Counter Responses, Section 5

Merlin Wrote:
As for the "think-tank" - well, I encourage you to engage more "real
physicists" in your tank.

My Counter-Response:
OK. But how many would Merlin suggest? There are several who are
involved on an ongoing basis, and there has been some interest,
including a great deal of encouragement, by many others in the past
two years (since I started it).
Yet, in this case, I doubt the number of supportive scientists really
makes much difference to Merlin. If it is any number short of a
plurality of all mainstream physicists in the world, I imagine Merlin
would say that we are all just a bunch of crackpots anyway, because
he obviously does not want to entertain even the hypothesis that
gravity could be faster-than-light.

Merlin Wrote:
... my favorite comment of all:
Kurt said, "As for the dispute between Merlin and myself, I believe I
have demonstrated in this thread that I am owed a sincere apology. "
I cannot even begin to comment on why anyone would think that an
apology would be warranted by the rebuttal above. No cogent argument
was achieved, and, after having read the entirety of the rebuttal -
my opinion remains unchanged. Wait a sec. - was that another bit of
shenanigans from you Kurt? I think it might have been... You
intimated that you managed to foil my critical dissection of your
theory by insinuating that an apology was warranted. By using your
logic, I could easily demand such an apology from you seeing as how
your rebuttal was even less compelling than your original argument.
Oh well, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. Good luck on
your quest for tachyonic gravity.

My Counter-Response:
What a conceited blow-hard! My argument was quite "cogent". And
his "critical dissection" of my theory on gravity (which is not a
theory, but a thesis; as I have, by now, pointed out far too many
times) was given not in the least in the form of constructive
criticism, but was plainly nothing short of a rather vehement and
extensive exercise in negative, even abusive, criticism.
And why, if I am such a nobody, so ignorant, lacking in sufficient
knowledge, with no compelling argument, does such a highly
experienced and impeccably-credentialed university professor, a
Fellow with honors of the American Institute of Physics, take the
time and trouble to offer such long-winded rebuttals to the ideas I
have published on the Internet?
Is it for my own good, as he suggests? Or is it to prevent
unsuspecting readers from falling victim to my con, if that's what it
is? Or is it rather to defend the integrity of the "scientific
method"?
Please. Spare me the false heroism.
I am still owed an apology.
Yet, I will never get it, for there is something else at work here;
something unspoken, which I have only lately come to realize. It is
something that Merlin has revealed about his motives in a number of
the Freudian slips that can be detected in his words.
From such hints I have finally concluded that it is not me personally
that Merlin disapproves of, nor does he really care how much or how
little I know. It can only be the potential popularity of my ideas
that he fears. And that fear has caused him to act out of all
proportion to the frivolity he attaches to the ideas.

Subsequently, Merlin Wrote:
... your "website's math" is not at all PROOF. For someone who claims
to be a "physicist", you should know that mathematical proofs look
absolutely nothing like what you are proposing at the tachyonics
website (yes - I did visit). I particularly liked the section where
you linked the readers to a different page due to the" limited
capabilities of the word processor used to write and publish this
article on the Internet, such symbols cannot be represented in a very
accurate way here."
... the fact that your entire 7-page thesis posted on AOL Hometown
display no "higher math" speaks volumes. Given that we are talking
about the interaction of theoretical particles outside of
relativistic bounds, I would have at least expected to see some math
similar to that of, something such as this.
<http://merlinsscience.0catch.com/YI.html>

My Response:
Here, once more, Merlin is attributing a position to me that I have
never taken. Then he becomes derisive because I have not produced
what he already knew I have not produced before. He seeks proof.
But I have never offered him or anyone else empirical proof of my
ideas. There is what could be referred to as "circumstantial
evidence", for instance, for the existence of tachyons, and
convincing mathematical implications that gravity is tachyonic, but
there is no hard proof, much less any sort of evidence that someone
like Merlin will take as indisputable at this time; because, like the
vast majority of today's mainstream physicists, he seemingly does not
want tachyonic gravity to be true, no matter what!
And, due to the fact that he has already embraced a certain
conceptualization of how gravity works, sufficient to support his own
view of the way things are, I suspect that he will never acknowledge
the possibility that tachyonic gravity may be proven someday (despite
his preferences), and he will probably continue to deny even the
suggestion that gravity could be faster-than-light until some group
of physicists he cannot belittle comes along with the kind of proof
that he is demanding; at which, I further suspect, instead of
changing his mind, dismissing his previous views and taking as
scientific fact the proven case, he will, I now bet, experience
something like a nervous breakdown - because his world view, the
one he as been staking his reputation on, and teaching/preaching all
these years, along with that of many of his peers, will thereby have
been completely shattered!
There are, to be sure, ongoing experiments, and others which are
planned, that are recognized as the most advanced efforts at
determining the most accurate form of the quantum theory of gravity.
The top few were discussed recently in the article "Quantum Gravity
Faces Reality", by Lee Smolin, [of the Perimeter Institute for
Theoretical Physics (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada)], in Physics Today
magazine, the November 2006 issue, pages 44 - 48.
The blurb for the article reads:
"String theory is only one of many approaches to quantizing general
relativity. Increasingly, all of those approaches will be judged by
how well they accord with experimental data."
I take such information very seriously, and try to keep abreast of
the latest developments. Note too that several of the coming
experiments Smolin mentions could result in a re-examination of how
we represent quantum gravity, and I would go so far as to suggest
that this may very-well result in the conclusion that gravity is
superluminal in nature, and that its quanta could even be described
by the kind of tachyons I propose in my thesis.
I shall therefore go out on a limb here, and make the following
prediction, which Merlin can take as someday bringing to a close our
debate on whether or not my ideas are valid. I predict that more
than one of these experiments (and others besides) will soon prove
beyond doubt that gravity is indeed tachyonic, and that this proof
will become undisputed no later than 50 years from now, but will be
embraced by the vast majority of physicists world-wide within the
next 5 years. Yet, I am willing also to say that I believe these
experiments will start to be recognized by the experimentors as
leading them in that direction within the next few months! [Some few
of which may even begin publishing their findings, in that regard, if
they are brave enough to do so.]
That should be soon enough for Merlin.
If, within the next few years, therefore, reports from the
researchers involved in at least two of the experiments mentioned in
Smolin's article do not state that the data being collected could be
interpreted as indicating a tachyonic representation format for the
most empirical quantum theory of gravity (even if my version of the
representation is not embraced), then I admit now that I have been
wrong about it all along. But if those reports confirm instead that
what I have been saying is probably true (that gravity is tachyonic),
then that will prove that it was Merlin who was wrong, and that he
will indeed owe me a sincere apology.
But I conjecture on future events. Let us return to the present.
To be as facetious as he, I am glad he "liked" it when I directed
readers at my site to another online source, due to the limits of my
software. As I said before, I am not a wealthy man, and I do not
have unlimited resources with which to buy equipment. I am a
moderate-income working-man, and devote my spare time to this
research as a hobby. So, I can only afford to direct so much time
and money to it. Thus, I simply have to do what I can with what I've
got, until I can afford to get something better.
And if that is not good enough for Merlin, well then all I can think
of to say to that is something politically incorrect.


More to come.