Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons and Alternative Theories of Everything

There’s a new very thought-provoking book out from Margaret Wertheim, entitled Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons and Alternative Theories of Everything. Much of the book is the beautifully told story of “outsider” physicist Jim Carter, who has spent much of his life developing an alternative fundamental physics theory based on objects he calls “circlons”.

I have to confess that, while respecting the impetus that leads people to develop such theories, I have essentially zero sympathy for this kind of thing as science. As Wertheim explains

In Jim’s theory of the universe, everything is mechanical; like INCOBO [an internal combustion boiler he designed], the world he imagines is made up of simple mechanically interlocking parts. As with his engine, none of the parts are complicated and you don’t need much mathematics to understand how it works…

One way to think about what Jim Carter is doing is that he insists on a universe he can comprehend. As with the old Chryslers and Cadillacs that grace his front yard, Jim demands a cosmos he can figure out for himself.

One way in which I’m very different than Jim Carter is that I’ve never been one for insisting on ideas that I can figure out for myself. I’m grateful for and fascinated by the fact that there’s a huge amount of knowledge about the universe out there discovered over centuries by a collaboration of a long list of brilliant people, and many places to try and learn about it. This kind of learning is a joy, and not being willing to engage with and try and appreciate the accumulated wisdom of the human race to me makes no sense. When I got to the point of learning about quantum theory, it became clear to me that this was something of great power and beauty, carrying the lesson that at a fundamental level the world is very different than the mechanical picture we derive from our human-scale intuitions. At the same time, fundamental physics and mathematics are deeply intertwined, with the deepest ideas in mathematics showing up when one tries to understand the deepest questions about physics.

The basic problem with efforts like Carter’s is that the tools and ideas he is using just aren’t powerful enough. There’s no way they can be used to understand the universe (and test one’s understanding by calculating from theory and comparing to experiment) with anything like the power of the Standard Model or general relativity. Anyone who wants to do better than the Standard Model or GR has to come up with equally powerful ideas. It seems unlikely that this can be done by any means other than understanding well the ideas behind these theories, as well as their weaknesses, as a starting point to look for something new.

Wertheim discusses a range of other failed and “outsider” ideas about physics. She sees an analog of Carter’s vision in the the 19th century work of prominent scientists like Tait and Thomson, who studied smoke rings as a phenomenon that might model physics at the atomic scale. More recently, Steven Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science featured claims that conventional fundamental physics could be replaced with ideas about cellular automata. Wolfram is a MacArthur winner, and Ph.D. in particle theory, so it’s not by credentials alone that one can identify “outsiders” barking up an unpromising tree.

Remarkably, Wertheim explains that her motivation for writing the book came from attending a 2003 conference on string cosmology at the Santa Barbara KITP. This was at the beginning of the “string theory anthropic multiverse” madness which has afflicted the field since that time. In 1998 she had attended with Carter an annual meeting of the NPA (National Philosophy Alliance), a group of “outsider” physicists, and she was shocked to find the KITP hosting something that seemed not obviously different:

That string cosmology conference I attended was by far the most surreal physics event I have been to, more bizarre than any NPA event for the very reason that this was not a fringe affair but a star-studded proceeding involving some of the most famous names in science…

After two days, I couldn’t decide if the atmosphere was more like a children’s birthday party or the Mad Hatter’s tea party – in either case, everyone was high…

… the attitude among the string cosmologists seemed to be that anything that wasn’t logically disallowed must be out there somewhere. Even things that weren’t allowed couldn’t be ruled out, because you never knew when the laws of nature might be bent or overruled. This wasn’t student fantasizing in some late night beer-fueled frenzy, it was the leaders of theoretical physics speaking at one of the most prestigious university campuses in the world.

Besides the difference in credentials, there is an important difference between most recent mainstream theoretical work, even when in multiverse madness mode, and that of the “outsiders” of the NPA. Mainstream theorists recognize that they need to be compatible with the SM and GR. What they are doing is working within a conjectural extension (call it “M-theory”) of the SM and GR, claiming to preserve the successes of those theories. In principle, working this way should provide a very tight constraint on what you can do. The problem though is that one doesn’t know exactly what “M-theory” is. All one has is a list of conjectured characteristics, and these seem to be weak enough to allow a vast array of “vacua”, of such complexity as to effectively remove much in the way of constraints on what you can observe at low energy. Since the conference Wertheim attended in 2003, there have been huge efforts made to extract some non-trivial implications out of this “landscape” scenario, with no success. In practice things have in many cases degenerated to the level of “outsider” physics: anything goes, and one ends up with a group of people making ambitious claims about their wonderful theory, with no conceivable way for such claims to be tested or backed up.

All in all, I think this is an important book, one which raises in an interesting way fundamental issues about how people think about and conduct research into fundamental theoretical physics. We’re at an unusual point in the history of the subject, one where the foundations of how this kind of science has traditionally been done are being questioned. Wertheim’s contribution to this questioning is worth paying attention to.

For some other recent reviews, see John Horgan here, and Michael Shermer here.

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56 Responses to Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons and Alternative Theories of Everything

  1. When you say “…I have essentially zero sympathy for this kind of thing as science” are you talking specifically about Carter’s work or do you mean this more generally? For instance, do you have the same feelings towards Penrose’s Twister Theory? I would not consider Penrose (and others) “outsiders” as Carter is but am just curious if your statement encompassed people (and theories) such as Penrose. Thanks!

  2. Peter Woit says:

    J. Caleb Wherry,

    As I try and explain in the next paragraph, my lack of sympathy is for the idea of new foundations of physics built out of simple mechanical ideas, requiring little mathematics or anything beyond everyday intuition to comprehend. Penrose’s twistors are very different.

  3. Anonymous says:

    I used to be very much in favor of alternative theories to physics. I still am, but after studying physics I only endorse the efforts of folks that are at least trying to maintain some consistency with what we already know. But it really gets me when people try the angle of trying to take the math out of physics. It reminds me of Sarah Palin trying to say we need a regular person in the white house and not a politician. I think it would be great if everyone could understand all the intricate details of physics, but the lazy approach or the idea that we can “dumb down” physics is completely absurd.

    I have people tell me that sacred geometry leads to a theory of everything with almost no math. But these sorts of things are far from rigorous. So again, I understand science is driven by many alternate approaches, but like you said, there are some avenues that are just silly to go down.

  4. anon says:

    The crackpots who disregard mathematics are easy to identify. But on the other hand, there are crackpots who know much more sophisticated math than most physicists. This category even includes some professional mathematicians who stray into physics. Their problem is that they think whatever beautiful math must lead to promising theory in fundamental physics, with total ignorance of phenomenology and experiments.

  5. Bee says:

    I think the issue has two causes. First, there is an ever widening gap between what’s going on in modern theoretical physics and what the average person has learned. Second, the average person has no clue how large that gap really is. So there is the occasional know-it-all who believes he has solved all problems without even understanding what the problems are to begin with. I believe this is supported by an abundance of terribly dumbed-down popular science books that leave the reader with the justified feeling like they can do better, without providing a guide how to, or without at least saying it’s dumbed-down.

    I have no clue what that particular string cosmology conference is she is talking about, but I suspect her impression is partly fed by her own lack of knowledge. I am not very fond of all the bubble-stuff, but some aspects of string cosmology are actually quite interesting, esp when it comes to CMB polarization. I am hoping we’ll be able to sort out some models in the next years, and that will be a good thing.

  6. Paulibus says:

    Peter : you’re quite right; Margaret Wertheim’s book is thought provoking, especially for those frustrated by the sterility of lots of today’s theoretical physics. Your first quote is particularly apt:

    …what Jim Carter (her special crackpot) is doing is (insisting) on a universe he can comprehend. As with the old Chryslers and Cadillacs that grace his front yard, Jim demands a cosmos he can figure out for himself.

    That’s just what string theorists seem to have been (collectively) doing for the last forty years or so. They accepted Einstein’s optimistic aphorism about the surprising comprehensibility (for us) of the universe. It’s been brave of them, but sadly they’ve not had the restraining benefit of making confirmed predictions to keep them on the rails.

    Perhaps, though, they’ve taught us (as Margaret Wertheim seems to be suggesting) that such optimism may just be anthro’centric hubris — like Einstein’s happy thought, so well justified in that case by his geometrical description of gravity. But here in the 21st Century biologists and paleoantologists have pretty well confirmed for us Darwin’s opinion, namely that the world is packed with us and our animal cousins, all quite similarly driven by quite similar DNA. Some, like my cat and the vervet monkeys in my trees, (probably) lack the capacity for understanding the universe fully. Perhaps we are also so limited, despite our wonderful discovery/invention of the Platonic world/language of mathematics.

    Thanks for reviewing this book.

  7. Christian Takacs says:

    It’s simply scandalous that anyone should try return physics to the understanding of the mechanical underpinnings of how the universe functions, instead of the far superior methodology of faith in anthropic principals, imaginary multiverses, virtual messenger photons, Higgs Bosons (31 flavors don’t cha know!!), renormalization of infinite answers from finite quantities, and logical paradoxes loaded high with contradictions galore lined up like added features in a car salesman’s pitch. After all, EVERYONE knows that all REAL understanding has ALWAYS come from the established academic elite, not common inventors, astronomy buffs, bicycle mechanics and patent clerks who presumed to try something without the blessing and peer review of their betters. Please for the love of truth, put the Hubris away Peter. From the debates that have gone on in your own site, it is quite apparent to even the lowly layman that esoteric theoretical mathematics have run rampant, wild, and free for decades… and made a hash of comprehending physics as anything other than verbose numerical onanism, or science fiction. Take your pick. Either way, someone is coming to change things . That someone is not going to be coming from inside your august academic ranks, or speak in the buzz words and tongues preferred by the HEP mathematical priesthood… that much is painfully obvious.

  8. Dave says:

    @Christian
    We are on the verge of discovering a particle which allow us to confirm the correctness of a theory explaining how a unified force is observed as two separate forces. This is quite a feat of theoretical and experimental physics and is truly Nobel prize winning. Along the way it will also the falsification (or confirmation of the correctness) of a number of models of symmetry breaking. All of this came from the particle physics mainstream. How does that fit into your worldview ?

    Also, how do you know the next big thing will come from outside of the pp mainstream ? You write that this is “painfully obvious” – can you share your soothsaying secrets and lay down the chain of logic which allows you to make such a declaratory statement devoid of uncertainty ?

  9. james says:

    Great review. I think in between the outsider crackpots and the fading string theorists there’s reason to be optimistic. A new generation can start fresh. I dont think the foundations of science will change. String theory failed to predict the physical constants of our universe, la la la, so string theorists give up with the possibility of multiverses with a wide array of constants. Kind of embarassing, but understandable. They can work on this stuff in their later years.. Fresh minds come out of school. There’ll be more people working on a consistent mathematical theory that has the standard model and its 40+ parameters as a unique prediction.

  10. Bobito says:

    The basic failure of the best, most imaginative physics crackpots is to forget that physics is an empirical science, and that what does not explain observed phenomena in a way useful for later building instruments and devices is really quite useless, and, moreover, not physics.

    The psychological failure that leads to this is often related to a deeply entrenched arrogance. It is simply impossible that one person can reproduce the cumulative efforts of the hardest working, most imaginative scientists over several centuries.

  11. Yatima says:

    @Takacs

    You write sarcastically: “all REAL understanding has ALWAYS come from the established academic elite, not common inventors, astronomy buffs, bicycle mechanics and patent clerks”

    Please remind yourself of the fact that the fêted “patent clerk” had a prior good grounding in / knack for mathematical physics and could base his understanding on the previous work of Maxwell, Hertz, Lorentz and Poincaré (with the equations already fully formed) as well as the experiments of Michelson and Morley and “just” had to look at the ideas in a new way. And even then, Minkovsky had to come in to clean up the formalism. The next step (1915) came after the use of *more* amazing math combined with persistency and hard work over 10 years.

    “That someone is not going to be coming from inside your august academic ranks, or speak in the buzz words and tongues preferred by the HEP mathematical priesthood… that much is painfully obvious.”

    The Chinese Cookie you will open today says “You are wrong”. Now go and start working on Group Theory.

  12. Danny Black says:

    Yatima,

    one should also remember that special relativity was not really a major contribution as it was “in the air”, if Einstein hadn’t come up with it someone else would have. As you pointed out Lorenz – from the “established elite” – had already come up with the key transforms and Poincare was close to establishing the same facts. Einstein essentially let the equations speak for themselves.

    By the time Einstein DID come up with something original and unexpected – General Relativity – he was well established.

    I am struggling to think of a major maths or physics breakthrough that was made by some “crank” outside the “academic elite” in the last 200 years, especially as one can argue the term “academic elite” only really gathered force in the late 19th century.

  13. Peter Woit says:

    Bee,

    Wertheim has a physics degree and some experience among physicists. The string cosmology conference was in 2003 at the KITP, probably one of the first conference dominated by “the landscape”, so at the height of enthusiasm for that idea. More recent conferences on the topic might have struck Wertheim differently, with the landscape proponents having eight years of going nowhere making for a lot less enthusiasm.

  14. Joel Rice says:

    There may be a lot of dumbed down popularized stuff out there, but there is also Veltman’s book, not to mention Feynman’s QED . If these folks want to see what they are really up against they should be reading Schweber’s QED and the men who made it, and contemplating what it was like when Dirac was pestering Feynman with “but is it unitary” ! It is unconscionable to have the bad books driving out the good.

  15. Giotis says:

    “Even things that weren’t allowed couldn’t be ruled out, because you never knew when the laws of nature might be bent or overruled.”

    This isn’t true. The fundamental principles of nature cannot be bent or overruled in the multiverse picture.

    No String theorist or cosmologist could have made such assertion. Obviously the author hasn’t the slightest idea about String theory or Cosmology. Her reaction is the naive reaction of an outsider.

  16. Jack Lothian says:

    Giotis,

    Outsider-insider?? Just what do these terms mean. If she has a physics degree, she has to be in the top fractional percent of people who might be capable of understanding this type of complex math/physics. Are you saying only string-theory practitioners can understand this stuff and everyone else is a dilettante and incapable of offering valid criticism?
    Her comment: “Even things that weren’t allowed couldn’t be ruled out, because you never knew when the laws of nature might be bent or overruled.” May be a bit over-the-top & phrased in a way that I am sure no true believer would phrase it but the comment is a not an unreasonable précis of many comments that I have read here.

  17. Peter Woit says:

    Giotis,

    If you interpret “Laws of Nature = Lagrangian of SM + GR”, what she is saying here makes perfect sense.

    About this time, possibly in reaction to the same conference, David Gross in his conference talks started quoting Churchill’s words during the Nazi bombardment of London (“never, never…. give up!”) as a call to arms to particle theorists to resist multiverse madness. It wasn’t only “outsiders” who were appalled by this…

  18. Giotis says:

    Peter,

    When we talk about laws of nature we mean the fundamental principles. Fundamental laws are the principles of QM for example and these you can’t bend.

    The content of SM is a derived concept, not a fundamental law/principle.

    Regarding GR, the low energy limit of String theory is just supergravity which fully respects GR as an effective description of Gravity.

    The author (due to ignorance I believe) gives the false impression that everything goes in the multiverse. This isn’t true. There are fundamental physical laws which must be respected and deep physical principles you can’t bend.

    Jack Lothian,

    “Are you saying only string-theory practitioners can understand this stuff and everyone else is a dilettante and incapable of offering valid criticism?”

    No, but of course you must have studied the theory at least in some depth to have an opinion. This could take months or years depending on your background. The author obviously hasn’t done that and a Physics degree doesn’t mean anything in that respect.

  19. D R Lunsford says:

    Peter wrote (beautifully)

    “One way in which I’m very different than Jim Carter is that I’ve never been one for insisting on ideas that I can figure out for myself. I’m grateful for and fascinated by the fact that there’s a huge amount of knowledge about the universe out there discovered over centuries by a collaboration of a long list of brilliant people, and many places to try and learn about it. This kind of learning is a joy, and not being willing to engage with and try and appreciate the accumulated wisdom of the human race to me makes no sense. ”

    Yes that’s about the entire matter right there -it’s really a cultural matter. As long as the culture is respected, you can stand up for whatever you want to – but you have to make some effort to take in what has been done before. If you don’t at least try that, then you don’t get a ticket to enter the contest.

    And what’s really frustrating, is to see that culture threatened by unphysical ideas, and there’s not much you can do to change it. At some point you lose patience and become Christopher Hitchens.

    -drl

  20. Marco Masi says:

    Woit says: “When I got to the point of learning about quantum theory, it became clear to me that this was something of great power and beauty, carrying the lesson that at a fundamental level the world is very different than the mechanical picture we derive from our human-scale intuitions.”

    And this is the main reason I don’t believe in string theory. A world which is too ‘classical’, intuitive, and made of ‘objects’ like strings or membranes, D-branes, etc. which please homo sapiens’ belief system and his human-scale perceptual mind made of forms in space and time, but which is far from the very different story QM is trying to tell us. What we know about is a micro-world where forces are exchanged indeterminstically, showing up as particles and yet behaving like waves, in a nonlocal context where things appear entangled in space (and possibly also in time), etc. Where is there any place left for ‘objects’ like vibrating strings having tension and extension, or sharp N-dim curled up spacetime manifolds? There is nothing like that ‘down there’, neither more no less than there are colors, tastes or smells. These are only our anthropocentric reifications. And unfortunately this is what most ‘outsiders’ have in common with those who they claim to challenge with their ‘new’ theory when they think in terms of ‘circlons’ type of stuff.

    So, what about going back to basics? But we have been told “shut up and calculate”. In fact it worked for some time egregiously and that gave us the SM. String theorists where encouraged by this and now want to ‘save the appearances’ at all costs. But epicycles and defernts did that for a long time too, and yet turned out to be the wrong worldview nevertheless. I would not be surprised to see history condemning string theorists as the new Aristotelians.

  21. Giotis says:

    I forgot to respond about David Gross,

    Gross reacted this way for completely different reasons. He never said that the theoretical structure/reasoning which leads to the Multiverse picture is crazy or unfounded. He just believes that is too early to make such claims since the theory is not mature enough to assert that the landscape is indeed its definitive prediction.

  22. LHB Jr says:

    Outsiders can be useful in breaking GroupThink. One excellent example of this is Yuri Knorozov. He was a pioneer in deciphering Mayan script. He lived in the Soviet Union, isolated from Western educational institutions, and brought a fresh (and ultimately correct) view of how to read Mayan script.

    Interestingly enough, he did this when progress in decipherment had stagnated.

    Given the vast democratization of information resources provided by the Internet, I don’t see why a particularly clever person, with relatively modest training compared to today’s elite, couldn’t spark an insight that leads to a major advance in theoretical physics. Maybe it will require an outsider. As Yuri’s Wikipedia page says:

    He(Yuri) was perhaps shielded to some extent from the ramifications of peer disputation, since his position and standing at the institute was not adversely influenced by criticism from Western academics.

  23. Peter Orland says:

    Giotis,

    You say the standard model is a “derived concept”, but the rules of quantum mechanics are “fundamental”. By that standard, all Lagrangians are derived concepts (if I understand your meaning).

    I have seen similar arguments before by landscape advocates, trying to say that the standard model is not a theory of nature, hence we have to something more “fundamental”. This is philosophy, not physics. Furthermore, it is not good philosophy.

    The principles of quantum mechanics aren’t very useful as form. They require content. I don’t care whether the content meets somene’s standard of fundamental.

    This wordplay distinguishing “derived concepts” from “fundamental laws” ones is not meaningful. There is no physics without the former, such as a force law or a Lagrangian. By itself, the latter is hot air.

  24. anonomous says:

    If somebody found a way to find more symmetry in the SM with fewer equations that reduces the number of free parameters, then that should be considered a breakthrough. This is not the same as dumbing down the math, but simplifying it to within a greater symmetry of known results. Of course the new model would have to match all known experimental results and predict new ones – but clearly the current path between GR and the SM is not working, so we need to try something new.

  25. Peter Woit says:

    Giotis,

    I don’t think Gross (or Churchill) was saying that “it’s too early” to give up. They were both saying “Never, Never, Never, etc. give up”, which is kind of different. It would be interesting to ask Gross what he would do in the event that string/M-theory is completely understood, but shown to have so many vacua of such complexity that you could never predict anything. I suspect he’d say that one should still not give up, but look for an alternate, better theory that was predictive. But, you’d have to ask him…

  26. There is no reason why the likes of Fermat, Ramanujan, Faraday or Pascal not to exist today.

    I know the common belief is that science is now a collective effort,. Yet there’s also no example of revolutions of science that have not been brought upon by individuals who thought outside the box, and often outside institutions. There is a reason for that. The kind of synthesis of knowledge and intellectual leaps required can only be done within the individual mind.

  27. Hendrik says:

    Thank you Peter, that’s a great review.

    The fascination with outsider science springs maybe from the fact that we all have a bit of the outsider scientist in us,- after all, to solve a problem with substance requires thinking outside of the box. (Of course there are degrees of how far out an outsider is.)
    According to Kuhn, scientific revolutions originate with the outsiders (the “seers” of Lee Smolin?), so it is good to have them around.

    But perhaps the new element illustrated with string theory, is that an outsider theory can become mainstream, not by surpassing the experimental & predictive successes of its predecessors, but by sociological forces alone. Maybe an example that an outsider theory can be detrimental to science. An indication that the mechanisms of science (or physics) may be in disrepair.

  28. Carl Sagan addressed this in an episode of Cosmos. There was a psychiatrist who tried to introduce a crackpot theory for the creation of the solar system. His hypothesis was pretty easy to dispute, but he was censored by mainstream scientists. Sagan’s point was that we don’t know where the next big insight will come from, so we shouldn’t reject ideas out of hand just because they don’t meet a certain aesthetic. He also said that the suppression of ideas has no place in science. 

  29. G Alex says:

    Yes, everybody officially welcomes ‘outsiders’. If you ask academics if they appreciate free thinking and original ideas everyone will tell you “of course I do, I even encourage it”. But that’s easier said than done and truth is different. The present academic system on the contrary accurately rejects from the outset those who dare to come up with their own research project based on unconventional ideas, especially if it does not fit with their ideological background. I found many of these then complaining that their students, despite being brilliant and well versed in the subject, for some reason they can’t understand, lack nevertheless of novel insights. But that’s no wonder… And when I hear about how ‘suppression of ideas has no place in science’ I can only lough about it. If not suppressed they are certainly discouraged to say the least. It is something intrinsic and deeply ingraved in our academic mindset itself.

  30. Bob Levine says:

    I’m afraid that some of the commenters here are forgetting a basic principle of scientific innovation: at *some* point, the novel approach must account at least equally well for the full range of facts as the conventional approach(es) it seeks to replace. People who complain about the rejection-out-of-hand of new or highly unorthodox hypotheses (or, at a more fundamental level, theories) should ask themselves if those hypotheses have come anywhere close to duplicating the predictive/retrodictive successes of the current ‘mainstream’ treatments, whatever they happen to be. That’s what the notion ‘burden of proof’ is all about. As far as I can tell, having *that* engraved in the ‘academic mindset’ is the reason why progress in science occurs is even possible.

  31. G Alex says:

    Yes precisely, at *some* point. But how can something get at that point if it is rejected out-of-hand? While the ‘mainstream’ approaches are frequently seen to be allowed to go far beyond that point, even if they failed in producing testable results.

  32. I think that the important, and difficult thing to do, is to distinguish between people with very unorthodox ideas (call them “outsiders” if you want, but they might also be found in academia), and crackpots (they can sometimes be found in academia too). Some have insisted here on the point that new ideas must always be compatible with known facts : this is certainly true but it is sometimes a difficult thing to judge (a striking example here is string theory). So it can’t be taken against a new idea that it does not fit at once with all the known phenomema, since it might be a very long process to derive these phenomena from a theory. It is even possible that a incomplete, but in the end right, theory be for some time in violent disagreement with observation (think of the heliocentric theory which was unable to explain why we are not flung in outer space by the rotation of the Earth until Galileo came with a new theory of motion).
    Perhaps a demarcation line could be found between reactionnary ideas and ideas which are only unorthodox, even wild, speculations.
    Crackpots often tend to hold reactionnary ideas. By this I mean that they want to go back to an outdated world view : whatever the next revolution in physics will be, it will certainly not be to go back to some incarnation of Newtonian mechanics.

  33. skeptical says:

    People here seem to be suggesting that professional physicists should carefully consider every idea thrown at them in blog comments or on websites. Obviously, if they were to do this they would not have time to do anything else. The unfortunate fact is that the vast, vast majority of ideas from outside academia are nonsense (some ideas from inside academia are also nonsense, of course). I know it was true in the past that plucky outsiders with a different viewpoint could make a big impact, but that is simply not possible today. To see how to go beyond our current best theories you absolutely must be well-versed in them, and that is well-nigh impossible if you’re not a professional. It’s a pity that this is the case, but there you are.

  34. Mark Bennet says:

    Answering skeptical: there is a tension between being so inducted into the current model that you can’t think differently, and knowing enough about the current model that you are confident/foolish/bold (same thing?) in thinking differently.

    If a different model from the current one is required – think relativity or quantum mechanics -v- what went before – the person who makes the next great advance will have to be versed in the right material which is radically different from the Standard Model. They will inevitably also have to know why the Standard Model is so compelling over the range of physical experiment for which it “works” – so will need to have that aspect tied up: and that will no longer be possible for an amateur observer like me: probably.

  35. anonymous says:

    What happens is that the constant rejection of all ideas that seem crazy (like Plate Tectonics, which very slowly gained acceptance even though it had quite a bit of evidence), slows down growth in the field and creates a very disheartened attitude from the public, some of whom think about becoming scientists and then wonder if they can handle the bureaucracy. Slow and careful, but not so slow and careful that the field dies an early death.

  36. Bob Levine says:

    “What happens is that the constant rejection of all ideas that seem crazy (like Plate Tectonics, which very slowly gained acceptance even though it had quite a bit of evidence), slows down growth in the field and creates a very disheartened attitude from the public, some of whom think about becoming scientists and then wonder if they can handle the bureaucracy. Slow and careful, but not so slow and careful that the field dies an early death.”

    Wait a second. Plate tectonics was rejected at first, then became increasingly favored as paleontological and stratigraphic evidence accumulated, and is now the fundamental framework of geology. And geology is a thriving scientific field. How does the example plate tectonics serve to counter the claim that if an idea is robust, and succeeds in motivating a variety of independent lines of evidence, it *will* survive in the face of severe scrutiny? Isn’t plate tectonics in fact a poster child for the vitality of ideas that really *are* correct, and for the position that the bar needs to be set high enough that only such ideas survive, and then only after proving themselves on multiple empirical fronts?

    And are you really suggesting that people don’t go into science because they’re discouraged by the fact that very high standards of explanatory and descriptive adequacy must be met before being accepted into the body of scientific knowledge?

  37. G Alex says:

    Fabien, and skeptical I’m not talking about crackpots or people who self-learned outside the academia but of professionals and students inside of it. I have seen several trying to advance novel ideas and research lines but saw it rejected, not on the basis of being ‘crackpotish’, but because they did not fit with the selecting committee/supervisor agenda and ideological approaches on how to solve a problem or on what is “interesting” and what is not. Those students and researchers who have original ideas but are not that good in politics and in pleasing the hierarchy (and perhaps are the shy introvert guy), even don’t dare to come up with something which is not strictly in line with the mainstream paradigm. Because after some attempts of having done so they learn quickly how it will end. And this state of affairs became even worse in the last two decades or so also in fields traditionally open to free thinking and which underwent a centralization based on the ideal of the ‘big science’ where reserach is conceived as in an assembly line and has to obey the diktats of few ‘science top managers’ (who in turn are also heavily dependent from the diktats of outside fundings). It is a matter of culture, it is the idea of how to conceive and organize research and education which has gone astray. In this climate the new Einstein for sure will soon leave or even never grow up.

  38. Casey Leedom says:

    People keep bringing up Einstein as an example of an “outsider who actually came up with something new.” Hogwash. Einstein built his ideas on the evidence and the ideas of all who had come before him. If he had existed 200 years earlier he might have been bright enough to have come up with some revolutionary idea about mechanics. But he would’t have come up with Special- and then later General-Relativity. He needed the input of Maxwell and a whole host of others to build his ideas upon. People who wander off the beaten path and come up with something new are the ones who _do_ pay attention to the work that’s gone before them and then find new insights from that information.

  39. Bobito says:

    There is a strong psychological tendency to celebrate the outsider, or the supposed outside (to label Einstein a “patent clerk” and try to portray him as an outsider is to exhibit a complete ignorance of the circumstances of his education and employment – he was highly educated in the classical sense and conversant with the relevant literature). The typical profile of the successful physicist is more like that of Chandrasekhar than that of Ramanujan – child of intellectuals, nephew of Raman, and supremely educated in the classics of both the east and west, in physics and outside of it too.

  40. Proudmemberofthecult says:

    Why apply the ‘outsider’ label only to string cosmologists? There’s more communities like this out there. AdS/CMT is heading this way. Loop quantum gravity is here already…

  41. Robert Plant says:

    With regard to Carter’s work – I can only add: In my thoughts I have seen, rings of smoke through the trees – and the voices of those who stand looking.

  42. srp says:

    One must distinguish between theoretical and empirical “crackpots.” Arp was the consummate insider until his inconvenient observations and interpretations got him tossed from mainstream astronomy. Frank and the late Sigwarth paid a huge professional price for their empirical work. Krisch seems to have come through by soft-peddling (judging from his U.Mich bio page) the importance of his anomalous findings, but neither do I sense any groundswell by theorists to either show that those findings can be accommodated in the SM or to use them to go beyond it.

    Read Benford’s entertaining novel Timescape for an insider account of how professionals feel about discovering revolutionary empirical facts. Hint: Their initial impulse is often to try to bury them to avoid trouble. I bet there was a strong faction that wanted to do that on the recent superluminal neutrino claim, and I tip my hat to the team for releasing the controversial findings.

  43. emile says:

    When circlon theory can get the first 10 digits of the gyromagnetic ratio of the electron right, I promise I will then pay attention.

  44. Coin says:

    Giotis: “This isn’t true. The fundamental principles of nature cannot be bent or overruled in the multiverse picture.”

    It seems to me like you can’t really say this because there is more than one choice of multiverse. Certainly in a Tegmarkian multiverse (MUH!) “everything goes”. How do we meaningfully determine whether we are in the Tegmarkian everything-goes multiverse, or in the constrained m-theory multiverse, or maybe even a non-string chaotic-inflation multiverse (which is also constrained but in a potentially different way from in m-theory)?

    And even if we pick the m-theory multiverse– can you really tell me that there is exactly one way to formulate the m-theory multiverse such that string multiversers would all agree on which physical ideas are fixed and which vary between different points in the multiverse?

    Once you’ve decided to start walling off physical principles as chance whims of the multiverse, I don’t really see what principle we have to guide us as to when to *stop*. Why *not* go full Tegmark and suggest the “fundamental principles” of the m-theory multiverse (like QM) are just due to local multiverse conditions as well?

  45. anonomous says:

    Bob,

    Here is a good read on how plate tectonics was shot down by physicist Scheiddiger (who’s arguments were strictly theoretical) in 1953, some 41 years after Wegener (who was not a geologist) proposed the theory in 1912 after seeing how the continential pieces might fit together:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_drift

    Yes, there was very good evidence in 1968, but there was quite a bit of circumstantial evidence for 40 years prior and the extreme rejection of an idea that was considered fairly simple (the pieces fit together on a globe) may play out again in physics.

  46. Trulo says:

    how professionals feel about discovering revolutionary empirical facts. Hint: Their initial impulse is often to try to bury them to avoid trouble.

    Funny you would say so, when the entire particle physics community has been begging for decades for at least a single shred of a tiny departure of empirical data from the SM.
    Revolutionary empirical facts is what everyone would love to see. The Higgs boson empirically excluded with 95% confidence from 115GeV all the way to 1TeV, for example, would have been pretty cool. Alas, it seems nature chose to stick to the SM. It’s not the theoreticians’ fault, just as it is not a government conspiracy that cold fusion was obviously wrong from the beginning, or that Opera needs to do a lot more work before their observation of superluminal neutrinos can be remotely believable.

    Transgression may be valuable by itself in poetry, but science does not work that way and it never has.

  47. srp says:

    I agree that particle physics has been so starved for new findings that the situation is different at present. (BTW, I haven’t been following the rumors closely, but aren’t you jumping the gun on the Higgs?) And a systematic error at OPERA is also my best guess about what is going on with the neutrino claim. On the other hand, I don’t sense great community excitement about the apparent huge proton transverse-spin anomalies, which appear to be well-verified. And I’ve seen little buzz about claimed anomalies in radioactive decay during solar flares–perhaps these are also assumed to be obvious experimental errors.

    I don’t think not finding the Higgs counts as an “anomaly” in the same sense because lots of people anticipated the possibility. When the organisms under your microscope spell out “take me to your leader” that’s an anomaly. (Check your colleagues’ propensity for calligraphically daubing growth medium on your slides before you call the newspapers.)

  48. Zathras says:

    Trulo: “… the entire particle physics community has been begging for decades for at least a single shred of a tiny departure of empirical data from the SM.”

    True. The question then has to be asked, why does there have to be anything beyond the SM. What necessity is driving a need to unify gravity with the SM? Maybe gravity is just different.

  49. Trulo says:

    @srp:

    but aren’t you jumping the gun on the Higgs?

    It might be so, that’s why I said “it seems” there’s a Higgs. More data and further analysis are needed to confirm the signal and, if it remains there, to find out what exactly it is.

    @Zathras:

    Maybe gravity is just different.

    Personally, I fully agree. But it is also true that I have no clue how that would work, so, as far as I’m concerned, it’s not a terribly productive idea.

  50. I’m probably chiming in too late with too little, but happily talk is cheap. I only want to say that I’ve been struck for quite some time about how loony much of the conjecture in theoretical physics has become. Worse yet, it worries me that theorists all too often seem to forget that they are merely conjecturing, albeit with the tools of math, and that experiment has yet to confirm gravity waves let alone any hint of the multiverse.

    It led me to devise an extension of Occam’s Razor, which I call “Clay’s Clipper.” It states that any proposition that tends to impair reason should not be accepted as true in the absence of compelling evidence. Everett’s Many Worlds interpretation of QM is one example. It *may* be true, but its implications are such that we should not presume it to be true unless and until some evidence is produced. (Unfortunately, the one experiment that could convincingly establish Many Worlds only works for the person conducting it, and involves a gun, a lottery ticket, and the violent deaths of at least five versions of the experimenter.)

    Clay Farris Naff
    Science & Religion Writer

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