Naturalness in particle physics

This is a philosophical topic. The professional title of the person who writes about "naturalness" does not change the fact that the topic is a philosophical topic. The topic is philosophical and it is independent of the professional title of the person who writes about this topic. If the person who writes about naturalness in particle physics is a physicist this does not make the topic physics but makes the physicist a philosopher.

Sabine Hossenfelder writes that

naturalness, [is] an idea that has become a prominent doctrine in particle physics. In brief, naturalness requires that a theory’s dimensionless parameters should be close to 1, unless there is an explanation why they are not. [...] Assuming a probability distribution for the parameters at high energies, you can then quantify the likelihood of finding a theory with the parameters we do observe. If the likelihood is small, the theory is said to be “unnatural” or “finetuned”. The mass of the Higgs-boson is unnatural in this sense, so is the cosmological constant, and the theta-parameter.

So physicists need to invent philosophical mumbo jumbo in order to call that old ad hoc term, the cosmological constant, "unnatural." What can be more pathetic than physicists discussing this ad hoc term they dubbed "cosmological" and "constant" for over a century. Cosmological constant is neither "cosmological" nor "a constant" but an ad hoc parameter. These physicists, don't they have anything more substantial to discuss?

The second, and newer, type of naturalness, is based on the idea that our universe is one of infinitely many that together make up a “multiverse.” In this case, if you assume a probability distribution over the universes, you can calculate the likelihood of finding the parameters we observe. Again, if that comes out to be unlikely, the theory is called “unnatural.” This approach has so far not been pursued much. Particle physicists therefore hope that the standard model may turn out to be natural in this new way.

Physicists discuss naturalness of theories they invent by assuming that "our universe is one of infinitely many that together make up a "multiverse." Why?

In this case, if you assume a probability distribution over the universes, you can calculate the likelihood of finding the parameters we observe. Again, if that comes out to be unlikely, the theory is called "unnatural." 

Not sure if this is a parody of philosophy or if it is a parody of physics. I guess this is what happens if people who spend their education --a very long education, about 25 years-- to study how to solve differential equations and make calculations by using 18th century methods and spending years and years learning data analysis techniques and bad programming but study zero --yes, zero-- hours of philosophy but when they grow up and start writing papers they write bad philosophy or physicophilosophical mumbo jumbo and call it physics!

These physicists are real jokes. Their professional title is Doctor of Philosophy but their knowledge of philosophy is nada, zilch.

For a physicist philosophy is any topic that falls outside of legal physics tropes he is familiar with.

Their professional titles should really be "Doctors of Data Reduction and Calculation". Because this is what they learn to do. Even their philosophy is about calculation. To find out if a theory they invented is natural they compute some probability in potential hypothetical universes that may exist only to make the theories they invented natural.

Well, I have to give credit to Sabine Hossenfelder. I was writing the above as I was reading her article paragraph by paragraph but then I saw that she ridicules and destroys these naturalness arguments so eloquently that I cannot hope to match even if clones of myself wrote about the topic in infinity of multiverses for infinity of time dimensions invented by Lisa Randalls of physics.

Ms. Hossenfelder writes:

The biggest problem, however, is the same for both types of naturalness: You don’t have the probability distribution and no way of obtaining it because it’s a distribution over an experimentally inaccessible space. To quantify naturalness, you therefore have to postulate a distribution, but that has the consequence that you merely get out what you put in. Naturalness arguments can therefore always be amended to give whatever result you want.

Damn these physicists! They are not only charlatans but they are crooks too:

And that really is the gist of the current trend. The LHC data has shown that the naturalness arguments that particle physicists relied on did not work. But instead of changing their methods of theory-development, they adjust their criteria of naturalness to accommodate the data. This will not lead to better predictions.

 ***

How did this happen? How did we allow these crooks corrupt the old science of physics into this state of corruption? Who is responsible? What can we do to cleanse academic physics from these useless and unnaturally bad philosophers who posture as physicists?

***

But this is not over. The charlatanism in physics hit the fan long time ago:

You see what is happening here. Conjecturing a multiverse of any type (string landscape or eternal inflation or what have you) is useless. It doesn’t explain anything and you can’t calculate anything with it. But once you add a probability distribution on that multiverse, you can make calculations. Those calculations are math you can publish. And those publications you can later refer to in proposals read by people who can’t decipher the math. Mission accomplished. 

The reason this cycle of empty predictions continues is that everyone involved only stands to benefit. From the particle physicist who write the papers to those who review the papers to those who cite the papers, everyone wants more funding for particle physics, so everyone plays along.

Academic physicists especially theoretical so called physicists are a bunch of corrupt academic opportunists, it looks like.
 
Notes:

--- These are the the referenced articles, by Sabine Hossenfelder, A philosopher's take on “naturalness” in particle physics, The Multiworse Is Coming

--- More on Lisa Randall.

Is circular reasoning legal in physics?

Referring to Lisa Randall, Sabine Hossenfelder writes:

And that is how the top of tops of theoretical particle physicists react if someone points out they are unable to acknowledge failure: They demonstrate they are unable to acknowledge failure.

If Lisa Randall is “the top of tops of theoretical particle physics” I feel sorry for humanity and the old science of physics.

When I started writing my book, I thought the problem is they are missing information. But I no longer think so. Particle physicists have all the information they need. They just refuse to use it. They prefer to believe.

So, physicists prefer to believe in their pet scenarios blindly instead of considering data that contradicts their pet scenarios. This is not the scientific attitude but the old scholastic attitude. Physicists are not trying to understand nature but trying to fit nature into their silly speculations.

Ms. Hossenfelder also calls physicists intelligent: “Some thousand of the most intelligent people the human race has ever produced.“ Is this really true? Can we call these scholastic doctors of philosophy the most intelligent specimens of humanity? They are just careerist academics trying to move up the ladder of academia.

If I were to write a few years ago similar stuff about corruption in physics Ms. Hossenfelder would have called me a crackpot. Now she is stirring the pot and rocking the boat of physics and I support her full heartedly.

Other physicists are calling her a dinghy challenging a super tanker for right of way. Very apt. I like the image of academic physics as a super tanker filled to the brim with junk theories that serve no purpose except career advancements.

She calls herself crazy, tongue in cheek, of course.

I’ve been writing about how corrupt physics is at least for 20 years and of course no one takes what I write seriously because I’m an outsider. But I want to build on some of the bad things she identifies in physics. One is the widespread use of circular reasoning in physics. Ms. Hossenfelder repeatedly shows that physicists use circular reasoning in their theories.

Is circular reasoning legal in physics? Talking about "naturalness" Ms. Hossenfelder writes:

The biggest problem, however, is the same for both types of naturalness: You don’t have the probability distribution and no way of obtaining it because it’s a distribution over an experimentally inaccessible space. To quantify naturalness, you therefore have to postulate a distribution, but that has the consequence that you merely get out what you put in. Naturalness arguments can therefore always be amended to give whatever result you want.

This is blatant circular reasoning. Is it possible that “the most intelligent people the human race has ever produced” can miss that their reasoning is circular? I don’t think this is possible. Ms. Hossenfelder, as a physicist, clearly sees that making predictions with naturalness arguments is nothing more than circular reasoning and you “get out what you put in” and “naturalness arguments can therefore always be amended to give whatever result you want.“

So, Ms. Hossenfelder is warning her colleagues that what they are doing is charlatanism: They invented an argument and called it “naturalness” but this argument is nothing more than circular reasoning that lets them obtain whatever results they want. This is really a damning accusation. So far, I did not hear a physicist replying to Ms. Hossenfelder and denying that naturalness argument is circular.

That’s why these physicists are charlatans. I’m not using the word charlatan lightly. In any other professional field where practitioners must obey professional and ethical rules such charlatanism will not be allowed. But physics is an unregulated professional field and physicists know this, they know it’s anything goes, no regulations, no responsibilities, so they break all the rules of logic and all the rules of reasoning and no one questions their silly philosophizing and childish arguments.

That’s why I say that academic physics is not science, it is legal. In legal, whatever is legal is true. If circular reasoning is legal, then no physicist will question circular reasoning. On the contrary, he will also use circular reasoning to further his own pet speculations.

Physics is an unregulated and corrupt professional field. It is unregulated because physicists have no customers. The government has no incentive to regulate physics. On the contrary, the government likes and uses absurd scenarios invented by physicists because these scenarios justify the building of outrageously expensive Big Physics projects in the name of making discoveries in “fundamental” physics. It’s a charade played by the governments and physicists.

Physicists work for the government anyway. Either directly, in Big Physics projects or indirectly through grants obtained by way of universities.

Ms. Hossenfelder is just scratching the surface, the corruption in physics is endemic, it’s in the culture, it’s chronic, acute and traditional. This becomes obvious when we realize who these people who call themselves physicists are. They are the current practitioners of the oldest profession in the world, scholasticism. A physicist is a scholastic Doctor of Philosophy. That’s a physicist’s true professional title. These are the same people who used to write De Motu’s in Latin in the same European universities in the middle ages and produced countless commentaries on commentaries on Aristotle.

Only the names changed. Now the commentaries are on Einstein and De Motu’s turned into papers on all kinds of forces and particles. The new Latin is mathematics or as used in physics, mathematicism, a pidgin mathematics with zero rigor, that acts only as false witness to physicist's doctrines. It’s all academic. Even experiments are academic. They all give null results. Academic means null. It would be so funny if this weren’t so tragic.

Notes:

--- I know scholasticism is not the oldest profession in the world. It is the penultimate oldest profession but I didn't want to get that pretentious.

--- These are the the referenced articles, by Sabine Hossenfelder, A philosopher's take on “naturalness” in particle physics, The Multiworse Is Coming

--- Lisa Randall is a radical Big Bangist who pretends to know the entire lifetime of everything that exists because Hubble observed that 24 galaxies appeared to going away from the Earth. 24 galaxies!! Lisa Randall is a charlatan who wants us to believe that 24 galaxies constitute a representative sample of the whole. This is a joke. I would have said arrogance but this is not arrogance, this is charlatanism.


--- What is circular reasoning? "The fallacy of circular argument, known as petitio principii (“begging the question”), occurs when the premises presume, openly or covertly, the very conclusion that is to be demonstrated."

--- Ms. Hossenfelder being a metaphorical dinghy against the physics behemoth is mentioned here.