Kantian Physics: "Higgs Discovery: The Power of Empty Space" by Lisa Randall

I’m going to do a review a la Randall.

Many further searches for the Higgs Boson have been performed and the evidence has gotten stronger and stronger since 2012. At one of the ICHEP conferences I read about at that time, analyses "rediscovering" the Higgs Boson in the new dataset were presented. The accumulated evidence for the 125 GeV Higgs was very strong, and there was no real chance that it would fade away (the chance would be extremely small). In contrast, the accumulated evidence for this hypothetical particle was much lighter than the evidence for the Higgs now is. (Though, in hindsight it appears that the early Higgs announcement might have jumped the gun a little bit, because it seems like the signal from the real Higgs boson was boosted by a statistical fluctuation in the initial data which is not exactly the same Randall states in this 2012 book).

I would like to see an end to the misleading idea that the Higgs field (or its boson) "gives" mass to particles. The Higgs field is not sticky and it does not slow particles down, and it loans energy more so than giving it. I think a better analogy might be two teachers walking through a daycare center--one popular and one unpopular. The popular teacher walks at the same velocity as the unpopular teacher but toddlers hopping on and off the popular teacher putting such teacher into a higher energy state AND increasing that teacher's inertia (resistance to acceleration) compared to the unpopular teacher who walks through unaffected. Since energy is equivalent to mass, the "mass" of the popular teacher has increased. Assume the daycare is so full of indistinguishable toddlers in indefinite energy states that the total background energy of the daycare does not change in a measurable way as one toddler or another jumps on or off the popular teacher. They come from and disappear back into the "daycare condensate". I'm sure one could do a better job in describing the toddlers in a weird choreographed single state as a better analogy for a condensate, but I'm not sure that aids the visualization.

Probably, in relation to the reported disappointment, the broad label of "physicists" should be replaced either by "particle physicists" or "physicists with a vested interest". In particular, those who have worked hard on the beautiful idea of supersymmetry, and haven't given up in the light of many years of negative results (including no proton decay), are seeing their field reduced from physics to mathematics - at least until the next breakthrough in observational particle physics comes along. Funding and the field will decline, at least for now.

At least they were fighting a good fight, with potential physical relevance, so there is no disgrace in their disappointment (and it must be remembered that the LHC data is certainly not disappointing per se - the LHC team should be rightly ecstatic about having nailed the Higgs!). In contrast, string theorists have only been doing mathematics for a couple of decades now, sitting well outside the physics spectrum. There is still plenty of good particle physics data coming in via astronomy, and hopefully from cosmic rays in the future, so the broader field is not yet moribund :-) (But particle physics probably is as this books amply demonstrates).

The physical properties of a telescope or particle accelerator determine a priori all physical realities observable through them. So when an instrument of observation does not offer anything new, it means that he has reached the limits of his own powers of penetration into the mysteries of nature. Physics is not an encyclopaedic science, which only observe and classify objects in nature, but is a hermeneutics of nature, i.e., an art to interrogate and interpret the responses of nature. Physical objects do not exist in and of itself, but they are created by our own faculty of imagination. Kant said that, two hundred years ago. So if we want to see something new, we must first imagine a different kind of existence and then another way of looking at things.

I'd say the excitement has, and the media emphasis should, begin to shift to astrophysics where things actually have been and actually are being discovered: dark matter, LIGO's gravitational waves and the possibility of primordial black hole dark matter, an estimated 6,000 fast radio bursts per day from unknown sources, and plenty of discoveries in the gamma ray part of the spectrum. Why are we so obsessed with particles? Maybe strict reductionism has been leading us down a dead-end rabbit hole. Maybe it is time to come up for air and see the light.

2 stars for the particle physics math in the book. 0 stars for the rest.

M-Theory: "Higgs - The Invention and Discovery of the God Particle" by Jim Baggott

One way to visualise this kind of stuff is to understand why Quantum Field Theory (QFT) is seen as weird. Imagine a 2D field (a sheet) that you excite with some energy – you get waves in the sheet of course. What QFT says is that if you reduce the excitation energy to some very small value, you don’t get small waves, you get no waves at all. Then, as you increase the energy past some threshold, you get a localised wave-like excitation, a standing wave if you will. In the 2D analogy, you can imagine it as a small vibrating bump in the sheet.

This bump has some important properties. It has to be capable of persisting in the field for some time after the excitation energy has been removed. Depending on the nature of the bump it can last for nanoseconds or for millennia, before it eventually decays back into the sheet (creating other excitation bumps as its energy is dispersed). It can move around the sheet without losing its localised integrity. It can interact with other bumps, attracting or repelling them as it wanders about.

So QFT describes a series of local wave excitations in a field, which because they remain locally small appear as particles. Because there are several fields, and because the particles interact with (exist in) more than one of them, the resultant dynamic system is rich and complex. The fields remain subject to the laws of relativity, and it is the fields that are the fundamental structure of the universe, not the particles.

So for example, in the search for evidence of the Higgs Field, the idea was to use the LHC to make a sufficiently large ripple in the Higgs field that a localised wave-group (particle) would be formed. This was the Higgs Boson, and much was said about it. But the boson was just evidence of the field. It is the field that is the fundamental structure, the thing that by its interaction with other particles gives them mass.

This is a much, much more important topic than most people realize, and many of the reasons have not even been mentioned yet in this discussion. Firstly, there is a limited number of top quantum/relativity scientists in the world. This fact is extremely important, because a big portion of those work on M-theory. People argue that M-theory is so complex that you need many of the top minds working on it (which they are), BUT that actually limits the brain resources for the rest of the fields. And I do not only mean science, but also ideas that could one day lead to science. One of their main argument is, quantum physics has hit a roadblock last 30 years, only discovered things that was more or less already expected, and only real progress come from astronomy. Well if old experts keep saying that to young students, they are going to choose something like M-theory, they don't want to devote their career on something that has no promise of big breakthroughs. But younger generations have often in science history come up with radical new ideas that can make a stale field move forward. Well, that might take a long time now, that many of the brightest works on M-theory.

And another thing. Even if M-theory can be applied to our universe(s), it looks to be a long way from science. People often say M-theory is like next centuries science, by accident discovered in the last. Well, it sure looks that way, also in terms of when it will become science. Likely not next 10 years or 50. As far as I understand it does not even have the string equivalent of fields yet. And, with the 10^500 permutations of possible universe configurations, it’s not even sure it will ever be useful, even if does fit the world we live in.

I am not saying it should be thrown away, it just vacuums too many bright minds away from other fields. One step at a time. Not all the steps at once, is what I vote for. Cannot force it on people of-cause, people should research what they feel like. Like doing more research into Grand Unified Theory (GUT), instead of trying to skip directly to Theory of everything (TOE), like M-theory. I just think it’s a problem, and a big one.

Many scientist working in quantum theories, often also believe in M-theory, even though it is not the field they work in. That could also be a problem, as they might for example think, "hmm, I would not spend my time on GUT, as M-theory will be the theory on that". Which would also limit competing theories on aspects M will cover.

First place to start; top M-theory experts should stop trying to paint opponents of M-theory as crackpots. It's not done directly, but can often be read between the lines. And stop calling it science, until it is. I hope this gets better, so science can move forward faster. I see only one reason to stop progress, that is if the scientists suspect new insight can lead to unwanted weaponization. Like antimatter bombs or something similar that is too powerful for us to handle. Then of-cause scientist should find ways to prevent progress in that field. But this does not seem to be the case, so please let’s get more research diverted from M-theory into improving our current framework of nature, so we can understand dark matter/energy, and other weird empirical data from the universe.

Were high-energy and fundamental physicists found to have abandoned the scientific method and to have resorted to 'metaphysics' or just plain juju, that would have serious repercussions for science, but little immediate effect on anything else. On the other hand, misrepresentation of science in popular works is definitely something we should avoid on grounds of general policy and good governance, but is rarely perpetrated by working scientists, and has itself zero effect on science.

It is true that one has the impression that science at the present cutting edge is rather theory rich and data poor. However I suspect that this is always the case, because at the frontier of science it is usually easier to theorize than to gather and interpret data. As the frontier moves on, unsuccessful theories fall by the wayside and are forgotten. We thus suffer from a sort of historical tunnel hindsight in which we see the path that science has traversed as an obvious high road, and forget that it was usually far from obvious at the time.

At the end of the day there is no problem with spinning all kinds of theories, because ultimately the facts will decide the issue. Scientists know that. There's no downside. Nobody is about to take string theory or whatever as fact and base their actions on that.

Follow-up on ∂S/∂t + H = 0: "Reality Is Not What It Seems" by Carlo Rovelli

"The world of quantum mechanics is not a world of objects: it is a world of events".

In "Reality Is Not What It Seems" by Carlo Rovelli

"Experimentation and transformation in both art and science spring from the same root - to understand, to encapsulate the world. This is why I've ever found reductionism (and scientism) drearily limiting and worthily pompous - that utilitarian speculation over what art 'is for', that misapprehension of art as a kind of elaborate trickery, only readable in the light of neuroscience or physics. The best writers of fiction, artists, composers and scientists are, I've long felt, the ones who see the 'divide' as porous, and are open to findings in both great spheres of endeavour and experimentation."

In "Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain" by David Eagleman

Rovelli is more than right to rail against the schism of art and science. Theoretical physics in some sense is the poetry of science; and science in its great evolution from the classical era on was intertwined with art (Galileo was a musician, Leonardo an anatomist and technological innovator; Piero was a geometer, while painters have ever worked at the edge of physics (light properties) and materials science (pigments and chemical properties), and so on). I have come across this author's work before and have found him to possess a really enlightening, critical yet accessible style. The work of his that I read and still stays with me is his "The First Scientist: Anaximander". It is a brilliant evaluation of the 'Earth as floating stone' thesis of the Greeks.

Just remembered the Hamilton-Jacobi equation ∂S/∂t + H = 0 is another way of describing a classical system. From which you can wiggle your way to the Schrodinger equation. I think particularly interesting is in a paper by Hiley, and de Gosson where they say, Schrodinger was led to his equation from his knowledge of the classical Hamilton-Jacobi approach which has a close connection with the eikonal of classical wave theory. They go on to derive the Schrodinger equation from classical mechanics using a very deep group and operator approach. The Hamilton-Jacobi equation is indeed a good motivation to get to the Schrödinger equation (and is already very similar to it).  Whichever way, you are motivated by classical mechanics, but you can't avoid the mathematical complexity of quantum mechanics. Classical mechanics is a good approximation in some regimes, but overall it's wrong and there's no "going back to classical" in physics.

This time around, I'm also struck that superdeterminist physicists think of correlations between widely separated points as "vacuum correlations", which are well-known to decay faster than exponentially at space-like separation. It seems better to consider correlations that are observed in experiments at widely separated points to be a consequence of experimenters taking months or years to set up and debug and tune their state preparation and measurement apparatus (which, moreover, is often constrained to an effectively 1-dimensional space of light guides or collimated matter or laser beams, so that the 3+1-dimensional vacuum is kept as far away as possible). Full of nonsense as usual, I am. Hey ho.

I think about the work of people like Einstein, Maxwell, Dirac, Heisenberg, Pauli, Fermi. The list is very long. Such as those could pull the physics right out of the math and make either predictions that can be measured or better yet people used the principles to make things like AM/FM radio, transistors, and more recently GPS from good old Einstein; the list is almost endless as I said. But some theoretical work seems very difficult to solidify. Maybe a 1927 style Solvay conference is needed to help the general audience understand where the focus is going on Quantum Mechanics, cosmology, particle physics, the hunt for dark matter, etc. Lots of great work is being done right now in condensed matter physics that may bring great practical applications but the money spent on the LHC thus far seems to be a dud. Other than the technology that went into it is remarkable but nothing truly remarkable came out yet (the Higgs boson; bah!).

I think Rovelli is closer than t'Hooft as Rovelli focuses on something that seems philosophically important to me. He talked about velocity as though it is meaningless to a particle unless it is measured in relation to another object. It implies that motion isn't a property as much as an observation. Space is relational and not substantival according to what I understood from Rovelli. I would argue that it is neither, but that might seem to "unscientific" to some, I'd imagine.

All Much Ado about Nothing: “The Trouble with Physics” by Lee Smolin

“The Weinberg-Salam model requires that the Higgs field exist and that it manifest itself as the new elementary particle called the Higgs boson, which carries the force associated with the Higgs field. Of all the predictions required by the unification of the electromagnetic and weak forces, only this one has not yet been verified.”

In “The Trouble with Physics” by Lee Smolin

Hello physicists and Lee Smolin in particular,

I can't say I agree with such a hard stance against string theory personally like Smolin does, but I’m what’s known as a stupid person, so it doesn’t really matter what I think. However, I do feel it is healthy for science to have people that challenge ideas from all sides. All this will do is galvanise people to work harder to provide evidence to prove or disprove any theory that tries to describe reality. Science thrives in areas of confliction.

Life is the memory of what happened before you died, i.e. we cannot extricate ourselves from the universe in any way shape or form, including our "objective," apparently repeatable theoretical notions. By definition, there is only one UNI-verse. If you want to call it a universe of multiverses or a multiverse of universes, or balls of string with no limits, no problem, but there is only one of everything that is and isn't. This assemblage of atoms, no different from any other atoms, called the human body, has a life and death, as do the stars; it also has an internal resonance we like to call the consciousness of self-awareness of existence. We all too often, de facto, accept that there is a universe outside our "selfs", our bodies, i.e. it’s just me, my-self, and I, and the universe that surrounds my body, as if there were a molecular separation of some sort. This starting point for science, i.e., this assumed separation from a universe that surrounds our (apparent) bodies is the first thing that has to go. By definition there is only one UNI-verse that includes Heisenberg, I, the photos and videos of flying objects that make apparently perfect right angle turns at thousands of miles per hour, which we casual observers are not able to identify, black holes, white holes, pink holes, blue holes, our memories, our records, not to mention everything else. It's all much ado about nothing. As someone else used to say, "This IS the cosmic drama," we are living at the interface of the Sun's outgoing light and the apparent incoming light from the universe that appears to surround the Sun. Ah, but, what if we live in a black hole and don't realize it? That would mean the night sky, which most of us consider to exist outside the sun would actually be all the light of the sun after doing a 180, except, and here's the kicker, daylight, i.e., the light of the sun that we experience as sunshine. Maybe we need to revise the old coin that says yin and yang, black holes and white holes, matter and anti-matter, light energy and dark energy, night and day, black and white, etc. ad nauseum, are two APPARENT sides of the same coin as perceived by bunches of atoms they (we) are observing other atoms in a universe that is completely outside their (our) own "personal universe" as defined by their (our) sensory input. In other words, the interface between black and white colors our apparent existence. That sophistry and $2.25 will get you a ride on the tube.

I am not a string theorist but back in the day I considered myself a physicist who knew a few physicists doing physics for a living. Something that might surprise people to hear is that many (perhaps the majority?) of string theorists did not spend any time thinking of ways the idea could make observable predictions. The reason for this was that the typical energy scale of string theory is much higher than even scales we try to probe in the early universe in cosmology. They argue that getting string theory to say something specific about physics 'beyond the standard model' would be like trying to describe friction of a carpet in terms of quarks and leptons i.e. theoretically conceivable but practically impossible. Seen in these terms though, string theory itself is a generalization of the 'theory of carpets' i.e., it is built as an extension of ideas we know are very successful at familiar energy scales: quantum mechanics and relativity.  Indeed, the reason the 'typical' energy scales of stringy stuff are thought to be so "unreachably" high is due to an extrapolation about the strength of gravity based on the value of Newton's gravitational constant you can measure on a table-top on earth.

In my opinion this huge extrapolation is a dangerous one as there are reasons to believe that they are things going on in physics before this high-energy scale which may change our understanding of things very much (e.g. the observed value of the 'cosmological constant'). These things could render any of the assumptions about string theory invalid. This represents a rather peculiar situation. Due to their assumptions, the string theory community is likely incapable of making any predictions about anything in our universe. Progress regarding the 'truth' of string theory therefore will not come from string theorists doing string theory calculations but from other physicists experimentally probing the assumptions that string theory relies on.

The question remains whether string theory has advanced understanding of the physical world. They had like one vague prediction for the LHC and when it didn't come true there were all like "ah, it only emerges at much higher energies!". LMAO! String theory is religion at this point. On the other hand, I side with Smolin when he says he’s interested in a testable theory. It just so goes that Smolin's ideas are not fatalist, which turns many militant atheist types off because it means life is not an accident; what that says about God, his position is completely agnostic. Considering the symbiosis we find in nature, his views make a lot of sense and unify well with a lot of biology and ecology.

I'm told string theory is great mathematics though, so great one String Theorist ended up winning the highest price in mathematics, the Fields Medal. I’m talking about Edward Witten who has also lots of references in Smolin’s book.

Between 2006 (when this book came out; see quote above regarding the yet still to be discovered Higgs’ particle), 2012 (when the Higgs boson was “discovered”), and 2017 (when I’m writing this review), what have we to show for String Theory? Not much. And since physicists have spent a lifetime ignoring observational data, they don't feel in the least bit accountable for (1) the plain truth (2) being wrong or (3) all the lives that they destroyed along the way when they mocked the people who were trying to tell them that they were wrong. Over the next few years you will see them lay claim to a beautiful theory of Quantum Gravity, even capable of making contact with experiment. They will even tell themselves that they were really working on this theory of Quantum Gravity all along.

Well, bottom-line: I hope someone kills String Theory, it's getting to the stage where physics is starting to resemble pseudoscience, and lots of pretty and convoluted theories that are essentially untestable.

NB: I don’t care about String Theory; what I really want is FTL travel. I want what the Tomorrow’s People had: flicking long distances in time and space in the blink of an eye; I want the Star Trek replicator that makes my dinner when I want it and how I like it; I want my phaser at stun; I want all of this. If the String Theory gets me there asap then spend, spend, spend...