Physics Today

Why do the "Skeptics" ignore "string theory" and "loop quantum gravity"?

One wonders, however, what Feynman's reaction would have been had he lived to contemplate the contemporary scene in high energy theoretical physics almost twenty years later. String theory and its progeny still have yet to make a single, falsifiable prediction which can be tested by a physically plausible experiment. This isn't surprising, because after decades of work and tens of thousands of scientific publications, nobody really knows, precisely, what superstring (or M, or whatever) theory really is; there is no equation, or set of equations from which one can draw physical predictions. Leonard Susskind, a co-founder of string theory, observes ironically in his book The Cosmic Landscape (March 2006), “On this score, one might facetiously say that String Theory is the ultimate epitome of elegance. With all the years that String Theory has been studied, no one has ever found a single defining equation! The number at present count is zero. We know neither what the fundamental equations of the theory are or even if it has any.” (p. 204). String theory might best be described as the belief that a physically correct theory exists and may eventually be discovered by the research programme conducted under that name. -- J. Walker http://kelvin@fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/


Can we compare string theory to the war in Iraq?
Looking for the actual equations and contact with experiment
like looking for Saddam's WMD? ;-)


Key paper by A. Valentini
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/0203049

Also

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/science/20060622-9999-lz1c22cause.html

Cramer and others (Srikanth, Hepp & Peacock ...) think signal nonlocality may be possible in orthodox QM i.e. cloning theorem wrong in some sense. This was what I had thought in 70's (Martin Gardner in "Magic and Paraphysics") but since changed my mind accepting the no-cloning theorem that linearity and unitarity precludes signal nonlocality in orthodox QM. My macro-quantum ODLRO theory is neither linear nor unitary in the orthodox QM sense - breakdown of Born interpretation for rigid local order parameter (PW Anderson's "More is different").
My views on all this are in my three books since 2002 (on Amazon)
Destiny Matrix
Space-Time and Beyond II
Super Cosmos (that has stuff from GR 17 BTW)
Physical Review does not publish this sort of thing. :-)

Basically I propose that all conscious matter needs signal nonlocality. You cannot have remote viewing without it. Therefore, orthodox quantum theory with no-cloning signal locality must break down in living matter. "Signal nonlocality" is analogous to "curvature" in relativity where zero curvature is the Special Relativity limit of General Relativity. In a similar sense, signal locality is the micro-quantum limit of a more general post-quantum theory with signal nonlocality in non-equilibrium macro-systems in sense of A. Valentini & Brian Josephson & Fotini Pallikari.

On a related front my theory of emergent gravity as a 4D covariant supersolid is formally similar to above. Note I published a prediction of the supersolid in 1969 before Tony Legget.

I claim Einstein's smooth c-number field equations emerge "More is different" very simply from the residual inflation vacuum ODLRO "Higgs" field's Goldstone phases (a kind of world hologram). You need at least two Goldstone phases to get GR unlike ordinary superfluids, which only have one Goldstone phase. You get something like Calabi-Yau adding 6 more Goldstone phases to the Higgs vacuum ODLRO field. So one need not posit GR + Inflation but derive GR from Inflation - that makes sense for the creation of curved spacetime of a pocket universe on the landscape of the megaverse in a bootstrap from the false vacuum. With signal nonlocality we can see into event and particle horizons so that the landscape is testable in principle with "remote viewing."