Bankrupting Physics: How Today’s Top Scientists are Gambling Away Their Credibility (MacSci) by Alexander Unzicker (PDF)

Description

The recently celebrated discovery of the Higgs boson has captivated the public’s imagination with the promise that it can explain the origins of everything in the universe. It’s no wonder that the media refers to it grandly as the “God particle.” Yet behind closed doors, physicists are admitting that there is much more to this story, and even years of gunning the Large Hadron Collider and herculean number crunching may still not lead to a deep understanding of the laws of nature. In this fascinating and eye-opening account, theoretical physicist Alexander Unzicker and science writer Sheilla Jones offer a polemic. They question whether the large-scale, multinational enterprises actually lead us to the promised land of understanding the universe. The two scientists take us on a tour of contemporary physics and show how a series of highly publicized theories met a dead end. Unzicker and Jones systematically unpack the recent hot theories such as “parallel universes,” “string theory,” and “inflationary cosmology,” and provide an accessible explanation of each. They argue that physics has abandoned its evidence-based roots and shifted to untestable mathematical theories, and they issue a clarion call for the science to return to its experimental foundation.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Unzicker’s arguments are well-grounded, sound, [and] informed.” ―Scientific American (German edition)“Bankrupting Physics is a blunt, but entertaining account of the current state of fundamental physics. The reader may not necessarily have the same opinion as the authors, but they will bear witness to some of the field’s unchallengeable high priests in action, and question whether the system itself is now in a period of stagnation. How does the struggle for power and money among modern scientists compromise the quest for uncovering the true secrets of nature? This is a worthwhile book to read that is guaranteed to raise some controversy, and is likely to receive a critical reception by the very actors it is reporting on.” ―Pavel Kroupa, University of Bonn“A broad dismissal of modern theoretical physicists…Unzicker also targets the massive expenditures of funds on high-energy particle accelerators.” ―Kirkus Reviews“Unzicker dares to think outside the mainstream. Readers will find a refreshing and provoking book that pushes the physics community to refocus how it conducts science.” ―Hans Volker Klapdor-Kleingrothaus, University of Heidelberg About the Author Alexander Unzicker is a German theoretical physicist and neuroscientist. Sheilla Jones is the author of The Quantum Ten and an award-winning Canadian journalist and a science contributor to CBC. She reviews science books for The Globe and Mail and the Literary Review of Canada.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Unzicker has piled the slow and tragic demise of modern physics into at least 3 heaps. He doesn’t divide things up this way; I do.In the first is data and the relentless stream of free parameters required to knead that data into obedience. Let me unpack that a bit.The public face of physics is dominated by the branch called particle physics. This branch is concerned with how atoms are built, and it has, over time, crafted what is known as the Standard Model of atomic structure. In Einstein’s day the atom was built of protons, neutrons and their orbiting electrons, a simple clump that served the early architects of modern physics not badly.It is of course cliche to say that Einstein was a genius. But the formative years of relativity and quantum physics were populated by true intellectual luminaries besides Einstein, contemporaries who collectively made up perhaps the most creative and remarkable brain trust in history: Wolfgang Pauli, Neils Bohr, Kurt Godel, Sir Arthur Eddington, Werner Heisenberg, Sir James Jean, Edwin Schroedinger, Louis de Broglie and many others. Together, in the span of about 20 years, they whipped up the foundation of the last two true revolutions in the history of physics: relativity and quantum mechanics (the first two revolutions being Newton’s gravity thing and then Maxwell’s yoking of electricity and magnetism).With these two theories in place, a lot of calculations happened for some decades. Gradually calculations stopped being confirmed by experimental observation, and were instead confirmed by other calculations. Unzicker quotes Einstein:”Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity, I do not understand it myself anymore.”Invaded indeed. As calculation increasingly trumped observation, these mathematical models yielded astonishingly precise consistency but vanishingly faint links to experimental outcomes. Then came the colliders. Particle colliders, that is. Nuclei were smashed into each other at high energies, tidal waves of unexpected signals came out of each mash, thousands of mathematically inclined physicists hovered around the data, and eventually Murray Gell-Mann theorized the quark into existence to explain some of those signals.Quarks were paradoxical from their start. They needed to exist only in pairs or triplets, each containing a fractional charge adding up to 1e, the charge of a proton, when in their group. And they are always in their group; quarks are impossible to separate from their couplet or triplet. How are quarks held together? Well, a new particle called a gluon was proposed (and accepted) to do that. OK, but the Pauli Exclusion Principle mandates that identical particles can’t exist at the same place and time. So, to patch things up, quarks were assigned colors. Of course quarks don’t actually *have* the property of color, but colors fixed the problem, making them different and thus avoiding the Pauli problem. Unzicker brings it together:”If we try to summarize the standard model of particle physics, we count six quarks, each in three different “colors” (red, green and blue), along with their antiparticles. This adds up to 36 kinds of heavy particles, not a small number. Let’s no forget the gluons gluing the quarks, which have to be colorfully dressed (e.g. red and antigreen). Imagine you are hearing this for the first time. Does this sound like Nature speaking to you?” (p. 149)The mess of data gets much worse from here. As energy levels in the colliders increased, the volume of data from each collision increased along with it. Collisions produced terabytes of numbers to be sifted through by thousands of scientists, no one of whom could possibly have understood the work of all the others. A large chunk of Unzicker’s book describes the folly of ritual that developed around these swarms of data. The steps were something like this:1) The known subatomic particles accounted for some small percent of the signals coming from a collision;2) A new particle was hypothesized to exist so that mathematical models worked out correctly. If it did exist, it would have a signal that looked like X, though requiring a higher collision energy to detect;3) A new collision was done, then all the signals accounted for by known particles was filtered out as “background”;4) The leftover data was sifted to identify anything that looked *even approximately* like X;5) That approximation was inevitably found, and the scientist who proposed the new particle got accolades or maybe even a Nobel Prize;6) In the next collision, X became part of the background to be filtered out so that some hypothesized new particle could be foundAnd so on. To get an idea of how much data was considered “background” and had to be filtered out to find the new particles, here is Unzicker again, writing about the collision that resulted in the “discovery” of the Higgs particle:”Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN have been slamming protons together at higher and higher energies with the hope of finding a trace of something that might hint at the existence of the Higgs. Keep in mind that the huge number of proton collisions produces a lot of “background” noise in the detectors. That noise is 12 orders of magnitude larger than the signal that would identify the Higgs. It is as if from the 7 million liters of beer drunk at the Oktoberfest, a single drop of an unexplained nature leaked out. That’s what happened at CERN, but it sufficed to intoxicate particle physicists” (152).Particle physics is lost in data that no one fully understands. Numbers, “free parameters,” that are not derived but added post hoc, have been inserted into equations to make them say what we want. So far there are 17 of these parameters propping up various aspects of the Standard Model of the atom. There was a time, those glory days of physics, when free parameters were seen as intrusions, ugly imposters to be explained away with better understanding. They have now become the drunk relative at a holiday party: only awkwardly welcome, and no signs of leaving anytime soon.Unzicker tells the story of this folly with humor and a great grasp of his topic.I’ve not done justice to the injustice of all this data, but I must move on. The next heap has to do with an unfortunate infection. It is the infection of cosmology by these particle physicists. But first, a bit of relevant info.The energies of the contrived collisions at CERN and elsewhere became greater and greater, far surpassing the power of equations to account for the results. Thousands of PhD sifters were required to sift through all the data, making replication or even scrutiny of these experiments impossible. Drunk with funding, particle physicists came to believe that their accelerators were inching them toward the nanomoments after the Big Bang.But the universe hung a tapestry of microwave radiation on its 380,000th birthday. Behind that, no observation can peek. For physicists, though, that hasn’t stopped the conjecture. Inflation theory, for example, is a grandiose mathematical guess stacked upon events surmised to have happened not in the first second or even the first trillionth of a second. It is built, in its well-funded entirety, upon guesses at what transpired when the universe was theoretically smashed down into a space not much larger in diameter than Plank’s length, 10^-35 meters. The time epoch for inflation started 10^-36 seconds after the Bang. It lasted, we are told, until somewhere between 10^-33 and 10-32 seconds. Forgive the inexactitude, they’re working on it.It is, of course, an absurdity, these notions that a) we can accurately conjecture what happened prior to 380,000 years after the Big Bang, and b) that the entirety of the mass of the universe can be assumed to have been squozen into this infinitesimally small space. What force would have so compressed it, we might ask. Gravity? It’s the weakest of the 4 known forces in operation in the universe. It is befuddling how any sensible person can think that the entire mass of the universe was once compacted into a space that is as much smaller than the head of a pin as that head of a pin is smaller than the known universe. But they say it was, and so it was, and both inflation and string theory gain their purchase on that wink.It is here, though, that the particle physicists claim reign over cosmology, and so the infection propagates.Do I seem incredulous? Blame Unzicker. It is difficult to pick out specific passages that back up these points, which is a testament to his writing. He weaves his argument brilliantly, writing from that privileged point of view of someone with their mathematical head peeking behind the curtain. The place where particle physics meets cosmology is only in the belly of computers, and this is the brunt of Unzicker’s point:”[T]he most successful simulations of astrophysics take place in the so-called dark age. This is the period between the era of the cosmic microwave background, 380,000 years after the Big Band … and the emergence of the earliest visible galaxies half a *billion* years later … whatever you may simulate [with computers] there, telescopes won’t protest” (p.114; emphasis in the original).Cosmology is not going to turn back anytime soon. The infection has already taken hold. What is actually *seen* in the cosmos has now been subsumed by what *should* be seen. The latter is a mathematical conjecture. Theory has trumped observation.The final heap, and perhaps the most fascinating of all, has to do with curiosity. Unzicker’s book is sprinkled with mysteries that once taunted great minds, and now are perhaps not even noticed by leaders in the field.- Electrical charges radiate energy when accelerated. But gravity is *identical to* acceleration. So why don’t electrical charges radiate energy when sitting still in a gravitational field (53)?- How is the spiral shape of galaxies maintained if stars are accelerating around their spiral paths faster the further away from the center one moves? Over billions of years they should be a stellar glob (83).- Why are arms of galaxies in a single plane? Why do they not orbit their center in a sphere rather than a plane (83)?- The cosmic background microwave radiation is divided into 8 distinct regions, a mystery known as the “octupole anomaly.” Where the hell did *that* pattern come from (100)?- Enormously large regions of space are empty. No one understands why (116).- Regions of space at opposite ends of the observable universe – which could have no communication with each other since the Big Bang – seemed to have “agreed” upon a temperature of 2.73 Kelvin. How the hell did *that* happen (122)?Beyond the observable curiosities are the purely mathematical mysteries:- When certain constants within quantum theory, electrodymanics and relativity are combined in a certain way, all units cancel out and a number emerges: 137.0359…” This is called the “fine structure constant.” The great physicist Richard Feynman commented, “All good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.” Why? Because it has no explanation other than that it just is. That no physicists have even conjecture about its origins is telling about the place of curiosity in that science (163).- The ratio of the electromagnetic and gravitational force is on the order of 10^40. It is a gargantuan number with no explanation. But physicist Jacque Dirac noticed two very odd things: that the size of the universe is 10^40 times the size of a proton, and that the number of protons in the universe is 10^80, the square of that other number. Coincidence? Herein are two unrelated physical values that have an equivalence that is identical to 40 decimal places, with no explanation (163-4).- Plank’s constant, h, is approximately equal to the speed of light, times the mass of a proton, times its radius. Again, two enormous numbers that come into very close proximity to each other. Why? No one seems to know, or to care (224).- Perhaps most shocking of all, if one were to lay out every proton in the universe in a carpet that is 1 proton thick, that carpet would precisely stretch across the observed horizon of the universe. It is as shocking as it is ignored by the community of physicists (226).And on, and on. These are profound mysteries, answered by cosmologists and physicists only by ignoring them. Perhaps they really are just coincidence, with no underlying correspondence. No one will know until they are taken as serious issues worthy of investigation. To acknowledge these anomalies is to court the perception of ignorance, which is the death knell of approval within modern funding cycles. Big Science wins out over Big Questions, to no one’s benefit.Unzicker has done us all a favor. He has translated the travesty of modern physics into a language that is erudite, witty and for the moderately committed reader, intelligible.If I had to pick a quarrel, and every self-respecting book review must pick at least one, it is that he seems unaware of the writings on the Electric Universe. Not all, but at least some (or perhaps many?) of the anomalies he identifies as sitting in the margins of the Standard Model of physics are compellingly addressed by the writings within the model of the Electric Universe. This model happens when the physics of charge is introduced into cosmology in a meaningful way. The influence of charge dwarfs that of gravitation, relieving the latter of responsibility for everything from the shape of galaxies to the structure of the universe. I hope Unzicker will pay it some attention, and use his welcome combination of brilliance, wit and curiosity to find the synthesis of it all that I can’t hope to achieve.

⭐I purchased the hardcover version of this book in early March of 2015, and finished the book later that same month. I’m not sure what draws me to contrary material like this, or authors-researchers-scientists such as Unzicker/Jones and other controversial-contrarians like them? Perhaps given the almost religious fervor and ‘self-anointed’ hubris of mainstream science, I find it refreshing to hear a dissenting voice once in awhile, especially given the endless barrage of popular scientific talking heads that never once question the prevailing paradigm of modern, mainstream science?NOTE: The following rhetoric is purely the views of this reviewer and not those of the authors.It does not take a “Rocket-Scientist” (or a particle physicist for that matter) to understand that something about the accepted model of theoretical physics is lacking; we are missing some fundamental piece of the puzzle and are bound and determined to collide sub-atomic particles together at ever increasing velocities until we find the answer or tear a hole in the fabric of ‘space-time’ and annihilate ourselves. This same attitude we have seen displayed before in recent history, concerning the unknown and/or collateral implications e.g. ‘worst-case’ scenarios as a result of scientific research. Case in point; (according to popular historic legend) before the above ground detonation of the first hydrogen bomb (circa 1952), some physicists worried, even argued that it might cause a conflagration of the Earth’s atmosphere (a bad thing for all us air-breather types), and yet that did not stop them! And now we find the physicists at CERN who keep telling the public, “We’re almost there folks, we just need a bit more time, perhaps a bit more energy in which to smash these particles, and oh yeah a lot more money!” Personally it seems to be a misguided boondoggle at times (God-particle my A$$!); I would much rather see that kind of money spent on a “manned” mission to Mars, but I digress…Once in a great while we do hear just a hint of a more humble reality, when someone like astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson quips in a ‘on-air’ interview; “A singularity is our way of saying that we don’t know!”; refreshing isn’t it? Otherwise the public is fed a constant diet of matter-of-fact, this is how it is, don’t ask too many questions and for god’s sake don’t mention anything about the electromagnetic forces or plasma as that just mucks up our mathematical models; which is why we want to sell you ‘dark matter’, ‘dark energy’ and our latest ad hoc posit ‘negative gravity’ (or some such nonsensical device to plug into our anointed models and make the damn things work. By the way did we mention that we really don’t have a complete understanding of gravity?). The general public at large would likely be more than a bit surprised to hear that, and yet it is an ‘inconvenient truth’ (thanks Al Gore).This is why these kind of books are important, feathers need to be ruffled in all scientific and research related disciplines as a matter of course. Thankfully we have the likes of Alexander Unziker and his coauthor Sheilla Jones, and other intrepid souls like them; thanks for their honesty and bravery.I found this book to be truthful and intelligent. Source and citations are adequately annotated. What some would call “overly critical”, I would call reasoned, measured and backed up by credible scientific sources. Like one reviewer wrote; “Sorry, but I liked this book.” No apology required, and isn’t it curious that the majority of reviews skewed towards the positive 4 and 5 star? But then we find a terse, negative ‘one star’ reviewer who admits that he is “not qualified” (his words) to comment due to his being an actual particle physicist, etc. Oh the irony. But wait is not the author a theoretical physicist as well? Are we going to question his knowledge base, background and credibility due to his Germanic origins? Has not the German peoples given the world more than their fair share of gifted physicist-scientists; what about that ‘slacker’ called Einstein?I wonder if this particular ‘one star’ reviewer, this “actual particle physicist” even read the book? Or did he just give it a cursory and dismissive glance before offering his “enlightened” review; a review short on content and without any particular reference to any one thing he found offensive within its pages. Just the title and sub-title alone were probably enough to set him off, to question his self worth, his vanity, his very belief system; to ruffle those fragile feathers.Yeah I do like books like this.

⭐There must be many scientifically trained individuals who have wondered at the extraordinary developments in theoretical physics in recent decades – asking themselves if it is really going in the right direction. If you are one of those people, Alexander Unzicker’s book is for you!He takes a hard look at the way modern theories of cosmology and particle physics have created enormously elaborate mathematical theories – often on rather flimsy evidence. These theories contain many parameters, and as he points out, this allows an incorrect theory to appear to fit the experimental facts and be misleadingly accepted.The book contains a lot of experimental facts which are rather startling. For example, the fluctuations in the microwave background require the removal of a signal from our local galaxy that is 1000 times stronger. If that were not enough to doubt that it is possible to see ripples in the data from the big bang, Unzicker points out that the end result has a strange alignment to the plane of our solar system!Another fact that startled me, is that the Higgs signal emerges from a process that filters out 10^12 times as much noise! Is the Higgs signal merely a systematic error of some sort – Unzicker clearly thinks it might be!He also attacks the way in which theories such as Alan Guth’s inflation (after the big bang) were considered highly speculative when originally suggested, but seem to have become accepted – and elaborated – without any real evidence that they are true. He also discusses the theory of dark matter in the same vein. Galaxies do not rotate in the way gravitational theory suggests – so is it wise to fix that by postulating invisible matter that does nothing but provide additional gravitational attraction, rather than question the underlying theory – General Relativity.Unzicker has a go at string theory, and the mountains of hype that it generates – parallel universes, universes sitting on hyper dimensional membranes, the holographic universe idea, extra dimensions that are curled up so small that we can’t detect them, etc. Unlike some physicists that are saying that it is time to ditch string theory, he would go further and also ditch the Standard Model, with its many parameters that are adjusted to fit the data.Anyone who is interested in the above topics should read this book. It might also interest politicians who fund this research!

⭐I’ve read a couple of Unzicker’s other fine volumes..and so was expecting this to be just a rehash. In fact, it turned out to be the best of the bunch (co-author perhaps :)? ). What I particularly liked was the penetrating spotlight placed on many key conceptual assumptions and axioms, and not just of cosmology (accounting for Alex’s previous concerns), but of basic physics to boot. Highly recommended.

⭐Love the authors hilarious quotes to highlight the absurdities of science not based on physical measurability and tests. Another reminder of how little we know and can know. Also another sad reminder of how corrupt ( can’t think of a better term than this) science and science funding can become. There are some other theories that might help clarify, but will never be funded until the gatekeepers are out of there positions. In the mean time we are just spinning our wheels.

⭐Alexander Unziker is clearly not an expert on the topics he analyze in his book. Some criticism is exaggerated. But the book is very welcome as a counterweight, for the general audience, to the latest overstated headlines from a big part of the theoretical physics community and the communications media. Nowadays we unfortunately constantly see incredible claims about multiverses, and other speculations that are far from real science. The way science is funded favors this tactics: inflated results and big headlines, instead of just a few but deep, powerful insights.Very advisable for the science enthusiast and the expert too (if the last one can sustain the critics…)

⭐Top quality product, very low price. Good job!!

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