Cyclotron Pages FAQ

I very much appreciate getting your messages either in the guestbook or by private e-mail, thanks, but there are a load of Frequently Asked Questions that I prefer to answer here.
"Q -" is the question and "A -" is the answer...

Q - Why have you not been updating your web pages much lately?
A - I was hit by a triple wammy: new job, new house, new family. It may take some years to recover. Meanwhile my web duties are background tasks.
Q - I can't print your pages because the text is white. Do you do it on purpose to annoy us?
A - You need to select the right print option on your web browser. Since you did not tell me which browser you are using I can't help you further but it is there somewhere if you look.
Q - The string theorists have it all wrong. I am sending you a copy of my theory which all the physics journals have rejected. Please help me to develop it and get it noticed.
A - Thanks for telling me about your work. I am flattered by your request. You should not worry that the journals reject your paper because they have been known to reject inportant work. The famous example is Fermi's paper on the neutrino but there have been others. I suggest that you publish your work on a web page. Try to develop the mathematics further and put it into context with references. It may be possible to produce a pre-print and circulate that even if you cannot get a journal to take it. Sending it to people like me is pointless. I am only a computer programmer yet I get lots of theories and papers sent to me. Imagine how many real physicists must get. I also have been doing research and trying to get string theorists to pay attention but it is hopeless if you are not in the system. I have even been to a string conference where I displayed my work on a poster under the eyes of Hawking, Witten and the rest of them, no response! All you can do is try to publish in whatever way you can and hope that someone notices. You may get some more help from my heretics page.
Q - Please give me more information about superstrings
A - It is a huge and developing subject. If I have not explained it at enough length on my strings page you will have to buy a book or something.
Q - I am doing a school project. Please send everything you know about monk seals.
A - Good idea. Everything I know about monk seals is on the Mediterranean monk seal pages. There are also links there to other sites which have more information. Good luck with your project.
Q - I would like to work with monk seals. Can you help me?
A - My interest in monk seals and conservation is only a casual one. I am not a biologist or ecologist and I do not have any contacts who could help you find placements. Try looking at some of the other web sites which I link to and write to the research institutes mentioned. You could also think about becoming an ecovolunteer. Good luck.
Q - Where can I get Cousteau videos?
A - Since you are probably living in a different continent from me there is not much point me trying to answer, and I don't know anyway. If you do a web search for the titles you may find a supplier.
Q - Tell me more about your cyclotron I want to build one too.
A - A cyclotron requires very high voltages and will produce radioactivity so they are not toys for amateur scientists. I don't really have one. It is a joke. Everything else here is for real.
Q - You spelt "license"e; wrong.
A - I appreciate all comments and corrections no matter how small but in this case I have merely used my English spelling rather than your American spelling. You say "a license" and "to licence" while we say "a licence" and "to license" or something daft like that.
Q - Why are you so serious? Laugh a little HA HA HA HA HA HA!
A - Sounds like you either missed the page with the joke or you didn't get it. Note that there are no jokes on this page because these are all serious questions so please don't laugh.
Q - Can I copy your pages and put them on my site?
A - I am not exactly keen on people taking whole pages of mine and using them on their site without asking permission or giving me credit. The situation is much worse when they place adveritising on the page too as someone tried recently. People who do things like that are likely to find themselves sued by the copyright owner, who will claim all the advertising revenue for themselves.
Q - Would you please add my search engine to your list?
A - I already have enough of them on my search page so I will only add another if it is a serious attempt to index the whole web or it makes good use of general PICS labels such as my Safe For Kids system
Q - Why don't you write a book?
A - I have written a book about my theory of Event-Symmetric Space-Time. It is available as a free electronic book on the web.
Q - Is your book available in hardback or paperback?
A - All 15 of the publishers I approached turned it down and I don't have time to print my own. It is impossible for someone who is not working in a university to publish a book with equations in it, except by self-publishing. It works much better as a free electronic book anyway, so take a look.
Q - What can I do to help the Mediterranean monk seal and other endangered species?
A - Firstly you should always respect and conserve the animals and their habitat especially when you visit the countryside or go on holiday. Monk seals do like to be disturbed so do not seek them out without guidance. If you want to actively support the cause, anything you can do to raise public awareness and/or money will help. Such activities are best done with the approval and help of an organisation like the World Wide Fund for nature.
Q - How can I do a guestbook like yours?
A - Like it says on my guestbook page , the facility is provided by Lpage.com They have instructions on their pages. It is a free service and you don't need to be clever to use it.
Q - I linked to you so will you now link to me please?
A - Sorry, I gave up trying to link to all the people who link to me a long time ago but I have many links in my pages so if you have something appropriate about physics, monk seals, Cousteau or curries I might oblige.
Q - Can I link to your page?
A - Yes, thank you.
Q - Why is there no curry powder in your curry recipe?
A - Curry powder is just a poor mixture of basic spices such as chilli, cumin and coriander which are in my recipe.
Q - How can I publish my theories?
A - Put it on the web. Read my heretic's hall page to find out more.
Q - But I want to get my theories peer-reviewed. What should I do?
A - To get a peer review you have to send it to a peer-reviewed journal. They are likely to give you a short negative reply. The journals do not like submissions from those outside the academic community. For example, I had very bad review from the journal "Classical and Quantum Gravity" of my paper on the big bang as a white hole. The referee said it lacked mathematical rigour and did not address any relevant problems in cosmology. I was even criticised for citing old papers by Lemaitre and Bondi. Just a few months later someone from a university cited mine in the e-print archive and submitted theirs to the same journal. I had another paper rejected by Nuclear Physics when I was doing my doctorate 15 years ago. They said it would be of no interest to anyone. A cut down version which I managed to get into Physics Letters has been cited 12 times in the last two years. Such treatment is typical of these journals. There are a few which are a bit more open minded but they are less well circulated.
Q - Please would you comment on this theory ...
A - Your theory is very interesting and should be seen by everyone. You should publish it on a web page.
Q - I have had my theory locked in a safe for 40 years what should I do?
A - There is no need to be afraid about people stealing your theory. The bigger danger is that no-one will be in the least interested when you tell them about it, but read my legal page about how to protect your intellectual property
Q - Please give me your mail address so that I can send you my theory.
A - I am flattered but there are several reasons why I do not like to be sent theories privately, either by e-mail or by post. If you send me a theory which vaguely resembles an idea that I already have, and then I publish my work a short while later, you may accuse me of plagiarism. It is essential that you publish openly as I described above. If you are concerned about ridicule, use a pseudonym. In any case I am an utterly uninfluential and unimportant person. Nobody believes my theories so why do you want to send me yours? Please accept this advice with the good spirit in which it is offered.
Q - Please will you help me with my homework?
A - No, sorry.
Q - Is it possible to go faster than light
A - Questions like this are answered in the Physics FAQ and Relativity FAQ.
Q - Are you interested in UFOs
A - No, sorry.
Q - You stole my theory about discrete space-time/centre of the universe/theory of theories!
A - Theories of this sort have been around for donkey's years and it would be impossible to cite every similar one to mine. The important original work is how the theory is realised. The devil is in the mathematical details.
Q - Your links don't work.
A - I have lots of links and it is impossible to check them every day. If you tell me which link on which page has changed I can fix it, thanks.
Q - I use Acme web page maker. How can I put your meta tags on my pages.
A - If the tool does not have a feature to allow you to include meta tags such as my Safe For Kids labels, then you can probably edit the HTML source code with a notepad or text editor to put them in. If this causes problems you chose a bad web page maker.
Q - I have a word document with lots of equations and want to convert it into HTML for the web.
A - I do not know of any easy way to convert form Word to HTML. If you want to do it by hand you can use cut and paste from word to a text editor and add in the HTML formatting tags.
Equations are a problem because Netscape and Microsoft made sure that the maths tags for HTML 3 were taken out of the standard. People use various means to include equations. In many cases the and tags for subscripts and superscripts help. Greek letters can sometimes be included using tags but this does not work on all browsers. If your equations are complicated you may find it better to make a gif image of each equation instead. There are tools which can grab and trim images from the screen but don't ask me where to get them.

If that is going to be too much work there is an alternative. You can convert your document to postscript. This is done by installing the driver for a postscript printer on your system. You will probably find that your system already has a number of postscript printer drivers available to be set-up. You don't need the actual printer! Now print the document from Word using the option to "print to file". This will create a postscript document file which can be read with ghostscript/ghostview. The software is available free on the web but don't ask me where or how to set it up. You will need to read your own documentation or call your support line for help if you get stuck on any of this.

People do include postscript documents like these through web pages but since it requires some effort to read them it is wise to also make a short HTML summary of your work and then refer to the postscript for more technical details.
Q - I am sending you a Word document to read.
A - Please don't bother. Since Microsoft saw fit to support viruses in their word documents, there is no way I can be persuaded to open any Word document which I get by e-mail or from the internet.
In any case I have a filter which silently discards all over large e-mail messages along with all spam before I have to pay to download them through my modem. So I will probably never see the message with your word document. Sorry.
Q - Do people really ask you these questions?
A - They are all based on questions I frequently get asked.

Try these geeky discussions too.

This page was last updated 1 August 1999.
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