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Originally Posted by baudrunner Any supplementary ideas? |
None. Sorry!
Not being a physicist, I have to rely on the community of scientists to do the heavy lifting. My growing dissatisfaction with cosmology over the years has been especially frustrating because I don't have a leg to stand on--to the folks at the frontiers of high energy physics, my dopey intuition that dark matter and MOND, etc. seem inelegant and wrong would mean very little. What do I know?
So when one of their own (Mayer) spoke up with a plausible (and elegant! and testable!) theory which eliminates these kludges, I was pretty excited. My enthusiasm for the ideas remains undimmed, but the lack of peer-reviewed publication
has dimmed somewhat my confidence that the theory is as solid as it appears to my layman's eyes. (Especially considering that the idea goes back to at least 2000, where he presented a poster at a meeting of American Physical Society entitled "Multidimensional Time Simplifies General Relativity." In the intervening years he has published nothing and collaborated with no one, according to the best info I can find.) Like I said, until the folks who can do the math and who know the field have chimed in, all I really have is my dopey intuition.
In any event, I've been scouring the net for more info since I first saw the story, because of my excitement. As a direct result of that search, I ran across this thread, at which time a couple things occurred to me. The first was that no one posting here seemed to be aware of the history of Mayer's presence on the Stanford website, and were therefore unaware that the disappearance seems to be something altogether less innocuous than the commonplace effect of getting slashdotted. So I posted what I knew about that, along with comments about my personal concerns regarding Mayer's scholarship. The second thing that occurred to me was that this was a really interesting place. So I actually joined TOEquest, which is the only online community I've
ever joined. Which is to say, I like it here.
So, to sum up my repsponse to the two main points in your post--the quality of TOEquest (including its founders diligent and timely research), and the promise of Mayer's theory: in short, you're preaching to the choir, friend.