I think that this is your service against science, Tommaso. You may like Carl, I like him, too. But both of us know that what he wrote is complete flapdoodle. It just goes against the very basic principles of science - and the scientific integrity - to promote flapdoodle if you know that it is one. Science's most fundamental procedure is, on the contrary, about the elimination of the wrong stuff....

Of course that I am not going to publish. I don't want the key ideas to be treated on par with complete garbage or worse. The world today is filled with people like you who promote nonsense and kick into gold - because you think it is the right politically correct thing to do. With my passion for the truth, I just can't stand such things. You're doing all these things because you are a far left radical. This is just wrong. And I even think that as a conservative, Carl knows it is wrong, too. 

You should be ashamed, Tommaso.

Although I am far away from this world's direct impact on me, I am still frightened by the way how the important ideas are being treated, overlooked, or sometimes directly hated and trash-talked by the people who surround science - like yourself. Take some above-average recent example - David Berenstein's and his undergraduate student's paper about the emergence of geometry in matrix models with 6 matrices.

Now, this is something. It is about a real phenomenon where we kind of "know" that something of the sort is really taking place, it is fascinating, it is about the way how geometry and/or gravity really emerge, and they want to put the pieces together, using a computer - which are almost certainly being "under-exploited" by the high-energy theoretical community. The undergraduate student is amazing that he can work on such things - he clearly has to be able not only to work with the computers but he must have mastered the AdS/CFT correspondence better than e.g. you, Tommaso.

It's all cool, but that's exactly what people like you don't like. You hate the idea that some people are *genuinely* better than you, and they have results that are more important than anything you have ever achieved and anything you will ever achieve in your life. You love to promote nonsense and unimportant stuff because this is your "politeness" service that helps you feel better - you are not worse than Carl, after all, and he will be grateful, and you may feel as a good person who has helped a person "crushed" by the scientific establishment. At the same moment, you have no passion for the results that are really important, for the insights that really make sense and that are deep.

Meanwhile, David Berenstein's and his student's work - and hundreds of other real promising papers - would never be discussed outside his preprint and the "fourth floors" of the top departments of physics, even though - in principle - undergraduate students can understand this stuff. One of them co-authored it. Even his blog won't help him.

You express some compassion for Carl who is being crushed by the scientific establishment. Except that Carl's work is being crushed or ignored by the scientific "establishment" for a very good reason. What he writes makes no sense. You, Tommaso, are the most despicable and dangerous combination of the anti-scientific P.R. haters because you combine an ignorant whose knowledge of physics, at least theoretical physics, is weaker than that of the knowledge of David Berenstein's undergraduate students - and you are also eager to promote wrong stuff for the sake of "balance" and "justice" - which is a result of your far-left radical political delusions that contradict the very basic principles of science.

But real science is cruel. It is not a democracy between correct results and wrong results. It is not a democracy between people who find out correct things and those who can only find and write rubbish that only gets published because the system always has to fail at some points, especially if politically active bloggers like you help it to fail all the time.

Paper

Let me just mention a typical excerpt of Carl's paper:

"In making these sorts of arguments, we must recognize that we cannot assume that the velocity of the gravitons involved is the same as the speed of light. In particular, in GP coordinates, a particle falling through the event horizon exceeds the speed of light (that is, |r˙| > 1). Gravitons capable of producing such a force must also exceed the speed of light. Such a theory would have gravity waves also travel faster than light. The experimental measurement of the speed of gravity is a subject much discussed in the physics literature. The mainstream view is that the speed has not yet been measured."

Holy crap, you don't really believe that this stuff is deep, do you? This is just pure rubbish. It's the kind of stuff that undergraduate students should be kicked out of the school if they say it during a physics exam. It's just complete bullshit.

The speed of gravitons is the speed of light. In fact, the "genuine" speed called "c" that enters relativity is the speed of gravitons. It's a well-known facts that gravitons  are those that really move by the maximum speed while photons (light) can sometimes be forced by the environment (such as a two-form B-field) to move by lower speeds. Speeds that are "superluminal" are a direct contradiction with relativity. Claiming that such things are "normal" and just a matter of "not settled experiment tests" etc. is a proof that the author has no idea even about high-school special relativity.

At the same moment, the paper is combining completely naive pictures from classical physics with some jargon that the author captured in presentations of quantum mechanics - but he hasn't understood them. For example, he says that the electric force follows an "exact inverse square law" just a few sentences above the quote I have already mentioned. Nevertheless, he attributes this force to virtual photons.

However, when virtual photons are being considered, he must clearly consider quantum theory, and in quantum theory, the electric force actually doesn't follow the exact 1/r^2 law. The fine-structure constant is inevitably running. So Carl has no clue about the effects that manifestly exist and that are connected with the deep principles of physics as it actually works - quantum electrodynamics, in this case - while he is randomly inventing lots of phenomena (superluminal speeds of gravitons) that manifestly cannot work, and uses wrong and foggy arguments to defend the indefensible.

Of course that if he is sending this garbage to all journals he can think of, it must eventually be published in a journal, probably a low-quality journal like the International Something or whatever the name is. But that doesn't mean that it's correct. It's clear that by sending stuff around, the author may increase the probability that it gets published. If getting published is the ultimate goal, it works.

But the purpose of the actual science - as you, Tommaso, clearly misunderstand yourself - is not to get published. The goal is to find correct explanations of Nature which "amateur physicists" who build on spamming journals - rather than learning from mistakes and others and the elimination of falsified hypotheses - are simply extremely unlikely to achieve, and in specific cases, once we look at the papers, we know that they haven't achieved it.

Once again, your celebration of the failures of the system to separate the seeds from weeds is disgraceful and dangerous, Tommaso.

WOW! Carl... congratulations^2.  This is fantastic news and I am proud to have been among the original "crackpot" posters who were featured during the same period on Tommaso's old blog.  I have been trying to publish as well... even had a physicist helping me... until he got all stringy and nuts in the head like Lumo... *snort*... so I had to cut him loose until he gets it out of his system... ;)