I assume you're suggesting that you are the inventor of the "new paradigm" right?
If you want to make any headway with the physics community you'll need to do only one 'simple' thing (those quotes are there for a reason).
Unfortunately, you've got your work cut out. Quantum electrodynamics predicts physical quantities to 1 part in 1
billion accuracy.
referenceYou've also got a problem with the simplicity issue too. Hundreds of thousands of physics undergraduates get at least a rudimentary understanding of quantum mechanics and relativity. It's hard to see a scenario where a theory could be rich enough to predict the myriad of physical phenomenon we observe and be less complicated than what we already have.
Good luck in trying though. If you're right you get lauded as a true genius. If you're wrong we get to laugh at you. It's a win win situation really.
[QUOTE]
'Promethius' says:
You'll need to show your new paradigm works better than the old one, that is, predicts the phenomenon we observe in nature more accurately or in a more simple way than what we already have.
Well, 'Promethius', that's exactly what we claim.
Anyway, thanks for the warning, but after more than fifty years doing this, I could write a thesis on the sorts of problems you mention. The record of it all runs to seventeen hard-bound volumes, on average, two inches thick, revealing the 'heat of the forge' that has tempered and honed my (now, our) suggested New Paradigm. These volumes are now stored in the County Archives, where they are treasured, in particular because the correspondence includes a letter from Einstein complimenting the young Viv Pope on his grasp of his, Einstein's, theory. Also, please don't underestimate my knowledge of students. As a retired lecturer in Logic, philosophy of Science, I know all about those spotty creatures!
Anyway, here, as promised is the 'Full Monty' - or at least, as much as I can cram in, here. For anything more, it will be necessary to access the listed website.
Here goes:
Un-thinking Relativity,
Is it possible to un-think all we presently know, about Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, Einstein's General Theory, Bohr's theory, Schrödinger’s theory, Maxwell's electrodynamic theory, the Expanding universe theory, the Big Bang theory, ... etc., etc., etc.? Are there any other theories, actual or possible, which, on the basis of the same physical phenomena and with same or even more predictable capability can interpret the same physical phenomena in an altogether different light?
The German perception/conception experimental psychologists identify something they call a Gestalt. A Gestalt is an organized perceptual or conceptual whole, such as a sculpture a picture, a piece of music or suchlike. Gestalten cannot be mixed; they are incommensurable. For instance, if half an orchestra were to play ‘Greensleeves’ while the other half played the ‘Hebrides Overture’, the result would be cacophony, hardly recognizable as music.
The same goes for theories, and those systems of theories called paradigms. For example, flat-earth and round-earth theories, like tunes, cannot be mixed without creating confusion, nor can Ptolemaic cosmology be mixed with Galileian. The mind-set required to consider any new paradigm of physics has to be kept distinct from any other paradigm, including the conventional one. Any attempt to judge the one from the standpoint of the other is futile.
This, one finds, is a severe limitation on these supposedly progressive forums, namely, that there is a shortage of subscribers with the intellectual capacity of proposing or judging any new theory or paradigm except from the standpoint of the old. They simply can’t make the required paradigm switch from the one mind-set to the other. Nor are any students of science educated to have that capacity. More and more, nowadays, even in our universities, scholars are educated with commercial subjects at the top of the curriculum, more like what used to be called Tech Colleges than universities. For that same reason, all research has to be directed towards ‘cost-effectiveness’, hence ‘bums on seats’. Any old-style open-ended or ‘blue sky’ research is severely curtailed. If Columbus were alive today, then in order to be funded for his expedition he would first have to supply his sponsors with a map of the United States, and then he would be prevented by the Health and Safety authorities from sailing too near to the edge of the earth.
Are we in that position today? Indeed we are. Everything points to the need for a new paradigm, yet our education system mires us in, to the extent that to contemplate such a prospect is almost impossible. What could be the hinge-pin on which such a revolution could turn. With Copernicus it was simply his inspired realisation that the movements of the planets could be more easily thought of as circling the sun rather than our earth, that these solar obits included that of our earth itself. For that suggested conceptual flipover, Copernicus went in fear of his life, as did Galileo for accepting that new, alternative paradigm.
So, what, in comparison could be the new revolutionary hinge-pin? There is something right at the centre of contemporary physics that is taken for granted as unassailable fact but which, on logical analysis, is seriously questionable. The logic of it is this: Suppose someone were to say to you that all black people are human beings, therefore all human beings are black; would you accept that statement as true? Of course you wouldn’t. So why is it so commonly accepted that because all velocities are measures of distance-divided-by-time, all distances-divided-by-time are velocities?
But what can we think of that is a distance-divided-by-time that is not a velocity. The answer is, the constant c which underlies just about every aspect of contemporary physics. Modern history attests that it is notoriously confusing to think of c as a ‘velocity’. For instance, if it is a ‘velocity’, then experimental observation demands that this ‘velocity’ has to be the same for all observers, regardless of whether or not they are moving with respect to one another. Moreover, if it is corpuscular (e.g. ‘photons’) then it has to be something travelling from A to B in a void. And if it is waves’, according to Maxwellian electrodynamics, then it has to have a wave-medium, whereas all searches for that medium, the so-called ‘luminiferous ether’, have failed. Also, how do those waves or particles ‘know’, ahead of time, where to land in order to satisfy the law of conservation of energy at the receiving end, as they do in situations such as the famous Thomas Young two-slit experiment ?
In spite of all these difficulties, the notion of c being a ‘velocity’ has become enshrined in Einstein’s Special theory of Relativity as his Second Axiom, and it is a tribute to Einstein’s genius that out of this conceptual chaos he somehow managed to distil some element of truth.
All these conceptual difficulties, plus its centrality in all physical theory, make c the prime candidate for revision, At least two thinkers have noticed this logical susceptibility of c to reinterpretation as the point of departure for a whole new paradigm of modern physics. One of these was the eminent astrophysicist, Herman Bondi who in his book Assumption and Myth in Physical Theory (1964) wrote:
'Any attempt to measure the velocity of light is . . . not an attempt at measuring the velocity of light but an attempt at ascertaining the length of the standard metre in Paris in terms of time-units.'
For Bondi, therefore, c was not a ‘velocity but simply a constant, what he called a ‘conversion factor’ for converting distance measures in metres into time-units in seconds and vice versa. The peculiar value of c = 2.997924568 x 10^8 metres to the second was, he said, no mystery. It was no more a matter of convention. For instance, in Imperial units, c has a different number, namely, 186,000 miles to the second. Conceivably, therefore, with a much more fortunate choice of units, c would be just one and would disappear from the physical equations altogether.
On this basis Bondi developed a new and much simpler method of introducing Special Relativity to young students and even children. Instead of starting in the conventional way, with the concept of ‘velocity’ and then deriving from this the Lorentz transformation, Bondi reversed the order of presentation by starting with what just about everyone understands, the Doppler effect, denoted by the letter k, and from this, deriving the essence of Special Relativity, that is, the relativity of simultaneity, time dilation, and length contraction, all in terms of k. By this means he explains the notorious twins paradox and eventually derives the Lorentz transformation, so vital to relativistic physics.
This, however, did not instantly launch a new paradigm of physical interpretation. It was another researcher, Viv Pope, who, independently of Bondi, around about that same time, made the same discovery that c could be interpreted as a pure dimensional constant, being no more a ‘velocity’ than the constant c^2 which interconverts joules of energy and kilograms of mass. In correspondence between them, he and Bondi concurred that a new and much simpler approach to Special Relativity, formulated by Pope on the basis of c being a constant, not a ‘velocity’, was both logically and mathematically valid and that, based on the theorem of Pythagoras, it was very much simpler than the conventional, Einsteinian approach.
However, while, for Bondi it was sufficient to use this new knowledge as a teaching aid, he left it to Pope, with his blessing, to develop what he saw as the ‘philosophical’ implications of this different interpretation of c. This Pope did, in extramural isolation for about twenty years until he met up with the man who was to be his colleague in a Maths-Philosophy venture which has continued to the present time. In this way they developed, in an ongoing project at Keele University UK, what became known as POAMS, the Pope-Osborne Angular Momentum Synthesis. Why angular momentum? Because this was their replacement for the Newtonian concept of ‘gravity’ as an invisible in vacuo force acting between bodies at a distance. What they discovered was that angular momentum, in itself, can explain the orbital motions of bodies without any necessity for Newton’s theoretical ‘gravitational force’.
In this way, what these researchers had discovered, in effect, was a whole new logical paradigm, much simpler in the way of conceptual economy than the extant paradigm and with even more testable predictability, although it is conceptually incommensurable with that extant theory. This demands an uncommon measure of cerebral effort by anyone unfamiliar with this new paradigm in seeking to understand it. So while for those who do understand it appreciate how simple and logical it is, for those viewing it from the standpoint of conventional physics it may appear altogether unintelligible. However, those who, for this reason, might react to it in the negative way that, as history illustrates, accompanies any radical change in thinking, it might be well to contemplate how unintelligible was once the Theory of Relativity, before it became accepted by professional physicists, as a recognised norm.
Another difficulty encountered by this new, POAMS paradigm is that it depends on holistic principles, such as the conservation laws of energy, entropy, angular momentum, and so on. The trouble is that some people cannot think of these conservation laws without having to conceive of some hidden mechanism which makes atoms and molecules obey those conservation laws. They have to think of the laws as caused by motions of particles instead of thinking of the motions of the particles as caused by those conservation laws. The fact is, however, that although the motions of the molecules in a steam cylinder, say, are completely random, not any one of them can move in such a way as to disconserve the overall energy. If it were otherwise, then chance interactions among the molecules in a kettle of water placed on an ice-floe would make it uncertain as to whether that kettle would boil or freeze.
As for your point about quantum theory, this is not something tagged-on to the paradigm. It is part and parcel of the paradigm, the basis of which is not a continuum, as in standard orthodox relativity, but a quantum discretum This is because the inverse of the (new) time-equation is shown to provide a series of discrete frequencies equivalent to those of the Balmer-Rydberg spectrum.
The above is no more than a fleeting glimpse of this logical paradigm that has been developing ‘in the wings’ alongside the current paradigm for just over a half-century. For twenty-five years of that it has been an official project known as POAMS, at Keele university, U.K., as a possible replacement for the presently ailing paradigm. The results of this project are encapsulated in some publications advertised on the POAMS website. Please note that although the books are for sale by the publishers, there is a large amount of information about the Synthesis on the website itself, as well as in some talks lectures, seminars, Conference Proceedings Journal papers and other articles which can be downloaded for free.
Is it time for the emergence of a new physics paradigm? What do you think?
Viv Pope