June 2001: The journal La Recherche caught up in the fashion of elegance in physics.
This dossier consists of two parts. The first will be relatively brief and begins with the reproduction of the editorial from the June 2001 issue of La Recherche. I suggest you read this text first:
In this text, you will find the following passage:
"Meanwhile, as we were finalizing this dossier, a group of theorists led by Justin Khoury from Princeton University surprised astrophysicists by proposing, on this basis, an alternative model to the Big Bang theory. Their scenario portrays our universe and its companion, a parallel and invisible universe."
The theme of duality surfaces again, and while French researchers have been working on this since 1977 and have published numerous papers in peer-reviewed journals, we continue to fixate on the slightest rabbit trails emerging from the superstring community. This is not ignorance, but deliberate suppression—unfair and dishonest. The outraged letters from readers of my website to newspaper editors will be of no use. The past few months have shown that such efforts are futile. The only thing left to do is patiently wait until my work is actually published, so that it can be injected into the various databases where "international scientific news" is shaped by tremors, the very beginnings of beginnings, and "intellectual vertigo." How absurd all this is! And no one dares say so. At least one thing seems increasingly confirmed: no French science journalist ever digs deep, nor is capable of providing even a minimally coherent description of what they vaguely hear about, given that the authors of the documents submitted to them "hide from their eyes the heavy mathematical load..." The bluff is truly the number one argument in the world of superstrings (trust us. You see, it's so complicated...). The journalistic imagination then fills up with wiggling little strings, oscillating branes, and above all, words—more and more grandiose words. Many are convinced that real progress is actually happening in this field, and that "soon, there will be observational confirmations." That's what Larousserie from Sciences et Avenir told me, voice trembling, throat choked with emotion. A decent fellow, like thousands of others, who had never gone beyond the first hundred pages—say—of Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe," without simply turning to page 415 out of sheer curiosity.
Enough fraud, enough farce, enough illusion. Give me concrete facts, please—not hopes for observational confirmations within the next ten years.
Second part: analysis of an article published in the same issue of La Recherche:
I have already included a text on my website referring to this famous "string theory." See the portrait of
Brian Greene
, author of the book "The Elegant Universe" published by Robert Laffont. Before continuing, I urge the reader to take a look at these necessary clarifications. The era seems gripped by complete madness. As my friend, mathematician Jean-Marie Souriau, so aptly put it:
Theoretical physics has become completely insane—and the worst part is that it’s the madmen who have taken over.
The tragedy lies in the fact that theoretical physics, and physics in general, have been in a major crisis for decades, practically since the last breakthroughs of a genius like Feynman. I have already touched on this point in my book published by Albin Michel: "We’ve Lost Half the Universe." What to do with "hundreds of elementary particles"? How to extricate ourselves from the avalanche of contradictions arising from contemporary astronomical and cosmological observations?
While our astronomers perform their work remarkably well, positioning ever more powerful instruments across all possible frequency ranges, like artillerymen, on the theoretical front, there is utter poverty, to say nothing of catastrophe. We need fresh ideas. Personally, I have proposed a few (see the cited book). Following a previous dossier, readers protested to the same journal because two authors in a special issue of La Recherche dedicated to time, in an article titled "Do Elementary Particles Have a Sense of Time?" by Gabriel Chardin and Marc Desjardin, seemed to completely ignore my own work, which clearly relates to the article’s subject (a "parallel universe" with an inverted arrow of time, etc.). See a
previous dossier
.
The journal forwarded this letter to the two authors. One simply declared, flatly, that he was unaware of my existence. The other gave a rather scandalous response. He began by writing, despite claiming to have explored my website where these publications are reproduced, that I had "published nothing at all." See:
Nuevo Cimento 1994
,
Astrophysics and Space Science 1995
,
The Int Jr of Mod Phys, 1999
I also have ongoing work in the process of publication, and I am growing impatient to finally "return to the game with fresh ammunition." Furthermore, these people wrote that I had "started by creating a website about the Ummites, then gradually removed all references to this matter from my site." This is entirely false. They are confusing my site with others I have no connection to. But this merely reflects their attitude: a researcher interested in extraterrestrials, UFOs, cannot possibly be serious. It's impossible for him to publish in peer-reviewed journals. His theories can't possibly stand! They take their desires for reality.
When my new batch of publications finally comes out, properly, I will have to go to the sanctuaries of these good people, have a quiet word with them, and set things straight. In seminars, I have never lost a battle, and when colleagues have dared to spread nonsense about me, it always cost them dearly—so much so that they often later found it difficult to sit down comfortably...
But let's return to this La Recherche dossier. I assume you have read the introduction to the problem of superstrings in the
already-cited link
. The article's author,
Ignatios Antoniadis
,
Director of Research at CNRS, detached to CERN in Geneva, promotes his own work much like Greene does in his book. We find bold headlines, very catchy:
Experiments are no longer out of reach
Once again, grand words like "unifying theory" are thrown around. But on page 25, don't miss the following sentence:
To date, string theory has received no experimental confirmation.
Antoniadis writes on page 27:
Supersymmetry
allows the unification
of gravity with the
three other fundamental interactions
And with observations
A conditional is missing. It should read "would allow." Because supersymmetry... does not exist. This "theory" remains at the stage of pure speculation—let us hasten to remind ourselves. Next to this splendid blue poster, read Antoniadis's sentence:
However, none of these superparticles have yet been observed in large accelerators.
Still, to quote the author's own words, at the top of page 27:
The abundance of articles published on the subject and the prominent positions they occupy among the most-cited physics papers...
I'm sorry. In theoretical physics, it's always the Big Crisis, but no one dares say out loud that the emperor has no clothes. We need a Feynman urgently—and all we have are Witten (some of whom, Greene writes in his book, think Witten might be "the greatest physicist of all time"). For now, the novel ideas we're endlessly bombarded with seem hardly fruitful. In what era of science history have we seen a theory so disconnected from reality that it cannot even account for a single phenomenon, let alone make a single prediction or produce a single model? One feels compelled to exclaim:
How could we have sunk so low?
Look for the conclusion of this new article's tirade. It's simple: by 2005, the future large hadron collider might bring something new—something to reflect on, to think about, perhaps even—just maybe—have an idea. Or perhaps, as with astronomical and cosmological observations, it will be even worse, with experimenters getting lost in ever more complicated showers of data.
There was a time when planetary trajectories were interpreted using epicycles. The worst part was that it worked remarkably well. This theory was not... falsifiable. Any observational deviation could be quickly incorporated into the model by adding... another circle. By the time Copernicus published his book, on his deathbed, they had already reached 48 circles. Heliocentrists were treated with contempt by supporters of this beautiful epicycle theory. After all, the poor souls thought planets moved in circles around the Sun. Therefore, their predictions were wrong. Kepler had not yet formulated his famous laws.
You know what? I think we're pedaling full speed through epicycles. We need to consider a profound paradigm shift, impossible to grasp, as usual (how could people obsessed with the "perfection of circularity," an idea first proposed by Aristotle, ever imagine that planetary orbits could be elliptical?). If I had the solution, I'd tell you. But I believe approaches like supersymmetry or "string theory" (at the extreme peak of contemporary schizophrenia) resemble the final days of epicycles. The more things go on, the worse they get. That's not a good sign...
Adding extra dimensions? Of course, everyone thinks about it. It's also possible that the "substrate of physics" isn't even a... continuum. But that's a whole different kettle of fish. That would be a paradigm shift of massive proportions—something we're currently incapable even of imagining, lacking the appropriate mathematical tools.
As shown by J.M. Souriau in the 1950s (Geometry and Relativity, Herman Ed, Chapter VII), only a five-dimensional world can simultaneously accommodate gravity and electromagnetism—this fifth dimension having been introduced in 1921 by the Pole Kaluza.
But don't imagine these things are simple. Consider that this highly meritorious approach secretly harbors an additional scalar and a surplus equation, like a sixth toe, with no one knowing what it's for. I take pleasure in reproducing them (Souriau's book, pages 406 and 407).
Mathematical physics is no easy matter! You're looking at an equation searching for a phenomenon. And yet, this is what's most serious on the market. Souriau's work remains a profound source of reflection (even if it's quite difficult to read—I admit it).
Back to the La Recherche paper. What do we find there? This time, a beautiful image of a "Calabi-Yau manifold" in two dimensions. Souriau fully agrees with me: it's mathematics (and not always very rigorous, according to him) that people try to pass off as physics. Long ago, Souriau amused us with his definition of contemporary theoretical physics:
Physics minus experiment—Mathematics minus rigor.
Alas, that's the sad reality.
As for the interview with Greene that follows, it's a monument to... emptiness.
Brian Greene
Inventor of disposable scientific thought.
Feynman and Einstein must be turning in their graves. Take this sentence, page 33:
A major success of string theory concerns black holes.
We don’t even know if these objects exist! But perhaps we should simply remind ourselves that in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed are kings.
Stéphanie Ruphy, who interviewed the Bernard Henri-Lévy of physics, had begun with a rather insightful question:
For over thirty years, physicists have been developing string theory, yet they still haven’t tested it experimentally. Such longevity without any empirical support is unprecedented for a fundamental theory in the history of modern physics. How do you explain the "faith" inspired by string theory?
Greene talks about subquantum fluctuations of unimaginable violence. Have they been observed? No. This supposedly unifying theory is "not falsifiable" (Greene, La Recherche interview, page 33). We can neither confirm nor refute it. But we should be understanding. It's such a young theory, adds Greene (it's actually over 30 years old, as the La Recherche journalist reminds us in the opening question...). Good heavens, how much money is spent on grants, conferences, missions around these matters, while it's the greatest scientific fraud of all time—and Greene isn't even worth a superstring to hang him.
That said, it's not enough to just spit in the soup. When my papers are finally published, I will publish another book, the sequel to "We’ve Lost Half the Universe," and I’ll return to seminars, if I can...
Let me tell you an anecdote. A few years ago, I approached Omont, who was then directing the Paris Institute of Astrophysics, proposing to give a seminar there. Immediate refusal. Reason:
-
You wrote that book about extraterrestrials...
-
But that’s not what I want to talk about.
-
Sorry, we can’t separate the two.
Only written pressure from Souriau convinced Omont to relent, allowing me to deliver a seminar before twenty stubborn faces. No questions. Silence. The wall of silence.
June 14, 2001
..............................................
Jean-Pierre Petit
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