If I’m reading this guy right, he seems to have found a new way to unite Relativity with Quantum Mechanics.
Geoff Haselhurst:
IIRC, using particle/wave duality, convert EVERYTHING into waves, and that can be explained using relativity.
Is he onto something, rediscovered something trivial, or is he just a crock?
There’s no difficulty in uniting quantum mechanics with special relativity. Well, rather, it takes a lot of math, but it’s known how to do it, and the resulting theory works just fine. The difficulty comes in unifying quantum mechanics with general relativity, and treating everything as waves, while standard procedure, doesn’t actually help with unification at all.
In other words, what this guy has that’s legitimate isn’t anything new.
Just a fairly mundane example of a physics crank. He’s got one easily visualised idea - in this instance, that particles are actually a combination of standing waves - and lots of waffle about how this explains everything, without any attempt to grapple with any maths beyond Pythagoras’s Theorem. Enough popular science books have been ingested, without understanding, for him to regurgitate words and sentences relating to different, already understood, issues. His reliance on quotations from past physicists as claimed support isn’t a universal symptom of the species, but is reasonably common.
Twenty years ago, he and others like him would have been largely restricted to vainly mailing typewritten copies of their work to physics departments. These days they have websites.
Oh, they still mail copies to the physics departments. My advisor has a “crackpot table” outside his office where he put all the self-published manuscripts that people have sent him; over the years, he’s accumulated quite a pile. They’re not typewritten any more, what with the advent of word processors, but some of them are still pretty impressively off-the-wall.
Or handwritten letters in green ink, if the former Head of Astrophysics where I was a postgrad is to be believed. He was baffled why it was always green ink, and not say red or purple or blue…