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.