[RascalPuff]

String Theory
The Inelegant Universe
by Miles W. Mathis
(A one page intro to a 14 page dissertation at http://geocities.com/mileswmathis/string.html )

Readers coming here from a web-search or from other chapters of mine may assume I have nothing to say about the math of string theory. They will assume that since I am neither an insider nor a famous mathematician, the subtleties of 11-dimensional math are beyond me. And since the first part of this paper attacks the theory and not the math, many will assume that I am just making a philosophical critique. They are quite mistaken. In Part II of this paper I will make a foundational critique of the math, revealing some astonishing facts that even the princes of the theory will not want to miss. So if you tend to nod off at any stretch of sentences that fails to contain a number or a variable, there is something for you here, too. The big laughs are in the first part of this paper, but the lasting interest lies in the last part.



Part I
The Theory
Since the late 1980's string theory has continued to gain in popularity, until now it has become a sort of fashion. Brian Greene puts it this way in his book The Elegant Universe: "[In 1984] there was a pervasive feeling among the older graduate students that there was little or no future for particle physics. The standard model was in place and its remarkable success at predicting outcomes indicated that its verification was merely a matter of time and details. . . ­. [Then] the success of Green and Schwarz finally trickled down even to first-year graduate students, and an electrifying sense of being on the inside of a profound moment in the history of physics displaced the previous ennui."
Most will find nothing particularly revealing in this quote, I imagine. No doubt Greene believes he is just stating a fact, not baring his wicked soul. But I find in it the entire explanation for the movement in science in the 20th century. The keyword is "ennui". In the late 20th century it took a lot to interest the top graduate students like Brian Greene. They could see no quick road to fame by studying the boring past. What was wanted was an avant garde math or theory to latch onto. This is what had made Einstein famous, and after him Feynman and Hawking and all the rest. Mathematics had been the key, and it looked to continue to be the key in the near future. For Brian Greene and the other ambitious young physicists of our time, the job is not to try to discover why the old avant garde maths aren't working; no, the job is to create ever newer avant garde maths that are harder to test. This will automatically provide fewer empirical contradictions, and thereby a stronger theory.

In this paper I will use The Elegant Universe as my scratching post. I do this for a number of reasons, but the main reasons are: 1) It is a recent bestseller and has done as much as any book to popularize the theory, 2) It describes an almost unbelievably inelegant universe, 3) It is as transparent as thinnest glass, setting me up for easy scores on almost every page. As far as the last reason goes, I will show that it is probably a mistake for avant garde maths and theories to allow themselves to be presented to popular audiences, especially if the presentation is in a clear language. Brian Greene is a good science writer: good in the sense that a reader can penetrate what he is saying. But science used to understand that obscure theories should always remain in obscure language. That was the only hope for them, no matter the audience. An honest presentation of a dishonest theory is too dangerous. For one thing, it allows other scientists like me to find the flaws too easily. Fully cloaked in its armor of equations, it is not so easy to sort out, even for a mathematician. But stated baldly it becomes a sitting duck.
I find it astonishing that string theory has made it this far. Greene says that the early years were a bit of a struggle, but I don't tend to believe it. The fact that a theory that is such a magnificent mess is on its feet at all is a very bad sign. It shows the uncritical nature of our milieu, not only in the public and publishing sector, but at the highest levels. The reason for this is clear: graduate students like Greene were well-trained in being uncritical, and they have been for more than half a century. The old uncritical graduate students are now deans and department chairs, and they are all very far gone down the road of non-discrimination. The list of things they have accepted at face value is long and shocking. Greene's first five chapters are a public airing of all the absurd things he has accepted without much analysis. It is clear that he has accepted them because he never really cared if they were true or made sense or not. He, like the others, has from the beginning judged each incoming piece of information based on its likelihood to add to his prestige, and anything that was already a settled question could not help in that area. What he and the other ambitious theoreticians were looking for all along was the end point. "Get me to the end-point as fast as possible." Because then they could begin making their personal contribution. "Put me as close to the front of the line as you can, where I can begin pushing."
For these brightest students, physics was no longer seen as a field they could add to, it was a field they could trump. Their greatest goal was to make all of the past immediately obsolete. Basic physics was digested like a breakfast at the drive-thru, Relativity was duly cut and pasted, and QED was memorized by rote. All this was done by the age of 24 or 25. Another year of all-nighters provided them with the latest hyper-maths and theories, so that they could immediately begin discussing ten-vector fields with full abandon at the coffeeshop and braintrust.
In this way science has become just like Modern Art. The contemporary artist and the contemporary physicist look at the world in much the same way. The past means nothing. They gravitate to novelty as the ultimate distinction, in and of itself. They do this because novelty is the surest guarantee of recognition. The contemporary artist always has his nose to the wind, sniffing the air for the next trend. As soon as he gets a whiff of it he is off running. He is always in a race with time, for it is no longer a matter of being best, it is a matter of being first. He therefore congregates with others of his type. They mass at the same hotspots, antennae erect.
The contemporary scientist is the same. He is a social creature, always trying to impress. Rigor impresses no one in the modern world, so he does not even have to fake it. What impresses are lots of difficult equations, with lots of new variables and terms. The ultimate distinction is coining new words for the new math and the new objects. Calabi-Yau shapes and 3-branes and orbi-folding: that is rich beyond anything.
The art departments have long since dismantled the old schedules: painting and sculpture are passe, studio art a dinosaur, drawing from the nude a sexist embarrassment. The physics and math departments will soon follow suit, no doubt. Mechanics and kinematics will be jettisoned as a theoretical nuisance, a blockage of creativity. Classical algebra and geometry will become an elective, taken only by historians and archivists. Instead, seventh graders will be offered "The Rudiments of Chaos Theory" and "Fun with Tensors" and "Computer Modelling with i."

Let me now show you a few examples of the absurdities that the standard model teaches. I do this to prove that by accepting these absurdities, it encourages a proliferation of more such absurdities. It teaches the graduate students, by example, that mathematical fuzziness pays and that conceptual rigor does not. Let us start with the "messenger particle,"1 a relatively new beast in the physical zoo. The messenger particle is a photon that tells another particle whether it should move away or move near. The messenger particle was invented to solve the problem of attraction. At some point it became clear to physicists that attraction couldn't logically be explained by a trading of particles. Their old blankets over this problem had begin to wear thin, so they needed a new concept. Enter the messenger particle. With the messenger particle, we no longer have to be concerned with explaining physical interactions mechanically. We don't even have to imagine that movement away in a field is caused by bombardment, which was such a simple concept. No, we can now explain both movement away in a field and movement toward in field as due to information in a messenger particle. This simultaneously explains both positive charge and negative charge. How easy: the photon just tells the particle what to do. Why did we not think of that before?
Once you accept that quantum particles are on speaking terms, physics is so much tidier. There is no end to what we can explain this way. We can have the particles trading recipes, emailing eachother, SMSing, watching TV. It is a theoretical goldmine.
Gluons, weak-gauge bosons, and gravitons are also messenger particles of their various forces. The problem of attraction is solved once and for all, for all possible fields. Gravity is not curved space or a physical force. It is a commandment.

The next absurdity is one of Feynman's famous absurdities.2 This one concerns letting an electron going through the two-slit experiment take all possible (infinite in number) paths simultaneously and then summing over these paths to find the wave function. Any idiot can see that this is just a mathematical consideration and has no physical implications, but Feynman was a special kind of idiot. He insisted for some reason that the math was the physics, and all the special idiots since then have taken his word for it. They love to quote or paraphrase him, as Greene does, "You must allow nature to dictate what is and what is not sensible." Which means, "You must allow me (Feynman) to dictate what is and what is not sensible. I am smarter than you are and if you don't allow me to dictate to you, I will browbeat you mercilessly." Even now that Feynman is long in the grave and incapable of personally browbeating anyone, the special idiots still quote and paraphrase and bow to his authority. Feynman himself was bowing to the authority of Heisenberg and Bohr, who first decided, by fiat, that the math of quantum mechanics was the physics. Or perhaps he was only learning from their example. Counterintuitive fiats had made them famous with all the toadies, why not make a few of his own counterintuitive fiats and toadies?
Greene tells us outright: "Quantum mechanics requires that you hold such pedestrian complaints [about things making sense] in abeyance." What could be more convenient for a scientist? He is now in the position of a priest. The priests have always said the same thing to non-believers. "You must not expect it to make sense. You must have faith. Trust the Lord." Trust Feynman. He is smarter than you and understands what you should believe. He has filled the blackboards with Hamiltonians and has cracked safes. He has earned the right to say ridiculous things, like the Dalai Lama or the Buddha or the President.
This is the most important thing that string theorists have learned from quantum mechanics: you do not have to make sense anymore. Any contradiction can be relabeled a paradox, any infinity can be relabeled an axiom, any absurdity can be given to Nature herself, who is an absurd creature, in love with illogic and caprice.

continued: http://geocities.com/mileswmathis/string.html

Regards
- RP

[mkirkpatrick]

Consciousness reignus supremo,thanks RP,as you well know my friend,we can all strain
on a gnat,while swallowing a camel? I saw the film about the Elegant Universe,it was really impressive,I enjoyed it!How I wished it were real!Was it real,well it was an explanation of how it "seems to be".

The universe is alive,conscious,intelligent,aware,and a ubiquitous WHole,with absolute
interconnectivity,no gaps,no spaces,no Seperate Parts,all is as ONE-peroid.

So whether you call that energy/consciousness/force/strings, or uncle tom cobbly

is basically irrelevent and of no REAL consequence.



regards michael.

[dleviwing]

This is the carnival presented to the general public by the academia type scientists that need to publish. Welcome to another version of “The Emperor’s New Cloths”. Those of us in the real world of science get the joke but do not appreciate the humor.

[theunify]

And those of us not schooled in math still have a chance to realize, string theory cannot be explained in english, it has to be math, and the math has to hold up, to the question can it accurately predict events, most key is the event of the big bang... 1,2,3 and 4 perhaps would be a good start, So far what we have are bits and peices, complex problems far too deep to be solved, and that's how it stands, we are asking questions like what's the difference between t and t^2??? Gee, 1^2 is 1, and 1^1, seems to be one....there is no difference at the absolute fundemental level, only at the abstract, geometric level can we..

[dleviwing]

If the numbers can’t be interpreted to plain language, it is most likely because those who created the numbers don’t know what they mean either.

[RascalPuff]

Dear David: Sang froid and equanimity it is then.

[RascalPuff]

Originally Posted by theunify And those of us not schooled in math still have a chance to realize, string theory cannot be explained in english, it has to be math, and the math has to hold up, to the question can it accurately predict events, most key is the event of the big bang... 1,2,3 and 4 perhaps would be a good start, So far what we have are bits and peices, complex problems far too deep to be solved, and that's how it stands, we are asking questions like what's the difference between t and t^2??? Gee, 1^2 is 1, and 1^1, seems to be one....there is no difference at the absolute fundemental level, only at the abstract, geometric level can we..

What David said. (Cool headed - aplomb - resistance to disturbance to you too, then, Mr. Unify. ^5.)

[dleviwing]

Originally Posted by RascalPuff Dear David: Sang froid and equanimity it is then.

What is it you are referring to RP?

[RascalPuff]

Originally Posted by dleviwing If the numbers can’t be interpreted to plain language, it is most likely because those who created the numbers don’t know what they mean either.

David:
This is what I was referring to. There's way too much of this untranslated 'language' finding its way to the mainstream.

Regards
-RP