No new TOE candidate in sight - researchers, be courageous!

So far, all 2013 papers on hep-th and gr-qc in the arxiv were disappointing. No new ideas arose on the theory of everything. No new TOE proposals.

Some obstinate people still work on supersymmetry or strings, even though they do not lead to predictions or uniqueness. Some quantum gravity people still work on their pet models, but without any predictions or uniqueness.

There are no new opinion pieces either. In the past, people used to write texts in which they told what their opinion are. Nothing hard, just their own opinions and beliefs. All these are gone. Nobody has an opinion any more about where to look for unification. No opinion pieces means that nobody has the courage to tell others what to do, where to search, or what to speculate. A whole generation of leaders, professors, and researchers has become silent.

In the past years, every researcher used to give interviews. Nowadays, interviews only cover multiverses and similar nonsense. The search for a TOE has stopped to be a topic for interviews. Researchers have lost faith, it seems.

Look at Steve Carlip, well-known researcher in general relativity. Since 2009, he thinks that space is made of "fluctuating lines". He tells this in every paper since. What happened? He was called all sort of names by colleagues. And he has to focus on defending the approach, instead of building on it.

Yes, it is hard to speculate if others call you crazy. Yes, it is hard to brainstorm if others call you mad. Simply forget the criticisms! Please, dare to dream again! Dare to speculate! Dare to brainstorm! Find the nature of nature! Find the components of nature! Inspire the young women and men we need to find the TOE!

Vacuum is a medium - we need the result to search for the theory of everything

Vacuum has microscopic degrees of freedom. They lead to black hole entropy, to vacuum energy, to particle-antiparticle creation, etc. It propagates gravitational waves. The degrees of freedom even lead to friction: in situations of high curvature, vacuum drag occurs. (Though not on light! Many experiments, even recent ones that used gamma ray bursts, have failed to find vacuum drag effects on light.)

Vacuum has mechanical properties. It bends when energy goes through it. It behaves like an elastic substance. It has an energy content.

Without being ashamed, we can say that MODERN vacuum has all properties that were once, incorrectly, ascribed to aether. The aether does not exist. But vacuum is a medium. We need to build on this result to find the theory of everything.

To understand nature, we need to find the microscopic degrees of freedom of the vacuum. This is what emergent gravity people try to do, what quantum foam researchers and string net researchers try to do, what quantum gravity people try to do, what string theorists try to do, what the strand model people try to do, what black hole researchers try to do and what all the other researchers working on a theory of every thing try to do.

Without the idea that vacuum is a medium, we cannot search for a theory of everything!

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It is not helpful that the Physical Society of a large country with a long history of physics officially writes that teachers should tell their pupils that vacuum is not a medium. It is wrong, deeply wrong, and the men that did so should resign from their posts:

 sfz@uni-ulm.de,
 bartelmann@uni-heidelberg.de,
 buehler.fabian@gmx.de,
 grossmann@physik.uni-marburg.de,
 Joerg.Huefner@urz.uni-heidelberg.de,
 loehken@uni-hd.de,
 meierk@kip.uni-heidelberg.de,
 meschede@iap.uni-bonn.de,
 peter.reineker@uni-ulm.de,
 tolan@physik.uni-dortmund.de,
 Jochen.Wambach@physik.tu-darmstadt.de,
 werner.weber@tu-dortmund.de

Give physics back to the physicists, and let the liars go home!

Is the membership in the German Physical Society acceptable?

My German friend Jonas is asking the question, because the GPS wrote such a deeply mistaken expert opinion on the correct teaching. Among the statements of the GPS are

1.  temperature and entropy are not the foundations of thermodynamics
2.  force is not momentum flow
3.  dipoles are not made of two poles
4.  light does not need vacuum for traveling

If you would tell any of this in court, you would go to jail. What a sad story.

Dipoles do not have two poles - German physicists drop out of the search for unification

In Germany, dipoles do not have two poles. At least if you believe the German physical society.

In the rest of the world, a dipole is the limiting case of putting two opposite poles, of same strength, at the same place.

This definition is valid in all cases. Not in Germany. In Germany you are allowed to use this definition in all cases, except one: for magnetic dipoles. In this case, poles are not allowed to be thought about, says the German physical society:

Teachers and pupils should not think that magnetic dipoles are made of two poles.

Remember the 1920s? Einstein, Heisenberg, Born? German male physicists were world class. Hundred years later - nothing and more. Why?  Because they use their energy to tell students that dipoles do not have two poles. And they add more nonsense.

The big problem of quantum gravity, and of unification, is to understand the microscopic degrees of freedom of the vacuum. However, the German physical society has explained in the same expert opinion that:

Vacuum is not a medium.

How can you find the microscopic degrees of freedom of the vacuum, if you are not allowed to think that vacuum has such degrees of freedom?

We will have to continue to wait for an Asian woman to achieve unification. Maybe a Swiss woman. For sure, German males have no chance!

From intelligent design to unintelligent physicists

In Switzerland and in Europe we often shake our heads about the discussions of intelligent design, which seem a mostly American exaggeration from here. Wrong.

First, German physicists must believe the following idea:

Electromagnetic waves do not need vacuum as carrier medium. 

There is no way to make this sentence into a correct one, or to interpret it in a way that is correct. It is dead wrong. Ok, everybody is entitled to have opinions, even wrong ones. But now comes the German side of the story: the German Physical society wrote an official letter to all ministers responsible for public schools.

The German physical society wants all teachers to teach this false idea to all pupils in secondary school / high school. 

The German Physical Society has now come down to the level of the intelligent design people, who also want teachers to teach false statements to children.

German Physical Society dismisses laws of physics and is candidate for Nobel Prize

This is more fun than I ever imagined. In February 2013, the German Physical Society published a committee report written by 9 physics professors and several senior physics teachers - all male - with the following statements:

Momentum flow is not the same as force. (page 2)

Reason, experiment, Newton with his definition F = dp/dt, relativity, and quantum field theory books say the opposite, but why care?

The attempt to put only temperature and entropy at the center of thermodynamics must be seen as misleading. (page 10)

Reason, experiment, Gibbs, and thermodynamics books disagree, but why care? There is much more nonsense that I leave out. And then there is the highlight:

Electromagnetic waves do not need vacuum as carrier medium. (page 12)

In contrast with quantum field theory and with all experiments performed so far, the committee is able to make experiments where light does not go through vacuum! Nobody has ever achieved this before! This groundbreaking result should be awarded with the Nobel Prize.

Update: Many physicists are appalled and many agree.

Physics is different at the University of Illinois

A very good friend told me a bizarre story loosely related to the topics of this blog. She once wondered why there where around the internet, a number posts where Christoph Schiller's physics book is said to contain mistakes, but no mistake is usually mentioned. And all are under different name, but with the same animosity and the same sentences. When my friend asked Schiller, she got the answer that all those posts are written, every time under a different name, by the same person.

She then asked a computer expert and he quickly found out that these posts are by a student-physicist from the University of Illinois. This student-physicist usually calls Schiller a 'crackpot', but gives no reason. I searched a bit around, and I found some real funny physics statements from this guy:

Elementary particles can have infinite momentum and energy values. 

He really insists on this: not just very big values, but actually infinite values.

Special relativity is valid in regions where space is curved.

Classical electrodynamics is valid even in quantum theory.

He also regularly adds that his professors agree with him. Well, a real man and scientist does not talk that way, you know. Does GPS navigation not work in Illinois? Are there no photons at that university? It really looks as if at the University of Illinois the laws of physics differ from those in the rest of the world.

Bu the best thing is that this guy is jealous about Schiller! He even says that the strand model is wrong, but does not say why. He sounds like a gay man whose sexual wishes were rejected by Schiller. My usual advice to get a good wife and finally find happiness will not work on him. And if you are not gay, sorry, man, but I am already happily married.

Ex vero quodlibet?

Lee Smolin has written a new book. In the introduction he writes:

I’m inclined to believe that just about everything we now think is fundamental will also eventually be understood as approximate and emergent: gravity and the laws of Newton and Einstein that govern it, the laws of quantum mechanics, even space itself…

As readers of this blog know, I agree, because the statement is correct. Particles and spacetime are the two sides of the same basic elements of nature.

Then the trouble starts. Smolin concludes that the laws of nature change, that the universe is fundamentally irreversible, that math is not important, and a lot of other nonsense.

Peter Woit, instead of simply criticizing the mistaken conclusions, also criticizes the correct statement above.

What do we learn from this debate? These two very different men, and probably many around them, both think whatever they want. They do not care about nature or truth; they only care about their personal preferences. They do not care about truth any more. This is especially sad about Peter Woit.

Women are the reason that the theory of everything has not been found

A  well-known male ex-particle physicist is really funny:

• I was searching for the theory of everything since my youth, but I stopped when I read in some newspaper that the head of the university where I worked was fired.  

• I was searching for the theory of everything all my life. Then I started to blame leftist women for my failure to find it. In fact, I blame such women for all bad things on Earth. 

• Instead of pursuing my childhood dream, I cultivate my aggressions towards everybody who disagrees with my opinions on the weather.  

• My only fault is my excessive humility. 

• Instead of pursuing my childhood dream, I prefer faking a deadly disease on my blog. 

• Instead of pursuing my childhood dream myself, I bash people who still pursue the same dream. 

• Instead of pursuing my childhood dream, I prefer being aggressive towards people who state that facts and data are more important than mistaken physical theories. 

• All my aggressive behavior is the fault of leftists and of women. It's all their fault, not mine.

A therapist somewhere is getting really rich with this loser.

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.