Wired on Peter Lynds

[Pangloss]

Wired has a cool article up about Peter Lynds, the New Zealand amateur physicist who's paper proposing that time has no discrete increments shook things up a bit last year.

 

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/physics.html

 

Here's a very brief excerpt (the full story runs four pages):

 

 

He went back to school that fall with the fervor and the audacity of the converted. During an office-hours argument with physicist David Beaglehole, Lynds pointed at the professor's coffee mug and demanded to know: At what "instant" would the mug not be moving if he dragged it across the desk? Exasperated, Beaglehole suggested that Lynds try to get his theory published, thinking that rejection from an academic journal would put the matter to rest.

 

Sure enough, Physical Review Letters, which published Einstein, said no thanks ("The author's arguments are based on profound ignorance or misunderstanding of basic analysis and calculus," one referee said). Foundations of Physics Letters didn't respond. A third journal, in Canada, said yes, and then sent him a bill - it was a vanity press. Lynds withdrew.

 

But then something extraordinary happened. Lynds called Foundations to ask for his manuscript and was told the journal had no record of his paper. So he sent it again. It got rejected. Lynds revised it and submitted it a third time ... and they said yes. The paper was published in August 2003, and Lynds became a celebrity. He was cheered (and jeered) on physics discussion Web sites. Big-name researchers talked to the press about his work. Conference invitations started pouring in.

[swansont]

Another important point to consider is also mentioned:

 

Of course, peer review does not anoint an idea as correct - just worth considering.

 

And, of course, publication in the popular press may fan the flames of crackpotdom, but will do little for actual credibility.

[[Tycho?]]

His paper was first published two years ago... wasn't it? I remember cause I read about it while visiting my grandparents over the summer, and I definately did not do that last summer.

[Severian]

You can find his paper at http://doc.cern.ch//archive/electronic/other/ext/ext-2003-042.pdf

 

Seems like bollocks to me - typical mumbo-jumbo of someone with no physics background getting confused about the semantics of words. (Notice there is no maths in the paper.)

 

Now, it could be that he has a brilliant idea and is not very good at communicating it, but the obvious question to ask is "Is your theory testible?". Well, it probably isn't since one cannot ever make an infinitely precise measurement of a continuous quantity. The only possibility to disprove this assertion is to prove that time is quantised, which is the opposite extreme for Lynds p.o.v. This isn't going to happen in our lifetimes though.

 

In fact, since Lynds theory has no mathematical footing to stand on, it isn't even really science....

[Rebel.esd]

Lynds is mired in the details of human experience. Relativity proved that time doesn't flow. The fact that a particle can exist in a haze of probability one "moment", and as a definite particle the next proves that time has locations just as real as space.

Personally, I just think Lynds is just trying to destroy Calculus.