Confession

Lubos Motl represented his view about science and democracy in his posting Science vs. democracy and in the same occarion continued his campaign against those miserable human beings known as quantum gravity crackpots (all those inhabitants of this planet who do not believe in M-theory). Since I cannot believe in M-theory, I cannot but confess that I am quantum gravity crackpot. To get rid of my horrible feelings of guilt I took the decisive step and made a public confession and glue it also below.

Lubos said:

I think that every reader who has at least a vague idea what physics is must know that such a method of determining the critical dimension as well as the result are completely absurd. M-theory as we know it just can't work in the total number of 8 dimensions.

The number D=8 mentioned here makes me feel terribly guilty of being quantum gravity crackpot.

First confession: I (yes,it is me, I cannot blame anyone else) regard the target space dimension of string theories as a purely formal notion. The construction of stringy vertex operators in terms of ordered exponentials of bosonic free fields brings in formal space-time dimension equal to that of Cartan algebra of the Kac-Moody algebra defining symmetries of the theory. This stringy dimension is roughly the dimension of space-time as it is determined in string theories. And no it comes: I have used almost 28 years of my life to construct a "theory" in which space-times are 4-D surfaces in 8-D space-time with stringy dimension equal to 10 and cannot but continue arguing that D=8 is the physical dimension.

Second confession: This D=8 imbedding space is fixed and non-dynamical apart from the scaling factors of metric but leaves us without landscape.

Third confession: D=4 for space-time surfaces is critical dimension for D=2 super-conformal closed strings with metric signature (2,2) or (0,4): this algebra actually extends to D=4 superconformal algebra which is the symmetry algebra of my 8-D theory. Very conservatively (even condensed matter physicist would agree), the dynamical spacetime surfaces in my own theory have the same role as 10-D dynamical target space in super string models. Hence I believe that gravity is at classical level four-dimensional phenomenon, not 10- or 11-D one.

Fourth confession: I dare to regard also strings as purely formal objects. In my own "theory" particles correspond to 2-D partonic 2-surfaces, submanifolds of space-time surface. N-point functions of conformal field theory at partonic 2-surfaces give stringy scattering amplitudes using the usual formulas. No fundamental strings in the "theory". The 4-D classical dynamics creates correlations between partons and even N=4 topological string could be physically realistic in this framework as a description of perturbative phase.

I have now confessed all that I can in the limitations posed by the limit the length of posting and I feel immense relief. Am I a quantum-gravity-crackpot? Jury can decide.

Jury can find a short summary about the most recent activities of the accused in the last section of chapter Construction of Quantum Theory.