String Theory: Good, Bad and Bogus 2

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

Date: Sun, 12 Dec 2004 03:20:43 GMT

"These are the phenomena"

Dennis Overbye wrote:
"It was another 10 years before Dr. Schwarz and Dr. Green (Dr. Scherk
died in 1980) finally hit pay dirt. They showed that it was possible to
write down a string theory of everything that was not only
mathematically consistent but also free of certain absurdities, like the
violation of cause and effect, that had plagued earlier quantum gravity
calculations."

Of course we "fringe" physicists who study UFOs, the paranormal and
consciousness are struck by the real evidence for the violation of cause
and effect! We do not consider the "signal nonlocality" of 4D string
theory and quantum gravity to be absurd at all. But we do consider,
perhaps, these extra space dimensions, that Roger Penrose says are
"unstable" to be an abomination! Schwarz and Green's results are,
perhaps a cure that is much worse than the disease. A disease that has
been misdiagnosed. Antony Valentini has shown how quantum theory can be
tweaked a tiny bit to have the violation of cause and effect. Henry
Stapp showed how that generalized quantum theory with signal nonlocality
can explain paranormal data. Stapp, a professor at UC Berkeley was
burned at the stake in the scathing pages of Physics Today for a paper
he managed to get published in Physical Review A on "General Physics".
"Never again!" said Robert Park.

"In the summer and fall of 1984, as word of the achievement spread,
physicists around the Year?” world left what they were doing and stormed
their blackboards, visions of the Einsteinian grail of a unified theory
dancing in their heads."

This is a scene out of Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" at the
Academy of Laputa where "to get sunbeams from cucumbers they've a plan
and they'll set The Thames on fire if they can" (Princess Ida, Gilbert
and Sullivan "These are the phenomena".

"String theory is certainly one of the most musical explanations ever
offered for nature, but it is not for the untrained ear. For one thing,
the modern version of the theory decreed that there are 10 dimensions of
space and time. To explain to ordinary mortals why the world appears to
have only four dimensions - one of time and three of space -string
theorists adopted a notion first bruited by the German mathematicians
Theodor Kaluza and Oskar Klein in 1926. The extra six dimensions, they
said, go around in sub-submicroscopic loops, so tiny that people cannot
see them or store old National Geographics in them. A simple example,
the story goes, is a garden hose. Seen from afar, it is a simple line
across the grass, but up close it has a circular cross section. An ant
on the hose can go around it as well as travel along its length. To
envision the world as seen by string theory, one only has to imagine a
tiny, tiny six-dimensional ball at every point in space-time."

Curiously, Gennady Shipov's torsion theory has 6 extra anholonomic space
dimensions from locally gauging the Cartan tetrad Lorentz group
rotations. But they are not all curled up.

"One of string theory's biggest triumphs has come in the study of black
holes. In Einstein's general relativity, these objects are bottomless
pits in space-time, voraciously swallowing everything, even light, that
gets too close, but in string theory they are a dense tangle of strings
and membranes. In a prodigious calculation in 1995, Dr. Strominger and
Dr. Cumrun Vafa, both of Harvard, were able to calculate the information
content of a black hole, matching a famous result obtained by Dr.
Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University using more indirect means in
1973. Their calculation is viewed by many people as the most important
result yet in string theory Another success, Dr. Greene and others said,
was the discovery that the shape, or topology, of space, is not fixed
but can change, according to string theory. Space can even rip and tear.
  But the scorecard is mixed when it comes to other areas of physics. So
far, for example, string theory has had little to say about what might
have happened at the instant of the Big Bang.. Moreover, the theory
seems to have too many solutions. One of the biggest dreams that
physicists had for the so-called theory of everything was that it would
specify a unique prescription of nature, one in which God had no choice,
as Einstein once put it, about details like the number of dimensions or
the relative masses of elementary particles. But recently theorists have
estimated that there could be at least 10^100 different solutions to the
string equations, corresponding to different ways of folding up the
extra dimensions and filling them with fields - gazillions of different
possible universes. Some theorists, including Dr. Witten, hold fast to
the Einsteinian dream, hoping that a unique answer to the string
equations will emerge when they finally figure out what all this
21st-century physics is trying to tell them about the world. But that
day is still far away ... For years physicists have looked for the
origins of string theory in some sort of deep and esoteric symmetry, but
string theory has turned out to be weirder than that. Recently it has
painted a picture of nature as a kind of hologram. In the holographic
images often seen on bank cards, the illusion of three dimensions is
created on a two-dimensional surface. Likewise string theory suggests
that in nature all the information about what is happening inside some
volume of space is somehow encoded on its outer boundary ... Just how
and why a three-dimensional reality can spring from just two dimensions,
or four dimensions can unfold from three, is as baffling to people like
Dr. Witten as it probably is to someone reading about it in a newspaper.
In effect, as Dr. Witten put it, an extra dimension of space can
mysteriously appear out of 'nothing.' ... Our own universe may be a four
dimensional brane floating in some higher-dimensional space, like a
bubble in a fish tank, perhaps with other branes •parallel universes -
nearby. Collisions or other interactions between the branes might have
touched off the Big Bang that started our own cosmic clock ticking or
could produce the dark energy that now seems to be accelerating the
expansion of the universe, they say."

I have a simpler explanation of the dark energy as residual zero point
energy of negative pressure that is not totally absorbed into the
coherent giant quantum vacuum wave out of which Einstein's curved
spacetime springs emergent like a song on FM cosmic radio - God's Talk
Reality Show.

"Critics of string theory, meanwhile, have been keeping their own
scorecard. The most glaring omission is the lack of any experimental
evidence for strings or even a single experimental prediction that
could prove string theory wrong - the acid test of the scientific process."

This is precisely Richard Feynman's definition of "Cargo Cult
Pseudo-Science. Paranormal research, flying saucers and cold fusion are
better than string theory in that regard. You do not see any Big
Professors at the Institute for Advanced Studies on those topics. I mean
not the one in Princeton. How come PSICOP is not attacking the string
theorists as beyond the "fringe"? Why the double standard?

"Dr. Harvey of Chicago said he sometimes woke up thinking, What am I
doing spending my whole career on something that can't be tested
experimentally? This disparity between theoretical speculation and
testable reality has led some critics to suggest that string theory is
as much philosophy as science, and that it has diverted the attention
and energy of a generation of physicists from other perhaps more worthy
pursuits. Others say the theory itself is still too vague and that some
promising ideas have not been proved rigorously enough yet. Dr. Krauss
said, 'We bemoan the fact that Einstein spent the last 30 years of his
life on a fruitless quest, but we think it's fine if a thousand
theorists spend 30 years of their prime on the same quest.'"

On Dec 11, 2004, at 1:59 PM, Jack Sarfatti wrote:

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".

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