I'm not in a position to comment much on the substance of your article, but this line:
"that the author works in the statistics department, appears to have never published any previous physics research, and in 5 months has not gotten this paper published in a peer reviewed journal and has not been cited by any other work."
irks me a little. Einstein was an unpublished patents clerk with a rocky academic record when he developed and published the special theory of relativity.
While prior publishing success and citations is undoubtedly a marker of good thinking, it is erroneous, in my opinion, to exclude the work of someone based of the fact they haven't. Because there are many, many precedents where prevoiusly unknown people have published groundbreaking work. I think everyone should be judged on the merits of their thinking, not on their status within academia.
> I think everyone should be judged on the merits of their thinking, not on their status within academia.
Which is what the preceding 3 paragraphs of my comment were about. And I said it was a red flag, not a reason to outright reject the paper. While there are a few cases of outsiders making significant breakthroughs, it's rare. It's far more common for outsiders to produce work with elementary errors, which is what appears to be happening here (see the dissection at http://badphysics.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/nobang/).
> Einstein was an unpublished patents clerk with a rocky academic record when he developed and published the special theory of relativity.
Einstein had a physics qualification, a teaching diploma and had several published papers to his name before he became a patent clerk. He became a patent clerk because he was unable to find a position teaching physics. A few years later he was awarded his PhD. He published the theory of relativity while he was a full-time academic.
Science is a social endeavor like all other human activity, and looking at an author's background is an amazingly efficient heuristic for detecting cranks. Relativity and cosmology seems to produce lots of them, and they--unlike Einstein--typically don't even fully understand the theories they're trying to replace.
Amateur Einsteins are the "SEO experts" of physics.
irks me a little. Einstein was an unpublished patents clerk with a rocky academic record when he developed and published the special theory of relativity.
While prior publishing success and citations is undoubtedly a marker of good thinking, it is erroneous, in my opinion, to exclude the work of someone based of the fact they haven't. Because there are many, many precedents where prevoiusly unknown people have published groundbreaking work. I think everyone should be judged on the merits of their thinking, not on their status within academia.