waterfall said:
Where did those people writing papers about Einstein's final theory see the einstein UFT manuscripts? Have you seen them yourself? Why are they not published in a book? It's still kept hidden in a vault?
Einstein kept publishing research papers in the usual journals, up to the end of his life. It's all just slight modifications of his 1915 theory of gravity, general relativity.
Isn't this we haven't united Electroweak and Strong force yet. The proton doesn't decay. What perflexed me is how do they plan to unite them under String theory when they were still not convensionally
In the weaker sense of unification - combined in the same theory - we
have unified electroweak and strong. The stronger sense that is usually intended by gauge unification is that the symmetry groups for these two forces are subgroups of a larger symmetry which is broken at low energies.
The failure to observe proton decay was the first real problem for these "grand unified theories", but they get around it by making the new force particles that would cause proton decay extremely heavy. Just as the Higgs mechanism makes the W and Z massive, it can also be used to make these "X and Y" particles supermassive.
I think there are two main reasons why GUTs are still at the center of beyond-standard-model particle physics. First, the embeddings of the standard model group into the bigger symmetry groups can
explain some of the details of the standard model. Second, the strength of the forces changes with energy ("running of coupling constants") and they converge roughly on the same value at very high energies. At very high energies the full symmetry should be restored and all the force particles should couple with the same strength, so this is consistent with the idea of unification. (Also, the convergence is even better if you assume supersymmetry as well as grand unification, so this is a standard reason for believing in supersymmetry. But the improved convergence is due to just a few of the many new particles introduced by supersymmetry - possibly you only need the "higgsinos" to obtain it - so I think it's rather weak evidence for supersymmetry; all you really need are some additional higgsino-like particles, which doesn't require SUSY.)
Another reason would be that GUTs arise naturally within string theory. So it could be that the mainstream has been on the right track ever since the 1970s, and all it has to do is keep going a little further, and we'll hit upon the model that explains everything.
Do you consider some papers at arxiv as crackpottery? How do you define the term crackpottery and know how to judge whether a paper is one or not?
There would surely be a few crackpot papers at arxiv. But we could distinguish between professional and unprofessional crackpottery. "Unprofessional crackpottery" is when someone who doesn't even know the basics of the subject they want to write about, then goes and says crazy things. "Professional crackpottery" is when people who
are technically competent in the subject, say the crazy things.
This is an example: this is a group of renowned cosmologists, who can't find a way to sensibly define probability in an infinite universe, who therefore propose that time will end a few billion years from now, for no other reason except to make their definition of probability work.
We could talk for a long time about the various different flavors of error, bad judgment, madness, etc, which can show up when people tackle problems like this. People can get confused, they can make bad philosophical choices which lead to dumb interpretations of what their research implies, they can be seduced by a combination of ideas and waste ten years on it. Most of the supposed intellectual sins of crackpots are just evil twins of intellectual virtues.
But outright crackpottery is not usually the problem in the arxiv. If a paper is bad, it will be because the author is careless, the result is true but unimportant, the hypothesis being developed is unlikely, etc. People also complain, not that papers are bad, but that they are written about fashionable topics. Also that people write papers for careerist reasons - to increase their publication count, to increase their number of citations, and all this will help them to get grants, because grants are partly decided on the basis of how many papers people have written and how many citations they got... So the complaint here is of an avalanche of careerist mediocrity. But mediocrity is also part of the process. Occasionally there is a new idea that opens up a whole new field of possibilities, much too big for one person or even for ten people to explore. It's actually helpful to have dozens or hundreds of researchers scouring the new landscape, it means that the new topic gets covered and understood.
Suppose we consider a model that is fashionable right now, the "G2-MSSM". This is M-theory compactified on a manifold with "G2 holonomy", so as to produce the "minimal supersymmetric standard model". By now, there would be a dozen or two dozen papers on this topic. But before this topic could even be developed, someone had to think of studying M-theory on G2 manifolds. And before that they had to come up with M-theory, and before that they had to come up with string theory and then unify it. While on the other side, they had to invent supersymmetry and then apply it to the standard model.
So from the mid-1970s standard model, even just to get to the possibility of thinking about the G2-MSSM, three or four big leaps of theory had to occur. In each case, there was a new idea, and then hundreds of people went over the subject for a decade, and then by the time that was done, and only then, it was now possible for someone to see the next step. I'm not saying the G2-MSSM is necessarily the apex of physics history; there are many "summits" that people have climbed towards, but only one of them will break through the clouds to see the truth. I'm just trying to convey how there can be thousands of papers written over several decades, 99% of them promoting ideas that are wrong, and yet the overall process still might get us to the right answer.
