I am disappointed in the winners of the FQXi essay contest. Maybe I am just a sore loser, because my essay is not one of the 20 winners, out of 271 submissions. But I do not think that the winners followed the contest objectives very well.
Most essays just promoted some crackpot theory without really explaining how or why the textbook theories are wrong.
Unfortunately, FQXi has taken down the page with these rules. You can find most of them here, or maybe in your browser cache.
Of the winning essays, most of them promote some completely mainstream and accepted idea, but try to make it sound original by attacking some silly straw man. Other essays presented some vague and speculative ideas about quantum gravity or some similar field where ideas cannot be tested.
In 2nd place, Ellis gives examples of causation being more easily understood with a top-down view, such as entropy increasing. Weinstein suggests that action-at-a-distance might explain some quantum mechanics and cosmology.
In 3rd place, Barbour doubts that reductionism will explain entanglement. Dribus rejects spacetime in favor of a "causal metric hypothesis". Hossenfelder speculates about quantum gravity. Wharton says the universe is not a computer.
My essay got a lot of attention, and many favorable comments. I have some much more provocative statements than the winning essays, but I thought that was the point. Most of the essays don't actually say Which of Our Basic Physical assumptions are Wrong.
So perhaps the judges thought that my essay was not "Technically correct and rigorously argued". If so, then I would have preferred them to say so in the online comments, so I could defend myself. As it is, I do not know what they disliked. If I had submitted it to a journal, at least I would have gotten a rejection report. I guess I could still submit it somewhere else, but it is not really a technical physics advance. It is an essay suited for this contest.