It is well-known that Einstein’s motto was to make everything as simple as possible, but not more so. Theoretical physicists today work in a completely different way, apparently with the aim of making everything as complicated as possible, and preferably more so. String theory, for example, has made physics even more complicated than is possible. It simply isn’t possible to make physics that complicated. That is the basic reason why string theory has completely failed to explain anything at all, and has completely failed to predict anything at all.
It was the same with epicycles. They eventually became more complicated than possible. It simply was not possible for astronomy to be that complicated. And eventually, a proper simplification emerged. It is the same with dark matter. Dark matter has infinitely many degrees of freedom, and can therefore be made to fit practically any observations, just like epicycles did. It doesn’t explain anything, however, and just now it looks as though it is having difficulty fitting to observations of wide binary stars. It doesn’t really matter whether this difficulty amounts to a falsification or not, what matters is that more epicycles are needed to explain the observations. Eventually, the weight of epicycles creates a theory that is more complicated than is possible.
It certainly appears that the dark matter paradigm has now reached this point. An article in Physics Magazine this week complains that they can’t see any dark matter because of the neutrino fog coming from the Sun. Has it not occurred to them that the dark matter might not exist, and that it is the neutrino fog that has the effects they expect dark matter to have? Certainly it does in their experiments – they detect the signal they expect to detect from dark matter, and then they say, ah, it isn’t dark matter, it’s the neutrino fog.
This reminds me of the man who went out to look for the forest, and he couldn’t find it, because of all the trees getting in the way. Yes, the forest is complicated. Yes, the forest is big. But when you see the trees, you know you’ve found the forest. And when you see the neutrino fog, you should recognise it as “dark matter”. It isn’t really dark matter, of course, it is a fog that prevents you from seeing what is really there – i.e., nothing. If you go to look for the forest, you should be content when you have found the trees. If you go to look for “dark matter”, you should be content when you have found the neutrino fog.
When physicists object to my models (on the rare occasions when they don’t just ignore them), the objection can always be paraphrased as “it can’t be right because it’s not complicated enough”. I tried to post a paper on the arXiv recently, simplifying the E_8 models to SU(7,2), but they rejected it because it wasn’t complicated enough. The reality is exactly the opposite – it is not simple enough. So although I was going to post the SU(7,2) paper here, I’ve decided not to – it is still too complicated.
Now I am working on simplifying it further to SU(4,2). It seems to have everything I need – somewhere between 11 and 14 dimensions of gauge groups, and a corresponding list of between 24 and 21 parameters (adding up to 35, of course). It’s got the Dirac algebra, the weak doublets of Dirac spinors, colour triplets, three generations, 9 mixing angles, 12 to 15 masses, and enough geometry to explain quite a few of the actual values of these parameters.
But if I try to get physicists to look at the trees, they say, where’s the forest? where’s the landscape? where’s the swampland? where’s the dark matter (mud)? where’s the dark energy (wind)? The trees are all around them, but will they look at them? Of course not, they’re just trees, what have they got to do with the forest?
Update (15th Nov): XKCD recently said “Triangles were long believed to be related to squares, but genetic analysis proves that they are actually very pointy circles”. I think that’s more or less what I was trying to say in the U(7,2) paper – the triangle of three lepton generations is unrelated to the square of weak isospin/hypercharge, but emerges instead from a circle of gauge symmetries for electrodynamics.