astro
10-20-2007, 05:45 PM
John Baez's Crackpot Index/String Theory/LQG/Tenure/Fame/Book Deals
It has been very well documented that both String Theory and LQG rank high on the famous John Baez crackpot index:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/10/31/161746/39
http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2006/10/string-theory-loop-quantum-gravity-and.html
http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-105196.html
http://www.advancedphysics.org/forum/showthread.php?t=205
Michio Kaku, Ed Witten, Lisa Randall, Lee Smolin, Brian Greene, and Lenny Susskind all rank way up on John Baez's crackpot index.
And yet, they receive millions upon millions of dollars for research, books, TV shows, blogs, and myspace pages. Thousands of groupthink physics fanboys are commanded from on high to snark all competing physical theories based in logic, truth, reason, and physics, and thus progress in theoretical physics has halted over the past thirty years, as elaborated on in Lee Smolin's THE TROUBLE WITH PHYSICS: THE RISE OF STRING THEORY, THE FALL OF SCIENCE, AND WHAT COMES NEXT--MDT.
What Baez's crackpot index leaves out is the true formula for postmodern success in the realm of pseudo-physics.
The higher the score on the Baez crackpot index, the better the opportunities, just as long as one is an aging, dishonest, amoral, snarky boomer, who rose to power as science fell.
As soon as they got tenure, the snark-a-lark boomers kicked down the ladders of truth, logic, and reason, which once provided the natural path for one to further one's career. And they replaced those ladders with fancy elevators for any useful-groupthink-fanboy-idiot who had nothing to lose by letting the baby be cut in half, as it was never theirs to begin with. So it is that they recruited legions of those who felt smarter when they were told they were smart--and the #'s looked good on the NSF balance sheets, for bodies are needed to justify millions upon millions of dollars. Adn if you asked, they would say, "we're almost there, just one more day!"
While physics has most usually been advanced by young mavericks asking and answering their own questions, felt deep in their individual souls, in many ways Susskind/Penrose/Smolin et al have legislated and bureaucratizzed curiosity, while they institutionalized zero progress in physics. Physics, like social security, has been redefined as that which empowers boomer's illusions of grandeur, while deepening their pockets. If you kneel before them, they give you a few dollars and send you forth to ignore/snark/castigate/impugn MDT and competing theories. A favorite pastime of young physics fanboys is to please their elders by demonstrating their procilivity with Baez's crackpot index--wielding it like a sledge hammer not against String Theory & LQG, which are backed by millions of dollars and institutionalized fanboy groupthink, but against small, indie physics. So it is that one's tax dollars are used against those who work real jobs.
Thus Sting Theory, Branes, Hawking's radition and blackhole entropy (for which there were never any tests nor proof), Twistors, LQG, and M Theory get millions upon millions upon millions of dollars, while physics comes to a standstill. Run the numbers on Baez's crackpot inex, and you will see that the sad boomer theories are nothing more than expensive crackpot theories, as attested to by Woit, Baez, and Smolin.
Here is the formula by which success, tenure, fame, and money are distributed in physics--as one can see, the higher the score on the Baez crackpot index, the better off one is:
((score on Baez's crackpot index) + (age of physicist)^(number of former grad students no longer employed in physics)) * (# of spurious, speculative, untestable papers published) * (# of claims that the conjectures can be tested) * (# of tv appearances) * (# of backcover blurbs from esteemed crackpots)^(# of positive comments the receiver of backcover blurbs issued to the backcover blurber's crackpot theories (woit & penrose)) * (# of behind-the-back emails snarking logic, reason, and physics) * (# of revolutions one's field has gone through while still failing) * (# of time physicist resisted speaking the simple truth, for fear of rejection) = BAEZ CRACKPOT SUCCESS FACTOR
So it is that Susskind/Witten/Green/Kaku/Randall et al have brought physics to a halt, snarking all the way to the bank, while also killing religion, breaking up the family, contributing to skyrocketing tuitions and rising divorce rates, fostering the decline of the university, and killing the great books and classics, all to make way for their Anthropic principle, LQG, ST, snarky crackpot indexes, multiverses, string-a-ling strings, Branes, wormholes--all of which are far, far removed from Einstein's, Feynman's, Dirac's, and Bohr's greatness, and their accompanying humility.
So it is that rising physicists ought to read the Classics penned by the Greats--read Einstein, Bohr, Fermi, Wheeler, Dirac.
Stay away from Hawking/Penrose/Baez/Greene/Randall/Kaku--for none of them have ever contributed to the advancement of science.
Collected Quotes from Albert Einstein
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
"Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love."
"I want to know God's thoughts; the rest are details."
"The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
"The only real valuable thing is intuition."
"A person starts to live when he can live outside himself."
"I am convinced that He (God) does not play dice."
"God is subtle but he is not malicious."
"Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character."
"I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."
"The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."
"Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."
"Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."
"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
"Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds."
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."
"Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it."
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."
"God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically."
"The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking."
"Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal."
"Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."
"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible."
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
"Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."
"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing."
"Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater."
"Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity."
"If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut."
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe."
"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
"In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep."
"The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead."
"Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves."
"Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!"
"No, this trick won't work...How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?"
"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind."
"Yes, we have to divide up our time like that, between our politics and our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever."
"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."
"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeeded be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."
"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."
"Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."
"One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year."
"...one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought."
"He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."
"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." (Sign hanging in Einstein's office at Princeton)
It has been very well documented that both String Theory and LQG rank high on the famous John Baez crackpot index:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/10/31/161746/39
http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2006/10/string-theory-loop-quantum-gravity-and.html
http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-105196.html
http://www.advancedphysics.org/forum/showthread.php?t=205
Michio Kaku, Ed Witten, Lisa Randall, Lee Smolin, Brian Greene, and Lenny Susskind all rank way up on John Baez's crackpot index.
And yet, they receive millions upon millions of dollars for research, books, TV shows, blogs, and myspace pages. Thousands of groupthink physics fanboys are commanded from on high to snark all competing physical theories based in logic, truth, reason, and physics, and thus progress in theoretical physics has halted over the past thirty years, as elaborated on in Lee Smolin's THE TROUBLE WITH PHYSICS: THE RISE OF STRING THEORY, THE FALL OF SCIENCE, AND WHAT COMES NEXT--MDT.
What Baez's crackpot index leaves out is the true formula for postmodern success in the realm of pseudo-physics.
The higher the score on the Baez crackpot index, the better the opportunities, just as long as one is an aging, dishonest, amoral, snarky boomer, who rose to power as science fell.
As soon as they got tenure, the snark-a-lark boomers kicked down the ladders of truth, logic, and reason, which once provided the natural path for one to further one's career. And they replaced those ladders with fancy elevators for any useful-groupthink-fanboy-idiot who had nothing to lose by letting the baby be cut in half, as it was never theirs to begin with. So it is that they recruited legions of those who felt smarter when they were told they were smart--and the #'s looked good on the NSF balance sheets, for bodies are needed to justify millions upon millions of dollars. Adn if you asked, they would say, "we're almost there, just one more day!"
While physics has most usually been advanced by young mavericks asking and answering their own questions, felt deep in their individual souls, in many ways Susskind/Penrose/Smolin et al have legislated and bureaucratizzed curiosity, while they institutionalized zero progress in physics. Physics, like social security, has been redefined as that which empowers boomer's illusions of grandeur, while deepening their pockets. If you kneel before them, they give you a few dollars and send you forth to ignore/snark/castigate/impugn MDT and competing theories. A favorite pastime of young physics fanboys is to please their elders by demonstrating their procilivity with Baez's crackpot index--wielding it like a sledge hammer not against String Theory & LQG, which are backed by millions of dollars and institutionalized fanboy groupthink, but against small, indie physics. So it is that one's tax dollars are used against those who work real jobs.
Thus Sting Theory, Branes, Hawking's radition and blackhole entropy (for which there were never any tests nor proof), Twistors, LQG, and M Theory get millions upon millions upon millions of dollars, while physics comes to a standstill. Run the numbers on Baez's crackpot inex, and you will see that the sad boomer theories are nothing more than expensive crackpot theories, as attested to by Woit, Baez, and Smolin.
Here is the formula by which success, tenure, fame, and money are distributed in physics--as one can see, the higher the score on the Baez crackpot index, the better off one is:
((score on Baez's crackpot index) + (age of physicist)^(number of former grad students no longer employed in physics)) * (# of spurious, speculative, untestable papers published) * (# of claims that the conjectures can be tested) * (# of tv appearances) * (# of backcover blurbs from esteemed crackpots)^(# of positive comments the receiver of backcover blurbs issued to the backcover blurber's crackpot theories (woit & penrose)) * (# of behind-the-back emails snarking logic, reason, and physics) * (# of revolutions one's field has gone through while still failing) * (# of time physicist resisted speaking the simple truth, for fear of rejection) = BAEZ CRACKPOT SUCCESS FACTOR
So it is that Susskind/Witten/Green/Kaku/Randall et al have brought physics to a halt, snarking all the way to the bank, while also killing religion, breaking up the family, contributing to skyrocketing tuitions and rising divorce rates, fostering the decline of the university, and killing the great books and classics, all to make way for their Anthropic principle, LQG, ST, snarky crackpot indexes, multiverses, string-a-ling strings, Branes, wormholes--all of which are far, far removed from Einstein's, Feynman's, Dirac's, and Bohr's greatness, and their accompanying humility.
So it is that rising physicists ought to read the Classics penned by the Greats--read Einstein, Bohr, Fermi, Wheeler, Dirac.
Stay away from Hawking/Penrose/Baez/Greene/Randall/Kaku--for none of them have ever contributed to the advancement of science.
Collected Quotes from Albert Einstein
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
"Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love."
"I want to know God's thoughts; the rest are details."
"The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
"The only real valuable thing is intuition."
"A person starts to live when he can live outside himself."
"I am convinced that He (God) does not play dice."
"God is subtle but he is not malicious."
"Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character."
"I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."
"The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."
"Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."
"Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."
"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
"Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds."
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."
"Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it."
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."
"God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically."
"The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking."
"Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal."
"Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."
"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible."
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
"Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."
"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing."
"Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater."
"Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity."
"If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut."
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe."
"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
"In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep."
"The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead."
"Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves."
"Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!"
"No, this trick won't work...How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?"
"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind."
"Yes, we have to divide up our time like that, between our politics and our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever."
"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."
"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeeded be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."
"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."
"Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."
"One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year."
"...one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought."
"He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."
"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." (Sign hanging in Einstein's office at Princeton)