Thread: Stephen Phillips Theory of Subquarks

Stephen Phillips is a parapsychologist who specializes in a very rare form of ESP called micro-psi. He presents a complex theory of subquarks, summarized in http://www.scientificexploration.org...4_phillips.pdf.

My only wish that his theory gets a fair hearing by someone in The Physics Forum who understands string theory. Phillips has also written two books on the topic: Extra-Sensory Perception of Quarks and ESP of Quarks and Superstrings.

I respectfully ask the interested member of the Forum to temporarily suspend his or her beliefs about ESP and determine whether or not Phillips has made proper use of string theory.

ESPinPhysics

Originally Posted by ESPinPhysics

Stephen Phillips is a parapsychologist who specializes in a very rare form of ESP called micro-psi.

He presents a complex theory of subquarks, summarized in http://www.scientificexploration.org...4_phillips.pdf.

My only wish that his theory gets a fair hearing by someone in The Physics Forum who understands string theory. Phillips has also written two books on the topic: Extra-Sensory Perception of Quarks and ESP of Quarks and Superstrings.

I respectfully ask the interested member of the Forum to temporarily suspend his or her beliefs about ESP and determine whether or not Phillips has made proper use of string theory.

ESPinPhysics

I'd like to start by recommending the referee's comments (starting on page 527). Its subject matter completely aside, the paper has serious issues.

That said, the answer to your question is that string theory is not used correctly in that paper.

There is certainly mention of it (both old and new kinds), and there is speculation about a correspondence between, on the one hand, certain categories of superstring states and, on the other, particles the author calls "ultimate physical atoms" (originally from a 1919 book by clairvoyants Besant and Leadbeater⁽¹⁾, whom the paper cites extensively). However, there is no actual string-theoretic argument given to support that correspondence, and (more importantly in the wider picture) no empirical data to support the hypothesis of sub-quark structure. It is simply asserted.

On the other hand, there are errors in what little superstring theory is applied. The paper states that toroidal compactification is necessary for the model being described, and acknowledges that this gives rise to unrealistic physics on the large scale. It is asserted that this difficulty can be avoided by compactifying at the hypothetical sub-quark scale, stating "what is unrealistic at the quark level need not be so at the subquark level, where the matter representations and gauge symmetry groups governing subquark forces do not have to be compatible with the phenomenological standard model" (p. 522). Unfortunately, this strategem does not succeed; even if the toroidal compactification occurs at the tiniest possible scale, this still leads to unbroken supersymmetry (and a lack of chiral gauge interactions) at the larger scales, contrary to observation⁽²⁾.

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⁽¹⁾ Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater, authors of Occult Chemistry, claimed to have special powers enabling them to perceive the "ultimate physical atoms" of nature. They made a bunch of incorrect predictions.

⁽²⁾ Shrinking the compactification scale will also scale up the mass spectrum of the sub-quarks. The theory outlined in the paper is too vague for me to claim that would be an issue, but it looks like the opposite of what the author was aiming for.