Saturday, May 1, 2010

A Diatribe on Nobel Prize

I remember when I was working for Dr. Manfred Fink in his lab at UT for the measurement of the electron’s kinetic energy coming off of the tritium decay to "essentially" measure the mass of the neutrinos. At the time, I wrote the paper on the subject that I have been deeply wondering about for a long time originally inspired by Dr. Veltman's lecture when I was at U of M. It was titled “Neutrinos Must be Tachyons” and uploaded in the LLNL archive. One day Dr. Fink happened to read it and exclaimed, “you will become very unpopular!!!” But he didn’t know exactly what my physics background was because I changed my graduate study to experimental physics after finishing my master’s degree. I remember wondering myself “why a scientist would want to become popular while his/her goal is supposed to find the truth of the nature?” I was naïve.

"The theory of dipole gravity whoever conjured it up in his mind deserves a Nobel Prize in physics". I don't think anyone, who understands what the presently understood general relativity is, would dispute this statement. If you think of it deeply with a little bit of time, you will end up admitting that this guy must be a devil to come up with such a dreadful solution.

In fact, the matter in the scientific community has become gravely serious because of the potential ramification that the theory will bring itself with it. It has already caused a total shock among the scientific community of dark matter problems and the jets from the accretion disc of the rotating black holes. It’s almost like the same situation when the geocentric model of the universe was seriously challenged and overcome by the heliocentric model of the universe after Newton’s publication of Principia. If calculus had been developed prior to Newton’s time, the theory of Newtonian gravity would have been a five page manuscript to explain how the solar system works.

In the process of presenting a scientific statement, the secrets of the nature can be divulged by a couple of paragraphs with hints. Note the following two paragraphs,

1. There is a case that the center of mass of the object changes without any external force in the direction of the motion, for example, check it with the rotating hemisphere in conjunction with special relativity.
2. Notice that it is a case that violates Newtonian mechanical principle and see if it can be the cause of the physically meaningful dipole gravity within the framework of the known general relativity.

Things in physics always start with an unusual or a tiny physical peculiarity that sparks the question leading to the detailed mathematical proof and then the clarification of the physical concept follows.

All in all, I don’t think I will get the Nobel Prize with the theory of dipole gravity. It is not likely to happen because I committed the cardinal sin. And that is “you don’t kick butts of the people who are supposed to pet your back”. No sane human being would do such a stupid thing.

Then how could it have been possible to present the idea of dipole gravity without offending anyone in the gravitational physics?

I would appreciate anyone who can answer to this question because I would have taken that advice very seriously. But frankly I don’t think there could be any. After the presentation of the idea of dipole gravity in front of the gravitational physical scientists with the mathematical proof, you realize that you have just told them, basically, in effect, “you all have been idiots” which is not diplomatic at all, actually very far from it.

So there is no winning situation here, because most of the times, especially in the recent years, Nobel Prize would be given to someone who made the majority of the people in the same field of community happy which means that the scientific discovery would be an extension of the subject everybody in the field have been looking for, but not for something that proves them totally wrong.

And imagine the situation that they have just figured it out that they have “in fact” been wrong for such a long time. I should be grateful for not being stoned to death, I mean, if we were living somewhere in the 14th century AD, let alone expecting any kind of prize. So, I guess the human society overall has made a great heap of progress up to this point, but not enough.

We are still living in a society where “service to self” mentality prevails. And we certainly have long ways to go.








No comments: