Well, I think everyone here has already formed their own opinion of me so I expect not to be bothered by those who are easily insulted; however, for those of you who are open to real thought, I have some comments to make. First, I am very much an opinionated old man and I would not bother with this at all except that it is becoming quite evident that I am most probably going to take what I have discovered to the grave. I still have the hope of reaching someone capable of comprehending what I have been trying to discuss or I wouldn't be posting here. It has occurred to me that perhaps a discourse on how I came to realize what I have realized would prompt someone with a decent education to step back and think about it for a moment or two. Or perhaps interest someone young in making a sincere attempt to understand some of the more subtle issues of fundamental physics.
My father liked to read science fiction and, when I was still quite young, he told me about relativity. It was a rather simple minded introduction but none the less convincing to a child with essentially no mathematics training. His explanation started with the need to send a light signal to check the agreement of clocks and how the assumption that the light moved at a constant velocity in their own frame would lead a person on a moving train to set his clocks slightly different from how they would be set by an observer in the station. When the observer in the station would measure the length of the train, he would clearly get a different answer than the observer on the train because they disagreed on the positions of the ends of their rulers (the issue being the necessity of marking positions at
simultaneous moments separated by some distance, the very issue they would disagree about). Obtaining the same value for the speed of light would also required their clocks to appear to run differently (since time was defined by how long light took to cover a fixed path this also made sense to me). And of course all that leads one directly to the twin paradox.
The simple minded childish conclusion which jumped into my mind was, "Oh, clocks don't measure time!" In my childish unsophisticated mind,
time being the same meant we could interact and
time being different meant one of us was in the past relative to the other and we couldn't interact. The final key he gave me was that Einstein conceived of the world as a four dimensional space time continuum. Of course I had no idea of what he meant by "space time". To me the four dimensional aspect was the only important issue and it was this fourth dimension which had to do with what readings were on the clock. He told me we couldn't see this fourth dimension because it was beyond our minds ability to comprehend: we could only comprehend three dimensions. (I seem to remember some allusion to Plato talking about working with shadows of reality on the wall). So, once again, I jumped to the childish conclusion that we couldn't see this strange fourth dimension because our minds could only see the projected shadow of it.
It was not more than a few days later that I had worked out in most all of the direct logical consequences of the picture which my father had unintentionally created in my mind. At the time, I fully believed that I totally understood relativity; my image of reality was exactly what I thought my father had described to me. As this was not an issue my playmates talked about, all my thoughts were strictly internal and not discussed with anyone else; but I did regard it as a totally valid conception of reality and it was quite often in my thoughts. By the time I was in high school, and had a little geometry to work with, I could deduce the consequences of almost any situation one could describe (I obtained a scholarship in physics to college via a national test where my ability to quickly answer questions related to relativity may have played an important role).
When I went off to college and actually began to study Einstein's relativity for real, I discovered that I was totally wrong. The mental image I had in mind bore little resemblance at all to what Einstein was proposing; however, by that time it was quite evident to me that both views lead to exactly the same conclusions. At the time, it was very clear to me that my idea was neither as rational nor as well thought out as the "real" theory as mine required this ridiculous ad hoc necessity to project out that spurious and unnecessary fourth dimension conceived of by my childish mind. None the less, being intimately familiar with my perspective through years of using it, I found it very convenient to switch between the two on a regular basis.
In most cases, one perspective or the other would provide a quicker and easier deduction of answers (which perspective was actually best depended very much on the details of the specific problem). For example, in my perspective, simple Newtonian F=ma gave the correct dynamic solutions for accelerated motion (one only had to use the original rest frame for the space part together with time as defined on a clock on the traveling entity to obtain the relativistically correct solution for accelerated motion). From that time on I generally thought of it as little more than a convenient rule of thumb useful for seeing quick results in some specific situations.
When I got to graduate school and began to studying quantum mechanics, I learned about the Heisenberg uncertainty principal. (Quantum mechanics was not part of the curriculum where I went to college.) Of course, what popped out at that time was the obvious mechanism for that fourth dimension being projected out. In my picture, mass being momentum in that unobservable tau dimension clearly made tau the variable canonical to mass, the fact that practically everything in our everyday experience consisted of mass quantized entities implied the uncertainty in tau had to be infinite. No wonder we couldn't directly perceive that fourth dimension. It was this realization that cast a whole new light on the issue of why my strange perspective worked so well.
So, that was the event that lead me to point out this useful alternate perspective to the Chairman of the department (one of the "theoretical gurus" of our physics department). Initially, his position was that what I was saying couldn't possibly be true. It was only after several hours of argument that I was finally able to lay out an
absolute mathematical proof that the two perspectives had to yield exactly the same result that he finally accepted the fact that I was right; however, he insisted that I not mention it to any of the other students as "it might confuse them". Yeah sure, I think it might have confused them into asking some serious questions he couldn't answer! (On the other hand, it is entirely possible that, in spite of the proof, he didn't really understand what I was doing; certainly no one here seems to have comprehended my thoughts.) Nevertheless, it didn't prevent me from carrying on with some thought about the issue.
About a year later, (in thinking about some subtle aspects of my
unauthorized perspective) I had dug myself into an interesting conundrum which lead me to asking my thesis adviser an admittedly strange question ("How can one prove a measurement in one dimension is the same as an analogous measurement in an orthogonal dimension?") . His answer rather surprised me. He said, "only geniuses ask questions like that and, believe me Stafford, you're no genius!" and left it at that. My mother was quite correct! (She had told me that one learns a lot more by listening than by talking.)
My thesis had to do with calculating "Nucleon-Nucleus Inelastic Scattering with Realistic Nucleon-Nucleon Interactions", a major number crunching effort suggested by an Oak Ridge colleague of my thesis adviser (of course it was done on a computer inadequate to the job as, in those days, everything was). It was pretty much a waste of time having utterly nothing to do with physics theory and everything to do with complex numerical approximations (the authorities of that day and age presumed they understood reality; the only problem for theorists was to figure out how to calculate the answers in their own lifetime). I always thought it was somewhat funny that Feynman's greatest contribution to physics was a method of keeping track of terms. (And that was not meant to insult Feynman as he was a very thoughtful and competent physicist.)
At any rate, it was during that period (when I was concerned with handling large numbers of virtual interactions) that I attempted to ask my last question. Being well aware of the great explanative power of exchange forces, (the quantum mechanical consequences of virtual exchange of fundamental particles), the impact as seen from my
unauthorized perspective implied some significant consequences. (In my perspective, as mass was quantized momentum in the tau direction, massive exchange forces had to obey a relationship quite similar to Maxwell's equation.) This fact moved me to ask him a question. I started with, "What if ..." and that is as far as I got. He said, "physics has no interest in 'what if'; physics is only concerned with 'what is'!" which pretty well laid the position of the Academy on the line. So I finished my Ph.D. thesis, got my degree and forgot about wasting my time with idiot savants.
The point of my "What if ..." question was that if
all forces are entirely due to quantum mechanical exchange forces, then the fundamental equation describing the behavior of the Universe turns out to be quite simple in that
unauthorized perspective my father had erroneously given me (if you are interested, you can see it explicitly displayed at the end of my paper
"A Universal Analytical Model of Explanation Itself", a rewrite of something I wrote some four years ago).
Though this conclusion stands on very strong ground (in spite of Qfwfq's educated position to the contrary), that fact is a pretty worthless piece of information if one cannot solve the equation. No one I showed it to was able to even suggest any reasonable methods of attack on finding solutions so it was quite a number of years before I was able to drag out and defend my first valid result. After that, solutions began to fall out almost on their own and I thought that I had enough to publish by 1982.
No journal I sent it to would publish it. I don't think a referee ever saw it as every journal I sent it to said it was outside their area of expertise and that I should try a different journal (were they trying to be kind to a quack?) After a year or so, I attempted to get assistance in publication from my thesis adviser but got rebuffed with the following comment: "No one will ever read your stuff Stafford, because you haven't paid your dues!" He also personally refused to even look at what I had discovered.
At the time (being a mere youth of 45) I didn't really believe the whole academic community was actually that adamantly concerned with their exclusive right to control the dogma. That they would, to a man, refuse to even think about an alternate perspective astonished me. But, after a few years, they pretty well convinced me they were. The physicists I knew said it was Philosophy, the Philosophers said it was Mathematics and the Mathematicians said it was Physics. Most tended to say that they felt the whole thing was just over their head. One thing they all agreed upon was that it was neither in their field nor of any interest to them whatsoever. So I laid the whole thing aside and went on with my life.
In 2000, while cleaning out my attic, I came across an old type set copy I had done on Word Perfect in 1987 (the first program I personally ever saw which could render equations). After so many years, I read it over and somewhat impressed myself. Particularly with the fact that, being totally consistent with quantum mechanics from the get go, a representation of general relativity consistent with quantum mechanics was actually quite straight forward and easy to deduce. Since I was retired and had considerable free time, I thought I would look around and see if there might be an rational educated person out there capable of carrying on an intelligent conversation with me. To date the answer seems to be in the negative.
I am very sorry if you all find that self serving and insulting but it seems to me to be a very accurate assessment of my experiences. Again, I am sorry that my search has subjected all you Charlie Browns out there to issues so far outside your own personal interests.
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Originally Posted by Charlie Brown
That's just the trouble. I am best in something where the answers are mostly a matter of opinion!
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I am looking for someone with an interest in precise thinking, hopefully young enough to carry an understanding of these discoveries into the future further than I can.
I believe that my perspective is superior to Einstein's for a number of very specific reasons. The first and single most significant reason is that my perspective is not based on any theory at all: its can be directly deduced from an analytical truth specified by an exact definition of
an explanation. But furthermore it solves a great number of philosophical problems about reality as seen by the physics community. It is quite simple to show that Schroedinger's equation (and thus all of classical mechanics), Dirac's equation, Maxwell's equation and particle exchange forces of nuclear physics are all approximate solutions to to that very fundamental equation.
When the required approximations are made (approximations required to deduce the physics equations mentioned above), certain consequences of those approximations become quite self evident. You should notice that the Dirac delta function in the fundamental equation makes every
fundamental entity in the universe a point object. This is absolutely inconceivable to the physics community because, from their
theoretical perspective, the implied energy of the interaction fields go to infinity (the old infinite mass associated with the electric field of a point electron). It turns out that the old problem of infinite mass for a point electron becomes a direct consequence of the approximations required to achieve Maxwell's equations: i.e., the required approximations simply are not valid when the energy of that hypothetical entity called a photon exceeds it's own rest mass. That is to say, Maxwell's equations are not correct, they are only macroscopic approximations to my equation. The very concept of fundamental particles is a direct consequence of an attempt to isolate and characterize specific solutions to the equation: i.e., ignoring the generality of the representation (it is exactly the far reaching generality of requiring all interactions to be included which is the major problem with finding valid solutions).
Another rather interesting consequence is that what is commonly called gravity is no more than a direct subtle consequence of gradients in the interaction density of those exchange forces. As such, the force of gravity always points towards the source of those gradients (making antigravity an absolute impossibility) and is also substantially less intense than any of the actual observed exchange forces (it is a very much smaller effect). A direct calculation of the effects of those gradients yields almost exactly the same gravitational results of general relativity. I examined the exact nature of the difference and concluded that the effect was far too small to be measured and would not provide a factor of interest in defending my results.
But that leads to a very interesting final clue. The difference between Einstein's result and my result may very well be an extremely small factor and quite difficult to measure but it might nonetheless yield observable consequences. The actual size of the factor is the same order of magnitude as Einstein's correction to Newton's gravitational result but is essentially orthogonal to it. That orthogonality makes it unobservable in both the gravitational deflection of star light and the relatively circular orbit of Mercury as it ends up being a very small radial correction in position of the photon or of Mercury's orbit, neither of which can be measured to the required accuracy.
However, the factor does amount to a very small correction in the radial potential energy of an entity which could certainly be seen as an unexplained small retardation of a radially outward moving object (essentially equivalent to calculation of the potential energy at a slightly erroneous position). Given sufficient time, a small deviation from Einstein's result might actually be noticeable. I can show that it will look like a small retardation. Does that look to any of you like the apparent retardation of that satellite heading out of the solar system; the one requiring the invention of Dark matter? Or is it more reasonable to presume the existence of "Dark" matter rather than consider a possible error in Einstein's general relativity? Apparently the academy believes the existence of "Dark" matter is much more probable than an error in our concept of time.
Have fun -- Dick
"The simplest and most necessary truths are the very last to be believed."
by Anonymous
Re: There are none so blind as those who will not see!
