Peter Woit has another post on “unification” today, in which he trumpets his latest video that explains nothing. In answer to every serious question, he says he has to do more work on it. That means he can’t answer any serious question on it, because his ideas are not even wrong. Mitchell Porter, as usual, asks penetrating questions, and gets no real answers. Woit’s answer, in fact, just says that Georgi and Glashow were right to give up on GUTs 50 years ago because of the proton decay problem. This answer, in fact, is a cop-out, because it rules out every conceivable unified theory, and implies that we should all give up and go home – even him.
The proton decay problem is a very serious problem, that indicates a very serious false assumption. I identified this false assumption years ago, and it even appears in the Manogue-Dray-Wilson paper – it is impossible for gauge bosons to lie in the adjoint representation of the gauge group. This assumption seemed like a good idea at the time (50 years ago), but this is the assumption that categorically rules out any unified theory of any kind, ever. So this assumption has to go. The M-D-W paper abandons this assumption, and it is high time that other people followed suit.
I tried to make this comment on “Not even wrong” but he deleted it almost immediately. He is simply not interested in the truth, only in reinforcing his own prejudices.