String Theory: Good, Bad and Bogus

From: Jack Sarfatti (sarfatti_at_pacbell.net)
Date: 12/11/04 

Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 22:01:02 GMT

Part 1

Commentary on http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/07/science/07stri.html
Words written by Dennis Overbye are between quote marks.

"a single equation that could explain all the laws of physics, all the
forces of nature - the proverbial 'theory of everything'" ?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Physicists, like Dr.
Robert Park, use a double standard not applying the same rules of
engagement to fashionable elegant string theory as they do to flying
saucers, the paranormal and cold fusion.
http://www.archivefreedom.org/

"And so emerged into the limelight a strange new concept of nature,
called string theory, so named because it depicts the basic constituents
of the universe as tiny wriggling strings, not point particles. ... By
uniting all the forces, string theory had the potential of achieving the
goal that Einstein sought without success for half his life and that has
embodied the dreams of every physicist since then. If true, it could be
used like a searchlight to illuminate some of the deepest mysteries
physicists can imagine, like the origin of space and time in the Big
Bang and the putative death of space and time at the infinitely dense
centers of black holes. ... In the last 20 years, string theory has
become a major branch of physics. Physicists and mathematicians
conversant in strings are courted and recruited like star quarterbacks
by universities eager to establish their research credentials. String
theory has been celebrated and explained in best-selling books like "The
Elegant Universe," by Dr. Brian Greene, a physicist at Columbia
University, and even on popular television shows."

'Let them eat cake' said Marie Antoinette shortly before she was
guillotined.

"even as they ate cake and drank wine, the string theorists admitted
that after 20 years, they still did not know how to test string theory,
or even what it meant."

Note "or even what it meant." Mainstream theoretical physics today is in
a sorry state. Not so for experimental physics.

"As a result, the goal of explaining all the features of the modern
world is as far away as ever, they say. And some physicists outside the
string theory camp are growing restive. At another meeting, at the Aspen
Institute for Humanities, only a few days before the string
commemoration, Dr. Lawrence Krauss, a cosmologist at Case Western
Reserve University in Cleveland, called string theory 'a colossal failure.'"

Brian Greene got a few million dollars advance for his book. The big
corporations have a vested interest in this hype that can be compared to
"WMD in Iraq."

"String theorists agree that it has been a long, strange trip, but they
still have faith that they will complete the journey."

The fusion of science and religion on the heels of the fusion of Church
and State?

"Twenty years ago no one would have correctly predicted how string
theory has since developed," said Dr. Andrew Strominger of Harvard.
'There is disappointment that despite all our efforts, experimental
verification or disproof still seems far away. On the other hand, the
depth and beauty of the subject, and the way it has reached out,
influenced and connected other areas of physics and mathematics, is
beyond the wildest imaginations of 20 years ago.' In a way, the story
of string theory and of the physicists who have followed its siren song
for two decades is like a novel that begins with the classic "what if?"
  What if the basic constituents of nature and matter were not little
points, as had been presumed since the time of the Greeks? What if the
seeds of reality were rather teeny tiny wiggly little bits of string?
And what appear to be different particles like electrons and quarks
merely correspond to different ways for the strings to vibrate,
different notes on God's guitar?"

"I'll play the music on my guitar, yes!" Rossini, The Barber of Seville.

"That would explain why you cannot have a single quark you cannot have a
string with only one end. Strings seduced many physicists with their
mathematical elegance, but they had some problems, like requiring 26
dimensions and a plethora of mysterious particles that did not seem to
have anything to do with quarks or the strong force."

You need the extra space dimensions because string theory violates
signal locality in Einstein's original 4D curved spacetime. That is,
final causes after their effects are possible in plain vanilla 4D string
theory with topology change. Of course, this is exactly what the UFO and
paranormal evidence is telling us along with "presponse" experiments by
*** Bierman and others. Then there is also the "Intelligent Design"
controversy. What is bad and bogus for string theorists is good for UFO,
paranormal and consciousness researchers. One man's meat is another
man's poison.

"When accelerator experiments supported an alternative theory of quark
behavior known as quantum chromodynamics, most physicists consigned
strings to the dustbin of history. But some theorists thought the
mathematics of strings was too beautiful to die. In 1974 Dr. Schwarz
and Dr. Joel Scherk from the École Normale Supérieure in France noticed
that one of the mysterious particles predicted by string theory had the
properties predicted for the graviton, the particle that would be
responsible for transmitting gravity in a quantum theory of gravity, if
such a theory existed."

This pyrrhic victory has been trumpeted as a great triumph showing the
power of fantasy in the minds of string theorists. Einstein's gravity is
not renormalizable as a quantum field theory which strongly suggests
that it should not be quantized top -> down like electro-weak dynamic
and chromodynamics. Indeed, Andrei Sakharov suggested that Einstein's
gravity emerges bottom -> up as a collective phenomenon just like the
elasticity in crystals. P.W. Anderson has since formalized this idea as
"More is different." Furthermore all current tests for grainy "quantum
gravity foam" that should show dispersion in the high energy gamma rays
from outer space have been null. That is, there is no evidence for the
equation

E^2 = [(pc)^2 + mc^2]/[1 + (pc/mPc^2)^2]

where mP is the Planck mass for the quantum gravity graininess of
Einstein'sw spacetime geometrodynamics.

Note that the high energy limit of this equation is

E -> mPc^2 ~ 10^-5 grams c^2 ~ 10^16 ergs ~ 10^9 Joules ~ 10^28 electron
volts

implying a maximal acceleration of

a_max = c^2/LP ~ 10^21/10^-33 ~ 10^54 cm/sec^2 ~ 10^51g

But, so far, no evidence supports this idea. If my theory of the
emergence of Einstein's gravity of MACRO-QUANTUM curved spacetime from
the PARTIAL cohering of the micro-quantum zero point vacuum fluctuations
in the BCS unstable massless pre-inflationary globally flat false
conformal vacuum is correct, there is no quantum foam in principle.

The BCS type energy gap Egap of "quasiparticle excitations" of the
non-perturbative background-independent MACRO-QUANTUM vacuum condensate
of virtual electron-hole pairs bound by virtual photons near the E = 0
Fermi energy of the pre-inflationay false vacuum obeys

E^2 = (pc)^2 + Egap^2

Egap ~ (Debye energy of edge of Fermi surface)e^-1/Vrho(0)

V is the attractive static potential energy between the virtual
electron-hole (hole = positron) pair from a single virtual photon
exchange. rho(0) is the density of Dirac's negative energy virtual
electron states at the edge per unit energy.

The Einstein-Cartan tetrads eu^a derive from the MACRO-QUANTUM COHERENT
WORLD HOLOGRAM phase of the LOCAL PARTIAL VACUUM COHERENCE "More is
different" "order parameter".

guv = eu^anabev^b = nuv + (1/2)Lp^2(PHASE OF VACUUM COHERENCE){,u,v}

= nuv + (1/2)[Eu,v + Ev,u)

{ } is symmetrizer (i.e. anti-commutator) with ,u ordinary partial
derivatives in a local coordinate patch of the manifold.

eu^a = &u^a + Eu^a

&u,^a = Kronecker-Delta i.e. 1 if u = a, 0 if u =/= a

Eu = Eu^a,a = Lp^2(PHASE OF VACUUM COHERENCE),u

This equation is the analog to the deBroglie-Bohm guidance equation of
IT by BIT for a quantum liquid. Here we have an ELASTIC ODLRO "quantum
solid" that I introduced into physics in 1966-67 in Physics Letters A on
"Super Solids" in Helium when I was on the physics faculty of San Diego
State and the creator of the National Science Foundation Summer School
in Superfluid Physics and Lasers for College Teachers at San Diego State
(1969 & 1970) that I ran with Herschel Snodgrass. The faculty included
F.W. Cummings and Jim Johnston.

The QUANTUM OF AREA Lp^2 = hG/c^3 ensures Hawking's (also Bekenstein,
Susskind, t'Hooft)

Entropy of Volume of Space = (Bounding Area of Volume)/4Lp^2

Space-time physics is local because the macro-quantum order parameter is
local. This same locality ensures that the early post-Big Bang universe
after the inflationary vacuum phase transition has low entropy so that
the Arrow of Time for the irreversible processes of the Second Law of
Thermodynamics points in the same "direction" as the presently
accelerating expansion of the 3D space of our universe from residual w =
-1 zero point dark energy of negative quantum pressure. Hawking's
blackhole entropy formula is automatically obeyed. That is considered a
triumph of string theory. It's no big deal really. Sorry for stealing
string theorist's thunder and upstaging them, but as Ludwig Boltzmann
said "Elegance is for tailors". Not that this new way of connecting the
cosmic dots is not elegant to the max. :-)

That is, the pre -> post inflationary Big Bang phase transition
collapses the phase space volume of the "ground state" and the "entropy"
is ~ kBlog(Phase Space Volume). This same collapse of ground state phase
space volume always accompanies "More is different" emergence of
qualitatively CREATIVE new order, AKA "spontaneous breakdown of vacuum
symmetry".

To be continued.

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