymmetry, higher dimensions, or strings will be discovered.