Some Things about Strings Pt I

[RascalPuff]

Excerpts from Part One of *Miles Mathis', The Inelegant Universe, follow; with the permission of the *author: ( http://milesmathis.com/ ) http://milesmathis.com/string.html

This is a critique of Prof. Brian Greene's best selling book, The Elegant Universe.

(Editor's note: Having repeatedly read this paper, as a mere science writer and lay physics buff, I was at first in a quandary as to which of the two main characters in this theater is bonkers - Greene, or Mathis. I'm no longer beguiled. Having metaphorically invaded Russia, he shall exit with shuddering fall. Not because I say so, or because the formidably glib and resourceful- if acerbic - Miles Mathis says so, but, because - in my humble (if resolute) opinion - Greene has irrevocably made his fateful entrance. Setting the stage for the future of Orwell's 1984 - just about the time when Brian Greene began this historically celebrated and benchmarked, colossal adventure... Greene's cavalier treatments - especially of 'dimensions' - are particularly slapstick: humor may be his strongest suit, and fortification. - K. B. Robertson, aka, Kaiduorkhon, aka, Kai.)
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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 (by Dr. Brian Greene), 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.

( To be continued - Pt II )

[austintorn@aol.com]

Funny stuff.