Several years ago, as President of ISUS, I led the fight to document Larson’s RST in Wikipedia. It was arguably one of the most protracted Wikipedia struggles ever waged at the time (everything has been deleted since then). We eventually lost the battle and everything about Larson was deleted, ostensibly on the grounds that Larson’s work constitutes original research. A while later, another member of ISUS managed to write a short biographical article, which was deleted just last week, after being in existence for several years. This time the reason given for deleting the article was that Larson is too obscure a figure, and he and his work are not “notable.”
Resisting the urge to rant over this, I just want to point out for the record, in this the most obscure of blogs, that Larson’s Reciprocal System of Physical Theory (RST), the universe of motion, is proving to be much more successful than Newton’s system of physical theory, which we refer to as the Legacy System of Physical Theory (LST), in the fundamental assumptions each brings to the table vis-à-vis the observations of experimentalists.
The LST’s fundamental assumption is that nature can be explained in terms of a few fundamental interactions among a few fundamental particles. These particles are assumed to exist within the framework of space and time. True, the framework has been greatly modified over time, as the LST transformed it via the enigmatic and incompatible principles of relativity and quantum mechanics, but Newton’s system of physical theory, his program of research, we might say, has remained unchanged.
In contrast, the program of research that pertains to Larson’s universe of motion is based on the assumption that there are no fundamental particles playing upon the stage of space and time. His new system assumes that space and time do not exist as independent entities, but are merely two, reciprocal aspects of the one component of the universe, motion, which exists in discrete units forming the observed particles of matter and anti-matter and explaining their interactions.
Fortunately, this radical difference, in the fundamental assumptions of the two systems of physical theory, enables investigators to compare how well observations conform to either system. For example, to explain the particle interaction of gravity, the LST postulates that the nature of space must conform to the principles of non-Euclidean geometry, while the RST emphatically insists that the universe conforms to Euclidean geometry: Recent observations confirm that the geometry of the universe is exceedingly flat (Euclidean.) Hence, RST 1, LST 0.
To avoid the difficulty of explaining how a charged point particle (a particle of no spatial extent) can avoid the embarrassment of the infamous singularity that has plagued the LST for many decades, scientists resorted to the concept of strings, but this could only be proffered along with a concomitant introduction of extra physical dimensions, something the RST rules out: Very recent observations coming from the experiments of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have greatly diminished the hopes of ever finding evidence of more than the three observed dimensions of space and the one of time. Hence, RST 2, LST 0.
Finally, in what may be the final iconoclastic blow to the LST, scientists have discovered that non-oscillating neutrinos, traveling from the LHC in CERN to Italy, seem to be arriving some 60 nanoseconds ahead of when they should, if they were traveling at the speed of light. Of course, it wasn’t long ago that neutrinos streaming in from the Sun were found to oscillate between flavors, giving them a slight mass, which slowed them down below the speed of light. Now, if the new results are valid, the faster-than-light neutrinos would have to have what we might call, for lack of a better term, anti-mass, or imaginary valued mass.
To say the least, there is no room for such superluminal particles, called tachyons, in the LST. In the RST, on the other hand, they are a necessary and integral part of the system, inhabiting the cosmic sector of the universe of motion. Hence, RST 3, LST 0.
Perhaps today, Wikipedia is not the place to announce the score in this tête-à-tête contest of the two systems, but my bet is that, in some future version of this venerable member of the online community, there will be a place of honor for Dewey B. Larson and his new system of physical theory.
Doug