(I wrote this offline following TerryWitt's "White Paper" post, and haven't had the time to read the new posts. I apologize for any rehashing.)
Terry, I think you just dug your hole a little deeper.
Mesons, kaons, and particles that decay into electrons (positrons) are essentially high-energy electron states, whereas sigmas, lambdas, and particles that decay into protons (antiprotons) are essentially high-energy proton states. Their instability is caused by the internal presence of bound positive-negative particles in combination with a stable particle. A muon, for instance, is an electron combined with a positive/negative pair. Think of it like an electron combined with positronium at nuclear density. The bound pairs that exist within unstable particles cannot exist singly in nature, like protons and electrons. The neutral pi meson, for instance, decays into two gamma rays because it is a bound particle/antiparticle.
Why didn't we think of that before---the particle zoo is just a bunch of high-energy excitations and bound states of the particles we're familiar with already! Um, we
did think of that (roughly 1940-1960) and we rejected it for darn good reasons. It looks as though you're aiming to justify "lots of particles with different masses, that decay to different things", and hoping that the details will work out somehow. But the details are the whole story. There's something fundamentally very different about a muon and a pion---can you describe and account for the differences? Why do you think that kaon-proton collisions can produce single lambdas, but pion-proton collisions only produce lambda-antilambda pairs? Why do kaons live so much longer than etas? What's the difference between K-short and K-long? What's the difference between K0->pi+ e- nu and K0 -> pi- e+ nu? Why does pi -> mu nu so outnumber pi -> e nu? Why does J/Psi -> mu mu occur, but not K0 -> mu mu? Can you predict whether pi0 -> e+ e- occurs, or how common it is? That's the sort of knowledge you're sweeping under the rug. I have no doubt that, given such a question
and the answer, you could think up a justification ("Oh, the kaon must have a persistent internal structure which mimics what you call 'strangeness'") but such justifications have zero predictive power.
I really have to emphasize: the Standard Model (which includes Schrodinger's Equation) correctly predicts
everything ever observed in atomic, nuclear, particle experiments, from the energy levels of hydrogen to fringe pattern in diffraction experiments to the decay modes of the Z. The unsolved problems, like large nuclei, are limited not by SM failures but by computational power. Your model predicts ... what exactly?
Oh, right, it predicts "the maximum material density in black holes". Given that we can't actually
measure this quantity, that's like writing a theory that predicts the color of leprechauns' shoes on the moons of Tau Bootes A. And it predicts the "strength and range of the strong force"? I presume you mean "I can make it fit the radii of small nuclei and maybe their masses", which doesn't even begin to capture the strong force: it's like saying "I have a complete theory of hydrodynamics" after writing down the deep-water wave equation.
High-energy neutron scattering mimics the existence of internal constituents (other than protons and electrons), but this is only because adding hundreds of MEV (or more) of energy causes a significant distortion of the underlying composition. It's like trying to measure the shape of a light bulb by shooting bullets at it.
That's quite an escape hatch! It looks like what you're really doing is building a wall around the things the theory "gets right" (i.e., the things you engineered the theory to fit), declaring everything else off-limits. I'm reminded of Autodynamics, which wrote an alternative to SR in order to fit 210Bi beta decay. They reacted very badly if you tried to use their equation to solve any
other SR problem (like, say, the relative speeds of two cars), or accelerators, or non-beta decays, or non-210Bi beta decays! But still they claim that their theory is true and SR is wrong.)
In reality, if you really had a "force law" describing what goes on in the proton or neutron, you should be able to predict those distortions. (After all, high-energy probes
do distort and/or destroy their targets; the Standard Model works through those distortions using the same force laws it uses everywhere else.) What's the energy at which "significant distortion" begins occurring? Does the distortion have a turn-on threshhold, or is it continuous? How do you determine this?
This is the easy part. There is no difference between a universe whose sum is zero and zero (same total), so a universal origin is nonsensical. The lack of universal origin brings into question universal expansion (which according to my sources Hubble never agreed with, but I’m not a historian). Enter tired light.
You're trying to distinguish yourself from crackpot physicists by saying "My tired-light theory works because my photons decay?" This is like trying to distinguish yourself from conspiracy theorists by saying "I can place the assassin on the grassy knoll." Do you know
why photon-decay hypotheses were rejected? (Hint: solve your "photon decay" with both energy and momentum conservation (good luck!) or whatever's appropriate in your theory. Do a Monte Carlo simulation of an ensemble of photons from a point source at z=3, applying your decay equation with appropriate probability densities, and keeping track of their directions. When the photons get as far as Earth, make a 2-D histogram of their directions and overlay it with the Hubble Deep Field. Then make a histogram of their energies and overlay it with a high-resolution spectrum from Murphy et. al., Mon.Not.Roy.Astron.Soc. 327 (2001) 1208.)
Physics needs a healthy dose of critical thinking right about now, and its lack thereof is making it progressively harder to discount pseudo science.
Every time I have seen someone make this claim, it has boiled down to this: "It is intuitively obvious that X is wrong; the only reason physicists could possibly accept it is closed-mindedness". This is not really different than, "Anyone can see that the WTC collapse is a controlled demolition, so the fact that NIST is still talking about heat-softening shows that they're closed-minded?" You're making the assumption that anything you "intuit", or anything you've proven to your own satisfaction,
must be correct and worthy of full-professional-consideration by the field. That's not a good assumption, Terry. You might well find something "intuitively obvious" because you are (a) closed-minded yourself, (b) unaware of some important experiment, (c) misunderstanding the theory (very common!), or (d) a crackpot, or perhaps (e) because it is indeed obvious. I have yet to have seen an example of (e).
Indeed, string theory IS pseudo science.
Have you ever
talked to a string theorist? In my experience, they will tell you one of two things: a) "I think of myself as a mathematician, exploring a mathematical landscape inspired by physics", or b) "We have hundreds of different theories which all
agree precisely with the Standard Model. We hope that most of these theories---maybe even all-but-one of them---will be disproven by internal-consistency checks, so that is what we spend most of our time on. If we get down to one, or a few, plausible theories, we can begin discussing whether this theory is the true GUT and how to find out." You can argue about whether this is worth doing, or likely to succeed, but don't call it pseudoscience. Compare it to, say, bioinformatics. Is it pseudoscience when a genetics researcher leaves data behind and starts writing pure graph-theory papers? Is it pseudoscience when an ecologist invents 10,000 hypotheses on a computer, throws out 9990 of them by comparison to Craig Venter's shotgun data, and publishes the remaining 10 with "further study needed" flags?
Also: String theory is just
one branch of theoretical physics. Quantum mechanics, the Standard Model, the Big Bang, etc., all exist independent of string theory; they will continue to exist if the string theory project fails (as it may). Theorists continue searching for non-string GUTs, non-string Standard Model modifications and extensions, non-string/non-GR gravity models, and so on.
Milky Way Radial Drift: The RAVE survey that ben m referenced has a resolution of at most 5 km/sec, insufficient to test the effect I propose, which is ~1.5 km/s. Thanks for playing, though.
I know about the 5 km/s, but you don't care about individual star velocities, you want an ensemble average. You need to break down RAVE's systematic error budget and see how well you can determine a centroid.
So what happens if space’s curvature is treated statically? It is still represented as a field of dv/dx, but the dv is not the motion of the underlying metric. Instead, dv/dx is induced in objects moving through it, resulting in the slow expansion of photons over vast distances. This is also why the signals from distant supernovae are broadened. Just as the photon is stretched, so to is the distance between them (I’ve got a great graph in the book).
In this case, you don't really have a non-expanding universe---you're just pasting a set of non-expanding coordinates onto the GR grid, saying that your coordinates are the "real" ones, and then treating the GR effects as effective forces. This isn't different in principle from the Newtonian approximation to static gravity (Newton says "this is the fixed x-y-z-t grid of the world, and here is the force field on that grid" whereas Einstein says "this is the curved x-y-z-t grid, along which objects move in straight lines"). If you actually
follow particle trajectories on a grid like yours, you certainly can get a situation where the particles think they're following geodesics in curved space.
Of course, you may be confusing yourself by making your photons "decay". If you've got a way to stretch photon wavelengths, that lowers their energy without any additional decay process needed, just like gravitational redshifts and Dopplar redshifts.
So, what's the point? You want the Universe not to expand, but you don't care if all of the particles
in the Universe feel like it's expanding? If that's the framework which fits your philosophy, that's fine with me. Or you want the Universe's curvature (or effective curvature, or whatever) do obey something other than the Einstein equations? Fine: write down your equations, specify the free parameters carefully, and do a proper global fit to cosmology data. Don't just describe it and say "it works", because we're going to presume that your criteria are no stricter here than they were when you claimed to "explain" particle physics.
