Lubos Motl’s “Reference Frame”
Lubos Motl is a string theorist well known for writing a blog called ‘The Reference
Frame’. Lubos was an assistant Prof at Harvard until summer 2007. He currently lives in
Pilsen, Czech Rebublic. His blog is a collection of personal insults that are in many cases
targeted at PI itself, or PI researchers especially in the QG group. All these insults are still
publicly available.
1. Attacks on PI/QG Group
2. Personal attacks on PI researchers
3. General Conspiracy Theories
Sorted by date, beginning with the most recent. This list is not exhaustive, and does not
date back earlier than 2007. Left out are too numerous insults of Peter Woit.
1. PI/QG Group
Leonard Susskind, global warming, and groupthink
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/07/leonard-susskind-global-warming-and.html
July 29, 2008
“These are methods of Gestapo informers and you can't be surprised that I view
Smolin, Woit, and a few others as symbols of moral deterioration and totalitarian
tendencies in the Academia. Having some experience from communism, I
couldn't ever work in an environment that allows this disgusting immoral crap to
flourish.
You know, every good physicist I have known kind of knew (and knows) that
Smolin was a sort of crackpot. But their shared left-wing politics has always been
more important for them.
Smolin is the ultimate builder of a "consensus science" who would never tolerate
any disagreement with his own opinions that are, when it comes to politics, even
more "progressive" than Susskind's. And he writes these things very explicitly in
his book, too. I am shocked that so many people haven't understood what he
actually wants. In the book, he proposes to create a group of "scientists of good
faith" (apparently including himself or even led by himself) who could never be
criticized and whose (usually very dumb) theories could never be questioned. This
group is subsequently supposed to search for "original" thinkers, i.e. mediocre
pseudointellectuals who are exceptionally good in licking the butts (and
sometimes not only butts) of the "scientists of good faith" such as Smolin: this
ability is referred to as the "social skills" over at Backreaction. (They often like to
lick them, to reward Smolin's promotion of their crackpot papers.)
In reality, he also surrounds himself with many people, usually females, who are
not up to their job but who mostly say "Yes Mr Smolin". Physicists with IQ above
120 could easily explain him what are the problems with every new glub-glubglub paper that he writes and what are the correct answers to some questions he
can't even formulate well - but he doesn't want to listen to the people who know
what they're talking about. He is not interested whether his theories (and others)
are actually correct or not. Instead, he wants to enjoy (a completely undeserved)
privileged status of a "scientist of good faith". And because of the support from
the extremely limited journalists and laymen whom he is able to manipulate
single-handedly, he actually does enjoy the status even though he has never
contributed anything valuable to science.
This is not how real science can work or should work even though some
disciplines that have become pseudoscientific obviously do operate in this way. I
hope that the bulk of theoretical high-energy physics won't join them.”
Monckton, APS, and Medusa
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/07/monckton-aps-and-medusa.html
July 21 2008
“The APS could also adopt the official position of the PI and announce that "the
members of our society are certain the world follows the laws of ekpyrotic loop
quantum cosmology with a variable speed of light, two metric tensors, and 30+
braided octopi swimming in the spin foam." :-)”
Friday, May 9th 2008
PI goes ekpyrotic
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/05/pi-goes-ekpyrotic.html
(Comes with a picture of a monkey)
“The Perimeter Institute informed us that the new director would be
"an internationally respected scientist of the highest order."
[B] ecause of the description above, I would have frankly made a bet that it
couldn't be e.g. Neil Turok.
I was wrong. Quite obviously, different people have different ideas what it means
to be an internationally respected scientist of the highest order […]Neil T
Turok is a good example of a scholar who is helping the journalists to promote
Hollywood physics and various bizarre yet popular myths, […]
[T]he Hollywoodization of physics continues. As soon as the remaining heretics
will be removed, the PI's cutting-edge picture of the Universe will be based on
ekpyrotic loop quantum cosmology with a variable speed of light and 30+ octopi
swimming in the spin foam. ;-)”
Monday March 03 2008
Singularities and stringy geometry
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/03/singularities-and-stringy-geometry.html
“I think it is an absolutely paramount requirement for science to eliminate
answers that can be shown to be wrong and, at the sociological level, to eliminate
the people who have shown that they are only able to produce wrong answers. It
is extremely bad for science if the journalists, media, and other non-scientific
channels are helping to flood science with politically convenient loop quantum
gravities, spin foams, dynamical triangulations, their proponents, and gigatons of
similar garbage in order to dilute the concentration of valuable physics and
valuable physicists (and the resources available to this group) to arbitrarily low
values.
The point where the concentration of serious physics in the ocean of nonsense
converges to zero is another example of a singularity and I hope that this one will
also get resolved soon - by imposing a cutoff that won't be breached too easily.”
Jan 2nd 2008
Susskind in Wonderland
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/01/susskind-in-wonderland.html
“Leonard Susskind attends an alternative talk about quantum gravity at the
Perimeter Institute (12/06/2007).
Bianca Dittrich: Introduction to quantum gravity
Dittrich spends an equal time with causal dynamical triangulations as she does
with loop quantum gravity and spinfoams. The latter approach is studied by 50
times higher number of papers than the former approach but this discrepancy is a
purely sociological artifact. The actual scientific value of both approaches is
equal, namely zero.
[…]
Her talk is a typical example of cargo cult science. They use words that sound
scientific, they talk about experiments and about their excitement. Formally,
everything looks like science. […]”
“But if an institute has a lot of money, it can employ a top physicist to listen to
dense pseudoscientists. Note that I have politely used the word "employ" and not
"corrupt". For progress in physics, it would surely be a better idea to employ all
these Perimeter Institute "quantum gravity" people as additional secretaries of
Susskind - or cooks in the restaurants where Susskind may spend his holidays but unfortunately we don't live in a perfect world.”
Sep 3rd 2007
Physics World: a testing time for strings
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/09/physics-world-testing-time-for-strings.html
“For example, a month ago or so, I was offered a job at the Perimeter Institute.
Now, I view a private institute such as the PI to be the optimum arrangement of
scientific research. But after some analyses who is there at the PI and how they
think about science, the answer was, of course, No, thanks, your institute is
literally overrun by cranks.”
(Upon inquiry I was assured by various people Lubos was never offered a job at PI.)
May 29th 2007
Myths about Einstein
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/05/myths-about-einstein.html
“Lee Smolin, the same man who often talks about original scientists, reveals that
he actually likes something completely different, namely if young people are
writing even more confused parodies of his and other narrow-minded and
physically naive papers that should be viewed as important because they resemble
the flavor of some basic misunderstandings of a genius that were written when he
was already unspectacular. That's one of the reasons why he surrounds himself
with loads of untalented people who only say Yes Mr Smolin. He also likes when
people's opinions about the society are judged according to a universal, politically
correct criterion.”
March 18th 2007
"Einstein may have started the rot"
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/03/einstein-may-have-started-rot.html
“Smolin is a mediocre, slow thinker with a bad memory, below-average
imagination, bad ability to focus and investigate details, and with kindergarten
ideas - it is always hard to tell whether he is just joking when he talks about his
childish ideas or whether he is serious - who is unable to learn the state-of-the-art
physics at the technical level and who has never written a paper that would remain
both valid as well as important among physicists who know their field for more
than 10 minutes - you can check it yourself - and Highfield's description is simply
another misinformation.
You may imagine whether Lee Smolin's disciples are more or less original and
capable than himself.
The whole hype around Smolin's work is artificially created by himself, by the
media, and by other crackpots. Smolin's work is much less correct and much less
important than the work of a typical - even young - particle physicist or string
theorist and the positive words about it are mostly created by politically organized
ignorants. Whoever buys that Smolin is a good physicist is being had.” (mad?)
2. PI Researchers (in the broader sense)
Insults: Bianca Dittrich (see above), Sabine Hossenfelder, Joao Magueijo, Fotini
Markopoulou, John Moffat, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Lee Smolin, and “all participants
of the Loops 2007 except for Moshe Rozali”. Attacks not quoted here, because they are
comparably lame include Thomas Thiemann, Sundance Bilson- Thomson, and Carlo
Rovelli.
Cargo cult science: sociology of science
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/07/cargo-cult-science-sociology-of-science.html
July 15, 2008
“Let me give you a superficially innocent example of the dramatic incompatibility
of the scientific underclass and the conventional scientific process.
Sabine Hossenfelder wrote another activist text promoting the idea that science the very selection of correct and promising ideas and research programs - should
be controlled by social criteria and by the bureaucrats.
[…]
After years of heavy interactions with people as stupid, as aggressive, and as
arrogant as yourself, i.e. with the underclass, have you completely lost your mind,
Ms Hossenfelder? I don't know how to explain you these matters comprehensibly
enough but let me try again: relatively to real top physicists, you are just a tiny
piece of a waste product of metabolism who got into the system mainly because
of quotas on the female reproductive organs. Whether you would like a certain
kind of change is completely irrelevant.
Sabine Hossenfelder's musings are the ultimate incarnation of this cargo cult
science that doesn't work because its predictions are never being tested by the
scientific method. She wants to put mobs and sociologists (including the amateur
ones, such as herself - she reveals that she has even applied for a grant to be paid
for pretty much the same junk she is writing on her blog: fortunately, the
application was rejected) not only above the high school teachers but above the
scientists themselves!
No, it won't work. The selection in science works and has to work very differently
from the way envisioned by Lee Smolin and the scientific lumpenproletariat.”
Tegmark: The world is made of mathematics
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/06/tegmark-world-is-made-of-mathematics.html
Thursday, June 19, 2008,
“Sabine's opinions represent a large portion of what I hate about the pompous
fools and self-centered pseudointellectuals.
[…]
So if you are proposing to hire people regardless of the value of their work, and it
seems that it is exactly what these people are doing all the time, then you are
definitely not building a scientific community. You are building a pompous quasireligious community of arrogant and stupid crackpots of the Lee Smolin type
whose babbling is incoherent and who don't understand basics of "their field" but
who like to dress up as intellectuals and to emit populist clichés that sound good
to the complete ignorants among the laymen.”
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Fun with John Moffat
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/05/fun-with-john-moffat.html
“[…]an old Gentleman who used to paint landscapes.
However, he couldn't earn money so he sent mail messages to Einstein, presenting
himself as a disciple. Finally, John Moffat ended up as a researcher at the
Perimeter Institute. ;-)
He has co-invented many things such as the Variable Speed of Light and similar
nonsense. He has also copied Einstein's silly papers about non-symmetric metric
tensors, presenting them as his own.[…]
If you need to sell a manifestly wrong idea, call it "an experimental signature". It
surely makes a difference, doesn't it? It is so impressive and testable and
falsifiable! :-) However, you should be warned that this marketing strategy will
only work for those who don't have a slightest clue about particle physics, for
example for the readers of Lee Smolin's books and the pornographic excrements
from Peter Whore's blog.
Particle physicists might conclude that you are getting senile. Moreover, they
would be almost right but not quite because you have probably been senile for
many decades. :-) “
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Hep-th papers on Thursday
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/05/hep-th-papers-on-thursday.html
“Finally, let me end up with a sociological observation that I find absolutely
stunning. Among the 14 pretty interesting hep-th papers above, there is only one
(1) that includes authors affiliated with the U.S. institutions (van Baalen et al.).
We are talking about a discipline that has been literally led by the U.S. for
decades. I think that one of the key explanations is the lethal impact of Mr Woit,
Mr Smolin, and similar breathtakingly dishonest far-left anti-scientific subhuman
activist garbage. The American physics was just incapable to destroy these
disgraceful, cheap jerks and liars, so these jerks are now free to destroy the
American physics. This is where appeasement with scum may lead. An example
where a death penalty is too little, too late.”
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Conspiracy theories about magnets
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/04/conspiracy-theories-about-magnets.html
“Peter Woit, Lee Smolin, and zillions of retarded but vocal laymen […]”
March 19, 2008
Iraqi scientists: is the Earth flat?
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/03/iraqi-tv-scientists-is-earth-flat.html
“I really think that this discussion is way too similar to the discussions that
physicists sometimes have with the likes of Peter Woit or Lee Smolin who are
always ready to use technically silly arguments because the actual justification for
their wrong statements are sociological cliches not unsimilar to the Iraqi
astronomer's Islamic belief: the only reason why they can be heard is that millions
of uneducated people are ready to buy and approve their irrational stupidities.”
March 11, 2008
Myths about the Planck scale distortions
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/03/trans-planckian-gravity-bambi-freese.html
“[...]Sabine is apparently convinced that an angel guarantees that she can't be
wrong and refuses to understand very clear, indisputable, and sometimes really
transparent statements and arguments, indicating that she thinks that she is
"teaching" Moshe new things. ;-(
Discovering new physics by misprints
Sabine believes in all kinds of unmotivated and almost certainly impossible
distortions associated with the Planck scale. And she is not the only one, for that
matter: there are many people similar to Giovanni Amelino-Camelia or Jack Ng.
[.....]
I am afraid that this cognitive step - and, more generally, rigor - is just way too
difficult for certain people. [...] Do you want to help them in their research? What
Louise or Sabine want you to tell them is how they should modify the shape of the
wooden earphones.
[...]
It is unfortunately much harder to explain them that they are doing something
really stupid with the very method how they use their brains. It is much harder to
liberate them from their extremely naive and narrow mental boxes. It is much
harder to explain them that they could be perhaps making variations of the same
elementary mistake all the time. It is hard to convince them that if they tried a
little bit harder and restricted their excessive arrogance and unjustifiable selfconfidence, they could perhaps learn some new things and fix their old
misunderstandings.”
March 7th 2008
Trans-Planckian gravity: Bambi-Freese paradox
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/03/trans-planckian-gravity-bambi-freese.html
“In the literature, most of the talk about the "minimum length" in quantum gravity
is a vague sloppy babbling of incompetent people who don't have enough
imagination to ever understand how Nature actually solves these things - think
about profoundly and permanently confused authors such as Ng, AmelinoCamelia, Hossenfelder, and dozens of others.”
March 3rd 2008
Singularities and stringy geometry
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/03/singularities-and-stringy-geometry.html
“The people who will argue that everything goes and a universal answer such as
the "discrete spectrum of geometric quantities" is perhaps good enough to explain
everything about quantum gravity - but who will actually tell you nothing about
the spectrum of allowed values of the relevant quantities etc. - are just religious
bigots who are not interested in the actual scientific answers to tough questions
but who prefer to repeat clearly wrong and naive, non-quantitative dogmas for
long enough time so that some intellectually challenged listeners will start to take
them seriously. Lee Smolin is indisputably a textbook example of these
manipulative pseudoscientists.”
Feb 27th 2008
Stephen Hawking and Ed Witten try to compete with new Einsteins...
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/02/stephen-hawking-and-ed-witten-try-to.html
“This is the work not only of hostile imbeciles such as Peter Woit but also of wise
but phlegmatic cowards in high-energy physics who always prefer to stay silent
instead of patiently yet unambiguously explain e.g. why Lee Smolin is a textbook
example of a limited, ignorant, cheesy crackpot.”
Feb 24th 2008
Hillary vs Obama: healthcare
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/02/hillary-vs-obama-healthcare.html
“So even though Obama tries to be as peaceful as he can, in relation to all
possible groups of people including the Christian traditionalists, and he hasn't
made me excessively upset so far, I do see something very dishonest and
hypocritical about him, something that reminds me Lee Smolin - a crackpot
whose position is based on his tricks to be likable, not on his noteworthy and
serious contributions to science that don't exist - and many other people.”
February 21, 2008
500,000: Kosovo is Serbia
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/02/500000-kosovo-is-serbia.html
“The contemporary media are obsessed with the underdogs. That's why various
Smolins, loop quantum gravities, Garrett Lisis and loads of similar crap thrive in
the media. That's why feminism and inverse racism has effectively become a part
of the establishment.”
Dec. 30th 2007
Concentration of knowledge & funding cuts
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/12/concentration-of-knowledge-funding-cuts.html
“As far as I know, every single high-energy physicist - graduate student, postdoc,
professor - at every good enough place knows that the comments of people like
Peter Woit or Lee Smolin about physics are completely worthless pieces of crap.
Peter Woit is a sourball without a glimpse of creativity who only spreads bad
mood and confused, superficial propaganda. He has never contributed anything
substantial to science and it is likely that he will never contribute anything of this
kind in the future.
He's a typical incompetent, power-thirsty, active moron of the kind that is capable
to destroy whole countries if he gets a chance to do it: think about someone like
Robert Mugabe.
Analogously, Lee Smolin is a prolific, full-fledged crackpot who has written
dozens of papers and almost every single one is a meaningless sequence of
absurdities and bad science. Once again, everyone in the field knows that […]”
Nov 29th 2007
Paul Davies: Taking science on faith
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/11/paul-davies-taking-science-on-faith.html
“Paul Davies correctly writes that the anthropic principle is becoming
increasingly acceptable in the science circles. Of course, in this context, both of us
are talking about real scientists - meaning people like Weinberg, Hawking,
Susskind, Wilczek etc. and not Sarfatti, Woit, Hossenfelder, Smolin, and similar
jokes who have almost nothing to do with the contemporary research in physics
but who are extraordinarily capable to jam the Internet and the newspapers with
garbage and to push the laymen's opinions exactly in the opposite direction than
the direction indicated by the scientific research.”
November 19, 2007
BBC HARDtalk with Václav Klaus
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/11/bbc-hardtalk-with-vaclav-klaus.html
“If you happened to think that HARDtalk is always equally hard, have a look at
the interview with a far-left critic of physics, Lee Smolin: Real Video, HTML. I
can't watch the whole interview because 90 percent of his statements are lies so
that it drives me up the wall.
[…] Why is it that in the field controlled by lousy scientists, it is always the
majority who must be right and any disagreement is "plain arrogance", while in
fields dominated by the smartest people on Earth, it is the "audacious" minority
cranks who must be supported by the journalists?
Well, as long as it is the far-left loons who are fighting against the basic values,
principles, "establishment", and achievements of the Western civilization and
science - such as crackpots of the Lee Smolin type - they deserve the support.
Once this politicizing crap takes over - for example in the case of the left-wing
climate "scientists" - heretics must be liquidated. This is how the left-wing
movement thinks and this is why it is comparably dangerous as Al Qaeda if not
more so.”
Oct 31st 2007
David Gross: The coming revolutions in fundamental physics
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/10/david-gross-coming-revolutions-in.html
“But this mystification, hype, and fashionable excrements are not how real
science has ever worked. This is how it works in the skulls of retarded
pseudoscientists and charlatans, and I am surely not talking about global warming
salesmen, Mr Woit, and Mr Smolin only. Serious science is a conservative
enterprise and its philosophical summaries only change very rarely and very
subtly. Intellectual diarrhoea - like the production of Lee Smolin's papers - is
something very different than science.”
Oct 3rd 2007
Brian Greene vs a hippie physics critic
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/10/brian-greene-vs-hippie-crackpot.html
“People are ready to believe any stupidity you like as long as this stupidity is sold
in such a way that they will find it attractive because this stupidity makes them
feel smarter, nicer, and happier. These people want to believe that they're not
"missing" anything - which is completely absurd - so they do believe it. Lee
Smolin is not only a crackpot but a shameful crackpot if he uses these tactics - if
he employs uneducated average people to leverage his influence in science that
would otherwise be zero.
I am convinced that high-brow science will simply be unsustainable in current
circumstances because the Smolin-like scum will be increasingly using
brainwashing campaigns in the media to contaminate the scientific discourse by
irrational garbage. Last year, I realized that the situation was already so bad that I
couldn't even publicly say something that every good physicist knows - that
Smolin is a crank who has nothing to contribute to serious science - not even
politely. What will be next? Will scientists be expected to worship such people or
write meaningless follow-ups of Smolin's equally meaningless postmodern
"work"? Will string theorists be attacked in the media as "deniers" of an alleged
"failure of string theory"?”
Sep 21 2007
Disinviting Larry Summers: a mirror for the far left
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/09/disinviting-larry-summers-mirror-for.html
From the comment section
“LM: And I would forget about some of the other things which were probably
much worse, as measured by my reactions. A well-known Canadian crackpot has
contacted most of the senior colleagues in the department and his goal was to
eliminate my review of his book from Amazon.com. So he has also included the
standard jargon that they must do it because I was racist, sexist. I was told about
the detailed nature of these letters and I will probably always consider Smolin and
Woit to be moral scum for having done these nasty Nazi-style things. Smolin
included the comment that my review was sexist because I didn't appreciate the
intellectual quality of his postmodern feminist bitch friend from the MIT who was
the #1 promoter of his book at that time. Woit has writen that just like I was
mostly silenced in the PC issues, I must also be silenced in relation with his
crackpotish attacks against science. To some extent, I was. These people won't be
repelled by any technique. They're scum.”
“LM: Wow, Prescod-Weinstein seems to be a real hardcore. It's an extremely
serious problem that people like that are penetrating into the intellectual spheres.
It's not hard to see http://scholar.google.com/schola...escod- weinstein that she
has 0 citations in total right now but she already feels qualified enough to be
firing virtually all non-leftist professors from the Ivy League I know. If I knew,
back in the 1950s, that this is what would inclusion of women into the Academia
lead to, I would have definitely opposed such a step because this is potentially
about a complete liquidation of a scholarly, rational discourse. Incidentally,
Chanda might be obsessed with these progressive things because she is not just
black and female but also lesbian,
http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~bla...laes/lgbtastro/ ... See also her amazing
worshipping of Hugo Chavez, http://66.102.1.104/scholar?hl=c...escod- weinstein
... Venezuela, under this great leader, has become a "shining example" for
"grassroot democracy". Wow. Given the fact that I kind of agree that he should be
assassinated, we would probably not agree about politics.
Sept 13, 2007
Bad physicists and populism
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/09/bad-physicists-and-populism.html
“In other words, Einstein was the exact mirror image of the people who like to use
Einstein's name for populist purposes, e.g. Lee Smolin. Smolin dislikes
established results of science, he doesn't understand them, he hates mathematics
and the concept of mathematical beauty, and 90+ percent of his papers are pure
junk. Still, he likes when people call him a "new Einstein". What an irony.
[...]
If they can't show themselves that Lee Smolin's "popular physics" is based on
wrong science and irrational arguments by the third year, they are just bad
physicists themselves. It is not a disaster if one or two such physicists get a PhD
in a decade. But flooding the scientific community with these severely limited
people is dangerous.”
Sep. 4th 2007
Nobel prize winners vs crackpots
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/09/nobel-prize-winners-vs-crackpots.html
“OK, let's look at this bizarre match. On one side, we have David Gross, Gerard 't
Hooft, Steven Weinberg, Edward Witten (Nobel laureates or Fields medal winners)
and their 17 peers or so. The other team is composed of giants such as

"M", Peter Woit, A. J. Tolland, Sabine Hossenfelder, Thomas Larsson,
Yatima, Dr. E, Milkshake, Chris Oakley, Arun, Jon Lester
It's not a problem for these stupid people to overestimate their expertise by many
orders of magnitude.”
“I guess that Peter Woit wants to teach physicists and mathematicians. Too bad that
all readers of his blog are crackpots just like him or worse.”
“I simply can't believe that Sabine is so incredibly dumb whenever it comes to
modern physics. Can't she just listen and try to understand? She is surrounded by so
many simpletons that she can't help to become another one. But unlike them, Sabine,
you're supposed to be a physics postdoc, not a crackpot such as Chris Oakley.”
July 28th 2007
Gravity from spin-two gauge invariance
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/07/gravity-from-spin-two-gauge-invariance.html
“That's not too good. Needless to say, the situation with crackpots such as Peter
Woit and Lee Smolin is analogous. The content of all criticisms of science by
these people - especially their fanatical anti-mathematical sentiment - is a pure
reflection of their own severe intellectual limitations and 100% of support of this
crap in the society is created by combining the screams of people who are equally
stupid and dishonest as Smolin and Woit or even more stupid and dishonest.”
July 21st 2007
Phenomenology of quantum gravity
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/07/phenomenology-of-quantum-gravity.html
“Sabine's musings
[…]
[Sabine’s] opinions about a majority physics questions that go beyond the college
material look scarily uninformed to me if not downright dumb.
Her article "Phenomenological quantum gravity" is no exception. I guess that
because of political correctness and her sex, no one ever tells her why her
constructs are physically nonsensical. At "Loops 2007", there is one more reason
why she wasn't told so - namely that all participants except for Moshe Rozali
were cranks.
[...]
Sabine's "arguments" in favor of the myth are nothing else than the usual foggy
unscientific gibberish […] “
June 8th 2007
Lee Smolin vs Thibault Damour
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/06/lee-smolin-vs-thibault-damour.html
“Lee Smolin urges everyone to study any alternatives, whether they're garbage or
just junk, and dares to talk about "tragic consequences" for "suicidal young
physicists" who would like to work on these alternatives. (Similarity of his
language with global warming is not a coincidence.)
All readers who understand anything about reality know that the situation is just
the opposite than what Smolin says - namely bad consequences are more likely to
meet those who publicly disagree with politically correct fashionable crackpots
like himself. But "catastrophic" language and victimism is exactly the weapon
used by those who already have about 500 times higher influence than they would
deserve. (Similarity with crying feminists who already control the Ivy League is
not a coincidence either.)
Damour has argued that not even Smolin can be so limited that he would actually
believe the naive Popperian dogmas. Well, I am afraid that Smolin is much more
stupid than Damour can even imagine. Accepting statements of philosophers as
dogmas, blowing them out of proportion, applying them behind the range of their
validity regardless of physical arguments, and using them to organize witch hunts
is something that Lee Smolin is very good at.”
June 1st 2007
Varying Speed of Light (VSL) theories: crackpots par excellence
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/05/varying-speed-of-light-vsl-theories.html
“Tonight, Magueijo and Moffat have submitted an answer that have made me so
upset by its breathtaking stupidity that I simply had to write this text to calm
down. ;-) They don't understand a single one among Ellis' obvious complaints.
Instead, they paint themselves as new Galileos because they are ready to make a
constant variable.
[...]
A very similar criticism applies, to a lesser extent, to doubly special relativity etc.
The people who work on all these stupid things have a tremendous problem to
distinguish physics from conventions, predictions from ways of writing things,
deep insights from vacuous sequences of mathematical symbols. They don't
understand what a choice of units and field redefinitions means and why they're
unphysical. Despite all of their profound ignorance about basics of physics, these
crackpots are extremely arrogant (Magueijo is the #1 example, of course) - they
view themselves as competitors of inflationary cosmology and many other key
segments of science - which makes me quite upset. ;-)”
March 10 2007
Panel: Michael Duff and Lee Smolin
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/03/panel-michael-duff-and-lee-smolin.html
“Smolin wants to throw all of society into some kind of ultracommunism where
increasingly bad, stupid, uneducated, and impotent people are making increasing
meaningless, inconsistent, vague, and failing activity, and all of them tell each
other how great all of them are and how beautiful new clothes they have. I just
can't stand intensely unreasonable and ideologically blinded people like Smolin
influencing the Academia in such a profound way.
Can't we just agree that this man is insane?
[…]
Smolin argues that the string theory conferences should be transformed into an
incoherent gathering of crackpots and random critics, resembling the conferences
that Smolin likes. He's obviously doing everything he can to pollute science with
all this crap and popular misunderstanding and emotional battles between
scientists on one side and idiots and their imbecile friends on the other side, and
Michael Duff is one of the few people who realizes that this should be stopped.”
Feb 11th 2007
Loop quantum gravity and non-locality
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/02/loop-quantum-gravity-and-non-locality.html
“Several readers have asked me what I think about

Disordered locality and loop quantum gravity states
by Fotini Markopoulou and Lee Smolin. […]
“The figures in the paper are irresistable. Some of them look like a handcuffed
octopus or Roman numerals IX and XI. Maybe it is not an octopus but rather
kalamari, to remind you of one of the authors.”
(The latter link is a Google image query for ‘Kalamara’ and brings up at least 5
photos of Fotini.)
3. General Conspiracy Theories
Monday, April 28, 2008
Alain Connes and the Soviet science
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/04/alain-connes-and-soviet-science.html
“I am always appalled when I read the amazing ideological nonsense written by
Lee Smolin and similar far-left ideologues about the diversity or the philosophical
character of science being hurt by globalization or competition. […]
Any attempt to enforce some kind of "affirmative action" to promote a certain
kind of ideas returns us to communism. […]
I see some clear signs that the ideology promoting stagnation and fake,
ideologically-driven values over the actual results is beginning to spread in the
West, too. Third-class scholars with no significant achievements are increasingly
trying (and succeeding) to skew the character of the scientific research by purely
ideological goals and clichés.”
March 05, 2008
A feminist babbler will lead Harvard College
“Evelynn Hammonds, a black postmodern feminist science-hater, was chosen to
lead the Harvard College.
During the anti-Summers witch hunts, this pseudointellectual was the chairwoman
of the "Women Task Force" - the Feminazi Inquisition - and one of the main
people who forced President Summers to throw USD 50 million out of the
feminist window. Whenever I heard her speaking at the FAS faculty meeting, I
was really down.
In her "scholarly" work, she has criticized science as an industrial tool of the evil
straight white males to oppress the sexuality of the nice black female lesbian
people: see e.g. her masterpieces "Black (w)holes and the geometry of black
female sexuality" or "Conflicts and tensions in the feminist study of gender and
science".
In the physics title above, you could also replace "l" by "r" in the second word.
She has also co-authored articles arguing that the doctors shouldn't be allowed to
look at race when they try to cure their patients. Her work is a textbook example
of the postmodern trash whose worthlessness was demonstrated by Alan Sokal,
among others.
I personally find it outrageous that people of this kind are awarded degrees these
days. But when this woman becomes the dean of a college of one of the most
famous universities in the world, expected to control all of its undergraduate
education and to be even able to integrate the feminist studies into the curriculum,
we might start to be afraid that the situation has become irrepairable.”
Oct 12th 2007
Affirmative action for rightwingers?
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/10/affirmative-action-for-rightwingers.html
“There are whole departments where people are quite generally incompetent and
almost never reach the scholarly qualities of their colleagues in standard
departments. All these departments of gender studies, African studies, and similar
overspecialized and redundant constructs are artificially constructed to create a
false impression of balance in questions where balance cannot exist because of
facts of biology. These departments have become the key driving forces for
politicization of the Academia. I think that responsible university officials should
try to shrink these departments as much as they can but no one is actually doing
so.
The perverse political opinions of the people in these departments are often
imported to other departments, too. The infection rate is very high.
Meanwhile, wrong people are being absorbed to many standard departments, too.
At all levels, ideological bias is huge. Members of racial and other groups that are
likely to be extremely leftist are being hired more often than members of other
groups. In the case of natural sciences, many women decide to go to science
mainly because of their feminist ideological beliefs. Because there are not many
responsible colleagues who would make it impossible, the percentage of feminist
women in science also grows out of proportion, pushing the average further to the
left.
Quite generally, the fields that are most brutally affected by the leftist political
bias are the same fields where mechanisms to create this bias may be easily
detected.”
From the Comments:
“Anonymous: Can you explain us why a deparment like African Studies can not
be compare to other deparment and can only create a "false impression of
balanced" while "balance cannot exist because of facts of biology"? Speak your
mind, you are a free man now.
LM: Of course that I can. It's been explained many times. A group of people, in
this case blacks, whose mean IQ is 1.1 standard deviations below the average of
another group, in this case whites, simply cannot be expected to have a
proportional representation in the Academia. The larger-than-sensible
departments of African and African American studies are partly designed to
reduce the white-black gap in the universities by this specifically engineered field
that selectively attracts blacks. This is a wrong policy because in the Academia,
there should simply be no fields that are *defined* to be made by an ethnic group.
Anything that would be defined in the opposite way would be a target of bloody
criticism. But if there is a field - African studies - that is designed to be studied by
blacks only, it is presented as an OK thing. It is not OK at all because the fact that
it is studied primarily by blacks indicates that the topic is not that universally
important for the whole mankind.”
Sept 21, 2007
“Lawrence Summers was invited to speak at University of California […]
Maureen Stanton has decided that it shouldn't happen. She collected about 350
signatures of fellow Feminazis
[I]s the Academia more influenced by top scholars, economists, and policymakers
such as Lawrence Summers, or by hysterical far-left activists? As you know very
well, this question is a rhetorical one. The answer is that the Academia - and
University of California in particular - is controlled by a self-invited far-left
thought police.
[…]
Political correctness and affirmative action have filled the Academia with
thousands of people who shouldn't be there and who are starting to use their loud
voices and immoral techniques to destroy basic principles of scholarship.
For example, Bitch PhD [a blogger] writes an incoherent text about the topic
whose only comprehensible component is the intriguing title: "Larry Summers:
zombie or pirate?" In the comments, she explains that the right answer is probably
"dick". She disagrees with some people who have criticized the disinvitation such as Prof Eric Rauchway whom she considers a respectable "right-on feminist
dude" - but her explanation makes no sense. So let's summarize: the most wellknown female leftist Academic blogger in the U.S. - and I hope that she is going
to be flattered by my posting - informs us in her latest work that Larry Summers is
a dick. And she probably doesn't mean Dick Feynman even though Dick Feynman
was a "sexist pig", too. ;-) This observation shouldn't be unexpected for those who
know something about the feminist garbage that has filled the U.S. universities.
Most feminists have similar qualities as this Dr Prostitute, at least when it comes
close to any topic that is supposed to be covered by their favorite ideology.
[...]
P.S. If you worry about the freedom of speech, there are also good news.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be unanimously and enthusiastically welcome as a
speaker at Columbia University; see this interview that Mahmoud considered to
be non-interview. ;-) Peter Woit may show us a new map - gift from the president
- without Israel that is not even wrong.”
August 26, 2007
“It seems to me that you don't have to understand any physics if you just want to
understand why Peter Woit's "work" is pure garbage. Just look at his postings:
there is not a single physics-related idea, and if there is one, it is always copied
from a convenient "authority". What he cares about is to transform people into
fanaticized imbeciles - imbeciles who are never willing to learn the truth or
understand details about any question. Imbeciles who can't listen and who only
know how to attack and intimidate people whose IQ is roughly 40-60 points
above the imbeciles' IQ.
I must tell you: these aggressive imbeciles have already intimidated a huge
portion of smart people - scientists who are afraid to say what science has actually
found because they would be instantly attacked by Woit and his trash fan club.
Unless we do something about this scum, they will soon control the whole
scientific community.”
June 7th 2007
Clifford Johnson and Big Brother
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/06/clifford-johnson-and-big-brother.html
“Since the beginning of my latest job, I've constantly been intimidated by piles of
radical left-wing scum into thinking what they wanted me to think and acting in
ways they wanted me to act. Feminist girls who should normally be spanked for
hours for their bad behavior were trying to dictate me what I think about the role
of groups in science and how should I grade students; crackpots like Naomi
Oreskes wanted to dictate me what I should think about global warming;
crackpots like Woit and Smolin were finally trying to determine what others
including me think about quantum gravity. This whole machinery was secretly
tolerated or even supported by some of the people in the hierarchy of power. The
rules are such that exactly when you get to some position, it is the imbeciles who
decide what you should do and think. Don't be surprised that I ended up hating
most of these people.”
May 21st 2007
Noisy picnic and political correctness
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/05/noisy-picnic-and-political-correctness.html
“I apologize but under normal circumstances, being black hasn't allowed one to
make a huge mess in the middle of Harvard. In the past, everyone would
understand that if someone didn't know why the previous sentence is true, his
proclamation that "I am Harvard" shouldn't have been uncritically accepted.
These days, the Academia - universities as well as their individual departments are literally flooded with similar distasteful foundations and committees whose
only purpose is to overfill the community with propaganda and fear and to impose
very unbalanced, politically biased code of a certain flavor.
We have a lot of committees for diversity and various departments for women's
studies, among others. I think that the very name of these institutions is
constructed to guarantee that only one type of ideas, one sex, and one race is
being "protected" by these institutions. Feminists have a monopoly in the
questions about the women's role in the society. Radical blacks have a monopoly
in the questions about the interracial relations. Environmentalists have a
monopoly in the committees that are dedicated to the questions of the
environment.
Everything is designed to protect the totalitarian influence of one ideology and no
one seems to care.
Show me a single influential scholar in a department of women's studies who
understands the very basic insight about that discipline, namely why virtually all
of scholarly feminism is intellectual garbage. Show me a single director of a
foundation for diversity who would protect a white person against a black person.
Show me a single chair of a deparmental diversity committee who understands
that the lack of conservatives at the universities is much more serious a problem
that the lack of a certain skin color.
The very structure of these institutions and foundations is designed to help to
indoctrinate, intimidate, and radicalize the members of the academic community.”
April 27th 2007
An MIT dean with high school education (or less)
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/04/mit-dean-with-high-school-education-or.html
“ Thousands of activist women and radical members of other "oppressed" groups
- groups that actually control this whole disgusting theater - pretend that they are
much more than they are and the whip of political correctness guarantees that they
can do so. Feminism and other types of victimism are forms of organized crime.”
Aprin 11th 2007
Chaotic FAS meeting
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/04/chaotic-fas-meeting.html
“Indeed, this is the cutting-edge feminist/Smolinian crap whose spirit you can find
in the currently proposed rules. The extremely soft "scientists" have simply spread
like an illness and they're threatening to kill the very basic features of science
education at every single school in the world.”