• Who Killed Physics: String Theorists or...Einstein?

    From Pentcho Valev@21:1/5 to All on Mon Feb 7 06:36:44 2022
    "Don't Let String Theory Ruin The Perfectly Good Science Of Physical Cosmology" https://forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/08/17/dont-let-string-theory-ruin-the-perfectly-good-science-of-physical-cosmology/

    Peter Woit: "If, as seems increasingly all too possible, we're now at an endpoint of fundamental physics, with the field killed off by a pseudo-scientific argument ("no point in continuing, the multiverse did it"), Arkani-Hamed is one of those who will
    be most responsible for the situation." http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=9444

    Sabine Hossenfelder: "Looks like Chris Anderson was right when he proclaimed the end of theory." https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=11961

    Peter Woit: "There's a very real danger...that we will in our lifetimes see the end of fundamental physics as a human endeavor" http://math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=8392

    Sabine Hossenfelder (Bee): "The criticism you raise that there are lots of speculative models that have no known relevance for the description of nature has very little to do with string theory but is a general disease of the research area. Lots of
    theorists produce lots of models that have no chance of ever being tested or ruled out because that's how they earn a living. The smaller the probability of the model being ruled out in their lifetime, the better. It's basic economics. Survival of the '
    fittest' resulting in the natural selection of invincible models that can forever be amended." http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=9375

    Peter Woit: "As far as this stuff goes, we're now not only at John Horgan's "End of Science", but gone past it already and deep into something different." http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=7266

    Neil Turok: "The extensions of the standard model, like grand unified theories, they were supposed to simplify it. But in fact they made it more complicated. The number of parameters in the standard model is about 18. The number in grand unified theories
    is typically 100. In super-symmetric theories, the minimum is 120. And as you may have heard, string theory seems to predict 10 to the power of 1,000 different possible laws of physics. It’s called the multiverse. It’s the ultimate catastrophe: that
    theoretical physics has led to this crazy situation where the physicists are utterly confused and seem not to have any predictions at all." https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/perimeter-institute-and-the-crisis-in-modern-physics/

    Peter Woit: "Fundamental physical theory may now be over, replaced with a pseudo-science, but at least that means that things in this subject can't get any worse." https://math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=12604

    The texts below imply that, if the speed of light is variable (it is!), physics has been long dead. The so called fundamental physics is actually a pernicious but lucrative ideology. But dead physics means dying civilization. Are you killing the
    civilization, theoretical physicists?

    "He opened by explaining how Einstein's theory of relativity is the foundation of every other theory in modern physics and that the assumption that the speed of light is constant is the foundation of that theory. Thus a constant speed of light is
    embedded in all of modern physics and to propose a varying speed of light (VSL) is worse than swearing! It is like proposing a language without vowels." http://www.thegreatdebate.org.uk/VSLRevPrnt.html

    "If there's one thing every schoolboy knows about Einstein and his theory of relativity, it is that the speed of light in vacuum is constant. No matter what the circumstances, light in vacuum travels at the same speed... The speed of light is the very
    keystone of physics, the seemingly sure foundation upon which every modern cosmological theory is built, the yardstick by which everything in the universe is measured. [...] The only aspect of the universe that didn't change was the speed of light. And
    ever since, the constancy of the speed of light has been woven into the very fabric of physics, into the way physics equations are written, even into the notation used. Nowadays, to "vary" the speed of light is not even a swear word: It is simply not
    present in the vocabulary of physics." https://www.amazon.com/Faster-Than-Speed-Light-Speculation/dp/0738205257

    "The whole of physics is predicated on the constancy of the speed of light," Joao Magueijo, a cosmologist at Imperial College London and pioneer of the theory of variable light speed, told Motherboard. "So we had to find ways to change the speed of light
    without wrecking the whole thing too much." https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8q87gk/light-speed-slowed

    See more here: https://twitter.com/pentcho_valev

    Pentcho Valev

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  • From Pentcho Valev@21:1/5 to All on Mon Feb 7 10:30:28 2022
    Albert Einstein (1954): "I consider it entirely possible that physics cannot be based upon the field concept, that is on continuous structures. Then nothing will remain of my whole castle in the air, including the theory of gravitation, but also nothing
    of the rest of contemporary physics." John Stachel, Einstein from 'B' to 'Z', p. 151 https://www.amazon.com/Einstein-B-Z-John-Stachel/dp/0817641432

    Physics was "based upon the field concept, that is on continuous structures" in this way:

    "The two first articles (January and March) establish clearly a discontinuous structure of matter and light. The standard look of Einstein's SR is, on the contrary, essentially based on the continuous conception of the field." http://arxiv.org/ftp/
    physics/papers/0101/0101109.pdf

    "Einstein's March paper treated light as particles, but special relativity sees light as a continuous field of waves." http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/genius/

    Albert Einstein: "I introduced the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light, which I borrowed from H. A. Lorentz's theory of the stationary luminiferous ether." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_ether_theory

    Banesh Hoffmann, Relativity and Its Roots, p.92: "Moreover, if light consists of particles, as Einstein had suggested in his paper submitted just thirteen weeks before this one, the second principle seems absurd: A stone thrown from a speeding train can
    do far more damage than one thrown from a train at rest; the speed of the particle is not independent of the motion of the object emitting it. And if we take light to consist of particles and assume that these particles obey Newton's laws, they will
    conform to Newtonian relativity and thus automatically account for the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment without recourse to contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations. Yet, as we have seen, Einstein resisted the temptation
    to account for the null result in terms of particles of light and simple, familiar Newtonian ideas, and introduced as his second postulate something that was more or less obvious when thought of in terms of waves in an ether. If it was so obvious, though,
    why did he need to state it as a principle? Because, having taken from the idea of light waves in the ether the one aspect that he needed, he declared early in his paper, to quote his own words, that "the introduction of a 'luminiferous ether' will
    prove to be superfluous." https://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Its-Roots-Banesh-Hoffmann/dp/0486406768

    That is, Einstein killed physics by "borrowing" his fundamental axiom from the continuous (wave-in-ether) model of light and ignoring the correct Newtonian alternative (variable speed of light confirmed by the Michelson-Morley experiment).

    More here: https://twitter.com/pentcho_valev

    Pentcho Valev

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