Thread: Ideas anyone??

As you can tell by the number of my posts I am kind of new to the forum. And if you have read my post you know it. I love to read the New Hypotheses and Ideas section. One thing I notice is there are certain people who post these new ideas (mostly new people) and then there are the well experienced skeptics of anything and everything. This is not a criticism I think it's all very interesting reading for the most part. What I am curious about though is do you guys (the skeptics with more than 1000 posts) have any new ideas of your own? I am not asking that in a challenging or disrespectful way and I am really interested. I have not gone back through all the years and read your posts and for all I know you have offered many interesting ideas. At this time I am mostly interested in cosmology, physics or gravity but anything would do, I'm just curious. Maybe you guys could list a few of your ideas. Thanks

Originally Posted by bill alsept

As you can tell by the number of my posts I am kind of new to the forum. And if you have read my post you know it. I love to read the New Hypotheses and Ideas section. One thing I notice is there are certain people who post these new ideas (mostly new people) and then there are the well experienced skeptics of anything and everything. This is not a criticism I think it's all very interesting reading for the most part. What I am curious about though is do you guys (the skeptics with more than 1000 posts) have any new ideas of your own? I am not asking that in a challenging or disrespectful way and I am really interested. I have not gone back through all the years and read your posts and for all I know you have offered many interesting ideas. At this time I am mostly interested in cosmology, physics or gravity but anything would do, I'm just curious. Maybe you guys could list a few of your ideas. Thanks

'Iron sharpens iron.' Sceptics and critics here are such.

I don't have any "new" ideas in physics or cosmology for the simple reason that I don't know enough about these subjects. Any ideas I come up with my current level of knowledge would be so trivially simple that they would either be well-known or trivially proven wrong. I would have to study physics and maths full time for many years to get the basic level of understanding required to be able to come up with new ideas and test them.

In my real job (where I am supposed to have some expertise) I have occasionally come up with new ideas (they have usually turned out to be already well known) some of which have worked.

I even came up with my own idea about Japanese linguistics that turned out to be (largely) correct. Some well known linguist had published a paper on it. I'm still quite pleased about that.

But if someone had pointed out that any of these ideas were wrong (with the appropriate explanation/evidence) I would have just accepted it.

The problem is not that people come up with new ideas. I am always pleased to see that (whether they are right or wrong). It is when they come up with new ideas which are known to be wrong (or are just meaningless) but refuse to accept that.

What I am curious about though is do you guys (the skeptics with more than 1000 posts) have any new ideas of your own?

As a matter of fact, yes I do. However, I am not nearly ready to present it here ( or anywhere else for that matter ), simply because at this point in time it is merely a concept without the appropriate formalism that needs to go with it in order to check whether it has any scientific value or not. My main problem is that I don't think the mathematical framework needed to formulate that concept even exists - if it does then I am not aware of it.
Suffice it to say for now that space-time, energy, fields and elementary particles ( though valid descriptions within their own domains ) may not be irreducible, separable entities/principles at all, but only facets of something much more fundamental. This basic notion is simple, but what happens when you follow that line of reasoning further is not, and the arsenal of mathematical tools known to me runs out pretty quickly.
At the moment I do not have the required maths and physics knowledge to develop a formalism, and until I do I will give no further indications as to what I think that "something" might be. The above is not the actual hypothesis ( we already know there must be something underlying the fundamental forces with a higher symmetry group ), but only a starting point for it.

Originally Posted by Strange

I don't have any "new" ideas in physics or cosmology for the simple reason that I don't know enough about these subjects. Any ideas I come up with my current level of knowledge would be so trivially simple that they would either be well-known or trivially proven wrong. I would have to study physics and maths full time for many years to get the basic level of understanding required to be able to come up with new ideas and test them.

A pity a number of other forum members who come up with "new" ideas, in physics or cosmology, don't appear to accept the above!

Originally Posted by Halliday

A pity a number of other forum members who come up with "new" ideas, in physics or cosmology, don't appear to accept the above!

True enough.
As for myself, I do have ideas of my own, but I accept without question that those ideas may very well be complete BS. That is why I refrain from elaborating about them, until I have something concrete to present.

Originally Posted by Markus Hanke

Originally Posted by Halliday

A pity a number of other forum members who come up with "new" ideas, in physics or cosmology, don't appear to accept the above!

True enough.
As for myself, I do have ideas of my own, but I accept without question that those ideas may very well be complete BS. That is why I refrain from elaborating about them, until I have something concrete to present.

Just to be clear, when I made my post, I was not referring to all forum members.
I am sure some of the ideas you have could well be of scientific value.

Also, to counter a common misconception about those of us who try to argue against some of the nonsense ideas here and elsewhere, I am fascinated by new ideas on the frontiers of science. The new ideas and paradigm shifts are one of the things that makes science so exciting (and why I have studied the history of science - a way of getting more of that excitement, even if retrospectively).

But any new breakthroughs in quantum gravity, cosmology, particle physics, and any other are of science are not going to appear first on a form like this or some random website. Even if the idea is developed by someone working outside of "established science" (whatever that means) like Markus, that person will be smart enough to realise that the only way to get the idea considered, tested and (possibly) accepted is to submit it to the appropriate peer-reviewed journals.

Posting some initial ideas on a forum populated by relevant experts could be a good way of ironing out the gross flaws and improving the idea. But that is only possible if the person is open to the idea that they might be wrong in either detail or totality.

As I say, a tiny number of people have done this on the BAUT forum. A handful (probably much less than 10) have admitted their idea is wrong and needs more work (or to be abandoned). Two I am aware of have gone on to publish papers after refining the idea on the forum. The remaining 99.99% are unwilling to accept any criticism and insist the idea is right because they though of it.

I say get your ideas out there if you have something. Life is short and who knows how many in the past have died with their ideas locked away worrying about criticism or that their ideas are not ready. History shows many scientist who thankfully came out of the closet (some on the death beds) and sufferd through this criticism.
Marcus, I too find this idea interesting "space-time, energy, fields and elementary particles ( though valid descriptions within their own domains ) may not be irreducible, separable entities/principles at all, but only facets of something much more fundamental." I think you have enough respect on the forum to at least do as Strange says and refine your ideas here on the forum.

Originally Posted by bill alsept

I say get your ideas out there if you have something. Life is short and who knows how many in the past have died with their ideas locked away worrying about criticism or that their ideas are not ready. History shows many scientist who thankfully came out of the closet (some on the death beds) and sufferd through this criticism.
Marcus, I too find this idea interesting "space-time, energy, fields and elementary particles ( though valid descriptions within their own domains ) may not be irreducible, separable entities/principles at all, but only facets of something much more fundamental." I think you have enough respect on the forum to at least do as Strange says and refine your ideas here on the forum.

Maybe you are right, but I just don't feel ready yet, because at this stage I simply don't know if what I am thinking of will reduce to our known physics at low energies, not even in principle. There are many areas of known physics of which I have only a very basic knowledge, for example quantum field theory. I need more time to study those areas in detail, or else I have no real way to tell whether there is anything to my idea or not. That is one of the reasons why I have started to self-study again, so that I can really get a good grounding in all the various disciplines of physics.
Btw, the underlined bit above is not actually my idea yet, it is only a starting point...

Just give me time

Originally Posted by Markus Hanke

the underlined bit above is not actually my idea yet, it is only a starting point...

I realize that but the facets of something much more fundamental." is very interesting. I would think that anything that can create a field, is effected by a field or produces any kind of force other than kinetic would not be itself fundamental but would consist of parts and could be reducible. And what ever these facets are, they either supply the cause and effect of everything we can see or they recieve the cause and effect from something else even more fudamental.

How do we know if that idea is even real. You can't test it with current technology at all. Even the Higgs particle require billion of $ and alot of energy to test.

IMO random idea is pointless. Better hear what people discover in their own life. Its more exciting and more realistic.

In term of science: more discovery, less theorizing...

One of the 'skeptic' things we do here is not directed primarily at posters. Remember far more people visit, lurk and never or rarely post. As a non-mathematician, non-scientist, I think it's really, really important to guide casual or young readers to what science is about.

The idea of the lonely genius toiling unappreciated in an isolated ivory tower or secret laboratory is mere fiction. Real science is hard work - in some fields like oceanography or archaeology it can be life-threatening - and it is profoundly, seriously competitive. At one end there is the competition for grants to finance research. At the other end there are conferences where competing analyses and conclusions can result in shouting matches. These disputes can go on for years until enough evidence accumulates to fully validate one or the other, or something else entirely.

Once you realise this, you realise that when real scientists seem brusque or dismissive or even insulting to some people, that's nothing to what they do to each other. Peer reviewers can be helpful and constructive if they see promise in a paper submitted for publication. They will also insult, demean and humiliate anyone who looks to have made errors.

Science is not for the faint-hearted. It can be a very rough game. Check out the sample 'comments' listed at this post The nothing that was Climategate | Not Spaghetti . Think how you'd feel if this paper was the results of years of your own work - and of attention to requested revisions.

And here's a couple of extracts from the 2 comments on the post.

"Science is so powerful that it drags us kicking and screaming towards the truth despite our best efforts to avoid it. And it does that at least partly fueled by our pettiness and our rivalries.

Science is alchemy: it turns shit into gold. Keep that in mind the next time some blogger decries the ill manners of a bunch of climate scientists under continual siege by forces with vastly deeper pockets and much louder megaphones."

I once went to a math conference and was talking to one of the mathematicians about his impressions from having gone to a conference in materials science...and he was amazed at how adversarial it was, much more so than in math.

Originally Posted by msafwan

You can't test it with current technology at all.

That is a very good point, msafwan, and also one of the reason why I am not yet ready to further elaborate on my little pet theory - I need some way for it to make a testable prediction, and for that I need a mathematical formalism. At the moment I have neither.

Originally Posted by bill alsept

What I am curious about though is do you guys (the skeptics with more than 1000 posts) have any new ideas of your own? Maybe you guys could list a few of your ideas. Thanks

My ideas, such as they are, revolve around evolution. However, as others have said in this thread, I am not (yet) sufficiently knowlegeable to presume to make a serious proposal. Consequently, I keep my thoughts to myself and continue to build up my knowledge.


Half of being productive in science consists of asking the right questions. The other half consists of finding the right answers. I think I have asked some good questions in the sense of identifying areas of concern in the evolutionary process. I felt since my undergraduate days that we are too ready to gloss over the incompleteness of the evolutionary process; that there was more to this than simply selection of variable characteristics. So it was a delight to me when hox genes were discovered and evo-devo emerged and so forth. My own thoughts revolve around what could be seen as a teleological bent. One doesn't say teleology in biology without having considerably more data than I have as yet.

I happen to be a non-believer in the Big Bang. However, if you search my posts on this forum, or on other forums if you knew my names on those, you would find me defending Big Bang Theory. Why? Because it is the best explanation we currently have. And my objections to it are philosophical, not scientific. I just wish those posting their revolutionary ideas would show a similar discretion.

I just wish those posting their revolutionary ideas would show a similar discretion.

Exactly.

Personally, I have serious reservations about some aspects of climate science. But there's no way to do the measurements I'm interested in (interior temperature of Antarctic glaciers 100+ years ago for instance) nor do I have the skills, let alone the equipment, to run GCMs to test a few ideas out.

I'm stuck, like everybody else, with looking for useful papers as they come out and asking my questions or raising my issues in the appropriate forums. That would not be here - this is not the kind of specialist forum needed for those questions.

But I don't challenge the science that real scientists and established scientific theory and data lead us to. I wish others who seem to know even less than I do would keep their fruitless speculations for those half-sozzled conversations (at 3 am in the kitchen after a party) they belong in.

Originally Posted by John Galt

So it was a delight to me when hox genes were discovered and evo-devo emerged and so forth. My own thoughts revolve around what could be seen as a teleological bent. One doesn't say teleology in biology without having considerably more data than I have as yet.

Sounds very interesting. I have read a few books on evolution/natural selection and I really enjoy reading about DNA. I have just started reading "Lifes Ratchet" How molecular machines Extract Order from Chaos. By Peter M Hoffmann It is a good book for connecting physics and biology.

Originally Posted by John Galt

I happen to be a non-believer in the Big Bang. However, if you search my posts on this forum, or on other forums if you knew my names on those, you would find me defending Big Bang Theory. Why? Because it is the best explanation we currently have. And my objections to it are philosophical, not scientific.

I think the Big Bang would have been silent inflation and almost instant but thats not what your talking about is it? Just out of curiosity what other models are still being considered ?

Originally Posted by John Galt

I just wish those posting their revolutionary ideas would show a similar discretion.

I love the revolutionary ideas even the old ones. Some pan out, some don't and some lead on to other ideas. Secretly I think you guys enjoy them far more than you complain about it. Maybe there should be a category for only dreamers to post but it wouldn't be as fun without you guys.

Originally Posted by bill alsept

I love the revolutionary ideas even the old ones.

Me too. A tiny proportion of people will post a new (to them) idea, be told why it doesn't work (or even that it is basically correct) and be happy with that.

The problem is the remaining 99.99% who say, "No. I thought of it so it must be right ... closed minded ... rely on math .... worked on it for year ... sheeple ... just because Einstein said ... religious ..."

I can propose one really strong idea about what revolution means that I came upon recently.

All true revolutions are not departure from old working concept, but something build on it, ready for the next turn iteration or revolving.

That's what Einstein did for example, when it take Lorentz and Maxwell works(themselves revolution build upon other ones) seriously, even literally, and got the insight needed to derive that to the notion of time is relative. It was in plain sight, but nobody had seen it. Other revolutions in many other field follow suit.

Some other thing like "Big Bang theory" or "String theory" does not even qualify to enter the small circle of useful/fertile, verified, mathematically described/computable set of rules. Call them conjecture, bad ones that posses the wrong questions, and answers to un-spoken ones if you want. That is science while it is still coherent, but as useful as the 'multiverse' were I am going right now. It is the one were every body agrees with me so I don't have to think further. No useful, but convenient.

I am still waiting for a definition of what a "wave" is. or what "energy" is, and I am not alone:

Originally Posted by Richard_Feynman

"It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge what energy is.)"

So my second idea is that wave is the way nature dissipate energy. And energy is what is trying hard to dissipate(entropy'cally) by creating waves. It is barely new or mine.


Do not forget that we are now in the mutliverse were everybody agree with my frame of reference

Originally Posted by Boing3000

ome other thing like "Big Bang theory" or "String theory" does not even qualify to enter the small circle of useful/fertile, verified, mathematically described/computable set of rules.

Really ?
It is for example straightforward to derive General Relativity from just the basic action of String Theory :

Derivation of General Relativity

I would call that computable, and definitely useful. Not that I am a particular fan of String theory, but there is a certain undeniable beauty to it.

Originally Posted by Markus Hanke

I would call that computable, and definitely useful. Not that I am a particular fan of String theory, but there is a certain undeniable beauty to it.

Hello Markus ! I had read your very interesting post about the 4 ways (at least) to derive GR from 'random' vantage point. Now for the sake of the sanity of the discussion I am supposed to play the devil's advocate, so I'll do my worst...

You perfectly knew what I meant by computable. I meant actually compute something relevant to be measure against the reality (event with budget blower experiment like LHC). That's why the standard model qualify for a theory. First it is one (a precise set of rules full of add-hoc constant bounded by a domain of application), second you can confront it to reality.

You know what I think of the SM, that it is digging deeper and deeper and farther and farther away from reality, like an ostrich and a very expensive sand.

If you think that being the forth way to be able two symbolically converged into a theory 100 years old is an achievement worth paralyzing/absorbing physics budget attention from the 80's to late 90's (If I remember Lee Smoling's ranting correctly) then... no ... there is no then. You do not believe that, nice try

Is string mathematics pretty and cool and beautiful ? sure is. You even succumb to the charm. Is is math ? definitely Will it be useful ? maybe to prototype the next vintage generation of hula-hoops. Or maybe when they will have define what M stands for, and the number of dimension or string or brane or whatever they think they can topolog'ed with my money.

You being my most most definitive reference in math in my universe, I would really like to hear your opinion about this thread about the fractal state of the art. If there is mathematics that seem to match the universe, maybe any small fractal/chaos math 'discovery' is more relevant to this thread about scientific revolution then this string self indulgence.

Originally Posted by Boing3000

You being my most most definitive reference in math in my universe, I would really like to hear your opinion about this thread about the fractal state of the art. If there is mathematics that seem to match the universe, maybe any small fractal/chaos math 'discovery' is more relevant to this thread about scientific revolution then this string self indulgence.

Ok, unfortunately I am not an expert in the area of fractal geometry - I know some of the basics ( once wrote a software routine that could compute the Mandelbrot set in under two minutes on an Atari ST - quite a feat ! ), but that's just about it. It is interesting to note though that fractals appear to crop up in some of the very latest theories, specifically in Causal Dynamical Triangulations :

Causal dynamical triangulation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I think the basic concept ( if not the actual implementation ) of this theory has great promise.

Originally Posted by Markus Hanke

Ok, unfortunately I am not an expert in the area of fractal geometry - I know some of the basics

Well this is probably 10 times more than I

Originally Posted by Markus Hanke

( once wrote a software routine that could compute the Mandelbrot set in under two minutes on an Atari ST - quite a feat ! ), but that's just about it.

The 68000 was a smooth beast to work with, and two minutes for an infinite set, that is definitely a feat !

Originally Posted by Markus Hanke

It is interesting to note though that fractals appear to crop up in some of the very latest theories, specifically in Causal Dynamical Triangulations :
Causal dynamical triangulation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I think the basic concept ( if not the actual implementation ) of this theory has great promise.

Very very interesting, thank you for that link

Originally Posted by bill alsept

do you guys [...] have any new ideas of your own?

I discovered that the so-called Least Squares Method can be derived without minimizing or squaring anything, but years passed before I found a statistics professor to confirm that I didn't discover anything new (whereas the other professors told me that it couldn't be done). I also discovered the mathematical foundation of the arithmetic mean, and that the arithmetic mean and the Least Squares Method are related, which makes sense.

Originally Posted by Boing3000

The 68000 was a smooth beast to work with, and two minutes for an infinite set, that is definitely a feat !

Ha ha, you got me
What I neglected to say is of course that it only calculated the first few iterations deep, so that you got the basic Mandelbrot set image. Monochrome of course.