Sunday, March 6, 2011

Into which group will you fall?

I have had other physicists and scientists review my book and provide their comments back to me.  The results have been really absolutely fascinating.  Each set of comments falls unambiguously into one of two black-and-white categories, and none occupy the grey area in between.

The first group reacted with fierce indignation, very much along the lines of, “Are you calling my god stupid?”  These individuals didn’t finish the book.  In fact, they abandoned the book somewhere in the middle, near my discussion of the Copenhagen Interpretation.  Quite frankly, I took this as a good sign that I was on the right track.  After all, it's not at all unlike how many scientists have reacted to bold new theories and breakthroughs in the past which turned out to be valid and propelled scientific thought in effective, new directions.

The second group reacted very differently.  The individuals in this group read the book through to its conclusion.  The feedback I received from this group was that they were angry with me.  Upon further questioning, I discovered that they were angry because they had previously believed that they would provide the crucial insights by which to understand our universe, and that they now knew that wouldn’t be the case because they felt I had cracked that nut.

I make no claims that what I propose in my book is "The Answer."  The scientific method, to which my readers and I surely subscribe, requires that this judgment be left to others.  Whether I am right or wrong, there will surely be a spectrum of responses, and some of them will likely be critical and unkind.  Yet, I’m willing to make my contribution by putting these new thoughts out into the world.  I’m confident that the concepts in my book will spark some lively debates and this could only be considered a very good thing, regardless of which group you happen to fall into.

I would really like to get YOUR comments on this once you've read the book and especially after you've discussed it with others.

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