Little green men (they really are)

One of the faddish issues in physics is gender inequality. Females are strongly underrepresented. Of course those in power try to exclude people different from themselves. This is glaring in physics in which anyone who is not a crackpot like the leaders is pushed out. But gender inequality has become a faddish issue so there is great concern about it. One person trying to deal with it is Jocelyn Bell Burnell. She is well known for her work as a graduate student, which won her advisor a Nobel Prize. He was given the award for his brilliance in finding a student who discovered pulsars. These are now known to be rapidly rotating neutron stars but the signals were then thought to be communications from little green men (gender inequality goes back a long way; little green women were never considered). Of course she was never given an award. But why should she? She never found a student who made a major discovery. It turns out however that little green men were involved. They were on the Nobel Prize committee. What they were communicating can only be guess at.

How to determine crackpots

There are many strange ideas that are masquerading as science. How can crackpots be determined? There is a way that tells if a person is a crackpot. Someone who brags about all the great discoveries he is about to make is clearly a crackpot. Reading what they say shows that string theorists are screaming at everyone that they are crackpots. It is not necessary to look at string theory, which is glaringly crackpot, to tell, string theorists are screaming that they are crackpots. Of course string theory has nothing to with science, nor is it meant to. It is purely a religion (and like a religion ignores what experiment --- reality --- requires). Replacing science by religion is not unusual in physics. A half century ago, for example, there was much excitement about ideas extended from dispersion relations, involving smoothness of surfaces. Its center was at Berkeley and its leader was Geoffrey Chew. There was so much excitement that people at Berkeley asked each other "are you a member of the Chewish religion?". That idea had no real rationale and was wrong but was not crackpot. String theory is crackpot. That is why it lasted so much longer. It is still the leading religion of physicists. And the problem is not only in physics. One particularly cruel example is autism, a devastating neurological disorder, now known to be due to brain abnormalities. However the experts decided that it was do to the coldness of mothers, named refrigerator mothers. The way the mothers held the baby in the first 30 seconds caused devastating abnormalities. Of course there was no evidence of this but that was unnecessary. They were experts so qualified to decide even with no evidence at all (and, like string theorists, no matter how absurd their views). There is one thing experts know: how expert they are. And this was particularly cruel, adding to the burden of a parent with a severely sick child the extra burden of (nonexistent) guilt. But experts responsibility is to their expertness, not to facts, not to patients, not to those with grievous misfortune, but to themselves. And they were allowed to get away with it. All too often experts are so proud of their expertise their heads swell up in pride so much that it causes brain damage. This is quite clear in physics, especially with string theory, and in so many other places. Experts are dangerous.

Does physicists' choice of an approximation scheme determine the laws of nature?

Certainly. That is what many "physicists" believe, that is the foundation of much work in "physics". For example in the most widely used approximate calculational method, perturbation theory, certain integrals in intermediate steps have a lower limit of 0 so are infinite. This perturbs "physicists" immensely, so they try to revise nature (which is why they developed string theory which has the great attraction of being known wrong) to eliminate thus "problem". However when all steps of the algorithm are completed the result is finite and correct. The infinities are meaningless and are purely the result of stopping in the middle. If another approximation scheme were used this "problem" would never have arisen. Nevertheless "physicists" feel that this make-believe problem is so important that nature must be changed (for example by changing particles, which do not appear in the theory and have nothing to do with these integrals, to strings). Then there are the absurd beliefs about the vacuum. There is a way of drawing pictures to keep the bookkeeping straight in this particular way of approximating. Some of these pictures can be fancifully interpreted to imply absurdities about the vacuum. But there is a difference between bookkeeping and physics. Unfortunately "physicists" do not understand this. They will claim it is just their extreme incompetence. Reading the "physics" literature shows so many examples of the difficulties "physicists" have in dealing with the world of reality (or maybe it is just fraud).

A SUBVERSIVE VIEW OF MODERN "PHYSICS"

This discussion is carefully designed to infuriate as many people as possible. Since all statements here agree with reality it undoubtedly will. Even worse the statements have been mathematically proven to be correct. These proofs cannot be given in this short space but are easily available in books. As this column does not allow references the books' author must remain anonymous. We start then with the most popular subject of modern "physics". String theory is designed to solve the problems caused by point particles. However there is nothing in any formalism that even hints at particles, let alone point particles. Where did this idea of particles come from? Could it really be that thousands of physicists are wasting their careers to solve the problems caused by particles with not a single one even noticing that there are none? Don't dots on screens in double-slit experiments show that objects are points? Obviously not, they are consequences of conservation of energy. Moreover there are no problems. There are infinities in intermediate steps of a particular approximation scheme, but they are all gone by the end. With a different scheme the idea of infinities would never have arisen. The laws of physics are not determined by physicists' favorite approximation method. But these are not the real problems. What could be worse? String theory requires that the dimension be 10 or 11, in slight disagreement with reality. If predictions of your theory do not agree with experiment just say that it is not yet able to make any, while the ones it does make are carefully ignored. It has long been known that physics (a universe) is impossible in any dimension but 3+1. Why? Coordinate rotations give wavefunction transformations. If the wavefunction gives spin up along an axis it must be transformed to one giving it at some angle to a different axis. Coordinates being real are transform by orthogonal (rotation) groups; wavefunctions being complex require unitary groups. These groups must be homomorphic. They are not as shown by counting the numbers of generators and of commuting ones. Fortunately there is one exception, else there could be no universe: dimension 3+1. Why 3+1, not 4? The rotation group in 4 dimensions, SO(4), is unique in splitting into two independent SO(3) groups. It is not simple, only semisimple; SO(3,1) is simple. Whether God wants it or not the dimension must be 3+1. It is mathematics that is omnipotent. God, Nature and we, and even string theorists, must do what mathematics wants: accept dimension 3+1. Thus string theory is a mathematically impossible theory, in violent disagreement with experiment, designed to solve the terrible nonexistent problems caused by nonexistent particles. Perhaps that is why "physicists" are so enthusiastic about it. Next is the object that billions of dollars are being spent looking for: the nonexistent Higgs. There has been much interest in gauge transformations and in trying to extend them. These are the form that Poincar‚ transformations take for massless objects, and only these. This is trivial. Consider a photon and an electron with parallel momenta and spins along their momenta. We transform leaving the momenta unchanged but the spin of the electron is no longer along its momentum. The spin of the photon is unchanged (electromagnetism is transverse). Despite the opinion of physicists to the contrary this is required not by God but (omnipotent) mathematics, the Poincar‚ group. Here are transformations acting on the electron but not the photon, which cannot be. What are these? Obviously gauge transformations. So massless objects --- only --- have gauge transformations. The belief in Higgs bosons comes from the wish that all objects be invariant under gauge transformations, strongly disagreeing with experiment. However physicists are so enthusiastic about gauge transformations they try to apply them to massive objects. There are reasons for the laws of physics, like geometry and group theory, but these do not include physicists' emotional reactions. So all objects are massless. Nature does not agree. Physicists believe that if their theories do not agree with Nature, then Nature must be revised. Instead of giving that belief up it is kept --- physicists are emotionally attached to it --- and a new field, that of Higgs bosons, is introduced to give objects mass. This is like saying that since orbital angular momentum has integer values all angular momentum has. Since this is not true a new field is introduced to produce half-integer values. That would make no sense and neither do Higgs bosons. This introduces a new particle designed to make Nature agree with physicists, and also a force to make objects massive, which should have other effects and should show up elsewhere. This introduces (at least) two unnecessary, unsupported assumptions. Occam would be very upset. Actually if he knew what is going on in modern "physics" he would be furious. There are no Higgs. Why isn't there a cosmological constant? It sets a function (the left side of Einstein's equation) equal to a constant which is like saying that x^3 + 5x = 7 for all values of x. The cosmological constant must be 0, unfortunately. With one gravity would have a fascinating property: a wave would be detected an infinitely long time before being emitted. Let us quantize gravity, replacing a quantum theory with wild assumptions. Why must general relativity be the theory of gravity, thus the quantum theory of gravity? It is required by geometry (the Poincar‚ group) being its only massless helicity-2 representation. It is a quantum theory (consistent) not classical (inconsistent), having a wavefunction and uncertainty principles. It is different being necessarily nonlinear. Why don't people like it? Then ${\it times up}$