LANDSCAPE PHILOSOPHY

It has been recognized in many articles by now that the string
landscape poses a serious threat to the future of physics, and
ultimately to all scientific endeavor. In a way, the quest for a
rational, ultimate description of all of nature is about being given
up - are those scientists promoting the landscape aware of what
they are doing? We don't think so - in dealing with questions of
that magnitude, the physicists leave their turf and wander into
realms of metaphysics that they are not trained to ponder upon.

Fortunately, there is professional help. The Germans, in their
innate fundamental skepticism, lead the way out - this becomes
evident in an recent article in the influential "Zeit" magazine about the landscape.
Among what is written there is the statement (freely translated):
"German physicists play no role in the discussion of the landscape,
rather the discussion is done at a philosophical level..." and then,
consequently, a philosopher is interviewed. He confirms what we have
been suspecting, namely that the landscape theory is no science!

This teaches us that physicists should more often consult with the
philosophers, rather than wandering astray with their speculations;
the latter have been more competent, essentially since Plato's
times, to meaningfully address questions of this depth. And the
physicists should also realize that the philosophers can actually
say much more also about down-to-earth particle physics, especially
about things physicists take for granted but which are, in fact,
ontologically and epistemologically on shaky grounds. Again, the
Germans lead the way here - in a truly foresighted manner,
in the best tradition of the country, the German Physical Society (DPG) will stage a huge meeting on the Philosophy of Physics,
including lots of talks on quantum gravity.
It speaks in favor of the character of the organizers not
having bowed under the outside pressure, by not having allowed talks
on strings and landscape, but rather having put emphasis on alternative
theories such as loop quantum gravity.

And they even go on further: almost revolutionary are some of the
treatises of the workgroup "Philosophy of Physics". Especially
stunning is the contribution "Does a Higgs mechanism exist?"
The author investigates the argumentative
structure of the concept of spontaneous symmetry breaking in the
context of gauge theories. He finds that upon closer critical
analysis, the Higgs mechanism is just a rewriting of the degrees
of freedom and as such cannot posses any interpretable instantiation
in Nature. The philosophical results suggest that neither an
ontological, nor an epistemological interpretation of the Higgs
mechanism is tenable!

This quite clearly shows what goes all wrong when physicists do not
pay attention to the proper underpinnings of what they call
theories...had they been asking the philosophers 20 years earlier,
20 years worth of senseless work of thousands of researchers on the Higgs mechanism
would not have been wasted! Fortunately, from now on the situation
seems to be better, in that philosophers are finally invited to
Particle Physics conferences, at least in Germany. The APS would
be well advised to follow the lead and get those guys also over to
the US, in order to prevent even more philosophically misguided
resarch in particle physics, quantum gravity and above all, string
theory.

LHC OLYMPICS

Exciting times ahead: at CERN the first LHC Olympics will take place!
It's sort of a contest between the leading particle physicists, to figure out what the right extension of the standard model is. It starts out from fake data that anticipate the real data that the LHC will generate within two years of time.

It will also be a contest between the various possible models. Which model it will turn out to be, may in a sense be more exciting to know than the physicist who figures it out. There are so many fascinating possibilities, like low energy supersymmetry, split supersymmetry, extra dimensions, little Higgs, black holes, and endless combinations thereof, apart from specifics pertaining to the concrete type of model (such as gauge groups, ghost fields, etc).

Since the data will be prepared by Gordy Kane, we can safely exclude the possibility that the solution will just be "Nothing exciting beyond the Standard Model". This leaves essentially two classes of solutions: one of Gordy's favorite models, or one of Savas' favorite models. One may think that since Gordy will prepare the data, it would be one of his models - but that would be too cheap, isn't it. This would have been the easier solution, because Gordy has constructed by far not as many alternative models as Savas. In fact, as pointed out in Motl's blog, Savas has insightfully pretty much covered up most of the space of possibilities - he almost can't fail this way. So given this enormous statistical weight factor, it is almost guaranteed that the winning model must be one of his models - congratulations!


Needless (I guess ?) to add that this nicely makes contact to the "Landscape" of string vacua. My conjecture is that quotienting out the stringy landscape by all the non-observable quantities, will just produce more or less Savas' set of theories - "more or less" meaning that there is a small remainder that will correspond to Gordy's models (and perhaps a few other models from outsiders, but those are expected to form a subset of measure zero so they are not statistically significant).

And we can even further cut down on the number of possibilities, by making use of a kind of anthropic reasoning! As we learned recently, almost all analysis software that exists is based on the MSSM or simple extensions of it; ie., it does not capture models without low energy supersymmetry. This let us safely exclude split supersymmetry as the right model, and even more so models without any supersymmetry - see how far we can get by simple arguments ?

So, indeed exciting times ahead - while the inventor of the winning model can be pre-determined by a statistical landscape-type analysis, as explained above, we can't wait to hear what precise low-energy susy model it will be! I figure this will take some time, though, hopefully someone will blog about any progress as it happens and keep us informed.

MANY NEW EINSTEINS !

Finally a somewhat touchy, but overdue topic has made it into the
media and consequently, a few blogs.
Namely the question about freedom in science, a question that really
goes down to the very foundation of every academic endeavour.
Nowadays what counts as "politically correct" science is dictated
by a few influential individuals, who after having gotten tenure
don't do anything other than forcing younger people to work on their
mainstream subjects, such as string theory. It seems that one cannot
get a job in theoretical particle physics today without some career
in string theory.

Other competing ideas like loop quantum gravity are heavily suppressed;
and even more the more off-mainstream alternatives. It's really so
unjust: here and there people are working hard on problems, and one
set of people get jobs and recognition and funds, while
the others get denied all that - despite of having alternative
ideas is morally on a so much higher standing, not the least just
for contradicting the mainstream! It's so cheap to
simply follow the crowd and repeat what everybody says, in comparison
to a revolutionary rebel, who opposes almost every word in a text
book for the sake of it, and who doesn't believe in the accumulated
lies in all those papers. Who has the courage to challenge the
unreflected claims that are repeated and repeated of thousands of
blind followers of the mainstream. Who doesn't bow to the pressure
to give up. Who fights his mission through the academic institutions.
Who pulls off the mask of camouflaged incompetence from the faces
of all those established "experts". Who brings up shocking
alternatives to quantum mechanics, general relativity, string theory,
that are so radical that those old farts get sick.

Yes, that's the kind of independent thinkers that I respect. Thanks to the internet, we will see more and more now... the days of the oppressive academic establishment are over soon. Indeed everyone can be an expert, everyone can be a new Einstein! As we learned, Einstein was a quite mediocre person in fact. Perhaps he simply got the luck others, before and later, were denied. Everyone has a chance, it's just a matter of communication and timing - so you should get up and write down your own alternative theory, a few examples of such are listed on the sidebar to the right. Who says there are no new Einsteins ? Plenty of new ones are emerging!

ANYTHING GOES ?

There was an interesting discussion going on over at
Motl's Blogspot. It started with the analysis of a talk of Eva Silverstien
who claimed to have found even more consistent string backgrounds,
not tied any more to the usual dimension of superstrings (which is
11). If true that would mean that string theory would be even less
predictive than it appeared so far.

Motl's arguments seem strong and convincing: we just can't give up
the sacred principle of critical dimension without ruining the whole
approach. Adopting Silverstien's viewpoint would, ultimately,
translate to "anything goes" - physics without any contraints, where
everything is possible. That means, no physics at all.

I think the string physicists went too far here, the "landscape"
is already bad enough. They should adopt a more solid conceptional
underpinning for their theories. Examples for a more reasonable
direction of research is for example is
ghost condensation, which ingeniously presupposes a kinetic term with
the "wrong" sign. One may envision here a lot of generalizations,
for instance one may flip the signs of all terms in the standard
model lagrangian (incl gravity), and doing this in all possible
ways would generate a lot of new models with interesting cosmological
implications. One may also combine this scenario with various stacks
of branes, for example one may put all the known "standard model"
physics on one brane, but puts a supersymmetry breaking brane
sufficiently far away so that supersymmetry is only weakly broken.
The same can be done with CP violation in a similar way. Not to
mention to do this not in four, but in say 5 dimensions (or even
more); but that's not my point.

What I propose in this context is switching the signs of the various
kinetic terms on one brane, but keeping them as before on some other
(this is not to be taken literally, of course, for instance one may
also consider hybrid constructions where only a subset of kinetic
terms on a given brane is switched - but you get the idea). I am
pretty sure that this will lead to many new classes of interesting
models, and by picking the right branes and signs I bet one could
reproduce, earlier or later, the standard model of particle physics
as we know and love it.


That's a good example, you see? The string "physicists" should
learn from the phenomenologists to do solid and interesting physics
like this, rather than more and more loosing themselves in fancy
mathematics.

Oh well....

Being a physicist doesn't make my life easier !
Giving classes is such a pain... I shouldn't try to be the nice guy all the time. My office is swamped after each class, I hardly find time to go on with my research. I wonder whether they really want to ask me about inflation scenario building, or what.

NEW MODELS !

Things really start getting exciting now, even more viable new models are coming up. Life got sorta boring the last couple of years when we were looking for models with low energy supersymmetry, which everybody took just for granted because we were told so. Now thanks due to a new revolutionary inspiration, we can start building new kinds of models we couldn't have dreamed about in the past !

Even more recent dramatic progress along these lines can be found here. It's almost there, just some little extra spice, like non-commutative extra dimensions or some background Ramon-Kolb fields are still lacking which would make the model even cooler.

ON THE FOREFRONT: LARGEST BRANE MODEL EVER CONSTRUCTED

A team of physicists and engineers successfully completed the
construction of the largest and most complicated brane model ever.
"We all are very excited", tells spokesperson Massimo Mozzarella,
"it's also the most accurate model built so far - by using of all
plugins and modules that are available, we will be able to cover
all experimental results that the LHC at CERN possibly can produce".

While details were not available as of yet, rumors say that the model contains several dozens of branes, intermingled in a number of extra dimensions. "Until the LHC starts running in 2007, we have more than enough time to further refine and extend the construction, possibly by adding anti-branes on top of it", other sources say, "this will leave the competition in the dust".

REPORT: BRANE MODEL BUILDER AND TOY DESIGNER SWAP JOBS

"When I met Joe on the plane", theoretical physicist Carlos
Mendez-Guttierez recalls, "we started talking about our jobs, and
when he mentioned his work as an employee of a big company which
manufactures the little plastic figures that go into those well-known
Suprise Eggs, it suddenly occured to me: hey, what the guy is doing
is not too different from what I am doing !" "I am not sure about
who got the idea first, but at some point we converged toward
swapping our jobs, at least temporarily", Carlos continues, "I was
fascinated of finally doing some creative work that I could see
with my own eyes and could touch with my hands, while not having
any more to convince collegues why my models would be better than
theirs - all what counts are sales figures, which I felt to be
somewhat more fair than those citation scores used for evaluating
the work of scientists".

One the other hand, we learned that also ex-toy designer Joe enjoyed
the swap. After initial fears of not being competent enough, he got
thrilled to do some really cutting edge research work, especially
after Carlos' promises turned out to be true that he does not need
to know quantum gravity or string theory for being a successful
brane model engineer. "All what it takes is some elementary school
knowledge of group theory and anomalies", he confirmed, "and off
you go - all those buzzwords you always had been dreaming about
using, such as extra dimensions, warped spacetime, graviton profiles
and tachyonic inflation, are at your's disposal and just wait to
be used." Excitedly he adds: "What I really enjoy and like more as
compared to me previous job, is that anything goes! There is no
constraint that spoils the fun in designing new models - every
fancy idea that comes into my mind, can immediately be converted
into a new paper!"

After pressing him, he details his latest project: it involves a
still kept-secret number of extra dimensions, and combines the
largest number ever of fancy ingredients in a single model, including
non-commutative, non-supersymmetric triple-intersecting branes on
orbifold singularities with torsion fluxes and with modding as high
as Z_77. "After little more work", he proudly adds, "I will be able
to push this well over Z_100 while doubling the number of branes
at the same time". His secret trick to success, he concludes with
low voice, is that he is able to use the same software that he has
been using before for toy designing, and this gives him the edge over the
competiton, by being able to shell out a new model every two or
three days.

PHYSICS HEADLINES...GREAT NEWS FROM ALL AROUND THE WORLD !

INTERNET EXPERTS SAY: STRING THEORY "WILL TUMBLE THIS FALL"


TEL AVIV: BOOKS ON TWISTOR THEORY LANGLANDS PROGRAM SOLD OUT EVERYWHERE


NON-COMMUTATIVE FIELD THEORIES SUDDENLY TURN NON-INTERESTING


STANFORD: LARGEST EXTRA DIMENSION CONCEIVED


PRINCETON: MATRICES SUCCESSFULLY RECYCLED


MADRID: NEW PRIME NUMBER USED FOR ORBIFOLD


IAS/HARVARD: GAUGE THEORY OWNERSHIP DISPUTED


USC/BERKELEY: PHYSICS PROBLEMS ALREADY SOLVED 25 YEARS AGO


CALTECH: RUSSIAN SENIOR PHYSICIST'S TALK NOT AS BAD AS EXPECTED


RUTGERS: STRING VACUA COUNTED, BUFFER OVERFLOW ENCOUNTERED



STANFORD: LANDSCAPE BURIED IN FOG


MADISON: LARGEST EVER INSTANTON NUMBER TABULATED


COLUMBIA U: FAILED PHYSICIST SEES PHYSICS FAIL


WITTEN WASTED