It's been a bit under two weeks since I presented my version 2.0 of the manuscript for the theory of everything. Since then I've written a theory of everything for dummies and have also rewritten the supplementary information for it.
But most important of all, I've read the manuscript through, printed it out, marked everything I considered unclear and rewrote it so that it seems fluent to me.
The pictures aren't perfect yet, but the main idea is already solid. It doesn't really have gaping holes in it anymore. It has already been seen by a couple of Academy professors and they haven't immediately found anything to object to.
The challenging problem is that while they are pretty much the tops in their fields, what I propose isn't in their expertise. Thus, while they might not find clear objections, they probably don't feel too comfortable endorsing something this radical until they've heard someone with expertise in this particular field give their expert opinion.
So, I'm currently in the process of finding a mentor. But the role of the mentor isn't to exactly teach me anything specific, but to rather show where the text is not logical enough and to search for any possible errors let in it.
This time I don't wish to submit the manuscript for peer review without someone saying that they've both read the manuscript and given it a green light. Green light in this context means that it sounds logical enough and that there are no obvious errors in it.
I'm actually relatively happy that after the two pairs of observant eyes on the paper, it hasn't been 'gunned down' immediately.
I actually feel compelled to finally attempt to submit the paper to a preprint repository, such as ArXiv, or ChemRxiv. The problem is that at least for ArXiv I need to have a mentor who can vouch for me. For ChemRxiv, there isn't this kind of a requirement, but the last time I attempted to send a reprint there, they said they don't take in the sort of manuscripts that I was sending a year ago. It might be that things have changed in a year, but let's see.
Anyhow, here is what the manuscript looks like now.
For the uninitiated, it probably looks exactly like it did before. This is the boring thing about peer review. Once you're pretty much ready, there's still a long way to go until you're really ready.
But at least one thing is clearly new: I recolored one picture.
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