How will CERN manage the lack of discoveries?

CERN management is nervous. After having spent 5 billion euros to build the LHC, the lack of discoveries, unanimously predicted by all physicists in the world, is embarassing. The latest internal CERN proposal on how to deal with the situation makes two statements.

- No discovery is even more interesting than the discovery of the Higgs. It would be "revolutionary".

- CERN needs to take more data to say more.

What a weak report! Since the report is so weak, I bet that:

- CERN will NOT publish the Higgs results for the first 5 inverse femtobarns this year.

- CERN will SPREAD the results (say for 3 fb^-1, then for 4, then for 5) over various months in 2012, to stay in the press, even though the results will be available long before those dates.

There will be a distressingly long waiting time ahead, due to bad politics only.

In the meantime, CERN people should read Schiller's strand model. He predicted the lack of any new discoveries a few years ago. He also proposes a consistent solution for all open problems of the standard model. And he did not need 5 billion euros to do so.

Motl will give back his PhD if the Higgs is not found

I just read Motl's comment on this blog, where he writes "If there’s a proof that there doesn’t exist any Higgs boson below a TeV, you may remind me to return my PhD."

He made this comment in a discussion where he stated that nobody who denies the Higgs should be allowed to work for a PhD in particle physics. This statement is not respectful, but at least he is consistent.

But the question remains: Why such a drastic, self-imposed punishment? If there is no Higgs, then 99.9% of all particle physicists were wrong in the past 40 years. So what? A punishment is only acceptable if people were *aware* that they were wrong.

The ideology of international particle physicists

Read this link, called "Beacons of discovers", written in autumn 2011. It is a committee report on the future of particle physics, written among others, by Alvarez-Gaumé and Pier Oddone.

Among the big questions of particle physics, the committee puts "the search for extra dimensions".

The committee does NOT ask: "what is the origin of the fine structure constant?" Feynman said that this was the greatest open problem of particle physics. But present particle physicists don not agree; they prefer to ask nonsense questions instead of the real questions.

Every single member of that committee should be fired from his or her present job.

Neutrino Madness

It is now becoming clear that neutrinos travel more slowly than light even in Italy. Of course, there was an Italian physicist who claimed the opposite, and misused his CERN affiliation to get this absurd claim into many newspapers.

It now turns out that the result is compatible with a neutrino speed below the speed of light, because the pulse shape is not defined as precisely as the Italian group claimed.

One has to know that the Gran Sasso is full of underground experiments, but no discovery whatsoever was made. The Gran Sasso experiments have the same problems that plague all present particle physics experiments: no discoveries whatsoever. The pressure on the researchers is mounting.

Experimental physicists have heard for 40 years from deluded theorists that many discoveries are to be made. After 40 years they actually believe this nonsense. But facts say otherwise: We already know almost all of particle physics, even if no theorist wants to admit this.

No mass calculation

The strand model, though my favorite, lacks a good explanation for particle masses. It does explain certain mass ratios, but it does not explain the absolute mass values. We should help on this topic.

Bilson-Thompson's dream is brought to a halt by his collaborators

Bilson-Thompson was a guy on a mission. His mission was to describe all particles with knotted bands. He progressed well while he worked alone, and he was almost as far with his ideas.

Bilson-Thompson wanted to find structures for all particles, to explain the gauge interactions, to deduce quantum field theory, and to explain the coupling constants.

But then he went to the US, and the people who worked with him convinced him to do nonsense instead of physics, to stop completing his model, to stop continuing on his path, and to do useless math instead. His environment now produces one nonsense paper every year, with no new ideas and no new results.

What a sad story!

Three mathematicians - one famous - make a fool of themselves

Three men, the famous Michael Atiyah, together with Nicholas S. Manton and Bernd J. Schroers, propose "Geometric Models of Matter".

This is modern academic comedy writing. You will note that they do not speak about quarks, nor about W and Z bosons. They also have problems incorporating spin 1/2. Nor do they describe interactions.

In short, they neglect most of modern physics, but still claim to have done something sensible. What is the truth? They just played a little with their favorite mathematical concepts. But they did not do anything sensible.

It seems that Atiyah has completely lost contact with reality. What a pity - he was one of the sharpest minds of mathematics.

A further theoretician prefers prejudice to facts

Just read and enjoy this blog entry by L. Motl. It is incredible how deep a really smart man can fall.

A real smart man, Motl is led into a really primitive trap by the author of the preprint he is discussing. The otherwise unknown author, a certain Archil Kobakhidze, suggests that Verlinde's idea implies a momentum operator for a particle that differs from the usual one. Why? He does not say so - he just refers to another paper of his. (That is already a completely unprofessional attitude in itself. A woman could never write a paper like that.) Read that other paper, and you will find that the author is in need - well, let's say - of soothing care. The argument against gravity being entropic is deeply flawed, and obviously so, but Motl doesn't want to acknowledge this.

Two poor men, and now a woman is telling them all this ...

The failure of quantum gravity

Have a look at the overview article arXiv:1108.3269 "An introduction to quantum gravity" by Giampiero Esposito.

It lists 16 approaches to quantum gravity that were followed in the last 80 years - string theory is one of them. Then it lists their achievements. All are theoretical! Not a single of the achievements is a testable prediction.

Yep, quantum gravity is a dead alley. We all can stop reading gr-qc.

Another theoretician left reality

This theoretician is too little-known to be named. He dislikes the strand model. But for a simple reason: He thinks that time has two dimensions.

This seems too crazy too be true. But some people get paid for saying and writing such nonsense. Modern research is full of nonsense.