[Jeltz]

Greetings,
I am an engineer from Australia with a lay interst in TOE's. I guess this interest arose because there remain a lot of unanswered questions in spite of the remarkable successes of quantum mechanics and relativity. I don't subscribe to the belief that these theories are wrong; or even not correct in their formulation;simply that they do not answer some questions that seem to be entirely reasonable ones to ask.

My view is that in the next few decades a paradigm shift will happen in physics in the same way that Newtonian physics was displaced by relativity.

My approach is simple (use the scientific method with a healthy dose of lateral thinking an intuition); take note of important experimental results; formulate (in there simplest form) important questions that relativity and quantum can't answer at present (this is harder than you think given the hand-waving and slight of hand that seems to surround these subjects).

Finally, don't try to build on exisiting TOES;but use concepts from them that make sense. For example as a lay person I am most unlikely to make a contribution to the technical detail of string theory that the thousands of people working in the area have not already considered.

Instead I start with simple formulations for theories that seem likely to answer some of the unanswered questions and work forwards until either
a) I reach a conclusion that does not fit exisiting experimental data
b) I spend too much time on it without reaching a testable prediction
c) develop a testable prediction and try to convince someone to do the experiment.

I take solace in that if the underlying base theory is not simple then it is probably not worth me finding it anyway. Given that a simple formulation exists, then I am just as likely as the next person to think of it!

I leave you with a question. Why is the formulation of relativity assymetric in space-time?

A formulation with 4 spatial dimensions and four time dimensions seems to make much more sense. That way the equations naturally and symmetrically exist in 4 dimensions where each dimension is defined by a complex plane (complex in the mathematical sense (a+ix))

Relativity is a description of one of 8 assymetric subsets of this space; four identical subsets contain 3 real number spatial dimensions and one imaginary (time dimension) (as we observe our own to be) and four of which contain 3 time dimensions and one spatial dimension.

This formulation provides a natural place for all that missing antimatter to hide (in the four time-dominant spaces), and indeed a lot of the dark matter that astronomers seem to go on about might hide away in the other three space-dominant subsets equivalent to ours.

I also point out that complex number theory is the simplest domain which mathematicians have found to talk about wave theory and so it is likely that quantum mechanics will also formulate well in this dimesnionality.

I speculate that the quantum vaccum (virtual particles etc) we see is in fact very real particles travelling at an angle to our universe that intersect one or more of our dimensions in a transient manner (appear and disappear). I am hoping this will lead to testable predictions for the spectrum of quantum fluctuation frequencies and amplitudes in the vacuum. It also means that these fluctuations may not be totally uniform in space and time (anyone for Casmir experiments in low gravity?)

Regards, Jeltz

[Guille]

hi, I wellcome you.

I like yopur point of view in not-using existing big-developed TOEs because the probability is too low of you finding something. Many people here think that I try to find sometihng strign theory and research no it. But no. I only support the theory and blieve it is the highest probable to become the TOE. Although maybe strign theory wouldn't be a such-as-good TOE as we are expecting to have one. I work on my own TOE because of this.