Siegel has given up

Warren Siegel is a physicist famous for his aggressive comments and his small stature. As a woman, I do not like nasty bearded dwarfs, so I admit being partial. Siegel works on strings and supersymmetry. His aggressive behavior against other people searching for a final theory is well-known. Besides, Siegel probably is the only person in the world claiming in writing that supersymmetry is predicted by experiment. Despite his religious devotion to supersymmetry, since many years, his papers lack any physical idea, any notable advance and any relation to experiment. And every new paper he writes is less interesting than the previous one. His last paper shows that he has effectively given up. This is understandable: the LHC has shown experimentally that most supersymmetric models are mistaken. Siegel has become a typical modern particle theoretician: with strong opinions that are wrong. If he is consistent, he will now start making nasty comments about his own work. That will be fun to watch. But it will make him more human, and more likeable.

Men, women and passion

Weinberg, one of the most successful physicists ever, is now an old man. And he is sad and bitter that large particle experiments are so expensive and so tough to get funded. But why? Because his own passion took the wrong turn.

We women like men with a passion. We often are less passionate than men on issues, and are more passionate on human relations. We admire men with their abstract passions. Weinberg is such a man. He is passionate about particle physics since many decades, and has been an example to many.

Since 50 years he goes around saying: "Symmetry is the way to go forward! Look for larger symmetries, such as supersymmetry! The final theory will be found in that direction!" And essentially everybody agreed for 50 years. All particle physicists across the world followed him. But there is a tiny problem: he was wrong. The followers were lemmings.

Now Weinberg is sad. If he were a really great man, he would say: "Search elsewhere, I was wrong!" Instead, he is just a normal man, and goes on saying "Search harder! Spend more money!" His passion took the wrong turn. He is getting sad and bitter. And this despite the fact that everybody did what he wanted! How can such a successful man end up in such a mess?

Men need women who help them to remain sane and retain their good mood. And we need men for the same reason. My man will not end up being bitter and sad. We will take care together that our life, our deeds, our guiding principles and our successes do not lead us into a web of self-deception, despite all things that happened and that will happen.

Theoreticians, especially passionate ones, are in danger of getting entangled in falsities. Even more so when their environment agrees with them. Success is dangerous. But we all need to be careful, whether successful or not.

Citing nonsense 20 000 times

A theoretical high-energy physicist called Arkani-Hamed appears frequently on the internet. Listen to his talks. He is not a physicist, he is a missionary. For him, the key to all is supersymmetry. But nothing he ever did fits with experiment. And he is cited in research papers, in total more than 20 000 times.

In today's papers, physicists do not cite correct results upon which their own correct results build. They cite friends who will help them in getting grants.

Citing missionary nonsense 20 000 times does not make it true. But at least it helps getting grants and research jobs.

American Physical Society gives a prize to a fraudster

The American Physical Society has given a prize to fraudolent string research. Peter Woit has the story here. The recipient claimed a prediction (on the Higgs mass) that was, in fact, a retrodiction.

On top of the fraud, there is still a good chance that he is wrong: it might well be that the Higgs does not exist at all...

Men without caring women are often lost creatures.

How fundamental physics research is influenced by violent men

Sabine Hossenfelder has a new preprint, on minimum length in nature: http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.6191 . Read it. What you find is a 70 page overview and not one conclusion that is noteworthy. It only sums up 80 years of research by saying that minimal length is implicit in essentially all of modern physics, but that its existence is still an open issue.

How can she make such a weak statement in the field she dedicated her life to? To understand this you must know that she is constantly attacked by one of the worst woman-haters around, Lubos Motl. Motl has a simple world view: women are bad and string theory is good. Of course, string theory implies a minimum length, but Motl is the only string theorist in the world that denies this. Armed with this inherent contradiction and all the hate he has accumulated in his life so far, he constantly hassels Sabine with the statement that there is no experimental evidence for a minimum length, and does so with all his nastiness. After all these years of fighting, Sabine has caved in: she avoids any statement that endorses minimum length, because "no experiment has seen it". This is also Motl's mantra.

But there is a tiny thorny issue: they are wrong. Planck showed already in 1899 that there is a huge number of experiments that show that a minimum length exists: every length measurement is based on a minimum length. The Planck length is the unit of length. Without a Planck length, without a minimum length, length measurements are impossible.

Yes, the minimum length makes length measurement possible. It takes only a bit of thinking to deduce that the minimum length itself is hard to measure in an experiment, because to see it, tiny black holes are necessary. (Schiller does not explain this well.) So, the minimum length exists, and at the same time it is hard to actually find it in a real measurement set-up.

In 2012, we know much better than Planck why the length unit is hard to measure. But honest women such as Hossenfelder are wary to explain this because violent men such as Motl unjustly criticize them.  There is only one advice: Never, never, never give up.

Truth is defined by correspondence with data, not by lack of male violence.

Do not trust womanizers

First google "Antonio Ereditato", spokesperson of the OPERA experiment at Gran Sasso, and watch some videos. Then continue reading here.

The guy is a womanizer. Such men should never be taken seriously. Here is why:  when people in his experiment found that the neutrinos are not faster than light, but that a faulty cable falsely gave this result, he wrote a press report in which he claimed that there was a second error that could revive the sensational finding. This is a lie, obviously just added to save face.

Ereditato is a crook - like every womanizer is.

Why the laws of nature cannot evolve

Smolin and several other particle physicists believe that the laws of nature evolve.

They don't. Experiment shows that Newton's law, Coulomb's law, or the conservation of energy and momentum are valid all the time and everywhere. Nature's laws cannot evolve. Laws are by definition that part of nature that stays the same.

"Evolutions of laws" is doublespeak. Let us put Smolin and his companions where they belong: into oblivion.

Hep-th is doing badly - no honest theorist in sight

Reading the hep-th summaries, I note that here is almost nothing on string theory or supersymmetry since many months. There are no new proposals for unified theories since a long time. Why?

The LHC will provide data at the end of 2012. And obviously particle theoreticians have no courage to propose something that can be checked soon. The whole community is doing nothing. Almost nobody has the courage to predict: "This is what will be measured!"

• When Einstein found general relativity, he wrote: This is what will be measured. Check my prediction!

• When string theory came, the proponents wrote: We do not know what will be measured, but what the others are doing is nonsense!

What a difference between the two approaches. Well, there is one exception. Schiller's spaghetti model indeed makes the clear predictions that I am longing for. But the predictions are not on hep-th. I conclude: there is no honest physicist on hep-th.

Not only is there no honest physicist; there are also no leaders: there are no voices that show the path that should be followed.  There are no voices of reason. No voices of reason in a community of thousands of theoretical physicists. What a sad situation.

Nonsense about tension

Strings have tension, theorists say. Particles are vibrating strings, they say. But tension is a macroscopic quantity, like temperature. So is vibration. What is the meaning of a macroscopic tension in the case of strings? None. "Vibrating strings" makes as much sense as "flying toothbrushes".

Schwarz's history of string theory

Have a look at http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.0981, where John Schwarz tells about "The Early History of String Theory and Supersymmetry". Read is as if you never had read anything on the topic before. Try.

The results is astonishing. Schwarz tells how string theory arose from a wrong description of the strong interaction and mesons and baryons. He tells how it arose from playing with the mathematics of the strong interactions. Then he tells how he and others generalized it to a framework for the description of all interaction and particles. He never says why this generalization makes sense, which problems it solves, which questions it answers.

The report sound like a man completely lost together with his research colleagues in a world of fantasy Lagrangians, fantasy dimensions, fantasy symmetries and fantasy dualities. There is no attempt to clarify ideas, to clarify the structure of what is being done, to clarify the goals, to present the progress in understanding or to present the advantages of the approach. It is a man running around in a forest of abstract mathematics, telling how pretty it is, but not explaining what he is doing or why. And Schwarz is an old man: he is 70 years old.

When we read texts by the old masters, like Einstein, Schroedinger, Heisenberg, they tell us what they did, why they did it, what dreams drove them, what motivations they had, what discoveries triggered them and why the enjoyed what they did. Schwarz is the opposite. He tells nothing of all this. It is obvious from his account that he is not a master of his field and that he does not know what he is doing. He keeps his motivations for himself. He obviously knows that they are not worth sharing. What a disappointment.