This is Terry's post on regarding my essay, So I am posting from there......
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Author Terry Bollinger replied on May. 13, 2020 @ 15:24 GMT
Dear snp,
Since you are OK with me assessing your essay purely in terms of its scientific and theoretical content, I'll go ahead and make some comments on that part of it. Since I have been an editor for a technical magazine, I have ethical considerations about how folks should do FQXi mutual reviews. Here are some guidelines I posted three years ago for FQXi reviews.
(1) Overall, I liked the various assertion you made about the scientific method in the first and larger part of your essay, though I was a bit baffled about why you do not like imaginary and complex numbers. Complex numbers are both very self-consistent and extraordinarily useful for applications such as expressing 2-dimensional angles and vectors.
(2) Your second shorter section was on your Dynamic Universe Model that uses "21000 linear [tensor] equations ... in an Excel sheet". Computer modeling is of course a great way to explore phenomena that change too slowly for direct observation, and spreadsheets provide a more powerful programming language than I think a lot of folks realize. So there's nothing wrong with using such a model per se.
However, you also mentions features of your model such as "Independent x,y,z coordinate axes and Time axis [exhibit] no interdependencies between axes". That is a problem, because it contradicts the extraordinary amount of not just evidence but application of special relativity, including for example in GPS systems. A computer model can only be predictive of the real universe if the initial assumptions built into it have been verified experimentally. Otherwise, you just has a model that may give interesting results, but those results will have no correlation to or predictive power about the real universe. Not having special relativity for example immediately isolates the model from making predictions that have much to do with the real universe.
So, if I rated your essay, following my own ethical guidelines of not caring one whit whether or how you might rate mine -- the incentive to care is a very unfortunate feature of the FQXi community review model -- I would give you a 3. The credits would be for the good assertions about science, the debits for giving a model that I'm sure has lots of good work in it, but which does not adequately attempt to model actual, well-validated outcomes of real experiments. Making strong assertions about the real universe based on the computational results of such a model is a big debit.
At the same time I would rate your efforts much higher than almost half a century of extremely costly work on superstring theory, which was quite recently (March 2020) experimentally shown to be flatly incorrect by a HAWC Consortium paper on high energy gamma implications. You, at least, have a working model of the universe! They have nothing executable after that half century and likely hundreds of millions of dollars total of direct and indirect costs, not to mention innumerable research careers wasted on papers that discuss experimentally disproven formalisms that cannot be run on a computer and cannot predict anything about the actual universe.
I will not actually enter the 3, in part because I don't think it's fair to downgrade your significant efforts at creating a very real, predictive computer model, even if flawed, when so much money and time has been wasted for decades on the supposedly more "mainline physics" discipline of superstrings. At least you took the time and effort to create a real model capable of making real predictions! That never happened with superstrings, which from the start chose to explore only topic they (incorrectly, as it turns out) would be safe because they could never be disproven.
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You are free to grade me as you see fit, although I would again encourage you first to read my guidelines on FQXi review ethics. Don't hesitate to give a low grade if you truly feel that is what I deserve! I would much, much prefer to get an honest low grade than any kind of grade the felt like a "favor".
The other factor you might want to consider regarding FQXi mutual ratings is that, at least three years ago, they seemed to matter very little in terms of actual selection of winners.
I recall that I was quite disappointed when the essays that I and many others thought were the most innovative, insightful, well-written, and science-focused -- essays that scored well in reviews like this (I was not in this group) -- nonetheless ended up getting at best a few lower-level awards.
Meanwhile, authors who other essayists had not noticed much during the internal reviews somehow ended up not just winning the big prizes, but getting heaps of praise for their dedicated repetition of themes that were far more traditional and predictable, and whom in at least some cases had been previously supported by the same groups that fund FQXi. An unfortunate appearance of conflict, that, although it was surely unintentional.
Cheers,
Terry
