I have been participating in the forum at AtlantisRising.com, under
the heading of "Future Science"; discussing my ideas on tachyons,
Tachyonics, and tachyonic gravity. Recently, however, although that
forum was specifically intended as a place for people to post and
discuss unorthodox ideas, I came under intense attack from a physics
professor who frequents the forum, and who, apparently, does so for
the express purpose of shooting-down (i.e., debunking) individuals
who actually post unorthodox ideas there.

I asked myself: "What gives?" I had long since ceased attempting to
post my ideas on mainstream physics forums (the kind where such
individuals belong), because of the dire and angry opposition to my
ideas that I encounter in such forums, but it seems to me that the
proponents of mainstream doctrine go too far when they interject
themselves into alternative forums with condemnatory commentary.

Then it occurred to me that such aggressive closed-mindedness is one
of the main reasons for the lack of progress towards the development
of, and contributions to, an Interdiscipline Synthesis Cosmology
(ISC) on the part of mainstream scientists - they have become like
a corrupt medieval priesthood, setting themslves up as Lords over our
minds, and holding onto out-dated concepts as if their views were the
tenets of some unalterable religious dogma. And they will all go to
their graves defending the establishmentarian status-quo of today's
scientific community; dominated, as it is, by corporatism, which
shuns new ideas as unprofitable. So, they tend to see new ideas, no
matter how promising or enlightening, or potentially beneficial to
our understanding of reality, as a threat to their positions as the
quardians and promoters of what they label as "scientific fact", much
of which is not fact at all, but some dead scientist's belief.

Yet, the issue of ISC, in this context, is complicated, because it
requires playing on their turf; beating them at their own game.

I have therefore decided to post somewhat of the debate I have had
recently with this professor, who calls himself "Merlin", and who
seems to have prompted some of his followers to support him with
comments of their own, but which are equally closed-minded, as the
reader will readily recognize. It is hoped that by knowing what
arguments are thrown up against my ideas, counter arguments can be
found that cannot, in all honesty, be so readily dismissed.

The topic is Tachyonic Gravity. In what follows, I will re-post here
certain posts that originally appeared on the Atlantis Rising Forum,
and will later-on begin offering additional comments of my own.
[Find the original posts at the www.AtlantisRising.com forum, under
the "Future Science" heading; subheading "Richter's Credentials".]

____________


On a thread started by Stromgol, I was asked by Stromgol to discuss
my ideas on tachyonic gravity as compared to Stromgol's view that
gravity pushes rather than pulls, because of how the expansion of
spacetime works. However, this is an open forum, and Merlin
interjected his own thoughts; to one of which I offered a response
that he seems not to have liked very much, and thus attempted to,
well, I quess you would have to say, he tried to "debunk" me.

But the last thing he did in that effort was to insult me by giving a
somewhat short list of the college courses I assume he himself has
taken, but which he implies that I have not.

In fact, I have, and then some. But the details can come later. Here
I would like to re-post the messages that started the debate, and
then take it from there with additional commentary.

Merlin, of course, is free to respond.


************


Previously, Merlin wrote:

"... Theoretically, strings give rise to fermions and bosons via
vibrational modes - but we can only acertain that through theory &
math. The electromagnetic force and fields are another issue. Since
we have no idea of why "charge" exists, any answer we give would be
fraudulent. Gravity, on the other hand, is different. We have many
ways to describe it, and observation to prove its existence, but no
way to determine how it is transmitted. So - in the end, we are at a
loss for words to "know" what it is. ... "


My response was:

Actually, there is a way to deterimine how gravity is transmitted, by
assuming that it is faster-than-light, and is therefore a tachyonic
force. [See an abbreviated version of my thesis on this by clicking-
on "Tachyonic Gravity" at www.TachyonicsSociety.com

There have also been some recent technological breakthroughs that
will result in the design of experiments that I predict will yield
empirical support for this idea very soon (within a few years, at the
latest, if not just months).

Please remember also the reason for this thread; a comparison between
my thesis on gravity and Stromgol's concepts. Somehow, we strayed
from that discussion, and Merlin has even suggested here that there
is no description of gravity that lets us "determine how it is
tansmitted".

With all due respect, that is not correct, because the tachyonic-
gravity hypothesis was not included as a viable possibility in
Merlin's assessment.

Quantum gravity is, in fact, fully explained, and is made compatible
with General Relativity, Newtonian Gravity, and even M-Theory, if the
quanta of gravity are described as a special kind of tachyon. And the
tachyonic-gravity hypothesis is based almost entirely on a
description of how gravity is transmitted (via superluminal quanta).

What is more, while the spin-2 massless graviton does indeed obtain
its formal representation in the language of Quantum Mechanics, the
original reason for its invention was the desire to cast quantum
gravity as an analog of electromagnetism, so that it would be
compatible with Special Relativity, in hopes that a way could then be
found to make it compatible with General Relativity. That did not
happen, because of the incompatibility between Quantum Mechanics and
General Relativity - which problem M-Theory (or Brane-World Theory)
purports to solve; and, to its credit, does successfully explain why
gravity is so weak at subatomic distances (being weak in our brane,
but strong in another). But the M-Theory "explanation" of gravity
actually amounts to yet another macro-encompassing description of
what gravity does (its large-scale effect), not a quantum-mechanical
description of the microcosmic exchange-particles responsible for the
force we know as gravity.

It seems to me, therefore, that much of the mystery about gravity
(and therefore of the many conceptualizations of it), comes not from
what we know about it, but from what we assume about it.

Our initial assumptions determine the range of choices of
mathematical tools we can use, and that, in turn, limits the kinds of
experiments that appear to be the most promising for yielding results
that confirm or disprove our theories.

One example of what happens, in this respect, is that many theorists
now assume that there are no gravitational quanta at all, because
Einstein's theory of General Relativity, describing gravity with
great accuracy macrocosmically, does not involve specification of a
field of quanta.
Yet, that assumption is not a scientific fact. It is just an
assumption. And, what is more, it implies a mandated discrepancy
between the way gravity and the other fundamental forces behave.

In particular, the assumption that there are no quanta for gravity is
not consistent with what we know about natural processes. Every other
force of nature has been described empirically using Gauge-Field
Theory (a branch of Quantum Theory) to represent the exchange and
interactions of quanta. And that kind of theory remains the preferred
formal format of nearly all mainstream experimental physicists
involved in elementary particle research. The Standard Model of
elementary particle physics is a Gauge-Field Theory that unifies the
weak-nuclear force with electromagnetism, in a single force called
the "electro-weak force", which is also unified with the strong-
nuclear force, in the language of Quantum Chromodynamics.

They have, to-date, been able to establish a quantum-mechanical
description of all of these fundamental forces, sans gravity, in a
single Unified Field Theory, which is wholly supported by
experimental data.

So, it is reasonable to conclude that gravity can likewise be
quantized, and then unified with the other forces. But the assumption
that the quanta of gravity must travel either at lightspeed or at
infinite speed, but never, for some reason, in-between, does not make
sense. The in-between possibility has been dismissed for far too
long.

Why is that? It is because of out-dated ideas.

It is not an "a priori" that the spin-2 graviton has to travel at
lightspeed. That specification is an assumption, based on the old but
erroneous assumption that nothing goes faster-than-light.
And it is not mandatory that the only other choices are that there
are no quanta for gravity, or that its quanta travel at infinite
speed.

Theorists in Einstein's day (including Einstein himself) could not
accept the Newtonian assumption that gravity acts instantaneously
(which would imply that gravity's quanta travel at infinite speed),
because that causes the math to be undefined (it gives infinite
solutions). And with the great experimentally-verified successes of
Quantum Theory, their logical choice for quantum gravity was to
consider an analog of electromagnetism; where the first nonvanishing
solutions required a quadrupole field (rather than a two-pole or a
monopole field).

Yet, because that did not work out, it was then widely assumed,
because of the success of General Relativity (which does not specify
a field of quanta), that gravity has no quanta at all!

Now, however, that assumption too is no longer adequate, because it
begs the question:
"Why, if the assumption is true, did Mother Nature quantize all of
the forces but gravity?"

No, gravity can be quantized, empirically, but not according to the
spin-2 graviton model.

Gravity's quanta are probably faster-than-light, but do not travel at
an infinte speed. They are more likely to be special kinds of
tachyons, with imaginary masses, that travel between lightspeed and
infinite speed excusively. They would be quite easily created by any
real mass (because infinite speed corresponds to a tachyon's zero-
energy level). And, instead of traveling curved paths, they must
travel absolutely straight paths from their sources to an infinte
distance.

To explain how this works, note that tachyons have reversed causality
(negative time), compared to that of ordinary particles. When photons
of light from a lightbulb, netrinos from the Sun, or particles coming
from a radioactive substance flow out from their sources, they give
rise to radiation pressure on objects that they hit or pass through.
And that pressure is felt as a force which is directed away from the
source. That is, standard (i.e., positive) radiation pressure is a
repulsive force. Alternatively, due to their reversed causality, the
radiation pressure setup by radiating tachyons would cause a pull
towards thier source, when hitting or passing through the same
objects. They setup an attraction (negative radiation pressure),
rather than a repulsion. And that attraction is what we experience as
the force of gravity.

Thus, these specail tachyons can be described as constituting a
monopole field macroscopically, in accord with a Classical Newtonian
vector-field, applied locally; as causing the overall warping of
spacetime described by the Riemannian geometry of Einstein's theory
of General Relativity (which is equivalent to Newtonian gavity at its
weak-field limit); and as compatible with M-Theory, since they
explain how it is that gravity can be so weak in our brane, but very
strong in another brane (according to the latest M-Theory ideas).

Conclusion: Gravity is faster-than-light, and is therefore a
tachyonic force.


************


That ended my comments to that juncture, and they appear to have
angered Merlin so much that he posted quite a lengthy and insulting
response; taking issue with most of what I said, ...

____________


To be continued.