I intend no insult to you in my disagreement (and I apologize for missing your ironic intent, if that is what I did). Our experience and intuition differ, and I have been explaining how mine lead me to different conclusions in this matter.

(Also, what you are complaining of is abuse, not ad hominem - it's an important distinction.)

(Edit: To summarize the link, "ad hominem" goes, "you're an irrational person, therefore you are wrong", whereas we are saying, "your argument is wrong, therefore you are not rational". We refuse to accept your claim that ECE is a theory-of-everything because you have not supported it, not because we think you're stupid - in fact, I don't think you're stupid, just mistaken.)

Are you ... taking pride in sounding like a crackpot? That doesn't seem like a very good plan for figuring out what is really going on in the world. That's why we denounce crackpottish proclamations like "this theory is largely rejected/ignored by both the particle and string mainstream [because it is] very very threatening to their funding and careers" - because these sorts of statements are easy arguments to wield against people with the temerity to dispute your favored idea.

I haven't read the paper you linked here, but the titular "ECE" - "Einstein Cartan Evans" - returns no hits in a quick Scitation search. If you ask me, it seems premature to treat the results with anything like the confidence you attribute to it.

Well, I think my question about gauge symmetries is more general anyways. Are you claiming a rejection of QFT itself?

Didn't look all the way through that paper yet, but... if you mean the Riemann curvature tensor having antisymmetric parts... so? How does that kill GR? (besides, anti symmetry is a type of symmetry. I didn't mean symmetric as in "symmetric vs antisymmetric tensors", I meant it in the more general sense.)

(Okay, I know of Einstein-Cartan-Theory, but I haven't studied it yet. I still only have a rudimentary grasp of the math of basic GR)

But... what's any of this got to do with my original question?

This comment scores a full 68 points on the Crackpot Index. That doesn't make it wrong, but if it's right, I think you need to explain yourself more clearly.

To start with, as Psy-Kosh asked, what theory are you talking about, anyway? Where is it published, by whom, and what predictions have been made with it?

Huh? Sorry, I was unclear.

I meant "this is my understanding of what the mainstream theory, ie, the Standard Model says. In fact, it's my understanding of what many of the candidate theories that go beyond it say, it's my understanding of why so many theories are described in terms of their symmetries. Because once one knows their symmetries, one more or less knows the basic structure of the forces it implies. Is this understanding correct, or did I completely miss the point about gauge symmetries and such?"

What theory are you talking about anyways?

Oh, a bit off topic, but mind clarifying something for me? My QFT knowledge is very limited at the moment, and I'm certainly not (yet) up to the task of actually trying to really grasp the Standard Model, but...

Is it correct to say that in a sense the force carriers are, in a sense, illusory? That is, the gauge bosons are kind of an illusion in the same sense that the "force of gravity" is? From what little I managed to pick up, the idea is that instead one starts without them, but assigns certain special kinds of symmetries to the configuration space. These local (aka) gauge symmetries allow interference effects that basically amount to the forces of interaction. One can then "rephrase" those effects in a way that more looks like another quantum field interacting with, well, whatever it's interacting with?

ie, can the electromagnetic, strong, and weak forces (as forces) be made to go away and turn into symmetries in configuration space in the same sense that in GR, the force of gravity goes away and all that's left is geometry of spacetime?

Or have I rolled a critical fail with regards to attempting to comprehending the notion of gauge fields/bosons?

Thanks. Again, I know it's a slight tangent, but since the subject of the Standard Model came up anyways...