The Modern Physics Journal recently published an article by Drs. William Stuckey, Michael Silberstein and Timothy McDevitt. Their essay entitled “Explaining the Supernova Data without Accelerating Expansion” was accepted for publication in the International Journal of Modern Physics D. In addition, the essay won honorable mention in the Gravity Research Foundation’s 2012 Awards for Essays on Gravitation.
Stuckey said that the essay explained a consequence of the calculations in another paper that he, Silberstein and McDevitt worked on entitled “Modified Regge Calculus as an Explanation of Dark Energy.” He noted that the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae, although they were able to fit the same data without the accelerating expansion used in their previous paper. As a result, they then wrote a separate essay, “Explaining the Supernovae Data without Accelerating Expansion.”
According to an article in the Elizabethtown College Alumni Magazine, Stuckey has been interested in conceptual problems in physics since he was a doctoral student studying general relativistic cosmology in the 1980s. During this time, he wrote a series of papers involving topics about general relativity. In 1994, Stuckey read a paper called “For Whom the Bell Theorem Tolls,” which discussed concepts regarding quantum non-locality, first highlighted in 1935 by scientists such as Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen as well as J.S. Bell in the mid-1960s.
However, Stuckey continually struggled with the fact that this topic was still left unresolved. “No one really understands what’s going on in quantum mechanics, and yet we just keep on teaching the formalism,” he said in Elizabethtown College Alumni Magazine.
The paper Stuckey read in 1994 was, in fact, written in part by Silberstein, then a doctoral student at the University of Oklahoma. When Silberstein came to Etown, the two began a collaboration to resolve the mystery of quantum non-locality. The two also collaborated with one of their students at the time, Michael Cifone, a 2000 graduate. Cifone eventually convinced Stuckey and Silberstein to direct their work in a different way. As a result, the three began to explore a concept known as “the relational blockworld,” an explanation for unifying quantum mechanics and relativity.
“In a blockworld, the future, past and present are equally real,” Silberstein said in the Elizabethtown College Alumni Magazine. “There is no uniquely evolving universe or unfolding now. Every event that will happen or has happened just ‘is’ in a blockworld.” The blockworld is dependent on frames: the past, present and future.
Stuckey, Silberstein and Cifone have published 20 papers on their own work in various publications, including Foundations of Physics and a special issue of Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics. They have also spoken in Sydney, Australia; Ontario, Canada; and College Park, Maryland.
McDevitt said that he began working with Stuckey and Silberstein in late 2008 as a late-comer to the group. “They’ve been working together for a long time, and I contribute mostly by doing the relevant computational work,” he said.
Stuckey said that the calculations for their most recent paper were done from July-October 2011. “Although, we had spent years getting to the point at which we could do those calculations,” Stuckey said. “In fact, we submitted the paper just after the Nobel Prize was announced, so we didn’t bother to change the paper to point out that our result was at odds with the citation.”
Stuckey also said that the group was invited to submit the essay to the International Journal of Modern Physics by the editor after the essay awards were announced. It was further referred by the journal before being accepted for publication.
As the calculations and results of the paper are the culmination of work that began years ago with Silberstein in 1994, Stuckey said that he is very gratified, given the publications were ultimately 18 years in the making.