The vixra of politics

I keep an eye on vixra.org. Another site I keep an eye on is unz.com. They are an odd couple, and might seem to have nothing in common, except that both were founded by physicists (Phil Gibbs, Ron Unz).

But both serve as a source of shunned news and views. Vixra, of course, started life as a haven for physics papers that were kept off the arxiv. Unz.com, meanwhile, is "A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media". The powers have no interest in Vixra, it is left to sink or swim on its own, but Unz.com carries material that is considered genuinely dangerous (mostly from the right, but also from the left), and I would be unsurprised to wake up one day and find that it has been taken down by some politically motivated campaign.

Vixra oddities of 2019

Obviously I focus on physics here, but sometimes I like to sample some of the other oddities that show up on vixra...

2800+ pages of "a novel hermeneutical science", written in the dense frantic style of someone overflowing with thoughts. Could it be as significant as Hegel or Heisman? Someone would have to try to read it, to find out.

200+ "refutations" of everything under the sun, apparently derived by a system of logic original to the author.

Glimpse of the neo-Vedic world civilization that could exist 500 years from now, latest work of S.V. Balasubramanian, himself a glimpse of the kind of ideas that contemporary India can produce.

A numerologically rich revision of today's physics from small to large, that incorporates the "Kotov cycle" and the "Sternheimer Biological scale factor". What gets me is that there are nine authors. Usually something like this is the work of one person. Though it's always possible that some of those coauthors are there without their consent; there is a note at the end from Atiyah saying, "please do not use my name in any way other than referencing a published paper"...

Uncanny dual

Lubos Motl just posted an essay, "Quantum gravity from self-collisions of the configuration space". It makes an analogy between a property of strings, and how quantum gravity in the larger world may work. Namely, a string may appear to be a self-contained world, but if the worldsheet fields approach the same values as those on another string - or even elsewhere on the same string - then interaction can occur, because both strings are actually moving in a larger space, and having worldsheet fields with the same values, means the strings are at the same place in the larger space.

So Lubos says, this may be a property of quantum gravity in general, that when quantum fields in different places approach similar values, there is some possibility for the formation of a wormhole connecting them.

What has me in mild shock is that this is the best rationale yet for something like Sheldrake's "morphic resonance", and for any number of alleged paranormal phenomena. The attempt to influence something far away by making a copy of it used to be called sympathetic magic, and is sometimes used as an example of pre-scientific or pre-causal thinking. And here we have the perfect mechanism for it!

Furthermore, there's no reason why these connections should be purely spacelike... For more details, see these future thoughts of mine.