--> Unpublishable Papers:


Once in a while, an idea appears that is so far out of the mainstream that it cannot be published without extraordinary effort.
Often such ideas cannot even get reviewed.
I present a few examples here.

For the first example, which was ultimately accepted after rejection from 15 different journals over the course of 7 years, I include a synopsis of reviewer comments here.

The comments are informative in that reviewers object to every imaginable aspect of the manuscript - its writing, its logic, its references, its mathematics, its simulations, its biology, its conformity, the examples chosen, its suitability for review, its fraudulent nature - and appear to share only the opinion that the paper must be rejected. I provide these reviews in the hope that future authors, and reviewers, may benefit from this experience.

    Why is the right half of the body controlled
          by the left half of the brain?

Many vertebrate motor and sensory systems "decussate," or cross the midline to the opposite side of the body. The successful crossing of millions of axons during development requires a complex of tightly controlled regulatory processes. Since these processes have evolved in many distinct systems and organisms, it seems reasonable to presume that decussation confers a significant functional advantage - yet if this is so, the nature of this advantage is not understood. In this article, we examine constraints imposed by topology on the ways that a three dimensional processor and environment can be wired together in a continuous, somatotopic, way. We show that as the number of wiring connections grows, decussated arrangements become overwhelmingly more robust against wiring errors than seemingly simpler same-sided wiring schemes. These results provide a predictive approach for understanding how 3D networks must be wired if they are to be robust, and therefore have implications both for future large scale computational networks and for complex biomedical devices.

    Why do insulators charge one another?

In this letter, we investigate the spontaneous triboelectrification of similar materials. This effect, first reported in 1986, has been little studied but is easily reproduced. We report here using a model system of common balloons that identical insulators, prepared in the same way and rubbed symmetrically, break symmetry so that one balloon becomes positive and the other negative. Curiously, the distribution of charges on the balloons appear to be self-similar, with different charge patterns on the positive and the negative surface. We propose a mechanism in which an initial localized charge may spawn the production of smaller localized charges of the same polarity, and we speculate that a similar charging instability may be at work in other charging phenomena.

    Why is the spin of the proton 1/2?

Exact wave functions are derived from an azimuthally periodic Hamiltonian using both the Klein-Gordon and the Schroedinger equations. We show that, curiously, for both relativistic and non-relativistic equations, integer spin wave equations necessarily produce half-integer angular momentum in this potential. We find additionally that the higher energy, relativistic, solutions require an asymptotically free potential, while the lower energy, Schroedinger, solutions can exist in a potential that grows linearly with r. These are purely mathematical results, however we speculate on possible physical interpretations.