Farsight wrote:So tell me about the "outright errors", omissions, and gratuitous slams.
Proton-antiproton annihilation: Farsight seems to think that they do not produce charged pions or more than 2 particles, at least not in significant quantities. But I've looked at the literature for p-p* annihilation and it produces not only neutral pions, but also charged pions in similar quantities. The same is true for n-p* annihilation; yes, neutrons can annihilate with antiprotons.
Quarks outside of baryons: Farsight seems to think that all baryons are somehow excited states of protons, or protons + extra particles, and he seems to think that quarks are only parts of protons. However, there's lots of evidence that mesons are composed of quark-antiquark systems.
Beta decay: Farsight ignores the full range of reactions, hoping to imply that a neutron is an excited state of a proton, or even that a neutron somehow contains a proton, an electron, and an antineutrino. Here are the reactions observed; which one happens depends on what is energetically favorable.
n -> p + e
- + nu
*
p -> n + e
+ + nu
p + e
- -> n + nu (electron capture)
Slams: Farsight make Dirac claim that a neutron is made of cheese seems like a gratuitous insult. Likewise for Hawking claiming that ordinary matter is made of black holes, or Curie claiming that ordinary matter is made of radioactivity.
Also, Witten's “Er, string, sir?” implies that he's not very confident that string theory is a viable possibility.
At least Farsight got Gell-Mann's position right.
That's as much as I had patience for.