This is one of those old Yorkshire sayings that I was brought up on. In our family, we are all daft, in our various ways, but none of us is stupid. So I have no problem admitting that all my ideas about physics are daft. Obviously they are. But I do argue with people who say they are stupid. Because they are not.
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Hidden assumptions 
July 4, 2021 at 1:19 am |
Science has developed a hive mind. Basic physics of quantity. Quantity is very good for number crunching. It is also very resistant to alternatives.
July 4, 2021 at 2:52 am |
Quantity refers to numbers and a discrete spacetime would be a reality entirely of numbers. Riemann explained a continuous spacetime needs to get a metric from the outside. Gaining a metric is not a problem at all for the discrete. And there is a workaround to make the discrete have Lorentz Covariance- by using Casual Sets. In regards to your comment, quantity and/or Casual Sets ARE the alternative. The mainstream is continuous fields.
July 4, 2021 at 7:50 am |
I have a theory that the problems with the arXiv moderation are at root a failure to distinguish between daft and stupid ideas. Ideally, one wants to distinguish between good and bad ideas, but for that one requires refereeing, which the arXiv explicitly refuse to do. So instead they want to distinguish between clever and stupid ideas, and weed out the stupid ones. But if they confuse stupid with daft, then in practice they distinguish between daft and sane ideas, and throw out the daft ones.
Now consider the fact that all the really important ideas in the progress of science have been daft ideas. Many of Einstein’s best ideas were daft ideas that happened to be good ideas. Conversely, the lack of significant progress in theoretical fundamental physics in half a century can be attributed to the lack of appropriate daft ideas, and a plethora of sane but wrong ideas. Hence the arXiv moderation policies have the effect of throwing out the (daft) baby with the (stupid) bathwater.
July 5, 2021 at 3:35 am |
Marni Sheppeard and Tony Smith had a discussion with Tommaso Dorigo on this, only they were convinced that the ArXiv system was blacklisting them. Marni was willing to write a paper on Category Theory and give it to someone else; would the ArXiv reject it coming from her? Probably. Would they accept the exact same paper if it came from someone else’s name? Probably.
Phillip Gibbs had a fix to this problem long before it hit Tony or Marni. Gibbs created ViXra. It is known to host a huge load of *crackpot* and *conspiracy*, which has led to attacks on Gibb’s reputation. Phillip Gibbs is credible and knowledgable and most definitely NOT a crackpot. A lot of the papers submitted to his journal are, however, because there is no moderation. Tony Smith put his most unconventional ideas there: ArXiv had seemingly blocked him for life. He studied under David Finkelstein but did not recieve a PhD degree. The degree wasn’t really his goal, anyway. Just ideas, however crazy they might be…
Both Tony and Marni were oppressed by the blacklisting. To think that a rejection would come based on only the NAME of the author!
Dixon didn’t like having his papers moved to the *lower* category. They moved Lisi’s E8 paper around these different categories. This is a more common example that a lot more people deal with there…
December 11, 2023 at 6:49 pm |
Arxiv suppression of papers is down to Jacques Distler, string “theorist” at Texas Uni, Austin. I was able to upload a predictive QG paper to arxiv using my Gloucestershire Uni email address in 2003, but distler or one of his postdocs removed it within seconds.
Later I had a discussion with Distler (on his blog, at least he didn’t immediately delete it!), which explained everything. He’s a wooden mathematical barrel organ handle winder, who can’t accept that new theories don’t need to accept old stringy ideas as a subset. To give a specific example, Richard P. Feynman himself replaces his own traditional complex space (Argand diagram) particle polarization vector, exp(iS) with simply its real cos S, in diagrams (and explanations) of how a mirror works in his 1985 book QED.
Distler however kept coming back that the book was a completely different one, which Feynman co-authored with his student Albert Hibbs in 1965, twenty years earlier, before Feynman met Bohm and developed his path integral explanation of the reflection and refraction of light using real space only, thus cos S not exp(iS).
Distler then insisted as a “no go theorem” against my fully proof checked QG that, because the optical theorem employs complex space, Feynman was wrong to simplify exp(iS) to cos S in his 1985 book to explain light properties simply! This isn’t true. The origin of complex space in quantum field theory and indeed QM was Hilbert’s original gauge theory around 1918, which Einstein dismissed but Schroedinger later used to explain quantum energy levels and get his equation. exp(iX) gives a series of discrete real solutions for X which makes it ideal for modelling spectral lines, which Schroedinger correlated to Bohr’s energy levels. The continuous solutions are conveniently in complex space. It’s also the solution to Schroedinger’s equation. However, it’s a mathematical tool being used to represent discrete events. You can’t assume that the first simplistic model that is used must disprove all subsequent alternatives!
If that’s the level of Distler’s intelligence, God help physics.
December 11, 2023 at 7:04 pm |
Yes, I know I have upset Jacques Distler, by refuting a number of his published arguments, which are just plain wrong. Both his arguments that “There is no E_8 theory of everything” are based on assumptions that are simply not true. One of them is the argument that three generations of fermions require three disjoint Dirac spinors. I have constructed a model in which a single Dirac spinor deals with three generations simultaneously. Other people have constructed models in which two Dirac spinors do the job. His argument is naive and dogmatic, and does not hold water. The other argument is more subtle, and harder to refute, but I eventually located the error precisely, and explained it carefully. It is clear that Distler does not understand the difference between real, complex and quaternionic representations, and treats all representations as if they were complex.