Brian Greene, author of the book published by Editions Robert Laffont: "The Elegant Universe"
Thirty-five, presented as "one of the world's leading experts on string theory". On the cover, it says:
A scientific revolution:
from the infinitely large
to the infinitely small,
the unification
of all the theories
of physics.
Below are some excerpts from his book.
page 61: During the years 1984 to 1986, physicists around the world published over a thousand research articles on string theory.
page 189: However, aesthetic judgments do not determine scientific truth. In the end, theories are judged only by how well they withstand the harsh and cold realities of experimental evidence.
and on the next page:
...The decisions made by theorists are motivated only by aesthetic reasons, according to which theories must exhibit the elegance and structural beauty that go hand in hand with the world we observe. Obviously, nothing says that this strategy leads to truth.
page 247: Supersymmetry appears as a fabulous unifying concept (*)
(*) Fabulous: belonging to imagination, chimerical (Larousse).
page 235: Ironically, we will see that although string theory is potentially the most predictive that physicists have ever studied, they are not able to make sufficiently precise predictions to be confronted with experimental data.
p. 235: Is string theory correct? We don't know.
p.252: It is entirely conceivable that more than one generation of physicists will devote their lives to the study and development of string theory, without ever receiving the slightest experimental feedback.
p.300: Edward Witten () is considered the worthy successor of Einstein in the role of the greatest living physicist. Some even go further and say he is the greatest physicist of all time.*
(*) Witten, a Fields Medal winner, is one of the founders of this theory. Below is a photo of him:
Edward Witten
p.308: It is one of the few examples in physics where the absence of important observable phenomena is a source of great excitement.
...My personal opinion on this book:
...Greene's book is a formidable war machine, which could make him the Hubert Reeves of theoretical physics. Indeed, let's grant him that, he is an excellent popularizer. The first 150 pages of his book are entirely devoted to the popularization of key concepts of modern physics, but very classical ones. The book has 465 pages. Few readers, in fact, go much further. I'm talking about the "average reader". Having understood a certain number of things in these first 150 pages, well-structured, he is therefore ready to issue a blank check to the author. You saw the announcement on the cover:
From the infinitely large to the infinitely small, the unification of all the theories of physics.
...It is not written "...towards a unification of all the theories of physics". The reader would therefore be entitled to find in this book the elements of this chronicle of an announced unification. But this book resembles a brothel where, after paying the entrance fee, the reader would find himself facing a succession of doors, each with signs: "Brunette, Blonde, Brunette", then "Large, Small, Medium", etc. After passing through a large number of these doors, he sees in front of him a final door, which he opens and finds himself... on the street.
...If you leaf through this book in a bookstore, go out of curiosity directly to page 415. You are then five pages from the end of the book, in the climax. The title of the chapter is:
Can string theory be experimentally tested?
...You will not find a positive answer, nor even a suggestion. Yet, string theory has the reputation of being a "TOE" (theory of everything): a "Theory of Everything". But it is similar to a tool of which we only have the handle, although anything can be attached to it. Let us quote Brian Greene in this conclusion:
...Of course, we could be even more optimistic (...), and hope that within the next ten years - before even the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva is operational - string theory will have advanced sufficiently to allow detailed predictions about supersymmetric particles, before their long-awaited discovery. Their confirmation would be a monumental success in the history of science.
...But how the hell can one get an idea of this damned theory? What arguments can one oppose to it?
...Theoretical physics has been in crisis since the mid-1960s. Quantum electrodynamics (Feynman) is in fact the last great advance in modern fundamental science. It is both explanatory and predictive. Read the excellent book "Light and Matter, a Strange Story" by Richard Feynman, in the Points-Sciences collection. It is a theory that works remarkably well, but, as Feynman is the first to point out: we don't know why it works. ...The great successes of quantum physics should not make us forget this strange paradox: it is a functional theory, how much so, but no theorist can say why this theory works, what its "ontological basis" is. It was born from analogical considerations. The Schrödinger equation was not initially conceived to "serve as the basis for quantum theory". It was simply realized that it contained many more treasures, that it had many more virtues than had been initially attributed to it. The string theorists therefore made the same reasoning. Someone imagined that reality could be composed of "tiny strings", possessing many vibrational modes. Those who follow the news know that in recent years, superstring theorists have considered moving from strings to vibrating membranes, two-dimensional (the membranes, or 2-branes), or even more than two dimensions (the n-branes). But unlike the Schrödinger equation, the equation did not start from nothing. It was not an equation constructed to account for a certain class of phenomena, which one could hope later to be able to handle a much larger number. The string or superstring formalism did not start from nothing. They are initially just a purely mathematical game. A bit like if someone one day asked "what music could I produce using a ten-dimensional violin?"
...The fact of not starting from something a priori was not in itself condemnable. The whole point was still to find a way to attach this formalism to any reality, at some point or another. But for thirty years, this has not been the case. String theory is a schizophrenia, a powerful autism. But why, you will say, could such madness have suddenly seized the world of theoretical physics? The answer is simple: there is nothing else to fall back on. The "non-stringists" have nothing to offer, as Greene points out in his book.
...Theoretical physics, and physics in general, are in a major crisis (as are cosmology and astrophysics). The CERN has just closed. This complex structure had been designed to carry out a certain number of experiments, which have all been done and redone. With such energy, there was nothing left to consider, to suggest, and to ... explain. Experimentalists and theorists at CERN are therefore left in technical unemployment, after the closure of their shop.
...Let us make a quick return to the past. At the beginning of the century, atoms, electrons, protons, neutrons, and then a number of other particles, involved in the "nuclear game", like mesons, were discovered. The physicists' strategy was simple. They tried, by firing increasingly violent shots at structures, to "disassemble matter" into its constituents. For molecules, atoms, and nuclei, this had worked rather well. It remained to disassemble protons and neutrons. The simplest was to use two accelerators to inject energy into two bunches of protons. You may know that this takes time, hours, even. At each turn, the protons gain a little more speed, approaching more and more the relativistic limit. Then these two storage rings are connected and, the two bunches of protons colliding in opposite directions, we obtain a "collider".
...Boom.....
...Some expected to recover the elements from which these protons were supposed to be made, namely quarks. Identifying quarks in the free state should not have posed a problem, given that they have fractional electric charges: 2/3, 1/3. But: no more free quarks than butter in a pan. It was therefore necessary to understand why this absence existed. There are different ways to formulate the "answer" to this question, like saying, for example, that the force that binds two quarks, unlike other known forces, increases with distance. Therefore, if these free quarks had the idea of existing, this solitary existence would be of very short duration, the recombination, to form all the menagerie described by what we have called quantum chromodynamics, was "practically instantaneous".
...If I may be allowed a comparison, quarks remind me of Ptolemy's epicycles. It is a kind of phenomenological description of the "real" that is based on the phrase "it seems as if..."
...On the other hand, quantum mechanics "sets" a characteristic length, the Planck length. It is the property of theoretical models (when they claim to describe something). They have their limits. I cite an example. Take fluid mechanics and the description that can be given through the Navier-Stokes equations. It works quite well. But there are scales of length and time beyond which this system of differential equations will no longer be of any use to you, for example if you want to study the free fall of a molecule of gas among its neighbors, under the effect of gravity, or because, carrying an electric charge, it is moved by a field. It is impossible to consider and calculate "the flow of the fluid around this molecule". It no longer makes sense.
...Quantum theory has similar limits, centered around the Planck length: 10-33 cm and the Planck time 10-43 seconds. To study a phenomenon that involves scales of length and time smaller than this no longer makes sense, simply. Of course, these quantities are extremely small and there is no phenomenon in nature that exhibits such orders of magnitude. There is another way to look at things. The inverse of the Planck time is a frequency. By multiplying by the Planck constant, we obtain an energy, on the order of a billion joules. Expressed in electron volts, this gives 1020 GeV. You would arrive at the same result by equating the Planck length to a wavelength. Some have estimated that to involve such energies, it would be necessary to build an accelerator as big as a galaxy. Any physicist would shrug at such things. But, conceptually, these quantities call us. In cosmology, they make people ask the question:
- What happens when the age of the universe becomes less than 10-43 seconds?
...Does this question make sense? Do all questions make sense? It depends on how they are formulated. If I ask you "why does the vacuum rain?", you will answer: "your question makes no sense!". But how to verify if a question makes sense or not, when you don't even know what you're talking about?
...Back to the beginning. What is reality? A subject of study that can be approached by equations, the theoretical physicist will answer.
...But what is an equation? Answer: something that translates a phenomenon of conservation (of energy, for example), of the kind
A = B
or:
A - B = 0
...The equations of physics are differential equations, including the Schrödinger equation, the Klein-Gordon equation, etc. There is therefore a presupposition: that reality is a continuum and that one can, among other things, dissect space and time infinitely. This is the very definition of differentiability. Now, let's look at what the superstring people do. They start from this limiting distance, the Planck length. They then evoke these violent turbulence that reign at the "subquantum" scale, turbulence that have always seemed to me to have an honorific character, since no equation is able to describe them and no phenomenon is able to account for them. The goal that these people of superstrings set for themselves, clearly indicated in Greene's book, is to make this annoying problem disappear. To do this, all the constituents of the universe are assimilated to vibrational states of objects called "strings" whose characteristic dimension is then this famous Planck distance. The "vibrational modes" of these strings, superstrings, membranes or n-branes are almost infinite. The superstring theorists hope to discover the "ultimate equations" allowing finally to master the problem (the mere use of the word "equations" implies an implicit belief in the differentiability of the universe, as a geometric object). The superstring approach implies, incidentally, that the universe is endowed with additional dimensions, associating yet another tiny characteristic dimension: the Planck length. These dimensions intertwine, wrap around and "symmetry considerations" show that they must form particular geometric structures, called Calabi-Yau. Below is a Calabi-Yau geometry, in two dimensions, obtained using the Mathematica software, reproduced by Greene in his book:
...The boxes correspond to the resolution chosen in this software for producing surfaces from an equation. Initially, the tangent plane exists and varies continuously. The object is twisted but, for a geometer, it could be an "immersion", with or without singular points, "cusp-like", pinches or others. It doesn't matter that this kind of 2D navel is entirely housed within a "Planck box".
...Greene adds that the "string approach" precisely hides the violent turbulence of the subquantum world since, being the ultimate objects of the universe, they are also the instruments of analysis, the "scalpels". It is well known that one cannot cut slices of sausage thinner than the thickness of the blade used to obtain them. According to Greene, the string or superstring, being the ultimate constituent, with a characteristic dimension of the Planck length, one can no longer go to a smaller scale and the subquantum fluctuations, he writes, at the limit "cease to exist".
...But then, with what tool, even a conceptual one, does one dissect a Calabi-Yau structure?
...I understand that, mathematically, all this constitutes an extremely diverting game. Greene, in fact, practices it with his little companions, discovering a form of "surgery" in these Calabi-Yau structures, which will seem quite natural to any geometer. For example, by pinching a cylinder, you can turn it into a string of sausages. By removing these pinches, you can conversely transform a string of sausages into a cylinder. On this side, the sources of amusement are almost infinite. Below is an example of this kind of exercise found on page 283 of the book.
September 2005: a small note from a reader:
- I found what superstrings can be used for. To weave nets to catch Calabi-Yau shapes. Because Calabi-Yau with mustard is excellent.
I don't deny that it can be extremely fun, especially if you go to a number of dimensions greater than two. That such work could be awarded a scientific prize, why not (Witten is the holder of a Fields Medal) even though it may seem a bit ridiculous that such work produces "intellectual chills" (Witten). However, where is the physics in all this?
...My opinion is that "superstring theory" is the greatest scientific fraud of all time, a fraud consisting of passing pure mathematics work for physics. How was such a deception, in which thousands of researchers have been involved for decades, possible? Because, apart from that, there is nothing, or very little. Indeed, what could a competing theory look like? A quantized vision of the dimensions of the universe, simply. This idea is not new. It has been considered by many scientists who, those, have left their names in the history of science, like Heisenberg, for example. But, if you opt for this approach, it is the mathematical tools that are missing. What tools to use?
...Let us recall the work of Eyal Cohen, from the Lyman Laboratory of Physics, Harvard University, Massachusetts, titled
Random Lattices as Theories of Space-Time
...In the abstract, it says "The theory is based on a discrete space-time formulation and is invariant under general coordinate transformation". "Random Lattices" means "random networks or lattices". For now, it doesn't go very far, but it was simply to cite something alternative, fundamentally different. Why aren't there thousands of researchers who have plunged into this path? Because this approach may be less "productive" than that of superstrings. You have read correctly: between 1984 and 1986, more than a thousand papers were published on the subject, in the world. This simply means that there are very many ways to make these objects "vibrate", very many ways to make Calabi-Yau shapes twist, each twist constituting an excellent doctoral thesis topic and an excellent publication material. It may be much more difficult to knit random lattices. Moreover, since the providers, in terms of science, are also the customers, it would be necessary to immediately create a journal:
The quantum lattices journal
for example.
...The superstring world has quickly become strongly organized. It has its journals, its referee system, its experts. It also has its guru: Witten. Receiving the approval of such a person is equivalent to a consecration in this closed world, like once being cited by Lacan for a psychoanalyst.
...We already knew the definition that Souriau gave of theoretical physics:
...His reaction after the publication of Brian Greene's book:
- Theoretical physics has become a vast psychiatric hospital and alas, it is the madmen who have taken power....
...I will try to give an image of this extremely disconcerting evolution of contemporary theoretical physics. Imagine that you are flying over a battlefield, quite high. Below, "blacks" and "whites" are fighting. These hundreds of thousands of "blacks" and "whites", seen from quite high, seem to form a continuous fabric. Where the "blacks" have a lower density, it appears "gray". Etc...
...By decreasing your altitude, you suddenly realize that what you had thought was continuous is not. In fact, what is happening below is a kind of game. "Objects", or what you think is a set of objects, do not really move. Like in chess, this universe is made of discrete squares. The present itself has a finite thickness: the duration of the move.
...Consult a chess player and ask him what happens, between the moment a king moves from d1 to d2. What happens to him during this "subquantum journey"? He will look at you with round eyes. Same attitude if you ask him what happens between two moves, in chess, on the chessboard, of course, or with what material the pieces are made, what their exact shape is.
...One could also consider making these chess squares vibrate, whose characteristic dimension would obviously be the Planck length. One would discover, in passing, that there is an absolutely fantastic number of ways to make them vibrate, as "2-branes". By adding some extra dimensions, the game would become even richer. It would then be a matter of making vibrational hypercubes with n dimensions, which should then, perhaps, be structured in the form of Trondheim-Balnukov hypersurfaces, or of Malcom-Bérénichkowicz. From there to imagine that these hypercubes could be the object of convulsions, of very complex internal rearrangements, it is only a step. As the Shaddock said "why make it simple when you can make it complicated".
...Of course, the sufficient reason for this approach, the ultimate goal, would be to describe the "moves" as the result of the vibrational interaction between adjacent squares. You hope, among these tens of thousands of different ways to make these vibrating squares interact, to one day find, for example, checkers or chess. But one thing is certain. By doing so, you have built the:
TOEG
...In English "Theory of Every Game", the theory of all games.
...Never would one have conceived a theory potentially more comprehensive than yours, since it would contain them all a priori. It would be the absolute musical instrument, the decadimensional Gaffophone, the ultimate harp.
...It's worth trying....
The day after the Arte broadcast on superstrings, hosted by Brian Greene
The Time of the Great Scandal
March 10, 2005
I dedicated a dossier to the appointment of Veneziano, a great pioneer of string theory and superstring theory, a document that I titled (the word is from Souriau) "Fifty Years of Non-Physics." It is already a new one that I consider catastrophic. Yesterday, with two of my collaborators, we clung to our chairs to follow one of the programs proposed by the Arte channel about the centenary of the invention of the Special Theory of Relativity by Albert Einstein, in 1905. I think the title was something like "What Einstein did not see, or did not understand..."
And what did we see on the small screen? The small Brian Greene.
Brian Greene, the man who is not worth the superstring to hang him
I had to cling to my chair.
If you followed this broadcast, think about what you were presented: nonsense, a complete fraud. It was shocking. In fact, young Greene tries to do the equivalent of what Carl Sagan did twenty or thirty years ago with his series "Cosmos" (a television series, a book that immediately becomes an international bestseller, lectures, etc). On the occasion of this centenary of the discovery of the Special Theory of Relativity, they therefore went to find "the cream of physicists". What a mess. They are all there: Michal Duff, Leonard Susskind, Witten, Horowitz Schwarz, Alan Guth (who says, solemnly, "I don't like nothing").
Did the viewers who followed this broadcast, where Greene spends his time showing off and even goes as far as multiplying himself into five copies in front of the camera, realize that all these speeches were empty, completely empty. All the propositions are conditional.
My aunt had it, that would be my uncle!
I noted some sentences:
- Einstein was not always right, said this little pretentious Greene, who has never found anything in his life, will leave nothing.
- Strings "calm the chaos"
- Strings "reconstruct space"
- Particles are small strings. Strings generate all the particles of nature (although, to date, there is no description of particles by strings. It is only a ... dream, a totally unsubstantiated idea)
Good people, these scientists are simply making fun of your face with your taxes, with impunity, for ... thirty long years. The emptiness of their speeches reveals the crisis in which theoretical physics has been sinking for thirty years. And young Greene continues his conditional speeches:
- If we manage to "master the rhythm of the strings", then we will explain everything and this theory could well keep its promises, it is to be a "Theory of Everything".
Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patienta nostra?
( yellow pages of the dictionary)
How long and how far will you continue to abuse our patience, Catilina?
I issue a challenge, which will probably never be taken up. I would like, myself who thinks I have some things to say, to be able to do so in front of Veneziano, at the Collège de France, or in front of Thibaud Damour, at the Institute of Advanced Studies (whom this latter has done his best to block me from access). I issue a challenge to these two, who are nothing but wind. Go see the words of our learned academician, about his theory of the before Big Bang, which, according to him, "is not quite mature".
Well, well...
To make it complete, it would be necessary to invite Charpak. Fundamental physics is in such an impasse that one ends up giving Nobel prizes to device designers. A man who has not hesitated to cut down and defame my friend Jacques Benveniste. But why would he not go after a physicist like me? I would accept the descent into the ring, immediately, in front of "peers" or journalists, if he wishes, since he loves to express himself in the media, playing censor.
- Come on, you big mouth, take on an opponent who is from your milieu, you who have such a big mouth!
The Cosmic Troupiers hold the high ground, while researchers who have really found things are ... excommunicated, ostracized, banned from the media. Shocking, lamentable. I am angry and I say it.
I return to this nightmare of a broadcast. All the "champions" pass one after another. Greene, who plays the master of ceremonies of this circus, which is nothing more than a lamentable circus, tells us that before 1984 there were five string theories but that that year a real "thunderclap" was launched by the spearhead of this group, Ed Witten, awarded a Fields Medal (a mathematics prize) for certain mathematical results of his work, but not "for his work on superstrings". Witten is the justification, "the honor" of this confused group, its only "letter of nobility". Think, he has received a prize, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize, but for mathematics! ....
Speaking of this "revolution", Greene:
- It was a shock for everyone, but we learned to live with it.
It's better to hear it than to be deaf. But, do you, television viewer, understand that this type, before your eyes, is just piling up nonsense after nonsense?!
In his book, Greene writes "that Witten is considered the greatest physicist since Einstein" and that he may be "the greatest physicist of all time." What idiotic grandiloquence! Witten is .... a physicist without physics, a champion of variable geometry, an expert in publicity effects, in "thunderclaps" perfectly hollow and devoid of foundation (example, the "cosmic strings", another of his inventions), a specialist without discipline, a champion without a sporting event. In the film broadcast on Arte, he even has the luxury of saying that the M-theory could mean "M as shit". Stunning.
But, great gods, what is a physicist? Isn't it someone who is supposed to explain phenomena, provide interpretations, models, who can try to predict things, to explain others (what my twin theory does throughout the pages. But my book "We lost half the universe, 1997, disappeared quickly from bookstores, due to lack of echo in science media and in the media in general). What has Witten done? Nothing of the kind. String theory completely turns its back on reality. It is not in contact with the real through ... nothing. Yes, you read correctly. It is the time of the great scam. But, in 1984 Witten made a sensation, says Greene, by showing that these five theories could be reduced to ... one. And Greene adds "Witten boosted the theory."
They talk, they talk, that's all they know how to do...
What theory would describe what? Wait, butterfly. We are not there yet. Going from five theories to one is already "a great advance". From there to ask what this unifying theory, called "M-theory" by Witten, could serve, there is a step that one probably has to wait some time to cross. As Greene will say later:
- It may take a century, a million years to know if this theory is really valid. But despite the fact that we have no proof that all this stands, we, scientists, believe that this theory is the real one.
Greene fills his film with grotesque scenes. He spends long minutes trying to look very learned, explaining to the average American, who must be stunned, that a doughnut (a toroidal, classic American donut) and a cup are the same (they have identical topologies). Computer-generated images. The doughnut turns into a cup and vice versa. The crowd cheers. What a miracle, I understand! But what does it show? Nothing. Greene mentions the question of "wormholes," the ones dear to Kip Thorne, another member of the club.
These wormholes are called by Greene "cosmic shortcuts," but he quickly adds, solemnly, as if to reassure his world:
*- You cannot tear space. *
A computer-generated image showing a universe folding (in fact, the city of Manhattan), then a wormhole wobbling like a mirage. A science evolving in the virtual.
It's enough to explode. This "wormhole" theory, the "wormholes," isn't one either. In three sentences, in a seminar, in front of "a panel of specialists," I could ridicule the author of this latest imposture, whose mathematical and geometric structure is non-existent. It's just a word, another word. Physics and astrophysics have only produced words for decades. Wormholes, black holes, monopoles, quintessence, dark energy, branes, etc., etc...
It reminds me of a phrase from the late Jean Heidman, a leading figure in cosmology for decades, until he joined the stars.
*- When you talk about black holes, you have to leave your common sense at the cloakroom. *
Another one who found nothing, left nothing behind. It will be the same for Hawking, except for his famous theorem: "Black holes have no hair": Black holes are "smooth."
When an astrophysicist produces something other than words, people pretend not to hear. I remember those heavy minutes of silence at the Marseille astrophysics and cosmology conference in 2001 (general title of the conference: "Where is the matter?", i.e., "Where is the matter?"), after I had produced results that spectacularly matched the VLS, the Very Large Structure, the large-scale structure of the cosmos, obtained in 1992.
Cowards, cowards, accomplices of a thousand impostures, despicable, swindlers!
Reading these lines, the reader may think:
*- But how can he hold such views? How can he be so arrogant? Who does he think he is? *
I consider myself a scientist whose work is without shadow, with well-defined words, theories supported and confirmed by observations, ready to descend into any lion's den, to expose myself to the most learned, ready to risk public discredit, ridicule. I am a researcher, always active ( see my latest work ) who has never fallen on his face in a seminar, in 35 years of career in all the fields he has addressed: MHD, geometry, astrophysics, cosmology, mathematical physics. But, on the other side, what cowardice! I remember, it was 28 years ago. A mathematician, member of the Centre de Physique Théorique de Marseille, Patrick Iglesias, had proposed that I give a seminar in his lab. But his colleagues feared that this would "discredit their lab."
- What, had Iglesias said (he testified about it in one of my books in 1986), if you criticize so much these kinds of theories, invite him and bring him down publicly, throw his speech out, and end it once and for all!*
But it didn't happen. Because when there is a face-to-face confrontation, and I am attacked, it is I who bring others down with theorems and with agreement with observational or experimental data. I never attack first, but when someone dares, it's like a scientific Clint Eastwood. I have quite a few notches on the stock of my six-shooter. The last one was in October 2003. A foolish mathematician who had taken me for a joker during a seminar I had given in his lab in Marseille. It's silly, but that's how it is. Many people have confused me with a simple comic book author or song composer, a "SF" author. I no longer count the number of seminars I have given, which ended with a hostile and cautious silence, like at the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, when it was directed by a certain Omont.
Omont, who was director of the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris
There was no debate, no confrontation. After my presentation, they all ran away, they all left the room in a hurry. This seminar had only been possible because Souriau was personally with Omont, writing him "Petit has new ideas, listen to them." But the reaction was rather:
*- Hide this science that I cannot see. *
Omont is another Tartuffe, one more. Why does this change of paradigm, this idea of cosmic duality, launched in 1967 by Andrei Sakharov, scare them so much? Because the "cosmic shortcuts" would be right around the corner, and these would allow travel, incursions that no one wants to hear about, Reeves first, who, like the sand merchant, has been putting us to sleep for a quarter of a century with his "star dust."
A memory comes back to me. Twenty-five years ago I saw Reeves in Paris, walking up the Boulevard Saint Germain towards the Latin quarter. I called out to him, I crossed the street. He was so moved that at the end of this exchange he went back... in the opposite direction! But at that time the medal office on the Rue de Seine had already struck a medal in his image (I imagine they must be preparing another one for Veneziano).
Jealousy, resentment? No, indignation at the waste of public funds, at the closure, at the confiscation of thought, at the intellectual imposture, omnipresent. It has happened to me, and more than once, to light up some researchers, who came to give seminars, and whose statements I found somewhat light. I think of one of them, who had written bloodstained reports about me within the CNRS section I belonged to, and who had come to prance in my lab.
After his lecture, I reproached him for coming to give a presentation "in his territory." My colleagues still remember: this valiant man immediately fled after collecting his transparencies. An astronomer present even stood up, stunned, saying:
*- Did you see! Not only does he not answer your proposal, but he runs away. *
There is something rotten in the kingdom of science
Blanchard, entrepreneur in cosmology (since he made these remarks, the general framework has indeed collapsed)
In another sequence, Greene takes us to a bakery. Another clowning.
- This structure in multi-universes, physicists call it the "bulk" (the mass, the package, the whole). Another word, another one, and other images: Greene cutting slices of bread, then spreading sugar or jam on them.
*- You understand, gravitons are like sugar. They don't adhere to branes. *
But no one knows what a graviton is, has never provided a theoretical model. We don't know how to quantify gravity, which doesn't prevent a very well-known review: "Classical and Quantum Gravity" from existing and being very "picky and selective" in accepting papers (in fact, you have to be a member of the club, that's all).
Greene writes galaxies on slices of bread.
*- We could live on a "brane." *
Always the conditional.
- If we manage to catch the graviton before it escapes, we will have won the game!
" If," as the Spartans say. In this world that pretends to be scientific, we follow the mirage of the conditional statements made by this representative of the depths of thought, we spread them, while turning away from what works, which is flawless, without shadow, as if we had shit in our eyes and wax in our ears. It's epistemic rot in action.
Other phrases from Greene come back to my mind. At one point he mentions the Big Bang and says:
- Two branes began to drift against each other ...
Computer-generated images showing "brane drifts." What are these nonsense?!
A 100% virtual thought, a speech built with strawberry twigs.
Let's be clear. For thirty years, taxpayers from many countries have paid researchers, theoretical physicists who ... find nothing, but talk, publish tons of papers (one a day! Thousands have been published!) without any basis. They meet in many conferences, direct theses, or support them in juries where no one dares say:
- The king is naked
How could we have arrived at this?
Take a particle of rest mass m. It represents an energy m c2, where c is the speed of light. The mass of the proton is
mp = 1.67 10-27 kilo
It represents an equivalent energy of 1.5 10-10 joule. But high-energy physicists are used to expressing this using another unit, the electron-volt. Let e be the unit electric charge, that of the electron (or the proton):
e = 1.6 10-19 coulomb
We go from measuring energy in joules to measuring V in "electron-volts" by writing
m c2 = e V
Apply this to the proton. We then obtain an energy close to 1,000,000,000 "electron-volts," a billion electron volts, or 1 GeV.
The keV is the thousand, the MeV is the million, the GeV is the billion. Simple.
The history of particle physics is written in the rise of energies used in "particle accelerators." Do you know how they accelerate particles?
A particle accelerator is similar to your ... small intestine. You know that you transport your "food bolus" using contractions of your peristaltic muscles.
Transport of a food bolus in the small intestine by peristaltic muscle contractions
A particle accelerator is a huge torus, surrounded by superconducting coils. The magnetic field, more intense near them, "confining" the particles in a region near the center of this torus. If "Nature hates a vacuum," charged particles have "hate for magnetic fields," they flee them. This is experimental and perfectly understood, mastered theoretically and experimentally. Plasma physics teaches us that charged particles tend to go to regions of space where the magnetic field is weakest. We will use this to accelerate them.
Imagine that along our particle accelerator you pass a more intense current through one of the solenoids. The "magnetic field lines" will be tighter in this region, and the charged particles will tend to be pushed away from this place.
Imagine now that you propagate this intensification of the magnetic field. This will exactly conform to the image of the propulsion of the food bolus in the small intestine.
Acceleration of charged particles by pinching the magnetic field in an accelerator
The particles will be pushed forward, accelerated. Few people know the time needed for a particle accelerator to fulfill its function, to give the maximum speed to the charged particles it propels. This time is ... in hours. You have to row to accelerate particles and make their speed approach, painfully, that of light, without ever reaching it.
You can also use two accelerators placed next to each other, so that when "connected" suddenly, two streams of particles, accelerated to relativistic speeds, arrive against each other.
Collider
Thus, we obtain what is called a collider. What do we accelerate? Essentially protons, that is, hydrogen nuclei.
When researchers estimated that they had played enough with the nuclei, by breaking them, they tried to "disassemble the protons." And for this, there is nothing better than taking two protons and hitting them against each other, as violently as possible. With what energy? An energy higher than their mass-energy equivalent. Therefore, a collider that carries protons equipped with an energy higher than GeV, the giga electron volt.
A certain Gell-Mann had imagined that protons could be made of quarks (three, to be precise). But there was a big surprise for physicists. The quarks ... refused to separate. It was as if the force that bound them increased with distance, instead of decreasing.
Is there a limit to the energy that can be given to protons? Apparently not.
In non-relativistic terms, we talk about kinetic energy
Kinetic energy ( in non-relativistic )
But in relativistic terms, the energy is written differently
Expression of the energy, in Relativity
The student will immediately see the link between the two by noting that if he performs, for v small compared to c a "series expansion," he easily retrieves the non-relativistic formula.
Transition from relativistic to non-relativistic
Nevertheless, even though the speed of any particle is strictly limited to c, we can give it any energy. If v approaches c, this energy even tends toward ... infinity. But I won't do like Greene, play the smart guy, amaze the common people with arguments of the science shopkeeper, well-known to any first-year physics student.
When people tried to "break protons," they expected to have to provide a certain energy, then to be able to observe the quarks, its components, in free state. But in fact, things happened differently. If, for example, we give protons ten times more energy than that corresponding to their masses, the collision produces a very strange result. It was as if these protons were broken for a short time and these fragments immediately recombined into other particles, possibly of higher mass, most of the time unstable. They then compared the quarks to the ends of a piece of string. To simplify (which is false), suppose that protons are made of two quarks q1 and q2, similar to the two ends of a piece of string. Wanting to isolate quarks is like pulling a string to separate the two ends. What happens then? The piece of string breaks and instead of having one particle, you end up with two, with two pieces of string, each having two ends.
Transformation of energy (tension), with the appearance of a new particle (string model)
The disassembly of protons proved to be impossible. But the model was confirmed in the sense that "it seemed, indeed, that protons were made of quarks." Particle physics, called elementary, then resembled a strange game. Imagine a blacksmith hitting a steel ball with a hammer, giving it more and more energy. The hammer represents this energy which is materialized. The blacksmith tries to break the ball, but instead, he gets a "shower" of new balls, which represent in a way the conversion of the injected energy into matter, its "condensation" into new particles, which are, however, highly unstable.
High-energy physics led to what was called the "Standard Model." A number of experiments were prepared, stemming from this model, and, over time, they were all carried out, all those that could be done with the existing machines. Then a new impasse was reached. To go further, it was necessary to sophisticate the model again, to envision new structures and, beyond that, new particles. In a path called supersymmetry, particles are then associated with a sort of double, more massive. The neutron is thus associated with a "neutralino," the photon with a "phototino," etc. But since these masses of these "super-particles" are higher, to progress in the experiments, it would be necessary to use even higher energies. To make the "Higgs boson" appear, physicists estimate that they will need to handle colliders that reach the TeV, the tera-electron volt: a thousand GeV or a million MeV or
1,000,000,000,000 electron volts
The higher the energy, the larger and more expensive the machine. We then enter the domain of ploutophysique, of "expensive physics" (ploutos, in Greek, means expensive). It is not only expensive, it is positively ruinous. The film "coached" by Greene shows two monster laboratories in competition: the American Fermi Lab, and a laboratory currently under construction at CERN in Geneva, which will be completed in 2007 and will be seven times more powerful than its American competitor's machine.
What does this mean? That for thirty years, theoretical physicists have been left to themselves, deprived of an experimental guide. In physics, if you no longer have experience to serve as a guide, as a support, you can then do ... anything, and with this "fantastic discovery" made by Veneziano, they then launched into an enterprise that could be called autistic.
Why did they follow this path? The answer is simple: because they had no other idea, simply. Outside of strings, no one had any idea to propose. Moreover, the string theory was "wonderfully complicated." By the way, what would it take to perform experiments involving superstrings? It is easily calculated. These objects are like the mesh of a sweater, since they constitute, in principle, everything: the content and the container, like these sophisticated sweaters that have either flat surfaces or full of reliefs, twists. To touch these structures, it would be necessary to be able to "pop a mesh." But this fabric is like that of Alec Guinness in the famous film "The Man in the White Suit." The meshes are hyper strong and tight. Characteristic dimension: the Planck length:
Lp = 10-33 cm
The experimental physicist, familiar with the quantum approach, immediately assimilates this to a wavelength lambda. By pulling out Planck's constant from his hat:
h = 6.67 10-34
he immediately brings out a characteristic energy, which he converts into electron volts:
Result: 1025 TeV
1 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times the energy of the most powerful accelerator currently under construction!
The experimentalist shrugs his shoulders and leaves. But Misho Kaku, another proponent of these "super-theories," will tell you that it is "a physics that is too far ahead of its time." It may have ... millions of years ahead.
I will try to give an image of this madness. Imagine people who want to understand ... music. Let's compare particles to musical instruments, which produce certain sounds, with certain timbres. Sounds, timbres, represent the particles, their masses, their charges. Detail: we don't know why they have these masses and not others. It's ... like that. Music, harmony, constitute the analog image of all phenomena and the laws of nature.
Someone, suddenly, discovers that a sound, a periodic vibrational phenomenon, can be considered as the superposition of elementary sinusoidal vibrations, out of phase with each other (the "spectral decomposition invented by the French mathematician Fourier). The one who discovered this declares that he has discovered a theory allowing to create "all possible sounds" and even, quite simply ... "all possible music." But if someone says to him "what sound, what music do you suggest creating?" he won't know how to answer. He doesn't know which sounds to consider and has no notions of harmony or rhythm to propose. His musical imagination turns out to be perfectly null. He only claims that when his theory works, it will be able to generate "all possible music."
This reminds me of a drawing teacher I had when I was ten, at the Lycée Carnot. He recommended that we draw by placing a kind of pencil rubbing on the paper and added:
*- That way you are sure that the right line is there. *
My mother, who drew and painted, was of the opposite opinion and recommended instead to try to draw by making only one line, in one go (those who know me know that I usually draw without an eraser). My drawing teacher and I were therefore in disagreement and I quickly became a nightmare for him, as well as for those who succeeded him, because I started to make portraits of him that were quite similar, which he was incapable of doing. In fact, he drew like a foot.
The string theory is not a symphony, it's a cacophony of vibrating strings, open or closed. The proponents of this theory think that everything can and must be reduced to particular vibrational modes of strings. Since nothing has emerged in thirty years, they have imagined vibrating these strings in spaces containing a greater number of dimensions. Ten, to be precise. Everything then became as complicated as desired. At this stage, there were five ways to generate sounds. In 1984 Witten, by adding an additional dimension, which brought their total number to 11, showed that these five ways could be reduced to one, and he called it the "M-theory." That is to say, instead of having five cacophonies, we now have only one. There was a stir in the room after this latest announcement. But we were no further ahead.
The more the string theory plunges into its conceptual void, the more it tries, to escape ridicule, to fill our heads with promises of mountains and wonders. It was thus that the concept of TOE (Theory of Everything or Theory of Everything) appeared about ten years ago. Honestly, these people have no chill and, in addition, no one dares to shout "but it's nonsense and it's only nonsense!" It is not about sawing the only branch on which everyone is sitting. In theoretical physics and cosmology, in astrophysics, what dominates today is the spirit of the group.
*- Whatever happens, stay together. *
- It's not because we have nothing to say that we have to shut up. If people want something new, we just have to invent words.
As Reeves said:
*- When I have nothing to say, I say it. *
The image of the conception of sounds is not so bad. Take a flute. How do you go about producing specific notes? Well, the part of the flute near your mouth produces "all possible sounds," that is, a background noise, a "blow." With the system of holes (some being open and others closed), you prioritize specific vibration modes. In this perspective, the string theory resembles the Gaffophone of Gaston Lagaffe. It's a flute where you can imagine putting the holes in an infinite number of ways. You can even imagine opening and closing these holes in another infinite number of ways. In short, with this "potential flute," you can say that, in principle, by considering all the possibilities of drilling the holes and manipulating the object, you have an instrument that is capable of generating all possible music.
What music? None of these theorists knows. But strings have passed to membranes. A membrane like that of a speaker is, topologically speaking, a disk, with a circular edge. An open string is a segment bounded by two points. The 2D equivalent of a closed string is a closed surface, a 2-brane, the closed string being a 1-brane, a "sphere S1, with one dimension." But geometry indicates that we can then imagine 3-branes, 10-branes, etc., and everything becomes wonderfully complicated.
In the document released by Arte, you may have heard Greene (the little Greene man) declare that our universe "could be a brane" and "that the Big Bang could result from the collision of two branes."
And your sister?
It's nonsense. These people get out of it by emphatically declaring that there could exist other universes, corresponding to other branes.
- In some, life could exist. In others, the laws of physics could be completely different, says Greene
A thought that evolves in ... fiction and is only fiction.
You understand, the field of investigation of superstrings and branes is that of "all possible physics." Normally, a person who holds such speeches, we treat him, we give him pills, we advise him to rest. Souriau is not wrong when he says that contemporary theoretical physics resembles a vast psychiatric hospital where the madmen have taken over. It even goes so far that a man like Veneziano dares to assert in his opening speech upon his appointment at the Collège de France "that it is fundamental research." In fact, we could consider it as scientific surrealism. Years ago, a group that liked to play with language had created the OULIPO, or "ouvroir de littérature potentielle." I had met some of its members, including the Lyonese. It was very amusing. You may remember:
The slippers flew in the famished azure
When suddenly appeared my American uncle
And the lobsters, flying around the portals
To see better, took off their sweaters
And the oil, sitting by the roadside
Watched all this, not understanding.
Excerpt from a work titled "The Blonde Negro" by Georges Fourest
It's amusing, but it has neither tail nor head and other functionality than to make us laugh. It's nothing but a story. Perhaps the theory of superstrings, which boasts "elegant," to take Greene's word, has no other pretension than to rise to the level of a new surrealism. When you see the text above, it keeps a rhythm. These are verses. But you could remove the rhymes, abolish the grammar, the syntax and even the spelling, consider a much richer discourse, made of characters placed one after another, and of spaces, commas, periods, which contain "all possible words" and "all possible stories." What gain in richness!
In fact, the theory of superstrings resembles a kind of expression of a new principle of uncertainty.
The more ambitious the project, the less it proves to be fruitful
I will end this text with a simple formula:
Those whose giant brains prevent them from thinking
I am 68 years old. My professional life is an unbroken sequence of successive wastelands. After having successfully carried out very nice plasma physics experiments, after having operated in 1966, for the first time in the world, an MHD generator with two temperatures instead of one, I began by proposing experiments that no one wanted to hear about, such as eliminating shock waves around models immersed in supersonic gas currents. This led to a revolutionary concept: hypersonic flight, the "MHD flight" without Bang. A technique that was not science fiction (which the Americans have made a reality since 1990 a flying reality ). These researches were suppressed, despite ten years of struggle. They deliberately let the wheat rot on the field, without harvesting it, until this blockage, engineered by these fools of military men, forced me to abandon it, twenty years ago.
The main responsible ones have names and faces, although they have recently died. They are:
- René Pellat, who was high commissioner for Atomic Energy and President of the CNRS - Hubert Curien, who was successively director of the CNRS, then of the CNES, then Minister, then director of CERN and so on.
They are responsible, in France, for an irrevocable thirty-year delay in MHD.
In astrophysics and cosmology, look at Schatzman, a member of the Academy of Sciences.
In theoretical physics, in twenty or thirty years, one can ask Thibaud Damour, the watchdog of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Bures-sur-Yvette, who is waiting for his pre-Big Bang theory, based on that of the strings, to mature. But at that time, I would have already passed away. And if one day you hear louder flashes than others, it will mean that, in the afterlife, I will settle my accounts with Pellat, Curien, Schatzman, or even Thibaud Damour
Isn't science beautiful? ---
September 4, 2005: Philip W. ANDERSON's opinion, Nobel Prize, Princeton U, on the theory of superstrings ** **
http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_10.html
| Philip
| W. ANDERSON | Physicist and Nobel laureate, Princeton University |
|---|
Is string theory a futile exercise as physics, as I believe it to be? It is an interesting mathematical specialty and has produced and will produce mathematics useful in other contexts, but it seems no more vital as mathematics than other areas of very abstract or specialized math, and doesn't on that basis justify the incredible amount of effort expended on it.
My belief is based on the fact that string theory is the first science in hundreds of years to be pursued in pre-Baconian fashion, without any adequate experimental guidance. It proposes that Nature is the way we would like it to be rather than the way we see it to be; and it is improbable that Nature thinks the same way we do.
The sad thing is that, as several young would-be physicists have explained to me, it is so highly developed that it is a full-time job just to keep up with it. That means that other avenues are not being explored by the bright, imaginative young people, and that alternative career paths are blocked.
Translation:
Is string theory a futile exercise, as research supposed to belong to physics? I think it is. It is an interesting specialty of mathematics that has already produced useful elements and will produce more in the future. But this field does not seem more interesting in mathematics than many others and does not justify the incredible efforts being made in this direction.
My opinion is that string theory is the first theory, for centuries, to have been developed against the principles set forth by Bacon, that is, without following any experimental guiding thread. It is a way of describing Nature as we would like it to be and not as it appears to us, and it is unlikely that Nature thinks the way we currently do.
What is sad, as several young people wanting to become theoretical physicists have told me, is that this discipline is now so developed that it has become a full-time job just to keep up with it. This means that other research directions are not being explored by bright, imaginative young people, and that there is no other way to have a career than to follow this single path. Other paths are simply blocked.
| Philip W. ANDERSON | Physicist and Nobel laureate, Princeton University |
|---|