About civilized blog behavior and neutrinoless double beta decay

In Not-Even-Wrong there was a comment about The Rare Symmetry Violating Processes (RSVP) project in which the goal is to detect processes like photon-less conversion of muon into electron. This inspired me to send a comment about neutrino-less double beta decay for which some evidence is claimed to exist. The message was rejected.

Myth about extremely interacting neutrinos

The most probable motivation of Peter Woit for censoring was the naive text book wisdom about neutrinos as those elusive particles which traverse through kilometers of steel without interacting. Of course, standard model neutrinos are extremely weakly interacting, yes, but this statement has been experimentally verified only at sufficiently high neutrino energies, and there exists a lot of evidence that at poorly tested low neutrino energies situation is different. Tritium beta decay anomaly is one example: that even tachyons have been proposed to explain this phenomenon tells how strong the myth about extremely weakly interacting neutrinos really is. There is also evidence that the mass scale of neutrino depends on the environment: something in a complete contradiction with the myth about elusiveness. Also evidence for oscillations of weak nuclear decay rates in astrophysical time scales exists. All these anomalies have been put under the rug. The links given at the end of the posting contain references related to these anomalies. TGD indeed predicts at very low neutrino energy range something which cannot be read from popular text books. In particular, the age old mystery of chiral selection of bio-molecules essential for bio-catalysis finds a nice explanation from classical long ranged Z^0 force predicted by TGD to exist and play key role in bio length scales. During these years I have found that questioning of the neutrino myth gives you immediately the label of crackpot. Everyone knows the stories of Koch and Wegener but it is difficult to realize that the power of collective stupidity in science community is still the same.

Methologically competent idiotism

The extreme narrow mindedness of so many colleagues (of course, I sincerely hope that those making most of the noise in physics blogs are exceptions) makes me really sad. There are too many theoreticians (especially M-) whose competence is obviously restricted to a mere mechanical application of very advanced mathematical methods. The deeper understanding of physical theories and, most importantly, the understanding of their limits of applicability, is lacking. Sometimes crackpots have much better overall view about the limits and anomalies of existing theories than these young methodological genii. One can learn the limits of existing theory only by developing a new theory. Although Peter Woit does a good job in pointing out the situation in M theory, it has become more and more clear that his real motivation is not the state of M-theory but the inability to tolerate any new ideas. I do not however want to believe that the motivations relate to the personal competence as a theoretical physicist as his group theoretic musings "Wick Rotation", which inspired the nasty comment "theatre critics should never start acting himself", might suggest. All of us of course make blunders sometimes.

Cowboy mentality

My visits to physics blogs have been valuable and helped to understand why the situation in theoretical physics is what it is, and why it is so difficult to change it. The colossal arrogance of particle physicists is familiar to me but I was surprised that 90 percent of discussion is exchange of personal insults in blogs. Here I must express myself more accurately: the mad house like blogs have been in US. If you try to inject some fresh point of view with good argumentation and references about the intended topic of discussion to these blogs, the changes are fifty-fifty for getting it through while these casually written insults full of typos get through without any difficulty. Is it that the real motivation is the desire of the blog keeper to remain the king of the hill? Or is it indeed that these people as Americans feel themselves somehow superior? How American phenomenon this cowboy mentality is and how much of it is a result of natural selection in jungle like academic environments like Harward? I visited in some physics blogs at the old continent, and found that the situation was much better: people seem to behave most of the time like intelligent human beings with civilized manners.

Neutrinoless double beta decay and TGD

After this lengthy and emotional (sorry, I have not learned to tolerate academic stupidity) introduction some words about the topic. Neutrinoless double beta decay (NBD) process is possible only for Majorana neutrinos and according to New Scientist September 4, 2004 there is some experimental evidence for a process looking like NBD. In TGD NBD is not possible but classical Z^0 force and the presence of condensed matter neutrinos make possible a double beta decay in which either or both of decaying neutrons absorb condensed matter neutrino so that the net energy of emitted electrons is larger than for the normal double beta decay and a signature resembling that to identify NBDs experimentally results. The classical Z^0 force causes the correlated double beta decay instead of strong force and the dramatic prediction is that double beta decay could occur for neutrons belonging to different nuclei having distance even of order cell size! The verification of this prediction would be a triumph for TGD and a death blow for the standard model and all the competing theories that I am aware of. For more details see the article Processes Looking Like Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay as a Crucial Test for Standard Model and TGD? and the chapter TGD and Nuclear Physics where many anomalies related to neutrinos are discussed. Also other chapters such as TGD and Condensed Matter and Anomalies Related to the Classical Z^0 Force contain discussion about neutrinos and references.