Reciprocal Theory

The Reciprocal System is a Theory of Everything presented by its proponents as an alternative to everything that every physicist has ever said about the nature of reality. A flyer for the 30th conference of the International Society of Unified Science (the society set up to worship its inventor, Dewey Larson) describes the reciprocal system as follows:

The theory is wrong in every detail, and is trivially proven so with simple and obvious experiments. This has, of course, not given its proponents the slightest pause.

Dewey Bernard Larson
Dewey Bernard Larson (1898-1990) was the creator of Reciprocal Theory, and an otherwise irrelevant American engineer. While he was writing only a few years before the Standard Model of physics came along to more fully refute his claims, he seems to very casually ignore how successful quantum mechanics has been in, among other things, explaining the physics of the electron and in providing fundamental explanations for essentially all of chemistry, even by the 1950s and 1960s. However, Larson still maintains a strong and passionate following among a few cranks who think that they've stumbled upon some great secret body of knowledge.

Larson's 1963 book (self-published, from what anyone can tell of the origins of "North Pacific Publishing, Portland" ) entitled The Case Against the Nuclear Atom proposes that the Rutherford model of the atom is wrong, and that the conclusions brought about by the Marsden-Geiger experiment were equally consistent with an atom the size of the atomic nucleus that is surrounded by energetic force-fields. In the book he actually dismisses quantum mechanics as an attempt to change previously established laws of nature, namely classical physics, to fit with a concept that was unfounded to begin with (the Rutherford model). The short version is that Larson would be absolutely correct if the Marsden-Geiger experiment was all we knew about the atom and subatomic particles, but it isn't. The book itself is mostly a tl;dr rant about critical thinking, and in fact doesn't postulate any experiments, equations, or testable ideas of any kind to back up his own model &mdash; he simply asserts that it fits equally with the evidence (except where it doesn't) and if you "think critically" it should come out as self-evident.

None of Larson's work was ever published in any peer-reviewed scientific journal. The only evaluations of Larson's work were performed by known supporters of the Reciprocal System, and have an alarming tendency to use the word "published" when they really mean "uploaded to a WordPress blog".

Because Larson was nothing more than a lone crank, his "Dewey B. Larson" Wikipedia page was deleted in 2011 for the non-notability of the subject, but cranks resurrected a page for him anyway under in 2014. The pre-2011 article in question was entirely a piece of fancruft, based largely on a biography of Larson hosted by his supporters. The newer Wikipedia article was also deleted for non-notability on 1 April 2018.

Mathophobe?
One of the most striking features of Larson's work, and the source of tremendous criticism, is the almost total lack of any mathematics anywhere to be found amongst his books. This is particularly galling to most mainstream physicists who view equations as essential for making the numeric predictions required to match theory with experiment &mdash; experiments that tend to punch out numbers, such as transition frequencies, absorption coefficients, energy ratings in particle accelerators and so on. Yet Larson avoids doing any rigorous mathematical analysis at all. It's not entirely clear if he just sucked at the subject (though his biographies claim that he had a "gift" for mathematics) or genuinely thought it wasn't needed. Certainly, the lack of it in his main reciprocal system theory causes a lot of scientists to scratch their heads when figuring out exactly what observations he's saying to expect for the theory to be right. As a practicing engineer though, it would be particularly odd if he did not at least have a good working knowledge of calculus.

Mark Chu-Carroll of the Good Math/Bad Math blog has a catchphrase: "the worst math is no math." When it comes to physics, the lack of a formal mathematical explanation is a huge red flag.

Asimov's "support"
The Case Against the Nuclear Atom briefly got some attention in the 1960s in a couple of review columns of engineering news journals. It even came to the attention of Isaac Asimov. Often cited by Larson's advocates is Asimov's praise for the book's ability to act as a critical thinking exercise: As an iconoclastic work, Larson's book is refreshing. The scientific community requires stirring up now and then; cherished assumptions must be questioned and the foundations of science must be strenuously inspected for possible cracks. It is not a popular service and Mr. Larson will probably not be thanked for doing this for nuclear physics, though he does it in a reasonably quiet and tolerant manner and with a display of a good knowledge of the field.

Less often quoted, however, is Asimov's conclusion with the book, and its rebuttal to many of its points regarding the nature of electrons, although a full copy is hosted on reciprocalsystem.com. Asimov concludes: If no electrons exist within the atom, as Larson suggests, I do not see how the photoelectric effect can be explained. From this I conclude that however stimulating Larson's book might be as an intellectual exercise, it need not be taken seriously as anything more than that.

Ronald Satz
The main current torch-bearer for the Reciprocal System is Ron Satz, who runs the blog transpower.wordpress.com (not that kind of trans power). Satz extended and computerised Larson's "System" and even produced equations that might lead to predictions &mdash; none of which Satz seems keen to actually use. While Larson's publications are long text walls, Satz's work often features pages upon pages of badly formatted equations. This usually renders his work completely unreadable because of the ambiguity in what constants he's using and how these equations fit together &mdash; at worst, some of them fall off the page so can't be read even if you can somehow translate it all into something recognisable to a mathematician or engineer.

Capacitance
In late 2011, Ron Satz appeared on the Bad Astronomy and Universe Today Forums (BAUT) to discuss the theory and doubts about modern physics. While initially met with an understandable "not another theory-of-everything crank" response, the discussion settled into what the Reciprocal System would predict in the behaviour of electronic devices. With such a testable statement then satisfied, one enterprising member of the forum actually tested it with easily obtainable equipment &mdash; something Satz seemed at a loss to try himself. The situation is best summed up by the final post in the thread:

Not too long after, a BoN appeared on RationalWiki to assert that, because they were electrolytic capacitors, the experiment totally didn't count. Quite why seems to be curiously absent &mdash; such a specification wasn't cited by Satz and cannot be found in the (like Larson's work, extremely long) paper proposing how the Reciprocal System would predict capacitors to act but it did magically appear after the BAUT forum tore into Satz's work. By June 2012, Satz had finally got around to doing some experiments that showed RS theory to be wrong, though despite his mentor Larson constantly insisting throughout his books that you should abandon ideas if they don't match experiments, Satz didn't give up on RS theory, and seemed more intent than ever to hammer it into reality in any way possible.

Flip-flopping and non-falsifiability
While Satz's rapid goalpost moving over capacitors highlights his attitude, perhaps the most striking involves faster-than-light neutrinos. In 2011, neutrinos were spotted traveling faster than light by the OPERA experiment, which fired the particles between Geneva, Switzerland and Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. Satz had this to say on the subject, jumping on the story pretty quick:

So, the reciprocal system explains the observation &mdash; so evidence for Larson's work, and something that would make even quantum mechanics and the Standard Model tumble to nothing. Shame that, not long after, the results failed to be replicated and, after several other ideas tried and failed to rewrite physics, it was revealed to be most likely due to faulty wiring providing the timing equipment with a bit more of a delay than expected, hence the results. So, were Satz's equations and the Reciprocal System suddenly made redundant because of these new observations? After all, if his theory predicted this, and it turned out to be not true, then the theory was wrong. Hell no, the only things travelling faster than light were Satz's goalposts:

Needless to say, this is not how evidence works. If experimental data D is evidence for hypothesis H, then the opposite experimental outcome, not-D, is necessarily evidence for not-H.

Books
Larson's works include The Structure of the Physical Universe (1959), The Case Against the Nuclear Atom (1963), Beyond Newton (1964), New Light on Space and Time (1965), Quasars and Pulsars (1971), Nothing But Motion (1979), The Neglected Facts of Science (1982), The Universe of Motion (1984), and Basic Properties of Matter (1988). Ronald W. Satz summarises Reciprocal Theory in The Unmysterious Universe (1971).