Several facts about this paper are huge red flags even without reading it in detail:
* Single author
* No affiliation
* Not peer-reviewed
* Claims to trivially solve a huge problem on a few pages
* Barely contains any math except for some basic equations that are known to undergrads
If the solution is so simple, why hasn't anyone thought of it and why won't anyone recognize this paper? How do you answer this question without resorting to some conspiracy theory in which a shadowy elite a.k.a "the establishment" suppresses progress for nebulous reasons?
And lastly one question on the actual subject: the paper claims that as a consequence there is no expansion and no big bang. The most obvious question that arises immediately is: how do you explain the CMB? The fact that author has not preemptively answered this crucial question already tells me that this is not worth my time.
The pdf version is somehow showing a date in 2021, although this is clearly a 1997 preprint. SemanticStrength's reply to you also implies this was written in the 90s. The PDF has the 1997 date on the clickable link back to the arxiv, so there is some time-travel going on that I do not understand.
The date of the preprint is important context, for reasons I'll return to at the end, wrt your point about the CMB.
That's your parent comment's complaint, isn't it? I do not know if it was peer-reviewed. I don't expect the paper to gain much traction with anyone in 2022 since it advocates abandoning local Lorentz covariance (which is exceptionally well tested, directly, in our solar system), so I don't feel any desire to play Reviewer 2 today. I have a handful of comments below, though.
Hardly unknown in this field. Also hardly unknown for an instutionally employed author to omit an affiliation for unstated reasons (or even accidentally), which appears to be the case here. See also the later preprint's affiliation of Weisterstrass Institute, Berlin[1]. And, if there is any doubt, <https://archive.wias-berlin.de/receive/wias_mods_00000235>.
> Barely contains any math except for some basic equations
I'd love to meet the people who think §3 is basic stuff.
> known to undergrads
I spent more minutes than I care to admit hunting down p.14's "well known Lagrangian". In another preprint [1] the author gives a reference for it as Rosen, Ann. of Phys. vol. 22, nr. 1, pp. 1-11, 1963. Which, it turns out, corresponds to https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/0003-4916(63)9029... at eqn (13), which the author has rewritten in modern notation.
I would say, at the very least, that it isn't something expected to be known by undergrads.
> Claims to trivially solve a huge problem on a few pages
Also hardly unknown in this field. Sometimes successful, even, although I think it's more common that short papers tend to reveal or create huge problems instead.
In the broadest sense the idea is not entirely insane for 1997. Starting with a continuum theory acting on a fixed background, then quantizing that into a QFT, is a frequently-used approach. Lattice QCD was all the rage, so "de-continuumizing" the resulting QFT doesn't strike me as particularly bad. Claiming results on a lattice hold up as we take the lattice spacing to zero was very 1990s.
Where things go off the rails is in §5: "The conclusion is very non-trivial: we have to choose this non-relativistic theory as the best available theory of quantum gravity. That means, the relativistic paradigm has to be rejected. Instead, we have to use pre-relativistic ether-theoretical metaphysics." That would have been an impossibly hard sell to a 1997 journal editor, just for tone. For reviewers, it is not clear they would agree this point is supported by the preceeding sections. For potential reviewers in 2022, the core approach itself and the other arguments raised in the Discussion section have been overtaken by other developments, notably in numerical relativity and numerical methods for quantum gravity.
I have no idea whether the author submitted it to a journal or not, or even planned to do so without further work. I don't think SemantincStrength or you knows either. However, it is not "the first valid cannonical quantization of Gravity" (as SemanticStrength wrote), by three decades. (Bergmann, 1966; DeWitt, 1967 -- DeWitt is what you find in textbooks and DeWitt is also what you find in [6] of the preprint SemanticStrength took us to).
> how do you explain the CMB? The fact that the author has not preemptively answered this crucial question already tells me this is not worth my time.
You took time anyway, as did I. I don't buy the novel arguments raised in the preprint, but I have twenty-five years of history accumulated since it was written. Speaking of since it was written, the first data from BOOMERanG was in 1997 with 2000 data being acutely relevant; MAXIMA wasn't until 1998, so even coarse knowledge about the anisotropies arguably postdates this 1997 preprint. I don't think you can lean on COBE's primary findings (or anything earlier) without further developing your objection. \Lambda-CDM was very new when the author was writing this preprint. It was not even the favoured model until the discovery of the accelerated expansion in 1998 (High-Z, SCP).
Finally, I think we have conflated SemanticStrength's comments with the content of the preprint, and perhaps only because the preprint is in numerous places rather forceful in tone.
- --
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0104013v1 (2001 but dated 2011) p.5, "There are Lagrangians which are not strong covariant but have covariant Euler-Lagrange equations, like the well known Rosen Lagrangian [20]. This is a consequence of the fact that the Lagrangian is not uniquely defined by its Euler-Lagrange equations. But the Rosen Lagrangian is a well known GR Lagrangian too." Emphasis mine. Also, O RLY.
I don't have time to comment in any detail on this new link (or to peruse it, although I did read Appendix H.3 with some care), other than to say that it is a better read (and more professional) than the 1997 preprint you supplied earlier. I don't know Advances in Applied Clifford Algebras, but I hope that was a good choice for the author.
It does bother me though that the journal reproduces the latest preprint's typo "exteriour bundle" (superfluous u) in the second sentence of the second paragraph of the article. This is hardly a ringing endorsement of Springer quality on a "transformative journal" which is trying to squeeze out of authors 2300 euros in article-processing charges... https://sci-hub.se/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007... (for the published version)
> What is motivating your interest in Schmelzer's papers?
Isn't it obvious..
I am looking for meaningful, potent advances in physics.
I am looking for the code of the universe: a coherent unified theory of everything.
I am looking for a concrete resolution of quantum gravity which current status is a gigantic failure.
I am looking for a theory that advance cosmological modeling.
For insights about the singularities or even their non existence (see frozen stars) and most importantly for an epistemic and causal interpretation of quantum mechanics and credible sub-quantum (including hidden variables) theories.
While I have no problem finding significant progress in Medecine topics, in physics I have much less expertise and the technical issues or progress towards those issues are much less googlable.
There is this meme that physics do not progress on its major open problems since the 90s and that is true to a big extent. One of the reason being that there has been potentially very significant advances, like e.g this concrete Lorentz theory of gravity but 1) I can't find them and 2) they do not receive attention by the community, therefore the community and those theories do not progress.
You're interested in Schmelzer's papers. The author has a colourful website <https://ilja-schmelzer.de/> on which he solicits comment and provides an email link. I think you should feel reasonably welcome to send a brief initial hello and a couple of questions about his work. Additionally, he might have some ideas on your point (1), beyond the reference sections of his various papers. He might also have some thoughts on (2), which could turn out to be related to what I see as a remarkable contrast between his 1997 preprint's Discussion section and the final paragraph before Appendix A in his 2012 publication.
the easy thing to understand is: papers claiming to solve gravity cannonical quantization are few. In fact this is very likely the only one out there. (others would ditch QM and go full classical)
So if it was a scam, the scientific community would have a lot of resources to analyze and properly refute it.
However despite being ~ the only paper making this claim, and this claim being the main issue of quantum mechanics and a theory of everything, there is no excuse for the scientific community to ignore it.
But it has and keeps being ignored since the 90s. Even no forums except me mention it.
The thing is, yes this author make big claims. He is not a fraud, see e.g. his other papers. but he might make too high claim and his paper might have mistakes. At the same time, the scientific community is mediocre on average (much more than malevolent) and he has been wrongly ignored, like many other extremely potent results I know of.
I generally believe quantum research is extremely siloed and has NIH syndrome + the sunk cost fallacy. Quantum loop gravity and string theory aren't going anywhere and its been ~50 years since their formulation.
Independent researchers have a higher propensity of saying bullshit and also have a much higher propensity of thinking outside of the normative box and disrupt it, see e.g. physics research in the 20th century.
As a reminder Einstein refused peer review. I'm not advocating against peer review but it is not absolutely necessary to bring consideration to a paper.
Also, variations of classical gravity has already shown huge potential with MOND.
moreover it is so simple because his works build upon the work of giants such as Lorentz and Poincare.
> how do you explain the CMB?
The author has not to explained every subtopics of his theory though. He has an interesting result solving the whormhole information loss paradox though, which is huge.
Scientifically, there is very strong evidence to says that parkinson, alzheimer and cancer are mostly solved problems.
Nobody knows this because most of the scientific research is siloed.
The concept of meta-researcher, someone that actively research the research is almost inexistant, otherwise I wouldn't be the only person on the internet to cite thoses papers on major issues on forums (I have checked)
You have to understand that scientific papers in quantum mechanics have on average 0.93 citations. Now consider then most of the citations a paper get are from a future paper from the author himself, or from the same organization. I don't have numbers on that propensity but it seems credible to me that ~80% of papers have 0 citations outside of the organization/friends.
Does that means we have to discard ~80% of scientific knowledge ? No.
That means there is much more scientific revolutions to find in the past (even more for the pre internet era) that there is in the future. 1) because of the diminishing returns of the search space and 2) because most of the pearls have been consistently ignored. Some of the pearls are frauds or mistakes, and the rest are sleeping revolutions waiting to be woke by the few meta-researchers like me. Unfortunately, I do not have the media power to give them enough recognition so the best I get are the self fullfilling prophety of "nobody has analyzed it so I won't take my time to analyze it"
While (true) { /* do nothing */ }
More generally, I like to observe the reality that scientific research is "frozen". There is no public issue tracker for methodically tracking progress. Imagine a technical github-like repository (but with collaborative issue editing like on wikipedia) where we could observe in real time, with sub-threads, progress of the search space on major scientific problems. You could have an issue "implement quantum cannonical quantization" as a sub issue of quantum gravity and this link should receive major attention there. Except no, scientific research is not methodological progress driven globally, only miserably internally to some extent, by siloed organizations. Which is the reason mankind progress so slowly.
One day I will die and those things will not have changed much.
* Single author
* No affiliation
* Not peer-reviewed
* Claims to trivially solve a huge problem on a few pages
* Barely contains any math except for some basic equations that are known to undergrads
If the solution is so simple, why hasn't anyone thought of it and why won't anyone recognize this paper? How do you answer this question without resorting to some conspiracy theory in which a shadowy elite a.k.a "the establishment" suppresses progress for nebulous reasons?
And lastly one question on the actual subject: the paper claims that as a consequence there is no expansion and no big bang. The most obvious question that arises immediately is: how do you explain the CMB? The fact that author has not preemptively answered this crucial question already tells me that this is not worth my time.