Is this BS?

[coyotesfrontier]

I was researching theories of everything, and came across this: https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0602047

Is it all pseudoscience or is this actually viable?

[Superfluous J]

It's about 43 more pages than I'm willing to read to determine if it's viable.

Or what it's about.

Quote

Rc (the radius of the space-time continuum)

Edited October 2, 2020 by Superfluous J

[Kerbart]

Since it’s quantum physics, it can be BS and not BS at the same time. Just don’t look at it.

[Guest]

"Axiomatic formulation of this theory". In other words, we don't know if it's BS or not BS, but if our assumptions are true, that's what they imply. It probably checks out with what we already know, but that's not the hard part. It seems to be a work of mathematics disguised as physics, devoid of any empiricism whatsoever. 

[KerikBalm]

That author name sounds familiar to me, I think he's some guy trying to show failures of peer review...

but maybe I'm way off...

[Guest]

Well, I'm not in position to judge the maths (I deliberately steered clear of this sort of thing when picking my courses), but from a cursory look, it's a perfectly useless paper for anything but padding the author's publication numbers.  I saw a lot of trivial statements, presumably backed by lengthy, but not especially complex (by physics standards) equations. Empty theorizing, not even at its finest.  Then again, my field is biophysics, which I specifically picked because of its highly empirical nature. 

At least if that's a hoax to show the failures of peer review, it would be good for something.  This is the author's only entry on arXiv, so maybe.

[Bill Phil]

2 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

That author name sounds familiar to me, I think he's some guy trying to show failures of peer review...

but maybe I'm way off...

I don't think so, unless it's a deliberately different name.

[KerikBalm]

There had been a rash of BS papers lately:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/amp34166354/black-hole-center-of-earth-fake-study/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31850126/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32996903/

 

Could this be one that has so far escaped notice?

[mikegarrison]

It's a 14-yr-old paper with no co-authors that doesn't reference any peer-reviewed papers and was apparently not accepted to any peer-reviewed journal. So without reading more than a few sentences from it, I'm going to say it's probably somebody's fever dream of a "Theory of Everything".

[Kerbart]

8 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

That author name sounds familiar to me, I think he's some guy trying to show failures of peer review...

but maybe I'm way off...

John Bohannon?

[Jacke]

If it purports to be a sweeping basal physics theory, if it doesn't have a quantum mechanics-general theory of relativity unifying component that describes how space comes about with a simplistic 3-dimensional nature (ie. Loop Quantum Gravity or others), then it's likely excrementse.  Lack of co-authors and references as @mikegarrison points out is another warning sign.

[K^2]

There are a lot of theories out there that reformulate existing mathematical basis and aren't technically wrong, but also entirely useless. E.g., I can technically use Gauge Theory to state "Theory of Everything," which will produce a Lagrangian that must be satisfied by the universe to account for all known physics, including relativity and quantum effects. But if you try to derive anything from it, the integrals diverge even if you try to regularize them, so that formulation is useless, and this is why we still consider quantum gravity an open question.

So @Kerbart might have actually gotten it right... Not that I'm willing to spend time to figure out if this is actually valid and useless or just BS through and through for reasons outlined by @mikegarrison

[sevenperforce]

On 10/2/2020 at 10:20 AM, Dragon01 said:

Well, I'm not in position to judge the maths (I deliberately steered clear of this sort of thing when picking my courses), but from a cursory look, it's a perfectly useless paper for anything but padding the author's publication numbers.  I saw a lot of trivial statements, presumably backed by lengthy, but not especially complex (by physics standards) equations. Empty theorizing, not even at its finest.  Then again, my field is biophysics, which I specifically picked because of its highly empirical nature. 

At least if that's a hoax to show the failures of peer review, it would be good for something.  This is the author's only entry on arXiv, so maybe.

I'm in somewhat of a better position to judge the maths and I concur with @Dragon01 on this.