Comments on Sid Bertram's "Electromagnetic Forces" paper:

From a retired professor of electrical engineering:
“I finally had a chance to read your paper carefully, I cannot disagree with your treatment or your model and I believe it should be a useful approach to understanding the force-charge relations in relativistic situations.
Although I believe your paper should be published, I would anticipate some difficulty in getting it accepted because of the way most referees have been taught to think. Nonetheless, I think it should be submitted because it would be a definite contribution.”

Other comments:
I went over my paper with a friend who teaches electromagnetic theory and is involved in magnetics research. He agreed that the paper's theory could be taught in high school physics. It is interesting to note that "Relativity" is taught in graduate school!

I have a BS “with honor” from Cal Tech (1938) and thought Cal Tech might be helpful in getting my paper published. The copy I sent to the Cal Tech Alumni Association was turned over to the head of math, physics and astronomy. When I asked about review of the paper, he returned it to the Alumni Association with the comment (copied to me) “I well remember the paper by Dr. Bertram since I scanned it and noted what appeared to be an inconsistency with the principles of relativity. I did not have the time to do a proper analysis to be certain that my immediate impression was correct."

Some pertinent quotes:
From Gleick’s “Genius”, Francis Bacon (1561-1626) wrote “God forbid that we should give out a dream of our imagination for a pattern of the world.”

Leon Lederman’s in his book “The God Particle” quotes Feynman in his essay ”What is Science” as follows: “Each generation that discovers something from its experience must pass that on, but it must pass that on with a delicate balance of respect and disrespect so that the race … does not inflict its errors too rigidly on it's youth, but it does pass on their accumulated wisdom, plus the wisdom that it might not be wisdom.”

Today’s physicists seem to have forgotten the statement made by Einstein in 1921 in a talk before the Prussian Academy of Sciences: “as far as the propositions of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” (From MEASURE FOR MEASURE, A Musical History of Science; Touchstone, New York, NY.

Tolstoy, as cited by J. Gleick in his book "Chaos", best expressed today’s situation: “I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”[1]

Leo Tolstoy On Firmly Held Beliefs and Resultant Mental Gridlock:
"I know that most men --- not only those considered clever, but even those who really are clever and capable of understanding the most difficult scientific, mathematical or philosophic problems, can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with great difficulty --- conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives."[2]

The difficulty John Harrison had in getting the promised reward for his chronometer, the prototype of all clocks with accuracies sufficient to provide the longitude at sea (before electronic timekeepers), provides an example of the obstinacy of scientists. The astronomers of the day were so convinced that the answer was in the heavens that they never awarded him the prize -- even after his clocks had demonstrated their usefulness over several long voyages. His son finally met with the king who gave Harrison most of the prize money.

[1]from: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/radsafe/0201/msg00995.html
[2]Leo Tolstoy [1896] --- Source: "What Is Art?" --- Leo Tolstoy, Translated by Aylmer Maude, in Tolstoy's Collected Works, Charles Scribner's Sons, (1902), Volume 19, p. 468

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