Hello Carlo,
We miss you!
You write above, "Then there is a post on the waste of public money on research about time in quantum gravity. I take this seriously. Often at conferences I listen to talk after talk, and I wonder "is public money wasted here"? Maybe yes. But was it wasted public money the money that the Ptolemy's Kings put in Ptolemy's astronomy? Or that the Church put in supporting Copernicus completely useless searches? Or that supported Maxwell and Faraday, Shcroedinger or Einstein? No, it clearly was not. Is there a way to chose a priori who will be next Dirac? No, there is not. Research needs courage, wasted time and money, false directions. The history of our civilization is the proof that all this money is not wasted, in my opinion.
Carlo"
How much government funding did Einstein receive as a patent clerk, when he wrote his five miraculous papers which revolutionized physics?
For that matter, how much money did "Ptolemy's Kings put in Ptolemy's astronomy?" And was this public money? Sometimes I feel like we've reintroduced Kings in the realm (empires) of science, so maybe that is actually a good analogy!
And how much money did "the Church put in supporting Copernicus completely useless searches?" And were Copernicus's searches really useless? I thought Copernicus liberated us from the geocentric universe! And how much government funding went to support "Maxwell and Faraday, Shcroedinger or Einstein?" Unless I miss my guess, they all made their monumental contributions *before* they received massive amounts of funding, if they ever did receive massive amounts of funding. I'll bet you $100 on this. :)
Then you write, "Is there a way to chose a priori who will be next Dirac? No, there is not." This is true, so why does so much funding go to so few who never really advance physics? And then after a few years of not advancing physics themselves, they are given 10x as much funding to pick out the next Dirac, or the next Einstein, or Bohr. It seems that these days, unlike the past, the less one advances physics on one's own, and the more one sticks with "communal" ideas that go nowhere, the more and more funding they receive, until we have entire empires--the richest scientific empires in the history of science, which have frozen progress in physics, while outlawing new ideas.
Science is more of an art than a science, and it always seems to advance in manners never before anticipated by the establishment, as Planck stated. One cannot legislate, nor vote on, nor dictate the advancement of science by fiat. "One cannot pray a lie," as Mark Twain once said.
"New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment." --Max Planck
And again we see the primacy of the honest individual in the classic, epic hero's journey!
"A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man." --Joseph Campbell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth
And the Nobel Laureate eocnomist F.A. Hayek agrees!
"The tragedy of collectivist thought is that, while it starts out to make reason supreme, it ends by destroying reason because it misconceives the process on which the growth of reason depends. It may indeed be said that it is the paradox of all collectivist doctrine and its demands for "conscious" control or "conscious" planning that they necessarily lead to the demand that the mind of some individual should rule supreme--while only the individualist approach to social phenomena makes us recognize the superindividual forces which guide the growth of reason. Individualism is thus an attitude of humility before this social process and of tolerance to other opinions and is the exact opposite of that intellectual hubris which is at the root of the demand for comprehensive direction of social purpose." -F.A. Hayek, The End of Truth, The Road to Serfdom
Not only do the contemporary antitheory empires concentrate epic amounts of funding into a small group of physicists' hands, but by and by that group does not only not fund the advancement of physics, but it funds Ph.D.'s and postdocs to go forth and actively ban, censor, castigate, and attack new ideas, often anonymously, so as to please their elder kings and shore up their funding. Is this a prudent use of funding? Would we not be better off without such funding? Getting rid of this funding would remove the incentive for joining groupthink and regimes, along with the incentive to ignore and/or attack simple theories rooted in logic and reason, so as to keep progress in physics frozen.
Carlo--since, as you say, one cannot predict the next Dirac, why not distribute smaller amounts of funding to a greater number of physicists? Would this not make sense from both a statistical and moral standpoint, and lessen the probability of kingships and empires and their hired mercenaries who oppose the advancement of physics, thusly freezing its progress?
Even though the Greats have been banned from the Academy, every physicist ought read George Orwell and Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayke, who expound on how groupthink, in the absence of the moral appreciation of the Truth, leads to tyranny:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm (about when the LQGers overthrow the String Theory Regime and institute their own government, where all anti-theories are equal, but some are more equal than others)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four (about a young man working at the Ministry of Physics and a young woman working at the Ministry of Corporate-State Curiosity)
Well, no man is an island, and physics has ever been advanced by cordial conversation in the context of rigorous honesty and a humble acknowledgement of empirical facts. Einstein and Bohr disagreed often, but yet they had a deep respect for one-another, and I highly recommend the perusal of their converstations! Where would be be without the disagreements between Einstein and Minkowski, between Bohr and Einstein, and between Pauli and just about everybody? Contrast their exalted dialogues to the snarky dialogues in the modern string-LQG wars (and the 10x snarkier attacks lauched against MDT), and the perhaps even more troubling complete *lack* of dialogue for topics and approaches transcending those two "theories" which might not even be *physical* theories after all.
Again, the Nobel Laureate Max Planck writes,
"New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment." --Max Planck
And yet today's science is dominated by "communal" theories bolstered by multi-million-dollar media teams. And again, these theories aren't really *physical* theories. They are often merely "not even wrong"--and they defend their not-even-wrongishness unto the death, as it provides the center and circumference of a groupthink regime, which in turn guarantees infinite funding, accolades, press, televised mini-series, and awards for a small set of "leaders" heading anti-theory regimes.
Planck also wrote, "Eine neue wissenschaftliche Wahrheit pflegt sich nicht in der Weise durchzusetzen, daß ihre Gegner überzeugt werden und sich als belehrt erklären, sondern vielmehr dadurch, daß ihre Gegner allmählich aussterben und daß die heranwachsende Generation von vornherein mit der Wahrheit vertraut geworden ist."
Translation: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
Once upon a time new theories were opposed by established scientists and established science. But today, new theories are opposed by established anti-theory bureaucracies and established bureaucrats, which have done little, if anything, to advance or contibute to actual science. So walking into town with a new theory is more akin to Galileo standing before the Inquisition.
Bohr and Gamow loved Westerns--I woudl do anything to watch some Westerns with those guys. Westerns always open the same way. The lone cowboy--the high plains drifter--drifts on into town, and immediately the boss's lowly gangsters and postdocs mock, belittle, and intimidate him, just like how it goes down in today's "communal" realms of non-physics and anti-theory regimes, which are always run out of the saloons with the crooked dealers.
This is what it sometimes feels like talking about Moving Dimensions Theory, when I ride into town on a mule, as I don't have the funding to buy the BMW--the preferred ride of the anti-theorists I have heard:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADzFve-tKnU
Director Sergio Leone was a genius! Perhaps you saw some of his films in the original Italian! You can see how Sergio has that Homeric poetry in his soul.
It seems too many physicists have forgotten the Hippocratic Oath--"first, do no harm."
Perhaps we ought contemplate a oath for scientists!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath_for_Scientists
So, in light of all this, Carlo, I'm thankful for this conversation and to fqxi for providing this forum which brought us togetehr!
MDT provides opportunities for novel research programs and curriculums--for new directions and exalted pursuits in physics, philosophy, and knowledge--based upon the foundational works of physics. And on a deeper level, the "heroic spirit" the program exalts could find use across all realms in academia and throughout our economy, in which far, far too many people profit by saying one thing and doing another--activities which have lead to our current financial crises and familial, cultural, and scientific delcine.
MDT predicts all of relativity from a simple postulate and equation that also provides *physical* models for entropy, time, and all its arrows, quantum entanglement and nonlocality, and all the dualities--space/time, energy/mass, and wave/particle. Not bad for one small equation: dx4/dt = ic, which offers a *physical* unification across all realms of physics, tying together entities as diverse as quantum entanglement and the timelessness of the photon, while presenting insight into a novel physical facet of our universe--the fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions.
Finally, Carlo, you write, "Research needs courage, wasted time and money, false directions."
Well, I agree Research needs courage. Classic, cowboy courage!
Courage is a kind of salvation. --Plato
Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts. --Aristotle
O friends, be men, and let your hearts be strong,
And let no warrior in the heat of fight
Do what may bring him shame in others' eyes;
For more of those who shrink from shame are safe
Than fall in battle, while with those who flee
Is neither glory nor reprieve from death.
- Homer's Iliad (bk. V, l. 663),
All serious daring starts from within. --Harriet Beecher Stowe
Moral cowardice that keeps us from speaking our minds is as dangerous to this country as irresponsible talk. The right way is not always the popular and easy way. Standing for right when it is unpopular is a true test of moral character. -- Margaret Chase Smith
If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream. --Martin Luther King, jr.
Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
But none of the physicists you listed would agree that research necessarily needs "wasted time and money, false directions." It is not in a true physicist's nature to wish for wasted time amd wrong roads, as we know how fleeting life is.
All the wasted money, which is wasted so flippantly these days--so pridefully--is a vast and resounding insult to all the honest postdocs, grad-students, and hard-working professors, who are never. never paid enough.
And so it is that I propose a more equitable distribution of grants, for as long as "money is wasted," and "nobody can predict the next Dirac nor Einstein," why not approach the world, and one's fellow physicists, with more humility, kindness, and common courtesy?
For "humility, kindness, and common courtesy," cost nothing extra, and will go far further in returning the classic, heroic spirit to the realm of physics--the spirit by which physics has ever advanced, than will hundreds of millions of dollars, which cannot buy one iota of truth, any more than it can buy the soul.
An education obtained with money is worse than no education at all" --Socrates
"Humility, kindness, and common courtesy" will do far more to advance knowledge, wisdom, and culture than vast amounts of funding for regimes that have made a God-King of failure, and now bolster the black holes of anti-theories with hired mercaneries who play little games of censorship, snark, and PR hype, while penning 10^99 meaningless, indecipherabel papers. I am not convinced that such entities are necessary to the advancement of science, and I would, in fact, postulate that they are antithetical to the adavancement of science and culture, which find merrier companionship in truth, logic, reason, simplicity, honesty, and a keen appreciation for and dedication to *physical* reality.
For know this:
And yet it--the fourth dimension--moves! And its movement hath liberated us from frozen time, liberated us from the block universe, and liberated us from frozen progress in theoretical physics!
Change, my friend, has been woven into the fundamental fabric of spacetime, where it needs to be! For change encompasses every physical realm! There can be no measurement without change, and thus there can be no physics without change!
O happy day! A new, hitherto unsung universal invariant has been bestowed upon us--the fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions at c! dx4/dt = ic!
And this motion hath taken us to a brave, new heroic age!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_pur_si_muove
E pur si muove!
Now and Forver!
And unless I miss my guess, we are in for one wild night. . .
Best,
Dr. E (The Real McCoy)