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What's the purpose of the new category The parent category's goal is to present forums, from time-to-time, that are focused on a specific book, theory, lecture, and other areas of work that seem credible, have substance, and are worthy of discussion. The author of such works will be invited to participate in these discussions. The material will be available for review and study by ToeQuest members to gain new knowledge, insight, and to draw on the author and other members for key insights. Books may occasionally need to be purchased and ToeQuest will attempt to obtain discounts for ToeQuest members.
What's this Forum About I have come across some information that I think will make a great first "Review & Study" forum. The material is the basis for a new book to be released in 2006 by Alexander Franklin Mayer. The book is titled, "The Many Directions of Time". The study material is based on a single underlying idea: that time is not a single dimension of spacetime but rather a local geometric distinction in spacetime. The material for study consists of the following:
Posting Guidelines All discussions should be related to the study material. When you start a thread you may make general comments about the material but if you go into specifics you must include a reference so others can refer to the material. A reference can be something like this: "A Simple Experiment", Lecture 1, Page 45. and should appear near the top of your starting post. If you post to a thread, try and keep the discussion on the original topic. If the topic relates to another area of the lectures that you wish to discuss, you can state what the relationship is and provide a link to a new thread that you initiate on the related topic.
"I'm going on a TOE Quest!"
Last edited by Robert : 08-06-2006 at 02:17 AM.
Reason: Fixed links and added image copyright
His work deserves attention.. -
02-07-2006, 08:48 PM
I have printed the short intro to Alexander Mayer's lectures, saved the first lecture and read most of it. I find it lucid and insightful. It has even cleaned up bits of the clutter of some those unresolved matters in the recesses of my brain that have been patiently awaiting more input, such as that concerning the status of the Voyager and Pioneer missions. It is also a beautiful work, and worthy of the 18 megabytes of hard disk space that I have allocated it to.
I have some comments about the anomolous inconsistencies concerning expectations of GR, with respect to GPS accuracy. This is especially relevant to my experience because I have the ability to study the numbers that GPS data provides me, which I read from the computer in the taxi which provides my current source of income. In addition to the six decimal place precision of latitude and longitude I am also provided with the number that represents the number of satellites which contribute to that information at any given time, and which changes constantly. In that each satellite represents a unique vector contributing relative velocity and relative direction to the base line calculations one can imagine the complexity involved in the accumulation of data triangulated from all those sources and subsequently analysed mathematically to provide me with the information that supposedly determines my position to within a few feet. Well, I can tell you that it does not do this with the accuracy that it would in the ideal world and I suspect that that is why many GPS guided missiles used in Desert Storm would no doubt have missed their mark altogether had their intelligence not been supplemented by optical recognition technology, of that I am certain. That is not to belittle the GPS technology in the least because I am certain that its application is of more than sufficient accuracy to find lost souls and save lives, not to mention dispatch the closest taxicab to the location of its next fare, once that feature is implemented in our particular system. Let it not go unsaid that we currently do indeed have the capability, just not the application as yet.
Apart from the fact that the complexities of determining actual ground position are highly challenging anyway and the fact that corrections are made to the onboard clocks of all those satellites to compensate for the weaker gravity where they are located and also their velocity there must be additional surmountable factors which contribute to the anomalies which the experts have been puzzling over concerning discrepency between the predicted and the actual and they involve not just the means used to decipher the information, in spite of the fact that we do not live in a Euclidian Universe where Heisenberg is not constantly looking over our shoulders, and in order to determine with absolute precision one's place on this curved surface we cannot afford to overlook any and all contributing variables leading to the successful outcome of that exercise. Once we have resolved all of the outstanding issues that will allow us to derive the correct numbers we will no doubt have inadvertently met a major milestone in the development of the TOE as well, for it obviously requires a deeper understanding of the nature of reality than the scientific community now has.
"There is nothing permanent except change"
Last edited by baudrunner : 02-07-2006 at 08:52 PM.
Reason: content
I tried to access all of the above, but was greeted with Access Forbidden. I don't know if my computer is polluted with God knows what, or is that what others are experiencing as well. Who knows what garbage I pick up when I look for images in the gallery? As you can tell, I really don't want to know.
Have you read the book already, Robert? Where are you cruising the net to come up with such cool stuff, and I come back with corrupted programs? I swear, I only look up scientific topics.
The many directions of time, what a perfect title for a book. I have known for over 15 years, that time is only a perspective of a viewer. What great wording for the idea: "That time is not a single dimension of spacetime but rather a local geometric distinction in spacetime."
I have known for a long time, that there is no now, only future. Everything is in motion, always changing. Our evoluting universe is in constant change. The time factor in equations would be better served, as direction.
Oh! The great illusion of now. Will we finally bid itfarewell.
I tried to access all of the above, but was greeted with Access Forbidden. I don't know if my computer is polluted with God knows what, or is that what others are experiencing as well. Who knows what garbage I pick up when I look for images in the gallery? As you can tell, I really don't want to know.
Have you read the book already, Robert? Where are you cruising the net to come up with such cool stuff, and I come back with corrupted programs? I swear, I only look up scientific topics.
The website is down and I expect others are having the same problem. Could be due to a surge in traffic that was over burdening their servers. I expect this to be a temporary problem. I haven't read the lectures yet, but was hoping to do so this weekend. The actual book is not yet published, but should be out sometime this year. I've tried to contact the author but have not succeeded so far.
I have experienced no problems accessing any of the discussions, but I have an advantage that I will share with you. It's DSL. Sometimes I am unable to access the TOEquest website altogether after I power up, check my email, peruse some interesting sites and then make the attempt to log into TOEquest. Oddly enogh, I get a URL not found type of error message. I resolve that problem by connecting to my DSL modem configuration page and disconnecting, then reconnecting. This changes my IP address, and this allows me to start from a new slate. I then find the TOEquest site, no problem. Those of you who have "always on" connections, such as cable or Tn lines should either reboot your cable modem or your computer if this happens to you. DSL is great for this because spyware can't find you if it assumes that your IP address has been established as nn.nn.nnn.nnn and you've changed it to xx.xx.xxx.xxx. Hackers go crazy trying to track you down. Dial-up works the same way.
The only explanation I have for the problems that people are experiencing is that some form of cyber-terrorism is going on. Obviously we at TOEquest must be on to a real understanding of the fundamental nature of reality and the powers that be seek to deny us this knowledge. It is time to join in the spirit of solidarity and unite. Fight the enemy. Clean up your computers with anti-spyware and anti-trojan and anti-adware and anti-virus tools, switch your browser to Mozilla Firefox (Netscape 8.1) with built in anti spy-ware protection, get DSL, do whatever it takes but stay together! We must fight the enemy, even if he is our friend! First amendment rules!
I must add that once you are logged on and connected to TOEquest dot com you should be alright because the vBulletin software is outstanding, it deletes its cookies when you log out and it provides a secure environment for doing what we like to do most. I do suggest that just before you log on, delete all your cookies and clear your cache. Very important. I always follow this procedure.
"There is nothing permanent except change"
Last edited by baudrunner : 02-10-2006 at 07:33 PM.
Reason: addendum
I have been trying to figure this out since the slashdot story (on the 4th?). (In fact, my search for more info is what led me to TOEQuest). Like others, my impression of the lecture is very positive. But upon looking for more information about the author, I began to sense some unease. There are zero citations in peer-reviewed journals by him, at least that I could find. The two citations that I have seen were for a poster he presented as an undergrad in 2000, and a presentation at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in December of 2005. I will be the first to admit that this says nothing, really, about the merit of his theory. But I am definitely curious to know why he has not published, and why he has chosen to make a public presentation of the work before publishing.
At least as troubling is this sudden disappearance. I was able to go to his site on Feb. 7th, but the next day when I went to grab the link again, to send to a friend, the site was down. Also, he was listed on the Stanford Physics Dep't. website as a Visiting Professor as late as the 7th, but is no longer there ("Updated: February 8, 2006"). Notably, it appears his association with Stanford had just begun, as he is also not listed in the most recent Wayback Machine archive of that same page, from last semester. This is quite a bit more intriguing than just his site getting slashdotted!
I am looking forward to finding out just exactly is happening, because on the surface, this seems like genuinely interesting, possibly very important work. But the circumstances surrounding the appearance and sudden disappearance of AF Mayer and his material is not especially encouraging.
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If you check the dates of AF Mayer's web publications you will see that Robert is right on top of current events in the field of new physics because those publications are very contemporary, ie. late '05 and early '06. We are fortunate to be among the first to be exposed to Mayer's ideas because of his diligence. You are linked to a quality site, my friend. And, incidentally, it appears that Mayer may have discovered the heartbeat of the Universe. Any supplementary ideas?
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.
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forward into knowledge. -
02-06-2006, 11:00 AM
"There is nothing permanent except change" 
02-09-2006, 09:15 PM
Linear Mode
