Engr. Ravi <
ravic...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Friday, March 12, 2021 at 11:40:33 PM UTC+5:30,
bodk...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> As is well known, things only got worse for physics since QED. The
>>> revered Standard Model/QCD/QFT, when examined more closely turns out be
>>> another rotten sausage.
>> There you go. QFT is obvious garbage, according to you.
>
> No, again you put words into my mouth. I'm NOT saying QFT is "obvious garbage".
Well, “rotten sausage” seems like garbage to me.
> All I'm saying is that the actual experimental evidence for QFT is a far
> cry from the usual claims that SM/QCD/QFT is "a thoroughly confirmed
> theory". Read Unzicker's book, "Bankrupting Physics" and you'll get a
> whole new perspective regarding such claims.
First off, as others have pointed out, it’s not black and white and no one
knowledgeable claims it is, except maybe in gee-whiz popularizations. If
someone like Unziger publishes a book that has as its buzz line “You’ve
been told this whole time it’s White and it’s Not White at all!”, well,
that’s not really a revelation. Of COURSE there are issues with QCD, not
the least of which that perturbation calculations blow up pretty badly
because of the size of the coupling constant, and so the calculation method
that worked admirably for QED won’t work for QCD, but that does not really
address whether it is a good representation of reality but rather makes it
more challenging to produce predictions in some energy domains. That
doesn’t mean it’s rotten sausage at all.
Likewise in QED there was back in the 60s a lot of agonizing over
renormalization to handle the infinities of bare charge and bare mass of
point leptons, and whether that was mathematically rigorous. Feynman’s
famous argument here is that mathematical rigor is something you can
establish after the fact, once it’s agreed by all that it works to high
precision. And it’s true that not ALL predictions of QED are good to 12
digits. Who cares? That was never the claim. The Lamb shift calculation is
good to six digits, but the fact is that competing models didn’t get it
right to two. So does pointing out that twelve-digit confirmation is
perhaps a limited statement or could even be interpreted as an
overstatement and indication that it’s rotten sausage? No, it just means
that gee-whiz popularizations should always be taken with a grain of salt
and used as a springboard for deeper readings at a more precise (and
technically demanding) level.
>
>>> Alexander Unzicker does a great job of exposing how unreliable the
>>> experimental confirmation of SM/QCD/QFT is, despite claims that the SM is
>>> another thoroughly confirmed theory.
>>>
>>> String theory is of course the emperor parading naked, and Peter Woit
>>> does an excellent job playing the role of the child.
>>>
>> If you read Woit — actually read him — recall his complaint that string
>> theory makes no definitive testable predictions, and hence is not even a
>> physics theory. This is much different than the standard model, which has
>> made hundreds of definitive predictions validated in experiment. See the
>> difference?
>
> My point, put another way, is that the difference between String theory
> and SM, QED is a matter of degree: String Theory has not a single
> experimental prediction confirmed to-date (and more importantly possibly
> never will), while QCD/QED supposedly have "excellent" experimental
> confirmation, but when examined more closely, the experimental support is
> found to be a far cry from the standard narrative.
Again, that depends on what you consider “standard narrative”. If you
thought the standard narrative is that the Standard Model is bulletproof,
without any historical reservations, without any open questions, and with
unassailable precision that proves that it is THE answer, then that
narrative is indeed false — but so what?
There is a fundamental difference between string theory and the Standard
Model. String theory lacks any firm predictions, aside from accessible low
energy supersymmetric partners that have not been seen. The Standard Model
has made scores of predictions ranging from 3-jet collider events at the
right rate and right angular distributions, to the W/Z mass ratio, which
have been validated to solid precision. Certainly better than any other
candidates.
>
> By contrast, the experimental evidence for SR/GR, in terms of predictions
> matching observations can be called excellent. My problem with SR/GR is
> different. I think these theories are physically ABSURD and there is very
> likely a physically meaningful (and very likely more complex) theory that
> can explain these results based on a RATIONAL aether.
>
Fine, propose a rational aether theory that competes. Otherwise, what’s to
be gained by complaining that it doesn’t “feel right” to you? Think back to
Dirac’s comment about renormalization not feeling right. Does it have to?