New 150 GeV boson stimulates emotions and bad rhetorics

This bump at 150 GeV manages to generate strong emotional responses. Very understandable. All predictions of the hegemony which has dominated particle physics the last thirty years seem to fail and anomalies suggesting unexpected new physics are emerging. It is intolerable that the theory of this TGD guy who has tried to talk sense for thirty years and been ruthlessly silenced and ridiculed can explain the 150 GeV anomaly elegantly using 15 years old predictions of his theory.

The latest example about highly emotional response is from Lubos. I glue below my two comments to the posting of Lubos, the response of Lubos and my response to it: I do not know whether Lubos allows it to appear in the blog. Note that Lubos carefully avoids of saying anything about the contents of my comments since he simply cannot make any reasonable counter argument. Lubos also argues against completely nonsensical statements that he has put to my mouth: another telltale signature of the rhetoric of a poor loser. Draw your own conclusions.

My first comment

TGD suggests two explanations for the possible new particle. Exotic octet of weak bosons is the first guess: it fails because there is no preference to decays to quarks.

Second explanation is in terms of a decay of charged pion of scaled up variant of ordinary hadron physics: scaling factor is 512 for the mass scale from the ratio for the Mersenne primes M_107 and M_89 labeling corresponding p-adic mass scales. According to the recent view not identical with the original one, pions would be produced abundantly and ρ meson or the first p-adic octave of charged pion would decay to W and neutral pion in turn producing quark jets. One signature of the new hadron physics would be monochromatic photon pairs with photon energy in the range 60-80 GeV. The naive scaling argument from ordinary pion mass would give mass of 71.4 GeV. p-Adic scaling with 2 is possible and produces mass 143.4 GeV to be compared with 145 GeV mentioned by Lubos.

Maybe the most dramatic prediction of TGD will be verified within next years! For details see my blog posting .

My second comment

Internal consistency arguments force to conclude that new physics is in TeV scale and the people in CDF are high rank professionals. Therefore I would be cautious in making skeptic or even cynical comments about their skills and even motivations unless I were a similar top professional myself.

Those who predict take this kind of potential discoveries quite seriously for understandable reasons. Both the forward-backward asymmetry in ttbar production and the new particle candidate can be understood in terms of scaled up variant of hadron physics predicted by TGD as I explain in detail at my blog.

Personally I cannot take seriously any model postulating ad hoc particle with hoc couplings to explain single anomaly. Principle is needed. I though for decades ago that after the advent of superstrings theorists would start to predict entire new branches of physics instead of single particle with couplings tinkered to explain single experimental anomaly.

In any case, LHC will certainly tell within few years what is the truth. We can only wait.

Lubos

Don't be silly, Matti. Most of similar 3-sigma bumps supporting "previously unexpected physics" that have ever been promoted by similar teams turned have been showed to be flukes or mistakes. I have surely done similar things at the top global level so if you ask me whether I consider myself competent to judge the likelihood that this is just hogwash resulting from some rather silly errors, the answer is a resounding Yes. Your encouragement to irrationally worship people who are at least as fallible as I am and who have done lots of very problematic and complex manipulations doesn't belong to science. Science just doesn't operate and cannot operate in this way, by intimidating researchers by the "expertise" of other experts. Science can only get settled if the arguments are being verified and multiplied, not by mindless agreement with some people who are promoted to infallible holy fathers (and, in this case, also mothers).

Your TGD crackpot junk will be left without comments.

Also, it's nonsense that the LHC will need "years" to decide about similar effects. First of all, the D0 Collaboration - the second team at the Fermilab - will publicize its own verdict within weeks. And the LHC could already have the answer in their collected data, too. If it doesn't, it will have the answer this year. The more likely answer is that the effect is bunk. But if it is not bunk, it is not because of infallibility of the CDF folks who have contributed to this paper.

My response

Dear Lubos,

I am just saying that those people who have theories able to predict something (not very many of them!) are quite interested in these bumps, at I have a high respect to the work of the people doing the hard work with experiments and analyzing their results, and that I do not see why this respect could be somehow crackpottish. Certainly this respect does not mean a blind belief to the correctness of their analysis. We are all human beings and most of us are doing their best.

The person who takes the scientific discussion as a battle rather than exchange and comparison of ideas must fight against the temptation to use as the last weapon the crackpot claim. I can understand that for a fanatic string model aficionado the failure of the cherished theory is extremely traumatic experience. But still: I am disappointed that you could not resist this temptation. You are one of the *very* few blog physicists whom I can take seriously and I would respect you much more if you would make at least a single argument about the explanation provided by TGD. Why it is wrong? Why it is nonsensical? No emotional bursts: just answers to these questions in the spirit of normal scientific argumentation. Just arguments about content instead of crackpot rhetorics.

Lubos

Dear Matti, apologies but your comment that followed my comment above was so atrocious that I had to use it to ban you.

My comment

Dear Lubos,

it is amusing that you are telling someone that his posting is too atrocius;-)! It was not. I just told that your put my mouth something I never said as anyone can directly check. I also asked you tell tell why my proposal is wrong instead of labeling me as a crackpot. This is just ordinary scientific discussion.

I added to my blog the comments including the comment that you deleted so that anyone can see what is involved: see http://matpitka.blogspot.com/2011/04/new-150-gev-boson-stimulates-emotions.html .

I added also a simple estimate of the decay width of the pion of M₈₉ hadron physics (dominating contribution comes from the box diagram with 3 gluons and one quark decaying to W at edges). The order of magnitude for the decay rate is around 20 GeV as required if one assumes flavor octet explaining also top quark asymmetry.

If you respect the rules of normal scientific debate you should tell what is wrong with the proposed mechanism for associated production of W boson and quark pair from pions produced abundantly. You could also tell what is wrong with the estimate for the decay width: what makes standard calculation crackpottish? The estimate can be found at

http://matpitka.blogspot.com/2011/04/is-decay-width-of-new-150-gev-particle.html .

You can of course delete also this posting but I will add it to my blog so that everyone can see what is involved.

With Best Regards.

Matti Pitkanen

I could not get this comment through. The blog program told that it has more than 3000 characters. It had about 1000. Perhaps this is the manner to realize the ban. I am really surprised. The briliant Lubos Motl who has been talking about intellectual honesty is afraid of a real scientific debate and uses this kind of tricks to avoid it?! Why so? If the opponent is just a miserable crackpot it should be extremely easy to demonstrate that his arguments are wrong!