There is nothing wrong with abstraction if the abstractor (e.g. Einstein, Dirac, Pauli) knows what he's doing. The problem is, Witten and his crowd, Greene, Smolin, Susskind, Arkami-Hared, Tegmark, none of those people is any good at physics, despite how highly they may think of themselves. What they are good at is competition. Witten at least is a superb mathematician and does understand physics (e.g. critical phenomena) although he is no good at making it, because he has absolutely no physical intuition. He started life as an economist. The rest of that crowd strike me as not even very smart. They are good at taking tests.
-drl ----------------------------------------------- "I write a little. I erase a lot." - Chopin ________________________________ From: Eric Walker <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, June 5, 2014 10:55 PM Subject: Re: [Vo]:An article more documented than usual on Cold Fusion early hisory On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 4:32 AM, Danny Ross Lunsford <[email protected]> wrote: the people who ignored it or actively blocked it and suppressed its researchers are exposed for the charlatans they are. Their record will be empty string theory, vapid cosmology, multidimensional hallucinations, science fiction universes, and ignorant attacks on a new branch of science. I'm beginning to think what seems to have been a theoretical turn in the past few decades is partly what is responsible for the negative reception of the LENR research. Perhaps many physicists have lost their intuitive sense of what goes on in the physical world. There are whole subfields of physics that barely rely upon empirical evidence. Hypothetically speaking you might be able to connect string theory back to something that can be observed in the world, but even if this is true, it's so abstract that we've failed to do so yet. Presumably there are famous physicists who have devoted their careers to a subfield that has yet to give rise to observable predictions. One almost gets the sense that normal branches of physics (as opposed to theoretical physics) are second-class ones where scientists get their hands too dirty. Much of physics gives the sense of essentially being mathematics with additional fudge factor constants that you must include in your equations from time to time. My impression of the field is that it has become a little rarified, and its practitioners are tangled up in debates not unlike those of rabbinical scholars. Eric
