Claims on the Internet live on indefinitely.  I claimed to have found a testable candidate to unify gravity with the three other fundamental forces of Nature.  Thanks to sometimes trying efforts on this Science20 blog, I now have reasons why that claim was in error.  I consider it my responsibility to unambiguously rescind the claim.  If in the future, someone starts rehashing my proposal, at least I can provide a line of defense.

The word "retracted" was not used in the title since it is associated with fraud.  Editors will retract papers from journals when they determine the data was fictional, not factual.  Rescind is being used in the sense of repeal.  I am no longer trying to promote the GEM unification proposal because it is wrong.

The Higgs has been discovered, so this is the last of my Monday/Tuesday weekly blogs.  Blogging at Science 2.0 achieved my primary goal: debunking my GEM unified field proposal.  Part of that work suggested there was "no stinkin' Higgs".  The announcement from the LHC on July 4 of the Higgs discovery showed that technical speculation was in error. Don't believe the 1 in a million of being wrong PR however.  The spin of the particle detected remains to be shown in the data.

What I enjoy most is upsetting my own apple cart, presumptions about how things are as provided by my earliest teachers.  The image I learned about real numbers has negative numbers on the left, positive numbers on the right, and a zero sitting in the middle, with the integers marked out as even as can be:

[I changed the title of this blog to prepend Proto to vector space since a vector space is defined over a mathematical field.  While I explored the possibility that the positive real numbers might make up a mathematical field, that effort did not pan out.  In a subsequent blog, I will show how many properties of a vector space are shared by the positive real numbers over the group Z₂.]

April 24, 24 Steps To The Precession Of The Perihelion Of Mercury

Snarky puzzle

The only metric that is spherically symmetric and solves the Einstein field equations is the Schwarzschild metric, or so sayith Jørg Tofte Jebsen aka Birkhoff's theorem. [Correction: The theorem applies for a spherically symmetric, non-rotating, and uncharged source for the vacuum field equations.]