Severian

I stated this myself earlier in this thread. I agree that you would never calculate to this precision with a new theory. However, your new theory should not be in contradiction with this number, and you should do at least a basic calculation to ensure it isn't in contradiction.

I am slightly curious how you think anyone working on ATLAS could produce their own pictures. There is a high magnetic field in the pit, so anything metal is not allowed inside, certainly not a camera. The only pictures in existence are the official ones which had to be taken in special conditions.

You are right, I am a fraud, since I don't work at CERN. It was meant as a joke. And, unlike you, I am not very interesting.

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Here is a couple of mine: And before the detector went in:

A few years ago I would certainly have labeled myself as a 'liberal'. But as I get older I am finding myself getting more conservative. Does that mean that I am a less 'critical' thinker than I was before? No, it is quite the opposite; I have become more critical. To a certain extent this is because I have seen what 'change' can do. Being in higher education, I have seen the unbelievable drive in recent years of the 'liberals' to make education more 'inclusive'. This has undeniably led to a reduction in standards which make everyone suffer. We now have much more difficulty finding students capable of doing scientific research than we did before. So conservatism is often rooted in a desire to preserve systems that work. Once something has been broken by tinkering liberals, it may never be the same again, and everyone will be worse off. I now find myself as somewhere between liberal and conservative. I would like to see change in many areas, but that shouldn't be knee-jerk 'lets have a group hug' change. It should be well thought out, reasoned and motivated change, with honest tests and safety measures put in place to ensure the change is an improvement and a facility for changing it back if it is not. Ironically enough, I am finding that some of the things I want to change most (so in some sense I am least 'conservative' about) and the things that the 'liberals' have introduced into our society in the guise of progress.

Which theories are you taking about? The Standard Model, for example, has made no wrong predictions at all! In fact that is one of the big problems with particle physics at the moment - the Standard Model doesn't give us much leeway for going further. General relativity has also never made wrong predictions because we have been unable to test it on a quantum level. We don't have a consistent theory of quantum gravity (gravitons) yet. Yes it does. It must have at least one prediction better than current theories. As Swanson has already pointed out Copernicus' theory explained something which was previously not explained (just modeled). If you could explain some part of current physics currently only modeled with a theory with very few parameters, we would be willing to listen. For example, if you had a hadronization model with one or two parameters, I could guarantee you an audience of 100s of enthusiastic experimentalists. Only because the crackpots are too stupid to come up with anything semi-consistent. I do agree with this, but there has to be some level of standard. Look in the speculations forum and you will see that the majority of the suggestions can be discarded with just a moment's thought.

To be honest, it was rather the opposite point of view which led me to post this. At the time of posting we had been fooded by lots of people telling us that the Standard Model is wrong and that they have a revolutionary idea to replace it. This would be wonderful if it were true, but it is naive to think that scientists will just believe your model is right because you say it is (I am using 'you' in the general sense - I don't actually mean you). You have to provide evidence in support of your model, and that evidence needs to be better than the evidence for the Standard Model before anyone will prefer yours. That means that you have to do as well as the Standard Model in predictions like the anomalous magnetic moments, which (as you can see in the OP) are very well predicted. This is not actually as hard as it sounds - there are quite a lot of "Standad Model-like" theories out there that do this quite well. But if you want people to believe your theory, you need to do the legwork and make sure it gets these things right! I was hoping that the post would encourage people to think through their arguments more thoroughly.

I am certainly not a nuclear physicist, but I don't think we have any problem understanding these nuclear properties. Of course, they are using models, rather than the fundamental interactions. Indeed, I am rather surprised you changed tack - one minute you were talking about mesons, while the next you are talking about nuclei. The more interesting question is, can you explain how the quarks inside the mesons interact?

We already have a perfectly good model for predicting the pseudoscalar meson masses. QCD does just fine. It may be a little difficult to calculate anything with, but it gives a hell of a lot more understanding than "The pseudo meson scale is: 1/8, 1/6, 1/4."

Is anyone else having difficulty with this thread? My posts seem to be being eaten. They are there when I hit reply and look at the previous posts but not in normal viewing mode. This is a test.... Edit: yes, I can see this one.

I suspect this is simply out of date, since it was originally writtenin 1960. The hypothesis is not that the mass of the electron is entirely due to its own field - the hypothesis is that the mass of the electron is due to the interaction with the vacuum, which gains a non-zero field content due to the Higgs mechanism. Within this framework, the masses of the particles are understood. We cannot predict the actual masses because the strengths of the interaction are part of the model, but we understand how mass comes about. I think this is a slightly extreme viewpoint, but I have some sympathy with this view. However, since a well defined string theory could in principle make predictions it remains science - just because we are too stupid to work out what these predictions are is not the fault of strong theory. This is again out of context, but I think he is pointing out that Quantum Physics is not the basis of our fundamental theories - Quantum Field Theory is, which is a completely different thing. A quote from a non-physicist with an axe to grind is not good evidence. And one could exqually well ask 'why?' for your 'proposed wave structure'. If you can explain the masses of the particle via some other hypothesis, you will still have a hypothesis which is unmotivated. If you truely want to be able to derive masses with no remaining 'why' then you have to have no hypothesis in the first place, which is logically impossible.

lucaspa: I don't dispute any of that. String theories do indeed have particles in them with masses which correspond to vibrational modes. The last equation in your quote from the second link which didn't come out was [math] J = \alpha^\prime M^2[/math], so we can relate the mass to the spin. For spin zero (J=0) this gives M=0, or massless particles. For J=1 we get [math]M^2 = 1/\alpha^\prime[/math]. Remember that [math]\alpha'[/math] is the string tension, so this is predicting Planck mass particles. To be honest, I am getting confused while typing this, because I think this should imply that only the scalars are massless, but I was expecting to have all particles with a massless mode. I was then going to provide them with small masses via compactification (which is discussed in the second link you gave). I am also slightly confused as to how the above equation can lead to the tachyonic expression [math]M^2 = -1/\alpha'[/math] since this seems to require J=-1. Could he be meaning [math]J_Z[/math] when he says [math]J[/math]? That would explain it... Sorry, I am no expert on String Theory. Anyway, String Theories, while having particles with mass in them, are not predicting the masses of the particles. You can't sit down and work out the top quark mass for example, because it will be highly dependent on how you perform the compactification.

As I said earlier, the mass comes directly from the strength of interaction of the particle with the vacuum. However, the arbitrariness is that our model does not predict what these strengths of interaction are, so we have to postulate the right strength to get the right mass. So we have no reason, for example, for why the top quark is so much heavier than the electron.