Physics is broken. Worse than we think.

A couple of months ago I read Jim Baggot’s Farwell to Reality. I was very impressed. I won’t go into details, but the book takes the eminently reasonable suggestion that 11 dimensions, uncountable infinities of universes and other mainstream theoretical physics subjects are “fairy tale physics”.  Physics really needs people like Jim Baggot,  Peter Woit, and Lee Smolin  to show that the emperor has no clothes. But what if things are far worse than these authors report?

So I went looking for other writing critical of modern physics. Did I find it.  I read two of Alexander Unzicker’s books. The Higgs Fake and Bankrupting Physics. They are a great read, whether you agree with him or not(caution – unintended hilarity). As if to underline the mindset of the physics community at large, after writing these two books Unzicker had trouble with arXiv, and has several more stories about the negative reaction of this closely knit society to outside criticism. One fact about criticism is that people get most upset when the criticism strikes close to the truth.  Peter Woit’s criticism of Bankrupting Physics revolves around trying to classify Unzicker  as ‘a garden-variety crank’ – which of course then makes Woit’s job easy as it automatically discounts everything he says (unless he is in agreement with Woit of course). My take is simpler: Woit’s book and blog regularly complains about string theory and the multiverse being bunk, which in my opinion is something like 99.9999% likely to be true, while Unzicker’s assertions are ‘only’ 10 – 99.9999% likely to be true. Contrast that with the 50,000 papers on supersymmetry – each one of which is a 100% waste of time according to both Woit and Unzicker. Peter Woit can be wrong too. There are other areas of physics that smell as bad as String Theory.

Physics is broken. Worse than we think.