Bignose

seriously, guy? a personal attack? Why don't you actually address his point rather than dismissing him with name-calling? What are you going to do when reviewers or anyone else actually asks you questions? You better quickly learn that asking questions and having holes poked in your ideas is paramount to science today. 99% of it is people trying to help you think deeper about your idea and make it stronger. It is rarely personal -- until you make it personal via name calling. Once you start doing that, how much help do you really think you're going to get? Who would even consider donating to someone who presents himself as petty enough to start name-calling in just their 3rd post on a forum? Seriously, try addressing the questions uncool brought up. If they are as 'mediocre' as you say, then is should be easy for you to show uncool where he is mistaken.

nit accepted. And taken even the step further, there exists the possibility of a Bayesian analysis in which one can actually quantify how likely each theory would have produced the result. That is, in some cases, we can actually estimate a quantification of how much more better one theory is than another.

The one written so often about the skeptics (myself almost always included) about "not having an open mind" is the one that always burns me up. Because in most every case, the person writing that is just at least as guilty of that same behavior as the ones he is accusing. In the end it is one of the big reasons I like science: If theory A predicts 12.4 and theory B predict 12.7 and the observation is 12.75, the second theory is considered better at that prediction, by a measurable objective amount. In the end, it is all about accurate predictions.

Results, results, and results. That is the ultimate determiner. While there may be some initial hesitation, if the OP can demonstrate excellent agreement with predictions made by this idea with observations, then the community will accept it very quickly. Today, with the internet allowing tremendously easier access to information at any time in history before, means that with good results, there is no reason for work to remain 'dismissed' for long. That sword cuts both ways, though. If the theory doesn't produce good results, it is dismissed, and properly so. That is the rest of your little story up there. While Einstein's work wasn't initially immediately embraced, once it was shown the predictions coming from the work were far, far better than anything else available at the time, it was universally accepted. So, that is what the OP needs to do. Show results. Demonstrate why his idea is an improvement over what is out there today. He sure hit a lot of topics in his first post, but again so long as he can show results, then so be it. As per my other post in this thread, if he can show results, then he'll have more than enough grant money and/or a job at a research lab that he won't be reduced to begging internet forums ever again. But with science, you don't sell the sizzle -- you sell the steak. If that steak is made up of poor results or inaccurate predictions, it doesn't matter how many grandiose or wide-reaching claims the sizzle is made of. Right now, all that has been posted is sizzle. The OP needs to actually have some steak, and present that steak at conferences and publish in journals.

Get your results published in a high-impact well-respected journal and present them as some of the big physics conferences, and if it is as good as you say, you'll have more grant money than you know what to do with.

Alpha and Beta are how casinos make money... -or- trying to reason using them doesn't really make any sense.

If that assumption doesn't change the predictions (and I still don't see how that is possible -- whether that assumption is expressed a 'variable' or not, that assumption has implications somewhere) then it really doesn't matter what you assume there, does it? We might as well be arguing over whether neutrons taste like apples or cherries.

So what you are saying is that you can change the sign of a variable and get all the exact same predictions? I think you had better demonstrate this, because I am highly skeptical of this claim.

A trivial answer: the parents petitioned for and were granted permission to enter the United States. Another trivial answer: The parents moved to the territory of New Mexico some time before January 6th, 1912 and remained there through that date. On that date, New Mexico became a state.

Then I suggest you do the problems from the Schaum's, and learn the subject from a more thorough text. Those Schaum's are great as 'quick reference' books -- books you turn to remind yourself of the exact form of the equations so you don't miss a term or change a constant. But, they are not good teaching books. That was never their intent. I think that a real text will get you far farther along.

You gotta start somewhere. Axioms, by definition, are not meant to be provable. They are taken to be true. Without them, what can you even do? Axioms are obviously driven by things we observe and find useful. But, there is no proving them. If they could be proven, they would be based on other axioms, and wouldn't be axioms themselves. Like I said, gotta start somewhere.

You start with some axioms which are assumed to be true and derive logical consequences because the axioms are taken to be true.

But. The parts you want to toss out lead to the good predictions. Without those parts, you don't get good predictions. You also don't just get to claim the good predictions by changing something fundamental. How can you change something and "[have] the same mathematics and successful predictions"? You really didn't change anything then. Changing the assumption about the wave and particle direction has to have consequences... if you got the exact same answers, then you either re-used the old assumption either explicitly or implicitly, or you made a mistake. I'll give you the teeny tiny possibility that you may have found an assumption that doesn't actually affect anything, but I think you best post an awful lot of your work here to prove the point. (Sorry, but I am not going to buy someone else's book. If it is really as successful as you say, why is it not published in the journals? (Try not to make the usual claims of persecution, if possible.) If you want to discuss it, please do so here.)

I personally don't care how weird anything is. If the predictions are excellent, I'll take all the weirdness one can dream of.

This is true for most any real number algebraic manipulations on a computer, however. Care has to be taken to know how many significant figures are needed for the calculations. It certainly isn't limited to polynomial division, however. And, unless you force the program to only use integer math (and accept the rounding that will entail), using only integers doesn't limit the problem, because you can easily make numbers with many significant figures when dividing two integers. You do realize that programs do exist for arbitrary limit precision, though, right? Mathematica software can be set to as many digits as you want, and the programming language Python has modules that do the same thing. I suspect that most modern languages have modules/extensions that can do this, or one can write their own programming to accomplish this. Even Matlab has a toolbox to do this: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/6446 Where issues like this are much more common are in naively applying the mean and variance formulas for data sets, e.g. when the variance is small compared to the mean. Again, tools exist to handle this correctly, as well as cleverly-designed algorithms to avoid the errors even with atypical data sets. I guess, really, the question is: do you have something to discuss about this topic? Or a new algorithm to avoid the errors? Because one could almost think of the first post as spam to go check our your articles...

Your appeal to incredulity here is a logical fallacy. The model of gravity showing it is spherically symmetrical is pretty well validated. Also, don't neglect the billions of years that are available to let the planets 'settle'. That is, it may be lumpy for the first billion years, but as the plates shift, and impacts happen, and stresses form and release, the overall trend toward sphericity is a natural consequence of the symmetry of gravity. Using just this symmetry of this law, models have been made that replicate the observations seen in nature. As was asked above, your idea has consequences or predictions that would occur if it were true. You should be able to show what those predictions are, and how they are observed in nature. This is how science works. An idea is formed, the consequences of that idea are deduced, predictions are made, and then experiments are conducted to see if the observations agree with the experiments. At this moment, the theory of the molten core and plate tectonics is very well supported by many observations agreeing with predictions. Show us what predictions your idea makes and how they agree with what it known today.

You know what would be a big help? The next 10 days that tornado outbreaks are going to occur. Surely, if your ideas have merit, this should be pretty easy to provide.

Or maybe more to the point, predict the next 10 days in which there will be outbreaks of tornadoes in the MidWest.

Or, as Dr. Rocket is farcically saying there is: no one here is going to be willing to just do the work for you. But, what we will be willing to do is ask you to post the problem, post how you worked out the solution, and we'll look it over and try to help point out where we think you went wrong or confirm the correctness of your work. In general, the amount of learning you achieve from copying someone else is far, far, far, far less than the amount of learning you achieve from working on things yourself. Besides, unless your instructor is really poor at writing exams, he's going to write exam questions that are similar, but hardly exact like your homework. Or, in other words, you need to learn the principles needed to solve the problem yourself, so that you can apply them in new situations (like the exam questions are going to ask).

This idea seems like a solution really in search of a problem. That is, I think you are so eager to apply what you think is "a field effect" you use it to describe effects that may just be more simply explained. For example, wheat grows upward because a wheat plant that grows sideways receives lesser sunlight than its neighbors and would otherwise die off. I don't think that you need any kind of electromagnetic field effects to describe this. I also think that trees have evolved as a combination of strength & flexibility as well as also growing to take up space to ensure they get their share of the nutrients. And sure, two branches don't usually grow together. But it does happen. Same with two or more trees growing together -- Growing up I used to love climbing the two trees that had grown together in my back yard. Again, if they are all charged the same, how is this even possible? For that matter, how can kudzu or a leaching vine grow on other plants? The repulsive force should completely prevent intertwined growth, because the growth is slow enough that the repulsion should keep them apart. Frankly, can't this be easily answered just by taking an electromagnetic field monitor out to some plants? If the plant is really electrically/magnetically changed, moving the plant or a branch around should register on the EMF meter.

Is they are all charged that same, how can two trees grow into one another or even how could two leaves even touch each other?

Just because two things look alike isn't terribly good evidence that the phenomena controlling both of them are the same. As a good example: the Bohr model of the atom and the solar system look a lot alike. They looked so much alike that the Bohr model is still seen quite a lot, I think primarily because mankind likes that seeming symmetry of the very big and very small looking alike. But, I chose the word 'seeming' there because we know that the Bohr model is actually a pretty terrible model. And that the phenomena that govern the behavior of the atom and the behavior of the solar system are quite, quite different.

Or, you know, instead of multiplying, adding, multiplying, adding, subtracting, and then asking them to interpret the results correctly by looking at the specific digits -- I count 6 operations there -- one could just subtract the year they were born from the current year (something you asked them for in your steps) and get the answer directly in 1 operation. Frankly, my friends and family are intelligent enough not to be 'amazed' by arithmetical operations.

Not really. Religion pretty much asks someone to accept statements on faith. Science asks someone to accept statements only when backed up by evidence. Not very close to one another at all...

The bridge here is that someone with a certain degree or certification should be able to explain the details of why something is or is not correct. As iNow posted above, statements like "X is true because I have degree Y and I said so," are clearly fallacious. A person with degree Y should be able to cite texts and strong evidence why someone with that degree believes in X.