June 17, 1999
James Siepmann is the creator of the Journal of Theoretics, and has gained a certain amount of publicity recently through a not-wholly-flattering article in Science (see the journal). He contacted me, opening with "I ran across your website and I swear we must have been twins separated at birth". This, unfortunately, has turned out to be a delusion. It is just one more quirk of human nature: when we have a pet idea, we easily delude ourselves at first that others share it, as I have frequently found to my cost! It turns out that he is one of the many whose view of the universe has been shaped by a corrupted version of Einstein's, full of mass, gravity and photons but with no electromagnetism and no possibility of making sense.
Our second exchange of email has led me to write the following (June 17, 1999):
Subject: Fact, theory, logic ...
Dear Jim
I'm afraid we are poles apart. My initial reaction was that your site might be a useful forum, but, reading your Space and Observation article, I do not trust your powers of logic!
I doubt very much if it is possible to construct a logical cosmology from your premises. I do not find your assumption that Space density is relative plausible. I cannot see why you do not treat distance the same way you treat time: if time has to be absolute to make everything dovetail at the beginning and end of the Universe, why not distance also?
As I said in an earlier message, I doubt the existence of black holes. Did you know that the whole idea of the bending of light by gravity is suspect? See Paul Marmet's paper (which I have not yet read) about the evidence for bending of light by the Sun, at http://www.NewtonPhysics.on.ca/ . In fact, your whole approach seems to be building (as I also said before) on some of the least plausible features of Einstein's work, without regard to the real world.
The absolute top priority at this point in time is the critical review of what we really know about the real world. Endless derivations from existing theory without tying it into new knowledge and correcting errors due to erroneous interpretations of old data is just counting angels on the heads of pins!
New abstract theories have their place, but I am, personally, not prepared to risk my sanity by studying any based on premises that I know at the outset to be false.
The whole aim of the journal is impractical: Why insist on ideas being "new"? Good ideas are going to be discovered simultaneously by many people. May I suggest that you adopt instead aims closer to those of the Center for Frontier Sciences (http://www.temple.edu/cfs). I quote the following from their journal, "Frontier Perspectives":
I have just this morning received my copy. The article that caught my attention was by Robert Stirniman: "The Wallace Inventions, Spin Aligned Nuclei, the Gravitomagnetic Field, and the Tampere `Gravity-Shielding' Experiment: Is there a Connection?" Excellent! Gives all the references you could ask for, all the facts he can find. Though not all articles can be this good, they probably all have more scientific content than yours.
All I can hope is that you can attract a few papers of this calibre, to counter a somewhat shaky start!
Yours Caroline