Good - Bad - Beautiful


Good News:  

Since the 1980s, I have been developing the mathematical structure of a physics model that I call

the D4-D5-E6-E7-E8 VoDou Physics Model
The D4-D5-E6-E7-E8 refers to a chain of Lie algebras that describes the relationships among space-time, particles, forces, and the Worlds of the Many-Worlds with Jordan algebra structure.

The term VoDou refers to the 256 Odu of IFA that correspond to the 256-dimensional Clifford algebra Cl(8), which in turn is the mathematical basis of its unified construction.

It is now a unified model that produces the SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1) Standard Model with 3 generations of quarks and leptons plus the Higgs mechansim and Gravity.

Without ad hoc input, it produces the masses of the quarks, leptons, and Higgs scalar, and the force strengths of the 4 forces, all being consistent with current ( May 2001 ) experimental results as I understand them.

As far as I know, it is the ONLY physics model that does all that.

In fact, it does even more - it also is consistent with:

 


 

Bad News:

Even though I have put up over a dozen related papers on the Los Alamos e-print archive from 1993 to 2001, and I have a web site at http://www.innerx.net/personal/tsmith/ that the describes the model in detail, it seems to me that nobody else, not even my friend David Finkelstein at Georgia Tech, understands the model as a whole.

My experience with some physics journal refereeing has been less than pleasant, and I feel that the physics community regards me as "... the crazy old uncle nobody lets out of the attic ..." even though my work in fact "... stands at the crossroads of many interesting fields ...".

Why don't they understand my work ?

It may be, as David Finkelstein said recently ( 26 April 2001 ), that I have not done a good job of explaining it in terms that present-day physicists can understand.

It may be, as I tend to think, that it is a new way of looking at things that cannot be deduced directly from other known physics models, a new way that is so different from the present-day fashionable superstring models that no present-day fashionable physicist is willing to undertake the effort necessary to understand it. According to Freeman Dyson, in his 1981 essay Unfashionable Pursuits (reprinted in From Eros to Gaia (Penguin 1992, at page 171)), "... 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 maintsream 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. ...".

All in all,

now I have feelings somewhat like those described by Richard Feynman about his talk at the 1948 Pocono conference, about which he said:


"... My way of looking at things was completely new, and I could not deduce it from other known mathematical schemes, but I knew what I had done was right.

... For instance,

take the exclusion principle ... it turns out that you don't have to pay much attention to that in the intermediate states in the perturbation theory. I had discovered from empirical rules that if you don't pay attention to it, you get the right answers anyway .... Teller said: "... It is fundamentally wrong that you don't have to take the exclusion principle into account." ...

... Dirac asked "Is it unitary?" ... Dirac had proved ... that in quantum mechanics, since you progress only forward in time, you have to have a unitary operator. But there is no unitary way of dealing with a single electron. Dirac could not think of going forwards and backwards ... in time ...

 ... Bohr ... said: "... one could not talk about the trajectory of an electron in the atom, because it was something not observable." ... Bohr thought that I didn't know the uncertainty principle ...

 ... it didn't make me angry, it just made me realize that ... [ they ] ... didn't know what I was talking about, and it was hopeless to try to explain it further.

I gave up, I simply gave up ...".

 

 


Beauty and Truth:

Whether or not anybody understands my work, to me it has the Beauty of Truth.

Now, after I have passed the age of 60, "... I'll state my case, of which I'm certain ... I find it all so amusing to think I did all that ... For what is a man, what has he got, if not ... to say the things he truly feels ... The record shows I ... did it my way. ...".

 

 


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