Thanks,

-cvj

If you ask a specific and careful question, I will do my best to answer it. Otherwise, you may read any of the miles of stuff I have written on this topic on my blog and elsewhere.

Cheers

Cheers,

-cvj

In carrying out a discussion about physics, continued random claims that you can leap tall buildings in a single bound don’t help your case at all. It just makes you sound rather nutty. You wouldn’t want that now, would you?

How about addressing the physics question? I refer you to my advice above, linked here. If you can’t address it yet, since you’re still working on the answer… that’s ok! You’re not obliged to say anything if you’ve not got an answer yet. Silence on the issue is just fine. And, there’s no need to get aggressive when someone politely asks a question, ok?

Best,

-cvj

It is not expected that everybody will be convinced that such a cosmology is worth investigating until it is derived from a full unified theory. We might be closer to that than you think. For example, the lepton masses were derived by Brannen in a formulation that is fitting into our picture for M-theory. Do you know why MHV techniques work? Well, we do. I can derive the gluon amplitudes from Machian first principles, for which twistor space is always prior to a Minkowski type interpretation.

By Clifford’s estimate, we may have just 5 years to go!

Sorry, what estimate? I made no estimate. I don’t put time limits on ideas. You have me mixed up with someone else, I think.

Cheers.

-cvj

-cvj

Lab Lem, it turns out that permeability \mu_0 increases as t^{2/3}. Magnetic fields grow at the same rate as the Universe.

Thanks for your comment 34 - I’ve a discussion of alleged evidence why G ~ t at http://feynman137.tripod.com

Regarding the detailed advice about the burden of proof you give in comment 38, I’m very appreciative for that.

I do agree with you that when someone gets a complete explanation of everything which is very convincing, they will likely be taken seriously. The problem with this argument is that it’s very hard indeed to get any ideas that are original or that can’t be ruled out almost instantly. So most steps forward can be viewed as steps backward by critics (Copernicus in 1500 AD reinventing Aristarchus’s solar system of 250 BC, as an example).

There’s no guarantee that someone who happens to stumble on a useful idea and build on it, will be super-duper intelligent. Just briefly, Feynman’s Character of Physical Law has some very nice passages. He has a diagram of LeSage’s push gravity mechanism, shows that it accounts for the inverse law, but dismisses it because any gauge boson radiation would slow the planets down and make them spiral into the sun!

This reminds you of the objection Rutherford used against Bohr’s atom in 1916! (Rutherford cruelly wrote that Bohr’s idea is false because an orbiting electron radiates and lose energy, spiralling into the nucleus; that gets rid of Bohr’s theory. Luckily, Bohr ignored Rutherford.)

I keep wondering why Feynman did not associate the radiation with gauge bosons? And why he didn’t suggest the Lorentz length contraction is the effect of moving through gauge boson exchange radiation?

Later I discovered LeSage had been ridiculed because his theory had predicted the “nearly empty atom” too long ahead of X-rays and radioactivity! Once that part of LeSage’s predictions were confirmed, he was then ridiculed by Maxwell and others who claimed that the exchange radiation of gravity would heat up atoms until they were red hot! By the time the Standard Model was built on exchange radiation, these naive objections to LeSage (which would also more easily kill the Standard Model which is entirely based on exchange radiation for forces stronger than gravity) were no longer physics.

Finally, I discovered that LeSage was allegedly a plagarist and had stolen the theory from Newton’s alleged homosexual lover, Nicolas Fatio de Duillier. No wonder Feynman didn’t back it! However, Feynman did say:

‘It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of spacetime is going to do? So I have often made the hypothesis that ultimately physics will not require a mathematical statement, that in the end the machinery will be revealed, and the laws will turn out to be simple, like the chequer board with all its apparent complexities.’

- R. P. Feynman, Character of Physical Law, November 1964 Cornell Lectures, broadcast and published in 1965 by BBC, pp. 57-8.

Cheers,
Nigel

Clifford, these questions have been posed by myself and Christine Dantas previously. I agree that alternative theories should be explored, but they must be put into the context of known information. So if I come up with a theory of everything, I should be able to explain it in layman’s terms.

BTW what a nice even handed discussion of DE that you have done!

Kea, I know how you feel. We are on track to working all this stuff out soon. The consequences will keep physicists busy for decades

You mean Peirce’s 19th century philosophy? Or maybe Leibniz’ monadology. Or maybe the old Veneziano paper, the amplitudes of which I know how to recover rigorously from first principles?

Please take some time to learn the history of the subject. 20 years is a short time for a truly great idea about our universe to come to fruition. There are myriad examples. At 39 years old, and having worked in the field for so long, I’d have imagined you’d know that.

All the Best - I mean that.

-cvj

We’re talking about a job for many people. You are quite mistaken if you think I meant that I was intending to do it all myself. And 20 years is not a short time. On the contrary, in this business things can change very, very quickly.

Best,

-cvj

Specifically, you would change the relative diameters of positive and negative ions, which in turn would change the co-ordination states of these ions in ionic compounds (e.g. silicates), which would change the equilibrium compositions of early solar system bodies. Such changes are not observed.

Perhaps more important for the locals here, you would change the excitation energy of H and He, making redshift calculations a royal pain in the butt.

As Cliff said, it is geat if you can overturn fundamental physical paradigms, and we’ll all buy you beers in Stockholm if it works. But in order to do that, you need to show that your new world order explains everything that takes the old system for granted as well as, or better than, the old system. There’s a lot of everything out there.

As for the faint young sun, an increasing number of early Earth geologists are getting quite fond of a snowballed Hadean and early Archean planet. The direct evidence for surface water is scarcer that one might suspect.

I’m 39 years old. I have spent 20 years talking and working (some of the time) with professional physicists. Until now, I have been mostly polite and silent in the face of discrimination and condescension. Those days are now gone. I say what I think. If someone doesn’t want to listen - too bad for them.

Cheers,

-cvj

Kea, Louise, nc… I very much wish you all a lot of success with what you are trying to do. I confess to not understanding it (probably due to my own failing to invest the time), but I see no reason why you should not go ahead with what you are doing, and if it all comes to fruition and you develop a coherent prodictive framework that explains all we observe and predicts some great new stuff that we can go out and check…. This would be rather wonderful… we’re all looking for something like that in our own ways.

My only advice, which you are free to ignore, is this: - If you want to take a bold step from the mainstream and try a different approach to physics (possibly producing valuable and new results), when you come back with your results, in order to get them taken seriously you need to find ways to describe them in the terms of the mainstream, otherwise nobody will listen to you or take you seriously. I say this not because the mainstream is always right, but because of the fact that when you take a bold step away from everyone else.. the burden is proof is on you… so to start the process, it makes sense to do in on the mainstream’s terms… sometimes the mainstream will ask something that seems high-handed, or impatient, or annoying….. but you should consider those sorts of questions as helpful remarks that can help strengthen what you are doing.. maybe refine it.. if it is worth doing. I give you, Louise, and nc, the example of Jacques’ questions…. Take what he says on board and either answer his objections or refine what you are doing to take them into account. If there is something in what you’re doing.. it is possible. And then what you will be doing will be stronger… and easier to bring to the mainstream the next time you try… This is the way I suggest you proceed to get your work and ideas looked at by the wider physics community. Feel free to ignore me, of course.

-cvj

Shall I continue?