God does not play dice, she winds up spaghetti

I must think about the way people wind up spaghetti in Italy with a fork. Isn't that similar to how particles move in the spaghetti model? There is no fork, but there is still a rotation.

The chapter on deducing quantum theory from spaghetti is too hand waving for my taste, but it could make sense. It would seem that god does not play dice; instead she winds up spaghetti. Fun.

Update: Here is how a distant civilisation winds up spaghetti.

In awe of spaghetti

If I try to tell what pulls me most to the spaghetti model, here is my candidate:

Gauge groups follow from shape deformations.

I find this so strange and bewildering.  It is unexpected. I have so many positive feelings attached to this.

Maybe because I read it just before my surgery. Life saved, but no child. I used to get impatient with people who care more about their ideas than about their children. I still do. But now I am left myself with the ideas only. Fate.

Spaghetti shape deformations as gauge groups. The connection makes me dream. The dreams are coming back, slowly, and they are beautiful. Again.

Why I like the spaghetti model of physics

Some particle physics researchers are thinking that

Physical “laws are just an arbitrary, messy outcome of random fluctuations in the fabric of space and time”.

Peter Woit makes fun of such people, including Arkani-Hamed, and rightly so. But this fun-making has a dark side: because of his cynism, Woit will make fun of emergence for the rest of his life, throwing out the baby with the bath water!  Instead, the view provided by the spaghetti model is much more interesting:

Physical laws are the unique outcome of random fluctuations in the strand/spaghetti fabric of space and time. 

Just by changing two key ideas, the phrase changes from nonsense to testable.  This is the beauty of the spaghetti model that Schiller presents in his sixth volume of Motion Mountain. That is how he derives most of the standard model, including the three gauge groups and the three particle generations that nobody else has derived until now.

Schiller, please go on. We will convince them all that the standard model is the real thing.

Update: Woit is now strongly opposed to the exploration of emergence. And thus he has dropped out of the search for unification. He sees his role only in making fun of people who work on strings, susy and emergence. I agree on the first two choices, but not on the third. Unfortunately, Woit is wrong to think that emergence is not physics. But who is going to tell him? He has fallen into the usual macho trap.

Biting bulldog: numerical predictions from spaghetti

My favorite predictions of the spaghetti theory:

• The standard model is valid precisely. The known physics equations are correct. Nothing is left to discover!
• There are three gauge interactions, three dimensions and three generations. Nothing is left to discover!
• The cosmological constant gets smaller with time.
• Certain mass ratios (W/Z, W/Higgs) and sequences of values among masses, coupling constants and mixing angles can be deduced.

The last topic is not complete. That is sad! I am waiting for the details and for more numbers. Sometimes I try to search myself. Though communicating with Schiller takes patience. On the whole, these predictions are more precise, more "numerical" and more complete than those of any other theory I have ever read about, on arxiv, on vixra, in books and in papers. No grandiose claims.  No new effects. Nothing revolutionary. Just a promising work in progress.

What I like most: the spaghetti theory predicts that additional predictions are impossible. I passionately like the idea that we are near the end of particle physics. So many pompous machos repeat that nature is infinite and complicated. And they go on repeating that everybody else is stupid or wrong, in church and in the internet. Machos, stop doing physics. Go into your wife's arms.

Down quark mass in the spaghetti model

"Anonymous" is asking questions about the mass of the d-quark tangle. I am not the right person to discuss the problem, but I'll try. I recall that when I first read about tangles defining mass, I was confused. Schiller does not explain the issue very well; but he says that more complex tangles have higher mass and rotate more slowly.

Somewhere else he writes that there is a problem with the down quark: the spaghetti model predicts a smaller mass than the up quark, because the down quark is simpler. A simpler tangle has a smaller mass. What does symmetry have for an effect? I don't know; "Anonymous" writes that it should ease rotation.  Then symmetry reduces the mass and makes the problem worse. And now?

And what is the difference between an up and down tangle anyway? The tangles (page 287) seem the same to me.

Referees, be courageous!

Both the Templeton Foundation and the Foundational Question Institute fund research on the theory of everything. Well, they say so. But they don't. In fact, less than 3% of their funds go into projects that actually search for a TOE!

Why are they unable to keep their promise and follow their mission? Because of the referees of grant applications. Anonymous referees are not courageous, they are cowards. TOE projects do not get positive referee reports. So they do not get funds.

In normal words, most referees are corrupt.

How do you fight corruption? With courage. With women. With courageous, outspoken women. Get women referees! Get courageous referees!

Look closely: male physics in the US, Canada, Europe, Latin America, Africa, Oceania and Asia is corrupt. As referees, we either need physicists from Antarctica, or we need women.

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!

---

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!