Should journalists second guess the scientific truth?

This post is a reaction to recent article of Lubos Motl of the same name. It's not surprising, Motl supports his restrictive stance, regarding the rights to expression of private opinion from the side of journalists. But we shouldn't neglect the fact, with respect to climatic science Lubos is just an educated journalist like everyone else and he violates his own rules flagrantly, because he is trying to influent public meaning massively all the time. He is just trying to dispute rights of journalists to the same activity, which he dedicated most of his time - and because he uses Google Adsense on his blog, he's even earning some money for it like professional journalists.

In general, opinion of experts matters from intrinsic perspective only. But just because experts are specialized to narrow area of their private interest, they're not overmuch qualified in judging of their opinions in wider context - on the contrary, they tend to occupy their stances rather blindly - the more, the more they feel being an experts in given area. In this context the reading of articles The era of expert failure by Arnold Kling,  Why experts are usually wrong by David H. Freeman and Why the experts missed the crash by Phill Tetlock (in Czech) may be useful not only for Lubos Motl.

Niels Bohr: "An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field".

Higgs boson and fourth generation of quarks

This post is inspired by recent blog post of Tomaso Dorigo, who announced finding of Higgs boson with mass of about 150 GeV. By official media coverage it's just a rumour, that's got out of hand, as expressed by Fermilab's spokes'girl. More interestingly is, what's behind this rumour - and I don't mean over imagination or exploding ego of Mr. Dorigo, as Fermilab's Twitter post implies spitefully. Or do you really believe, Fermilab would give its official stance through Twitter? Such anonymous message is even much less reliable, then the original blogpost of Mr. Dorigo. But such way of  prematurely presentation of results and their vetoing indicates, how mainstream physics maneuvers between less or more opened tendency to announce findings as soon as possible for the sake of publicity and/or grant support ex una parte - and  the demonstrative expression of conservative skepticism on the other hand.

IMO Higgs boson is the same fuzzy unparticle stuff, like the virtual bosons responsible for Casimir force - their effective mass depends on surface geometry. Just at the case of Higgs boson the upper bound is limited by mass of top quark, so it can form a fuzzy signal, corresponding the dilepton channel of top quark decay, which was observed already. If even more massive quark exists, then its corresponding Higgs should indeed exist too and the whole concept of unique "God's particle" becomes fringe.

Mr. Dorigo himself putted the nail into coffin of Higgs boson by his previous announcement of fourth generation of quarks in 450 GeV range. Before finding of neutrino oscillation, the Standard Model contained 19 arbitrary dimensionless constants describing the masses of the particles and the strengths of the electroweak and strong forces. After the discovery of neutrino mass the new Standard Model requires 26 fundamental dimensionless constants, whose numerical values are, to the best of present understanding, arbitrary. Currently Standard Model is indeed incompatible with fourth generation of quarks or neutrinos, but thanks so high number of constants flexible enough to implement even higher particle generations. It's sort of regressive epicycle model keeping the Ptolemaic physics of modern era alive.

We can say, this finding is of approximatelly the same relevance like the previous finding of Higgs boson anounced (about three sigma in error level). And quess what? In this time the blog article was handled by NewScientist quite seriously and it got full coverage in media. The whole trick here is, most of physicists actually do not believe in concept of Higgs boson on background - despite the massive propaganda in CERN related media, the main purpose is to justify expensive experiments at LHC.

The title of recent another NewScientist article "In SUSY we trust: What the LHC is really looking for" (full version) illustrates clearly, physicists are aware of the conceptual problems of Higgs field concept. The article should be interpreted like: "Uhm, well, ... we actually don't believe, Higgs boson will be ever found at LHC - so we should concentrate to supersymmetry instead. ."

With respect to AdS/CFT duality the success or problems with particle search at Planck scale will be replicated/mirrored at cosmological scales (WIMPs detection) and vice-versa. Therefore it's not so strange, when dual situation recently appeared in media, when scientists started to speculate, (primordial) gravitational waves cannot be found at all due the "quantum-spread", which would render detectors of gravitational waves useless in the same way, like the LHC at quantum scale.

This is an example, how seemingly spontaneous scientific PR is basically working - layman public should trace subliminal messages of it for to get the realistic picture about opinion of this close sectarian community in the noise of PR journalism and propaganda.

Is the Universe Leaking Energy?

This post is an reaction to recent ScientificAmerican article, in which the idea of mass/energy conservation law for Universe at large scales is impeached.

In Aether Wave Theory (AWT, dense aether theory) Universe is completelly random stuff, similar to nested dense fluctuations of hypothetical dense gas (aether) and its energy content is basically stable at large scales. The red shift in visible light should be compensated with blue shift for radio waves in analogy to dispersion of light at the water surface, i.e. nothing really expands, neither is losing its energy in fact. This doesn't mean, laws of Universe are 100% valid - the Universe just appears like random noise at both quantum, both cosmological scales - so we cannot observe any trend in it at sufficiently global scale.

Because the effect of Universe expansion compensates with contraction just at the wavelength about 2 cm (human observer scale), we're observing the lack of dark energy and dark matter phenomena just during observation of Universe in microwaves (compare the post about cosmological time arrow  and reddit comment).

Quantum theorist explaining gravity is an ox(y)moron

This post is an reaction to ArXiv blog article New Quantum Theory Separates Gravitational and Inertial Mass. A typical problem with theoretical physicists is that they think that by presenting an alternative interpretation of a contradiction one can remove the contradiction.

Equations of quantum theory cannot describe gravity at all - on the contrary. By Schrödinger equation all wave packets of free particles should expand into infinity, not to collapse by gravity. We cannot switch 1 = 1 to 1 = -1 by any causal math because quantum theory reverses time arrow of general relativity.

In AWT we can reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics in two main ways:

1. By using of particle simulation of nested density fluctuations inside of very dense gas. At the certain level of condensation the resulting solution inside of dense particle clusters would become close to general relativity, while the solution of outside them would become close to general relativity.
2. We can solve wave equation in very high number of dimensions. After the solution in inner 3D slice of solution can be compared with quantum mechanics, in outer 3D slice it can be compared with general relativity.

Actually, in AWT the equivalence principle is violated by electrostatic or dipole forces, Casimir force etc. which are acting in extra-dimensions and nothing strange is about it. All these forces depend on different quantities, then just mass.

Higgs boson as an unparticle

The unparticle concept was proposed by Harward professor Howard Gorgi before few years. AWT introduces unparticles by concept of fractally nested density fluctuations inside of dense gas. For example clouds are scale invariant unparticle stuff, similar to Perlin noise. Recently D. Stancato & J. Terning have proposed unparticle character of Higgs bosone. Prof. Hawking reckons, that a number of "partner" particles will emerge, instead, thus making prof. Higgs upset by his stance.

This is not so difficult to understand, because from common perspective the unparticle hypothesis would effectively mean, no distinct Higgs particle signal will be ever found, until we achieve collider jets, composed of unique particles to demonstrate it - because Higgs field interaction would have a character of kink widespread over ultraviolet part of mass-energy spectrum. Could prof. Higgs deserve Nobel price, if it turns out Higgs boson is just some Unhiggs?

In more illustrative way, Unhiggs field is analogous to coat of virtual quarks, in which all elementary particles are surrounded at small distances. This coat glues particles together at smallest distances. Such unstable particles can still be observed by their collective effects, for example by jet suppression during particle collisions. Just because it's difficult to call them particles they're called an unparticles. It's responsible for so called Yukawa coupling, responsible for pairing and gluing of nucleons and quarks inside of atom nuclei, for formation of top-quark pairs, glueballs, pentaquark and another artifacts, which were observed recently at Tevatron.

From Standard model follows, the product of Higgs boson Yukawa coupling to the left- and right-handed top quarks have nearly the same rest mass (173.1±1.3 GeV/c2) like those predicted for Higgs boson (178.0 ± 4.3 GeV/c2). It means, Higgs boson was observed already at Tevatron as a product of top-quark coupling and identified by dilepton channel of top-quark decay.

In AWT such field exists at all scales and it manifests by Casimir force mediated by virtual photons at micrometer scale, or dark matter at megaparsec scale, for example.  It means, Higgs field has a scale invariant character of fuzzy unparticles, which are changing their size accordingly to carrier particles. The combination of trivial and topological band insulators within topological insulators and superconductors is bringing anyons and plektons - unparticles that behave neither according to purely Bose nor Fermi statistics.

The title of recent NewScientist article "In SUSY we trust: What the LHC is really looking for" illustrates clearly, physicists are aware of the conceptual problems of Higgs field concept. The article should be interpreted like: "Uhm, well, ... we really don't believe, Higgs boson will be ever found at LHC - so we should concentrate to supersymmetry, for not being blamed completely before publicity". The question is, whether physicists could admit openly before publicity, LHC is useless with respect to search of Higgs boson even by their own theories, if they wasted so much money in it.

This is a demo, how seemingly spontaneous scientific PR is basically working. Dual situation appeared recently in media, when scientists started to speculate, (primordial) gravitational waves cannot be found at all due the "quantum-spread", which renders detectors of gravitational waves useless. With respect to AdS/CFT duality the success or problems with particle search at Planck scale will be replicated/mirrored at cosmological scales (WIMPs detection) and vice-versa.

The similar U-turn we could expect later regarding estimations of LHC collider safety. The most problematic part of Unhiggs detection at LHC is the strangelet controversy: in contact with terresterial matter it could enable avalanche chain formation of clusters of particles, analogous to stable microscopic black holes predicted by Randall-Sundrum model. Recently A. Choptuik demonstrated, when extra-dimensions are involved, black hole could be formed with compare to existing CERN safety analysis, considering Hawking radiation as the only mechanism of black hole evaporation (1, 2, 3). In addittion, CERN considers, black hole could interact with its neighborhood via gravitational interaction only, thus purportedly neglecting their electromagnetic interaction, which is 10e+41 x stronger.

"Does that mean the LHC will make black holes? Not necessarily", Choptuik says. "The Planck energy is a quintillion times higher than the LHC's maximum. So the only way the LHC might make black holes is if, instead of being three dimensional, space actually has more dimensions that are curled into little loops too small to be detected except in a high-energy particle collision. Predicted by certain theories, those extra dimensions might effectively lower the Planck energy by a huge factor."

Well, if some extra-dimensions could wipe-out one quintillion factor (?!?) of LHC safety expected, can scientists admit, they're openly planning to verify theory, which predicts formation of stable black holes just by formation of black holes at LHC? Could CERN physicists ever admit, it could be qualified as an criminal act by the rest of society?

We should realize, CERN physicists just want to build and operate LHC collider despite of any risk, because it provides them safe and stable jobs and environment for scientific carrier. They're supported in their activities by lobby of private companies involved in technical support of LHC. We could say, high concentration of money in civilization leads to spontaneous formation of dense states of matter in simmilar way, like dense concentration of energy in universe. The desinformed rest of society underestimated these emergent relationships, which resulted into establishing of large groups of people, who are openly ignorant - if not even hostile - to further destiny of civilization.