There is no such thing as 'A right to the pursuit of unhappiness'.
Robert Canup.
We live in the age of the put down and the cheap shot; where anyone who is out of the ordinary is subject to ridicule and mockery. Mankind has progressed to the point that most of the time people who are different from the norm have little to add to humanity - most of the time - but not always.
If one examines the personal lives of those who are generally held to have had a significant effect on the thoughts of mankind there is one thing which stands out: these are, for the most part, very strange people.
My friend M. Robert Showalter, one of the most brilliant mechanical engineers to have ever lived, once pointed out to me that inventors of any type are, in general, very strange people: "If they were like everyone else, they wouldn't be inventors; they would do things the same way everyone else does them".
Advances in human understanding almost never come as expected, predictable, extensions of a known path. Aristotle's logic, Newton's physics, Galileo's experimentation with nature, Rembrandt's use of shadow, Goedel's undecideablility theorem, Plank's Quantum, Major Armstrong's invention of Frequency Modulation, and Babbage's difference engine all came as radical steps away from the paths explored by their contemporaries. New knowledge is almost always off the beaten path: where others have gone has generally been picked clean.
While being strange in and of itself is not sufficient for advancing human knowledge, it is a prerequisite. I think that just about anyone who knows me would not hesitate to describe me as "very strange". How I got that way is useful knowledge. Almost all small children go through a stage where they ask "Why?". In general they soon outgrow that phase. One of the defining moments in my life came very early when I realized that I was going to have to find out the answers to that question myself.
I have never stopped learning, I have learned more in each year than I did in the previous year. I have learned as much as I could about as many different subjects as I could. All of that work was done with one goal in mind; to answer the question: "Why don't things work?".
I believe that I now have some answers to that question.
Unfortunately I also know that I have a bandwidth problem in trying to communicate what I have learned to other people: it took me 37 years of intensive study to learn what I have learned - how can I transfer that information to the rest of you in a few web pages? The answer is that I can't. What I can do is try to give you a few key points to serve as anchors for your own studies. What I am not interested in doing is arguing with people about what I have to say.
I once read an anecdote about a little boy's oral book report - which went as follows: "This book told me more than I wanted to know about penguins". Having little desire to be in the position of the author of that book I find myself forced to make judgments about the knowledge level of the people I am addressing: how much do they know, how much do they want to know, when are they saturated and beginning to be overloaded with information? As a result I have made some choices about what to present in these pages: they are geared toward a knowledgeable readership; but not toward professional researchers.
In addition these pages are directed toward those with young minds. People who have achieved some level of success in life are much less likely to abandon their views of the world than are the young; who have potentially less to lose in changing their views. This is the reason that the young are at the forefront of most new movements: they are willing to give a differing viewpoint a chance - while the successful tend to be content with what they have learned, and are less likely to put at risk paradigms that have worked fairly well for them. The successful believe that there is only a slim chance that they might discover something which works much better than what they already know, and are naturally skeptical of any information which conflicts with their view of reality. Throughout history the successful are usually the last to adopt a new paradigm.