In early spring 2011 I had finally decided to devote a considerable amount of time to find a philosophical perspective from which the structure of physical law could be more clearly understood. For some years, it had been clear to me that such a perspective could and should be found, and that it should be simple enough that I could find it, even though my analytical abilities are very limited. Also, from the proper philosophical vantage point, it should be possible to discern new physics.
Thinking about these matters, I entered the antiquarian book store run by my friend Patrik Andersson in Lund. The moment I entered his shop he held a book in his hands he had just received, and he said he had already thought about giving it to me. It was Philosophy of physics by Mario Bunge. The synchronicity settled the matter. I just had to make room in my mind and in my calendar to think intensely about these issues.
A wonderful opportunity soon appeared. My friend Mi Lennhag was about to go to former Soviet republics for a few weeks to study everyday corruption by means of in-depth interviews, as part of her PhD work in political science. I could come along as her driver. That task left a lot of free time to think and write, forgetting all the distractions at home. In Kaliningrad, I had an excuse to reject phone calls from Sweden, since they cost 30 SEK per minute. More importantly, I had a chance to visit the tomb of Immanuel Kant, my main philosophical inspiration.
Since the trip to Kaliningrad, Lithuania and Poland in 2011, I have spent an enormous amount of time working with this project in the borderlands between philosophy and physics. In 2015, I blurted out the very long manuscript A strict epistemic approach to physics (arXiv:1601.00680). I know that it sounds presumptuous, but the feeling I got when (I thought that) I found the proper philosophical starting point reminded me of a quote by some mathematician, which I do not quite remember and whose source I cannot find. It goes something like this: With these definitions and assumptions made, the theorems started flowing out at an almost alarming rate.
Since then, I’ve tried to refine the work, divide it into smaller pieces that may be publishable as academic papers, and make contact with people who may be interested. I have submitted articles to several journals and have applied for several grants. I have had some meaningful conversations with other physicists, but all papers have been rejected and I’ve got no funding.
Being kind to myself, one reason may be that it requires some effort to appreciate what I have done. You have to invest more time and thought than if you evaluate a paper or a research proposal within an established field addressing a standard question. The expected return of such an investment may be perceived as small, since I have no formal qualifications in this subject. My focus as a theoretical physicist was complex systems.
Another reason may be that most physicists and many philosophers of science dislike the strict epistemic perspective I adopt, where the structure of knowledge and the structure of the world reflect each other. The subjective and objective aspects of the world are seen as distinct but inseparable, neither being more fundamental than the other. Rather, the subjective and the objective can be described as emerging from each other in a self-consistent loop. Some are appalled or even scared by any model that rejects the notion of observer-independent particles or fields dancing about in space as being the fundamental ingredients of the world. These people seem to think that any alternative idea ends up in postmodernism, solipsism or vague mysticism. This is not the case.
The method of my work is also somewhat unconventional. It does not align with the standard approach of neither physicists nor philosophers. The line of thought can be summarized as follows:
1) Philosophical ideas
2) New formalism based on 1)
3) Assumptions based on 1)
3) Physics derived from 2) and 3)
Nevertheless, there are conventional aspects of my work. The philosophical ideas align with those of several fathers of quantum mechanics – like Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac and Max Born. I just try to define these ideas more precisely and apply them more generally.
Of course, what I derive or argue for conforms to established physics. I’m not one of those oddballs who reject relativity or quantum mechanics in long self-published manuscripts. If you arrive at something that contradicts scientific results based on the work of thousands of scientists during decades or centuries, you are simply wrong – like all the politically charged climate science deniers.
I have got some positive feedback and constructive criticism that may be worth building upon. For example, a recent referee report for the paper A cognitive basis for physical time (arXiv:2411.01427) contains the following passage:
This paper contains some novel and interesting insight, but I do not think that in its present form is suitable for publication in an academic journal. I am aware that when a proposal is genuinely novel it is difficult to present it through usual vocabulary and conceptual apparatus, but the author should make an effort to lead the reader into the new territory step after step. In this very long paper, new ideas and concepts are defined and introduced at almost every page, and it is difficult to evaluate the overall picture. I suggest the author split the paper in at least two parts.
It should be added that other referee reports contain more negative opinions, such as the presentation in my papers being messy, incomprehensible, self-contradictory, or that the problems the work tries to solve do not exist.
Regarding the suggestion in the cited referee report that I split the paper into several parts: it touches a nerve. I mentioned that I tried to divide the first long manuscript into pieces to make the material publishable. The first paper on the subject of time that I wrote was the result of such a division. Then I divided it into two pieces once more, and then once more. If I’m going to divide it once again, it will be the fourth division.
Such a strategy of divisions raises a dilemma. To make reviewers and colleagues appreciate what I have done, it is necessary to be able to present some interesting results in each paper, in particular in the first paper ever to be published. Also, since the approach is quite novel, these results must be well motivated. That is, the papers must be self-contained. Since the research method consists of the four steps listed above, a considerable amount of material needs to be presented to reach from start to finish, from step 1 to step 4. Such a paper necessarily becomes quite long and involved.
After the rejection of the above-mentioned paper A cognitive basis for physical time, I recently posted it on the arXiv together with the companion paper Generally covariant evolution equations from a cognitive treatment of time (arXiv:2411.01427 and arXiv:2411.02885). These two papers are the result of the latest division procedure.
What will I do next? I’m going to contact some more physicists who seem to entertain similar ideas, but apart from that I’m at a loss.
What needs be done is deriving consequences from the modified evolution equations and stationary state equations I have arrived at. However, this requires quite an effort, and I was hoping that I would have some published papers and some minimum of funding as a steppingstone before I would embark on that journey. Also, with such a foundation in place, I was hoping that some other physicists with more mathematical knowledge and better analytical skills than mine would be willing to contribute to such work.
If anyone is interested, I present my work somewhat more in detail on my personal website.
On that webpage, I offer quotes from great thinkers of the past who have inspired me. The oldest one is from Democritus, according to a later fragment from Galen, in a dialogue between the intellect and the senses:
Intellect: Ostensibly there is colour, ostensibly sweetness, ostensibly bitterness, actually only atoms and the void.
Senses: Poor intellect, do you hope to defeat us while from us you borrow your evidence? Your victory is your defeat.
The only way to avoid debating for another 2 500 years whether the proper philosophical perspective is the scientific realism of the intellect, the empirical idealism of the senses, or some third alternative where intellect and senses are forever interlocked in a tight dance, is to see these competing perspectives as scientific racehorses. The philosophical approach that makes it possible to account for the most of physics in the simplest and most coherent way should be declared the winner. What I am trying to do is to put my own philosophical racehorse at the starting line of that competition, and to ride it until it either stumbles and falls, or others see that it is worth betting on.
