Hats off to Doug!
I just wanted to take a moment to says hats off to the Stand-up Physicist Doug Sweetser (He's always tipping his to us!) Doug your work, motivation, and sense of humor have made my personal journey back into these technical matters a thrilling ride. I've remembered and (learned) so damn many cool things by watching you on YouTube and then joining up here at VisualPhysics.org.
I am starting a grass roots organization here in Charlotte NC (UNC Charlotte) and attempting to get students involved with this work. There are many talented minds at the physics and optical science dept. that are open enough too at least explore this content (GEM) and give it a chance. The Greatest attribute of GEM is that it can be tested experimentally, so it's real physics! I may even be able to pull off a talk for you to host (and it shouldn't cost you $600), maybe just hotel fees and three squares. Maybe we could even get some of the string people over here from Chapel Hill so you can take "the sissors" to their theory.
__________________
Lowell
Hello Lowell:
This post made my evening!
It is great to be excited, but we must keep a giant block of salt on hand. The two things to test - bending light to second order parameterized post-Newtonian accuracy and the polarization of gravity waves - will not be done in the next decade. They are very tough to do, and other signals could swamp them. Granted, when I first figured these out (2002? an analysis of sci.physics.research could pin it down), I honestly thought that going to meetings and saying "here is a theory that makes predictions [unlike work with strings]" would be enough to get people excited.
I make presentations at 3 or 4 meetings a year. It is my experience that such a claim does not raise an eyebrow. The reason is that physics is so demanding, people feel comfortable in their own math neighborhood. If you train and get skilled with gravity, that means general relativity, a rank 2 theory. Along the way, there will be an exercise or two on why a rank 1 theory cannot do the job. Every serious/employed gravity worker does variations on general relativity. There is a large number of fringe people who claim to have done "undisputable proof to the Unification of Electricity and Gravity with Einstein’s E=mc^2 The True Energy formula E = mQ^2" [I got this URL today, and as is my practice, clicked away a critiqued, filed under fringe].
My last two talks (the national APS meeting in Denver, and a local APS meeting in Boston), where to a room of fringe physicists. Eight of the nine slides dealt with the algebra. The final slide dealt with the visualphysics.org web site. All the questions were about the site. The decision to invest in the moving picture show appears wise - people can get excited by that.
You point out something - there are just too many cool things going on when you kick around the details of this proposal. I wish I could force one of those well-educated folks to calculate the divergence of the Christoffel symbol of the Rosen metric, and when they get charge over R, do they think that is a happy coincidence? Such people would have plenty of other criteria though, other hoops that must be jumped through.
I should return to putting up animations of polynomials. There is so much to do, so little time - exactly the combination that keeps professional physicists from kicking this body of work around. A viral visual might seduce them sometime. Thanks for the words of encouragement.
Doug