WHY WE’RE LOST IN THE COSMOS

It is important to understand the difference between theories of principle (Special or General Relativity) and model-building (the Standard Model of particle physics, especially Quantum ChromoDynamics).

Model-building can work moderately well if you start out with assumptions that are empirically well-motivated.

However, if your model-building has a foundation that contains one or more fundamental assumptions that are wrong (e.g., Ptolemaic astronomy) then your models get increasingly weird, complicated, and in need of ever more “epicycles” to “save the phenomenon”.

In the early 1900s physicists adopted three dubious and closely related fundamental assumptions: strict reductionism, absolute scale, and absolute scale invariance for dimensional “constants” like the gravitational coupling constant, G.

Increasingly, physics has suffered from these assumptions. Perhaps we are approaching the point at which the anxiety over the lack of progress in theoretical physics is getting severe enough for physicists to go back and explore three alternative assumptions: limited reductionism, relative scale, and self-similar scaling throughout nature. These alternative assumptions lead naturally to a fully unified paradigm for all of nature based on conformal geometry and the fundamental symmetry of discrete self-similarity, i.e., a discrete fractal paradigm for the cosmos.

Robert L. Oldershaw
http://www3.amherst.edu/~rloldershaw
Discrete Scale Relativity/Fractal Cosmology