The Living Theory of Quantum Gravity: Part 3 Preventing the Replication Crisis

Today’s post on my ongoing polishing of my manuscript on the Theory of Quantum Gravity and Lignin Adhesives is about experiments. In my previous post I’ve been talking first about theory and then about the results of my experiments. But I haven’t talked (too much) about what these experiments exactly are. So, today I’ll try to remedy that.

The past couple of days I’ve been writing the Experimental section of my manuscript. In the experimental section a researcher describes how the experiments were made that produced the results that are shown in the manuscript. And the experiments should be described well enough so that they can be replicated.

And here we come to the subtitle of today’s post. In many scientific fields, including chemistry, there is a major replication crisis. That is, more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiment results. And in chemistry the number is 87 %. This is definitely something I don’t wish to happen with my experiments. I don’t want to be the guy who publishes results that are too good to be true, because they’re not true. Well, there a major way to prevent this is just not to cheat. Some instances of replication crisis have been just about cheating. A famous recent example is the case with Elizabeth Holmes.

But I think much more common is the case of false positives. People have produced remarkable results and rushed to publish them before making sure they can really reproduce the results themselves. Well, I’ve been replicating my adhesive and coatings results for over a year, and even though I know I could get even better, I’m at a point where I know that I can get pretty darn good results quite consistently.

So, what have I been doing these past few days? I’ve been writing down the experiments whose results I’m presenting in the manuscript. The details have to be clear enough for them to be replicable, because I they aren’t, people won’t be using the presented experiments. Or they will try, but if they fail, the research will die a slow death when it can’t be replicated.

There’s only one thing where I’m trying to have my cake and eat it too, and that is in the industrial scale-up of the production of my lignin spheres. I’m still showing the general principles of where their production is published, but I won’t show the details of how to optimize the process to an industrial scale. I’m hoping that the peer-reviewers won’t demand details there.

Then, you might ask “will people be able to replicate these findings, if I won’t show the details of the scale-up?” The short answer is, they should be able to replicate the results in the rotavapor-scale. And if they want to replicate the results with plenty of lignin spheres, they can buy it from our LignoSphere Company. This way, I can still get financial compensation for the results without needing to hide everything.

And for industrial processes, the devil is in the details. To get everything working efficiently and seamlessly, you need tacit knowledge. That is, knowledge that is difficult to extract or articulate. Of course, when talking about engineering, there really isn’t too many things that are truly tacit. More specifically, they are the sort of things that can be omitted from publications without objections, but which make replication cumbersome, but not exactly impossible. However, there is a fine line between difficult replicability and non-replicability. The former is okay, but the latter isn’t.

So, this is what I’ve been doing. First looking at the text and marking down every piece of experiment I’ve referred to and introduced a sub-chapter to the experimental section for each experiment. Then I’ve either written the experiment down from memory, or more commonly I’ve gone back to my notes and have written down the details of the experiments at the level of detail that is expected for scientific manuscripts.

And I’m still not even at the point of a bad first draft. I still haven’t written any text for quite a few sub-chapters. It just seems that I’m just a slow writer. Or that I’m trying to cram five and a half years of work into a single manuscript. This is its own kind of masochism. Normal manuscripts aren’t this big or complex. However, by now you’ve already learned that this manuscript is not normal by any stretch of the imagination. I’m talking about pure mathematics, biology, physics, chemistry and engineering in one manuscript. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a paper like this.

It's pretty much impossible to illustrate one of these texts in pictures, as they are by definition texts. However, they are related to illustrations, so for today’s picture, I’ll show an illustration of how to prepare a TEM sample that shows the hexagonal pattern of disrupted self-assembly of lignin nanotubules:

To understand what the picture means, you’ll have to read the manuscript’s supplementary information, which you can find here:

CLP-EGDE-ToE 2025_09_10_12_SI.pdf

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