Hi Andrew---
I must say that my engineer father has been clipping physics articles out of the literature and sending them to me in ridicule.
Not sure what to say to this---is he ridiculing you? I have glanced through your "Model of Reality" book online---presumably he thinks you're wrong? Or he agrees with you and he is ridiculing science?
I want to be clear that this post is not directed at people like you. You have developed some new theory which you think is right. I cannot really comment on your work because I only have a superficial understanding of it. If I ridiculed your work, I would be no better than Farsight or Singularity, who ridicule GR with little or no understanding of the subject.
The difference between you and them is that you actually have some experience with physics. Form your profile, you studied at UT under Wheeler, and (I assume) have at least a master's degree in physics.
For example, how about string theory? Do want to comment on that? I see that you have an interest in it.
Yes, an interest
The difference with string theory is that it undoubtedly contains something that looks like our universe. It is not easy to get, say, deSitter vacua from strings, but the framework can accomodate these solutions. String theory also contains the standard model. So in this sense, string theory is able to describe our universe. Other things, like chiral fermions in small representations of non-Abelian gauge symmetries are natural in string theory---if you take E8xE8 and compactify on an orbifold, you can get these things out very easily. In the standard model, these things are all ad hoc---that is, there is no reason to expect fermions in small representations---they are put in by hand.
When Farsight or Singularity or Zanket pop up and say "Everything is wrong, and I will show you how without examining the mathematical structure of the theory", it devalues the work that others have done. Because of the structure of these internet fora, these idiots' opinions are given equal weight as expert opinions. This problem is exacerbated by the, umm, loose moderation on SciForums. If the Physis and Math forum were moderated as tightly as the Biology and Genetics forum (where intelligent design posts are regularly axed), I would have no problem.
Either way the point is this---If Farsight posts something like "XXX Explained", and I say to him "You break Lorentz Invariance", he should look at his work and see if I am right, and explain to me why I am mistaken (I have been mistaken before, ask my students). But if I say "You break Lorentz invariance" and he says "No you're wrong" without even thinking about the comment, how can one hope to call what is happening science? I have pointed out a critical flaw with Farsight's work, and he is content to stick his fingers in his ears and talk loudly.
The same is true for zanket. I pointed out that one must define their reference frames at a single point to avoid tidal forces.
One does not have to go too far to figure out that high energy theory is in trouble. The problem is that the problem is too hard, and we don't have enough data. The death of the SSC is what caused all of this---had it opened up last decade, we would be busy trying to measure the properties of the higgs and SUSY, instead of talking about multiverses.
But there are other reasons to ignore this article you posted. This person is not affiliated with a university, and presumably this article has not been peer reviewed. I still find it hard to believe that there exists such conspiracies in phyiscs. Even the first scentence of the abstract discredits the work "Much recent work in “physics” is known to be wrong, with some shown to be nonsense with mathematical rigor."
Also, Mirman clearly does not understand compactification :"However it has long been known that physics (thus a universe) would be impossible in any dimension but 3+1 [1]. String theory and its extensions are therefore impossible." Classically, the compactified degrees of freedom are inaccesible, and not subject to the standard dimension counting arguments (i.e. the inverse square law is only possible in 3+1 dimensions, etc.). If you'd like me to refute Mirman's work point by point, I will do so to the best of my abilities, but in another thread.
And how about that the universe is supposedly mostly gravitationally repulsive and is experiencing an accelerated expansion?
But this is what observations TELL us. This is not some thrown together patchwork---the Lambda_CDM cosmological model is very precise, and (with the exception of a few errant data points at the end of the CMB data, which are expected to be errant for experimental reasons), it explains all of the observations.
One could argue that these are no better than the most common pseudoscience.
Categoricall not. The difference is that these theories are mathematically consistent, observationally consistent, and constantly tested by people whose job it is to test them.
If you want to change physics, you have to derive some experimental results. You have to show where your theory is better than all of the existing theories. Period.
