Today’s post is about self-inflicted damage. In my last post I decided that my manuscript is good enough to be shown around. So now I’m in the process of finding mentors for it, so that I can make it look acceptable enough for peer review.
After writing my last post, I also decided that I want to send it to preprint services as well. However, I still don’t have recommendations from physicists to submit to arXiv, so I at least need the mentor for that. But at least there’s no requirement for recommendation for ChemRxiv. So, I decided to send the manuscript there.
But the problem is that I forgot that apparently chemistry is not a theoretical discipline. I submitted the manuscript to ChemRxiv and got this response:
Dear Kalle Lintinen, We have received your submission, "The Mathematical Principles of All Physical Interactions Based on the Refraction of Elemental Particle s of Energy". Unfortunately, we cannot approve your submission for posting on ChemRxiv at this time.
Your work is solely speculative, with no evidence-based scientific results presented, nor is it an in-depth review of recent scientific results. As such, it does not meet the requirements for posting on ChemRxiv.
I don’t think that the ‘gatekeeper’ at ChemRxiv is right. However, looking at the criteria of submission, I realized that my paper cannot be considered ‘Chemistry’, at least by the standards of ChemRxiv.
On their website they say:
Submissions can be made at any stage of the research process up until the point that the content is accepted for formal publication following peer review. The content must meet the following requirements:
includes new research results and analysis (for working papers) OR includes a thorough overview of prior research from multiple sources with references.
What the above sentence means is that if the manuscript does not include new experimental results, nor go through prior research from multiple sources, the work cannot be published in ChemRxiv.
This marks it: I either must become a mathematician or a physicist. I really wouldn’t want to make this change. I don’t feel comfortable calling myself either. Apparently If one is to publish a theoretical paper, it must be in physics. So, I guess I’m the world’s first dot physicist, because I cannot be a dot chemist.
But to publish a paper in theoretical physics (instead of chemistry), I apparently need to hang around in different crowds as I’ve used to. Even Academy professors in Chemistry say that they can’t help me.
This is my goal: I’m not going to contact chemists anymore, as they are apparently way too reverential to physicists. I have to embrace my inner physicist and mathematician, even though I’ve fought it for the past year and a half.
I would absolutely not have done this even a year ago, despite having the basic theory of the supramolecular shells and the basic idea of the elementary particle of energy. But a year ago I had absolutely no mathematics to even consider talking with theoretical physicists. Or more specifically, I have to confess that very early on in my quest, before understanding anything about the physics of what I had discovered, I tried to contact physicists and sent a couple of e-mails. However, I received no reply. And knowing what I know now, I don’t blame them. Trying to come up with the theory of everything just having the basic concept of an elementary particle of energy is a bit like Galileo Galilei trying to explain the heliocentric model without the mathematics of Newton. I talked about this exactly a year ago in my post “How to Disprove a Postulate”. Galileo did discover a lot of important celestial object with his telescope, but he wasn’t a natural scientist, or physicist, as we would now call them.
In the post I said:
So, do we need a Newton to figure out the mathematics behind these ‘classical’ strings before the new postulate is accepted? Possibly so. I think of myself more of a Galileo or Copernicus. Possibly wrong in many accounts, but the first proponent of a postulate that requires a much better mathematical framework to be accepted.
But as it happens, in our day and age, the voice of a modern-day Galileo will be lost. While a year ago, I considered myself a Galileo (an experimentalist), I’ve had to consider myself a bit more of a Newton, who actually developed mathematics. I didn’t feel too uncomfortable comparing myself to Galileo a year ago, as he was considered a bit of a crank, but comparing myself to Newton feels extremely uncomfortable. Newton seems like an impossible bar to compare myself to, but in some sense, I have to.
The biggest objection to what I have to say is by people who don’t consider the mathematics of my theory. Considering any new theoretical concept, one has to exercise willing suspension of disbelief. This essay perfectly describes the process in the discovery of the Higgs Boson. Peter Higgs had an idea of a particle that should exist to as a way for some particles to acquire mass. I’m probably butchering the theory, as I don’t know enough about it, but the theory of the particle was developed in 1964 and it took until 2012 and the immensely expensive large hadron collider at Cern to detect the particle.
If Peter Higgs has tried to publish his paper in a chemistry journal, I guess he might have been able to cite recent papers, but he sure wouldn’t have given any experimental evidence.
And this is the rub. In physics you are able to ask “what if” questions, if you can back yourself with proper mathematics and ground it in experimental observations. In chemistry, you can’t really do it. At least anymore. I’m not sure how things were a hundred years ago.
So, now I’m trying to find a way to talk with mathematical/theoretical physicists. I think there will be a language problem. A natural reaction for a physicist would be to consider what I say with doubt, as I don’t use exactly the same language. It’s a bit like a discussion with a Dane and a Swede. In principle the two languages should be almost the same, but in practice mutual comprehension is hard.
But I think now I have a bit better chance of talking the same language. Even though the parametric equations in Euclidian space might seem quaint to someone used to much more powerful tools, any mathematician should still find the approach completely understandable. This means that if they stop to think about the theory, they should realize that there is nothing wrong with the mathematics.
This should be the first hurdle to cross. To make someone with the theoretical chops to take the theory seriously. I think it only requires one other person to get the ball rolling. But to find that one person might not be as easy as I now hope it is. In fact, there is “somebody else’s problem” (SEP) field between chemistry and physics. Chemists do not want to touch theoretical physics and by and large theoretical physicists are blissfully unaware of how poor the theoretical understanding of many fields of chemistry is.
As Douglas Adams said:
An SEP is something we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem. That’s what SEP means. Somebody Else’s Problem. The brain just edits it out, it's like a blind spot.
Continuing:
The Somebody Else's Problem field... relies on people's natural predisposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain. If Effrafax had painted the mountain pink and erected a cheap and simple Somebody Else’s Problem field on it, then people would have walked past the mountain, round it, even over it, and simply never have noticed that the thing was there.
The mountain painted pink is the ten dimensions of string theory. An authority in physics has said that mathematics points to ten dimensions. And he has the equations to back him up, so no one opposes this hypothesis, at least not very strongly.
Now I’m saying that there is an elementary particle of energy and show the mathematical basis for it, and I get “Your work is solely speculative, with no evidence-based scientific results presented, nor is it an in-depth review of recent scientific results.” So, while I present how all the scientific results could be interpreted by these particles, the hypothesis of ten dimensions is not solely speculative, but what I present is.
Now I need to get into the club of theoretical physicists, but there is a huge hurdle in that I reject the idea that I should use either quantum mechanics or relativity to explain my theory. When the causal arrow is opposite, I know what would probably (hopefully) convince physicists. I explain Maxwell’s equations with the refraction of elementary particles of energy. But this just seems so unfair. While I might be wrong, it feels like it will take forever to do this. It might be doable, but I’m ready now. I want the world to hear the theory and help me take the next steps.
And to finish this off, I don’t hold an individual grudge to the gatekeeper at ChemRxiv (who’s not really Reviewer 2, but there are no ‘gatekeeper’ memes). They’re doing exactly what is stated in the guidelines.
And also, I’ll have to give a shout out to the international readers! Before I thought that all the international readers were old Facebook friends, but now with the blog having readers from over a dozen nations, I think at least some of you don’t know me personally. If you wish this blog to receive more readers, remember to share it (in Facebook and elsewhere).
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