Uncovering Hidden Questions in Scientific Research

[Ripheus27]

So in a state of flux over the years, I've learned a lot about the concepts used in physics, mathematics that's mainly used elsewhere, as far as I know (like deontic logic), and more than I would like to go into right now; the end of it is that I have come across, or worked with, questions I would not have otherwise thought to ask, through all my research, and I know that answers to these are possible: but I also know that they either might or surely would have consequences for my beliefs about the laws of physics, too. So, my hope here is to check my ideas/beliefs against a mathematically rigorous background, since this is my greatest deficiency in the field (I feel like Faraday, if you will, haha... though I'm not claiming his engineering prowess at all...). Unfortunately (or not), some of the judgments I've made sound pretty extreme to me, or... arrogant, maybe, like I'm claiming (if only on the inside, to myself), "Oh, yeah, I figured *that* out already," except sometimes it does seem to turn out that I understand some of the questions (and evidence for their answers) much better than I would have expected of myself, more or less or to whatever extent.

Well anyway I guess I'll see

 

[anorlunda]

Welcome to PF.

You'll have to be careful to not run afoul of our policy of not discussing personal theories. See
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/physics-forums-global-guidelines.414380/#post-66018

PF is for discussing mainstream science.

 

[Ripheus27]

I think my aim would be to cast my ideas not as, "I believe that the universe works like A, B, C," but more like, firstly, questions, such as, "If I believe A, B, C, then if the mathematics required for those to be true would be relevant to questions in physics, then what effect should this have on my beliefs about physics--and, therefore, if I discovered some substantial conflict between my virtual (not direct) conclusions, and the consensus in physics, then...?" at which point I would have to leave it off at that, I realize.

Another way to put it would be: some of my ideas involve correlations that would have to be "mathematically relevant" to be even potentially true, which relevance is precisely what I'm unsure about. The question would not be whether the theory is actually true but whether it is even mathematically possible. That is, I would be asking how, or if, it would be possible to construct a mathematical model using accepted physical concepts and their symbolic parameters (as such), that would express such an idea *at all*.

So, the final way to put it is: I would try to avoid using the word "theory" to describe my ideas. To some extent, all of this, for me, revolves around a science fiction story that I've been working on for a long time, so you could consider my questions as "consultation" about whether the storyline would "make sense" when presented in a "theoretical" form. They did this for STAR TREK sometimes or whatever? And other works besides...

[For an example of what I really would like to post about, or well I'll look up posts about it first of course but if there weren't any: 2D-time theory/whether this could be the basis for a cool kind of scifi power system [I realize that would be in the Scifi/Fantasy subforum ;)].]*

*[If this is not the place for such questions, then I guess I'd just like to know where that would be? I tried this place, MathOverflow or something, and they weren't very responsive, more just like, "No, those questions don't fit in here." So is there some place, that's moderated well, for asking random(?) physics-type questions? I know philosophy forums might work out for this, except I'm not sure that the average philosopher would know the kind of mathematics that I don't know, or whatever.]

EDIT: Alternatively, what is a good way to hire a physics consultant? (Probably could just look that up...)

EDIT 2: Okay, so there's another perspective I have, on my perspective: the guidelines here stipulate that philosophy discussion, while acceptable, is subject to spontaneous emission ;) so I will confess at the start that some of my threads would amount to philosophical arguments about physics: with the caveat that they would all be more or less supportive of the Standard Model or mainstream extensions (like string theory or loop quantum gravity or whatever), or if not based on arguments in support of those, would be based on questions having to do with the application of those concepts (so the validity of those would be effectively presupposed). So, for what it's worth, to try to conform to the legitimate-citations guideline about published sources, I would cite (for example) the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (a lot!). [I wondered about arxiv.org, so the note in the guidelines was interesting on that score... I know some of the articles I was thinking of analyzing, or looking up analyses of, have been mainly/only published there; however, the SEP and people like Susskind or Smolin (or Saul Kripke, for what would be a relevant example on a different level...) would be the kinds of sources I'd be tending to cite/analyze as directly as possible, I hope.]

 

[anorlunda]

We should not hold conversations in the intro forum. I'll PM you.

Thread locked.