Unzicker
Bankrupting Physics
I am not old enough to remember all the deaths the theory of supersymmetry (SUSY) has died in the history of accelerator experiments. Supersymmetry attempts to give a unified mathematical description of elementary particles by postulating a collection of mirror particles. The hypothetical twins are distinguished from the known ones by their superheavy masses, and for that reason, remain undetected so far in all particle colliders. The first big gravestone was the DESY lab in Hamburg in 1978, where supersymmetry grossly failed to predict the experimental outcome. But a really agonizing year must have been 2012, when Scientific American published an article in their May issue asking “Is Supersymmetry Dead?” and not the slightest trace of supersymmetry could be found in the long-sought-after Large Hadron Collider data at CERN.
Peter Woit commented in his blog Not Even Wrong, “The paradigm that dominated the subject for the past 30 years has collapsed in the face of experimental (non)evidence, threatening to take down the life’s work of hundreds if not thousands of theorists.” However, the really die-hard adherents argue that “not the whole parameter space” has been checked yet, comparing the search for supersymmetry to a game in which your friend assures you that a pea is hidden under one of the five cups put upside down on a table. You have turned over four cups. Now do you still trust that the pea will show up under the fifth? Of course...
The reason behind the supersymmetry hype is the ugly complication of the standard model. With its arbitrary concepts, it leaves an unpleasant aftertaste, and this is an inspiration to look out for a more uniform, more beautiful theory, just like bleak industrial suburbs foster a desire for palm-decorated paradises.
The standard models of cosmology and particle physics are ailing, but theoretical physics overall is in a much worse shape. There has been no real output at all in the past decades. Strings, inflation, and multiverses have formed gigantic bubbles of speculation that can barely hide their ridiculously empty content. It is likely that theorists will aggressively defend their bogus fantasies for some time yet. But the higher-dimensional rigmarole will eventually be identified by the public and deflated. When the fantasies end in smoke, physics will be left without any credible theory. It will have lost its credibility...
Mass
The reason why the standard model cannot calculate mass is stunningly simple. Whatever formula may calculate the mass of a particle, it has to have the physical unit of a mass, which is kilograms, and those kilograms have to come out of the formula, you can't pull it out of your ass. The only way to do it is to find combinations of the fundamental constants of Nature, otherwise you are cheating. But there is no such combination, as every high school kid can understand... There is just one caveat - you can't do it unless you use the gravitational constant G, that is, you consider gravity in your model. But particle physicists don’t do it because gravity is a difficult business that goes above their minds. It’s outright lunatic that they declare that calculating masses, alas, is impossible in the standard model and at the same time deliberately disregard gravity which would offer the only possibility to try it
Video
"I don't know how many of you believe that the Higgs boson was the discovery of the century but what is sure that Einstein, Dirac, or Schrodinger would have considered this discovery as ridiculous they would never have believed that such a model with so many unexplained parameters reflecting anything fundamental.
So I'm going to argue that particle physics as practice since 1930 is a futile enterprise in its entirety. ...
First of all good physics is simple, and the true revolutions in physics always simplify the laws of nature. Maxwell's electrodynamics was a revolution because the electrodynamic constants and the speed of light were condensed in one formula, eliminating one constant of nature. So did the Planck constant h simplify the laws of nature and Newton's Theory of Gravitation condensed dozens of unexplained parameters into one gravitational constant.
[Today's] particle physics is going the other way around. It produced [too many free] parameters"
More Unzic comments; Robert Dicke rediscovered relativity with corrections (1957), speed of light should not be constant.
Knowledge
Even scientists themselves take lots of knowledge as given. The danger here is you can pile shit upon shit until stuck or the whole thing collapsing on itself.
New Direction
The new direction of physics can involve quaternions. From The Mathematical Reality Why Space and Time are an Illusion: "As early as the 1930s, the Dutch physicist and close friend of Einstein, Paul Ehrenfest, wondered why the wave functions for matter (complex numbers) and light (vector fields) were mathematically so different. The importance of this profound question is still underestimated today. If one follows the mission to explain natural phenomena in a unified picture, light and matter must be contained in a single formalism. This means that there has to be a mathematical object that on the one hand, must be a little more complicated than vectors and complex numbers, but on the other hand must incorporate their properties...
Hamilton.. one of the most brilliant mathematicians of all time .. started to study complex numbers. If it was possible to define a multiplication in two dimensions in such an amazing way, was it also possible in three dimensions?... On 16 October 1843, while walking along the Royal Canal in Dublin, Hamilton finally came up with the answer. In three dimensions it was indeed impossible; but at that moment, he realized that the tricky multiplication of complex numbers could be transferred to a four-dimensional number system called quaternions that had three imaginary units $i$, $j$, $k$ instead of just one $i$. Whether Hamilton could already have imagined the fascinating rotations that occur in this number system, we do not know. In any case, overjoyed at his idea, he carved the constituting equations into a stone of a nearby bridge..
$$ i^2 = k^2 = j^2 = i \cdot j \cdot k = -1 $$
... If we come back to the philosophical question of what mathematical structure could potentially describe all physical phenomena, quaternions are a strikingly simple possibility. Since they contain both complex numbers and conventional vectors as a subset, quaternions, in principle, can represent all the number systems physicists have used in their description of the elementary phenomena light and matter"
I don't know how many of you believe that the Higgs boson was the discovery of the century but what is sure that Einstein, Dirac, or Schrodinger would have considered this discovery as ridiculous they would never have believed that such a model with so many unexplained parameters reflecting anything fundamental.
So I'm going to argue that particle physics as practice since 1930 is a futile enterprise in its entirety. ...
First of all good physics is simple, and the true revolutions in physics always simplify the laws of nature. Maxwell's electrodynamics was a revolution because the electrodynamic constants and the speed of light were condensed in one formula, eliminating one constant of nature. So did the Planck constant h simplify the laws of nature and Newton's Theory of Gravitation condensed dozens of unexplained parameters into one gravitational constant.
[Today's] particle physics is going the other way around. It produced [too many free] parameters.