Armed vigil
July 18, 2017
I have been working for five hours this morning. I have watched the impact of a video I had installed yesterday:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvml7Wfg6E4&feature=youtu.be
More than two thousand views in less than twenty four hours and 67 comments!
I was right to do this work.
An academic like Aurélien Barrau has multiplied his conferences. He is everywhere. His CV is impressive.
Read it
.
That guy is spinning these nonsense in front of an audience of uninitiated people, it would be in the fashion. But if I chose this video, it's because he is speaking in front of a public of theoretical physicists, at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of CEA-Saclay, gathered for a conference on gravity. And the speech is exactly the same as the one he serves to the public, with the same words. Because there is nothing else, nothing consistent behind this idea of the Multiverse.
And no one in the room reacts. No one intervenes by saying
- Stop your clowning, old chap. That's enough!
Because theoretical physicists have nothing else to offer, except the ... gravitino, the phototino, supersymmetry, a neutralino that evades observation. When it's not the superstrings. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed are kings. It makes me think of the way my late friend the mathematician Jean-Marie Souriau summarized the situation:
J.M. Souriau:
Theoretical physics has become
a vast psychiatric hospital where the mad have taken power.
But how can one say such a thing at a time when science, bla-bla-bla...
There are two things to clarify:
-
Experimental physics makes undeniable progress day after day. For example, we know how to slow down antimatter nuclei to the point of being able to confine them in a durable way, etc.
-
Astronomical observation, both terrestrial and space-based, uses increasingly impressive means. We discover exoplanets. The discovery of the signature of the presence of life on some of them seems imminent.
-
Finally, mathematics know no comparable crisis.
On the other hand, in the field of theoretical physics, our knowledge "plateaus", since the appearance of quarks, which have become our modern epicycles. I personally think that our theoretical physics will have to mutate again, with a mutation comparable to that it underwent at the beginning of this century, to have a new grasp on matter, on what we call reality.
How? I can only give my opinion: by choosing a discrete representation of space-time, where it is comparable to the game of chess, with space squares and "moves", where the present is no longer infinitely divisible. Where the Heisenberg uncertainty principle comes from the quantization of a "position-velocity" space, six-dimensional.
But then, what to do with differential calculus, the pivot of all our sciences? Yes, it's not a small matter. A man like Carlo Rovelli has followed this intuition. But since he does it badly, it gives nothing.
Without such a leap, which also passes through the increase in the number of dimensions (also anticipated by the string people, but they also do it badly), physics will be condemned to observe "new particles" which will only be the infinite reflections of light, refracted by the facets of a wine bottle cap.
Yes, the jumps ( "as Deleuze would say ..." ) to be made are bewildering. I would say that we are looking for another object which, with respect to everything else, would behave like the basic piece of a Lego game called "the reality of the moment", as simple pieces such as the proton, the neutron, the electron were, with which all atoms could be reconstructed. But I imagine an object that, depending on the angle from which it is considered, could be either a mass, or a charge, or a quantum of space or time.
Until these jumps are made, time is in the greatest confusion. And if I have lingered on the case of Aurélien Barrau, it's because he is the most obvious example. His speech is nothing but words, put together, with many citations, plus a systematic and unnecessary recourse to an avalanche of pedantic neologisms. If you could see the way this verbiage, this logorrhea, is transcribed in mathematical terms, you would find the equivalent: equations, put together ... and at the end: nothing.
And Souriau says:
Theoretical physics has become mathematics without rigor and physics without experience.
What is extraordinary is that institutions are getting involved in this pitiful game. Six months ago I had Barrau on the phone, offering him a seminar where I would have wanted to present my point of view on astroparticles. He evaded like the others, mentioning his "duty to oversee recruitment and major directions". Yes, he was appointed to the "National Committee" which is in charge of recruitment and the definition of French research programs!
The king is naked....
How to imagine that the Joseph Fourier University, which created a series of videos where its researchers present their research topics, has published this video:
Aurélien Barrau and his rat
A video subtitled in English, as if Barrau wished from the start for these images to contribute to expanding his fame on an international scale. Does he realize the absurdity of this presentation? But what to do to stand out when you have nothing to say, even with a well-posed and strong voice? A white rat? Why not?
In fact, we live in the age of spectacle. The real journalists have disappeared, replaced by hosts. And the charlatans, the science hosts have replaced the scientists. All media follow, whether it's the big press, bought by the proponents of
radical liberalism
, or the popular science organs:
- We are delighted to welcome today Mr. Tartempion, author of a book on ....
I bring attention to this situation. Seventy-two comments on this video posted less than twenty four hours earlier. And that because it was me who posted it. Indeed, Barrau manages a multitude of other videos. There are more than thirty on his own YouTube account. But you will notice that often the comments are disabled. Why? Because many intellectuals, philosophers and scientists have tried to react, each in their own field. But all of them wrote to me:
- My comment was immediately deleted.
So I wanted, by doing this tedious work, to allow these comments to be heard outside the censorship operated by the author. And it seems that the mere fact of transcribing Barrau's words on the screen, without adding a comma, a comment, is enough to make the listener realize what is being attempted to be swallowed, unfolded with an unnecessarily inflated verb, sprinkled with pedantic neologisms. The most amusing comment I read referred to a phrase by Coluche:
Some provide such convoluted answers that in the end you don't even know what the question was.
You are being deceived in the media, in your spoken or written press. Well, it's the same thing in science, what do you think? Now you will perhaps have a more critical view of what you read in Science e...