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Kyle,
I don't think you really missed my point at all. I just don't express myself well and sometimes I get a little abrupt with my criticisms of the academy. I went into physics because I wanted to understand the world I found myself in (the scientific fields just seemed to be the areas where the bull was minimal and physics sort of underlies everything). I learned a lot in graduate school but the thing that bothered me the most was what I saw as creeping bull. As I am sure you can guess I did not win kudos from the faculty for my complaints.
Probably the single most significant event in my turn of thought was when I happen to read Gamow's Mr. Tompkins series. The one on quantum (what the world would look like if Plank's constant were large) is wrong but I could not construct a valid representation of the world he suggested. As I attempted to so in an internally consistent manner, I always ended up in a circle. It was at that point that I began to suspect Plank's constant was derived in a circular manner. You can imagine how that went over -- I clearly did not understand Physics and certainly the popular presentation of Mr. Tompkins had nothing to do with serious physics.
Add to this the idea that the research area of my Ph.D. thesis seemed to me to be a total waste of time (we were doing number crunching on woefully inadequate machines). No one was thinking about physics, they were all trying to figure out approximations so that they could do the calculations (the physics was known to be right). So anyway, except for still thinking about things, after I got my Ph.D. I sort of dropped out of the field. What you are reading came together in the late 1970's and early 80's. I tried to get it published and completely failed. Basically they all said I should try a different Journal. I think the real problem was that they didn't know who to have referee it; however, I can't be sure as I really don't know anything about the internal workings of the system.
About 1987 I submitted it as a paper for a Physical Society meeting and gave a general talk about what I had discovered. About 20 people attended the talk and afterwards, about 15 of them wanted to talk to me. What I discovered was 15 off the wall crazy people who clearly did not understand the field of theoretical physics and wanted me to support their insane ideas which they had been unable to get published. I was clearly classified as a nut. (Hey Harv, if you are reading this, that is an excellent classification you can put me in. I fit the qualifications quite well.)
The whole point of the above is to make it clear to you that I fully understand the problem I face. I know I am classified as a nut. The problem is that the world is chock full of nuts. Those serious scientists who are capable of following my thoughts cannot spare the time to investigate a nut. I have heard, "why don't you publish" enough times to stop me from discussing the idea. I made one other attempt to publish in 1993. That publication was limited entirely to the relativistic consequences of my model without any mention of the model itself (nothing more than the surprising consequences of an alternate attack on relativity itself). Again, I got "why don't you try another Journal?" Since then I have set life ahead of communicating my thoughts.
Last year I happened to mention the paper to my son in law, who is a web page design consultant, and he said, "why don't you translate it into html and publish on the web?" What you are reading is essentially the original paper I tried to get published in 1982 (somewhat altered, but not greatly). I have since come to the conclusion that the web may be a great idea but it is not a mechanism for a "walk on" to reach any serious consideration from the people you are talking about. That is why I quit translating in Chapter 5.
>>>Like I said before, members of the scientific community are the severest and most ruthlessly meticulous critics of each others' ideas. |
