Catalog: Fringe Ideas

Untested, non-peer-reviewed proposals developed outside the normal institutional research process — not automatically wrong, but carrying none of the vetting that Proven or even Unproven Systems At Large work has been through. Fringe status is about process and evidentiary standing, not a verdict on the idea’s ultimate truth.

• Pressure-Based Theory (PBT) / Hybrid Push-Aether Theory — this site’s own subject. Developed by one person (Matthew Foutch, with AI collaborators Grok and Claude) without institutional backing, formal peer review, or a research team — see Purpose & Goals. One piece has a permanent citable identifier via ai.viXra.org, a repository explicitly for papers outside the traditional peer-reviewed arXiv system, not a substitute for peer review itself. A 2026-07-21 audit found and corrected several real calculation and citation errors across the papers (see the Reference Guide’s corrigendum note); those corrections are appended in place on each affected paper, not hidden. PBT borrows real, credentialed frameworks in places (see Einstein-Aether Theory) and reuses real proven results in others (see QED) — but its own novel mechanical claims (shadowing-based gravity’s specific magnitude, the vorticity account of quantum spin, the entanglement mechanism) have not been independently tested or peer-reviewed.

Why this matters, plainly stated: it would be dishonest for this site to present PBT as equivalent in evidentiary standing to General Relativity or QED, or even to a credentialed-but-unconfirmed program like Einstein-aether theory. It isn’t. This catalog exists so nobody has to take that on faith or infer it — it’s stated here directly, and cross-referenced from every paper via the epistemic-status banner at the top.