Bill Hobba wrote:
It isn't going against the establishment the gives me problems it is the
refusal to:

Bill you have had a lot of replies to this, but why not one more
perspective. In general a lot of your comments have validity as it
applies to many people who post new theories. However there are subtle
little errors of generality and exceptions in almost every case.

1. Not acknowledging the establishment is usually fully in accord with
experiment and so is a perfectly valid theory

This may be largely true (although I would add "observation" as well as
"experiment" to cover astronomy). However there are notable exceptions
and some of these are in the areas where people make new suggestions.
For example, in astronomy the existence of periodicities in redshifts is
pretended to not exist as are physical connections between objects at
very different redshifts.

2. The belief that you are somehow brighter and better than all the smart
people that created the establishment

Not brighter than all the ones that created it, just brighter the
reactionaries that try to stop any further progress. :-)

3. The discovery of some point that has escaped the attention of
generations of students and physicists since Einstein or whoever published
their works and when you point out this is highly unlikely - nonsense such
as your not independently thinking or whatever is all they can say.

The mistakes in papers concerned with EPR / Bell's inequality / Aspect
experiment do actually qualify as generations of mistakes, surprising as
it may seem. These mistakes relate to the fact that the vast majority of
people (scientists included) cannot do statistics, particularly when it
relates to conditional probability and subsamples. This has been proven
by several people and published in peer-review jouirnals, but the
mistakes continue.

4. Delusions of grandeur where that believe they have found something that
puts them in the same class as people like Landau of Feynman when their idea
is obviously wrong or similar things have been known for some time

Definitely not in the same class as Feynmann. I would never for example
make the mistake of saying that light is a particle. ;-)

5. Failure to elucidate the physical basis for their beliefs when simple
considerations indicate that what their proposing is more complicated than
generally accepted theories. It is even worse when you point this out and
the response indicates they do not even understand the fundamental point
your making.

Good comments.

6. The attacking of the person that originated the theory as if this somehow
undermines the countless other people who have written on it as well.

Yes, this is a serious problem. One reactionary wrote a thing that he
called "The crackpot index" for awarding points to crackpots, so I did
an alternative one called "The reactionary index" for the other side of
the problem. All in jest, but many a true word ...

I could go no but I am sure you get the idea. These probably would not
apply to articles published is respectable journals. I suspect the tone of
the paper would give them away but not reading a lot of journal articles I
would not really know.

There are many incomprehensible articles in journals, and many mistakes
of all kinds in others. Most are never picked up because most journal
articles are never critically studied by anyone. A much smaller number
of mistakes are perpetrated for decades by "the establishment". I will
list a few of these in my opinion:

A. The fundamental calculation error in EPR / Bell's inequality which
does not understand the difference between a sample and a sub-sample.
There is nothing mysterious happening.

B. The resulting FTL communication of quantum events that is rubbish.
The intelligent physicists know that FTL information transfer is not
achieved by EPR experiments and therefore popularised articles are nonsense.

C. The belief that M-M experiment disproved an aether. It really proved
that matter is made of the same stuff as light, and a further generation
had to pass before DeBroglie said a similar thing. However the garbage
M-M explanation had by then stuck.

D. The big bang theory has been proven to be quite false. Keeping it as
a serious theory is an act of religious faith (they want a creation).

E. The "Collapse of the Wave-function" is a nonsense. There is no such
thing as a "photon in flight". Quantisation exists only at emmission and
absorption events and the E/M field is continuous exactly as Maxwell
stated. An absorbed photon may be related causually to an emitted photon
but it is not "the same photon" as a single emmission may result in more
than one absorption events.

That is enough to show that stupid ideas can persist in physics for
generations. Also, in the group sci.physics.research you cannot even
post some experimental results that have been published in peer-review
journals because it contradicts the beliefs of the moderators. That is
not science, it is religion.

Ray Tomes