Bill Hobba wrote:
"Nth Complexity" wrote in message
]...
"I think that there is a moral to this story, namely that it is more
important to have beauty in one's equations that to have them fit
experiment. If Schroedinger had been more confident of his work, he
could have published it some months earlier, and he could have
published a more accurate equation. It seems that if one is working
from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one
has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress. If there
is not complete agreement between the results of one's work and
experiment, one should not allow oneself to be too discouraged, because
the discrepancy may well be due to minor features that are not properly
taken into account and that will get cleared up with further
development of the theory."
-- Paul Dirac, Scientific American, May 1963.

One often hears Dirac's mantra from the modern crackpot theoretical
physicists. Particularly in such fields as string theory, experiment
is not even a concern to the clowns. But this disturbing trend has
been going on for a long time.

For those of you not familiar with the work of Paul Dirac, a bit of the
story will be useful. With the advent of quantum mechanics, it was
discovered that electrons sometimes behave as waves. However, the
theory of electron waves at that time was not consistent with
Einstein's theory of special relativity. Dirac's most famous work was
developing a theory of electron waves consistent with relativity. But
there was a problem: Dirac's theory implied the existence of particles
with the same mass and opposite charge to the electron, which had never
been seen. But Dirac stuck to his theory, and a few years, this
particle, called the positron, was discovered.

Unfortunately, some physicists got carried away with Dirac's success.
It made them willing to construct theories that included all sorts of
things that no one had ever seen, just because it made the theory
nice. They hoped that in a few years, their new inventions would
likewise be detected. But this is usually not the case.

Examples of this kind of thought abound in physics:

The idea of spontaneous symmetry breaking, a part of the modern
Standard Model of particle physics, says that the laws of physics are
symmetric in ways that the results of particle experiments are not
symmetric in. To explain this apparent discrepancy, the direction in
which the symmetry is broken is allowed to vary from place to place.
It is turned into an asymmetry of the world around us instead of the
basic laws of physics. The trouble with this is that if it is true, we
ought to see places where the direction changes abruptly from one way
to another. These places are called "topological defects," and
depending on their shape, they are known as domain walls, cosmic
strings, monopoles, and textures. Many theoretical physics papers have
been written about them. Yet they do not exist.

The modern theoretical model of electrons and related particles called
leptons requires that the particles have no mass. Since they clearly
do have mass, an interaction with a particle called the Higgs particle
was introduced to cause electrons to have mass. But where is the Higgs
particle?

Various theories have attempted to unify all known forces into a single
field described by one gauge theory with one group. A gauge theory,
BTW, is a very symmetrical and elegant way of describing a field, which
of course means that crackpot physicists will want to play with them
whether or not what they are doing described the real world. Some of
these theories predicted that protons, the very stuff most of the non-
imaginary universe is made of, ought to undergo radioactive decay.
Physicists assembled huge tanks of ultra-pure water deep underground,
and waited in earnest for just a few of the hydrogen atoms to decay.
None of them ever did.

The rims of galaxies appear to rotate so fast around the galactic
center that the galaxy would tear itself apart according to current
gravitational theory. This has led to the well-known postulation of so-
called "dark matter."

In addition, observations of the geometry of the universe do not agree
with theories of nuclear reactions in the early universe on how much
stuff there is in the universe. This has led to the idea that most of
the matter in the universe is not made of atoms, but is of an
undiscovered type of particle that passes directly through us without
us even noticing. Worse, neutrinos, which have been observed and are
the only things we know of that do pass through ordinary matter well
enough to make the cut, have been shown not to fit the bill. The
imaginary particles are called "WIMPs."

And even more ... some physicists think that rather than modifying the
equations of gravity to account for the observation that the universe
is flying apart at greater and greater speeds, it is better to
postulate a new, bizzare kind of energy that would be by far the
primary ingredient in the universe, if it existed, beating out even the
WIMPs several times. You have probably heard of it ... it's
called "dark energy."

Supersymmetry, the foundation of crackpot string theory, posits a
suggestion that attempts to one-up Dirac by promising for every
particle a "superpartner." Superpartners, unlike antimatter have
different masses and spins. Not one of them has ever been detected
after many more years of looking.

You seem very glib about throwing the word crackpot around. At least string
theory makes predictions (none of which has been falsified) whereas
crackpots that post on sci.physics.relativity are big on saying what is
wrong with current physics (nothing concrete mind you - just rubbish like
math can not be reality and similar junk) but small on making actual
predictions. I suspect there is a moral there somewhere. As someone once
said the difference between philosophers and scientists is scientists have a
full waste paper basket. In a similar vein I hypothesize a difference
between a crackpot and a scientist is crackpots criticize physics on grounds
that can not be tested so can never be proven wrong; (witness Nth
Complexity's effort) while genuine scientists also like to be proven wrong
because at least they know one approach that will not work.

It is interesting to note that "Bill Hobba" supports the true spirit of
science. Science should make predictions that can be proven wrong, not
predictions about an invisible or undetectable world like that of
religion, or the invisible, undetectable world of dark matter, WIMPs,
monopoles, superpartners, and other such fantasies!

-- Nth Complexity --
-- Have A Nice Day! --
"The teaching of science and mathematics must be purged of its
authoritarian and elitist characteristics, and the content of these
subjects enriched by incorporating the insights of the feminist,
queer, multiculturalist and ecological critiques." -- A.D.S.





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