Believe me, I sympathize. You are in possession of a truly incredible breakthrough that offers the prospect of changing the very face of science as we know it, if not more. The only problem is, you’re coming at things from an unorthodox perspective. Maybe your findings don’t fit comfortably with people’s preconceived notions, or maybe you don’t have the elaborate academic credentials that established scientists take for granted. Perhaps you have been able to construct a machine that produces more energy than it consumes, using only common household implements; or maybe you’ve discovered a hidden pattern within the Fibonacci sequence that accurately predicts the weight that a top quark would experience on Ganymede, expressed in femtonewtons; or it might be that you’ve elaborated upon an alternative explanation for the evolution of life on Earth that augments natural selection by unspecified interventions from a vaguely-defined higher power. Whatever the specifics, the point is that certain kinds of breakthroughs just aren’t going to come from a hide-bound scholastic establishment; they require the fresh perspective and beginner’s mind that only an outsider genius (such as yourself) can bring to the table.
Yet, even though science is supposed to be about being open-minded, and there’s so much that we don’t understand about how the universe works, it’s still hard for outsiders to be taken seriously. Instead, you run up against stuffy attitudes like this:
If there are any new Einsteins out there with a correct theory of everything all LaTeXed up, they should feel quite willing to ask me for an endorsement for the arxiv; I’d be happy to bask in the reflected glory and earn a footnote in their triumphant autobiography. More likely, however, they will just send their paper to Physical Review, where it will be accepted and published, and they will become famous without my help.
If, on the other hand, there is anyone out there who thinks they are the next Einstein, but really they are just a crackpot, don’t bother; I get things like that all the time. Sadly, the real next-Einsteins only come along once per century, whereas the crackpots are far too common.
And that last part is sadly true. There is a numbers game that is working against you. You are not the only person from an alternative perspective who purports to have a dramatic new finding, and here you are asking established scientists to take time out from conventional research to sit down and examine your claims in detail. Of course, we know that you really do have a breakthrough in your hands, while those people are just crackpots. But how do you convince everyone else? All you want is a fair hearing.
Scientists can’t possibly pay equal attention to every conceivable hypothesis, they would literally never do anything else. Whether explicitly or not, they typically apply a Bayesian prior to the claims that are put before them. Purported breakthroughs are not all treated equally; if something runs up against their pre-existing notions of how the universe works, they are much less likely to pay it any attention. So what does it take for the truly important discoveries to get taken seriously?
Happily, we are here to help. It would be a shame if the correct theory to explain away dark matter or account for the origin of life were developed by someone without a conventional academic position, who didn’t really take a lot of science classes in college and didn’t have a great math background but was always interested in the big questions, only for that theory to be neglected because of some churlish prejudice. So we would like to present a simple checklist of things that alternative scientists should do in order to get taken seriously by the Man. And the good news is, it’s only three items! How hard can that be, really? True, each of the items might require a nontrivial amount of work to overcome. Hey, nobody ever said that being a lonely genius was easy.
So let’s begin at the beginning:
1. Acquire basic competency in whatever field of science your discovery belongs to.
In other words, “get to know what is already known.” If you have a new theory that unites all the forces, make sure you have mastered elementary physics, and grasp the basics of quantum field theory and particle physics. If you’ve built a perpetual-motion machine, make sure you possess a thorough grounding in mechanical and electrical engineering, and are pretty familiar with the First Law of Thermodynamics. If you can explain the cosmological redshift without invoking an expanding universe, make sure you know general relativity and have mastered the basics of modern cosmology and astrophysics.
Just as an example, if fundamental physics is your bailiwick, Gerard ‘t Hooft has put together a list of subjects you should get under your belt, complete with bibliography! Many of them are online lecture notes; some of them are by me. So start reading! It may seem like a daunting collection at first; but keep in mind, this kind of curriculum is completed by hundreds of graduate students every year. Most of whom are not singular geniuses who will transform the very face of science.
Now, you may object that steering clear of such pre-existing knowledge has played a crucial role in your unique brand of breakthrough research, and you would never have been able to make those dazzling conceptual leaps had you been weighed down by all of that established art. Let me break it down for you: no. There may have been a time, in the halcyon days of Archimedes or maybe even Galileo and Newton, when anyone with a can-do attitude and a passing interest in the fundamental mysteries could make an important contribution to our understanding of nature. Those days are long past. (And Galileo and Newton, let us note, understood the science of their time better than anybody.) We’ve learned a tremendous amount about how the universe works, most of which is “right” at least in some well-defined regime of applicability. If you haven’t mastered what we’ve already learned, you’re not going to be able to see beyond it.
Put it this way: it’s a matter of respect. By asking scientists to take your work seriously, you are asking them to respect you enough to spend their time investigating your claims. The absolute least you can do is respect them enough to catch up on the stuff they’ve all made a great effort to master. There are a lot of smart people working as scientists these days; if a basic feature of your purported breakthrough (“the derivation of the Friedmann equation is wrong”; “length contraction is a logical contradiction”) is that it requires that a huge number of such people have been making the same elementary mistake over and over again for years, the fault is more likely to lie within yourself than in the stars. Do your homework, first, then get back to me.
2. Understand, and make a good-faith effort to confront, the fundamental objections to your claims within established science.
Someone comes along and says “I’ve discovered that there’s no need for dark matter.” A brief glance at the abstract reveals that the model violates our understanding of perturbation theory. Well, perhaps there is something subtle going on here, and our conventional understanding of perturbation theory doesn’t apply in this case. So here’s what any working theoretical cosmologist would do (even if they aren’t consciously aware that they’re doing it): they would glance at the introduction to the paper, looking for a paragraph that says “Look, we know this isn’t what you would expect from elementary perturbation theory, but here’s why that doesn’t apply in this case.” Upon not finding that paragraph, they would toss the paper away.
Scientific claims — whether theoretical insights or experimental breakthroughs — don’t exist all by their lonesome. They are situated within a framework of pre-existing knowledge and expectations. If the claim you are making seems manifestly inconsistent with that framework, it’s your job to explain why anyone should nevertheless take you seriously. Whenever someone claims to build a perpetual-motion device, scientist solemnly reiterate that the law of conservation of energy is not to be trifled with lightly. Of course one must admit that it could be wrong — it’s only one law, after all. But when you actually build some machine that purportedly puts out more ergs than it consumes (in perpetuity), it does a lot more than violate the law of conservation of energy. That machine is made of atoms and electromagnetic fields, which obey the laws of atomic physics and Maxwell’s equations. And conservation of energy can be derived from those laws — so you’re violating those as well. If you claim that the position of Venus within the Zodiac affects your love life, you’re not only positing some spooky correlation between celestial bodies and human affairs; your theory also requires some sort of long-range force that acts between you and Venus, and there aren’t any such forces strong enough to be relevant. If you try to brush those issues under the rug, rather than confronting them straightforwardly, your credibility suffers greatly.
For example, imagine you say, “I have a method of brewing a magical healing potion that bypasses the ossified practices of your so-called `medicine,’ and I’ve personally known several people who were miraculously cured by it, and also there was a study once in some journal that didn’t conclusively rule out the possibility of an effect, and besides you don’t know everything.” No non-crackpot person is going to pay a whit of attention to you, except perhaps to poke fun in between doing serious work. But now imagine you say “It’s true that my claimed magical healing potion appears to violate this famous law of chemistry and that well-established principle of medicine, which have been painstakingly developed and stringently tested against experimental data over the course of many decades, and it’s natural that you would be skeptical of such a claim — but here is the empirical evidence that is dramatic enough to overcome that skepticism, and this is the reason why there might be a loophole in those laws in this particular circumstance.” People will be much more likely to take you seriously.
3. Present your discovery in a way that is complete, transparent, and unambiguous.
What we’re getting at here is that scientific discoveries, unlike sonnets or declarations of love, are universal rather than personal. They belong to everyone, and once they are presented to the world, they can be explored equally well by anybody. By almost any standard, I understand general relativity better than Einstein ever did. (Most parts of it, anyway.) Not because I’m anywhere nearly as smart as Einstein, but because we’ve learned a lot about GR since Einstein died. Once the theory was invented, he didn’t have a monopoly on it; it was out there for anyone to understand and move forward with. Even if he had repudiated his own theory, it would have had no effect on whether or not it was correct.
Your discovery should be the same way. If it’s a revolutionary new theory, it should be a theory that anyone can use. That means it needs to be clearly expressed and unambiguous. I’ve had more than one long and fruitless discussion with alternative scientists who would say “You tell me the experimental result, and I will explain it with my theory.” That’s not the way it works. Your theory should have a life of its own; it should be a machine that I (or anyone) could use to make predictions. And if it’s a physics theory, let’s face it, it’s going to involve math. In this day and age, nobody is going to be moved by a model of elementary particles that comes expressed as a set of three-dimensional sculptures constructed from pipe cleaners.
Likewise, if your breakthrough is an experiment, it had better be a dramatically obvious one — and the more you are violating cherished scientific beliefs, the more dramatic the effect had better be. If what you’re claiming requires a re-arrangement of the energy levels in organic molecules, in flagrant disregard of the Schrödinger equation, you are going to need much more than a two- or three-sigma effect. And, equally importantly, you have to be up front about what the apparatus is, so that anyone can reproduce the experiment. No fair saying “Well, if you come into my lab, I’ll turn it on and show you how it works.” And “This experiment was done in the ’70’s in a secret underground lab in Gdansk, and the KGB has suppressed the lab notebooks” isn’t any better. If you’re actually playing the role of a scientist, share your procedure with everyone, so that they can become true believers themselves. If, on the other hand, you just want to make money, then by all means don’t tell anyone; just start producing the free energy (or amazing stretchy widgets, or whatever) and sell it on the open market. The millions of dollars that will doubtless flow your way will be very comforting as you rail against the establishment for failing to appreciate your genius.
So there you go! Modesty aside, this post might be the single greatest favor that has ever been done for the loose-knit community of non-traditional scientists. We’ve been very explicit about what is expected, if you want to get the recognition you believe is your due. Three simple items, start checking them off!
Also, one last thing. Don’t compare yourself to Galileo. You are not Galileo. Honestly, you’re not. Dude, seriously.
I’m finding the thread amusing. As somebody who frankly has a layman’s understanding plus a rudimentary math background, I’d say it’s easier for people to get confused in their analysis when they’re still learning any given field.
In linguistic development, you will see children making grammatical mistakes they have never been exposed to, and which they never made before–which indicates that they are in fact at a level where they are attempting to generalize and grasp what they know at a basic analytical level. Starting to say “she runned” instead of “she ran” is one such example.
I’ll readily admit to being at a crackpot level myself in my efforts to understand all that I have learned of physics. I confuse classical and quantum physics constantly because that’s how it’s been presented to me. I don’t mean to be one, but it happens. I studied a different field of science.
I personally find string theory very appealing, because I find Planck’s constant being strangely specific and tied to uncertainity in direction and location to be suggestive that the so-called lost dimensions are right inside Planck’s constant. I have a master-level book in math required for quantum mechanics that involve tensors, and I’m able to understand it fuzzily.
Still, I wouldn’t dare do a theory until I was sure I had understood everything inside and out; however it does make me sympathetic to theories of universe that invoke 7 or 11 dimensions since it synchs with what little I understand, and has the attraction of being mathematical.
Certainly when we look at E=MC ^2, I wonder– what do we have to learn about this equation? We simply don’t know much about mass and energy– nor about acceleration. None of those variables can be truly defined without invoking some kind of concept of space and time to start with.
If we dissect what acceleration and what mass and energy truly is… maybe we’ll have dark energy and matter all explained, as well as why NASA telescopes detected what seems to be a “Cosmological jerk” and variable universe expansion speeds.
And I think we’ll have a good explanation of gravity too– after all, acceleration is mostly studied in the context of gravity and matter. Photons both lack mass and lack any variablity in their speed except when going through mass-induced distortions (prisms, water, air, gravitional forces).
Anyway, people willing to develop experiments even on false premise and report results– that’s one step. There are many good experiments that have faulty or incomplete analyses. I don’t think crackpots should build a theory based on one experiment.
Lavoisser, an french nobleman who was a dedicated, indeed obsessed amateur chemist in his leisure time– and poured a lot of money in his lab– did thousands of experiments in his lifetime, all devoted to carefully measuring weight before and after chemical reactions.
His work helped develop the principle of conservation of matter.
If you have an experiment that yields interesting results, keep going. Take in all feedback, don’t defend flaws, just do more and more from different angles. Would you understand an elephant from a photograph of its trunk? Keep working on it, and if you have a full series of photographs of an elephant that you can use to model it 3-D, including its size, weight– in addition to finding other physical evidence, then you really do have an elephant to prove.
Not a “mysterious snake-like thing that attaches to trees or otherwise floats in midair.”
Dear Niel B.,
Your opinion that amateurs ideas can be scientifically useful and, even if not, dealing with them can be scientifically useful is interesting and deserved to be examined. But this was not the point I was making this time.
I am willing to take it for granted that amateurs ideas are never useful, and I think it is perfectly ok for a scientist to concentrate on her or his cutting-edge science and not be involved in any outreach activity. But for those scientists who are interested in outreach activities/blogging/popularization etc. (and even those who sometimes express their ideas on matters in which they are amateurs), I am not sure if Sean’s anticrackpots approach is reasonable compared to the alternative of just dealing with amateurs’ claims one at a time.
In addition, did any of you really ever encountered an amateur comparing himself to Galileo? Such a comparison seems to be a theme in the “how to deal with crackpots” literature to which Sean’s post adds. But is it for real?
A combined reply to several posts from Christine, Jenn, and Gina:
(Gina, please tell me that “I am willing to take it for granted that amateurs ideas are never useful,…” was a typo!)
First point: coming up with a whole new theory is not the only worthwhile thing to do, and not the least likely contribution from an average professional, much less an amateur. There are all kinds of interesting loose ends to pull on. For example, in special relativity there is the “right-angle lever paradox” from 1909 which you can look up. There were arguments about it for years, with some papers even lately, still arguing about energy currents and torques and “the asynchronous formulation of relativity” and stress tensor corrections and etc., and this is the experts not “cranks.” It is amazingly simple, and just the sort of thing an amateur could at least have posed in 1909. I think there are still funny loose ends (some of which I am looking into myself, please check my blog if I can say that here.)
That is a good job for amateurs, to poke around and find “embarrassing questions” to ask, whether they have good answers or not. So, physicists should be looking out for that. Indeed, their students in classes are such amateurs, and might ask a question that starts fruitful thinking (in other words, what an amateur starts can be fruitfully finished by the professionals if it is good ….)
Second: Few amateurs compare themselves to Galileo, at least in stature. The core issues about Galileo in that context are: That he challenged “authorities” by actually looking at things other people didn’t or couldn’t, and, the behavior of the doubters – the “refusal to look through the telescope.” The scorn heaped by many amateurs is about that unwillingness to look, often based on status issues (well proven by sting studies in which previously published papers, resubmitted under unknown pseudonyms, were rejected even by the same journals.)
PS – Here’s a simple “relativity paradox” to think about, that I haven’t seen directly elsewhere:
Suppose you use a crank (heh, good for the pun here) which can scrape along a surface on the opposite side. Here is a diagram, from “above”:
#——–X——-==
The “==” is a handle someone can push on, the X is the axle attached to a floor below (but we don’t really need gravity here), and the # is the scraping element, which rubs a high-friction surface below it. If I push on the handle, I scrape along the floor under the opposite side of the handle. I use up energy inside myself, and in special relativity (not classical mechanics) I get less massive (less “mass-energy.”) The scraping action imparts energy to what it scrapes, making it more massive, by however little bit. Total mass-energy is conserved inside this closed system, but the center of mass moves to the left.
Now: in Newtonian mechanics, this is no problem, since the mass distribution stays the same. But if the center of mass-energy moves in a body without a momentum compensation, that is a problem: it moves the centroid of the momentum vectors laterally in frames in which the body moves, without compensation. That would violate conservation of angular momentum, L (remember that L = sum of r X p of any kind, and is not just about rotation.) So, where does the compensation come from? It can’t be any force that would make sense in the classical version, since that would over-correct in such a case. It has to be something that happens only because of relativistic considerations (which don’t have to involve high velocities, as the very example of mass-energy equivalence shows.)
This problem is related to the right-angle lever paradox, since an “energy current” is involved. (My answer to that one, also implied by some who should know: There are tangential momentum vectors from the stress correction to momentum and energy, produced by the shear forces in the RAL. They correct for the changing reaction angular momentum from the unequal torques applied to the lever, since dL/dt can also be made from v X p.) In this case, perhaps the energy flow running across the handle counts as “p” for the v X p. Unfortunately, that extra p term is not what we get out of the stress-correction formulas (their corrections are proportional to length along the line of motion.) Hence, this needs further work, IMHO.
“tyrannogenius”
Gina: Non-physicists with what they perceive as revolutionary new physics theories tend to fall into two categories. The first is interested amateurs, who, when a mistake is pointed out in their work accept that they have made a mistake, and either go off to correct the problem, or drop it altogether. The second kind is the type who insist that they are right, no matter what flaws in their reasoning are highlighted. It’s this second group that are so unpopular with physicists. Their mind is made up, and pointing out flaws just leads to protracted email arguments that help no one and invariable involve the crackpot questioning your abilities and your integrity.
It should be reasonable for us not to wish to engage with these people. Unfortunately it can often be hard to distinguish between the two types of people from their initial correspondence, and while by ignoring both you may well be ignoring someone who might otherwise be benefited an email explaining some particular area of physics, the danger of getting dragged into a long argument weighs heavily against replying.
Personally, I don’t get very many crackpots (except when I mention Steorn), and so I don’t really mind replying. In fact I sometimes find the emails amusing. On the other hand, the people who are very involved in public outreach, blogging, etc. are the most visible and so receive the most crackpot-spam. If they were to seriously engage with everyone that writes to them with a revolutionary new theory, I suspect that they would get a lot less public outreach, blogging, etc. done.
Pharyngula is a pretty good example of this. The comment section is full of rants by creationist and various other evolution denialists. If PZ were to reply to them all, I can’t imagine him having any time to blog. I suspect the same is true of Cosmic Variance, although maybe somewhat less evident in the usual comment sections.
I have the same experiences as Galileo. The orthodox scholars refused to look through his telescope and they said that the sunspots should be blasphemy of the “Holy Scriptures”.
I have made a discovery of the wave-displacement phenomenon that everybody have seen but not noticed. The derivation of the experiments based on this discovery shows that Hubble and Planck have found the same phenomenon but both have misinterpreted it in different ways.
Hubble believed it was indication of Doppler-velocity of the galaxies. Planck misinterpreted the fractional displacement of the wave-units as frequency-dependent quantum-jump.
My experience is (like Galileo’s) that not any physicist (the priests of our present world-view) dare to comments my simple explaining experiments.
Do you dare to look at http://www.theuniphysics.info
hmm, I stand corrected. It looks that there are much more grang unifying physics theories by amateurs out there than I have imagined. As well as people really comparing thmselves to Galileo. Ohh well.
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Dear All,
For you amusement, you can find a large collection of crackpot theories at
http://www.crank.net/ , some by people who regularly post to this site. The amateur/alternative scientist out there might have a look at this as part of the checklist.
Sean Wrote:
“There may have been a time, in the halcyon days of Archimedes or maybe even Galileo and Newton, when anyone with a can-do attitude and a passing interest in the fundamental mysteries could make an important contribution to our understanding of nature. Those days are long past… If you haven’t mastered what we’ve already learned, you’re not going to be able to see beyond it.”
Physicists in particular are so certain that they distance themselves from the irrational claims and thinking of people they call crackpots, when the truth is that no one is immune. Physicists today have their own irrational bias are making their own huge mistakes in judgment, which we can only hope degrade in the future. Assuming that all the fundamentals are correct and can no longer be improved upon. That much arrogance just baffles me. And yet that is the norm.
Gevin,
I don’t think physicists today merely assume that the fundamentals are correct. They are correct. A typical characteristic of the crackpot is to claim that scientists don’t really know what they are talking about and that they just assume certain things to be true without checking. Nothing could be further from the truth. Physicists aren’t taught to memorize facts and equations, as the crackpots seem to think.
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Tim # 161 wrote
Humans are a credulous lot. Well established, high-profile scientist believed in the aether. an earth centered astronomy and the impossibility of heavier-than-air flight.
It is the history of science that in part encourages us crackpotsto question such beliefs you non crackpots faithfully ascribe to like dark matter, dark energy, the yet-to-be specified property of mass enables it to attract other mass and the the impossibility of harnessing of the gravitational force .
It is me, or the http://www.crank.net is beginning to list -at least for science- more sites with the label “anticrank” than sites with the label “crank”? Which suggests another question: is the label “anticrank” just for another kind of crank?
Seriously, to me the question is illumination versus empiricism (or math calculation at least), and it is possible to find science grouppies who fall in the illuminated cathegory, and mad scientist who at least are in the empirical group. Illuminism is fostered due to current approaches to vulgarisation, where the findings of academia are divulgated with the same methods that church dogmas are, instead of using the tools of reason and experiment. Most of the cracks of the illuminated kind simply had received this kind of asserted knowledge, rebelled against, and concluded their own set of dogmas.
Empiricist cranks, such as Peter above, are more near to survive as they start to recalibrate their measurements and to consider other possibilities (other theories) explaining his experiments. Of course, they can prefer to be blind to them in order to keep enjoying some sort of popularity (ahem, do scientists do the same?). Or they can self-impose blindness in order to exploit they work for a monetary scam, or another guy can try to use them for such schemes (think red mercury) Actually, this is also true of “illuminated” cranks, but while illumination targets “sects”, empiricism scams target “entrepreneurs”.
Peter,
Note that all of your examples are at least 100 years in the past, before the fundamental principles of modern physics were understood. As for dark matter and dark energy, there is a large amount of data in support of these ideas. Namely galatic rotational curves, primordial nucleosynthesis, the CMB power spectrum, and supernovae observations. Scientists do not just take their existence on faith. I think you have a misunderstanding of the nature of the scientific profession. This is n’t the 19th century, and scientists are not members of an informal gentlemen’s club who adopt whatever ideas seem fashionable. There is a rigorously established body of laws and knowledge with which any new ideas must be consistent
Tim
You with your rigorously body laws and knowledge have lost 95% of the stuff of the universe.
Peter,
Not really. We have a pretty good idea what will make up the dark matter, namely the lightest supersymmetric partner (LSP). Hopefully, experiments at the LHC will confirm this within the next few years. As for the rest, it appears to be Einstein’s cosmological constant. Basically, your attitude seems to be that you can’t accept that the universe is this way because it doesn’t conform to your notion of the way it should be.
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According to the author, there is no such thing as revolution at all!?
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Joe Fitzsimons, you couldn’t be more wrong. Biologist Dawkins is merely giving his thumbs-up to Physicist Smolin’s biology-resembling idea of Cosmological Natural Selection, which in turn draws on Nobel Physicist Wheeler’s biology-resembling suggestion that characteristics of baby universes can vary slightly from those of their parents.
Reality doesn’t care what you think. Joe Fitzsimons, you shouldn’t allow any latent `evolution denialist’ tendency to prevent you from seeing the importance of biological concepts at the very foundations of physics.
Eh, ‘evolution denialist’?
I think you’ve got me wrong. Evolution in biological systems in undeniable (well, people try, but I tend to laugh when they do). To be honest, I find it pretty amusing that you seem to think I’m an evolution denialist.
I was just saying that I think Dawkins overreaches when he endorses what is quite frankly a very fringe theory because it seems to resemble the biological evolution with which he is familiar. I’m not anti-string theory either, but it should be clear that this idea of baby universes being selected for based on certain characteristics is extremely speculative.
It’s somewhat petty to preface people with their credentials (‘Physicist’, ‘Nobel Physicist’), and doesn’t actually add anything to your argument. There are no authorities in science, and ‘nobel physicist’s have occasionally been known to go off the deep end. If this process actually happens, then I can certainly be convinced of it’s existence by sufficient evidence. The point is, however, that there is no real reason to believe it yet, and endorsing it based on its similarities to another another theory. I fail to see how this is in any way controvertial.
Let me just close by saying that no matter how you choose to look at it, physics is more fundamental than biology, in that physics is a prerequisit for the existence of biology, but biology is not necessary for physics to exist. As physics at a low level deals with individual particles/fields etc., it is often possible to prove things (such as thermodynamic laws) mathematically based on a very few well justified assumptions. This tends not to be the case with emergent phenomena, and you tend to more have to come up with rules of thumb, rather than exact laws. This is fairly evident in evolution, where accident can play quite a role. The extinction of the dinosaurs didn’t have to happen in the way it did, and could have dramatically changed the species currently in existence. Please be clear that I am not saying that evolution is accidental. It’s not. However, dramatic one off events (meteor impacts, large solar flares, gamma ray bursts) certainly have the ability to alter evolutionary paths. A hedgehog could evolve with a rare but extremely advantageous mutation in its genes that would gaurantee it’s dominance in the gene pool and enhance it’s survivability (say immunity to X, where X is the major cause of death among hedge hogs), only to be run over by a car before mating.
So yes, I think it is highly unlikely that biological ideas are at the root of fundamental physics.
Joe Fitzsimons says
I would have once agreed with this statement, but thinking purely in terms of mathematics and physics, I came to a different conclusion. You should read my paper `Self-Replicating Space-Cells and the Cosmological Constant’. Link to abstract:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0706.3379
By the way, I am certainly not merely postulating the phenomenon of Self-Replicating Space-Cells, nor am I a priori presuming that there should be any kind of replicators nor any other biological analogies. Instead I am arguing that the phenomenon of Self-Replicating Space-Cells must necessarily emerge from a discrete physics model, if it is to successfully model reality.
Let me know whether you think I am wrong, and why.
If so then what is your explanation for the various constants of physics? How do you choose what explanation(s) you favor?
Remember, what actually matters here is what is actually true.