Re: 20 Years of Peter Woit's "Not Even Wrong"

Ross Finlayson:

On 03/20/2024 09:20 AM, Ross Finlayson wrote:

On 03/20/2024 04:13 AM, Aether Regained wrote:

https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13864
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39753115
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" When I started the blog I was 20 years past my Ph.D., in the middle of
some sort of an odd career. Today I’m 66, 40 years past the Ph.D., much
closer to the end of a career and a life than to a beginning. In 2004 I
was looking at nearly twenty years of domination of fundamental theory
by a speculative idea that to me had never looked promising and by then
was clearly a failure. 20 years later this story has become highly
disturbing. The refusal to admit failure and move on has to a large
degree killed off the field as a serious science. " -- Peter Woit
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Supersymmetry has come back umpteen-many times.
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That's basically what it does, supersymmetry,
like "we found a new rule and as long as you
don't look at it cross-wise, the supersymmetrical
explanation for it is now gone!"  Then, somebody
looks around, and it results, "hey, you know,
supersymmetry isn't dead again".
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He says "higher energy scales" but doesn't mention
"running constants" so I kind of wonder whether
he just thinks the universe grows and particles
shrink or, what.
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I'm a fan of Woit among some physicists,
but I'm not quite sure how he's, "not even wrong".
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The title "Not Even Wrong" is pretty great,
it indicates several things, about first of
all the "purely theoretical" theories what
can't be applied, then in the applied, what
results either not observables or not falsifiables.
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It reflects on the usual greatest credo
or maxim "Quantum Mechanics is Never Wrong",
vis-a-vis, doing it wrong or not right.
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I don't follow Woit's blog, but read it
at least since more than a decade ago,
and usually when it was a strong enough
statement about the direction of physics,
that I relate it in some sense to Turok's
"Crisis" in physics, or in terms of evolution
and revolution, conceptually or theoretically,
and also to Penrose's "Fashion, Faith, and
Fantasy", with regards to the crisis in
physics, that functional freedom arrives
at GR and QM both right to 30 orders of
magnitude, yet in extrapolation disagreeing
to 120 orders of magnitude.
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My own sort of theory is rather "theory first",
with regards to not having to be right, while
at the same time, theoretically it's eventually
so that the practical and applied, is from
pure principles, vis-a-vis Einstein's "model
physicist" and Einstein's "model philosopher",
vis-a-vis "shut up and compute", and these
kinds of ideas.
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So anyways, supersymmetry is not dead:  AGAIN,
and it's the way of things, and Quantum Mechanics
is Never Wrong, and Continuum Mechanics is what's right.
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Similarly the super-string theory, that being
just a backdrop for Continuum Mechanics under
atomism and the Democritan and Planckian,
if "Not Even Wrong" it's also "Never Wrong".
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One wonders about taking blog feeds and finding
their Atom or RSS feeds and making digests what
result summary and digest NNTP feeds,
it's sort of an open system.
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"Is it Mach-ian?"  What kind of question is that, ....
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So, the age of electron physics, and the ultraviolet catastrophe,
is for supersymmetry super-string neutrino physics,
then as for an infrared catastrophe,
where a catastrophe is a singularity
is a perestroika is an opening is a multiplicity:
is a good thing, then for space terms and getting
electromagnetic and nuclear radiation better understood
about the special optical visible light,
as what's old is new again, and not just wrapped as new.
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Warm regards, good luck
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Luck:  you can't need it.
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One of the conceptual challenges of supersymmetry
is partners and partnerinos, two concepts, one of
them about the "high energy unification", the other
about the "low energy unification", the one at too high
energies to be found, the other at too low energies.
 
Being kinetic and all the atom is sort of the graviton,
then with "bigger bosons" and "gravitinos", supersymmetry
and for "symmetry-flex" as a concept is at least two concepts,
with a usual idea that high-energy is totally contrived as
according to either cosmology or collider, while low-energy
happens all the time and represents the flux of arbitrarily
small and fast and "ultramundane corpuscles", if only
because everything's a particle.
 
The term "flux" then also has quite a variation in terms of
its meaning. The Gaussian sort of flux is like potential
of a surface, like a Poincare surface, that just illustrate
continuity laws, while it's arbitrarily non-zero, in closed
systems. The fleeting flux then, like photons for example
but all the neutrinos and other fast parternerinos,
and for example photinos, is quite altogether about
the two notions of the one term, two definitions.
 
So, supersymmetry and flux and symmetry-flex, with that
not being the symmetry-breaking either way yet flex,
is sort of like Aristotle's versus Leibniz' entropy, which
isn't disorder yet simply minimization in whatever terms,
potentials, sum-of-histories, sum-of-potentials.
 
When half the people don't even know there are
two meanings to "supersymmetric", "flux", and "entropy",
then, it's usually easier to leave out the other half
they don't know also.
 
 

@Ross, IIRC you used to write with a lot more clarity. Have you
outsourced your thinking to a hallucinating AI bot or what?