Rick Lockyer wrote:If Fred and Michel still think Joy did not make a sign error, they are incompetent
There is no sign error. If you do not see what has been explained to you yet then it is you who is incompetent. If you do see it but can't admit your error, then you are being disingenuous. Your arguments on this thread are not about Joy's model, but rather a figment of your imagination.
Let me end with some advice for Joy from Jaynes, quoted liberally from
http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/backward.look.pdf:
Jaynes wrote:Dealing with Critics
Looking back over the past forty years, I can see that the greatest mistake I made was to listen to the advice of people who were opposed to my efforts. Just at the peak of my powers I lost several irreplaceable years because I allowed myself to become discouraged by the constant stream of criticism from the Establishment, that descended upon everything I did. I have never -- except in the past few years -- had the slightest encouragement from others to pursue my work; the drive to do it had to come entirely from within me. The result was that my contributions to probability theory were delayed by about a decade, and my potential contributions to electrodynamics -- whatever they might have been -- are probably lost forever.
But I can now see that all of this criticism was based on misunderstanding or ideology. My perceived sin was not in my logic or mathematics; it was that I did not subscribe to the dogmas emanating from Copenhagen and Rothamsted. Yet I submit that breaking those dogmas was the necessary prerequisite to making any further progress in quantum theory and probability theory. If not in my way, then necessarily in some other.
In any field, the Establishment is not seeking the truth, because it is composed of those who, having found part of it yesterday, believe that they are in possession of all of it today. Progress requires the introduction, not just of new mathematics which is always tolerated by the Establishment; but new conceptual ideas which are necessarily different from those held by the Establishment (for, if the ideas of the Establishment were sufficient to lead to further progress, that progress would have been made).
Therefore, to anyone who has new ideas of a currently unconventional kind, I want to give this advice, in the strongest possible terms: Do not allow yourself to be discouraged or deflected from your course by negative criticisms -- particularly those that were invented for the sole purpose of discouraging you -- unless they exhibit some clear and specific error of reasoning or conflict with experiment. Unless they can do this, your critics are almost certainly wrong, but to reply by trying to show exactly where and why they are wrong would be wasted effort which would not convince your critics and would only keep you from the far more important, constructive things that you might have accomplished in the same time. Let others deal with them; if you allow your enemies to direct your work, then they have won after all.
Although the arguments of your critics are almost certainly wrong, they will retain just enough plausibility in the minds of some to maintain a place for them in the realm of controversy; that is just a fact of life that you must accept as the price of doing creative work. Take comfort in the historical record, which shows that no creative person has ever been able to escape this; the more fundamental the new idea, the more bitter the controversy it will stir up. Newton, Darwin, Boltzmann, Pasteur, Einstein, Wegener were all embroiled in this. Newton wrote in 1676: "I see a man must either resolve to put out nothing new, or become a slave to defend it." Throughout his lifetime, Alfred Wegener received nothing
but attacks on his ideas; yet he was right and today those ideas are the foundation of geophysics. We revere the names of James Clerk Maxwell and J. Willard Gibbs; yet their work was never fully appreciated in their lifetimes, and even today it is still, like that of Darwin, under attack by persons who, after a Century, have not yet comprehended their message (Atkins, 1986).
