My simple physics ideas have become hot despite their heretical source. These last few days I’ve discovered that I’d missed three more citations of my stuff in the paper hard copy published peer-reviewed physics literature ( “so-there” to snobs who say that “anything” can be published on arXiv). This gives me a total of five citations, written by a total of five authors. Uh, only one of which is a card-carrying Einstein-denying, fellow traveller.
I feel kind of guilty for pulling off this stunt, but I really don’t have a complete theory of mass, it’s not easy for amateurs to get published (or even onto arXiv), and it’s a lot more fun to do physics (and write blog posts) than it is to hassle with editors. And anyway, I’m reading a biography of Gell-Mann and he’s way worse than me for failing to publish stuff. He managed to procrastinate his Nobel Prize lecture write-up so long it didn’t make it into the book at all. Let’s see, that was an admission of guilt, a promise to fix it later, a claim of difficulty, an appeal to the joy of amateurs, and a redirection by pointing out a greater sinner.
Of course all this calls for a blog party, with puns, palindromic comments, and other excesssses, but first the citations. Most of these are available on the web for free. The ones you have to pay for, I’ve copied a few lines one way or another.
(1) The Orbital Precession Around Oblate Spheroids; J. M. C. Montanus, The Netherlands;
Journal of Mathematical Physics 47, 072502 (2006).
The above paper is by a fellow heretic, J. M. C. Montanus. His papers are listed (along with others, and with mine) on the Euclidean Relativity spacetime-sinner Einstein-atheist laws of physics-losers link site. In the discussion section of the above paper, the author describes what is going on here:
“In the present alternative model the linearity for gravitation is restored. In contrast to general relativity, it is based on a flat and Euclidean spacetime. Nevertheless, it leads to the same prediction for gravitational time dilation, gravitational lensing, and the orbital precession around a point source or a bipole as the general theory of relativity. In this paper we applied the method for the analysis of the orbital precession around an oblate spheroid. Obviously the new model allows for the analysis of gravitational motion in situations that are difficult to solve within the general theory of relativity. The precession of orbits around an oblate spheroid is derived algebraically. To my knowledge, such a result has never been obtained with the general theory of relativity.”
Montanus kindly refers to my first paper on the fermions, The Geometry of Fermionsfrom 2004. His citation is completely unnecessary, but appreciated. Recently I’ve been making a few feeble attempts at understanding gravitation, and messing around with Painleve coordinates, even going so far as to write a simulator. One of the things on my list of stuff to do is to simulate the heretical equations of motion of Montanus, and to compare them with Einstein’s on Painleve and Schwarzschild coordinates.
(2) Neutrino Mass and New Physics; R. N. Mohapatra, A. Y. Smirnov; Department of Physics, University of Maryland, Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics, Institute for Nuclear Research RAS;
Annual Reviews of Nuclear and Particle Science, 56 (2006) 569-628
also available free at arXiv as hep-ph/0603118 (version 2)
The above citation came as a result of my reading the following preprint: hep-ph/0603118 (version 1)This preprint states “What about neutrinos? Due to weaker mass hierarchy eq.(22) neutrino masses do not satisfy the Koide relation.” My paper The Lepton Masses showed that when you write Koide’s relation as an eigenvalue equation, the neutrinos do satisfy it. I wrote a letter to the authors pointing this out, and they adjusted the paper to: “However, it was noticed recently, that the relation can be fulfilled provided that …” and references my most often cited (self published on my website) paper The Lepton Masses
(3) Heuristic Development of a Dirac-Goldhaber Model for Lepton and Quark Structure; Gerald Rosen, Drexel
University;
Modern Physics Letters A, Vol. 22, No. 4 (2007) 283-288
This paper is about something a few of us call “that damned number”. Gerald Rosen takes it to be 2/9. I prefer the experimentally measured value which is a tiny bit off. Rosen cites an APS meeting in Tacoma, Washington to which I sent an abstract. However, I got stuck in Louisiana looking at biofuel pies in the skies and missed the meeting by a day. I did bring back a snapshot though:
I really did feel bad about sending in an abstract and not giving the lecture. I know all those people really wanted to hear me talk about Koide’s mass formula. I’m sure that’s why they put my lecture last of the day (at 5:28PM); so that I could go way beyond my allotted 12 minutes and explain my theory to a thrilled audience, ignoring dinner time, hanging on my every word, each little nuance, until late, late, late, into the night. Or maybe they always put the kooks in last so everybody but the chair can leave early, who knows.
Dr. Rosen received his PhD about 50 years ago, so when he calls my stuff “a resurrected preon model” he probably knows what he is talking about. I’m not too worried. I’m doing density operator stuff, not the usual state vector QM, so the rules are a little different from what they were playing with in the late 70s. Linear combinations of spinors do not map to linear combinations of density operators and vice versa. Problems that are near impossible in one form can be easy to solve in the other.
(4) Tribimaximal Neutrino Mixing and a Relation
Between Neutrino- and Charged Lepton-Mass Spectra;
Yoshio Koide, University of Shizuoka;
to be published in J. Phys. G (2007).
(5) S_3 Symmetry and Neutrino Masses and Mixings; Yoshio Koide, University of Shizuoka;
to be published in Euro. Phys. J C (2007).
These last two papers are from arXiv preprints by Yoshio Koide dated last year and were the first to cite my neutrino mass formula. I didn’t know that they’d been accepted for publication until the latest paper from Yoshio Koide: [hep-ph] 0706.2534 mentioned this fact in its references. All three of these papers, the two peer reviewed and the discussion 0706.2534 cite The Lepton Masses. For a discussion of mass matrix arithmetic, see Koide’s excellent write-up.
As it turns out I’m also working on S_3 symmetries, but I’m applying the symmetry to the operator algebra instead of the states. I hope that this will work better than the above. The arithmetic showing why the S_3 permutation group is implicated in the weak hypercharge and weak isospin numbers of the elementary fermions is discussed in the section currently labeled “Finite Groups and Quantum Numbers” of my paper in progress (not even a preprint): dmfound. This pre pre pre-print was originally intended to be (finished in February 07 and) a short form version of my book on density operator applications to the standard model. Lately, the paper has been more up to date than the book. The book discusses some things at much greater length. Probably much greater length than you’re willing to read. At least judging by the negligible number of questions I get about it. I met Dr. Koide at the Joint Particle Physics conference in Hawaii in October 2006. This was a momentuous occasion for many reasons, not least of which is that we were apparently the only two adult males on the island wearing long sleeve shirts and long pants:
So there you have it. Amateur neutrino theories gone wild.
Mass 
For 3×3 Hermitian operators, S_3 permutations can upgraded to permutations with respect to the indices I = 1, 2, 3 (i.e. cycle maps). Cycle maps preserve the determinant if and only if our Hermitian operators are circulant.
Yah, a party! And you’ve decorated the room so nicely. I guess we’d better stop calling it ‘that damned number’ now, since it is beginning to look so friendly. We touched on some old physics in my PhD oral yesterday, too, which was a bit nerve racking, because it dawned on me suddenly that these old guys had grown up with some of these ideas. But things worked out anyhow. My guardian angels were watching over me, I guess.
Kea, I guess I could have told you that the old folks would ask you old questions. It beats asking you questions about subjects that they do not understand. You’re just lucky I wasn’t there. I’d have asked you to explicate the lyrics in a Grateful Dead song.
Kneemo, I’m beginning to understand the difference between how I and Koide use S_3. I’ll write that up as a blog entry. The insight comes from reading his explanatory notes.
Congratulations! Citations make us happy. My dream is to get at least single citation from an academic physicist before I die;-).
Cheers,
Matti
P.S. It is good that there are people realizing that we really do not understand much about mass problem. I also started my “career” from mass problem for about 33 years ago.
“My dream is to get at least single citation from an academic physicist before I die;-).” – Matti Pitkanen
Matti,
But Roger Penrose cited your work in the revised edition of the book “The Road to Reality”. Doesn’t that count as a “citation from an academic physicist”?
“‘[Unorthodox approaches] now seem the antithesis of modern science, with consensus and peer review at its very heart. … The sheer number of ideas in circulation means we need tough, sometimes crude ways of sorting…. The principle that new ideas should be verified and reinforced by an intellectual community is one of the pillars of scientific endeavour, but it comes at a cost.” – Editorial, p5 of the 9 Dec 06 issue of New Scientist.
“(1). The idea is nonsense.
(2). Somebody thought of it before you did.
(3). We believed it all the time.”
– Professor R.A. Lyttleton (quoted by Fred Hoyle in the book “Home is Where the Wind Blows”, Oxford University Press, 1997, p154).
It is interesting that even people like Feynman and Bohm were censored, mainly by groupthink led by some elite priest figure (Oppenheimer was behind the initial censorship of both Feynman and Bohm, although he changed his mind over Feynman after Dyson got Bethe to argue with Oppenheimer at length).
Tony Smith quotes Dyson’s conclusion:
“… At any particular moment in the history of science, the most important and fruitful ideas are often lying dormant merely because they are unfashionable. Especially in mathematical physics, there is commonly a lag of fifty or a hundred years between the conception of a new idea and its emergence into the mainstream of scientific thought. If this is the time scale of fundamental advance, it follows that anybody doing fundamental work in mathematical physics is almost certain to be unfashionable. …”
– Freeman Dyson, 1981 essay “Unfashionable Pursuits” (reprinted in “From Eros to Gaia” (Penguin 1992, at page 171).
That sort of time delay is totally unacceptable. You can see why the mainstream has so much support: new ideas are liable to “go down the tubes” for half a century not because they’re wrong, but just because they’re unfashionable. Problem is, there is a widespread “common sense” idea that anything unorthodox is crackpot and wrong, while orthodoxy is deemed sensible and correct even when it is, in the case of string theory, just groupthink and fantasy.
I don’t believe in hunting “crackpot hunters” because when you catch them they’re miserable little losers. There’s Erik Max Francis who owns and runs “www.Crank.net” and allegedly believes himself superior to all others because he discovered how to derive Kepler’s laws from Newton’s laws. (Actually, Newton used Kepler’s laws to derive his laws, so this is a circular argument.)
He was described in the New York Times as follows:
“Mr. Francis, 29, is not a scientist, and has taken only a handful of classes at a community college.” (Bonnie Rothman Morris in The New York Times of Dec. 21, 2000)
But this quotation is a bit misleading because when you look up the article, you see that Bonnie Rothman Morris is actually amazed in a positive way with Francis because he has only a handful of classes. She thinks that means he is really, really clever and qualified to call other people cranks.
This is the world we live in:
‘Fascism is not a doctrinal creed; it is a way of behaving … What, then, are the tell-tale hallmarks of this horrible attitude? Paranoid control-freakery; an obsessional hatred of any criticism or contradiction; the lust to character-assassinate anyone even suspected of it; a compulsion to control or at least manipulate the media … the majority of the rank and file prefer to face the wall while the jack-booted gentlemen ride by. …’ – Frederick Forsyth, Daily Express, 7 Oct. 05, p. 11.
Carl – sorry for the length and please delete this comment if it is unhelpful; I’ll copy it to my blog so it won’t be lost anyway. Cheers, Nigel.
Nigel, thanks for the note that Matti is cited in the important book by Penrose. I’ll be sure and pick up that version when I see it cheap at the used book stores I haunt. Maybe I will understand Matti’s work better. It is otherwise over my head.
I disagree about it being a tragedy that physics has fashions. Fashions are convenient for those who would use physics as a means of making a living because it tells them what to study. And for those interested in exporing something new, fashion keeps the money changers in the temple where they belong, and out of the wilderness where new ideas need to germinate. Fashions are a very human thing.
By the way, I have a listing on crank.net. I sent it in myself. I think it’s hilarious. If I got very many hits from it, I’d rewrite it to give the citations in the journals I’ve gotten.
I’m really stoked that the neutrino mass formula got citations into the literature so quickly and from so many authors. In retrospect, the reason is that the formula is simple enough that it can be used to extend work done by a lot of people. And it’s harder to ignore something simple and beautiful. But none of these authors have used anything I’ve said about the higher math used to get that formula. (They like a few of the pearls, but leave the necklace alone.)
I should write up a blog post on what I’ve learned about the sociology of physics. I think the best book on the subject is “Gravity’s Shadow, the search for Gravitational Waves,” which is cheap for such a long book.
Okay, let’s try using latex in a comment:
Whoa! We have LaTex!!! Let’s try some more!
You preced a latex comment by latex, where is the usual $ and “latex” is entered as such. Then you end latex mode by another . Let’s see, do arrays work???
Try again… “\left(\begin{array}{cc}3&3\\3&3\end{array}\right)”
Okay, try again with arrays…
A recent turn of the crank in my long PF thread could also relate to a paper of Rosen, IJTP Vol 34, N 1 (1995), p 31, whose abstract tells “Here¯m = 433.3 MeV is an input (mean fermion mass)”. This value is also the geometric average of muon and tau mass and, more surprisingly, it is also the mass difference between the pion and eta8, the two basic building blocks of the pseudoscalar octet.
To be precise, Taarik found that
\sqrt{m_e} \sqrt {m_\tau – m_\mu} = 29.22 MeV
m_\pi – m_\mu = 29.31 MeV.
And, after a false step, I noticed that
m_{\eta_8} – m_\pi = 434.34 MeV
to be compared with
\sqrt {m_\mu} \sqrt {m_\tau} = 433.27 MeV
as both possibilities of subtracting the electron mass (from muon or from tau) give very similar results.
It is also noticeable that footnote 6 in Koide’s 1981 paper (PRL v. 47 p. 1241) contains a phenomenological fit to Cabibbo angle in terms of some differences of masses of the charged leptons.
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