Electromagnetic waves - what are they?

[f95toli]

Just to clarify things. Einsten was taught physics at several universities in Germany.
As far as I remember he did not get his Ph.D. until after he published the special theory of relativity in 1905 (he also published his work on the photoelectric effect the same year), I think the topic of his thesis was Brownian motion. He got his Ph.D in 1905 or 1906. The point is that even though it is true that he was not an established scientist when he published his theories he had studied physics for many years and he definitly had a lot of formal training (the math needed in his work on Brownian motion is quite complicated and definitly not something an amateur would understand).

There are more recent examples of people that have done ground-breaking work withour beeing established in the scientific community, for example Josephson (Nobel prize in 1971 or 1972 for work he did as a graduate student) or this years Nobel price winner in Chemistray Tanaka (works as an engineer at a private company in Japan). However, all of them have had some , and in most cases a lot of, formal training.

 

[RossGr]

BaDaBooM,
Some 20yrs ago I worked as a technician for the local University Physics Department, this last Friday, I was on campus to pick up a book from the Liberary, and for fun dropped in on my old haunts in the Physics department. I ran into my old (now litteraly, man that guy has greyed!) coworker, in our 20min (or less) conversation he was attempting to tell me of his classical development of Schrodingers equation. Now any time you start developing QM from purely classical concepts you have stepped into the realm of Crackpothood, (I told him so!) , He has submitted 3 different verisons of his work, each succeding one more mathematical, to some journal (I am not sure which). The first was rejected out of hand as it contained no math, the later one was evidently read by at least one reviewer and rejected with a note that he had some interesting ideas.

He has several things working against him, 1. His basic concept is non standard Physics, 2. He has only a MS degree in engineering, IIRC, 3. He is not a member of the established theoritical physics community.

Will he ever get his work published? Perhaps, if he continues to develop the mathematical foundations of his ideas, if they are meaningful, if he can present them in a consistent, logical, and readable format, Maybe.

If he fails at anyone of the above points it will never be published in a real scientific journal.

That is the process, if you wish to get your ideas acknowledged by the scientific community at large you MUST be able to express them mathematically. Without that you have no hope. Frankly without the mathematical foundation you do not have a useful theory. Then finally you must get them published in a journal, and not Ladies Home Journal .

What is frighting is that if you establish a track record, your papers will be published with only cursory review. This has been demonstrated several times. A few years back a prominiate scientist (whose name escapes me) submitted a bogus paper that was complete techogarble, it was published. When he revealed the trick, he was condemned for it and the whole event was swept under the table because no real scientitist would ever purposely do that. Now, more recently, we have the fraudlent papers submitted by Jon Schoon and published. Hopefully the Scientific community will wake up to some new realities. The review process needs some review!

 

[BaDaBooM]

(Clarification: When I said someone not in the elite, I did not mean they were necessarily not knowledgable for the field of the discovery... maybe someone who does it as a hobby yet fairly well versed in it.)

Ok, so basically it's extremely difficult and gradual process for a theory. However what if it was a theory that was applied to a physical device that did something thought to be impossible? Or better yet, maybe they accidently made such a device when their goal was something normal; as such has happened in the past. You would think it would be easy with physical proof, but sometimes it is even hard to get people to take that seriously as there is a lot of trickery out there. What would that person, just a normal citizen, do to convince others and still keep their ownership? The press? Scientific communities? Business? How would they set themselves apart from the fakes? Good example of a fake (for the reasons I posted in it):

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=38&threadid=927549&highlight_key=y

I know this seems like a strange question, but it just got me thinking about what would be the right way to overcome such a long, uphill battle if it actually did happen.

 

[RossGr]

If you do not understand the current state of science, how do you know what is, or is not possible? If you do not understand the current state of science how do you know that your device does what you think it does?

Between Classical Physics, Quantum Physics and Relativity the current state of science we have a very good understanding of the world we live in. Do we understand everything? No, of course not, but IMHO the chance of someone who does not have a very good understanding of the Physics and math making a significant contribution to the body of physical knowledge is nearly nonexistant. Shall we say that ground is well plowed, if we did not have this understanding we would not have walked on the moon, we would not be corresponding via computers and the internet. The explosian of technology in the past 50 yrs is not accidental, it is the result of our understanding of the physical universe.

So you can fuss about the plite of the lonley genious who has build a perpetual motion machine, but I will not hold my breath waiting for it to happen. Meanwhile there is so much that is known, and I know so little of it, I can only keep learning. It seems the more I learn the less I know.

 

[BaDaBooM]

I guess my clarification wasn't clear enough.... In no way did my hypothetical situation include someone who knows nothing of science and math. Could be a retired engineer or something. Just someone who would not be expected to have an invention of this importance and does not necessarily have a reputation for it. Not that they aren't educated. (Nobody said anything about "perpetual motion") I guess I was just thinking, if it did happen, how in the world would they convince people like you, as a whole without getting screwed. I guess that's why a lot of people in history never got to see the fruits of their discoveries, because they died before people would believe it. Sad... oh well....

 

[f95toli]

If you have a good idea and have good, solid evidence that it might be correct you would submitt it to a a scientific journal. There is nothing stopping you from submitting a paper to Science, Nature or whatever journal you prefer.
The only condtion is that you have to accept the peer-review process which means that the paper is reviewed by one or more referees (basically someone from the scientific community that is qualified to decide if your claims are valid or not).

If you for some reason or another don't want the paper to be refereed you can submitt it to a preprint database which is basically a open web-based database where anyone can donwload/upload papers. However, since papers in these databases are not (yet) reviewed they are usually not considered to be "real" papers.

The scientific community is more open-minded than you would think simply because there are so many physicist working today that no one can keep track of them all, once in a while you will see papers with great new results coming from some unexpected place. The referees are usually quite good (there are exceptions of course) and would not stop a paper just because they don't recognize your name.

So, to summarize: If you have a great new theory just submitt it together with the evidence to back it up.