Some years ago, quite by accident, I found myself making a foray into the arcane world of quantum gravity. At the time I had no grandiose intention of looking into this problem; the whole thing seemed well beyond me. I could not, however, avoid circumstances that conspired to ping into my head some ideas that looked to me as though they were worth pursuing and I just couldn’t resist following them into the unknown! I ended up writing this self-published book about my explorations [published Nov 2004]. I saw little point in my wasting a lot of emotional effort and time trying to get the book published by unwilling established publishers. I wanted to get the project off my desk and clear that desk for my next project. Print On Demand provided the solution. Thanks to AuthorsOnline I got my ISBN number at break neck speed and now my ideas are well and truly committed to the one way street of history.
The story of just how all this came about can be found in an essay I posted as one of my very first posts of this blog.
The paper I have linked to above is a much shorter rendition of the book. In 2011 I revisited the arguments in the book and found a cleaner and more direct approach to the subject. The paper is only 18 pages long – about 8300 words, as opposed to the book’s 48,000 words and 300 equations. (However, the book does contain many insights that I was unable to incorporate into a short paper.)
I have no connections with academia and have little familiarity with the paths they are treading. I’m an independent hobbyist with enough time on his hands to escape the humdrum exigencies of existence by exploring some fascinating trails into the unknown. Understandably, academia can be affronted and even hostile toward independents outside of their culture who have the audacity to dabble in their very own subject. After all there are, as we well know, many anti-establishment cranks and conspiracy theorists out there on whom academia should not be wasting its precious time. Consequently, I've kept my contact with them to a bare minimum. But as I remember Fred Hoyle once putting it so well: Some people regard a domain of knowledge as their personal property! That kind of all too human fault can be found on all sides and even academia has its own eccentricities
It is unlikely that I’ve “solved the problem”, so to speak. I'm sure there are professional academics out there who could tell me why my proposed "solution" doesn't work. In the meantime ignorance is bliss; I have to admit that I still find the basic ideas I stumbled upon neat and compelling (I suppose I would say that!). No new gravitational particle has to be invented: Gravity is a fairly natural outcome of relativistic quantum mechanics. The quantum waves of matter naturally affect one another via a nonlinearity that modifies the space-time metric. I was even inexorably lead into the subject of dark matter and and dark energy. I touch upon these subjects in the paper, thus blazing a trail (or a garden path more like) from the micro world of quantum theory to the macro world of the cosmos!
Note: The picture published above comes from http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18357-ghost-galaxies-may-haunt-the-milky-way.html
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