Freedom of Science

After reading a summary of Witten’s upcoming paper at Not Even Wrong I posted Witten’s Pyramid of Authority and also wrote about Witten’s toy fiefdom.

People who actually read the paper could not control their sarcasm either: gunpowder&noodles commenting on Not Even Wrong wrote:

For all my admiration for EW, and gratitude to him for the way he has changed the subject, I have to summarize the situation as follows: he has shown that gravity with the wrong sign of the CC in the wrong dimension is wrongly described by Chern-Simons. Next talk please…

In Week 254 Joan Baez looks at Witten’s paper:

What is weird is that Witten is using Chern-Simons theory to determine the allowed values of the cosmological constant even though he wants to study what happens if gravity is NOT described by Chern-Simons theory!

This is funny. But in a way I am surprised that Joan Baez, a veteran mathematical physicist, does not know, or at least I should say, pretends not to know, that there can be no contradictions in physics. We know that physicists have been unable to unify physics the last century or so and they unified the truth table instead. In physics, true, false; is, is not; yes, no; exists, exists not; all mean the same thing. In physics, no unrenormalizable contradictions exist. Authority is a function which transforms contradictions into laws of nature. Physicists feed the contradiction from one side and there comes out on the other side the renormalized non-contradiction with a nice marketable name. Witten has enough authority to rename any contradiction as Witten’s-next-toy and serve it as true law of physics. And get away with it.

And sure enough Baez writes:

Witten knows this is weird: later he says “we used the gauge theory approach to get some hints about the right values of the cosmological constant simply because it was the only tool available.”

It boggles the mind why physicists are still pretending to compute a value for the cosmological constant. Cosmological constant is a tired old whore who would sleep with whatever solution pays her 1, -1 or 0 or anything in between. So, just define a value, i.e. pay her what she wants, and don’t pretend that she is a physical quantity.

I loved this one:

Indeed, the whole paper seems designed to refute the notion that mathematicians get less daring as they get older.

Baez continues:

Witten writes: “We make at each stage the most optimistic possible assumption.” Perhaps he has some evidence for his guesses that he is not revealing yet.¹ Or perhaps he’s decided it takes courage verging on recklessness to track the Monster to its lair.

And the punch line:

Now let’s move from 3d quantum gravity to real-world particle physics….

Then, how come true physicists do not take action and do something about separating physics into True Physics and Fine Physics where Witten and his disciples can build toy universes and play with them in their own scholastic sandbox? The reason is that physics is an unregulated professional industry. In an unregulated professional industry the practitioners have absolute authority to define whatever they want as true definition in their field. This is the state of physics today. Yes. This means physics is done by authority. What is called physics today is alphysics.

The pyramid shows that Witten’s authority increases with every commentary his string theory disciples writes on his papers. Baez also alludes to this fact:

If history is any guide, we can expect to see armies of string theorists marching into this territory any day now.

But I wrote this post to tie it to the wonderful galaxy project that I mentioned yesterday. What is needed is really a social networking site where physicists, mathematicians and general public would collaborate to analyze absurd scholastic papers such as Witten’s paper. Once Witten’s paper is analyzed and each of his scholastic concepts are classified and reduced to their original meanings there will be nothing left in the paper.² But it will take one person a year to go through Witten’s scholastic polemics to reduce it to something meaningful. But 1000 mathematicians can do it in a day or two. Can physicists and mathematicians collaborate in such a project? I believe they can. What do you think?

1. The pyramid says:  “Witten defines his choices as true choices.” Therefore, all Witten’s guesses will eventually acquire the status of laws of physics. Witten does not have to reveal any evidence for his guesses. There is no standard of evidence in physics.  [↩]
2. Someone actually did this and reported it a few years back in sci.physics.research. [↩]

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