The Stand-Up Physicist: My Three Rejections

The Stand-Up Physicist Doug Sweetser describes the process of submitting his paper on a Unified Standard Model to three peer-reviewed physics journals. While the paper was not accepted because it was both too radical and too conservative, things were learned.

A Mathematica notebook supporting the work, available at http://bit.ly/GEMnb, can be viewed if you own the program, or download the Mathematica Player from WolframReasearch.com

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Physics
• Gravity
• Unified
• field
• theory
• standard
• model

[Charlesincharge42]

To a hammer everything looks like a nail.

It seems like these people are ... well, inflexible, overzealous and stubborn.

Good luck, I find your work fascinating, now I just need to learn a lot more math. Can you recommend a path that does not include the tensors?

[sweetser]

It is worth while to be bilingual, since tensors are the dominant language (like learning English). It is also a great exercise to translate standard work in tensors to quaternions and hypercomplex numbers. This is how I learned most of what I know: copying the masters. I do have much more technical videos that show how to derive the Maxwell equations. Master that and you master the universe :-) Good luck in your studies.

[janne808]

Well, there are 'nut jobs' that get published too. Anyway 3 rejections doesn't sound that bad, there are lot more publications out there than that.

I know for a fact that there is lot of interest in Clifford algebras (closely related to quaternions as far as I understand it) in the math community.

[JarJar88forever]

@ Sweetser: Sokal Affair. Also, there were 2 French brothers that spun a web of BS about Big Bang that were sucessfuly peereviewed. I don't know if Dr. Supergravity ever extracted satisfaction from the ST mafia. Peer review proves nothing. One of the NASA probes checked relativity. I'm on an old phone.

[noeatingallowed]

lame.

[sweetser]

I received a spread sheet with over 4000 fringe physicists names on it compiled by a guy in France. My name made the list :-) I agree, their experience trains them to be dismissive.

Clifford algebras do have a following. I went to an international meeting they have once every 3 years. There were 2 meetings on quaternions, suppose to happen every 5 years, but the 3rd meeting never happened. There are no meetings for hypercomplex numbers.

Working on t-shirts, my work has better swag :-)

[BrandonFurtwangler]

There are so many nut jobs out there with unified theories that it's easy to see why they're so dismissive. You could try publishing something smaller in scope to build cred...good luck man.

[janne808]

The scientific method, right?