There are certain aspects of my book that I believe to be somewhat unconventional, in that they don’t conform very well to the prevailing culture of scientific compartmentalization and the expectations that go along with it. My book describes the means by which to achieve not only the unification of the four fundamental forces but also the unification of quantum mechanics with relativity and the unification of special relativity with general relativity. These are the traditional faces of the "unification problem."
The real issue in dealing with the unification problem is that you “can’t get there from here” – science and philosophy have been organized into specialties and sub-subspecialties that I contend are too compartmentalized to deal with the dimensions and scope of the current unification challenges. The current compartmentalization and expectation schemes currently in place are the result of prior events and prior thinking. They don’t lend themselves terribly well to overcome the issues of unification, and others, for which they were neither designed nor intended.
In fact, this assertion is the main reason I expect a great deal of harsh criticism and commentary − at least, initially − from today’s rigid science culture. Had the current culture and structure of science been suitable for overcoming the challenges it faces − such as unification, for which they have already had ample time and opportunity − it likely would have resulted in new epiphanies and understanding that overcome the limitations of today’s science and the plentiful paradoxes abounding about our universe.
If I were forced to choose a single compartment or genre which best describes the content of the book, then I suppose I might choose natural philosophy, the foundation from which the scientific method itself emerged about two millennia ago. Yet, the content of the book also necessarily focuses heavily on other topics more usually associated with physics, cosmology, and cosmogony, and their fundamental tenets. The book also covers quite a bit of content normally associated with biology, psychology, linguistics, ontology, and metaphysics.
Nonetheless, the book is full of scientifically verifiable predictions and does contain some key equations that could be used as the basis for empirical experiments and observations, as well as for new mathematical models. Please keep in mind that the book was designed to appeal to a very broad audience in large part because of the wide range of disciplines it covers. On a more personal note, I found that writing to a broad audience was also quite a lot of fun for me, which enabled me to finally write the book after decades of intent.
The content of the book, including the theories and hypotheses I propose, are thoroughly consistent with validated scientific truth and understanding. This perspective is covered at some depth repeatedly throughout the book.
However, you should not expect to see some alternative to Einstein’s field equations (EFE), which quite thoroughly describe the phenomena we observe. Einstein’s field equations are only part of a far larger context; the equations themselves don’t provide any real insight into their physical basis. Rather, the content of my book focuses largely on the underlying physical basis not only for the EFE but for all phenomena observed in our universe.
The theories and hypotheses contained within my book provide both philosophical and physical bases for unifying general and special relativity, for unifying quantum mechanics with relativity, and for unifying the four fundamental forces into a singular, cohesive framework.
The book covers an enormous amount of ground, and it has to for a number of good reasons. First, I designed the book to be stand-alone; you don’t need to fulfill any prerequisites to read, understand, and enjoy it. I hope I succeeded in achieving this for the broadest possible spectrum of readers.
Next, I had to provide firm foundations for concepts that appear later in the book. Finally, there’s quite a bit of unlearning that’s required to perceive the universe in an entirely new way, so I had to present a very deliberate, structured, and entertaining set of incremental steps to prepare readers. If it could all have been summed up in a short sentence, quite frankly, I wouldn’t have written a 120K-word tome. I may not be the world’s most succinct person, but even I would have a terribly difficult time expanding a concise statement by something like a factor of 10,000!
I do expect to follow-up this book with one targeting the physics community, which will focus far more heavily on mathematics and contain sufficient equations to delight the most hard-core physicists and mathematicians. One of the physicists who reviewed my book has already asked to co-author this next project and I’m not terribly interested or motivated in writing such a book myself.
In closing, String Theory and parallel universes are among the awesomely fanciful and completely unverifiable theories that have been proposed by theoretical scientists and mathematicians. They are, however, very entertaining. I hope you will consider the theories I propose in my book not only entertaining and thought-provoking but that they offer the added benefit of being scientifically verifiable, which really ought to count for something in the science community.
Does this sound reasonable to you?
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