‘Anybody who is not shocked by quantum mechanics has not understood it!’ – Niels Bohr.
‘Nobody understands quantum mechanics!’ – Richard P. Feynman.
There’s a total lack of respect in Feynman’s writings for the brainwashing non-calculational philosophical baggage of Bohr, which Feynman also generously dished out to string theorists. Feynman’s lack of respect for string theorists and Copenhagen Interpretationists is summed up by his kindly suggestion: ‘Shut up and calculate!’
‘I would like to put the uncertainty principle in its historical place … If you get rid of all the old-fashioned ideas and instead use the ideas that I’m explaining in these lectures [path integrals] – adding arrows for all the ways an event can happen – there is no need for an uncertainty principle!’
– Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Penguin, London, 1990, footnote on pages 55-6.
‘… 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. … why are the masses of the various particles such as quarks what they are? All these numbers … have no explanations in these string theories – absolutely none! … I don’t like that they don’t check their ideas. I don’t like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation—a fix-up to say, “Well, it might be true.” For example, the theory requires ten dimensions. Well, maybe there’s a way of wrapping up six of the dimensions. Yes, that’s all possible mathematically, but why not seven? When they write their equation, the equation should decide how many of these things get wrapped up, not the desire to agree with experiment. In other words, there’s no reason whatsoever in superstring theory that it isn’t eight out of the ten dimensions that get wrapped up and that the result is only two dimensions, which would be completely in disagreement with experience. So the fact that it might disagree with experience is very tenuous, it doesn’t produce anything…’
– Feynman, in the book by Davies & Brown, ‘Superstrings’ 1988 at pages 194-195.
The analogy of the Copenhagen Interpretation religion to the string theory religion is very interesting. The stringers are nearly all devout believers, they have faith in philosophical speculative (non-calculating) orthodoxy because they believe it is beautiful and a safe bet from experimental refutation. That’s why all these people, the worshippers who prefer to believe in what they don’t understand to the hard work of making predictive calculations, vandalise science, polluting the experimental work of generations with extra-dimensional fantasy that doesn’t connect to reality at all.
Nobody is allowed to say that a connection between non-observable spin-2 gravitons and non-observable near-Planck scale unification based on a non-observable 10 dimensional superstring (mem)brane floating on an 11 dimensional supergravity bulk is a lot of hype, even less scientific than a mathematical theory of leprechauns, or arguing over how many fairies can fit on the end of a pin. It’s worse because mathematics is being abused by M-theorists (the superstring-supergravity unification ideas) who obfuscate to cover up the fact of their non-existent ‘theory’. Even the name ‘M-theory’ is a falsehood: their speculations contain no dynamical theory, just an empty framework, like Pauli’s box.
Consider Heisenberg’s crackpotism that Wolfgang Pauli discredited with an anti-Heisenberg campaign.
It is a just a piece of paper with an empty box on it, the label of which reads: ‘Comment on Heisenberg’s Radio advertisement. This is to show the world that I can paint like Titian. Only technical details are missing. W. Pauli.’
Dr Woit explains: ‘With such a dramatic lack of experimental support, string theorists often attempt to make an aesthetic argument, professing that the theory is strikingly ‘elegant’ or ‘beautiful.’ Because there is no well-defined theory to judge, it’s hard to know what to make of these assertions, and one is reminded of another quotation from Pauli. Annoyed by Werner Heisenberg’s claims that, though lacking in some specifics, he had a wonderful unified theory (he didn’t), Pauli sent letters to some of his physicist friends each containing a blank rectangle and the text, ‘This is to show the world that I can paint like Titian. Only technical details are missing.’ Because no one knows what ‘M-theory’ is, its beauty is that of Pauli’s painting. Even if a consistent M-theory can be found, it may very well turn out to be something of great complexity and ugliness.’
– Dr Peter Woit, ‘Is string theory even wrong?’, American Scientist, March-April 2002, http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/18638/page/2#19239
Worse still, the 6-dimensional Calabi-Yau manifold needed to compress 6 dimensions introduces a vast amount of complexity into the theory of vibrating strings being fundamental particles: so much complexity (due to each extra dimension being capable of having a whole ‘landscape’ of different size and shape parameters), that there are an estimated 10^500 or more different ways (these different solutions are called the ‘landscape’ after a crude two dimensional way of plotting a graph of some parameters that superficially resembles terrain) of producing particle physics from the model, and no reason why any of them is the Standard Model of particle physics we observe. Even if this model is right, which might take some time to ascertain even with fast computers seeing that the universe is only something like 10^17 seconds old (i.e., even if you had the entire age of the universe to investigate the 10^500 solutions, you would need to be able to check 10^483 solutions per second to do so, which is still a massive computational problem!).
However, no matter what you do to replace the current false and time wasting empty box with genuine physics, you’ll just be insulting the religion founded by the ‘fathers’ of M-theory like Edward Witten and they won’t thank you for correcting their errors. Nobody has yet discovered a way to disprove a religion. It can’t be done. You see, a religion like M-theory isn’t built on any solid facts in the first place, so it’s completely invulnerable. Point out to the priest that you don’t see any angels or heaven or extra-dimensions floating around, and their response is to educate you that you must believe the theory because it is a beautiful tale, that all will be proved on the day of judgement. Can’t wait!
Speculation that can’t be checked is religion.
Bad science turned religion which is opposed rationally cannot be defended by rational argument (because the speculations have no empirical basis or confirmation), so such a thing is defensible only by fascism, with disastrous consequences for objective studies:
‘The creative period passed away … The past became sacred, and all that it had produced, good and bad, was reverenced alike. This kind of idolatry invariably springs up in that interval of languor and reaction which succeeds an epoch of production. In the mind-history of every land there is a time when slavish imitation is inculcated as a duty, and novelty regarded as a crime … The result will easily be guessed. Egypt stood still … Conventionality was admired, then enforced. The development of the mind was arrested; it was forbidden to do any new thing.’ – W.W. Reade, The Martyrdom of Man, 1872, c1, War.
‘Whatever ceases to ascend, fails to preserve itself and enters upon its inevitable path of decay. It decays … by reason of the failure of the new forms to fertilise the perceptive achievements which constitute its past history.’ – Alfred North Whitehead, F.R.S., Sc.D., Religion in the Making, Cambridge University Press, 1927, p. 144.
‘Fascism is not a doctrinal creed; it is a way of behaving towards your fellow man. What, then, are the tell-tale hallmarks of this horrible attitude? Paranoid control-freakery; an obsessional hatred of any criticism or contradiction; the lust to character-assassinate anyone even suspected of it; a compulsion to control or at least manipulate the media … the majority of the rank and file prefer to face the wall while the jack-booted gentlemen ride by.’ – Frederick Forsyth, Daily Express, 7 Oct. 05, p. 11.
Once you have committed to a false theory, based on speculations that don’t come from observation or experiment but from vain fantasy, science is finished. This is because all reasonable advances based on facts will be viciously attacked by the speculators, who use ad hominem methods lacking objectivity to censor those making checkable calculations.
Quantum field theory 
copy of a comment to John Horgan’s blog post “Who’s Hyping Global Warming?”, http://www.stevens.edu/csw/cgi-bin/blogs/csw/?p=13
Britain is supposed to cut CO2 some 60% by 2050. This target will be extremely costly to meet, and the cost comes now because the countermeasures take time.
Global warming is a fact, as is CO2 correlation to the warming. I’m not worried about whether the correlation is partly coincidence or whether there 100% of the warming is actually due to CO2. What worries me is that people assume that CO2 output will continue rising until 2050, and assert about how money is needed to tackle the problem, assuming that CO2 output continues to rise by itself.
Two issues:
(1) Dr William Connolly (a PhD mathematician and leading UK climate modeller) has a blog discussing climate change. I said we’re going to achieve a 60% or more reduction in CO2 output by 2050 without the need to spend a penny on expensive CO2 reduction schemes: we’re running out of oil, the price will continue rising and consumption will peak and then fall precipitously, when people move on to other forms of technology to replace expensive oil.
Evidence: almost 50% of the world’s easy flowing oil is in the Persian Gulf area, and Saudi oil is already over 50% water because 3 barrels of sea water have to be injected to get 1 barrel per barrel of oil/water recovered. By 2015 prices will rocket. The USA has immense reserves of impure oil sludge but the cost of refining it would be excessive. It’s not a lack of oil, so much as a lack of CHEAP oil which will end the CO2 emission crisis.
Dr Connolly replied that when oil becomes too expensive, coal will take over, and coal burning produces CO2. These mathematicians don’t have a feel for the problem: the assumption that CO2 output is going to remain high and increase in the absence of spending vast sums on CO2 reduction programs is entirely based on fraudulent assumptions about the future availability of cheap oil. As the price increases, the use of gasoline will be forced down. This will naturally place a limit on CO2 output. The main users of coal are countries like China, not the UK.
(2) Even if you want to spend money getting rid of CO2, there are tried and tested cheap ways to do this. I’m an enemy of Dr John Gribbin’s physics indoctrination books (he is a fan of the many worlds/multiverse hype over objective checkable phenomenology), but I praise his scheme to counter global warming by cheaply adding soluble forms of iron to the oceans. John Gribbin (then a New Scientist writer) in 1989 suggested adding iron to the oceans to fertilize them, causing plankton blooming and sucking in CO2:
“John Martin suggested that iron availability limited phytoplankton growth in the Southern Ocean, and that this could play a role in glacial-interglacial changes in atmospheric CO, (Martin and Fitzwater, 1987). In 1988, John Gribbin proposed that fertilization of the ocean could be used “to alleviate the anthropogenic greenhouse effect” (Gribbin, 1988). John Martin began to promote the idea vigorously (Andrew J. Watson, pers. comm., 2002). Most famously, at a lecture at Woods Hole in 1993, Martin made his remark “Give me half a tanker of iron and I’ll give you an Ice Age,“ reportedly in a mock-Strangelove voice.”
– Simulating Fertilization of the Ocean as a Carbon Sequestration Strategy: Effectiveness and Unintended Consequences, http://www.llnl.gov/tid/lof/documents/pdf/241632.pdf
This trick of spreading soluble compounds of iron on the ocean is experimentally verified. In the warm oceans where it would be used, there is a thermocline depth of 100-150 metres below the surface. In the 100-150 m layer from the surface down to the thermocline, the water is warmer and hence of slightly lower density than the deeper water, so it forms a stable pool “floating” on the colder water, and it traps soluble stuff in it.
(This was first well proved after nuclear tests in 1954-6 in the Pacific, where all the soluble fallout was uniformly mixed in the top warm mixed layer above the thermocline.)
There is hardly any iron dissolved in sea water, because most of the iron that enters oxidises to form dense insoluble particles that sink to the bottom. The plankton need iron, it is a limiting factor for its growth in the ocean. So it is possible to massively reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere by fertilizing the top layers of the oceans with soluble iron compounds, and you don’t need to add much to get a massive blooming. Fish eat it, the CO2 is then converted to CaCO3 when it enters fish bones, and when the fish die the CaCO3 sinks to the bottom of the ocean.
Eventually the CaCO3 on the ocean floor will be subducted into the earth’s mantle and the CaCO3 will then be reduced by the heat, with some CO2 possibly being released from volcanoes. But that will be spread out over many thousands or millions of years, and isn’t a real problem. The burning of forests started by lightning is likely to be more of a risk of releasing trapped CO2 on land.
FeCl2 and FeSO4 (which has been field tested for this CO2 reduction role with good results, see below) are both water soluble. The small amount of dissolved iron normally present is a hydroxide, Fe(OH)2+. See http://www.lenntech.com/elements-and-water/iron-and-water.htm
Another option is to use a complex chelating agent to hold iron until it enters the biosystem:
“While several essential metals may be involved in the limitation of growth in HNLC areas, iron has been shown to be the major micronutrient. Generally, 100,000 moles of carbon biomass require 16,000 moles of fixed nitrogen, 1,000 moles of soluble phosphorous and one mole of available iron. The main difficulty is the iron. Since surface ocean waters are highly oxygenated, any soluble iron is converted to Fe+++ with a half-life of about one hour and precipitates as Fe(OH)3. A shovel full of earth is about 5.6% iron on the average. The ocean, on the other hand, has 0.0000000001 or less moles per liter of iron, too little to sustain plant growth. The first problem, then, is how to add iron to the ocean so that it will be available to the phytoplankton (plants). The phytoplankton themselves exude organic chelating compounds into the ocean that protect some of the iron that is there from precipitation. Adding iron in the form of a chelate so that it does not precipitate but remains available for plant fertilization can mimic this natural process.”
– http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/proceedings/01/carbon_seq/p25.pdf (p3 on document page numbering, p4 as per PDF reader pagination).
“… ocean voyages were started in 1993 to determine the response. The first voyage in the equatorial Pacific, IronEx I, spread 880 lbs. of Fe as FeSO4 on a 25 square mile patch resulting in an increase in phytoplankton, but no measurable decrease in the CO2 content of the water. This was due to the sinking of the patch under an intrusion of barren warmer water. A second voyage in the same area of the equatorial Pacific, IronEx II, spread 990 lbs. of Fe as FeSO4 on 28 square miles of the ocean surface.11 In order to mitigate the effect of iron precipitation, the iron was added in three infusions, half on day zero, one-fourth on day three and one-fourth on day seven. This resulted in a bloom of diatoms. The chlorophyll increased by a factor of 27 times, while the CO2 partial pressure was reduced by 90 μatm in the patch.”
– http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/proceedings/01/carbon_seq/p25.pdf p4 on document, p5 as per PDF reader.
Copy of comments to http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/03/12/catholic-priest-proposes-new-model-for-creation/
nc on Mar 14th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
‘Popular accounts, and even astronomers, talk about expanding space. But how is it possible for space … to expand? … ‘Good question,’ says [Steven] Weinberg. ‘The answer is: space does not expand. Cosmologists sometimes talk about expanding space – but they should know better.’ [Martin] Rees agrees wholeheartedly. ‘Expanding space is a very unhelpful concept’.’
– New Scientist, 17 April 1993, pp32-3.
Spacetime contracts around masses; the earth’s radius is contracted by 1.5 mm radially (the circumference or transverse dimension is unaffected, hence the fourth dimension is needed to keep Pi constant via curvature) by its gravitation. Time is also slowed down.
This is pretty obvious in cause – exchange radiation causes radial contraction of masses in general relativity, just as in special relativity you get contraction of moving masses. Take the Lorentz contraction, stick the Newtonian escape velocity into it, and you get Feynman’s simplified (1/3)MG/c^2 formula for gravitational radial contraction in general relativity (you have to put in the 1/3 factor manually because a moving object only has contraction in one dimension, whereas the contraction is shared over 3 dimensions in GR). The justification here is that the escape velocity is also the velocity acquired by an object falling from an infinite distance, so it is velocity corresponding to the kinetic energy equivalent to the amount of gravitational potential energy involved.
It’s obvious that spacetime is contracted by gravitation. Expanding space really just refers to the recession of masses, i.e., expanding volume.
All the experimentally or observationally confirmed parts of general relativity mathematically correspond to simple physical phenomena of exchange radiation in a Yang-Mills quantum field theory. (Ad hoc theorizing to model observations is not observational confirmation. E.g., dark energy speculation based on redshift observations, isn’t confirmed by the observations which suggested the speculation. A better model is that whatever exchange radiation causes quantum gravity when exchanged by receding masses, gets some kind of redshift like light due to the recession of masses, which weakens gravitational effects over large distances. OK, I know you don’t want to know all the correct predictions which come from this physics, so I’ll stop here.)
*****************
Note that cosmology Professor Carroll’s comments on Lemaitre coming up first with the big bang as a “new” theory are bogus. Strange that some people with PhD’s and professorships make such errors. See:
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=273#comment-5322
Who, on big bang religion, please note Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), father of Charles the evolutionist, first defended the big bang seriously in his 1790 book ‘The Botanic Garden’:
‘It may be objected that if the stars had been projected from a Chaos by explosions, they must have returned again into it from the known laws of gravitation; this however would not happen, if the whole Chaos, like grains of gunpowder, was exploded at the same time, and dispersed through infinite space at once, or in quick succession, in every possible direction.’
Weirdly, Darwin was trying to apply science to Genesis. The big bang has never been taken seriously by cosmologists, because they have assumed that curved spacetime makes the universe boundless and such like. So a kind of belief system in the vague approach to general relativity has blocked considering it as a 10^55 megatons space explosion. Some popular books even claim falsely that things can’t explode in space, and so on.
In reality, because all gravity effects and light come to us at light speed, the recession of galaxies is better seen as a recession speed varying with known time past, than varying with the apparent distance. Individual galaxies may not be accelerating, but what we see and the gravity effects we receive at light speed come from both distance and time past.
So the acceleration of universe = variation in recession speeds / variation in time past = c/t = cH where H is Hubble constant. The implication of this comes when you know the mass of the universe is m, because then you remember Newton’s 2nd law, F=ma so you get outward force. The 3rd law then tells you there’s equal inward force (Higgs/graviton field). When I do the simple LeSage-Feynman gravity shielding calculations, I get gravity within 1.7%.
It is suppressed like Tony Smith’s prediction of the top quark mass by arXiv.org
Copy of a comment:
http://asymptotia.com/2007/03/13/more-scenes-from-the-storm-in-a-teacup-vii/
“… there is a constant claim that string theory and its proponents are somehow brainwashing and/or frogmarching young people into working on that area to the exclusion of all else. …” – Clifford
This is the issue that worries me. You are seriously downplaying the problem. Students are the least of it.
String theorists are firstly brainwashing one another that M-theory based speculations are science and encompass the most physics, secondly the[y]’re brainwashing the wider community of physicists including those who studied assorted applications who aren’t specialists in particle physics, and thirdly they’re brainwashing the media which in turn is brainwashing everyone, including students.
Consensus without facts is dogma. There’s nothing wrong with all this until you see the side effects, such as the editor of PRL using Witten’s published remark that string theory “predicts gravity” to censor papers without even sending them for peer-review first.
Peer-review can’t work anyway with regards to alternatives with only string theory being deemed to be a consistent theory of quantum gravity. If someone does have a really radical idea, different enough from M-theory to avoid the landscape problems and make progress, how on earth is that person going to be taken seriously by someone who believes in – and is funded for – a mainstream speculation?
Other ideas need serious nurture. Einstein didn’t come up with general relativity while a patent clerk. This is why there’s no progress. You need quite a lot of development of alternatives to M-theory to get somewhere.
To answer Hmm’s ridicule of Lee Smolin’s twisted braid approach to representing the standard model, because it doesn’t include features like chiral symmetry, Hmm should get excited about page 51 of Peter Woit’s http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0206135 which does find a tentative representation which encompasses the standard model, including chiral symmetry features. However, it’s clear that ANY promising ideas that model what is known fact will be taken today as being boring or at least less glamorous than the altar of M-theory with extra dimensions, branes and other uncheckable speculation.
Copy of a comment:
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=412#comment-23299
a.n. onymous Says:
March 15th, 2007 at 6:00 am
Just a reminder to everyone nerdy: Discover magazine’s deadline for submissions of a 2-minute U-tube explanation of string theory is 16 March, so submit today.
Details: http://www.discover.com/twominutesorless/
“The winning video will be selected by Columbia University physicist Brian Greene, best-selling author of The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos, and broadcast via a prominent spot on the homepage of Discover.com … The video should present an accurate, basic understanding of string theory that will stick in the brains of relatively intelligent non-scientists.”
Therefore, make sure you include a full proof of how gravity and the standard model are uniquely derived from 10/11 dimensional M-theory, proving how the 10 dimensional superstring universe is a brane on the surface of the 11 dimensional supergravity bulk. I don’t know they require you to explain how the 10^500 solutions of string theory correspond to the multiverse.
The main thing to get across is that a 1-dimensional string, when moved, gains a time dimension so it has 2-dimensions (a worldsheet). Then you add another 8 dimensions to satisfy conformal symmetry if there is 1:1 boson:fermion supersymmetry, or 24 dimensions without supersymmetry (i.e., for boson string theory). This explains the reasoning behind 10 dimensional superstring and 26 dimensional bosonic string.
Next, because general relativity is only 3+1 dimensional, you need to roll up of 6 dimensions in superstring, which is done by the Calabi-Yau manifold which compactifies those unseen dimensions. The great benefit here is that the Calabi-Yau manifold can have all many kind of sizes and shapes for its dimensions, so the resulting little vibrating strings which constitute fundamental particles can have 10^500 sets of states or standard models, corresponding to 10^500 parallel universes. The anthropic principle will tell us that the particular universe we inhabit in this landscape of solutions is the one necessary for our existence. It’s a very beautiful theory.
Copy of another interesting comment I’ve noticed elsewhere (goodness knows who its author really is):
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=532#comment-23302
Ptolemy Says:
March 15th, 2007 at 11:48 am
yagwara: he seems unaware that 10 dimensional superstrings are composed of a worldsheet of 1 time dimension and 1 spatial dimension, plus 8 other dimensions to include supersymmetric particle physics, 6 of which are accounted for the the Calabi-Yau manifold.
But if you examine anthropology objectively, you find the coincidence that we have 10 fingers (and also 10 toes) which is the same number as the number of superstring dimensions! Anthropic ideas are currently used (in default of anything else) in string theory to try to select the standard model from the landscape of 10^500 models string theory includes.
The anthropic principle implies that the reason for particle physics being the way it is, is due to the fact that we are around to see it. Anthropically, we have ten fingers and ten toes, and most commonly we use base ten. So, we have evolved with as many fingers/toes as there are supersymmetric dimensions. Coincidence?
Remember, as a great Harvard assistant professor once wrote, ‘God wrote the world in the language of superstring theory’.
Thus, it’s logical that God made the superstring from 10 dimensions, so that people can use their fingers to count them.
As for the eleven dimensional supergravity bulk in M-theory, can it be a coincidence that he square root of 137 is merely 6% higher than the number eleven?
But the anthropological fact we have 10 fingers is quite irrefutable. So it is pretty water-tight evidence for string theory being on the right track. In addition, because 2 of those fingers are really thumbs, we have 2 thumbs plus 8 other fingers. This is exactly like the 2 dimensional worldsheet, plus 8 added dimensions for conformal symmetry of particle physics. Don’t try to tell me this is coincidence. It first suggests that the anthropic principle is valid (the world is the way it is because people exist!), plus it indicates that there are hidden clues in evolution which tell us about string theory.
Copy of a comment to
http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/001200.html
Re: The Standard Model Landscape
Thanks for the link to http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0703067 which mathematically is straightforward for a change. The physical basis, however, is abstruse.
Any idea that particle physics (the standard model) and general relativity have a landscape of solutions is a reversal of the idea that such a theory is defined as representing experimental data.
The only way you can have a landscape for the Standard Model and general relativity is to change this definition, so as to include unobserved, unreal solutions. I.e. you can claim that the basic field equations have lots of solutions if the parameters can vary to unphysical (non observed) values. Thus, general relativity would predict a closed universe if the CC was small and the density was very high. By changing the parameters in the Standard Model, you can also get a landscape of unphysical solutions to particle physics.
But in the case of general relativity and the Standard Model, this landscape literally is not a real problem. This isn’t just because measurements and experiments determine the necessary values which go straight into the theory, but it is also because the physical theories are really based on empirical data: the Standard Model and general relativity are derived from empirical data, e.g. symmetries in particle properties, spacetime, gravitation, energy conservation for a gravitational field, etc.
Comparing the unphysical landscape from empirically developed theory to that from string theory (where the spin-2 gravitons, extra-dimensions, and 10^16 GeV unification are not observations), misses Woit’s point that in one case the landscape is neither physically real nor a problem, while in the other case the landscape is a real problem.
Nobody has proved that any landscape really exists in nature. The assumption that there might be other universes with different values of standard model parameters is just speculation. If it turns out that those parameters are interdependent and so can’t vary in the way assumed for landscape analysis (even if the multiverse is accepted), then this would eliminate or reduce the landscape size.
The objective of physics for some people like Feynman was to find the reasons for why general relativity and the standard model have the form they do. If this quest is successful without string theory, and all the constants and parameters are predicted to have unique values from a theory that doesn’t allow other values, then there will be no landscape whatsoever.
Posted by: Nigel on March 15, 2007 7:37 PM | Permalink | Reply to this
The last comment above has been censored off Jacques Distler’s Musings blog (Jacques may or may not be the arXiv.org censor responsible directly or indirectly from deleting my arXiv paper in 2002 which I submitted successfully using email validation while I was at Gloucestershire University, only to have the paper deleted a few seconds later).
You can see why Jacques Distler deleted it from a Musings post, where he suggested that the landscape just isn’t a special problem in string theory (because it is possible to create messy landscapes with fictitious, non-empirical assumptions from the framework of the Standard Model and general relativity).
Copy of a comment to
http://kea-monad.blogspot.com/2007/03/m-theory-lesson-26.html
“We can therefore think of these knot crossings as being embedded in a canonical manner in the real moduli space. That is, one crossing for each generation of the particle zoo.”
It’s good to see a mention of particle physics in a post about M-theory! Seriously, I hope you will deal with how leptons, quarks and neutrinos specifically arise from string vibrations at some point, or is this difficult to say because of the landscape? From popular accounts of M-theory, the impression given is that it predicts gravitation and the Standard Model, although there are some details to fill in, like masses. However, maybe the problem is much worse. Is there any specific evidence that M-theory accounts for chiral symmetry in the standard model?
What exactly does M-theory say about the standard model? Does it say anything at all? How far does the landscape problem go to prevent the particle physics predictions of M-theory being realized? Can anyone say anything definite about the Standard Model using M-theory, or is it completely impossible? I.e., general relativity gives some predictions which are independent of its cosmological landscape.
Gravitational redshift and time-dilation are for practical purposes independent of the small cosmological constant, etc.
Unless M-theory specifies that electrons and muons are distinguished due to so-and-so types of vibration, I don’t see how M-theory excites any interest. Does it at least say how many generations (3) the standard model has?
From: Nigel Cook
To: Guy Grantham
Cc: Whan Peter ; Montgomery Ian
Sent: Friday, March 16, 2007 12:03 PM
Subject: Re: objections to LeSage type gravity
Dear Guy,
Forget gravity for LeSage’s model! The LeSage model correctly explains the pion mediated strong nuclear attractive force, not gravity. Sir Karl Popper discusses how the uncertainty principle arises from impacts at high energy (i.e., in the intense electric field at small distances from a charge), in his book “Logic of Scientific Discovery”, which I quote on my homepage.
The “problems” which you get from trying to apply the LeSage mechanism to gravity become assets when you use it to explain how pion radiation via the vacuum causes protons and neutrons to be pushed together in the nucleus, if they start nearby. Fusion occurs when protons are brought close enough that the strong attractive effect from pions exceeds Coulomb repulsion, so the particles approach. Obviously, they don’t endlessly approach or the nucleus would become a singularity; instead, there is a shorter range rho particle mediated exchange which causes repulsion over smaller distances, so the nucleons (neutrons and protons) are kept a certain distance apart, something on the order 1 fm, by pion attraction at longer ranges (but with a limit of a few fm) and rho repulsion at shorter distances. Repulsion due to rhy particles is just the recoil of particles being mutually exchanged; imagine two thugs shooting machine gun bullets at each other, each will suffer a repulsion force caused partly by impacts from the other thug’s bullets, and partly by recoil (Newton’s 3rd law) of the machine gun as it fires at the other person.
Now for gravity. It’s a long range force. There are no charges in motion involved, only radiation, because pair production only occurs out to 1 fm from a charge. So gravity, which predominates at large distances, is due to exchange radiation.
Photons of light don’t interact with each other. They exert pressure when they are reflected or absorbed by surfaces because of the change in momentum p = E/c for absorption and p = 2E/c for reflection. But they don’t form a gas. Photons don’t obey the exclusion principle, so you can fit an endless amount of photons into a given space without any pressure arising!
This is why they obey bose-einstein statistics, rather than fermi-dirac statistics.
Even with water waves, you can see that there is no permanent interaction between them when they pass through one another! If you send two waves travelling in different directions through one another, they will superimpose temporarily either giving a resultant that is zero if there is “cancellation” of a peak with a trough, but after that transitory overlap each wave emerges and continues as before with its original form!
This is totally different from firing bullets at one another, where the superposition causes a permanent effect.
Unless you can see the difference between bosons and fermions and that gravity is a boson effect while the “errors” of LeSage are due to fermion radiation assumptions, we’re not getting anywhere. Once again, gravity is a massless boson (integer spin) exchange radiation effect. LeSage assumed material particles (fermions, or their composites like mesons such as pions) were the exchange radiation. LeSage’s particle assumption is only valid for pions, etc., in the strong nuclear attractive force. There, the “errors” which would be true of gravity are bonuses: the attraction is predicted to have a short range on the order of a mean free path of scatter before radiation pressure equalization in the shadows quenches the attractive force. This short range is real for nuclear forces.
For gravitation, curvature is the same thing as exchange boson radiation, and in loop quantum gravity curvature is equivalent to the effect of the full cycle of exchange radiation going from mass A to mass B and back again.
Curvature is a name for the radial contraction due to masses. To speak of curvature as being an alternative to exchange radiation causing general relativity, is as absurd as claiming that 1+1 and 2 are not the same thing. Of course they are merely different mathematical expressions for the same thing, physically. See http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/03/12/catholic-priest-proposes-new-model-for-creation/#comment-221007
‘Popular accounts, and even astronomers, talk about expanding space. But how is it possible for space … to expand? … ‘Good question,’ says [Steven] Weinberg. ‘The answer is: space does not expand. Cosmologists sometimes talk about expanding space – but they should know better.’ [Martin] Rees agrees wholeheartedly. ‘Expanding space is a very unhelpful concept’.’
– New Scientist, 17 April 1993, pp32-3.
Spacetime contracts around masses; the earth’s radius is contracted by 1.5 mm radially (the circumference or transverse dimension is unaffected, hence the fourth dimension is needed to keep Pi constant via curvature) by its gravitation. Time is also slowed down.
This is pretty obvious in cause – exchange radiation causes radial contraction of masses in general relativity, just as in special relativity you get contraction of moving masses. Take the Lorentz contraction, stick the Newtonian escape velocity into it, and you get Feynman’s simplified (1/3)MG/c^2 formula for gravitational radial contraction in general relativity (you have to put in the 1/3 factor manually because a moving object only has contraction in one dimension, whereas the contraction is shared over 3 dimensions in GR). The justification here is that the escape velocity is also the velocity acquired by an object falling from an infinite distance, so it is velocity corresponding to the kinetic energy equivalent to the amount of gravitational potential energy involved.
It’s obvious that spacetime is contracted by gravitation. Expanding space really just refers to the recession of masses, i.e., expanding volume.
All the experimentally or observationally confirmed parts of general relativity mathematically correspond to simple physical phenomena of exchange radiation in a Yang-Mills quantum field theory. (Ad hoc theorizing to model observations is not observational confirmation. E.g., dark energy speculation based on redshift observations, isn’t confirmed by the observations which suggested the speculation. A better model is that whatever exchange radiation causes quantum gravity when exchanged by receding masses, gets some kind of redshift like light due to the recession of masses, which weakens gravitational effects over large distances. OK, I know you don’t want to know all the correct predictions which come from this physics, so I’ll stop here.)
*****
‘In loop quantum gravity, the basic idea is to use the standard methods of quantum theory, but to change the choice of fundamental variables that one is working with. It is well known among mathematicians that an alternative to thinking about geometry in terms of curvature fields at each point in a space is to instead think about the holonomy [whole rule] around loops in the space. The idea is that in a curved space, for any path that starts out somewhere and comes back to the same point (a loop), one can imagine moving along the path while carrying a set of vectors, and always keeping the new vectors parallel to older ones as one moves along. When one gets back to where one started and compares the vectors one has been carrying with the ones at the starting point, they will in general be related by a rotational transformation. This rotational transformation is called the holonomy of the loop. It can be calculated for any loop, so the holonomy of a curved space is an assignment of rotations to all loops in the space.’ – Peter Woit, Not Even Wrong, Cape, London, 2006, p189. (Emphasis added.)
Professor Lee Smolin also has some excellent online lectures about loop quantum gravity at the Perimeter Institute site, here (you need to scroll down to ‘Introduction to Quantum Gravity’ in the left hand menu bar). Basically, Smolin explains that loop quantum gravity gets the Feynman path integral of quantum field theory by summing all interaction graphs of a Penrose spin network, which amounts to general relativity without a metric (i.e., background independent).
– http://quantumfieldtheory.org/
Best wishes,
Nigel
—– Original Message —–
From: Guy Grantham
To: Nigel Cook
Cc: Whan Peter ; Montgomery Ian
Sent: Friday, March 16, 2007 9:59 AM
Subject: objections to LeSage type gravity
Dear Nigel
I found a comment on the original objections to Fatio-LeSage type of gravitation that I understand you to use in modified form by the impact of (redshifted) gauge particles and their shadowing by masses. .
The Fatio-LeSage theory was criticised because the impact of inelastic particles would overheat the recipient; elastic particles would interact between themselves or be travelling in the wrong direction etc. to give regions where gravitation did not appear.; etc,etc.
The Wiki has a recent article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Sage%27s_theory_of_gravitation .
Nigel, would please work through for me how the criticisms in section 4 of that article would or would not apply to your preferred theory and the ways your model differs from LeSage? I prefer to think of [can only imagine!] ‘space’ being curved rather than as a ‘particle’ impact model, or process driven like Cahill’s and Ian’s theories and really would like to get a handle on the alternative points of view.
Best regards, Guy
Wonderful post however , I was wanting to know if you could write a litte more on this
topic? I’d be very thankful if you could elaborate a little bit further.
Many thanks!
Reblogged this on Ed Ward, MD's Blog: US Tyranny & Treason and commented:
Another reference for Theory of ‘Virtual Particles’ Regarding Spontaneous Pure Nuclear Fusion Energy – Basic Primer https://edwardmd.wordpress.com/2014/12/14/theory-of-virtual-particles-regarding-spontaneous-pure-nuclear-energy-basic-primer/
Although I used it more for – shut up and start calculating, and a few other quotes. Although a more appropriate saying would be – shut up and make sure it fits in basic physics laws.
Another nice reference for my stuff. Although, I used it for some of its quotes and insights as much a theory involved.
Best,
Dr Ed