This is a response to Bee's post at Backreaction, "Division by Zero".

If I write to someone, I assume they will to some small extent register the first two words of the title of my e-mail, and the nature of the e-mail address, and nothing more. If I pay some attention to whether those two words catch their attention, perhaps they'll read the first sentence of the e-mail. If something about that seems interesting, to them, they may go on into the attachment, the arXiv posting, or the published paper that I ask that them to read. I equally apologize and take no offense if they want no part of it.

I write to people who write engagingly, people whose approval I think valuable. I've written to Bee once, who replied with what I recognized as asperity that she doesn't work on foundations, but I knew very well that she does. Bee writes about methodology quite often, and her thoughts on Physics go considerably beyond "shut up and calculate", often with wisdom. Bee appears to have quite broad interests, and a crank who doesn't believe fairly passionately that what they're doing ought to be interesting to someone like her isn't going to be a crank for long. The emotional costs of being publicly identified as a crank are very high. I've been politely but rightly called out by Chad Orzel in the last few days for being at least something of a crank on questions of how to popularize QM, at Continuity, Discretion, and the Perils of Popularization, and even that hurt a little, so I'm now licking my wounds, hoping that I won't become a bitter old man about it. An interesting process.

Do people who receive a lot of crank Physics find it painful to have these things arrive because of the pain the authors feel at what they think is oppression? It is sadly true that the individual desperation of pain can become very unpleasant to a community, but is it best to turn away from the leper? Happily, I've had few enough of these attempts on my time to have been able to reply to them all, but I do not expect the same of someone who receives many.

All of which is to say to well-known Physicists who get a lot of this stuff, let these things come, allow that you'll read as much as you read, that if these strangers to you don't interest you beyond the first two words of the title of the e-mail, then that's all you'll read. Every now and then you can announce that you almost never reply to such e-mails, if you like, but people who write e-mails attempting to get feedback know very well that from almost everyone their most likely feedback is no reply at all.

I suppose this post will stop me and most reasonable people who are reading along with Backreaction from sending anything to Bee in future. I think it sets a tone that says that she does her own thing in her own community. So Bee has achieved something. But I suppose also that there will still be the unreasonable people and those who come new to Backreaction, who might believe from what they see that she is the attractive curious person that she does so well.

And to this response, no answer required.

On Monday morning, I read something announced by e-mail from Proc.Roy.Soc.A., Navascués, M. & Wunderlich, H. 2010 A glance beyond the quantum model. Proc. R. Soc. A 466, 881-890. (doi: 10.1098/rspa.2009.0453). The authors make numerous assumptions that I consider them to have less awareness of than they should if they're to write a foundational paper, but it's in common with very many physicists, so it's not something I consider outrageous. It's enormously difficult to notice that one is buried and might want to rise from under the commonplace. Of course, the issue is whether anyone can provide different assumptions that work better. For me, for now, I believe a random field approach is again a viable way to understand quantum field theory, and through it quantum theory, despite the standard Physics views about the violation of Bell inequalities (a belief that I can to some extent justify because of my paper Bell inequalities for random fields - cond-mat/0403692, J. Phys. A: Math. Gen. 39 (2006) 7441-7455), so I started to write a formal Comment on their paper. A day and a half later, I thought it came out well, so I submitted it, which is more rash than one is supposed to be, but the chance of getting the tone just right for the editors and referees to accept it is small enough that it's not worth spending enormous amounts of time on it.

The Comment can be found at http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.4993. Here's the title and summary:

Comment on “A glance beyond the quantum model”

Summary. The aim of “A glance beyond the quantum model” to modernize the Correspondence Principle is compromised by an assumption that a classical model must start with the idea of particles, whereas in empirical terms particles are secondary to events. The discussion also proposes, contradictorily, that observers who wish to model the macroscopic world classically should do so in terms of classical fields, whereas, if we are to use fields, it would more appropriate to adopt the mathematics of random fields. Finally, the formalism used for discussion of Bell inequalities introduces two assumptions that are not necessary for a random field model, locality of initial conditions and non-contextuality, even though these assumptions are, in contrast, very natural for a classical particle model. Whether we discuss physics in terms of particles or in terms of events and (random) fields leads to differences that a glance would be well to notice.
The weird thing is that I've since discovered (a friend pointed it out to me) that the arXiv preprint of this paper has no mention of fields in it at all. It looks as if the authors may have put in a reference to fields at the behest of a referee. The way they introduce classical fields in the published version looked heart-felt to me, "we've got to think about this in terms of classical continuous fields, ..." (that's not a quote), but with there being no "field" language in the arXiv version it seems that the whole paper is really about particles, business as usual. If I had seen that, I would not have felt the muse to write, and the certainty of a Comment on the lines I've just submitted being rejected would have been absolute, but there you go. The outcome, however, is that my Comment makes not much sense, at least not to me, if you read only the arXiv version. Sorry if you can't access the published version, but you could write to the authors requesting that they send you a copy.

There was a time when I used not to know how what I wrote would look to other people, particularly Physicists, almost at all. There came a time when I could see that Physicists would be OK with what I was writing and how I was saying it, but now it's more fuzzy again. I'm writing stuff that is only a little twisted from the mainstream, little enough that Physicists sometimes think it's interesting and constructive enough, and I cite the literature just well enough, and there's enough mathematics, that it ought to be published, and referees say OK to it, but sometimes, I suppose, there's not enough that's interesting and constructive to justify it. I've come to identify enough with Physics that I often write it with a capital P, and I love the way the whole thing tries to fit together as if it's a random tiling, not quite a lattice of ideas, so I don't want to pull it down, but I do want to do improvements that go beyond adding a flower or two.

My strong expectation is that this Comment will be rejected by the editors directly, or, if not, by the referee(s), but I write as much to see more clearly as to be read.