Dear Michaele Suisse and Peter Cameron,
My less formal comments, including a couple of strategy suggestions, are provided in reply to under your kind comments on my essay. Here I want to be a bit more formal and put on my technical editor hat, because I think your ideas are not getting as much traction as you would like in part because of your paper writing style.
The biggest problem is pretty simple: In your frustration to get your message across, you are trying to jam far too much content at every level -- into your papers, tables, figures, charts, pretty much whatever. Or to put it another way, you are doing something that is very common in bad government technical presentations, which is that when someone tells you "use fewer slides!", you do it by shrinking the fonts until no one can read them from the front of the room, let alone from the back. I should note some exceptions: Most of your flow diagrams, such as Figure 2, are actually quite good. Figure 3 on bivectors and trivectors is also pretty good, since it translates the definitions into nicely understandable figures.
I've scanned about half your papers at viXra.org -- please take that as a genuine complement -- and in one case you have a "one slide is best" presentation that is, um... 57 pages long? With one slide marked as the "one slide"? Even that one slide used small fonts packed densely, since you tried to get some kind of reference to all of your ideas into it that were then explained on all the other pages.
You are not getting it.
A good one-slider is visually simple, with a small number of lines, not much text, and an absolute minimum of novel words, preferably none at all. The one and only thing that should be novel about it is the collectively the content of that one slide should clearly capture some completely novel concept that will make your audience go "say what??" and "I never thought of it that way!" Both your impedance idea and your geometry idea are examples of concepts that might work very well for such slides, and I do think you tried to do just that. But in what you have, there is just too much noise, by which I mean too many math or and visual terms that are not really needed to make your point.
A gorgeous example of what not to do is Figure 4, with the only quickly comprehensible bit of text in the entire figure being the word "proton" in a box in the middle... and of course even that is baffling, because most readers (like me) came to the figure kind expecting it to be about fundamental fermions, which of course the three-quark proton is not. You do not even define that the zoo of letters and subscripts means! Your explanation under the figure instead seems to toss in every concept you can think of, including the unexpected remark that the top row is the electron and the left column is the positron... which was not the kind of orthogonal geometry one would immediately expect for a particle and its antiparticle, unless I am missing something obvious about a flip on the main diagonal? Since this is... sort of?... a matrix? Argh!
Tossing that kind of confusion into a figure that is supposed to explain some critical concept is even more risky for you that for most paper writers, because you are explicitly attempting to introduce ideas for which most readers will not have any prior familiarity.
Do you understand why that is risky?
As an editor, one of the biggest warning signs to me of an accidentally (or intentionally) bogus paper is that it always introduces a huge amount of impressive-looking noise--misuses or undefined terms and equations-- that ultimately don't fit together at all, but do leave most readers so exhausted that they give up.
If the author is famous and the review gets too exhausting from trying to look up and make sense of all of the noise terms, most reviewers abandon giving it a careful review and just rubber-stamp "OK!" on the paper... which they should not do, by the way!
If the author is not famous, they conversely automatically stamp "FAILED!" on the paper and toss it into file 13, mostly because they have no reason to trust the author and no desire to get called out later for passing what could be total nonsense. But at least this is what they should do in such cases, since if the authors have made the paper too difficult to comprehend, that's on them, not the reviewer.
Now, since you tend to write dense papers full of undefined terms, you have to ask yourself: Which of those two I-give-up review categories to you think most or all of your papers will fall into? (Bummer about your name being so similar to a famous mathematician, Peter. That just makes matters worse, ouch.)
And that brings us to my assessment.
Peter, Michaele, even though I think your ideas and papers are some of the best developed and most conceptually intriguing ideas I've seen, and even though I am very familiar with some parts of your turf where my own research and idea overlap, I can't tell based on your figures whether your really know what you are saying, or you are just blowing a lot of smoke our to make what you have look more impressive than it is. Figure 4 is a good example. That may be the most brilliant chart ever devised for explaining the Standard Model... but if it is, wow, you fulled me. I can't even figure out how it relates to standard particles, even to the only comprehensible label, which is the word "proton" in the middle.
So I find myself in the ironic position that while I really do like the descriptions you give of some of your ideas, such as in particular the impedance idea, your papers and this essay give me no easily defensible reason for thinking that you have worked those ideas out in detail. And I just don't have the time or inclination to spend hours or days trying to figure out the answer to that question on my own.
So, good luck in any case. I likely will come back for some more reading of your papers, if nothing else just to see if me initially positive impression was justified or a case of me fooling myself into believing there was more there than there really is.
And by the way, a secondary issue, one that is shared by I dunno, maybe over half of the essays this year?, is that you didn't really answer this year's FQXi question, which was how to tell if something is fundamental.
I realize by now (this is my first year, and despite many good interactions I am still ambivalent about having submitted my work here) that there exists at FQXi a lively history of the same people participating year after year just to share the latest iterations of their personal physics theories (or anti-theories in some case) via the FQXi community. So each year they (many of you who are reading this!) largely ignore the real question. They (you) instead write up a snippet of intro text that "explains" why the next iteration of their (your) idea falls under the new question, whether it dos or not. It's a tradition, sure... but it also is not really what FQXi is asking for, either.
Cheers,
Terry
Fundamental as Fewer Bits by Terry Bollinger (Essay 3099)
Essayist's Rating Pledge by Terry Bollinger
