astro
08-20-2006, 12:33 PM
Not to be rude or anything, but for all his bluster and bloviating, what has Lubos done in the realm of physics?
What is the Lubos constant? What are his postulates?
I graduated in physics from Princeton a few years back, and I heard many, many prominent physicists quietly criticizing string theory.
One of them clenched his fist one day and said, "Physics lacks the noble. The truth-seekers. The independent, humble heroes."
Peter Woit is leading the charge and taking the arrows--he will be justly remembered.
Prominent winners of the Nobel Prize and the very founders of String Theory--Michio Kaku--agree with Woit:
"The great irony of string theory, however, is that the theory itself is not unified. To someone learning the theory for the first time, it is often a frustrating collection of folklore, rules of thumb, and intuition. (IN OTHER WORDS IT IS NOT PHYSICS!!!) At times, there seems to be no rhyme or reason for many of the conventions of the model. For a theory that makes the claim of providing a unifying framework for all physical laws, it is the supreme irony that the theory itself appears so disunited!!"
Chapter 1. Path Integrals and Point Particles: Why Strings?
“Introduction to Superstrings and M-Theory,” page 5. –Michio Kaku
“If Einstein were alive today, he would be horrified at this state of affairs. He would upbraid the profession for allowing this mess to develop and fly into a blind rage over the transformation of his beautiful creations into ideologies and the resulting proliferation of logical inconsistencies. Einstein was an artist and a scholar but above all he was a revolutionary. His approach to physics might be summarized as hypothesizing minimally. Never arguing with experiment, demanding total logical consistency, and mistrusting unsubstantiated beliefs. The unsubstantial belief of his day was ether, or more precisely the naïve version of ether that preceded relativity. The unsubstantiated belief of our day is relativity itself. It would be perfectly in character for him to reexamine the facts, toss them over in his mind, and conclude that his beloved principle of relativity was not fundamental at all but emergent—a collective property of the matter constituting space-time that becomes increasingly exact at long length scales but fails at short ones. This is a different idea from his original one but something fully compatible with it logically, and even more exciting and potentially important. It would mean that the fabric of space-time was not simply the stage on which life played out but an organizational phenomenon, and that there might be something beyond.” –A Different Universe, Reinventing Physics From The Bottom Down, Robert B. Laughlin, Winner of the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the fractional quantum Hall effect.
More quotes from prominent physicists supporting Woit's work:
http://physicsmathforums.com/forumdisplay.php?f=60
What is the Lubos constant? What are his postulates?
I graduated in physics from Princeton a few years back, and I heard many, many prominent physicists quietly criticizing string theory.
One of them clenched his fist one day and said, "Physics lacks the noble. The truth-seekers. The independent, humble heroes."
Peter Woit is leading the charge and taking the arrows--he will be justly remembered.
Prominent winners of the Nobel Prize and the very founders of String Theory--Michio Kaku--agree with Woit:
"The great irony of string theory, however, is that the theory itself is not unified. To someone learning the theory for the first time, it is often a frustrating collection of folklore, rules of thumb, and intuition. (IN OTHER WORDS IT IS NOT PHYSICS!!!) At times, there seems to be no rhyme or reason for many of the conventions of the model. For a theory that makes the claim of providing a unifying framework for all physical laws, it is the supreme irony that the theory itself appears so disunited!!"
Chapter 1. Path Integrals and Point Particles: Why Strings?
“Introduction to Superstrings and M-Theory,” page 5. –Michio Kaku
“If Einstein were alive today, he would be horrified at this state of affairs. He would upbraid the profession for allowing this mess to develop and fly into a blind rage over the transformation of his beautiful creations into ideologies and the resulting proliferation of logical inconsistencies. Einstein was an artist and a scholar but above all he was a revolutionary. His approach to physics might be summarized as hypothesizing minimally. Never arguing with experiment, demanding total logical consistency, and mistrusting unsubstantiated beliefs. The unsubstantial belief of his day was ether, or more precisely the naïve version of ether that preceded relativity. The unsubstantiated belief of our day is relativity itself. It would be perfectly in character for him to reexamine the facts, toss them over in his mind, and conclude that his beloved principle of relativity was not fundamental at all but emergent—a collective property of the matter constituting space-time that becomes increasingly exact at long length scales but fails at short ones. This is a different idea from his original one but something fully compatible with it logically, and even more exciting and potentially important. It would mean that the fabric of space-time was not simply the stage on which life played out but an organizational phenomenon, and that there might be something beyond.” –A Different Universe, Reinventing Physics From The Bottom Down, Robert B. Laughlin, Winner of the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the fractional quantum Hall effect.
More quotes from prominent physicists supporting Woit's work:
http://physicsmathforums.com/forumdisplay.php?f=60