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Dear Sir,

We have discussed relativity critically in our essay. Since GR is also an inverse square theory, if MOND is correct, GR would also need modification. But for this modified versions to work, some sort of unseen or “dark” presence is a must, which looks a lot like dark matter. It won’t be described by particles in the way that dark matter is described - it may be described in...

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Dear Sir,

We have discussed relativity critically in our essay. Since GR is also an inverse square theory, if MOND is correct, GR would also need modification. But for this modified versions to work, some sort of unseen or “dark” presence is a must, which looks a lot like dark matter. It won’t be described by particles in the way that dark matter is described - it may be described in a more wavelike form or a more field-like form. In other words, MOND can do away with dark matter but cannot describe the universe simply as the product of a tweaked Einsteinian gravity acting on the mass we can see. It modifies gravity, but through the backdoor it introduces extra fields, which mean that the distinction between dark matter and modified gravity isn’t very clear. In a paper “No Evidence for a Dark Matter Disk within 4 kpc From the Galactic Plane” (http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.1289) the authors note that their findings directly contradict the predictions of MOND.

The energy “uncertainty” introduced in quantum theory combines with the mass-energy equivalence of special relativity to allow the creation of particle/anti-particle pairs by quantum fluctuations when the theories are merged. As a result there is no self-consistent theory which generalizes the simple, one-particle Schrödinger equation into a relativistic quantum wave equation. QED began not with a single relativistic particle, but with a relativistic classical field theory, such as Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism. This classical field theory was then “quantized” in the usual way and the resulting quantum field theory is claimed to be a combination of quantum mechanics and relativity. However, this theory is inherently a many-body theory with the quanta of the normal modes of the classical field having all the properties of physical particles. The resulting many-particle theory can be relatively easily handled if the particles are heavy on the energy scale of interest or if the underlying field theory is essentially linear. Such is the case for atomic physics where the electron-volt energy scale for atomic binding is about a million times smaller than the energy required to create an electron positron pair and where the Maxwell theory of the photon field is essentially linear.

However, the situation is completely reversed for the theory of the quarks and gluons. While the natural energy scale of these particles, the proton, meson, etc. is on the order of hundreds of millions of electron volts, the quark masses are about one hundred times smaller. Likewise, the gluons are said to be quanta of a Yang-Mills field which obeys highly non-linear field equations. As a result, strong interaction physics has no known analytical approach and numerical methods are said to be the only possibility for making predictions from first principles and developing a fundamental understanding of the theory. In QCD, the non-linearities in the theory have dramatic physical effects. One coherent, non-linear effect of the gluons is to “confine” both the quarks and gluons so that none of these particles can be found directly as excitations of the vacuum. Likewise, a continuous “chiral symmetry”, normally exhibited by a theory of light quarks, is broken by the condensation of chirally oriented quark/anti-quark pairs in the vacuum. The resulting physics of QCD is thus entirely different from what one would expect from the underlying theory, with the interaction effects having a dominant influence.

There is an urgent need to rewrite physics.

Regards,

basudeba

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Dear Thomas Howard Ray,

In your essay “Science of the Possible, or the Probable?” (page 4), you wrote, “What quantum theorists know and seldom talk about, is that Bell’s Inequality— the formal mathematical statement of Bell’s theorem— is only locally real. The issue of nonlocality arises in the proof of the theorem, and that proof is only by way of double negation.” In my...

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Dear Thomas Howard Ray,

In your essay “Science of the Possible, or the Probable?” (page 4), you wrote, “What quantum theorists know and seldom talk about, is that Bell’s Inequality— the formal mathematical statement of Bell’s theorem— is only locally real. The issue of nonlocality arises in the proof of the theorem, and that proof is only by way of double negation.” In my opinion there is a problem about assigning mathematically and physically precise meanings to “locally real” and “nonlocality”. Quantum field theory can provide infinitely many mathematical frameworks for particles that are unlikely to exist in terms of empirical reality. String theory (or M-theory) might be an order of magnitude worse than quantum field theory in terms of ambiguity. Wolfram has conjectured that there exist 4 or 5 simple rules that generate satisfactory approximations to quantum field theory and general relativity theory. I have attempted to make testable hypothesis based on Wolfram’s conjecture. If the Gravity Probe B science team is correct, then my attempt has failed. In any case, I think that the string theorists need to explain the space roar, the photon underproduction crisis, and the empirical verifications of MOND found by Milgrom, McGaugh, Kroupa, and Pawlowski. One of my basic ideas concerning science is: Experimental physics trumps theoretical physics trumps mathematics trumps philosophy. To my way of thinking, philosophy is imprisoned by words, and mathematics is imprisoned by logically precise imaginings freed from empirical restraints. If we want to break out of our prisons of ignorance and false belief, then we need to do controlled empirical experiments. What is really meant by the word “infinity”? Gödel’s first and second incompleteness theorems might suggest that the concept of a complete infinity suffers from inherent problems of axiomatization. If the foundations of physics have a satisfactory axiomatization, then such an axiomatization might imply that nature is finite and digital.

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