That was perhaps unfortunate because both you and mibn have made a bit much of it. The key was "words to that effect". Obviously he doesn't say that specifically but there is another paper that arrives in my inbox about ones every couple of months or so that does say exactly that, and more, going on about "Sciences and their false belief in Einstein", and proudly proclaiming that the Higgs boson is actually just an atom of Xenon. And it's also drivel.
There are some similarities in the presentation of that paper and this one. The close collegaue thing, again, is a case of taking things just a bit too literally. What I am saying is that he talks about a "private communication with Martin Rees" without giving any details. My claim -- it is only a suspicion, but I think a reasonable one -- is that this took the form of essentially a single email, "read this paper please Martin", with perhaps a very brief reply, possibly not even from Martin Rees but his secretary, in return, thanking Prof. Zhang for his correspondence.
Perhaps I am being unfair, but the manner in which the paper is presented is suggestive of such a scenario. I'm not just talking about the sloppy English. Even the choice of equations doesn't help. It's undergraduate-level General Relativity and that means that there is a tonne of detail that he has, so far as I can tell, not even considered. Black holes within black holes? What about the interactions between them? I cannot for one second believe that the dynamics of such a scenario would not be rather more bizarre than, say, black holes just on the normal background.
But when it comes to this paper it is entirely possible that I lack the necessary understanding to confirm or refute his findings, and so while I remain justifiably sceptical I wouldn't want to rule it out entirely.
But then we come to some of his other papers, including the one found in this issue of the same journal, on page 36 (some of the other articles seem filled with little worth paying attention to either)
http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/complete/PiP-2010-02.pdf
Now this article I do know about the physical background. And so I can read his paper and understand where it is right, wrong, promising, not worth it. And the short conclusion is that it's not worth it. Doesn't matter who wrote it. It's drivel. I don't even know where to begin deconstructing it. Starting with a discussion of the five elements in Chinese Wu Xing theory doesn't exactly help. A rather bizarre question "What is the weak charge?" posed as if the answer is not actually known or understood, which is false.An amusing little comment " Some studies of particular
particles show that the weak charges might be proportional to
electric charges." (Read: "are proportional, because they emerge from the same unified force, but for some reason I'm not aware of this already"). And so on. And that's just the first two paragraphs.
I'm all for looking into unorthodox views and making sure that we don't reject things definitely, out-of-hand, without considering it. But I've now considered it and there is exactly zero merit whatsoever in the paper of his I've linked to. I could go on debunking it but I'm not sure what purpose that would serve. I've read, I've seen, I've given him some time, I've tried to give him a fair hearing -- and I don't think it worth giving him any more attention. I'm sorry if this looks closed-minded but there's not much else I can do.