No one has been able to use string theory to calculate any of the standard model parameters in terms of the others. If you don’t believe this, try and find a string theory prediction of the one still unknown SM parameter (the Higgs Mass) in terms of the others, or a string theory prediction of anything that will be seen at the LHC.
It would be huge progress if string theory (or any other theory) was able to reduce the number of free parameters in the SM, but this has not been done. Any claims otherwise are intentionally misleading.
I could more or less agree if "(or any other theory)" would not be there. One should not talk about "any other theory" when one refuses to consider the possibility that there might be any other theories than string models and LQG. This refusal manifesting itself as a censorship in Not-Even-Wrong makes Peter Woit a wrong person to say anything about these approaches. I must say that Lubos, who has been often accused of censorship, respects comments demonstrating genuine thinking even if it they do not not conform with his own beliefs. It is difficult to avoid the feeling that Peter Woit's deepest motivations have origin in his strongly negative "sour grape" attitude towards any new idea.TGD predicts correctly the basic structure of standard model from extremely general starting point, reduces coupling constant evolution to p-adic coupling constant evolution, and makes also highly non-trivial predictions about this including relationship between color coupling strength and electro-weak U(1) coupling strength. TGD allows to reproduce physically realistic CKM matrix based on topological explanation of family replication phenomenon using very general number theoretical assumptions with minimum experimental input.
Most importantly, TGD allows to understand elementary particle masses from p-adic thermodynamics. Also Higgs contribution to particle mass can be understood in terms of thermodynamics. It would be really time for community to learn about p-adic mass calculations and if Peter Woit had a real interest in progress in physics he could have helped a lot by making his blog site an arena of genuine discussion about new ideas instead of boring endless repetition of what goes wrong in string models.
TGD also makes predictions about what might be observed in LHC: an example is p-adically scaled up copy of ordinary hadron physics (labelled by Mersenne prime M89: ordinary hadron physics corresponds to M107) meaning scaling up of mass scale about 29= 512. TGD based world view forces to give up reductionistic dogma means that highly non-trivial predictions follow in all length scales: nuclear string model and quantum model of dark matter represent two examples of this kind of predictions.
The basic problem in recent theoretical physics community is that people are intellectually lazy and quite too many of them are repeating loose statements echoing what some authority said somewhere. It is also extremely easy to label someone as crackpot and this trick guarantees always a grateful audience of mediocrits.
3 comments:
Woit is no different to the majority of lazy, overly self-confident academics. He is simply embarrassing himself a little more by maintaining a popular blog.
Oh, and the term is 'sour grape', although your version actually has a nice ring to it!
This overly self confidence and arrogance combined with laziness and intellectual inhonesty plus conviction that there exists no intellectual life outside USA seems to characterize quite too many academics in USA.
"Sore" was not intentional. I will change it.
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