Nothing new under the Sun: really?: comments on the flux tube video of Sabine Hossenfelder

Sabine Hossenfelder was ranting in the Youtube video What is “gravitic propulsion” and could the US government hide it? (see this) Sabine has an excellent skill of humour and she tries to get the facts right but I don’t like her aggressive attitude.

At this time, one theme was various exotic crackpot theories such as antigravity lacking mathematical foundations and physical motivations apart from some effects, which need not correspond to a genuine antigravity. I share Sabine’s non-enthusiastic attitude here. Neither can I believe that existing scientific understanding would be hidden by the government except when the hiding is to maintain a technological competitive advantage.

The third theme was “Nothing new under the Sun”. Particle physicists think like this, have been thinking so for half a century, that is, the time during which theoretical particle physics has not produced anything genuinely new. Sabine, who usually is not very empathetic towards particle theorists, shares this belief. The justification is that if there were some new physics, it would have already been observed. So nothing new. The problem is that Sabine, as a good reductionist, believes that all new physics must emerge in particle physics.

A couple of counterexamples. In my youth, fractals and solitons were invented. Suddenly, they were seen everywhere. A century ago, theorists told lay people that classical physics allowed us to understand everything. Then atomic physics and quantum physics came along and everything changed. The basic lesson here is that we only see what we believe is possible to see.

The enormous perspective bias of particle physicists is born out of reductionism: they believe that particle physics is the fundamental level from which everything follows. For a while, they even believed that all physics emerges from the physics of awe inspiring tiny strings at the Planck scale, but this led to a catastrophe: the theory was unable to predict anything and string theory is now perceived as an embarrassing topic of conversation.

At least Sabine admits that solving the fundamental problem of quantum measurement theory requires new physics. Or not new actually. Sabine believes that the world is deterministic as it was believed to be before the quantum revolution century ago. Such a return to the past is radical but not very inspiring.

At this point I have nothing to lose and I can safely predict that TGD is the next revolution and in fact will continue where the previous revolution left off when general relativity and quantum theory solidified into dogmas. The great narrative will change dramatically without being in conflict with what we observe now with our recent instruments and armed with the reductionistic belief system.

The belief system of particle physicists, astrophysicists, and cosmologists will experience the same fate as the belief system of classical physics more than a hundred years ago.Even the standard model with experience a revolution in the color sector leading to revolutions in hadron physics, nuclear physics, and even the physics of the Sun. But at the level of observed particle physics the changes will be small. Cosmology and astrophysics are already in the grip of a revolution. Also biologist’s and neuroscientist’s belief systems share the same fate as a TGD-based view of consciousness and life will inevitably replace them. This is because logically inconsistent belief systems cannot survive the fight for memetic survival.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.