Freedom of Science

7 Responses to “Who needs peer review”  

1. 1 Kea Feb 21st, 2008 at 9:04 pm

   Indeed, from my personal experience there is much more free expert advice available on the web than I have ever received from referees, not that that’s difficult given the usual referee responses to my papers, which, although the papers may well be badly written, always betray a total lack of comprehension about the subject under discussion. Critics are fast to point out minor errors, as if these are sufficient to demolish an entire argument which they haven’t the least ability to follow. Anyway, I don’t bother publishing.

2. 2 Pioneer1 Feb 22nd, 2008 at 7:37 pm

   I think blogging is publishing. And it is more dynamic than journal publishing. Probably your work is reaching more people through your blog than as a paper in a journal could.

3. 3 Tony Smith Feb 23rd, 2008 at 8:48 am

   Kea said:
   “… Critics are fast to point out minor errors, as if these are sufficient to demolish an entire argument which they haven’t the least ability to follow. …”.

   Sometimes the “critics” are quite capable of following the argument they seek “to demolish”, especially if the “argument” involves ideas that threaten their position in the existing status/funding pecking order.

   In my opinion, a recent example is Jacques Distler’s criticism of Garrett Lisi’s E8 model and the response of people in the physics community to that criticism. Here is a bit of detail, taken from commentary on N-category Cafe about Garrett Lisi’s E8 model in 0711.0770, as to which Garrett Lisi had subsequently clearly stated (on physics forums) that he is “… going to have to do something significantly different to get the second and third generations to work in this theory …”:

   1 - Jacques Distler said “… it’s impossible to get even 2 generations is independent of any of the details of how the Standard Model is embedded in E 8 …” and linked to his own blog where he said “… instead of two generations, one obtains a generation and an anti-generation …”.

   2 - I said “… So it seems that Garrett Lisi’s model, if modified to describe only one generation (the second and third being non-fundamental such as being composite) would be consistent with Jacques Distler’s math ideas. …”.

   3 - John Baez remained dismissive, saying that Garrett Lisi “… certainly makes no serious attempt to get the Standard Model Lagrangian in all its detail. Nor does it seem possible (without further feats of genius). For example, his Lagrangian has no place for the ∼25 adjustable constants contained in the Standard Model: particle masses, coupling constants, etc. Nor does he attempt to derive these constants. … he did not ‘get the Standard Model’ …”.

   Those excerpts show me two things:

   that Jacques Distler’s criticism was motivated by a desire to demolish Garrett Lisi’s E8 ideas, NOT to engage in constructive criticism that could lead to a better model ( probably really a realistic unified theory);

   that critics seem to move the goal posts - even if one line of criticism is shown to not destroy the model, but rather show how to improve it,
   another line of criticism is immediately raised to dismiss the model,
   as in John Baez’s dismissal on the grounds that Garrett Lisi had not yet derived “… particle masses, coupling constants, etc …”,
   thus holding Garrett Lisi to a standard far above what has been achieved by either superstring theory or loop quantum gravity people in the physics establishment.

   Tony Smith

   PS - As someone who has put up (on the web, not the Cornell arXiv due to blacklisting) a paper based on Garrett Lisi’s E8 model that DOES calculate “particle masses, coupling constants, etc”, it is clear to me that even if Garrett Lisi had already done those calculation,
   his work would still have been dismissed.
   In fact, on 27 November 2007 I asked Jacques Distler (on his blog)
   “… Would you [Jacques Distler] endorse it [my E8 physics paper] for posting on hep-th where Garrett’s 0711.0770 is posted ? …”
   and
   I have yet to receive the courtesy of a reply, much less an endorsement.

   In case there is any interest,
   my paper based on Garrett’s E8 model can be found at
   http://www.tony5m17h.net/GLE8Cl8TSxtnd.pdf

   PPS - There seems to be a problem with my web site at valdostamuseum.org

4. 4 Pioneer1 Feb 23rd, 2008 at 6:22 pm

   Tony,

   Thanks for the comment.

   Sometimes the “critics” are quite capable of following the argument they seek “to demolish”, especially if the “argument” involves ideas that threaten their position in the existing status/funding pecking order.

   I think that physicists refereeing for journals have different motivations than physicists answering a request for help or getting involved in a discussion voluntarily. Refereeing I guess is a chore and it has its own rules.

   I don’t think that Garrett Lisi would have gotten so much feedback if his paper was published in a peer reviewed journal first and without the media attention. John Baez has written about Lisi’s work in his This Week’s Finds but without the media attention no one was interested as far as I know.

   Since I know nothing about that type of mathematics I cannot comment on the technical details of Lisi’s work, or Distler’s criticism or your paper. But I believe that it was wrong for Lisi to use a title that did not reflect correctly the content of the paper and to claim that what he did amounted to a theory of everything. Anyway, theory of everything in physics is a pun that can mean anything.

   Correct me if I am wrong but I see the Standard Model to be a curve fitting theory. Standard Model is not a rule based theory. Physicists do not make this distinction since they talk about Standard Model as being a great theory that they invented.

   As far as I understand Lisi’s attempt was to find a mathematical model that would eliminate the need for curve fitting. Physicists think this would be a great achievement because this has been one of the things their predecessors have been doing and Nobel prizes have been given for it. It is basically bean counting or accounting or in computer programming idiom, it is like writing a macro.

   But the ultimate goal of physicists is to reduce the whole thing into a rule based theory, the ultimate philosophers stone, so that it can be written as an equation on a T-shirt.

   My understanding is that a mathematical theory is still not a rule based theory. It is like saving astronomical tables with trigonometric series.

   Newton was the first one who claimed fraudulently that he discovered a theory of everything. He Newtonized Kepler’s rule and called it Newton’s laws. So what Garrett Lisi has done when he claimed falsely to have found a theory of everything is good old physics tradition. He just didn’t have Newton’s cunning to carry it through. And Newton had Kepler’s rule.

   My understanding is that the Standard Model Lagrangian is also Kepler’s rule written in Newtonian terms as kinetic energy equals potential energy. But since no symbolism is sacred in physics, as far as I understand, physicists corrupted the Lagrangian by adding new terms to it until it became the spaghetti Lagrangian with as many ad hoc terms as needed.

   But I only have a vague idea of how Standard Model works and I don’t really understand what’s going on.

   Thanks again for your comment.

5. 5 Tony Smith Feb 24th, 2008 at 3:47 am

   Pioneer 1 “… see[s] the Standard Model to be a curve fitting theory. …
   Lisi’s attempt was to find a mathematical model that would eliminate the need for curve fitting.
   Physicists think this would be a great achievement …”.

   That is an interesting assessment.
   The Standard Model came about around 30 years ago as an effort to use symmetry to organize a lot of experimental data.
   Back then,
   the primary competing theory to try to deal with the huge number of kinds of particles produced by accelerators was the bootstrap theory, which was sort of rule-based in that it was based on two principles:
   1 - unitarity and analyticity of scattering processes;
   2 - democracy among the many kinds of particles, with none being especially fundamental.
   Around the 1960s, bootstrap theory was almost as dominant as is today’s superstring theory. Indeed, they have philosophical similarities, and Ed Witten (leader of today’s superstring theorists) studied for his PhD under David Gross who studied for his PhD under Geoffrey Chew (leader of the old bootstrap theorists).

   However (sort of like superstring theory) the bootstrap theorists, despite years of effort, could not do calculations of the data produced by experiments,
   but
   by using gauge group symmetry the Standard Model people could do very accurate calculations, provided that they put by hand into the gauge group structures a couple of dozen or so curve-fitting parameters corresponding to particle masses, force strengths, etc.

   Even though the couple of dozen put-in-by-hand parameters were sort of embarrassing, the group symmetry calculations were (and still are) so accurate in describing experiment that most physicists like them a lot,
   and
   therefore consider that any larger symmetry that might dramatically reduce the number of put-in-by-hand fitting parameters would be sort of like a Holy Grail and they started using Grand Terms like Grand Unified Theory or Theory of Everything (particularly if gravity could also be described by any such larger symmetry).

   So, what Garrett Lisi did was to use the large symmetry of E8 in a way that (as far as I know) nobody else had used it (although there had been other work using E8 in different ways),
   and getting from that large symmetry a substantial reduction in how much had to be put-in-by-hand.
   He did in his title make a play on words such as “simple” which has not only its common meaning but also a technical math meaning for E8 and some other groups,
   but
   really he was only using a terminology that had been in common use in the physics world for years, by lots of other physicists,
   many of whom commonly used very much over-the-top terminology in their publications (such as one book about Higgs bosons entitled “The God Particle”).
   Also,
   when you read the fine print of his paper, you see that he only claims that it is a work in progress and may need various modifications to get a realistic huge reduction in the number of put-in-by-hand stuff. That is also common practice in the physics community, such as claims by the superstring community that superstring theory is “the only game in town” and the “best candidate for a Theory of Everything”, while in fact superstring theory is still itself a work in progress,
   so
   it seems to me that Garrett Lisi’s work is within the framework of common practice in the physics community, and that much of the criticism directed toward him is not only unwarranted, but motivated by jealousy of his favorable press coverage.

   Sorry for the length of this comment, but I wanted try to put the matter into some sort of historical perspective, and I apologize for errors and omissions in the above.

   Tony Smith

   PS - I should disclose that I have had internet discussions with Garrett Lisi over the years, and that he was nice enough to list me in the acknowledgments in his paper, and that I work along lines similar to his.

6. 6 Pioneer1 Feb 25th, 2008 at 8:12 pm

   Tony, many thanks for this comment and the historical perspective. I learned a lot.

   I didn’t know about the bootstrap theory. It seems that there is a distinction between my understanding of “rule based theory” and “a theory based on principle.” By rule I mean a proportionality that is used in computations, such as Kepler’s rule (Kepler’s third law).

   Wikipedia gives Einstein’s SR as a bootstrap theory because it is based on the equivalence principle. To me, equivalence principle is an axiom or a principle not a rule. It seems to me that unitarity, analyticity and democracy principles are also axioms used to build a theory. They are not rules or proportionalities. I believe that physicists call a proportionality symmetry.

   So that part of Standard Model, the symmetry part, is confusing to me. I have to go back and read a lot of history to eliminate all the labels physicists have been using as puns to understand what is underneath.

   “Putting by hand curve fitting parameters” implies to me that Standard Model and its derivatives are not rule based. So the order is like this

   first database (raw observations)

   first interpretation (standard model)

   second interpretation (mathematical models such as Lisi’s)

   In astronomy, NASA, or JPL, have given up on rule based computations long ago. They use numerical integration. My understanding is that this can be iterated indefinitely and very accurate results are obtained. I imagine Standard Model to be some such mathematical framework.

   Physicists look for regularity or symmetry in the database. Maybe something like what Kepler was doing when he was fitting Platonic solids to planetary motions or numerical guesses such as Titus-Bode law. I am not saying numerology is good or bad, I don’t know enough about it.

   Thanks also for putting Garrett Lisi’s work into perspective and as a product of physics system. Still, I think that overall, without isolating any individual physicist, the system is corrupt. More than that, it is controlled by the media. Once God Particle becomes a pun physicists exploit it to get funding and recognition and fame.

   Things that you list such as

   Using over-the-top terminology to sell books and draw media attention

   Papers with fine print where fine print contradict the title

   Put-in-by-hand stuff that allow free adjustments to make any predictions

   To make claims such as the theory one has been working on is “the only game in town” or that it is the “best candidate for a Theory of Everything”

   The recognition of a paper only after it is mentioned in the New Scientist

   all point to an unregulated professional industry where anything goes. In this unregulated industry what counts is authority. I think people are complaining that there is a string theory cabal controlling the arxiv.org. True or not I don’t know. But these things are not supposed to happen in science. They happen in legal professions.

   Thanks again.

1. 1 The first brand never dies at Freedom of Science Pingback on Mar 5th, 2008 at 7:48 pm

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