A paradox: the theory of everything cannot be published

This is one of the best stories I heard. Imagine you have discovered the theory of everything, the TOE. You want to publish it and prove that it is correct. Of course, you need to show that it contains quantum theory, general relativity, quantum field theory, the standard model and so forth. For this proof, you will need at least a hundred pages, maybe much more. But no journal accepts such long papers. No problem, you think, "I'll publish it in pieces". No, that is not possible either, because then the "unsubstantiated" claim of a TOE cannot be made in any of the pieces - except maybe the last one. Then the earlier pieces have no interest and will not get published. 

Now we have another reason why no TOE is found in a journal so far.

Wilczek is lost - so is humor

If you read Wilczek's new paper on the "mulitiverse", http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.7376, you will be astonished about how deep a Nobel  Prize winner can fall. Wilczek is a really smart man. But there is neither a correct nor an intelligent sentence in the whole paper.

We must help men from this nonsense. Only we women can do it.

But it is getting tedious to cry "Wolf!" whenever a smart man writes nonsense. The search for a theory of everything is dominated by dinosaurs that think and write and talk nonsense. The satire is losing its humor. Following research is more like a visit to a psychiatric ward. Depressing, not funny. I will post again only when lightness is back.

Return of the Lance Armstrong of particle physics

Seiberg is a man who spent his whole life bullying people who did not agree with his mistaken ideas about particles; he bullied all those who competed with him on the search for a theory of everything, or TOE.

Lance Armstrong has stopped bullying people competing with him. Seiberg has not. In his latest talk, Seiberg goes even further. He is now telling young students that is unlikely that the TOE will ever be found, because of the multiverse.

So he has reached the point at which he says to students: I did not achieve it, you won't either. He forgets to mention that he did not achieve the TOE because he chose the wrong way. Armstrong at least admitted that he was on the wrong track. Seiberg did not. This is why Seiberg deserves, even more than Armstrong, to be forgotten.

String theorists in the Royal Society fail the high school writing test

Please read http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.3534, a paper called "Multiparticle one-loop amplitudes and S-duality in closed superstring theory".

The summary section, on page 47, has latex mistakes, and a sentence is incomplete. Nobody in the team noticed this. Of course not! The summary is several pages long, and is not a summary: it does not explain what they found. It just explains that one might get more understanding by studying additional details. "We played around with the math, we cannot explain what we did, nor what we found, but we plan to play around more." In high school, you would not pass any writing test with such a summary.

Not even the abstract of the paper is clear. Who cares? In string theory, they do not bother about naive rules about abstracts, aims, or summaries. You will find no better example about how three men can sit down together for a year and produce 50 pages of utter ghibberish.

One of the authors is successor of Newton and Dirac, by the way. Nowadays achieving that is easier than achieving high school standards.

Fun with supersymmetry nonsense

Have a look at the preprint http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.2578 . It is written by three typical string theorists, two middle aged men and one old man. The paper is quite long and starts:

BPS surface defects in N= 2 four-dimensional gauge theories are an interesting theoretical subject which ties together many subjects in mathematical physics.

Translate:

"We know that our work doesn't concern high energy particle physics, but we do not care. There is not a word about nature in our whole paper. But we like doing this."

Read the other papers by these men. The translation just given is valid for virtually their whole life's work. Incredible. In which private world do they live in?

These men are smart. But they lost their true north. Such men know: publish or perish. Publish even if it is meaningless. They have sold their soul to a lost cause. Wake up, guys!

The strings 2013 conference

The slides of the talks are found here. Have a look. I did nor spot many discussions on how string theory describes nature. I did not spot many discussions on where the field is going.

The apostles of string theory are very depressed and subdued: Witten, Seiberg, Sen, Vafa etc.

Many have switched to exploring emergence: Maldacena, Arkani-Hamed, Myers etc. In his last slide, Arkani-Hamed concludes that both space-time and quantum theory must emerge together.

The summary talk is also worth it: a superb summary of how detached from reality the speakers are. Like the summary of a conference of the communist party...

Schellekens - how deep can a string theorist fall?

Men are funny. Just read this text by a well-known string theorist. I quote:

My point of view was then, and still is now, that a huge number of gauge theory vacua is a requirement for a fundamental theory in order to understand anthropic coincidences. 

Yes, this man thinks that a purely religious requirement is necessary in science.

Yes, this man thinks that a false requirement helps finding the fundamental theory.

His "point if view" contains a record amount of nonsense.  

Phenomenological quantum gravity - getting paid for waiting.

Phenomenological quantum gravity is the research topic of Frau Hossenfelder. Her post is interesting. She is looking for experimental results in quantum gravitation. She gives a long list that nobody found any. In fact, she is waiting for others to find such result. Indeed, she writes

What I do believe in ... is that it is possible for us to find experimental evidence for quantum gravity if we ask the right questions and look in the right places. 

This is her research: to wait! To wait for something that will never happen. She gets a salary for that. Frau Hossenfelder is waiting, and calls this research. Mind you, she organizes conferences on this topic (i.e. on waiting); she writes papers on it, gives talks, etc. It looks like research. But in reality it is just  

waiting.

We should not be astonished. In particle physics, everybody is waiting, at present. Read arxiv/hep-th or arxiv/gr-qc. Nobody is searching for new ideas. Humanity is paying all these researchers for waiting. Waiting for the correct ideas.

The next folly: the international linear collider

A folly with its own website: http://www.linearcollider.org.To see that it is a folly, read this page: http://www.linearcollider.org/from-design-to-reality/ It is unbelievable. They give 4 reasons to build the ILC:

- check the standard model
- explain dark matter and dark energy
- find supersymmetry
- find extra dimensions

Here is what we know:

- the standard model is correct and reproduces everything we know and ever saw.
- dark matter and dark energy are not found on earth; dark matter is an invention.
- susy is an invention and does not exist.
- extra dimensions are inventions and do not exist.

Yes indeed, the collider is sure NOT to discover anything new. We know that already now! Thousands of men, and alas, also some women, have designed a machine for nothing.  Millions of dollars down the drain.

Do you think this is a scandal? Then you should know that exactly the same arguments were given for the funding of the LHC. And what did they find? The Higgs, 50 years after its prediction. And nothing else. Yes indeed, the ILC repeats all the errors of the LHC, but with a difference: This time, NO particle has been predicted to be found.

"We did not find anything, so we look again." That is not worth billions. Spend them on medical research instead.

The difference between 10^16 GeV and 10^16 GeV plus 1eV - Why unification does not require a unique coupling constant

Supersymmetry people always argue that it can help to unify the coupling constants of the strong weak and electromagnetic interactions; they come together to a single value at 10^16 GeV. That is an argument for supersymmetry, they claim.

But wait. Why should the coupling constant reach a single value? After all, the coupling constants of the electromagnetic and the weak interaction do not reach the same value, and still the two interactions unify.

So we do not need the same coupling constant value for unification? Agreed. But then we do not have an argument for supersymmetry any more? Agreed. But then supersymmetry people are telling nonsense? Agreed. As a check for the last conclusion, ask your favorite supersymmetry expert the following question. At energies higher than 10^16 GeV, the three coupling constants separate again; are the interactions not unified any more at higher energies?

You will get answers like: "We do not know what happens there." So the supersymmetry people who propagate the argument that unification requires a single coupling constant are people who tell us that we know what happens at 10^16 GeV, or
10000000000000000 eV,
but we do not know what happens at 10^16 GeV plus 1 eV, or
10000000000000001 eV.

These people can calculate integrals in fermionic space (which does not exist) but are unable of simple logic (which does exist). Supersymmetry "experts" are really hilarious.