- From the flyleaf to The Physics of Consciousness
Alamo-Girl, please correct me if any of the substance of this story is incomplete or incorrect.
After all this time, the physics community cannot get its mind around intangibility, real though it has proved to be. I am thus not surprised that Walker could be considered "fringe" within a group where timidity reigns. A paradigm shift is not required. Quantum mechanics IS a major paradim shift.
Walker covers all this and much more in his clear, eloquent, incisive book. It is a fine and beautiful work and I recommend it unreservedly.
OK, so I did a Sci Finder search. Since his 1977 paper in Int. J. Quantum. Chem., where he put forward his quantum synapse hypothesis (he was at Aberdeen Proving Ground at the time, BTW), he wrote a 1980 cancer review (a review is a summary of published work, not original research ). An Evan H Walker filed a patent in 1990 on a binary munition system; this could have been the same guy, given where he worked. There is one natural products isolation with Evan H. Walker as a senior author, and the Walker Cancer Inst. as an address, in 2002.
And we have "Cancer as a mechanism of hypermutation". Walker E H U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD 21005 ACTA BIOTHEORETICA (1992 Mar), 40(1), 31-40. Looks like he's also got novel thoughts to share about cancer, as well as consciousness. Acta biotheoretica is not a journal I'm familiar with; BTW. But here' a quote for ya, from the abstract:
It is proposed that cancer exists as a phylogenetic mechanism serving to promote "hyperevolution", albeit at the expense of the ontogeny, that is similar to a process recently discovered in bacterial mutations. Cell-surface-associated nucleic acid in tumorigenic cells and sperm cell vectorization of foreign DNA indicate the existence of essential mechanisms necessary to the occurrence of cancer mediated hyperevolution. An analysis of the proposed mechanism indicates that for mutagenesis of chemical cytology, stress induced neoplasticity confers an evolutionary advantage of more than two orders of magnitude.
Horror of horrors, he's an evolutionist!
There are a few E.H. Walker and E.H. Walker, Jr. papers from Tulane, UCLA and Oklahoma State, and the MRC in England. The MRC guy is Edward H. Walker. The OSU guy looks like a grad. student. Since Walker's address in 1992 was still Aberdeen Proving Ground, we can rule out papers in the 1980s with a different address.
So, since 1977, we have not one but two, ahem, highly original theories suggesting the biophysical or biomedical community has gotten it all wrong; one review, one natural producs isolation, and one patent. I can't find much before 1977 either, but abstracting systems are generally less efficient the further you go back, so I don't put so much faith in that. He might well have 100 publications; scientific search engines, though good, are not perfect, but gosh, I'm having a hard time finding ten I can positively assign to him. And, God bless him, he does publish his ideas and subject them to the snide comments of a$$holes like me, so he has some courage.
I don't normally hang my hat on arguments from authority, but when someone else claims authority or credentials, I examine the claim.
Maybe you should try to be just a little skeptical here, Phaedrus?