[deleted]
Hi Wilhelmus and Dan,
First, Dan:
Thank you so much for your suggestions. You have mentioned venues that were not on my radar screen at all. Before I contact them, though, I will attempt to check how well they are generally regarded.
I should also mention that I was contacted by a publisher who has offered to publish the follow up paper as book (even though it is only 19 pages long?). Evidently, they go through university archives and check for theses that they wish to publish, at no cost to the author.
I checked and it appears that it is legitimate publisher, but that the quality of their publications is regarded by the academic community generally as low. This may not be too surprising considering that (they claim) they've published over a million titles (I seriously doubt that there even exist anything close to a million high quality science papers).
If all else fails, I may just go with them. In case you wish to find out more, I can forward you the email with the faq etc. if you like.
Thank you again for your suggestions.
Now, Wilhelmus:
I'm glad that the A/V issue got settled.
About your questions:
1. As I mentioned before, I am not convinced that the Planck scale is as significant as currently people think it is because, again, it lacks a solid theoretical foundation. Dimensional analysis based on a plausibility argument is not enough in my book to qualify as a solid theoretical foundation. This is not to say that I absolutely don't think nothing will happen at that scale, just that I am more skeptical than the rest of the physics community on this point.
As to what exactly happens at that limit, this is really the same astute question that Dan asked me a while back. You see, I only postulated that such a limit exists. I did not specify how it is actually approached, or how to mathematically carry out the operation of taking the limit. The reason I haven't done this is because I simply don't know how, other than that below the limit, the notion of space is postulated to be as imaginary as the notion of 4-space is to us. This is a very important subject and I strongly suspect that a detailed description can only be given in the context of quantum field theory, not plain quantum mechanics. Unfortunately, this is a subject on which I am still not well-versed. I can tell you however what my current train of thought is (subject to change as I get more educated): As before, I don't think that you "lose a dimension" (which implies that you modify the repository but ultimately still keep it) but that really spacetime vanishes, "all at once", as it where. The problem is, of course, that for any quantity involving finite distance this would prima facie conflict with relativity. So the idea is that instead of focusing on a particular volume element, you focus on a (quantum) object over a small interval of time (therefore you are considering a 4-dimensional object), and that the change at that limit is really a change in the object's behaviour, perhaps something analogous to a phase change (e.g. going from ice to liquid water). There is a very intriguing fact that quantum field theory is formally very closely analogous to thermodynamics.
A more visual analogy is as follows: Surely you have seen photomosaics (if not, you can see one here:
http://click7.org/image-mosaic-generator/?create
At a sufficient large magnification, all you see is a juxtaposition of pictures. But as you step back, you notice that all these pictures come together to form a bigger picture. My current working hypothesis is that the emergence of spacetime from areatime may have to be modeled as something similar, except that the component parts have one fewer dimension.
But, keep in mind, this is all speculation. I really don't know, and I don't have anything near a substantive quantitative model to back it up.
2. It appears to me to be more self-consistent that, yes, the process continues with increasingly larger scales, than that it stops at spacetime. I briefly alluded to that in my follow-up paper, noting that the fact that Dark Energy and Dark Matter are phenomena which are essentially "invisible" at our scale may be a hint. Also, I should mention that I have come up with a toy model, taking into account the additional dimension at larger scale and a simple modification of Newton's laws to take this and the changed dynamics to allow for stable orbits that seems to replicate and thereby give axiomatic underpinning of MOND. In case you're not familiar with it, MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics) was developed about 25 years ago by an Israeli Astrophysicist to explain the galactic rotation curves. It is strongly considered only by a about 1% of astrophysicists, in large part because it seems unmotivated physically, but also because it does not account for the dynamics of galaxy clusters very well(to learn more, google "Mond Pages").
However, I am nowhere near going public with this because I still need to learn a lot more about galactic dynamics and cosmology and because, once again, the ideas are so unfamiliar that it would permanently put me in the crackpot category.
Anyway, thanks for your comments.