On the same origin of quantum physics and general relativity

[dipstik]

TL;DR Summary

On the same origin of quantum physics and general relativity from Riemannian geometry and Planck scale formalism by Srichan, Danvirutai, Cheok, Cai, Yan
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927650524001130
GR, dirac, maxwell and QCD under one roof... but lots of hand waving and this:
As the universe expands, the charge and mass of electrons decreases, resulting in less interaction in the aging universe. The electron charge and mass are no longer constant.

This pop up on anyone radar? Electron mass different throughout the universe?
I don't see how this section could have passed peer review:
The masses of electrons, muons, and tau can be explained by the different curvatures of universe, galaxy, and solar system, respectively.
I've seen crazy stuff in papers before, but my news feed keeps showing articles about this and I am wondering how crazy this is.
pdf

 

[renormalize]

Great Caesar's ghost! This is the most 'crackpot' paper I've ever encountered in (what purports to be) a refereed journal!

 

[Demystifier]

I've got lost at the transition from (5) to (6), where did the Dirac matrices come from?

 

[Lord Jestocost]

Great Caesar's ghost! This is the most 'crackpot' paper I've ever encountered in (what purports to be) a refereed journal!

Maybe, it could be helpful if you analyze the paper using John C. Baez's crackpot index.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crackpot_index

 

[Demystifier]

Sabine Hossenfelder scrutinized the paper very well.

 

[Demystifier]

Great Caesar's ghost! This is the most 'crackpot' paper I've ever encountered in (what purports to be) a refereed journal!

Moreover, the journal has a rather high impact factor (IF=4.2).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/astroparticle-physics

 

[Vanadium 50]

C'mon, this isn't the first crap paper that's ever been published.

 

[pines-demon]

What surprises me the most is not that it got published in a peer-review journal. I am amazed instead on how these kind of papers get to the "public" discourse so fast. It was the same thing about LK99, it got quickly to everyone (who cares about superconductors). Why are these bad papers not ignored? I wonder if that is the future of PF, YouTube and whatever is left in academic Twitter, to peer-review clearly crackpot papers for the sake of "maybe they are onto something".

 

[dipstik]

oh wow, never seen her stuff before. some sweet vids

Sabine Hossenfelder scrutinized the paper very well.

 

[pines-demon]

oh wow, never seen her stuff before. some sweet vids

Some videos of her are on point, some are just that of a physicist who thinks that she can speak about any social issue, some are just rants about funding, and some are just her promoting her superdeterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics (every time that she mentions entanglement).

 

[Vanadium 50]

I am amazed instead on how these kind of papers get to the "public" discourse

Why?

We have a member here who regularly posts abstracts of papers that have titles he thinks are interesting, but clearly doesn't understand. (i.e. can't or won't summarize, or the paper doesn't say what he says it does)

We have another member who regularly asks "is this SF idea real?" and when is told no, gets angry at us. So of course there is incentive to popularize this junk.

The truth can be boring. It's more fun to pretend. The problem comes about if you want to call it science.

I am not an expert in this paper's topic, but it seems not even wrong. Tensor indices don't seem to line up and there seem to be derivatives operating on nothing.

 

[pines-demon]

We have a member here who regularly posts abstracts of papers that have titles he thinks are interesting, but clearly doesn't understand. (i.e. can't or won't summarize, or the paper doesn't say what he says it does)

We have another member who regularly asks "is this SF idea real?" and when is told no, gets angry at us. So of course there is incentive to popularize this junk.

Sure but those members either get their threads closed or removed. But papers like this one travel all over the web even when dismissed, it wouldn't surprise me if Science or Nature even dedicate a news article to it (for being controversial). There are thousands of crackpot ideas out there, what makes one this one get pass the filters a go viral?

 

[ohwilleke]

The threshold for peer-review journal articles that propose BSM physics is not very high, and they probably make up around half of HEP-phenomenology articles on arXiv and maybe 2/3 to 3/4 of GR articles on arXiv.

Once the premise of the paper is that the SM and GR are wrong in some respect, the wheels come off the bus, and lack of rigor is excused in lots of physics papers.

This said, some of the problems with the paper, recognizing that it is proposing many kinds of new physics are:

1. Many of its predictions for physical constants are falsified relative to their experimental values at more than a five sigma level on their face, and unlike many BSM papers, no real explanation is provided for how this discrepancies could be resolved. The electron charge and the neutrino masses, for example, are all vastly more than five sigma off.

In a more complex quantum theory, you can hand wave and say that your predictions are for the "tree-level" value of fundamental constants and that higher loop calculations are "expected" to make your predictions fit observations. But this paper doesn't even try to claim that.

2. It claims in its abstract to reduce the number of fundamental constants to two but doesn't deliver.

3. There have been numerous observational studies in astrophysics at relatively high redshift to see if the physical constants which they say change actually do change over time. All of those experiments are consistent with a null hypothesis that they don't change.

Certainly, they clearly rule out changes proportionate to the dimensions of the observable post-Big Bang universe, which has at least tripled over the range of observations of the values of the fundamental constants that are supposed to change over time in this theory.

4. It is trying to reconcile Maxwell's equation and GR, not quantum electrodynamics and GR. So, part of the physics it is dealing with is classical and part of it is drawn from the Standard Model. Similarly, apparently the authors have never heard of the Standard Model weak force.

5. Ignoring numerically minor contributions to an equation to simplify it are commonplace in physics, but their equation (2) is very audacious indeed:

It is one thing to neglect the cosmological constant term in Einstein's field equations (which really is negligible in many applications), or to say that the observed phenomena that support the inclusion of the cosmological constant in Einstein's field equations are actually a quantum gravity effect and shouldn't be part of the equation at all. But, ignoring entirely one of the three core remaining terms in Einstein's field equations is over the top given the context in which this is being done. This term is not generically negligible. It is material is a huge range of circumstances. Among other things, it destroys mass-energy conservation in the equations.

6. Another point which a peer review journal with pride really should care about, but apparently didn't, is that the published paper is riddled with capitalization and grammatical errors, as well as numerous more serious copyediting problems in the equations (over and above the substantive flaws in the paper). While these kinds of things aren't a big deal in a first draft of a pre-print written by people who are not native English speakers (three authors are from Thailand and three are from China), the more obvious errors usually get cleaned up prior to publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

7. There is very little review of the literature, which is usually done in a more thorough way in the introduction. Likewise, it refers to all sorts of important theories and findings from others over a whole range of physics and BSM physics with only the most passing of references and no discussion of why it is appropriate to apply them in this situation.

8. More generally, the article bites off far more than can be suitably discussed in a single journal article. Most of its individual chapters are typically the subject of a full journal article. As a result, the discussion of each of these topics is highly superficial.

The gist of the article isn't really any more crazy than lots of other non-crackpot theories, although the fact that half of the authors are from the engineering faculty at a university in Thailand, rather than a physics or astronomy faculty, should raise eyebrows.

So should the fact that it was one of the uncommon papers to solicit another paper criticizing it, published today:

Expression of concern: “On the same origin of quantum physics and general relativity from Riemannian geometry and Planck scale formalism” Astroparticle Physics, Volume 164, 103036​

which states:

This is a note of a temporary expression of concern related to potential errors in the formulas of this paper. The concern and this note will remain appended to the above-mentioned article until the investigation is closed and a decision is made regarding the article retraction or correction.

Being placed on a retraction watchlist certainly isn't an auspicious omen for a newly published journal article.

 

[ohwilleke]

Why are these bad papers not ignored?

The institutional norms of peer-reviewed academic journals is to let academic discourse go forward even if it is implausible or even flawed.

Also, peer reviewers aren't necessary paid much or anything for their efforts, it's a voluntary contribution to what is sometimes a for profit journal (I don't know if this particular journal is non-profit or for profit).

Some peer reviewers take their duties very seriously and provide probing beta reader commentary (although they rarely veto papers from PhD professional faculty in any vaguely relevant field, especially if there are multiple co-authors to the paper), but others give it a cursory review because they have other pressing demands on their time. The fact that peer review is generally anonymous also means that a peer reviewers professional reputation isn't at stake when doing it, which undermines one of the key non-monetary incentives in academia as an incentive to do the job well.

 

[pines-demon]

The institutional norms of peer-reviewed academic journals is to let academic discourse go forward even if it is implausible or even flawed.

Also, peer reviewers aren't necessary paid much or anything for their efforts, it's a voluntary contribution to what is sometimes a for profit journal (I don't know if this particular journal is non-profit or for profit).

Some peer reviewers take their duties very seriously and provide probing beta reader commentary (although they rarely veto papers from PhD professional faculty in any vaguely relevant field, especially if there are multiple co-authors to the paper), but others give it a cursory review because they have other pressing demands on their time. The fact that peer review is generally anonymous also means that a peer reviewers professional reputation isn't at stake when doing it, which undermines one of the key non-monetary incentives in academia as an incentive to do the job well.

That question was not related to peer-review journals, but to popular discourse (Youtube, Twitter, PF, and so on)

 

[ohwilleke]

That question was not related to peer-review journals, but to popular discourse (Youtube, Twitter, PF, and so on)

Apologies for failing to get that this was your main point.

With respect to popular discourse, the attention makes a lot more sense. A peer-reviewed journal article's conclusions, in a journal with a decent impact factor, are basically presumptively credible, and the bigger the claim that a presumptively credible source makes, the more interesting it is.

Of course, more sophisticated participants in the "great discussion" on the Internet about journal articles can tell the difference between a crap paper and a solid one. But if they don't discuss a peer reviewed published article making big claims, it will look like they got scooped by someone less sophisticated, or that they are part of some conspiracy to crack down on revolutionary but non-mainstream scientific ideas. So, from the point of view of a sophisticated commentator, like Sabine Hossenfelder, the incentive is to engage with it and explain why it is a disaster, rather than ignoring it.

 

[ohwilleke]

Tensor indices don't seem to line up and there seem to be derivatives operating on nothing.

Excellent point. This sounds to me like it may be the biggest reason for the journal's "expression of concern" posting today.

 

[ohwilleke]

oh wow, never seen her stuff before. some sweet vids

The video (which I hadn't viewed before this comment, because, its hard to listen to audio and watch videos in the place where I am when I'm writing here) makes it more clear why Sabine, in particular, engaged with this article, and she adds several more really biting and accurate criticisms to those expressed in this thread. She points out lots of bad copyediting and lots of nonsensical equations.

Part of her academic agenda is that the scientific community spends far too much time on speculative crap BSM proposals that shouldn't be taken seriously, and even if they aren't as flawed as this paper, are a case of resources that would have been better spent elsewhere.

Her book, "Lost in Math" explores quite a bit why this happens. In her view, the community does a poor job of vetting and prioritizing hypotheses for physicists to examine with scientific and professional care at great expense of time and money.

While this particular paper doesn't really arise from the big systemic flaws in hypothesis selection that she identifies (she would favor a system in which most BSM research is motivated by observational evidence of anomalies relative to established theories, and mathematical consistency, rather than considerations like "the hierarchy problem" and "naturalness"), it makes a great lightning rod to serve as a cause célèbre for igniting a moral panic about the laxity of peer-review at even respectable journals, and about the more general problem of too many crap physics papers getting published.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Youtube, Twitter

They don't care if it's right. They only care if you click.

"How to live forever with this one simple trick" - why should we assume this should be taken any more seriously?

 

[pines-demon]

They don't care if it's right. They only care if you click.

"How to live forever with this one simple trick" - why should we assume this should be taken any more seriously?

Because it seems that it is the new evolution of the peer-review system. The journal cannot handle it, so the new best thing is to spam your paper everywhere to see if some popular science communicator reviews it on their YouTube channel It does not matter if it is experimental or theoretical, it worked also with LK99.

 

[haushofer]

Oh boy, this paper is wrong on so many levels that I have a hard time believing it to be serious.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Do you think it was written by a person or a bot?

 

[pines-demon]

Do you think it was written by a person or a bot?

According to Hossenfelder, it seems like it was written by a human, at least a bot would have been more proficient in English. Unless it was written by a bot in Thai (as most of the authors of this paper are) and then translated.

 

[Vanadium 50]

I'm not sure I buy the argument "no bot could be that dumb."

I looked up the authors. It's the first paper except for Yan, who appears to be some kind of AMO theorist.

 

[haushofer]

Do you think it was written by a person or a bot?

A person. I know of more academic people writing outside their expertise at this level of nonsense.

But who knows.

 

[arivero]

I've got lost at the transition from (5) to (6), where did the Dirac matrices come from?

From the initial usage of Planck units I thought it was going to be just our old https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/calculating-the-quantum-kepler-length-of-a-particle.14007/ thread, but the Dirac magic surprised me too.