Dear Critic,
Before delving into the substance of our discussion, let me first point out that this is the second time you have failed to identify yourself, and the first time you have failed to do so after being explicitly asked to. While I welcome the opportunity to defend my paper against thoughtful criticism from anyone, general norms of internet etiquette do not require me to do so against an unidentified party. If, after I publish this post, you deign to publish a reply, it will go untreated unless it is attributed.
You claim that my paper fails to satisfy FQXi minimal criteria of quality, relevance and propriety. I could offer the trivial solution and argue that, since (by the very same section of rules that you quote) FQXi is the sole arbiter of these acceptability criteria, and furthermore that these criteria are evaluated prior to a submission being published on this web site, then the very fact that my paper was published on the site at all indicates that FQXi disagrees with you. But, you have made other valid points to which it would be churlish of me not to respond.
You have highlighted one passage each to exemplify how my paper supposedly fails each of the three aforementioned acceptability criteria. I disagree that any of these passages provides grounds for dismissal of the paper, but I concede that one of them represents a notable error of scholarship on my part.
The passage about which you are obviously correct and I am obviously mistaken is the "black hole" bullet under "Cosmological Evidence," which you hold up as a violation of the "quality" criterion. You are absolutely correct that black holes do not have infinite mass. I did not have a clear understanding of how black holes are defined and did not realize that their masses do not automatically grow without bound. I am mortified to have allowed this mistake into the submitted version of the paper, but all I can do now is quote Richard Dawkins: "I gratefully accept the rebuke."
So, I agree that the bit about black holes is bad news for me. The only good news is that it isn't central to the overall point of the paper. In fact, of the bullets points under "Cosmological Evidence," I had already viewed the black hole bit as the least interesting of the bunch. If FQXi were to give me the opportunity, I would happily remove that entire bullet and resubmit the paper otherwise unchanged. Depending on how strongly you feel about it, perhaps you could lobby them to allow this.
Next you quote the first sentence of my conclusion as an example of a violation of the "relevance" criterion; and yes, I will reacknowledge my paper's failure to definitively answer any questions or solve any problems in physics. I guess my only response here can be, since when does "being relevant to X" translate to "definitively answering at least one question or solving at least one problem in X"?
Objecting to this passage on these grounds implies that your standards of relevance are so high as to disqualify not just my paper, but indeed the majority of submissions to this contest. If such rigorous notions of relevance are really this important to you, why have you remained silent when confronted with submissions that are clearly even less relevant to physics than mine? Seriously, dude, have you read, for instance, Eugene Clear's submission, in which he basically asserts that physics is what God does for fun in his spare time? Where was your crusading zeal to uphold austere and rigorous notions of relevance when that opus got submitted?
It seems to me that the real substance of your objection to my paper is the phrase "gauge theory chauvinist." I suspect it could save us a lot of time and keystrokes if you specifically acknowledge this, so that we can move on to (a) the reasons why I would use such a phrase and (b) the reasons why you would find it so offensive. Actually, hell with it -- I'll go ahead and present (a) now.
First, I want to assure you that I do not mean "gauge theory chauvinist" as an insult. Indeed, I wish I, a lowly private sector code monkey who flips zeroes to ones for a living, unschooled in the ways of physics or even higher math, had the expertise to warrant such an accusation. The phrase is not meant to impugn anyone's intellectual integrity, moral character, personal hygiene, or anything else of the sort. It is meant to describe the mindset of a professional physicist who has spent so much time studying the abstract mathematical formalisms of string theory and other advanced physical theories that s/he has fallen victim to a "map/territory confusion" that leaves them believing, to quote my paper, that this "abstract mathematics . . . is the only proper expression of 'real physics.'"
To me, a gauge theory chauvinist is someone who, in their heart of hearts, believes that IF a genuine theory of everything is ever found, it will consist solely of equations. The philosophical essence of my paper is, what if the ToE is better expressed as _source_code_ than as a bunch of equations? I imagine that a professional theoretical physicist's very first reaction to this idea would be one of three things:
(1) Uh... maybe. Probably not. Why do you ask?
(2) You should go collaborate with X and Y, they're thinking along the same lines.
(3) Bullshit. Go back to flipping zeroes to ones.
It is my contention that any professional theoretical physicist whose very first reaction to this idea is (3) is a gauge theory chauvinist. Another telltale sign of gauge theory chauvinism would be, rather than bothering to read the paper carefully and in its entirety, instead superficially scanning it looking for glaring but peripheral mistakes one can use to project the superficial impression of having done due diligence. Fortunately, FQXi tends to attract the open-minded, so I don't have to worry about that behavior here.
