LACHLAN CRESSWELL SUBSEQUENT POST PREV LOST IN SPACE ABOVE;
Regarding paradigm changes, I decided to ignore maths, philosophy and the current thinking in physics and start off my thinking back in classical physics, which I saw back then as 'pure'.
I was lucky enough to stumble onto particle physics via a SciAm special book printed in the 1980's which took my interest in a topic that I totally ignored in 3rd year Uni physics. But thanks to a typo in a Paul Davies book called "Superforce", I had a reverie - out of which I discerned a fundamental difference between protons and neutrons that had been previously overlooked. I used my new found discovery to find flaws in some particle interactions on a Fermilab webpage eighteen years ago, and they replied back to me thanking me for correcting the errors. I have had the luxury of the last 18 years to hone the theory and work towards a TOE.
For the first decade I did no reading in physics other than immediately what I was working on, for fear of tainting my theory with other ideas that were most likely red herrings. This approach paid off, and it is only in the last 7 years that I have started to read widely. What I have achieved is a working Preon theory, a theory of time and a theory of aether, which together appear to dovetail nicely (With minimal maths and philosophy). But this TOE can answer the big questions, make predictions, that you would expect a well developed theory to do. It is firmly based on classical physics and does not rely on any quantum field theories, yet can do what they do with both explanation and understanding.
When Feynman said that the most important single piece of information he would pass to the future was the idea of the existence of atoms, I would modify this to include fields as well, such that fields and atoms cannot be seperated in reality. It is only in the insufficient models we use to describe the framework of physics, that we tend to view them individually.
I say all of this in respoonse to what was quoted of Freeman Dyson. Some of us don't bother with challenging or supporting the current paradigm. We just push on in our own bubble, being creative. Some of this is Art, some science or science fiction, but at least we are creating!
Cheers
Lockie Cresswell