The Emperor Has No Clothes

I am going to re-work my manuscript. I am going to restructure it, and also add the QCD analyses I did in recent posts. This is the first draft of the foreword. Let me know what you think of it. 🙂

[…] I had various working titles for this publication. I liked ‘A Bright Shining Lie’ but that title is already taken. The ‘History of a Bad Idea’ was another possibility, but my partner doesn’t like negative words. When I first talked to my new partner about my realist interpretation of quantum mechanics, she spontaneously referred to a story of that wonderful Danish storyteller, Hans Christian Andersen: The Emperor’s New Clothes. She was very surprised to hear I had actually produced a draft manuscript with the above-mentioned title (The Emperor Has No Clothes) on quantum electrodynamics which – after initially positive reactions – got turned down by two major publishers.[1] She advised me to stick to the original title and just give it another go. I might as well because the title is, obviously, also a bit of a naughty wink to one of Roger Penrose’s book.[2]

The ideas in this book are not all that easy to grasp – but they do amount to a full-blown realist interpretation of quantum mechanics, including both quantum electrodynamics (the theory of electrons and photons, and their interactions) and quantum chromodynamics – the theory of what goes on inside of a nucleus.[3] Where is gravity? And what about the weak force, and the new Higgs sector of what is commonly referred to as the Standard Model of physics? Don’t worry. We will talk about these too. Not to make any definite statements because we think science isn’t ready to make any definite statements about them. Why? Because we think it doesn’t make sense to analyze the weak force as a force. It’s just a different beast. Gravity is a different beast too: we will explore Einstein’s geometric interpretation of spacetime. As for the Higgs field, we think it is just an ugly placeholder in an equally ugly theory.

What ugly theory? Isn’t the Standard Model supposed to be beautiful? Sabine Hossenfelder[4] – writes the following about it in her latest book: “The Standard Model, despite its success, doesn’t get much love from physicists. Michio Kaku calls it “ugly and contrived,” Stephen Hawking says it’s “ugly and ad hoc,” Matt Strassler disparages it as “ugly and baroque,” Brian Greene complains that the standard model is “too flexible”, and Paul Davies thinks it “has the air of unfinished business” because “the tentative way in which it bundles together the electroweak and strong forces” is an “ugly feature.” I yet have to find someone who actually likes the standard model.”[5]

You may know Hossenfelder’s name. She recently highlighted work that doubts the rigor of the LIGO detections of gravitational waves.[6] I like it when scientists dare to question the award of a Nobel Prize. If any of what I write is true, then the Nobel Prize Committee has made a few premature awards over the past decades. Hossenfelder’s book explores the discontent with the Standard Model within the scientific community. Of course, the question is: what’s the alternative? That’s what this book is all about. You will be happy to hear that. You will be unhappy to hear that I am not to shy away from formulas and math. However, you should not worry: I am not going to pester you with gauge theory, renormalization, perturbation theory, transformations and what have you. Elementary high-school math is all you need. Reality is beautiful and complicated – but not that complicated: we can all understand it. 😊

[1] The pre-publication versions of this manuscript are date-stamped on http://vixra.org/abs/1901.0105.

[2] Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind, 1989.

[3] Physicists will note this is a rather limited definition of quantum chromodynamics. We will expand on it later.

[4] You may know her name. She recently highlighted work that doubs the rigor of the LIGO detections of gravitational waves. See: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/06/16/was-it-all-just-noise-independent-analysis-casts-doubt-on-ligos-detections. I like it when scientists dare to question a Nobel Prize. If any of what I write is true, then it’s obvious that it wouldn’t be the first time that the Nobel Prize Committee makes a premature award.

[5] Sabine Hossenfelder, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, 2018.

[6] See: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/06/16/was-it-all-just-noise-independent-analysis-casts-doubt-on-ligos-detections.