Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Today's vixra weather

The number-one reason I monitor vixra is physics numerology. However, a lot of other stuff happens there, and a few times I have remarked upon it here.

Today has an unusual surge of interesting activity. Most of this is due to a document dump by an independent researcher in Bangalore, who appears to combine some genuine expertise and originality in signal processing and device physics, with a commitment to a traditional cultural synthesis embracing music, metaphysics, and language, and then rounded out with general polymathic speculation.

But there's also just a higher-than-usual density of papers combining geographically diverse origins and professionalism above the vixra average. In particular, this paper on neutrino mixing from China has a quite professional look and exposition - until the author wants to motivate their ansatz for the mixing matrix, and then suddenly there's crazy talk [*] about fractals, Tsallis statistics, and M theory. Also notable is that this newly uploaded paper immediately acquired a comment by "Critic" purporting to explain its error. It makes me wonder if "Critic" is some colleague of the author's, who promised to publicly explain their criticism.

Finally, someone is using vixra to lampoon a notoriously self-promoting critic of modern physics, by writing preprints which assert that his work is vindicated by the most avantgarde trends of the mainstream. The first such paper was just silliness, but today's paper is sophisticated silliness, in that it shows a fluency in contemporary mathematical physics beyond what can be obtained by just copy-pasting snarxiv output. My guess is that the author is at PhD level.

[*] I may write a separate post about this paper.