Real Physics vs Ideal Physics - Jim's Magnum Opus.

I asked Jim: "What is your 'magnum opus'?".  His reply:

This is based on what I have been doing in retirement besides lecturing and tutoring. I have produced a paper every year from 2000-2010, except for a break in 2005-6 when I had cancer, at AAHPSSS conferences This started from my interest in teaching mechanics in 1995 or thereabouts. I started by rescuing Newton from the textbooks: these days it is taught by first requiring an inertial reference frame to make Newton's Laws of Motion valid. As I had never been taught this back in 1957 or taught this when I first started lecturing in 1965, I wanted to find out why. There turns out to be a deeper reason besides changing the foundation of mechanics from dynamics to kinematics and that is a shift in the philosophical base from Realism to Idealism. This has its own history. Anyway dynamics it is and Newton is fine except for inertia. This is inadequate, but the medieval concept of impetus fills the bill. Then it goes on to remove the reference frames from relativity i.e. removes relativity, which goes on to having repercussions in cosmology.

The relativity sections have been road tested, besides the conference, at the Philosophy Dept, Centre for Time in 2007 and in 2008.  There is lots more and it is going to upset everybody. The working title is Real Physics vs Ideal Physics (Nature vs Ideology). There is not a book quite like it as it grows out of teaching, rather than research or scholarship. The problems grow out of errors understandable at the first year level; it is very much about mass space and time---the things we rush over at the very beginning of first year.  It doesn't take the salami slices approach but redoes the entire foundations of mechanics in one hit. When you try to correct one part a referee will object from another part that has also to be corrected. It is substantially finished.