| This book has its origins in my leaving applied physics in 1969 to teach at a small college and ponder the foundations of physics without pressure, even if with limited time caused by a heavy teaching load. Richard Feynman had lectured weekly during the two years I spent at Hughes Labs in Malibu, after graduating from Engineering Physics at Cornell. I had considered switching to theory at Cornell and was discouraged from doing so by visiting Hans Bethe, their ranking theorist. Feynman reawakened my love of and confidence in pursuing the foundations of physics. I felt, however unworthy it was, that he and I were kindred spirits. He searched his whole life for a new path into post QED physics and encouraged me to also do so, through his lectures.
That was a long time ago and much has happened to my career but I never gave up the quest. Now I am old and it is time to leave the insights I have gained to the next generation of mavericks to push forward. My most admired physicist is Dirac, for he seems more than anyone to have a creative spirit that pioneered so many new ideas on the foundations, even if he was a weird person. He would have loved this book I am sure, as would Feynman. I started out thinking that complex numbers fit non-relativistic quantum physics, then why not a larger number system for relativistic physics? I avoided the literature on such things fearing that I would wind up where Feynman was, and he had not found the answer. He showed us Maxwell's equations in Pauli matrices and I knew electrons obeyed laws in the extension to Dirac matrices, so I tried to generalize these number systems and see what equations I could find. I reinvented many wheels in the years that followed and wasted a lot of time doing so, but it kept me independent in outlook. That is perhaps why I have succeeded where others have failed, if I indeed have-with my weird ideas of multi-mass and extended Lorentz combined with absolute motion. |
