Dr. Stacy McGaugh made a short post “Divergence” on his Triton Station blog, which is a good read, and I responded with this rather pleasant rant although I don’t know if it made it through the filters :
Here’s an idea to consider. The most face-saving idea for everyone is to press the rewind button. How far back you want to rewind is a matter of your own views, but at least go back before the terms dark matter and MOND were coined! Simply agree that the choice of frameworks is likely impeding the science. To convince dark matter folks, point out that the really deep physicists like Wilczek are no longer thinking about spacetime as a geometry. They are starting to open the door in their thinking to an aether. I listen to so many of these interviews that I don’t have a reference, but just listen to recent Wilczek social media and read his latest book. Now, if their roiling quantum pair producing vacuum is really an aether, then we have a whole ‘nuther (Noether!) ball game. That means all the astrophysicists photons are traversing this newly imagined spacetime.
I would press the rewind button back much farther, as I trace a dozen major failures in the decision history. I learned of one today, “bootstrap” and it is a whopper:
Geoffrey Chew and others went so far as to question the distinction between composite and elementary particles, advocating a “nuclear democracy” in which the idea that some particles were more elementary than others was discarded.
Wikipedia
Imagine that, they decided NOT to look for fundamental particles. The scientific method does not address this kind of crisis.
I request and recommend that physics academia and professionals as a “field” simply “Take the L.” I’ve provided the Urban Dictionary definition that I am using in this context. At some point physicists will catch on and there is really no other sensible alternative than to say, “We went off track on interpretations and that cascaded into major confusion. Now we are back on track and it is amazing. Clear sailing from here!”
Today, I listened to a Dr. Sean M. Carroll podcast and his tortured, confused, misunderstanding of spacetime, general relativity, and quantum mechanics. It’s such a tragedy that our best and brightest minds are so confused about nature. Until today, I didn’t realize how deeply the bad interpretive code has influenced Sean’s programming. I had thought it was confined mainly to the many world’s nonsense that Sean has been advocating to his readers, viewers, and subscribers. It is far deeper and insidious.
This is not about Sean. I think under different circumstances, we might be fast friends. He is certainly a good, kind, and highly intelligent person trying to live his best life, like most of us. Despite Sean’s tortuous explanations I do learn a lot about how GR/QM/LCDM era physicists think about nature. That is very informative. Often they have great insight albeit shrouded in wrong interpretation. It’s a matter of introducing a cognitive transformation to map their vague understanding to what most likely is happening in the point charge reality of the universe.
Let the physics and science historians do the back-tracking to try to understand the provenance of each interpretational error. As a hobbyist I’ve traced at least a dozen and they seem to network to each other. Nature is such a symmetric house of mirrors it is easy to see how so many theories have vestiges of the truth of nature.
Science must also address the fact that the scientific method must be updated to self-detect false prior situations or crisis gaps in progress. Think about it, 50 years of no major progress, and I argue 150 years off track narratively! The scientifc method failed several generations of scientists! The intellectual and financial waste is enormous! We could have had the keys to nature by at least 1920. We are behind schedule by at least a century. We must learn that when research slows in what should otherwise be a fertile area, it is time to re-examine priors and probe assumptions. Why were point charges discarded so easily?
To what degree was physics intentionally diverted off track? See my post about Heisenberg and Bohr. Surely someone could have thunk to take the ideal point charge and give it some characteristics to overcome any concerns about self-energy or annhilation. Even today this is a good project for an undergraduate electrical engineering or physics major. It is not a complicated problem. We know a lot about the ultimate results of the emergent descriptive math.
I have introduced a new architecture for nature that I have intuited via thought experiments. I think I have figured out the physics priors that are in error that have caused the narrative interpretation of physics to get confused and muddled and led to the current challenges. I don’t mean this pejoratively, but physicists are still suffering from Plato’s allegory of the cave.
Many physicists or at least guardians of physics have strong feelings about non-professionals bearing gift ideas. It is quite disconcerting to me when they use the c-word, or worse, as well as other offensive techniques such as censoring, blocking, and banning. It is as if the community of physics is closed off to new ideas while at the same time it is in a well known 50 year crisis of progress regarding understanding of nature. Seriously, why are you educating millions of us with your outreach if you don’t have ways to receive the best ideas in return? Your audience is capable of creative and insightful ideas!
Had physicists been collaborative, we could have wrapped up the theory of everything in six months, by year end 2018. I was shocked by the reaction and the continued stiff-arm and bullying. Nevertheless, in the meantime, my set of ideas has gotten better and more parsimonious and covers more territory now than ever. So what is it now, a three year delay? As predicted, I did have a life threatening event and thankfully I survived. Shout out to Dr. Parth Patel at MGH! Now, I have a few more years perhaps to break through.
I wonder what will happen if I fail to get through to physicists? I suppose that eventually my WordPress subscription will expire, and all my blog posts will disappear, and then who knows how many decades or centuries it will take for physicists to discover they were incredibly lost?
My hobbyist thought experiments have led me to picking up point charges from the physics bonepile of discarded ideas and refurbishing them with immutability. Simply the idea that no two point charges can approach closer than some distance around the Planck length.
The thought experiments are going quite well and I have now produced the first periodic table of particle physics. It turns out that immutable point charges are useful for solving a bunch of other issues as well, for example we know there aren’t singularities, but now we know why, and can predict that densely packed point charges (in the core of some black holes?) have one microstate, and zero entropy, zero temperature, and zero information (ok, maybe you could argue 1 bit of information).
I have listened to many Sean M. Carroll podcast on my walks. Sean is excellent at explaing the tortured interpretations of GR, QM, and LCDM era physics and cosmology. It feels like listening in on a confessional. I take no glee or solace in saying that. I have no voice.
I would really enjoy a civil discussion about my mundane point charge interpretation of nature vs. all the exotic interpretations from academia. It is so much simpler than physicists imagine. Physicists definitely have vestiges of understanding, but it is really the allegory of the cave. And physicists are so pompous, at least almost all the ones I encounter. Maybe not Sean. My jury is still out on him. But most of my interactions with physicists on social media have resulted in my suffering a severe intellectual and psychological bullying. I think I have now grown a fairly thick skin but along the way the severe bullying was quite disconcerting and depressing and I definitely slowed down as a result. It’s always perplexed me that my ideas are so simple at the foundation and I have rarely been challenged technically on specific ideas I’ve offered. Instead it is mostly ad-hominem attacks directed towards Op (me).
It rankles me, but who really cares if I am able to straighten physicists out or not? Perhaps I should reduce my efforts to get through to them. Unrequited love, I guess? I could talk to the chemists or philosophers or science historians and I probably should at this point.
There has been a terrible tragedy where incorrect priors have set physicists off on an incredibly confusing, difficult, and unproductive quest which has unfortunately resulted in a physics community that has become toxic in many respects. There may be no alternative for administrators, other than to purge the physics department and start over with new talent. Thus is the nature of paradigm changes. Not to worry or fret, every one will find plenty of opportunity in the point charge era.
The scientific method does not address this failure case of its own method! Here is a HUGE historical find (in my opinion) :
As a result of physicists veering so far off track interpretively, while having an effective theory with high precision, which is not really that big of a deal it turns out, they dove into mathematics head long, and now use intense mathematics as the gate code to the walled garden of precise but interpretively wrong physics!
J Mark Morris
How about that?!
J Mark Morris : Boston : Massachusetts
Neoclassical Physics and Quantum Gravity 