by John Horgan, The Scientific Curmudgeon
Are strings finally unraveling?
For decades, string theory has been the leading candidate for a unified theory of physics, which wraps quantum mechanics and relativity and all nature’s forces into one tidy mathematical package. Depending on which variant you prefer, string theory holds that reality is woven out of infinitessimal strings, or loops, or membranes thrumming in a hyperspace of ten, or eleven, or [fill-in-the-blank] dimensions. Advocates–let’s called them “yarn-heads,” or “braniacs” (because “membrane” is often shortened to “brane”) or better yet “pluckers”–claim strings represents a “theory of everything” that will answer the most profound of all questions: How did the universe come to be? And why did it take this particular form rather than some other form that would not have permitted our existence?
The trouble is, pluckers have not produced an iota of empirical evidence for their theory. In fact, according to the theory’s fine print, strings’ existence cannot be proven even in principle! I’ve been harping on these embarrassing facts for more than a decade, and especially in The End of Science, where I called strings the epitome of unconfirmable “ironic” science.
In 2002 I put my money where my mouth is, betting the braniac Michio Kaku (whom I’ll debate at Stevens on October 18) $1,000 that no physicist will win a Nobel Prize for string theory or indeed any other so-called quantum gravity theory by the year 2020. I’d make the bet even if the Nobel deadline were 2120. (Of course, biologists would have to solve the problem of mortality for me to collect, but that’s a topic for another post.)
Meanwhile pluckers have continued to strum odes to strings in popular books such as The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, The Cosmic Landscape by Leonard Susskind, Parallel Worlds by Kaku and Warped Passages by Lisa Randall. The physicist Lawrence Krauss of Case Western University offers only a tepid critique of strings in his recent book Hiding in the Mirror, perhaps because—as he keeps reminding us–some of his best friends are yarn-heads.
I am thus delighted by the publication of a new book by Peter Woit–a mathematical physicist at Columbia, not a mere English major and journalist like me–that slices strings into snippets (sorry, it’s compulsive). Recycling a legendary put-down by Wolfgang Pauli, Woit likes to say that string theory is so speculative–so utterly disconnected from the physical reality that physicists can actually probe with accelerators and other instruments–that it is “not even wrong.”
That is the title both of his new book and of a blog where Woit gripes about strings. Woit’s book was released in England last month and is scheduled for U.S. publication.in September. Perhaps unwisely, Woit favorably mentions my anti-string rants in The End of Science and elsewhere. On his blog, Woit has also given a pat to “The Scientific Curmudgeon.” I hope his association with me does not harm his credibility. So far, so good: Woit has gotten positive coverage from John Cornwell in the Sunday (London) Times and from Sharon Begley in the Wall Street Journal. Woit also came off well in a Q&A in Discover last February with Susan Kruglinski, who dubbed him the “Dean of Debunkers.”
Woit and I disagree on one significant point: he believes that even if string theory represents a dead end, theoretical physics still has a future, because mathematical advances will trigger revolutions as profound as those that took place a century ago in physics. I have my doubts, which I’ll spell out in a future post.
Woit’s book will be joined in September by another anti-string screed, The Trouble With Physics by the gadfly physicist Lee Smolin. Will this mounting criticism persuade all the pluckers that strings are hopelessly out of tune and should be abandoned? Never entirely, I suspect. If academic scholars can keep writing papers on political allusions in Beowulf or the aesthetics of Grecian chamberpots, surely a few obsessives at marginal institutions will always fiddle with strings.
Moreover, even if most physicists no longer take the theory seriously, stringy memes will continue to infect the culture at large. New Age authors in particular have embraced string theory. The appeal is obvious. Along with such quasi-scientific notions as Gaia, complexity theory, psychoanalysis and the anthropic principle, strings entwine the public’s imagination not because they explain the world but because they mystify it.
June 29th, 2006 at 7:21 pm
Hi John,
I hope your association with me won’t harm your credibility.
A truly impressive collection of bad puns, etc. about strings. This posting will provide a valuable resource for science writers for many years as they cover this story.
Peter
June 29th, 2006 at 8:01 pm
String theory has 10^500 acceptable vacua. It lacks empirical pruning. Only one superfluity is obvious and testable.
1) The Equivalence Princple is true, gravitation is gerade, inertial and gravitational mass are fundamentally identical, spacetime is achiral. Parity violations (e.g., the Weak Interaction) are inserted exceptions from local symmetry breakings.
2) The Equivalence Principle is not true, gravitation is ungerade, inertial and gravitational mass can be decoupled, spacetime is chiral. Parity violations derive from a vacuum pseudoscalar background (spacetime is intrinsically left-handed).
String theory incorporates both gerade and ungerade gravitation; it is both achiral and chiral. One of them is wrong! A left foot can only be tested by a (snugly fitting) right shoe. Left shoes and socks will all fit identically. All chemical compositions of matter fall identically to 10^(-13) difference/average.
What is geometric - not optical or compositional - chirality? Only oppositely chiral mass distributions, atom by atom, are active in the experiment. Parity is chirality in all directions,
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/invert.gif
Calculate geometric parity divergence to identify the most extreme opposite examples for the test. Solid single crystal spheres of enantiomorphic space group P3(1)21 (right-handed screw axes) versus P3(2)32 (left-handed screw axes) quartz are maximally parity divergent by theory and calculation. An otherwise unremarkable three-month parity Eotvos experiment in existing apparatus pins the tail on string theory.
http://www.npl.washington.edu/eotwash/
Composition contrasts always evince null outputs. Gravitation theories are geometric not compositional. The proper challenge of spacetime geometry is test mass geometry.
A contingent output obtains in two days in paired calorimeters, with 32,000 times greater sensitivity,
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/lajos.htm
Inertial and gravitational masses would be non-equivalent for a contrasted pair of enantiomorphic crystals (for their parity-divergent atom locations in chiral spacetime - left and right shoes on a left foot) but not in their identical amorphous achiral melts (socks on a left foot). E=mc^2. The difference must show as an anomalous differential enthalpy of fusion dependent upon local time of day (angle between Earth’s inertial spin acceleration and gravitational orbital acceleration). Benzil is a flat molecule melt, solution, or gas phase that reversibly deforms into left- or right-handed homochiral helical crystal lattices,
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/benzil.gif
Biological homochirality has no reasonable source (all chiral protein amino acids are L-configuration, all chiral sugars are D-configuration). Weak Interaction asymmetry is insufficient to explain the observed preponderence of matter over antimatter from an otherwise unbiased Big Bang,
http://www.pparc.ac.uk/Nw/triangle.asp
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/06/060624115839.htm
http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/tip/special/cp.htm
Nobody has examined gravitation for a parity anomaly. If it exists it would source both and have no effect on common matter. Meat and wood in Earth’s biosphere cancel, affording no hope of a parity Nordtvedt effect.
HD Flack, “Chiral and achiral crystal structures”
Helv. Chim. Acta 86 905 (2003)
http://www.flack.ch/howard/cristallo/cacs.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flack_parameter
M. Petitjean, “On the root mean square quantitative chirality and quantitative symmetry measures”
J. Math. Phys. 40(9) 4587 (1999)
http://petitjeanmichel.free.fr/itoweb.petitjean.html
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/qzdense.png
Theoretical slope is -2 exactly. Intercept is structure-dependent.
CHI=1 is maximum geometric parity divergence
CHI=1-[10^(-15)], 1 cm diameter quartz solid sphere
CHI=1-[10^(-16)], 3 cm diameter quartz solid sphere
D. Yogev-Einot and D. Avnir “Quantitative Symmetry and Chirality of the Molecular Building Blocks of Quartz”
Chem. Mater. 15 464 (2003)
Acta Cryst. B60, 163173 (2004)
Somebody should look. Do a decisive experiment. Stop whining.
June 29th, 2006 at 8:38 pm
John,
The anthropic principle is only “mystical” when string theorists abuse anthropic selection “methods” in order to rationalize that there are an infinite number of possible universes, from which the anthropic landscape falls…
Otherwise, it represents a conservation law, since the entropy of our universe is minimized to less that what it should be according to any known model of turbulence generated structuring that we can imagine, without said, “anthropic constraint”.
The question is whether or not the principle is actually related to our existence in a meaningful way, or are we simply a consequence of the physics that defines the actual stability mechanism that’s behind it.
To call the anthropic principle a “quasi-scientific notion” is the same as calling many reputable, “causality-honest” physicists, crazy.
John Wheeler said that we are the mechanism by virtue of the requirement that quantum mechanics demands an observer, in conjunction with the time-warping quantum weirdness that is supposed to enable this to be possible, physically. His solution is at least, “causally-responsible”, and it is more valid than any other proposal to date, because he is in fact supported by the current interpretations of experimental support for quantum theory. This is the default “preferred cosmological model” in a universe that is observationally, “less-than-copernican”, if you don’t allow unproven theoretical speculation into the mix, like the multiverse.
Brandon Carter wasn’t even the first to note that the diametrically opposing runaway nature of the anthropic coincidences are relevant to the near-flat structuring of our universe, as expansion is almost perfectly counterbalanced by gravity, “but not quite”.
Robert Dicke got his anthropic coincidence from Paul Dirac’s, (flawed), Large Numbers Hypothesis, and there is reason to believe that the anthropic principle is completed and clarified when Dirac’s Hypothesis is repaired.
The experience that Dirac got from his great success unifying quantum theory and relativity led him to beleive that ‘nature had provided us with a number’ in the form of a dimensionless constant, for which a ‘theory would someday provide a reason for’… which means that the constants were all connected to the dynamics of our expanding universe when taken in context with his large numbers hypothesis.
Dirac had a very strong reputation as a hard-nosed stickler for saying only what the math was telling him, and he even gives the other option to his hypothesis in this interview with David Peat:
http://www.fdavidpeat.com/interviews/dirac.htm
The age of the universe, of course, gets bigger and bigger as the universe gets older. So the other one must be increasing also in the same proportion. That means that the electric force compared with the gravitational force is not a constant, but is increasing proportionally to the age of the universe.
He actually went the other way with it, making G decrease over time, but I would suggest, given the chaotic state of modern gravity physics, that people have been much too quick to accept assumptions that contradict what our best theories were trying to tell us.
You’d be amazed what a little new information can do to a lot of lame rationale, given physics that derives dirac’s own defined “alternate” hypothesis, while completing and clarifying the anthropic principle in the process.
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/spr/2005-06/msg0069755.html
June 29th, 2006 at 11:49 pm
[…] If you’re not getting enough string theory bashing today, head over to John Horgan’s Scientific Curmudgeon blog, where he has a posting entitled Pulling the Plug on Strings. It contains a wide selection of string-puns (or whatever you call such things), and he has decided to refer to string theory advocates as “yarn-heads” and braniacs. For his trouble, his comment section is under assault by the usual suspects. There’s also this site, containing a graphic mentioned here before which I refuse to admit to finding funny. The proprietors have an interesting way of dealing with the comment section. […]
June 30th, 2006 at 12:24 pm
I think that it’s a real shame that Peter Woit thinks that his willful denial of the facts makes others “usual suspects”.
It shows that he is more motivated to take down string theory than he is to advance science.
June 30th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
Just to say something in defense of string theory: we engineers love it.
Last fall, I gave a talk at the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications (http://www.ima.umn.edu/) about emerging mathematical techniques for of quantum model order reduction (MOR) (http://www.ima.umn.edu/recordings/Workshop/2005-2006/W11.07-11.05/sidles.ram). MOR is something that control engineers do all the time — it is pretty much the main conceptual tool we have for designing complex systems (a task that is in complexity class NP-hard even for classical systems). So it is pretty exciting that tools for achieving quantum MOR are beginning to come on-line.
What the talk doesn’t mention is what we engineers are only now beginning to appreciate: the manifolds on which engineers do quantum MOR are precisely the Kahler manifolds of string theory. To my embarrassment, the above talk completely overlooks this (in retrospect obvious) mathematical relationship … Doh!
So (very) roughly speaking, what we engineers are beginning to do in quantum MOR appears to be related to string theory as the Schroedinger equation is related to field theory, namely, quantum MOR is a practically-oriented arena—considerably simpler than string theory—which shares many of the same physical ideas and mathematical tools.
From this point of view, string theory is a wonderful example of one of the most valuable kinds of human creative activity: the creation of new mathematical and conceptual tools.
I would have posted this on Peter Woit’s blog … except Peter’s blog does not presently permit discussion of engineering-related applications of string theory. This is regrettable, IMHO. Perhaps Peter will eventually change his mind!
June 30th, 2006 at 4:59 pm
I wrote this at NEW but it is perhaps more appropriate here:
“Moreover, even if most physicists no longer take the theory seriously, stringy memes will continue to infect the culture at large. New Age authors in particular have embraced string theory. The appeal is obvious. Along with such quasi-scientific notions as Gaia, complexity theory, psychoanalysis and the anthropic principle, strings entwine the public’s imagination not because they explain the world but because they mystify it.”
As a researcher in granular systems I certainly must take some offense with this notion of complexity being first of all lumped in this group and additionally with the very statement that it is somehow mystifying nature.
I am not here to discuss the merits of chaos however, but rather to state that it is not an argument to suggest that someone’s misappreciation of science reflects upon the subject itself.
I have often encountered individuals with significant misunderstandings pertaining to heisenburgs uncertainty principle, special relativity or a variety of other physics. That in no way diminishes the validity of these as proper scientific theories, and it should not ultimately reflect on string theory, regardless of that theories actual scientific validity. And that also goes for Gaia, psychoanalysis and the anthropic principle!
NM
July 1st, 2006 at 1:39 pm
Some sparse comments:
“For decades, string theory has been the leading candidate for a unified theory of physics,”
Only in the limited view of the arrogant stringers community. People doing research in different branches -including complex systems- knows that string theory lacks the adequate formal structure for a trulely unified theory (if really existing). That is reason that Murray Gell-Mann (as many other leading physicists including several Nobel winners) considers a bad joke the claim that string theory is such one candidate; obviously string theory is wrong as a TOE.
“Which wraps quantum mechanics and relativity and all nature’s forces into one tidy mathematical package.”
Never seen one of those!
“Depending on which variant you prefer, string theory holds that reality is woven out of infinitessimal strings, or loops, or membranes thrumming in a hyperspace of ten, or eleven, or [fill-in-the-blank] dimensions.”
And versions with giant “strings”, and others dealing with 5-branes. Not forget also that after decades arguing why pointlike particles of Standard Model are unelegant, last “string theory” models propose that basic elements of nature are pointlike particles: D0-branes.
“‘membrane’ is often shortened to ‘brane’”
membranes are a subset of branes or p-branes.
“‘pluckers’–claim strings represents a ‘theory of everything’ that will answer the most profound of all questions:”
None serious “TOE researcher” has heard them at this point.
“The trouble is, pluckers have not produced an iota of empirical evidence for their theory.”
That is not the problem. The problem is that any new theory of physics may be backward compatible with current sucessfull theories. Nobody has proven that Standard Model follows from string theory, nobody has reduced string theory to general relativity (in despite so many claims in popular media).
“In fact, according to the theory’s fine print, strings’ existence cannot be proven even in principle!”
No problem with that! If your theory explains experimental data, it can be used. Nobody has measured curvature of spacetime but general relativity is good. Nobody has measured a wavefunction (is not possible) but quantum mechanics works…
“I’ve been harping on these embarrassing facts for more than a decade, and especially in The End of Science, where I called strings the epitome of unconfirmable ‘ironic’ science.”
Some of us (including leading string theorists as S. James Gates) prefer to call string theory “religion”. Last name is more adequate, sure.
“Woit and I disagree on one significant point: he believes that even if string theory represents a dead end, theoretical physics still has a future, because mathematical advances will trigger revolutions as profound as those that took place a century ago in physics. I have my doubts, which I’ll spell out in a future post.”
Theoretical physics has a lot of future, and we will new radical changes in next years. I agree with Woit (in the surface).
Juan R.
Center for CANONICAL |SCIENCE)
July 1st, 2006 at 4:21 pm
Peter Woit spent twenty years trying to advance physics as a pacifist. See his 1980s papers. As he says in Not Even Wrong, the problems with string “theory” (there isn’t a physical theory, just abject speculations which in an abstract sense past muster as a mathematical theory, which is not useful to the real world) are:
(1) It gets attention for nothing, or worse, for fiction/fantasy connections (Star Trek /Michio Kaku entangled dimensions/Brian Josephson’s stringy ESP).
(2) Alternatives have physical basis in observables, but are ignored. For example, the loop transformation in Loop Quantum Gravity can be interpreted as the gauge boson being exchanged between masses in Yang-Mills quantum theory (the standard model of particle physics): the exchange of a force mediating boson from one mass to another and back again to the first is probably the sort of underlying loop dynamics being described.
Smolin has shown clearly in webcast Perimeter Institute lectures earlier this year that the quantum theory of gravity which doesn’t depend on uncheckable extra dimensional strings/supergravity is a spin foam vacuum. It is well established from the success of the standard model that the Yang Mills quantum field theories (exchange radiation) make a lot of checkable predictions. The standard model of particle physics has 20 supposedly as-yet unexplained parameters including masses and coupling strengths for forces, but makes thousands of confirmed predictions for reactions, within 0.1% accuracy for nuclear forces (strong and weak) and far greater accuracy for electromagnetism.
Smolin gets quantum gravity into the standard model format by unifying general relativity with quantum field theory. The loops of force-causing gauge boson exchanges in Yang Mills quantum field theory can be described by Penrose spin networks, with nodes representing interaction points (eg masses). By summing graphs of all interactions between masses in the vacuum, you get the path integral of quantum field theory, which Smolin in his lectures shows to be equivalent - for gravity - to general theory without a metric. (The metric can be put in from a mechanism, for example the Schwarzschild metric of general relativity see for example http://physicsmathforums.com/showpost.php?p=2315&postcount=4 ).
This is the causal quantum field theory of gravity. It will make checkable predictions because the Yang-Mills exchange quantum field theory for gravity requires that ALL the masses in the universe are interacting. But we know there is cosmological recession, which redshifts bosons like photons and all other radiations!
Hence it will make cosmological predictions. For example, the redshift of very long-range gauge bosons would progressively weaken gravity, preventing distant supernovae from feel a gravitational deceleration. This was actually predicted in 1996, two years before expermental results verified it. Unfortunately, the reason why galaxies are not being decelerated by gravity has been falsely attributed to unobserved “dark energy” manifested by a small positive value of the cosmological constant. The latter is completely inconsistent with physics as Nobel Laureate Phil Anderson says:
On the small positive value of the CC see Phil Anderson’s comment on cosmic variance:
‘the flat universe is just not decelerating, it isn’t really accelerating’ - Prof. Phil Anderson, http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/01/03/danger-phil-anderson/#comment-10901
The point is that general relativity is probably not a complete theory of gravity, as it doesn’t have quantum field theory in it.
Assume Anderson is right, that gravity simply doesn’t decelerate the motion of distant supernovae.
What value of the CC does this predict quantitatively? Answer: the expansion rate without gravitational retardation is just Hubble’s law, which predicts the observed result to within experimental error! Hence the equivalent CC is predicted ACCURATELY WITHIN EXPERIMENTAL DATA LIMITS by this mechanism, implied by Yang Mills quantum field theory loop quantum gravity.
Check Woit’s book (Cape edition) page 179 for the string theory prediction of the CC value: it is off by a factor of 10^113.
Sent: 02/01/03 17:47
Subject: Your_manuscript LZ8276 Cook
{MECHANISM OF GRAVITY WITH QUANTITATIVE PREDICTIONS OF GRAVITY STRENGTH AND COSMOLOGY FEATURES}
Physical Review Letters does not, in general, publish papers on alternatives to currently accepted theories…. Yours sincerely, Stanley G. Brown, Editor, Physical Review Letters
So string theory is defunct, a fraud, and a lie. It doesn’t predict gravity. In 2002 I submitted a mechanism predicting gravity to Physical Review Letters and arxiv from Gloucestershire university, but it was taken down within a few seconds (ie without even being read). The administrators of arxiv turned out to be mainly string theorists.
To them, ironically, extra dimensions are the “accepted theory” and the facts which do make predictions are somehow obviously crackpot.
This is how the coercion works when you have an organisation all thinking alike about a bad idea.
See my comment complaining about this on Professor Jacques Distler’s blog: http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/000855.html . he is an arxiv adviser. I’m not sure if he is linked to suppressing my paper, probably not because there are so many bigots in the string community pulling the strings in physics nowadays. And I’m grateful he allows people like me to comment. But they just ignore the facts!
My CERN Document Server-hosted draft preprint paper “Solution to a problem with general relativity”, EXT-2004-007, 15/01/2004, cannot be updated with an updated and expanded version because CERN now only accepts feed through arXiv.org which is blocked by “string theorists”:
“String theory has the remarkable property of predicting gravity.” - Edward Witten, M-theory originator, Physics Today, April 96.
“The famed encylopedist Denis Diderot was once invited to visit the Russian Court by the empress, Catherine the Great. To the embarrassment of his host and the rest of the court, he promptly launched into an animated defense of atheism. Reluctant to muzzle her guest directly, Catherine hatched a cunning plan. Diderot was informed that a learned mathematician had discovered an algebraical demonstration of the existence of God and would present it before the Court, if he wished to hear it. Diderot naturally consented. The mathematician Leonhard Euler duly appeared and gravely declared: “Monsieur, (a + bn)/n = x, therefore God exists!” The upshot? Diderot, entirely unschooled in algebra, was rendered speechless; peals of laughter erupted around the room; Diderot, greatly embarassed, asked for permission to return to France; and Catherine gratefully bid him adieu.” - http://anecdotage.com/index.php?aid=14079
“… I do feel strongly that this is nonsense! … I think all this superstring stuff is crazy and is in the wrong direction. … I don’t like it that they’re not calculating anything. … All these numbers … have no explanations in these string theories - absolutely none! …” - Richard P. Feynman, in Davies & Brown, ‘Superstrings’ 1988, at pages 194-195.
The Standard Model, which Edward Witten has done a lot of useful work on (before he went into string speculation), is the best tested physical theory. Forces result from radiation exchange in spacetime. The big bang speed is 0-c in spacetime of 0-15 billion years, so outward force F = ma = mc/t = mc/(15 billion years) ~ 10^43 Newtons.
Newton’s 3rd law implies equal inward force, carried by vector bosons (exchange radiation), predicting gravity, current cosmology, and the contraction of general relativity, other forces and particle masses.
This is an example of a predictive quantum theory of gravity being suppressed right now due to string theory. Lee Smolin is tied to the relatively abstract mathematics, as is Peter Woit. But gravity is can be predicted as a causal effect with gauge bosons (rather than material gas) delivering forces.
If this is wrong, who will check and disprove it? Or isn’t falsifiability a virtue now string theory is choking physics?
July 3rd, 2006 at 7:08 am
I’m glad I’m not one of the usual suspects.
“… I do feel strongly that this is nonsense! … I think all this superstring stuff is crazy and is in the wrong direction. … I don’t like it that they’re not calculating anything. … All these numbers … have no explanations in these string theories - absolutely none! …” - Richard P. Feynman, in Davies & Brown, ‘Superstrings’ 1988, at pages 194-195.
The Standard Model, which Edward Witten has done a lot of useful work on (before he went into string speculation), is the best tested physical theory. Forces result from radiation exchange in spacetime. The big bang speed is 0-c in spacetime of 0-15 billion years, so outward force F = ma = mc/t = mc/(15 billion years) ~ 10^43 Newtons.
It is tragic that cosmology starting from a steady state abstract (non-causal) general relativity model in 1916, was so easily converted to BB by dropping the CC in 1929.
What should have happened when Hubble observed recession velocities were a linear function of observable distance, was a recollection of Minkowski’s “spacetime” in which distance and time can be converted by: distance = c.time. Taking time past as the spacetime coordinate (instead of distance, because we are seeing the earlier universe, so are seeing varying time with higher velocity), the Hubble parameter is no longer velocity/distance = H seconds^-1, but becomes
Velocity/time = acceleration. From mass of universe (density times observed volume) and this acceleration you get the effective outward force in the spacetime we actually observe: F = ma. This is newton’s 2nd law. HENCE GRAVITY:
Newton’s 3rd law implies equal inward force, which according to the possibilities of the Standard Model must be due to the momentum carried by vector bosons (exchange radiation), predicting the exact strength of gravity, and the contraction of general relativity, other forces and particle masses. It also predicts the exact alleged (fictitious) CC value, simply because there is no mechanism for gravitational retardation (the BB causes gravity, when you examine the mechanism details, gravity doesn’t retard the BB), so the CC epicycle value in the false Lambda CDM model can be predicted to be that value which mimics zero deceleration.
This is an example of a predictive quantum theory of gravity being suppressed right now due to string theory. Lee Smolin is tied to the relatively abstract mathematics, as is Peter Woit. But gravity is can be predicted as a causal effect with gauge bosons (rather than material gas) delivering forces.
If this is wrong, who will check and disprove it? Or isn’t falsifiability a virtue now string theory is choking physics?
This is how string theory destroys physics. It is the survival of fascism. Heisenberg’s Nazism lives on in the lying mainstream bitterness towards causality and mechanism which is manifest in extra dimensional religion, whose sole purpose is to destroy physics with intellectual cult type paranoia.
July 3rd, 2006 at 5:53 pm
I haven’t studied physics beyond the college level, but I would like to ask a question on the subject of whether there will be any major advances in theoretical physics in the next few decades.
The question is, how much of physics can be derived from the standard model? For instance, can the temperature at which water freezes be derived from the standard model? Does the standard model tell us which materials make good high-temperature superconductors? Can the standard model tell us what the emission or ionization cross sections should be for energetic particles passing through a gas?
If the answer to any of these questions is “no” then is it just a matter of finding the right way to derive these quantities mathematically, or is there perhaps some limitation in the standard model?
I would like to mention the Schrödinger’s cat paradox also. Is there a consensus among physicists that the boundary between quantum and classical physics is well understood? Can the concept of a “measurement” used in quantum mechanics be precisely defined? Is it really going to be necessary to replicate the conditions at the time of the big bang to clear this up?