Respectable physicists gone crackpotty July 21, 2007
Posted by dorigo in humor, news, physics, science.trackback
While discussing with me the ups and downs of a quick diffusion of information in the blogosphere, an esteemed theoretical physicist pointed me to a paper posted on the ArXiV just four days ago, as an example of the damage that scientists themselves may risk causing to their own field of research.
The paper is a startling read. I apologize to the authors for my bluntness, but I am used to speak my mind in my blog: I had not seen such a pile of unmitigated BS in the ArXiV since I don’t know when.
The paper (hep-ph/0707-1919), titled “Search for Future Influence from the LHC”, is written by two respectable physicists, and at least one of them is indeed quite famous. I am tempted to review it in detail, but let me rather choose the path of utter incorrectness for once, by quoting out of context, just to give you the flavor of the whole pile. Quoting out of context is a sublimely reproachable art: you can make a genius look like an idiot, and vice-versa. It’s called journalism, baby.
So here we go. Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to get bumpy.
“Abstract: (yes, it starts right there) We propose an experiment which consists of pulling a card and use it to decide restrictions of the running of LHC at CERN, such as luminosity, beam energy or total shut down”.
I have to compose myself, since tears are running down my cheeks.
…
Ok, let’s move on.
The paper starts with a sobering remark, which nobody can disagree with. It still gets shivers down my spine:
“Usually it is believed by causality that backward causation[1], in the sense of what happens at a later time influences what happens earlier, does not occur”.
That really sets the stage: the authors know what they are talking about: they are not aliens, they pat our shoulder and say, pal, we’re on the same league here.
“When the Higgs particle shall be produced, we shall retest if there could be influence from the future so that, for instance, the potential production of a large number of Higgs particles in a certain time development would cause a pre-arrangement so that the large number of Higgs productions, should be avoided.”
Hmm… A momentary divergence ?
“Such prearrangements may be considered influence from the future”
No. The helm is firmly set towards nonsense.
The paper now starts discussing probabilities in the context of the path integral formalism, with an action which has an imaginary part (a crucial detail, apparently). A discussion of the impact of a imaginary part of the action on the evolution of the universe follows. Then things get even murkier:
“However, high energy physics machines with their relativistic particles would [...] may [sic] influence their past and for instance such influence could have meant that these machines would have been met with bad luck by prearrangement and got their funds cut so as not work”.
Here I am crying for the revolting grammar, but the point is that these guys are using a noun, “luck”, which, let’s put it mildly, does not belong in a scientific paper. But more tests are in store:
“Seemingly there were no such effects of bad luck for relativistic accelerators as ISR wherein the particles were even stored for long times”.
There follow a couple of sentences which I have no guts to copy here. Some fragments:
“To rescue our model [...] we could, however, make in our opinion the very mild speculation that fundamentally there exists magnetic monopoles [...] provide the argument for that even for the high energy experiments so far no effect of bad or good luck should have been observed”.
And then they turn to the Higgs.
“Thus it is really not unrealistic that precisely at the first a large number of of Higgs production also our model-expectations that is influence for the future would show up”.
That is too much. Such grammar would be enough for me to prevent publication even on a preprint server. But refraining from vomiting, let me quote the following sentence.
“Very interestingly in this connection is that the SSC in Texas accidentally would have been the first machine to produce Higgs on a large scale. However it were actually stopped after a quarter of the tunnel were built, almost a remarkable [underlined in the original] piece of bad luck.”
Aha! Now I get it. Let me guess. Probably the future influenced the minds of US congressmen into voting off the SSC funding, so that fewer Higgses would be produced. The universe is saved! D3B0, open the worm hole, we’re going home!
Do you need to stop reading and get a glass of whiskey ? Please do, it’s not over yet. Pour it down and stay with me till the bitter end. We’re now going into the section called “Proposal of the experiment“. They need to lay down some preliminary observation first.
“It seems most likely that production of Higgs particles should lead to smaller P(s) than no Higgs production since otherwise there would presumably already have been produced lots of Higgs particles in nature somehow.”
Gulp. John, please give me another glass. No ice.
“With this model we expect, that a Higgs producing machine will be stopped by some accident or another if the effect is sufficiently large…”
Oh god.
“The experiment proposed in the present article is to give the ‘foresight’, so to speak, a chance of avoiding having to close LHC by some funding or other bad luck accident, as it happened to SSC, by instead playing a game of pulling a card from a well mixed stack about the running of the LHC”.
John, you can leave the bottle here. Gosh. No kidding. These guys are proposing to save the LHC physics program by pulling a card out of a deck. But it gets even more delirious, if you still haven’t reached the bottom of your scale yet.
“On most of the cards there should be just written ‘use LHC freely’, so that they cause no restrictions.”
Whew, I feel relieved.
“But on a very small fraction of the cards there should be restrictions for luminosity or beam energies or some combination. On one card one may eve have ‘close LHC’.”
I could comment that I did play similar games in my middle school time and again, but I never reverted causality, maybe because I never got the hot card - kissing the ugly ones was the most exciting thing that used to happen.
Enough already ? Not really. Read this:
“The numbers r,a and p should of course be very small, whereas the excess average damage, presumably is of order unity. One could, however, estimate that this damage extra presumably involves even human lives so that several people may be killed during some explosion stopping LHC.”
Wait. You’re right. Enough said.
It’s very sad to see some valuable minds writing such a pile of unmitigated bullshit (I allow myself the word this down the post). It makes one wonder if their reputation is an accident. So now who is the crackpot ? The honest amateur who tries to find a relationship between mass values, or the big shot with hundreds of published papers ?
Nobody is a crackpot. Ideas are good, bad, idiotic, demented. If there were a fifth category, the paper discussed above would belong to it.
Update (for the series, better late than never): I realized with a week of delay that Sabine at Backreaction had already discussed the paper… Oh well, that allowed me a fresh look at it rather than a pre-digested one ;-) Not that I object to Bee’s paper digestion…
Maybe, they got a bet running? Maybe on how many people will discuss their paper in their weblog?
Best,
H.
The posting of the Nielsen-Ninomiya paper on the hep-ph section of arXiv at 0707.1919
Search for Future Influence from L.H.C
makes me feel honored to be blacklisted by the Cornell arXiv,
so that
my recent work is not in the same pool contaminated by such stuff.
My sympathy to others whose recent work posted on hep-ph is now associated with such garbage.
Tony Smith
PS - Helge’s comment indicating a possibility that Nielsen and Ninomiya may have posted the paper as a joke or social experiment is
sadly
refuted by looking at another paper by Nielsen and Ninomiya:
hep-ph/0612032
entitled “Future Dependent Initial Conditions from Imaginary Part in Lagrangian”
whose abstract concludes with the statement “Higgs machines will be hit by bad luck.”
Now I will go drink some Strega.
There is a guy at the University of Washington who’s trying to set up an experiment on “backward causality” involving only a laser, a beam splitter and plenty of optical fiber. No Higgs, no messing around with billion dollar colliders. At least he’s cheap. So cheap in fact that he could get no funding until some newspaper wrote about his “plight” and he received some $40000 in donations to perform the experiment:
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/07/17/274531.aspx
Here’s the really scary part. Quoting straight from the Cosmic Log post:
See, maybe Nielsen and Ninomiya are on to something, but got it backwards: the experiment really wants to be performed.
P.S. Strega is great. Wish I had some handy.
Disturbing post, Tommaso, but I cannot believe you misspelt whyskey…
Indeed. Corrected before you mentioned it… I had a hard time during posting this, because of some glitch with wordpress. I now fixed a few other things too…
Cheers,
T.
Hi Helge, Tony is right - this is no joke. It is darn serious BS.
Tony, I agree, hep-ph could use some rehashing of their censorship lists…
GW, sure, the two crackpots are not alone in this game of perverted causality. But the article they wrote really, really goes too far. Maybe they do have some ace up their sleeve. Then again, they busted it.
Cheers,
T.
Come on, Dorigo! Even an Italian high energy physicist can use some sense of humor. Don’t you ever laugh? It’s a prank OK, but it’s not serious crackpotism.
And it is NOT a crackpot idea that the LHC may well be shut down for funding reasons. You know it is not about science. It is about politics and economy. I suggest that we shut down LHC, for the reason that it is using up too much of the limited remaining helium resources on earth, depriving other fields of science their fair change of development, like cryogenics. It is true, the start up and operation of LHC will consume almost 30% of the world’s helium production.
Helium IS the second most abundant element in the universe but it is an extremely rare element on the earth, generated by natural decay of elements, and only exists in certain rigid geological structures where the rocks are so tight they can not escape. We have not yet grasped the technology that would allow we to travel to outspace and harvest helium economically. Nuclear reactors in the world does generate minuscule amount of helium but the cost will run to a million times more expensive than gold.
Hey, we could do a paper about not finding the Higgs: No new physics in the LHC would imply violation of unitarity, thus non conservation of the probability, thus the sum of the probabilities of all the possible outcomes being different of the unity (but I am not sure if it should be greater than unity or smaller than unity). Now try to work out causality in this scenario.
You actually read the whole paper! I am impressed. I gave up right after reading the abstract.
It’s sad, but admittedly, this blog is sloping down the filthy side of journalism… How could you omit the quote “In this way we claim to obtain the
second law of thermodynamics out of our model” ???
The funniest thing is that Nielsen is beginning this August his associate professorship at CERN TH. Thus, he has the means to demonstrate the backwards-in-time influence. For example, he could prove his theory by flooding the tunnel or blowing up the detectors…
Hats off to the selection commitee
Hi Quantoken, helium is extracted from natural gas and there is no risk of running out of supplies in the near future. As far as your proposal to shut down the LHC because it is using too much of it, I guess it does well fit in this column, given the sorely a-scientific nature of the things it deals with.
Hi Alejandro. Yes, it is a good suggestion, but I think I have more constructive ways of using my vacation time
We should ask the guys to work out a way to make money gambling. Before then, they should be prevented from publishing again…
Amitabha, it is one’s duty when reporting about a paper to at least read it once
Tulpoeid, I did spot the sentence, but there was such a long list of quotable nonsensical assertions that it remained in the queue. Thanks for bringing it up…
Hi Jester, yes, it is embarassing to hire somebody who proposes to close the lab. I hope he will change his research interests…
Cheers to all,
T.
In fairness, I feel obliged to point out that there is a simple way to avoid the (accidental) “close the lab” outcome. The deck of cards could be consulted every 24 hours (or other convenient time period), and the result would be valid only for the next 24 hours. So, the worst possible outcome of each draw would be “don’t run the LHC for the next 24 hours”. Now, if that result kept coming up day after day, in spite of having some very low probability (e.g. one in a million, with a radioactive sample connected to a detector acting as true random number generator and a computer doing the “drawing” of “cards”) even we hardnosed skeptics would have to start wondering what’s going on. If, on the other hand, there is no backward causality, the LHC will run as usual and no damage will have been done.
“Dr Mary Malone would have been familiar with that sort of story in the course of her search for dark matter. But it might not have occurred to her, for example, when she sent a postcard to an old friend shortly after arriving in Oxford for the first time, that that card itself would trace part of a story that hadn’t yet happened when she wrote it. Perhaps some particles move backwards in time; perhaps the future affects the past in some way we don’t understand; or perhaps the universe is simply more aware than we are. There are many things we haven’t yet learned how to read”
In this house of R’lyeh, the Great Cthulu sleeps and dreams of our world, spinning.
And we shall use the weapons of the Great Old Ones to defeat them, and set our world free.
This is an approved article by the Society To Free Earth From Time Lane Hijackers. Begone, pests.
Wait, isn’t their paper an … extended anthropic principle?
s.
The motto of the Serra di Cassano family (written on their famous palace in Naples) was ‘VENTURI NON IMMEMOR AEVI’, ‘we do not forget the future’, or something like that. (Unfortunately the family
had, since then, a tragic story).
Would this card be a card from a standard pack or a special card or a Joker?
Do you think there will be an Earthquake tomorrow? Only if you have built a two loop colider and not told anyone!
Maybe there is an Hannibal Lecter out there who eats branes for breakfast so Quick that it does not matter how big you build your collider?
We set sail on a ship towards nonsense a long time ago, it’s just nobody has realised it yet. Here is a bit of nonsense; I’ve tested all colliders in the universe already, and yours is poor, plays a nice light note tho!( when it works! ) It’s when you’ve created a band that starts playing Nearer, My God to Thee, then its time to worry; all the musicians went down with the ship! Am just glad am the Chef!
Breakfast anyone?
Papers by Nielsen are considered as crazy in the good sense.
LHC is not an easy machine; for the first time CERN built a collider while having budget problems; precision data suggest a light Higgs and finding it needs a difficult analysis; the Higgs can be be undetectable in a hadron machine if it decays into new neutral particles…
It is quite possible that the “prediction” by Nielsen will be successful for the next 20 years!
GW, I may agree that once one crosses the line of mental sanity there still are various levels of craziness. However, I do not see the benefit of performing an experiment on backward causation with such a pile of nonsense as support…
Alejandro, who is Mary Malone ? Is that a quote from a science fiction book ?
Serafino, thanks for the quote from the Serra of Cassino… Never heard of them before.
Philip, Qubit, ok, the paper is nonsensical, but this column should remain sane - at least so I hope.
M, good point. Nielsen may have made a smart move after all… His first few years at CERN will be crowned by a working prediction - until he finds a way to flood the tunnel.
Cheers all,
T.
Dr. Mary Malone is a character in Phillip Pullman’s 3-part book “His Dark Materials”, sort of like Harry Potter with a bit more physics and many-universes. Part 1 (called in the USA “The Golden Compass”) will be released in movie form this December.
Dr. Malone studies the I Ching and Dark Matter Shadow Particles of Consciousness also called Dust (”… when people consult the I Ching, they’re getting in touch with Shadow particles … dark matter …”).
As Alejandro said in a comment on Cosmic Variance: “… Not only Dark Matter, but also extra dimensions are explicitly named in the books, let’s see what happens in the filmed version. …”.
Mark on Cosmic Variance on 21 June 2007 put up a post titled “Pullman Wins the Carnegie of Carnegies” about the fact that the first part of the trilogy “… was declared the finest children’s book of the last 70 years …”.
Some of the comments on that post deal with interpretations of how Pullman deals with aspects of religion (he is pretty clearly against Authoritarian religious structures, but it is not clear that he is against all religious belief).
Tony Smith
PS - Maybe Nielsen et al are wasting their talents by posting their work on the physics arXiv instead of publishing it as children’s novels and movies. Think of how much money Harry Potter has made (the BBC says “… Harry Potter has made author JK Rowling richer than the Queen, according to The Sunday Times Rich List …”), and Pullman’s Dark Materials may make, and how usefully it could be spent in funding real experimental physics.
[...] year’s award for most ludicrous hep-ph paper is likely to be won in a walk by this one. Tommaso is even better than Sabine on the [...]
Over on Not Even Wrong, where Peter Woit says aboout the new paper by Nielsen and Ninomiya “… This year’s award for most ludicrous hep-ph paper is likely to be won in a walk by this one. …”,
there is an apparently serious comment by Kapsar Olsen saying:
“Concerning Holger and Ninomiya’s paper:
Yes the idea is crazy, and contrary to what we know, but I don’t think it is fair to call it “ludicrous”. If you accept some of the premises - which of course might be very hard - then certainly the idea is not foolish, or completely unreasonable.
Try to read the paper, and present your own reason for why you think it is “ludicrous”.
Kasper”.
Kasper Olsen’s blog site says “… I hold a Ph.D. in theoretical physics and my current work is concentrated on string theory - the “landscape” and applications of K-theory in D-brane physics; and more recently, various aspects of Ricci flows. …”.
The fact that Kasper Olsen is a landscape string theorist supports my feelings that a lot of today’s theoretical physicists are so wrapped up in superstring abstract math that they don’t have the time and energy to really understand the Standard Model well enough (i.e., at a level of detail similar to that set out in the review sections of the Particle Data Group publications) to realize what fascinating stuff is being done at Fermilab and will be done at LHC.
Since they known to journalists as “EXPERT BRILLIANT PHYSICISTS”, journalists will ask them about the expensive machine that is LHC,
and
since they don’t understand the fascinating details of the real stuff (and certainly don’t want to admit ignorance to a mere journalist) they talk about what they know about, which is extra dimensions and black holes etc
thus
distorting the general public’s understanding of physics.
As JoAnne Hewett (Stanford real physicist) said (over at Cosmic Variance) about Stanford Landscape Superstringers:
“… in reality, as a phenomenologist at SLAC,
I am literally (in many senses) miles away from that stuff
and have essentially no interaction with the campus string theorists.
So, I am not connected to that stuff at all …”.
Tony Smith
PS - On the other hand, maybe the fact that Kasper Olsen refers to Nielsen (and not Ninomiya) by his first name (Holger) indicates that personal friendship may play a role in Kapser Olsen’s defense of the Nielsen-Ninomiya paper.
Tony Smith
Marshall “T” Earp,
This post is like a good ol’ western: cards, booze, and characters that deserve to be shot. Based on your excerpts, it seems like they are hedging their bets on the side of intelligent design. Fear is a big stick that is particularly effective on mortals. I like the recurring idea of using science fiction for the funding of sciencific research except for the belief that it would only confuse and be abused by the “socially challenged” forces that seem to rise to power every single generation. Funny, but the more I learn the more I appreciate the existence of someone like Keith Richards of the Stones each day. As the slaves from the Deep South long ago penned and rejoiced, “Rock ‘n roll, baby. Rock n’ roll.”
Dorigo - your disdain for the colleagues that you are criticizing shows up in many of the paragraphs you write. Vomiting because of grammar? This can have the effect of coloring my opinion of your opponents, before I have even met them. Surely their conclusions are not affected by their syntax, especially in blogs where everything is dashed off in haste.
But worse than that, you are using ad hominem arguments, which are often seen as the last resort of a logician who has run out of cogent arguments.
You do not encourage me, by careful and impersonal writing, to want to wade through your verbiage to try to glean the good information from it. As I read I feel like the dung bird who follows the elephant and tries to get a meal from what is left behind; he does find a few kernels of grain, but look how much manure he has to push aside to get his meal.
Cordially,
Warren
Hi Warren,
sorry - you stepped on the wrong post. I am used to much milder language, but strangely enough, when I am on vacation I get more aggressive.
The paper in question did, however, raise outrage in my feelings as a scientist, and I stroke back in rage. Too bad if I get to lose a few readers every now and then by being politically incorrect and harsh - I cannot always play the good guy.
Cheers,
T.
Tomasso,
You have missed the point completely but showed how narrowminded and arrogant your are.
Great physics comes from looking outside the box and not from conteplating yet another global fit and tan(beta)) vs mass(higgs) exclusion plots.
F15,
I indeed missed the point of the paper. And I am arrogant at times - not always, but you cannot always be narcotically correct. As for narrowmindness, I deny that.
Cheers,
T.
Hi Tony,
thanks for the explanation on Mary Malone… And yes, I saw the comment on Woit’s blog - I did answer it. As to speculations on personal links, I prefer to avoid them… I must say I think I have already gone a bit over the edge with the tone of my criticism to
the paper, so I prefer to avoid adding speculations to injury.
Cheers,
T.
Fred, I too like science fiction, and science budgets are not nearly superluminal these days, rather they are really down to Earth. But mixing science and science fiction is very dangerous for the former IMO.
Cheers,
T.
Tomasso,
History repeats itself - anything out of orindary is being ridiculed and proponents of new ideas are called names. The first to throw a stone a loudmouth, superficial posers like yourself. If you had a grain of common sense you would have deleted non-substantiated attack on the article that
violates your mediocre common sense.
Read the referneces wherein. Stephen Hawking rings a bell? Check out
this link at least, do some googling (this is what you seem to do to fill your day)
http://everythingforever.com/hawking.htm
Bottomline, recall quarks, dual nature of matter, genetics, phsycoanalysis, black holes, special theory of relativity. All started with calling proponents of these ideas “crackpots” and today you are looking for bumps in the mass spectrum to get your butter on bread thanks to them. So please shut th f*ck up.
I don’t see any reason to be upset. People write a crazy paper, everyone sees that it is crazy, paper never gets cited, no harm done. What is *far* worse is when Famous Physicist declares :” We understand, in detail, exactly how quantum gravity/eternal inflation/baby universes/black hole evaporation/[fill in utterly mysterious thing HERE] work.” Then subsequent papers treat this statement as fact. *That* is vastly more dangerous, and worthy of getting upset about. Almost as bad: Famous Physicist says: “Here is a really interesting idea: let’s all use category theory/twistors/moonshine/[fill in badly motivated or frankly unphysical idea which is clearly going nowhere HERE]” and then suddenly the paper, which would have been ignored if it had been written by anyone else, starts getting cited heavily. Again, what N+N have done is trivial by comparison.
Hi Tommaso: *lol* great job
We too had an amusing discussion about that paper here. It’s still not completely clear to me what the authors were aiming at. Maybe they just found the arxiv needs to improve its entertainment value.
Best,
B.
f15mos, I personally doubt you are a scientist, even an amateur one (which is so ok), yourself; mentioning the references of an article and especially S. Hawking’s name in order to prove its validity is a dead give away. The article is very deep in bs and everyone is having a laugh at it around the world; if you had some arguments or better language I guess it’d be interesting to listen to you, but now as a reader I feel annoyed…
This “proposal,” if it can be called that, reminds of the MIT time travellers convention a few years ago. The fact that no time travellers showed up is evidence on the possibility of time travel then, just like this card to be drawn for this experiment may yield evidence of people in future influencing the choice.
Famous Physicist says: “Here is a really interesting idea: let’s all use category theory/twistors/moonshine/[fill in badly motivated or frankly unphysical idea which is clearly going nowhere HERE]”
Hmmmm. Assuming first that this is referring to Witten’s latest work (after all, there aren’t many famous physicists working directly with Moonshine) there is the problem that Witten has never really said anything about Category Theory, even in the excellent Langlands papers. Assuming, to the contrary, that this is a general comment about the apparent uselessness of said subjects…I would be interested to hear Amanda’s detailed analysis of the state of quantum gravity theory and why these superb ideas are of no physical use.
Amanda said “… moonshine … badly motivated or frankly unphysical idea which is clearly going nowhere …”.
Although I am not a “famous physicist” such as Witten,
my physics model does involve Monster Group moonshine stuff,
and my latest work (based on string theory with strings being interpreted
physically as particle world-lines) is in pdf form at
http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/MonsterStringCell.pdf
It is partly motivated by the fact that the order of the Monster Group is
roughly the product of
the square of the Planck Mass
and
the square of the Weak Boson Mass
in units of the positronium mass (about 1 MeV).
It is connected with reality in the sense that it contains the Standard Model,
as set out in more detail in some of my earlier papers.
Therefore,
I disagree with Amanda’s claim that Monster moonshine is “… badly motivated …
unphysical …[or]… clearly going nowhere …”.
Tony Smith
PS - The paper is not on the Cornell arXiv because I have been blacklisted.
Wait, isn’t their paper an … extended anthropic principle?
No.
If there were a fifth category, the paper discussed above would belong to it.
Observer Ejected Quantum Mechanics… lol
Cool, Tony! Thanks a lot! This crackpot stuff is really catching on.
OK, I’ve read it now, Tony. Operads! Bloody brilliant. Just one major gripe: under step 11 you mention MacDowell-Mansouri for DE etc., but we can get a no-DE varying-c cosmology from the Jordan moonshine picture by using 3 Times from the SO(3,3) twistor picture a la (eg.) Sparling.
I don’t want to discuss all this stuff because it would be off-topic. Let me give another example instead, drawn to my attention by a posting on Bee’s blog. There’s a Stanford celebrity who has a series of papers out that reason as follows: observers generate a lot of entropy. THEREFORE observers are most likely to be found at times when a lot of entropy is being generated. He then uses this to compute the cosmological constant. My point: bullshit that will in all likelihood lead to some poor bastard wasting 4+ years on a PhD is far, far worse than totally harmless bullshit of the Nielsen variety. Why get upset over the latter and not the former?
There’s a Stanford celebrity who has a series of papers out that reason as follows: observers generate a lot of entropy. THEREFORE observers are most likely to be found at times when a lot of entropy is being generated. He then uses this to compute the cosmological constant.
Amanda, that doesn’t even begin to make sense. You can’t calculate the cc from times when entropy is high, and that certainly is not what is observed.
The anthropic connection to entropy is *efficiency* - we tend to maximize work because we’re lazy or not crazy, but that’s also the difference between a wide-open expanding universe and what is observed. Entropy always increases with minimum wasted energy.
The result is a more even dissemination of energy than would be the case if the universe were wide-open, because much energy would go inert before it could do any work if entropy was maximized by the cc.
The AP is an energy conservation law in this context, and can be quantified via the Lindblad equation, which derives that the small cc serves as a natural harmonic damper mechanism that keeps the imbalanced universe from evolving inhomogeneously, so this is the most natural configuration… (IF the universe is finite and closed… and if given that there is an inherent asymmetry in the energy). This will necessarily maximize the time that the expansion process takes, and that’s what a flat universe accomplishes via anthropic structuring.
The AP very apparently tells us that the universe is finite, closed and bounded… only nobody listens because, uh… ‘we know so much more about it all now’… phhhht
Thanks to Dorigo, for entertaining me while I avoid finishing a paper. After reading so much BS and meta-BS, and now adding my meta-meta-BS, etc, I am compelled to say something, if only for my own sake: it’s exhausting when a community tries to always be proper, rational and correct to the point of neuroticism. This paper was funny (to some of us). We shared a laugh. The end. By the way: what helps drive some people away from a blog may be what helps attract others.
I found myself laughing while reading their paper. Their premises are absurd. It seems their basic premise is:
But what about the Titanic? Because it sank, does this prove backwards causality is associated with iceburgs? Should passenger ships draw from a deck of cards to determine whether to sail? Perhaps their next paper should be on the connection between backwards causality and ice?
Because the LHC is so complex, it is easy to believe that something may go awry with its operations. I hope that this does not occur. But if it does, do we have to listen to these authors say “I told you so!” What they are doing is very disengenious.
I meant to say:
It seems their basic premise is: If something goes bad with the LHC, this suggests backwards causality is associated with the Higgs particle.
Not if you believe that the Higgs field is tachyonic, so you’re right, it IS a stretch… of Dirac’s negative energy solutions, which are themselves a re/miss-interpretation of his hole theory… on and on the insanity goes:
Historical models
As the modern understanding of particle physics began to develop, retrocausality was at times employed as a tool to model then-unfamiliar or unusual conditions, including electromagnetism and antimatter.
Feynman employed retrocausality to propose a model of the positron[17] by reinterpreting the negative-energy solutions of the Dirac equation. In this model, electrons moving backward in time would appear to possess a positive electric charge. Wheeler invoked this concept to explain the identical properties shared by all electrons, suggesting that “they are all the same electron” with a complex, self-intersecting worldline.[18] Yoichiro Nambu later applied it to all production and annihilation of particle-antiparticle pairs, stating that “the eventual creation and annihilation of pairs that may occur now and then is no creation or annihilation, but only a change of direction of moving particles, from past to future, or from future to past.”[19] Although further understanding of antimatter has rendered this model largely obsolete,[20] it is still employed for conceptual purposes, such as in Feynman diagrams.
Once Upon a SpaceTime
Hi Amanda,
thank you for putting things in perspective.
Bee, sorry for not noticing you had already discussed the paper. I apologize - being on vacation makes
my attention to other blogs more erratic.
Zathras, I am unaware of the MIT time travel convention, do I need a time machine to get an invitation ?
Kea, Tony, others, you are welcome to discuss here, but I can’t be of any help - for me moonshine is a
rather annoying thing as a visual observer of galaxies, nothing more.
Amanda, I agree with the fact that some BS is more dangerous than other varieties. But anybody has the right
to decide which one to have fun of…
Tom, I think that the authors did not consider their paper an insurance bet. I think they want to bet on the real thing,
by drawing the cards rather than seeing the dealer’s… If you know blackjack you understand what I mean.
Cheers all,
T.
Here is a report on the time travelers’ convention:
http://web.mit.edu/adorai/timetraveler/
Yep,
I am no scientist not even amateur. I’m a bouncer in brothel.
But you know what? I happened to listen to Holger Bech Nielsen’ lecture, or conference talk rather, and then talk to him in person at cocktail party. So far no one I ever encountered impressed me so much (and I met quite a few of famous people). So you guys keep on laughing. Ignorance is a bliss.
Myself, being true to the spirit of experiment, would support CERN official running the proposal drawing of the card. Does not cost too much to do it.
f15mos
Okay, I found this on Bee’s blog and it’s a little different than what I’d understood Amanda to be saying:
This is true, humans are “Far-From-Equilibrium-Dissipative-Structures”. This is something that we have in common with black holes… among “other” things, like the creation and isolation of matter/antimatter pairs.
Quantum mechanics depends very much on Hamiltonian mechanics, and so it isn’t inherently able to describe dissipative structuring, except by way of a special master equation case for the Lindblad equation. You can weakly couple an oscillator to a bath of oscillators that are in thermal equilibrium with a broad band spectrum, and then average over the bath.
Does this, alone, solve the coincidence problem?
Only if you think that the cc is *the* coincidence problem.
Which is about par for the course of what ignorant yet opinionated people know about the anthropic physics!
[...] out the comments on those articles for some people much, much, much, more knowledgeable than me. This blog has some pretty good comments on the paper; but I’m pretty sure the original authors are [...]
You are a bunch of conceited snot-noses. Go look up “Wheeler’s delayed choice experiment” and see if you can find experiments done where backwards-causality has been demonstrated. I know of at least two.
Go do some reading before inserting your pencil in your butt and using it to type on your keyboard.