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The paper cited in the previous post is actually worth a read. A number of ideas -- the role of imaginaries and quaternions in QM are interesting, but too poorly developed to actually be sensible, yet.

He quotes Penrose's 1989 The Emperor's New Mind extensively. This is an excellent book and full of many good ideas, and Penrose is certainly much smarter than I am, but this is a popular source, and not a peer reviewed article. I highly recommend Penrose over this paper if you want to read something that will make you think.

The essence of the sense in which this theory departs from conventional thinking can be described by this statement, which the author explicitly rejects:

't Hooft says: ‘... we must demand that our model (of nature) gives credible scenarios for a universe for any choice of the initial conditions’.

Unfortunately, I must agree with Nobel Laureate 't Hooft that this is a reasonable expectation, and although I am accused of a "withering scorn" for people who don't sit in "my little holes," I will hazard a guess that there is no physicist living or dead who would disagree with this requirement, except the author of the paper himself.

If you read the paper, pay particular attention to the section on page 9 discussing ontology and also the section on page 16 concerning non-locality, where the rabbit comes fully out of the hat. What the author ultimately wants us to believe is that all reality is embedded in a nowhere dense subset of phase space (think the Cantor Dust.) All of the details of the theory actually developed to a point to be thought-provoking are hidden in a leap of faith that any state constructed that contradicts his theory "probably" aren't in this set because it has measure zero. This is not proved, and he brushes aside the severe constraints that physics already places on admissible states in phase space without comment. Unfortunately for his thesis, these restrictions would make it highly likely that any physically realizable state is indeed in this set. Therefore he can dismiss the consequences of Belle's theorem or any other counter-intuitive result in QM because thought experiments aren't even admissible in his perverse ontology.

As an aside: the Invariance in "Invariant Set" comes about as a result of the fact that this nowhere-dense fractal set has is postulated to have physical invariance under a set of dynamical laws -- which are not specified. Until they are, there is really no "there, there."

"Disgrace indeed, to be caught in a metaphysical position"
J. S. Bell,
Free Variables and Local Causality, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics p. 101

A little dry Scottish humor!

I downloaded and started reviewing the paper yesterday. And I agree there are interesting points. But I am unsure whether this is something that creates anything new or testable.

Now, I'm just a guy who does computers and has an interest in physics. I do not have the skill, actually, I probably do, but I don't have the patience for the mathematics.

This really is a very interesting time, but I'm unconvinced that Palmers theories are more than a shoot from the hip approach.

There are a few on some of the FR physics threads that make a cogent argument that pure mathematics is divorced from physics. This is an easy argument to reject on it's face, but there may be way more to it than we can imagine now.

All of the experiences in early physics dealt with something that was perceived to be dense and continuous. One could make an argument that this view had to at least start being rejected with Plancks work.

Here's the deal: If the physics gives us results that contradict the predictions of the mathematics, we have to toss out the math, not the reality!

Einsteins work as much as I understand it depend on a dense, continuous four dimensional world. But Bell's arguments show GR is incompatible with quantum logic. Not just in the scope of the very tiny neighborhood of a particle, but macroscopically.

So it seems to me that what we are seeing is a change from physics being something concerned with centimeters and seconds and whatever (a physical geometric model) into something concerned with set theory and topology (a looser abstract model).

And I applaud the author for moving in that direction. I have long felt that the ultimate answers were going to be more in the abstract world.

What use is it to posit an abstract theory that has no phenomenological basis? That's kind of like a computer graphics program drawing a picture of the most beautiful woman you could ever imagine.

Interesting exercise, maybe, but ultimately, a waste of time leading to frustration. Some good effort needs to be spent looking at the wherewithals of abstract models and how to "value" them. Thumbs up!! Thumbs down!! A Roman kind of thing. If we are dealing with totally abstract, untestable models, we might end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And I'm not sure we would have lost anything!

"Depends on what the meaning of 'IS' is."
Bill Clinton

So we'll see, I guess. This is a preliminary paper. But he admits the base and results are non-computational, so I'm not going to hold my breath or lose any sleep over it...