Crackpot or not crackpot?

There’s a good chance that every physicist has had a healthy dose of self-doubt. Established academics reaching into new territory, and amateurs alike, should have the quiet voice of the devil's advocate challenging them with the meaning of this question from time to time:

A little of this is healthy. It is the 'Imposter Syndrome'.

What is a crackpot?

The Crackpot Physicist is someone, who (optionally knowing that their work is poor) elevates the importance of their own work to that of the famous names in physics, and perhaps writes to all the living ones to ask them what they think. They are also prone to reading the Crackpot Index [Baez] and then hastily editing their own work to remove casual references to Einstein. Note that the last sentence is one of the very few places that I have written that name — the irony of self-reference is not lost on me there. I’m also aware that if I keep writing that word (“cr...pot”), or if this article is sought-out enough, then that word will become associated with my website in search engines. If you’re reading this, I’ve decided to brave that possibility.

So you’re probably wondering whether the work on this site falls into the Crackpot definition. Your expectation is likely to be that my work is really two steps further towards Crackpot than I am prepared to admit here. But this is a necessary evil with developing works, until they reach the goal of reconciling quantitatively with established physics. This aspect, of requiring mathematical parity with established theory or measured observations, is a basic requirement for good scientists and advocates of the scientific method. It holds their hand, guiding a scientist through the uncertain jungle paths of the Imposter Syndrome.

It’s very likely that an amateur physicist is ignorant of the basis and strange nature of quantum mechanics, through lack of reading, or because they are blind to inconvenient truths. This creates conflicts and difficulties when such authors have already made an investment of time and emotion in their own ideas. It difficult for an author to rewind and have the courage to demolish something built with great care, albeit on unsound foundations.

What are we doing?

So far, my work fails to meet my own criteria for a good scientific work. I believe my ideas are sound, and that I’m finding a reasonable explanation for almost every unintuitive aspect of quantum mechanics as emergent from my mechanism (the good part), but it is lacking in the mathematical proof that confirms correspondence with accepted measurements of reality and The Standard Model (which, although flawed in some area, does work to a high degree of accuracy in its best areas, so is to be worked with rather than dismissed [FAQ 3]).

When I was recently asked, “What are you doing this for? What are you trying to achieve?”, my answer was that I was not satisfied by the abstractions adopted in standard literature: they work, but in addition to the known lack of unification with gravity, they do not provide a satisfactory description of reality, nor a fundamental process that implicitly generates the quantum mechanical model. Abstractions are useful, but they sit uncomfortably with me, because they should be abstractions of something traceable. We’re aiming to describe reality as a collection of fundamental things that are the same. Rather than assuming the most fundamental building blocks of matter to be The Standard Model's fundamental parts (a set of fermions, of three generations or flavours, and matter/anti-matter, along with some bosons that represent the interactions between the fermions), we should be looking deeper to find something possibly far simpler, say a fundamental object with a minimum of variables, which can be combined in a simple process to produce the particles and radiation known to The Standard Model.

Do we score any crackpot points?

The above ticks one box in Baez’s Crackpot Index:

I appreciate that most models have gaps in their pictures, and some deal with only one aspect of a foundational duality, so we cannot expect this of most models.

Elsewhere I’ve written about the accidental choice of interest areas in mainstream cutting-edge research, and the institutional reluctance to engage foundational physics. I think I might have dodged earning 40 points here, because I have written about the subject feeling under-represented, rather than my work being unheard:

I hope the context of my arguments is enough to satisfy readers that I am not worthy of the above 50 points.

Finally

By most definitions, my work is not of scientific standard: it remains a collection of workable ideas. Until I have developed my ideas to the rigour demanded by science, I regard my work as ‘not good enough’. Until then, I share what I have done so far, along with the research warning that tells people not to let this disrupt their formal learning. It is welcomed in some competent (but admittedly still fringe) groups in academia, and I use this as an opportunity to formally share the ideas, to have them published where someone else might pick them up and find some use for them. By its nature, my work is under-developed, speculative, and I bear the risk that it might be Wrong (or ‘not even wrong’).

In my introduction, I say that the basis of the model ‘needs a different approach from convention’, which certainly should ring alarm bells. However, my rethink is one that demands a view on the way that the simplest entities express themselves as reality: how waves propagate and collapse, what they’re doing when they’re not being measured or interacting, and how systems can have hidden variables without complying with the framework that implies Bell inequalities. In other words, we do not fall into the frequently-visited naivety traps when we seek explanations for well-documented aspects of physics. On the other hand, this too could be viewed as delusional!

Generally, if one is worried that one might be a crackpot, then one might indeed be guilty of being one. This does not exclude the possibility that someone who is adamant that they are not crackpot is more likely to be crackpot. Most likely, a non-crackpot is someone who does not think about it much, has no need to address the question, and produces good useful work.

Having ideas is not necessarily an indication of a Crackpot. A Crackpot is someone who has ideas that have no hope of reconciling with reality but who promotes the work as good science.

I certainly hope that if my work has flaws, then someone will be kind enough to point this out.