Re: A journal for unpublished research?

From: Doug Sweetser (sweetser_at_alum.mit.edu)
Date: 06/30/04 

Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2004 22:38:12 +0000 (UTC)

Hello Caroline:

> In desperation

Nature is indifferent to whether we understand its ways. I try to adopt
that same attitude towards my work. It deflects insults and prevents
ego bloat from the rare experiences of praise.

> I have put some editorial comments on my web site.

Good for you.

> "In 1964, John Bell proved that local realistic theories led to an
> upper bound on correlations between distant events (Bell's inequality)
> and that quantum mechanics had predictions that violated that
> inequality. Ten years later, experimenters started to test in the
> laboratory the violation of Bell's inequality (or similar predictions
> of local realism). No experiment is perfect, and various authors
> invented "loopholes" such that the experiments were still compatible
> with local realism. Of course nobody proposed a local realistic theory
> that would reproduce quantitative predictions of quantum theory
> (energy levels, transition rates, etc.).

This does sound like a fair reading of the the past literature. No one
has beat Bell yet!

> This loophole hunting has no interest whatsoever in physics.

Well, this is not generous, and certainly could be wrong someday, but
probably not (meaning betting on a trend that has lasted several
decades is safe). This person may have skimmed through a few papers of
this variety, and was not willing to give an open reading. That does
happen, and the tone suggests it happened here.

> It tells us nothing on the properties of nature. It makes no
> prediction that can be tested in new experiments.

This to me has to be the one core issue. Later you claim "that they do
make testable predictions". This really should be the focus of the
paper, front and center.

I read the abstract of your paper, and really don't want to read any
more (that is my gut reaction). An abstract is a summary of results.
Instead, there is a complaint:

    "Prestigious journals have been driven in desperation to reject all
    papers on the Bell test loopholes as being of no interest to
    physics."

Prestigious journals do not strike me as being desperate, they are too
stuffy for that. I don't think a line like this, however true, should
ever be in an abstract. The comment is about the publication process,
not about what this paper is about. Abstracts should answer: What is
the problem, how do you bring new things to the discussion, what
exactly are the new predictions? Since I saw no new predictions, my
interest was not sparked. The abstract must sell results or people
will stop reading like I did.

>From a quick scan of your web site, you may have a hard time publishing.

>I am led to suggest that perhaps there is other currently-accepted
>"evidence" for both quantum theory and Einstein's relativity theories
>that needs re-investigation. (There is! See Forgotten History .) I
>am not talking of "re-interpretation", but of recognizing that if we
>want to understand nature, not just produce "predictions", the first
>step is to re-assess the facts, reject falsehoods.

Physicists do not like their evidence put in quotes! Anytime people
start using quotes, I have to "wonder" what they really "mean" :-) If
I had to rank physics by solid logical foundations, it would go:
classical mechanic, the Maxwell equations, special relativity, and
quantum mechanics. All of these strike me a granite-solid theories
that predict an enormous number of things (more than I would be able to
calculate in a lifetime). There are lots of different ways to
understand these things. It is a great exercise to look for new ways
to understand things. I will however never dis Dirac for the clear way
he presents the logic of quantum mechanics. The man was too great.
There were times when reading "The principles of quantum mechanics"
were I felt a kind of chill due to the clarity of his presentation. I
do have my own slant on _why_ causality is different for quantum
mechanics, one that would take quality time with a mathematical
physicist who loved complex analysis to work out the detail. Given the
current arc of my life (downward physically and professionally), I may
not get any of my own work published. Fortunately I am indifferent :-)
If it is all a technical delusion - it may certainly be the case - then
it had its rewards in coloring my world view. If some aspects had
truth inaccurately presented, then some other person will go over that
path again, straighten things up, and sell the ideas to intellectual
marketplace. Seams like a win-win.

doug
quaternions.com

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