Physicists Try to "Big-Mystery-Glamorize" Their Pigeonhole Pet Projects

 Scientists believe that when two very high-energy photons collide, they produce equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and that when matter collides with antimatter, it is converted into high-energy photons. Such a belief is based on what scientists have observed in particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider, where particles are accelerated to near the speed of light before they collide with each other. But such conclusions about matter, antimatter and photons lead to a great mystery as to why there is any matter at all in the universe.

Let us imagine the early minutes of the Big Bang about 13 billion years ago, when the density of the universe was incredibly great. At that time the universe should have consisted of energy, matter and antimatter. The energy should have been in the form of very high-energy photons that were frequently colliding with each other. All such collisions should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter. For example, a collision of high energy particles with sufficient energy creates a matter proton and an antimatter particle called an antiproton. So the amount of antimatter shortly after the Big Bang should have been exactly the same as the amount of matter. As a CERN page on this topic says, "The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the early universe." 

But whenever a matter particle touched an antimatter particle, both would have been converted into photons. The eventual result should have been a universe consisting either of nothing but photons, or some matter but an equal amount of antimatter. But only trace amounts of antimatter are observed in the universe. A universe with equal amounts of matter and antimatter would have been uninhabitable, because of the vast amount of lethal energy released when even a tiny bit of matter comes in contact with a tiny bit of antimatter.

The mystery of why we live in a universe that is almost all matter (rather than antimatter) is called the baryon asymmetry problem or the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem.  There is not much of a prospect that this problem will be solved in our lifetimes.  It's like the problem of "why is there something rather than nothing?" That's not a problem we can expect to solve in our lifetimes. The infographic below explains this matter-antimatter asymmetry problem. 

But sometimes when scientists have embarked on a boondoggle costing billions, they may evoke the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem to try to sanctify their misguided schemes.  That is what is going on with various boondoggle projects researching neutrinos. They include these projects:

• An ongoing T2K experiment in Japan that beams neutrinos over a distance of 295 kilometers. 
• An ongoing 280-million-dollar NOVA experiment in the USA that beams neutrinos 804 kilometers (500 miles), from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois to a 14,000-ton detector in Ash River, Minnesota.
• An under-construction 3-billion-dollar DUNE experiment in the USA that will attempt to beam neutrinos 1300 kilometers (800 miles), from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois to a very-deep-underground facility in Lead, South Dakota. 

The first two experiments have been running for years, and there was recently released a paper announcing a kind of combined results from the projects. Nothing of any importance was found.  But you might think otherwise from some of the press coverage, some of which attempts to make this "found nothing" result sound like something worthwhile. 

Scientists were hoping to find evidence of something called "mass ordering" or something else called "inverted ordering," but the paper says, "The data show no strong preference for either mass ordering."  We read, "There is no statistically significant preference obtained for either of the mass orderings." We also read, "We do not see a significant preference at present for either mass ordering."  

The only thing the paper authors say on the question of the matter-antimatter asymmetry is, " It is unknown whether neutrinos—and thus leptons—violate charge-parity (CP) symmetry and thereby provide a source of matter–antimatter asymmetry in nature, which is of great interest given the connection between CP violation and the unexplained matter dominance in the Universe." Since the paper says nothing else on the topic of matter-antimatter asymmetry other than this "say nothing" sentence,  the results obtained utterly fail to shed any light on the mystery of matter–antimatter asymmetry, contrary to the sales pitches for these very expensive projects, which tried to suggest that they would give important insight on this topic. 

The Reuters article on this paper describes it without exaggeration, and does not claim that the work shed any light at all on the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem. We have a headline of only "Researchers in US and Japan offer insight into ghostly neutrinos."

A Caltech press release on the paper uses some scrambled reasoning to gin up some relevance to the results. It states this:

"The combined results of NOvA and T2K so far do not favor one mass ordering scenario over another. However, if future results show the neutrino mass ordering is inverted and not normal, NOvA's and T2K's results published today provide evidence that neutrinos do exhibit the suspected asymmetry, potentially explaining why the universe is dominated by matter instead of antimatter. "

This is  kind of like someone saying, "My photo published today of triangular marks in the mud provides no evidence of extraterrestrial creatures; however if it is proven in the future that there are extraterrestrial visitors with triangle-shaped feet, then my photo published today potentially provides evidence of such creatures." 

In the article here, a Professor Yu speaks in a bungling way. We read,  "Professor Yu said, 'Given these results, we expect that next-generation neutrino research facilities such as Japan’s Hyper-Kamiokande or America’s DUNE will discover matter–antimatter asymmetry,' adding, 'We anticipate being able to understand why matter exists in overwhelmingly greater amounts than antimatter in the universe.' ”  But we already know that matter-asymmetry exists, so it makes no sense for Yu to be claiming that it will be discovered by the still-under-construction DUNE project. That's as silly as saying that you anticipate that some new project will discover that the sun exists. There is no basis whatsoever for the described "anticipation." The new paper describes 14 years of expensive neutrino search that failed to shed any light on why "matter exists in overwhelmingly greater amounts than antimatter in the universe."

We can describe the neutrino study projects listed above as "pigeonhole pet projects." That's because they are investigations of some topic of no interest to the general public, and only of interest to a very small number of physicists, such as neutrino specialists. If you are a scientist trying to get funding for one of these pigeonhole pet projects that are of no interest to 99% of the public, what sales strategy can you take? One strategy: try to make your little pigeonhole pet project sound like it has some relevance to some grand mystery that people are interested in. 

Fine-Tuning Denialism Can Lead to Largely Wasted Careers in Science

It seems that throughout his career, cosmologist Ethan Siegel has been the epitome of an "old guard" scientist -- someone dedicated to defending old speculative theories of physicists and cosmologists, mostly theories that have never been well-supported by observations. Year after year, Siegel keeps making the case for theories that somehow got popular among little cliques of physicists or cosmologists, but which never got any good evidence in their favor: theories such as supersymmetry (SUSY), primordial cosmic inflation, and dark matter. Don't be fooled by the hype of the latest "dark matter map" claim, discussed here; we still have the situation that no one has seen dark matter. 

Reading Siegel's posts is rather like reading some old monk argue for the old dogmas of some old organized religion, very much a kind of "you must keep believing as they taught me in college four decades ago" affair. A 2024 post by Siegel tries to explain why scientists have not given up on a theory they spent decades on, but which was never supported by any observations: the theory of supersymmetry (SUSY). For quite a few years around 2010, physicists were publishing about 1500 papers per year on this theory. 

The post by Siegel begins with a silly-sounding statement: "One of the greatest ideas in all of physics, regardless of whether it turns out to be a true idea that reflects reality or not, is that of supersymmetry, or SUSY for short." How unwise to think that a theory is "one of the greatest ideas in all of physics" regardless of whether such an idea is true or false. 

Although having a title of "The one reason that physicists won’t give up on supersymmetry," Siegel's post fails to explain what that reason is, in any way that the average reader will be able to follow.  I can explain more clearly the real reason why some physicists have not given up on the theory of supersymmetry, despite the lack of any evidence for it: it is that such a theory serves as an atheist analgesic pill, helping slightly to relieve the pain that atheist physicists feel when encountering the enormous fine-tuning within the universe's physics and biology. 

The supersymmetry theory arose as a speculative attempt to explain away (or kind of sweep under the rug) a case of cosmic fine-tuning that bothered scientists. The issue of the fine-tuning of the Higgs mass (the mass of the Higgs boson) was skillfully explained by physicist Ben Allanach in an  article at the Aeon site: 

"Behind the question of mass, an even bigger and uglier problem was lurking in the background of the Standard Model: why is the Higgs boson so light? In experiments it weighed in at 125 times the mass of a proton. But calculations using the theory implied that it should be much bigger – roughly ten million billion times bigger, in fact....Quantum fluctuations of ultra-heavy particle pairs should have a profound effect on the Higgs boson, whose mass is very sensitive to them....One logical option is that nature has chosen the initial value of the Higgs boson mass to precisely offset these quantum fluctuations, to an accuracy of one in 10¹⁶. However, that possibility seems remote at best, because the initial value and the quantum fluctuation have nothing to do with each other. It would be akin to dropping a sharp pencil onto a table and having it land exactly upright, balanced on its point. In physics terms, the configuration of the pencil is unnatural or fine-tuned. Just as the movement of air or tiny vibrations should make the pencil fall over, the mass of the Higgs shouldn’t be so perfectly calibrated that it has the ability to cancel out quantum fluctuations. However, instead of an uncanny correspondence, maybe the naturalness problem with the Higgs boson could be explained away by a new, more foundational theory: supersymmetry."

In an article in Symmetry magazine, we have a similar explanation:

"To understand what’s fishy about the observable Higgs mass being so low, first you must know that it is actually the sum of two inputs: the bare Higgs mass (which we don’t know) plus contributions from all the other Standard Model particles, contributions collectively known as 'quantum corrections.' The second number in the equation is an enormous negative, coming in around minus 10¹⁸ GeV. Compared to that, the result of the equation, 125 GeV, is extremely small, close to zero. That means the first number, the bare Higgs mass, must be almost the opposite, to so nearly cancel it out. To some physicists, this is an unacceptably strange coincidence."

How big a coincidence? The Symmetry article later quotes physicist Lawrence Lee Jr. as saying “the conundrum with the Higgs mass, which would require fine-tuning on the order of 1-in-10³⁴,” which is a coincidence like the coincidence of you correctly guessing the full phone numbers of three consecutive strangers. 

Scientists should have just accepted this case of very precise fine-tuning in nature.  But instead, many of them made a long, quixotic, futile attempt to overthrow it (like someone trying to overthrow the observation that the sun is hot, with some elaborate theory trying to explain how the sun isn't really hot).  Why did they do that? Because they had a motivation, an ideological motivation rather than the motivation of simply discovering truth. Their ideological motivation was related to a belief that the universe should not be anything that looked like a product of design. This ideological motivation is clearly stated in a Symmetry article by physicist Lee, who states it as follows: “In general, what we want from our theories—and in some way, our universe—is that nothing seems too contrived.” If you want for the universe to not "seem too contrived," then you may twist yourself into knots trying to explain away cases of apparent fine-tuning in the universe. 

An article makes it rather clear that the supersymmetry theory was mainly motivated by a desire to get rid of a case of fine-tuning, and make the universe look like it was a little less lucky, a little less  providentially blessed. We read this:

"For example, the small mass of the Higgs boson is notoriously difficult to explain—its calculation requires subtracting two very large numbers that just happen to be slightly different from each other. 'But if you add supersymmetry, this takes care of all these cancellations such that you can get a light Higgs mass without needing to have such luck,' says Elodie Resseguie, a postdoc at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory."

The small mass of the Higgs boson is one of only very many cases of fine-tuning in nature.  There are many very precise examples of fine-tuning needed for our universe to be habitable, such as the very precise matching of the absolute value of the proton charge and the electron charge needed for planets and stars to be able to hold together (explained by the astronomer Greenstein here).  There are many times more cases of fine-tuning in biology, such as the endless thousands or millions of different types of very precisely fine-tuned protein molecules, with functional thresholds so high they cannot be credibly explained by Darwinian evolution.  A functional threshold is a particular amount of arrangement of parts that must exist for something to have any functional value.  With protein molecules, the functional threshold is typically so high it involves thousands of very well-arranged atoms. 

The visual below depicts a scientist who clings to some old, failing theory trying to explain some of this fine-tuning:  

The old theory serves as an atheist analgesic, helping slightly to relieve the irritation the scientist feels when encountering the endless examples of fine-tuning in nature:

Below is an interesting graph I got after using the Google Ngram viewer to search for references in Google Books for the terms "supersymmetry" and "fine-tuning."  We see that supersymmetry theory had its peak around 1980, and has been in decline since then. But we have ever-more references to fine-tuning, very many of them references to fine-tuning in physics and biology.  It seems that the efforts of scientists to sweep under the rug fine-tuning are not succeeding. 
 

Siegel's 2024 post that I discussed above is entitled "The one reason that physicists won’t give up on supersymmetry." But a recent article in Quanta Magazine does not tell any such "sticking to their creed" story. That article instead rather has a kind of "hubris has been humbled" ring to it, with kind of a "they're fumbling around and losing their confidence" sound to it. The article is entitled "Is Particle Physics Dead, Dying, or Just Hard?" We have a quote from one guy saying, "I think that it’s kind of irrelevant what we plan on a 10-year timescale, because if we’re building a collider in 10 years, AI will be building the collider; humans won’t be building it." Anyone familiar with how utterly enormous is the physical work involved in the building of a giant particle collider may realize how inane this statement is. 

Quantum Gravity Theorists Spin Out Contorted Cobwebs of Speculation

Two of the biggest theories of modern science are quantum mechanics (which deals with the subatomic world) and general relativity (a theory of gravity that works on a large scale, dealing with large massive objects). For decades, scientists have had the hope of uniting the two into a single theory. Einstein spent the last years of his life working on such a project, but came up empty-handed.

In the past few decades, some physicists have continued to work on theories that attempt to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity. Such theories are called quantum gravity theories. One class of these theories is called loop quantum gravity.

But whenever you hear the phrase “quantum gravity” you should also think to yourself: not even half-baked. Or perhaps it might be better to think: not even tenth-baked. This is because it is perhaps centuries too early to be advancing a theory that tries to unite quantum mechanics and gravitation. One reason is that there are too many mysteries involved in gravitation and quantum mechanics. Uniting quantum gravity and gravitation might have to wait until we solve such mysteries.

The following might be a logical plan:

1. We solve the basic mystery of what causes gravitation, something we don't understand. We know that gravitation is proportional to density of matter, but as it is easy to imagine a universe with no gravitation, we don't really understand why gravitation exists.
2. We solve the mystery of why gravity is a trillion trillion trillion times weaker than all of the three other fundamental forces of the universe.
3. We solve the basic problem of the nature of the collapse of the wave function, something which is still furiously debated by quantum mechanics theorists.
4. We solve the incredibly perplexing problem of quantum entanglement, and how this spooky mysterious “action at a distance” can be occurring.
5. We solve the mysterious “observer effect” in quantum mechanics, the bizarre fact that matter can behave very differently depending only on the way we observe matter.
6. We clarify the mysterious “double slit” experiment, which suggests that both electrons and energy photons can switch back and forth between wave behavior and particle behavior.
7. Then, after gaining a vastly clearer understanding of both quantum mechanics and gravitation, we attempt to create a single theory uniting both of them.

But some of our physicists have jumped straight to item 7 in this list before understanding the first six. This seems to make no sense. How can you unite quantum mechanics and gravitation into a single theory, when there are so many unsolved mysteries involved in both of them?

As physicist Carlo Rovelli recently said about quantum mechanics and general relativity (the prevailing theory of gravitation), "When you try to put the two theories together, they appear to result in all sorts of contradictions and paradoxes."

Quantum gravity is a nice little niche for some physicists. If you are a quantum gravity theorist, you can spend your year working on some theory that no one will expect to work, piling on one far-out speculation after another. If anyone complains about a lack of verification or predictions, you can say: come on, this is quantum gravity, what do you expect? I'm reminded of that Broadway song with the lyric: nice work if you can get it.

Perhaps the main type of quantum gravity theory is what is called loop quantum gravity theory. Such a theory is based on the idea that time is quantized. You can get kind of an idea of quantized time by imagining that each second is a stack of time-slices, and that there are a limited number of these time-slices in each second.

I think this idea is misguided. The idea of quantized time reinforces the assumption of a strict segregation between this instant and the next instant. But rather than thinking in such a way, we should perhaps be moving in the opposite direction. Although it may shock our expectations, experiments on precognition suggest that there may well rarely be some kind of partial intermingling or information exchange between the future and the present. The same thing is suggested by many human experiences very well described in the book The Science of Premonitions by Larry Dossey MD. A particularly striking example is given on page 41 of the book. On May 2, 1812 an Englishman named John Williams had a dream of the assassination of the British prime minister Spencer Perceval. Williams had the dream three times on the same night, and the dream included very specific details. Nine days later Perceval was assassinated. As Dossey puts it, “The details of the assassination were identical to those of the dream, including the colors of the clothing, the buttons on the assassin's jacket, and the location of the bloodstain on Perceval's white waistcoast.” (See here for another author's discussion of this incident.)

I have a series of posts discussing similar cases:

When Dreams or Visions Foretell a Death

More Dreams or Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death

Still More Dreams or Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death

Still More Dreams, Visions or Voices That Seemed to Foretell a Death

Even More Dreams and Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death

Some More Dreams or Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death or Disaster

When the Future Whispers to the Present

When Dreams or Premonitions Seem to Act Prophetically

Dreams, Visions or Premonitions That Seemed to Correctly Predict a Death

Sometimes Dreams, Visions or Premonitions Seem to Foretell a Death

Dreams, Visions or Premonitions That Seemed to Foretell a Death

It is hard enough to explain such experiments and experiences with our normal assumptions about time, and it seems even harder to explain them under some assumption of quantized time. If physicists wish to create some exotic new theory of time, they would do better to create one that can help explain experiments on precognition and human experiences of premonitions that came true. Rather than imagining a rigid “one-way street” leading between the past and the future, such a theory might allow for the possibility of a limited degree of mingling or communication between the past and the future, possibly in both directions. Such a theory might describe a separation between the past and the future that is more fuzzy and blurred than we normally imagine.

But such a theory may be a long way off. And quantum gravity may be centuries away from being ready for prime time.

But despite having no predictive successes and no grounding in evidence, quantity gravity recently got a reverent treatment by the frequently scientist-fawning Quanta Magazine. When I go to the site on the day I wrote this post, I see my entire screen filled up by a huge photo of the  face of quantum gravity theorist Carlo Rovelli. We read of a 12-hour conversation with him. We hear him making groundless speculative claims such as this: "Basically, loop quantum gravity implies that space is not infinitely divisible — it’s made of elementary chunks, which are linked together into loops." We do not hear of any evidence backing up such claims. It isn't quite the usual "nothing but softball questions" interview we tend to get when scientists are questioned, because a few tough questions are asked. But the interviewer fails to ask the "where's the evidence?" type of questions that should be directed to a theorist spinning out cobwebs of speculation not backed up by evidence. 

We have this confession from Rovelli that there's no experimental evidence for quantum gravity, mixed with not a report on actual observational results, but mere wild fantasizing about observational results that might occur:

"The main shortcoming is the lack of experiments supporting it. However, there’s hope on the horizon. There are some proposals to use loop quantum gravity to make sense of signatures in the cosmic microwave background radiation that’s left over from the Big Bang. And there’s another new idea I’m very excited about: If loop quantum gravity is right, there should exist tiny black holes weighing around 10 micrograms that are long-living and that interact only gravitationally. We’re thinking about ways to detect a background 'wind' of these particles. And perhaps these tiny black holes are actually what we call dark matter, a mysterious widespread astronomical phenomenon that we have not yet understood."

These cobwebs of speculation sounds as substantive as someone fantasizing that he may one day meet Bigfoot, and also that he may encounter a flying saucer that he can walk inside and inspect. 

We are told this about Rovelli: "A decade later, he proposed a new 'relational' interpretation of quantum mechanics, which goes so far as to suggest that there is no objective reality whatsoever, only perspectives on reality — be they a physicist’s or a pigeon’s."  In the same interview, we read this quote by Rovelli: "We must not confuse the knowledge we have with the reality of the world." Elsewhere Rovelli said, "At the foundations of physics there is today confusion and incoherence," a statement which may apply to his own assertions.

The Google Ngram page (which you can use at the link here) can be used to get a feel for the popularity of references of a topic in Google Books, over a period of time.  The image below shows the relative frequency of references to three types of physics theory: string theory, supersymmetry and quantum gravity. The graph suggests that supersymmetry and string theory were failing efforts.  Quantum gravity seems no more popular than string theory and supersymmetry after both suffered a sharp decline. 

Using the same tool, I get the graph below, which suggests that people are getting much more evidence for apparitions than for quantum gravity. But that's to be expected. People see apparitions, but don't see quantum gravity. 

But a recent article in Quanta Magazine suggests that the quantum gravity guys may be trying to catch up by injecting a little "ghost glamor" into their speculations:

Asking "Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life," Hawking's Collaborator Has No Sensible or Coherent Answer

 In Quanta Magazine, we recently had a podcast giving an interview with physicist Thomas Hertog. The podcast is entitled "Why Did the Universe Begin?" In the podcast Hertog discusses some of the issues he discussed in his 2023 New Scientist article "Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life?" Hertog offers no coherent-sounding or sensible-sounding answers to either of these questions, nor does he even give any coherent-sounding or sensible-sounding speculations while trying to answer these questions. But along the way in the article and the interview we get some revealing confessions. 

Hertog collaborated for years with the well-known physicist Stephen Hawing. After an interview says "you said some of the first words that Stephen ever said to you was, the universe we observe appears designed," we have this confession from Hertog:

"I do not believe, and Stephen certainly did not believe, that there was an actual designer or a ‘God’ behind this whole thing. He would rather keep religion out of the physics of the Big Bang. But then on the other hand, the laws of physics as we know them, seem mysteriously fit for life. They seem fine-tuned. It’s as if the universe was destined to bring forward life at some point."

Later in the interview Hertog gives more details, saying this:

"Down at the level of fundamental physics, down at the level of the particle forces and the composition of the universe, the fact that we have three dimensions of space and all that, it seems to me fine-tuned to bring forth life. Change any of these properties of the laws, and quickly you end up with a lifeless universe."

We have here multiple confessions. One is a confession that the universe appears fine-tuned. Then there is the confession that Hawking and Hertog were atheists, the type of people who would not believe in a designed universe no matter how well-designed the universe appeared to be. In his New Scientist article Hertog quotes Hawking as stating, "The universe appears designed." I have added this statement to my very long list of scientist confessions that you can read here, which is the longest collection available anywhere of scientists making confessions they do not normally make. 

In his New Scientist article Hertog elaborates further on cosmic fine-tuning:

"Of all the universes that could exist, ours is spectacularly well configured to bring forth life....The universe’s biofriendliness, it turns out, concerns the laws of physics themselves. There are numerous features in these laws that render the universe just right for living things...But the density of vacuum energy seems to be 10¹²⁰ times lower than physicists expect based on theory. If the vacuum energy density of the universe were just a tad larger, however, its repulsive effect would be stronger and acceleration would have kicked in much earlier. This would have meant that matter was so sparsely distributed that it couldn’t clump together to form stars and galaxies, once again precluding the formation of life. The laws of physics and cosmology have many more such life-engendering properties. It almost feels as if the universe is a fix – a big one."

In his New Scientist article Hertog claims that Hawking rejected the idea of the multiverse as an attempt to explain cosmic fine-tuning. He states this:

"Stephen’s reticence to embrace the multiverse grew stronger in the early 2000s, when it became clear that it didn’t actually explain anything....Multiverse cosmology is like a debit card without a PIN or an IKEA flatpack closet without a manual: useless."

We then have in the article some incoherent mumbo-jumbo that does nothing to explain why we have a habitable universe. It is some cockamamie musing that attempts to throw some mention of the word "natural selection" without actually offering anything referring to the so-called "natural selection" of Darwin. We read this:

"Stephen and I came to understand what went on in the early universe as a process akin to that of natural selection on Earth, with an interplay of variation and selection playing out in this primeval environment. Variation happens because random quantum jumps cause frequent small excursions from deterministic behaviour and occasional larger ones. Selection enters the picture because some of these excursions, especially the larger ones, can be amplified and frozen-in thanks to quantum observation. This then gives rise to new rules that help shape the subsequent evolution. The interaction between these two competing forces in the furnace of the big bang produces a branching process – somewhat analogous to how biological species would emerge billions of years later – in which dimensions, forces and particles first diversify and then acquire their effective form when the universe expands and cools. And just like in Darwinian evolution, this introduces a subtle backward-in-time element to our hypothesis. It is as if the collective quantum observations retroactively fix the outcome of the big bang. For this reason, Stephen liked to refer to our idea as 'top-down cosmology'  to drive home the point that we read the fundamentals of the universe ex post facto, somewhat like how biologists reconstruct the tree of life. 'We create the universe as much as the universe creates us,'  he once told me."

This is nonsensical incoherent hogwash. All of the references to natural selection and evolution are spurious, as they refer to a time when life did not exist. We have some scrambled effusion with a little Darwin seasoning sprinkled in to try to make the mess sound a little more sensible. No, we don't create the universe. No, observations after the Big Bang cannot possibly "fix" the Big Bang in terms of making it retroactively compatible with life's eventual appearance. The passage has a reference to "quantum observation," but the reference makes no sense, because what is being talked about is a time when there were no observers. The claim by Hertog at the beginning of the quote that he and Hawking "came to understand what went on in the early universe" is very vain groundless boasting. Jumbled, unreasonable, incoherent-sounding speculation is not understanding something. What went on in the early universe is a mystery a thousand miles over Hertog's head. 

The subsequent paragraphs in Hertog's New Scientist article are  laughable. He starts talking about the hazy, murky concept of a holographic universe, as if that had some relevance to his discombobulated musings. Hertog isn't making a speck of sense when he says this:

"In this cosmological setting, it turns out it is the dimension of time that holographically pops out. History itself is holographically encrypted. What’s more, time emerges in the ex post facto manner that we had envisioned. The past is contingent on the present in holographic cosmology, not the other way around. In a holographic approach to cosmology, venturing far back in time means taking a fuzzy look at the cosmological hologram. It is like zooming out, an operation whereby we discard more and more of the entangled information that the hologram encodes. Holography suggests that not only time, but also the physical laws that shape our universe, disappear back into the big bang."

This statement, like the previous paragraph I quoted by Hertog, belongs in some compilation that we might entitle "scientists shoveling incoherent or unbelievable baloney and BS." In the more recent Quanta Magazine podcast interview, we don't get anything any better. Hertog gives us this far-from-enlightening statement:

"I guess the crux of the hypothesis that Stephen and I ended up developing is that this process of simplification and unification, maybe it just goes on all the way, and maybe ultimately even the distinction between space and time disappears. That’s the crux of his hypothesis. And the unsettling thing, of course, is that the Big Bang — the origin of time — would also become the origin of law. The laws themselves sort of evaporate going all the way backwards."

Nothing that Hertog says in the Quanta Magazine podcast interview or his New Science article makes any sense in terms of helping to explain why the universe is just right for life or why the universe came to exist. In the interview he talks on and on about the concept of a holographic universe, and it all sounds as incoherent, confused and irrelevant as his quote above referencing that concept.  The holographic universe theory is the harebrained speculation that the universe's volume is an illusion. It was stated by physicist Leonard Susskind like this: "The three-dimensional world of ordinary experience—the universe filled with galaxies, stars, planets, houses, boulders, and people—is a hologram, an image of reality coded on a distant two-dimensional surface." A theory so silly does nothing to explain the universe's origin or the fine-tuning of the universe's laws and fundamental constants. 

Hertog has no sensible or coherent answer to questions such as "why is the universe just right for life" and "why did the universe begin." There is a sensible and coherent answer to such questions.  It is the answer that a transcendent power and wisdom wanted our universe to exist and caused it to have characteristics that would allow creatures such as us to exist. 

Dark Matter Guys Avoid Plain English When Announcing Their Latest Failures

Behold the great spectacle of scientists who waste gigantic sums of money constructing  very fancy devices that find utterly nothing. Two of the worst examples are the observation failures of the dark matter cosmologists and the cosmic inflation cosmologists (believers in the unprovable idea that the universe underwent a momentary burst of exponential expansion during a fraction of its first second). Their efforts are schematically depicted in the visual below:

The cosmic inflation cosmologists have been using fancy equipment to try to find something called primordial b-modes. They have found no such thing. The dark matter cosmologists are trying to find the first proof that dark matter exists. They have found no such thing. 

But you might not realize that from reading the latest press account of the failure of those searching for dark matter. We do not get an honest headline saying something like this:

"The Latest Result of the Dark Matter Search: Still Nothing Found"

Instead we get this headline used by the press release announcing the failure to observe any dark matter:

"The LZ experiment's first science run sets new constraints on dark matter interactions"

Such is the rule for scientists running grand projects that find nothing. They seem to never candidly confess that they found nothing, and act like the guy imagined below:

A search on the Cornell Physics paper pre-print server for titles containing the phrase "new constraints" gives 442 results, indicating that physicists are very massively using the term "new constraints" to describe their failures to observe something. A search for the phrase "finds nothing" on the same server gives zero matches, even though a large fraction of the papers returned by the first query should have used the phrase "finds nothing" rather then "new constraints." A search for the phrase "found nothing" on the same server returns only three papers.

When I search using Google Scholar for the latest results of the fruitless search for the primordial b-modes sought by the cosmic inflation theorists, I don't get any candid "nothing found" paper titles. Instead at the top of my results are two papers talking about finding nothing, but using the word "constraint":

Diving into the press release announcing the failed LZ experiment, we get almost no mention of the "nothing found" result. We get euphemistic text like this:

"The LUX ZEPLIN (LZ) Dark Matter experiment is a large research effort involving over 200 scientists and engineers at 40 institutions worldwide...The LZ Collaboration recently released the results of the first experimental run of the LZ dark matter experiment. These results, published in Physical Review Letters, set new constraints on the interactions between dark matter and other particles, which could inform future searches for weakly-interacting dark matter candidates."

In the midst of all of the long jargon-heavy gobbledygook and euphemisms, there is a confession that only extremely careful readers will be able to notice. Below I underline and boldface that confession:

" 'Though our first search resulted in no dark matter signals, it has constrained properties of dark matter, which in turn allows for dark matter theories to be refined,'  said Williams. 'Many of the signals we searched for in this work had not been searched for before.' "

No trace of any plain speaking can be found in the abstract or title of the scientific paper announcing these results. We hear no mention of the observational failure that occurred, at least no mention using any language that even 1% of the population could understand.  The closest the paper comes to confessing the total failure that occurred is when it says, "No significant evidence of an excess is found in either the isoscalar or isovector bases," a statement that virtually no one but a dark matter scientist will recognize as a statement of observation failure.

In the January press release Williams referred to the failure of "our first search." But an August article referred to gathering "280 days of data" using the same LZ detector.  That article's headline was "LZ Experiment Sets New Record in Search for Dark Matter," which sounds like some kind of success, even though it actually was a failure to observe any dark matter. The article never told us what this record  was. We merely had the claim that a "record-setting experiment" had occurred. 

Peering into the article, I get this quote: "The results analyze 280 days’ worth of data: a new set of 220 days (collected between March 2023 and April 2024) combined with 60 earlier days from LZ’s first run." Referring to the failure of "our first search," Williams has given us a quote with a "we've only just begun" sound to it, but the truth is that the LZ experiment has been running for 280 days without success. Each of those days can be considered a search. Instead of referring to the failure of "our first search," Williams should have referred to the failure of the first 280 searches. 

Recently there was published the paper "Search for continuous gravitational waves from known pulsars in the first part of the fourth LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observing run." I have never seen a paper that listed so many authors. Below is a screen shot of the first page, and there are three other author pages listing  as many authors as the first of these pages.

The paper has something like 1000 different listed authors. What is announced is an observational failure, and the Universe Today site summarizes the results with a headline of "LIGO Fails to Find Continuous Gravitational Waves From Pulsars." But why didn't the title of the paper tell you about the failure? Was it maybe that the 1000 different authors didn't want you to easily find out about their involvement in so massive an unsuccessful search?

You just have to shake your head here, and ask: does it really take that many people to find nothing?

Another boondoggle scientist project is what I call Dirty DUNE. It is the DUNE project, DUNE standing for Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. Involving gigantic amounts of digging with a large chance of groundwater contamination, the project may well turn out to be an environmental nightmare, for reasons I describe in my post here. The project advocates have made unfounded and misleading attempts to try to insinuate that the project has some relevance to the matter/antimatter asymmetry problem. Studying neutrinos will shed no light on that problem. 

In the latest attempt to gin up some rationale for this misguided and environmentally reckless project, some scientists have resorted to generating fake data and appealing to never-observed extra dimensions. We read this:

" 'We simulated several years of neutrino data from the DUNE experiment using computational models,'  Masud said. 'By analyzing both the low-energy and high-energy effects of large extra dimensions on neutrino oscillation probabilities, we statistically assessed DUNE's ability to constrain the potential size of these extra dimensions, assuming they exist in nature.' "

Get the idea? They didn't use real data gathered by the DUNE experiment, but instead used fake data that was merely "simulated." It was kind of like some football coach that justifies his expensive million-dollar player salaries by using a computer program that generates fake football statistics for the years 2026 and 2027.  And how about that appeal to "these extra dimensions, assuming they exist in nature"?  That part is like having your fake football statistics for future years include lots of touchdowns scored by the cheerleaders, and lots of 100-yard field goals kicked by the referees.  

I discussed how the physicists and cosmologists use language the average person won't understand when they write up papers describing their observation failures. But at least they write up some kind of paper. It's different when neuroscientists find nothing after long eager searching. Neuroscientists have been using more and more powerful microscopes, examining endless samples of brain tissue, looking for any trace of human learned knowledge stored in brain tissue. They have found nothing of the sort. They found not a single word stored in brain tissue, and not even a single letter of the alphabet.  They found not a single image of something someone saw in the past, and not even a single pixel of such an image. They found not a single remembered sentence, and not a single syllable of such a sentence.

Do our neuroscientists write up papers describing such failures, so relevant to the topic of whether brains store memories? No, neuroscientists just avoid doing that, and hope very much you won't ever notice the observation failure. If memories were actually stored in human brains, they would have been discovered by microscopic examination around the year 1960, shortly after the genetic code was discovered. For a full post about this topic, read my January 16th post at https://headtruth.blogspot.com/ .

The Perfect Cosmic Balance Foreordained from the Very Beginning

The very readable cosmologist Ethan Siegel has a long-running "Ask Ethan" series of posts that are sometimes characterized by explanatory overconfidence, in which Ethan often acts as if he understands great mysteries that are actually far beyond the understanding of any human. An example is his latest post in the series in which he incorrectly states that "we know what makes up the Universe — i.e., what our ratios are of dark energy to dark matter to normal matter." No, we don't know any such things, and no one has ever even directly observed dark matter or dark energy, which don't even have any place in the standard model of physics.  We don't even know whether dark matter or dark energy exists.  I wish I had a nickel for every time a scientist said "we know" about some thing that is not actually known; I'd be rich. 

Siegel's latest post in this series is a post raising the question "Why Is the Universe Electrically Neutral?"  There is a kind of a half-answer to this question: the universe is electrically neutral because  from the very beginning there has been a law of nature (the law of  conservation of charge) that guarantees electrical neutrality in any universe beginning in an incredibly hot and dense state such as the Big Bang.  But this is only a half-answer, because there is no known intrinsic reason why such a law had to exist from the beginning.  Rather than explaining how this law foreordained an electrically neutral universe from the beginning,  Siegel refers us to speculative papers he has written that do not give us the main reason the universe is electrically neutral. 

When a person refers to the electrical neutrality of the universe, he means the apparent fact that the total amount of positive electric charge in the universe seems to be equal to the total amount of negative electric charge in the universe. At the lowest level, such electric charges are found in protons and electrons.  

Below are some of the fundamental constants of the universe, numbers that are believed to be the same everywhere in the universe:

Speed of light	299,792,458 meters per second
Planck's constant	6.62607004 × 10-34 m2 kg / s
Gravitational constant	6.67408 × 10-11 m3 kg-1 s-2
Proton mass	1.6726231 × 10-27 kg
Electron mass	9.1093897 × 10-31 kg
Proton charge	1.60217733 × 10-19 coulomb
Electron charge	-1.60217733 × 10-19 coulomb

The table below shows a a great big coincidence scientists cannot explain. Even though each proton has a mass 1836 times greater than each electron, the charge of the proton is the exact opposite of the charge of the electron. An absolute magnitude is a number that you get when you discard the sign in front of the number. Experiments have actually indicated that the absolute magnitude of the proton charge and the absolute magnitude of the electron charge differ by less than 1 part in 1,000,000,000,000,000.

RATIO OF PROTON MASS TO ELECTRON MASS
1836.152672
RATIO OF PROTON CHARGE TO ELECTRON CHARGE
-1.000000000000000000

A physicist might try to offer an "explanation" for this coincidence by referring to the idea that protons are made of smaller particles called quarks. The theory is that each proton consists of three particles: two "up" quarks with a positive charge of 2/3 of the proton's charge, and one "down" quark with a negative charge of 1/3 of the proton's charge.  But this really only worsens the explanatory problem. Under such a scheme we have not just one very precise electric charge coincidence in the fundamental constants of nature, but two such coincidences:

(1) The coincidence that the absolute value of the proton charge has always been very precisely equal to the absolute value of the electron charge;

(2) the coincidence that the absolute value of the up quark has always been very precisely twice the absolute value of the down quark. 

Doubling the number of very precise coincidences isn't really anything in the way of explanation. In the informative and entertaining book We Have No Idea by physics professor Daniel Whiteson and Jorge Cham, on page 54 the authors state this:

"If the quarks had any more (or less charge), then the charge of protons wouldn't precisely balance the negative charge of the electron, and you couldn't form stable neutral atoms. Without these perfect -1/3 and + 2/3 charges, we wouldn't be here. There would be no chemistry, no biology and no life."

But is there any explanation for this? Apparently not, because the authors next state this:

"This is actually fascinating (or creepy, depending on your level of paranoia) because, according to our current theory, particles can have any charges whatsoever; the theory works just as well with any charge value, and the fact they balance perfectly is, as far as we know, a huge and lucky coincidence."

Life could have existed if protons and electrons both had some different charge, but only if the proton charge was the exact opposite of the electron charge. The situation is illustrated in the diagram below (when reading the diagram, imagine that the green line is less than a billionth of the width of the square):

As far as we know, our planet has an equal number of protons and electrons, and our planet is electrically neutral, having an equal amount of positive charge and negative charge. Given that electromagnetism is a force very roughly a hundred trillion trillion trillion times stronger than gravity (the force that holds our planet together), it seems that even the tiniest imbalance (such as 1 part in 1,000,000,000,000) between the proton charge and the electron charge would result in an electrical imbalance strong enough to prevent a planet such as ours from holding together.  

On page 64 of his book The Symbiotic Universe, astronomer George Greenstein (a professor emeritus at Amherst College) says this about the equality of the proton and electron charges: 

"Relatively small things like stones, people, and the like would fly apart if the two charges differed by as little as one part in 100 billion. Large structures like the Earth and the Sun require for their existence a yet more perfect balance of one part in a billion billion." 

You can read the quote above in its original context using this link.

In fact, experiments do indicate that the absolute value of the charge of the proton and the electron match to fifteen decimal places, differing by less than one part in a million billion (1 part in 1,000,000,000,000,000). 

Scientifically speaking, what kind of explanation can be given for this equality of positive charge and negative charge in the universe? The only thing that can be offered is a kind of half-explanation: a reference to a law of nature. The law is called the law of  conservation of charge. According to the law of conservation of charge, any event that causes an increase in electrical charge must also cause a corresponding decrease in electrical charge; and any event that causes a decrease in electrical charge must also cause a corresponding increase in electrical charge.

The best way to illustrate this law is to refer to the high-energy collisions that occur in particle colliders such as the Large Hadron Collider.  In that massive machine, particles are accelerated to almost the speed of light. When two very high-energy particles collide at such speeds, they create mainly out of energy new matter particles such as protons and electrons. Following Einstein's famous equaion of E=mc², energy can be converted to matter, and vice versa. But following the law of conservation of charge, nature always "balances the books" so that the number of protons created equals the number of electrons created.  For example, if a high-energy collision creates 1000 new protons mainly from energy, then also exactly 1000 new electrons are created. And if a more energetic high-energy collision creates 8338 protons from energy, then also exactly 8338 electrons are created. 

Given such a law of nature, and a universe beginning in an extremely dense and hot state such as the Big Bang, electrical neutrality follows as a consequence. In the earliest moments of the Big Bang, the universe was so hot and dense that everything was like the high-energy collisions occurring in the Large Hadron Collider.  With a "balance the books" charge conservation law being followed everywhere, it was inevitable that the result would be an equal amount of positive charge and negative charge.  But this is merely a kind of half-explanation.  For we do not understand why such a law existed. 

Brittanica.com states the law of conservation of charge as the law that "at a subatomic level, charged particles can be created, but always in pairs with equal positive and negative charge so that the total amount of charge always remains constant." It describes this rather intricate "balance the books" system within nature:

"When a charged particle changes into a new particle, the new particle inherits the exact charge of the original. When a charged particle appears where there was none before, it is invariably accompanied by another particle of equal and opposite charge, so that no net change in charge occurs. The annihilation of a charged particle requires the joint annihilation of a particle of equal and opposite charge. "

Brittanica.com mentions mentions three other conservation laws, saying, "The laws of conservation of energy, momentum, and angular momentum are all derived from classical mechanics." But no such claim is made about the law of conservation of charge. There would seem be no contradiction if no such law existed, and we should not expect any such law of the conservation of charge to exist in a random universe.  

The term "law of the conservation of charge" is something of a misnomer, because charge itself is not conserved.  Over billions of years, stars convert matter into energy, resulting in a gradual decrease in the number of charges in the universe (as fewer protons and electrons exist). What is conserved is the ratio of positive charge to negative charge.  The law of the conservation of charge would be better named as the law of the preservation of the ratio of charges. But scientists would not like to use such a more accurate term, which would tend to make the universe sound like some purposeful, programmatic, mathematically-minded bookkeeper interested in the preservation of mathematical ratios. 

Imagine if there was a strange law in your household that you called the Law of Money Balance. The law might work like this: whenever you lost money, you would gain an equal amount of money. And whenever you gained money, you would lose an equal amount of money. So, for example, if there was a hole in your pocket and you lost $50 by dropping it on a crowded street, you might come home and find there was $50 that mysteriously appeared on your coffee table. And whenever you saw that there was some direct deposit of $4000 sent by your employer as a salary payment, you would find that there was at the same time some mysterious withdrawal of $4000 from your bank.  This would be great if you started out as a millionaire. No matter how much money you spent, you would always end up with the same amount of money, so you would always stay a millionaire.  

You might take such a law for granted, regarding it as some "natural law of how reality works." Or if you started out as a millionaire you might reasonably suspect that the strange law was some providential blessing.  Ditto for the law of conservation of charge, something we would not expect to exist in any random universe. 

In his recent post Ethan Siegel does a poor job of attempting an answer to the question: why is the universe electrically neutral? He fails to explain how the law of conservation of charge is the underlying physical law behind the universe's electrical neutrality (the perfect balance of positive electric charge and negative electric charge). Referring to failed wildly speculative "grand unification theories" never supported by evidence, Siegel  speculates wildly about how the universe could have begun with an imbalance of proton charge and electron charge, something that would have been in violation of one of our universe's main laws, the law of conservation of charge. He then refers us to some  imaginative paper he wrote that speculates about how such a universe with charge imbalances might have become more electrically neutral.  All of that makes up a very bad explanation as to why the universe is electrically neutral.  A much better and simpler explanation (although only a half-explanation) is to explain how our universe has always had a law (the law of conservation of charge) that guarantees that there would be a perfect balance of positive and electric charges.  But since we have no scientific explanation for why so convenient a law exists, one of many very convenient laws of nature necessary for our existence, this is merely a kind of half-explanation.

We take for granted a law such as the law of the law of conservation of charge, because it is has always existed. It seems that anyone always enjoying the blessings of a favorable law of nature will take that law for granted, no matter how improbable that law would be in a random universe.  For example, if we lived in a universe in which people always had nice gentle landings whenever they jumped off of high cliffs or high buildings, we might call such a law "the Law of Gentle Landings," and think that it was nothing special, not any providential blessing. And if we lived in some universe in which nice tasty well-cooked food would always conveniently drop from the sky at dinner time, gently landing in our back yards, we might call that regularity "the Law of Convenient Food Delivery," and think that it was nothing special, not any providential blessing, but just some law of nature to be taken for granted.  We would say "there's nothing special" about such a law, and claim that "it's merely the way nature works," language also strangely used about the law of  conservation of charge.