Perfectly Imperfect Mirrors

A new review system for high-risk high-reward scientific proposals

Scientific advancement includes two types: one is incremental and the other is transformative. The incremental one is typically consists of conservative small improvements based on widely agreed frameworks or principles. Obviously, effort of this type is easy to gain support from the community. Contrarily, the transformative one involves disruptive / unorthodox ideas which more often lie outside of the box of our collective thinking or even break some existing principles. Not surprisingly, these kind of so-called high-risk / high-reward ideas and studies are difficult to get funded, especially in the beginning. To balance both types of efforts, open science practices are in need.

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A crackpot’s counter-statement

Some physicists have labeled me as a crack pot when considering my works on the new theoretical framework of mirror matter theory. However, I disagree in the spirit of scientific principles. With three papers published in esteemed journals, seven invited seminars by unrelated people (or more than 10 in total), and grant-seeking in collaboration with several different groups, I don’t think that it is fair to categorize my work on this topic as crackpottery. It is not, especially when considering the unique concrete predictions from my new model that can be readily tested in the laboratory using existing technologies.

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New blog to continue my mission on open science and mirror matter theory

Under enormous pressures, I had to close my former blog hosted at Notre Dame. This is my new blog site that contains all my previous posts and articles. And I will continue my advocacy of open science principles and studies on the new mirror matter theory. I wish that the right of academic freedom and freedom of speech would not have to be such a luxury, at least in the United States. Join me if you believe in freedom and openness in both science and society.

Future of the new mirror matter theory

The new mirror matter theory has only a very rough framework with many of its aspects waiting to be greatly improved and further developed as a nascent research direction. In particular, its mathematical rigor and foundations have yet to be established. Relevant new mathematical tools and approaches are desired to be implemented in the new theory. Theoretical efforts in the past several decades on fundamental physics, especially on topological quantum field theory, string theory, and quantum gravity, need to be merged into the new theoretical framework under the guidance of the newly proposed first principles. Most importantly, the neutral hadron oscillation effects predicted by the new theory are ready to be experimentally tested in laboratory, and it is time for more observation and simulation works in astronomy and cosmology under the consideration of the new theory to be conducted.

As presented below, I’d like to say a few words on the future direction of the new theory to interested mathematicians and physicists.

Is arXiv a monopoly bully in scientific publication?

After decades of ever-increasing dominance, arXiv.org has become the largest and most popular storage space or eprint service for scientific publications in physics and other related fields. It would have been the most beneficial to the physics community had arXiv sticked to its original principles for sharing new ideas and works quickly. Sadly, arXiv.org is becoming more and more arrogant these days instead. Veiled censorship by arXiv is making it just like another giant refereed journal system but without any transparency.

Over-moderation makes arXiv.org another refereed journal

I just so happened to stumble upon a very interesting comment on arXiv’s moderation issues (certainly more interesting than the original blog article). I could not agree more with the commenter. It is almost exactly like what I would like to write about the issue but probably not as well as the anonymous commenter articulated. In particular, I made similar comparisons between science and business; startup companies vs. researchers with risky/novel scientific ideas, etc. I can not help but fully quote the comment here,

New paper on first principles

I just tried to post my new paper of “First Principles of Consistent Physics” on arXiv.org. Unfortunately it was put on hold immediately and I then submitted it to the OSF eprint server. This is quite an exciting paper to me. It proposes new foundations and guiding principles on fundamental physics and cosmology based and improved upon my early blog “first principles of physics“. It should shed new light on further developments of the new mirror framework.

First principles of physics

The approach of first principles has been pursued in the development and history of physics. Ever since the establishment of the Standard Model of particle physics in 1970s, the idea of going after theory of everything has become popular as the latest approach of first principles among theoretical physicists for unifying all particles and interactions. However, we seem to live in a dynamic world as indicated, e.g., since the discovery of an expanding Universe and it is definitely at odds with the static picture of an ultimate unified theory for physics.

The dynamic picture tells us that the time reversal symmetry has to be broken and it has to be the first (broken) symmetry. Whatever first principles we propose have to be able to naturally break this symmetry first in the very beginning. And there is no reason why the current 4-dimensional spacetime, in particular, its dimensions can’t be dynamic. It is probably more natural to consider that spacetime has evolved in a dimension-by-dimension way.

First of all, we propose and summarize the three first principles as follows:

A measurable finite physical world is assumed.
The quantum version of the variation principle in terms of Feynman’s path integral formalism is applied.
Spacetime emerges via dimensional phase transitions (i.e., first time dimension and then space dimensions got inflated).

How should private foundations support science?

It is amazing that there exist quite some private foundations in the United States who care about science and are enthusiastic about funding scientific projects. However, a lot of them, if not all, don’t seem to know how they should support science in a complementary way when compared to government funding agencies like NSF and DoE.

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Time to reform peer-review

One of the critical features in scientific research is the application of the so-called peer-review process before a scientific paper is officially published in a journal. Ideally, peer-review, at least seemingly in its original purpose, should serve as a measure of quality control that benefits both the authors and the readers. However, nowadays, it becomes more and more like an obstruction to the advancement of science, in particular, in terms of radically new ideas and directions.