Why is Mendel Sachs's work not taken seriously? Or is it?

Question

Back in college I remember coming across a few books in the physics library by Mendel Sachs. Examples are:

General Relativity and Matter

Quantum Mechanics and Gravity

Quantum Mechanics from General Relativity

Here is something on the arXiv involving some of his work.

In these books (which I note are also strangely available in most physics department libraries) he describes a program involving re-casting GR using quaternions. He does things that seem remarkable like deriving QM as a low-energy limit of GR. I don't have the GR background to unequivocally verify or reject his work, but this guy has been around for decades, and I have never found any paper or article that seriously "debunks" any of his work. It just seems like he is ignored. Are there glaring holes in his work? Is he just a complete crackpot? What is the deal?

Answer 1

Mendel Sachs may have been blacklisted, which would certainly be wrong. But his theory has a fatal error. His derivation depends on the assumption that certain 2x2 complex matrices, standing for quaternions, approach the Pauli spin matrices in the limit of zero curvature. This is impossible; the Pauli matrices are not quaternions and the argument collapses.

Answer 2

Good question! (I have wondered the same.)

I hold Mendel Sachs (deceased 05/05/12) to have been the most astute theoretical physicist since Einstein. His quaternion formalism was, no doubt, exactly what Einstein sought over his last thirty years, to complete GR. And its spinor basis induces me to suspect that Sachs' interpretation of QM, via Einstein's Mach principle, as a covariant field theory of inertia, is also right on the mark.

Considering Sachs' volume of output, after much mulling, I finally had to conclude that he was "blacklisted," the establishment not permitting any discussion if they can have anything to do with it! I can see no other way that that quantity -- much less, quality -- of work could have been ignored.