Joy, I plead guilty to not understanding your model. I have told you that for quite a while now. I have read your book and all your papers, but I do not see physics the way that you do. While I am not an expert on FLRW models, some of the other essayists seem to be and seem to, if not dismiss them, at least downplay them. Tom quoted Einstein, "All physics is local" and that is what I tend to focus on as all discussions of global topology or global wave function or global anything seem to exceed my imagination, or a least my ability to grasp the reality enough to take it seriously as other than a mathematical exercise. Probably my failing. The fact that I do not understand your model physically is not an insult to you and has never been intended to insult you. I have actually invested a lot of time and effort trying to understand your model. I wish people would do the same for my model. One option of course is to say nothing at all about your model, but you may recall that on your Disproof blogs I often served the purpose of bringing the discussion back from endless haggling over whether or not a sign error exists to questions of a more fundamental nature. I recall that you thanked me at least once for this. And you posted a pdf containing my defense of model in almost half a dozen places.

Joy I bear you nothing but good will. You said to Georgina that I am a friend who has supported your work. I hope that is true. The fact that I do not have the picture that you have, nor the picture that Tom has is not an attack on either you or Tom, it's just a simple fact. I am not against topology, in fact I now have, as part of my theory, a topological model of spin one-half particles that I searched for decades to understand. So I believe in topology in its place, I just don't understand yours. I was not trying to demean your ideas when I said that I now see why 'synchronized switching topology' is inappropriate, but your explanation of the choice of handedness occurring at every event seems unphysical to me. Of course now that you have explained (again?) that you are not trying to get rid a^b I also see that my remark about unwanted terms is also inappropriate. I'm glad you have an interpretation for those terms in your model. I have decided that I would like to be able to explain the a^b in my model. At the moment I have no such explanation. And you are correct that I separate the physical from the mathematical, which may account for much of this impasse.

Anyway, feel free to correct any misstatement on my part about your model. I do not make them to antagonize you.

Best,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Hi Edwin,

Thanks you for your reply. I am of course grateful to you, both for defending my work against some unjustified attacks and for taking active interest in it. I also understand that my work is by no means easy to understand. It requires understanding the foundations of quantum mechanics very deeply. And here I have an advantage of some 30 years over most people on these pages. I have been privileged enough to learn and practice the subject at the feet of some of the best experts in the world, including John Bell himself. Moreover, my work requires understanding several other branches of prima facie unrelated physics and mathematics. There are two other factors that may be obscuring the understanding of my work. First is the fact that it has emerged in separate papers, written over the period of some five years, rather than as a single, continuous monograph. And secondly it has been obfuscated beyond recognition by some of my uninformed and unqualified critics, for their own unscientific purposes. I recognize that all of these factors can be a hindrance to the correct understanding of my ideas and results. The only thing I can do about this is correct any misunderstanding whenever I can, and that is what I have been doing.

In any case, I stress again that I am indeed grateful to you for both defending my work and taking an active interest in it. I know you are only trying your best to make sense of it. Not surprisingly, I myself see it as a transparent painting of Picasso, not requiring a single additional stroke.

Best,

Joy

  • [deleted]

Hi Edwin,

Topology is global and continuous. You wrote,

"Your idea that ' ... all possible quantum correlations is derived from the maximum of parallelizing torsions within all possible norm-composing parallelizable manifolds", is understandable as English, but doesn't do it for me as physics.'"

It isn't my idea. The words are quoted from Joy. They physically describe the limit of the topology that compels quantum correlations to be real and local. In other words, the discrete local measure is a direct consequence of the continuous global structure. I don't find that obscure -- to use a metaphor, my body's global structure forbids certain local actions, like touching my right elbow with my right hand; it facilitates other actions, like crossing my right and left arms across my chest. The right and left are correlated.

"When trying to understand the basis of our disconnect I've wondered if it's as simple as: you try to fit physics to math, I try to fit math to physics. It's probably nothing so simple."

I don't try to fit physics to math, nor math to physics. I do math for its own sake, and I find that language (no matter whether natural or mathematical) is independent of meaning. The science is in the correspondence of mathematical theory to physical result.

Tom

A Great paper!

I enjoyed reading your essay very much, Edwin Eugene. I thought I'd have to put it aside, but then could not put it down and found myself at the end. I will need to read pages 6-9 again, and maybe more too, before I can determine whether you have proved your point or not.

There is certainly a lot to like, in your paper, content wise. You have chosen to champion several insights I favor; so how could I complain? I guess I could wish your theory was more even-handed, as some other folks have commented. I am uncertain where the C-field handedness comes from, but I do recall it is integral to your construction.

Very interesting ideas, and worth a little digging to flesh out my understanding what they are about. More feedback after I re-read and digest, compare notes, and so on.

All the Best,

Jonathan

    Jonathan,

    A heart-warming comment. Thank you very much. I am very pleased that you enjoy the paper as I have always been impressed by both your essays and your comments in these fora.

    By the way, I just finished reading Dan Bruiger's essay, and highly recommend it as well.

    Thanks again,

    Edwin Eugene Klingman

    • [deleted]

    Thank you for addressing basic issues concerning the wave function. It is a long-standing scandal that so many physicists have stated that QM cannot be understoo - not stated as a humble confession that problems remain, but rather as a point of pride: "We 'understand' that we don't understand! And we tell our students to follow our fearless lead to forget about that old idea of 'understanding' and just go ahead and apply the formalism!" It is another scandal that professors teaching what they don't understand has not been seen as the crisis in academia that it represents. Wikipedia is not always a reliable guide, but it is instructive that fully seventeen, mutually incompatible "common" interpretations of QM are listed there. They all have philosophical attractions of one kind or another, but most end with an insoluble paradox. So, it will be interesting to see if the Klingman solution can convince others to follow-up on the physical implications of a wave function that does not allow "superposition" and does not demand "collapse". Good luck in the contest...

      Dear Norman Cook,

      Your comments are very meaningful to me. A number of significant essays have already been submitted in this contest, but yours remains one of the very best.

      As for the continued existence of contradictory models of basic physical processes, you stated it perfectly in a comment on your own thread:

      "In the context of nuclear structure theory, the various nuclear models can account separately for different data sets, but the necessity of jumping from one model to another is jarring for anyone who values coherency... and makes me think there are different understandings of what "understanding" means."

      Thanks for your participation -- you always raise the quality level of FQXi essay contests. And thanks again for your gracious comment.

      Edwin Eugene Klingman

      Down the rabbit hole...

      Some claim that Bell made a serious mistake and is wrong in his calculations and his conclusions. I have made such arguments and am in process of updating them in "Physics-based Disproof..." and I make another argument in my current essay. Joy Christian also claims that Bell is wrong, for reasons explained in his book and on his blogs. Just today I read a 2011 paper by Hess, De Raedt, and Michielsen on "Hidden Assumptions in the Derivation of the Theorem of Bell". And Ulf Klein's current FQXi essay analyzes the meaning of Bell's conclusions about completeness, and argues that quantum mechanics does not apply to individual events. There are many more such arguments against Bell.

      On the other hand, many physicists assume that Bell has banished local reality. That is, reality is non-local and properties don't exist or become real until measurement. Of this 'weirdness' they brag 'we can't possibly understand it' so just "Shut up and calculate!"

      To see just how cloud-cuckoo this can become, I call your attention to an Aug 3, 2012 PhysicsWorld article, "Can the future affect the past?" which discusses a new paper by Aharonov et al. based upon weak measurements (as described in my essay). Briefly, "Bell's theorem forbids spin values to exist prior to the final choice of the [EPR] spin-orientation to be measured," and yet the weak measurements [prior to choice] agree with the strong measurements [that 'collapse' the wave function and make the properties "real"].

      Get ready. Here it comes:

      Aharonov claims that "the only *reasonable* resolution seems to be that ... the weak measurement's outcomes anticipate the experimenter's future choice, even before the experimenters themselves know what their choice is going to be."

      Yep, that's "reasonable" in a Bell world.

      This is where blind faith in Bell's theorem leads. If this does not constitute de facto proof that Bell mis-analyzed the problem and came to a faulty conclusion, then such proof [as the actual experiments being discussed here] will probably never exist, and physicists will dive deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole.

      Edwin Eugene Klingman

        Hi Edwin,

        Very nice summary! I agree with every word of it, and more importantly, with the spirit of it.

        However, what you have not yet appreciated (and this I know from our previous discussions and from your "physics based disproof") is that Bell did not make a silly, easy to overcome mistake. He made a profound discovery and a very instructive mistake. You have not yet understood either his discovery or his mistake. Bell discovered that quantum correlations are stronger, and hence more disciplined than the correlations we usually encounter in the classical world. This is a non-trivial discovery. Consequently, meeting Bell's challenge requires a non-trivial understanding of quantum correlations. It requires understanding what they are all about and where do they originate from.

        Your "physics based disproof" does not come anywhere close to disproving Bell's theorem or even recognizing his error---because, as I have said before, you have no understanding of what Bell was concerned about. With all your good intensions, you must first understand Bell's theorem correctly before you can challenge it. The community of physicists who believe in Bell's theorem may be somewhat dogmatic, closed-minded, and naive, but they are most certainly not stupid. They believe in what they believe in for very good scientific reasons. Until you understand these reasons you have not understood Bell's theorem. You cannot disprove that which you haven't understood. I say this with the best of intentions because I know your heart is in the right place. I hope you will use my words for your own benefit.

        Best,

        Joy

        Hi Edwin,

        The scientific community has been asserting it's unquestionable authority that human beings have no soul, there is no hereafter, and that psychic phenomena doesn't exist on the basis that everything is explainable with science. You said,

        "Aharonov claims that "the only *reasonable* resolution seems to be that ... the weak measurement's outcomes anticipate the experimenter's future choice, even before the experimenters themselves know what their choice is going to be."

        Here you are trying to bring down an accepted theorem, Bell's theorem, on the grounds that weak measurements somehow know what the experimenter will chose. You make it look as if Bell's theorem has to be wrong, because if it's right, it means something spooky and paranormal is occurring.

        I am not criticizing your point of view in the least. I am merely injecting my opinion that when science tells us there is no paranormal, no psychic phenomena, no soul, no ghosts, nothing unknown, that science can explain everything, that science is really feeding us a load of crap. Suddenly the choice of the experimenter is now part of some unknown variables. Clearly, quantum mechanics destroys all classical belief that we are soulless biological machines. I'll take back my faith, thank you.

        • [deleted]

        Hi Edwin,

        A lot of physicists have undertaken to explain why action at a distance isn't "spooky." Aharonov's and everyone else's explanation necessarily relies on a probabilistic interpretation of reality. (Richard Gill is also among those who do not think that nonlocality is necessary to quantum mechanics -- that probability alone determines measurement outcomes.)

        All of these explanations end up assuming what they intend to prove, for at least one very elementary mathematical reason (a), and one very elementary physical reason(b): a) the measure space is made of a continuous range of variables, while the measurement result is discrete (this is what makes Lamport's discovery profound); b) given that relativity is true, there can be no probabilistic distinction between past and future, which is equivalent to assuming a privileged coordinate frame.

        Like Joy Christian, Aharonov et al propose nonlocality as only apparently true: " ... what appears to be nonlocal in space turns out to be perfectly local in spacetime." So far, so good -- except that it is impossible in principle to perform a probability measure on the spacetime continuum. The difference between purportedly entangled discrete particles and demonstrably correlated continuous wave functions is a strict constraint; spacetime can't be discretized without assuming either nonlocality or a privileged frame of reference. If considered to be a complete theory, quantum mechanics *cannot* discard the assumption of nonlocality, or else the theory is incoherent.

        Joy does away with the conundrum, by allowing a natural, constructive, and globally continuous topological condition (all proofs of nonlocality are nonconstructive, and all topology is global) to be realized in the local discrete measurement outcomes -- without invoking probability or time, which in turn shows that quantum correlations do not result from particle entanglement, and both nonlocality and entanglement are illusions.

        In other words, while Bell's theorem explicitly demonstrates that no classical theory can be derived from the principles of quantum mechanics -- it does not forbid quantum mechanical results from being derived on classical principles. This latter is what Joy has demonstrated, and which satisfies the completeness criterion for a physical theory; i.e., every element of the mathematical theory corresponds to every element of the physical measure.

        Tom

        • [deleted]

        Dear Edwin

        Sorry for the delay in commenting on your essay; I have been giving your essay some thought.

        As you saw in my essay, I agree with you that the wave function captures a real physical wave and not just some sort of mathematical probability wave. In the example of wave interference for electrons, it is possible to take such a purely mathematical view of the situation far from the slits causing the interference pattern. The alternative is to take the view of a physical wave, where the focus is then on the slits. As these must be on the scale of the wavelength of the particle, physical intuition leads to focusing on what is going on at the scale of the wavelength of the particle - as you do in your essay. I also make the same choice of physical intuition over the mathematics as you do, and consequently agree with you on the assumptions that you challenge. The problem is that the maths doesn't agree with our choice. So either we abandon our physical intuition and go with the abstract maths, but as Roger Schlafly discussed in his essay, this could be a major source of the problem physics has had. I point with which I agree.

        Models with causal linkage between the particle and wave property generally have problems with Bell-type analysis, or re-analysis. Quantum Theory has a very peculiar form of non-locality, with what can be called non-locality of identity which is confirmed by wave interference and quantum entanglement experiments. However, this is strangely not accompanied by non-locality of causation such that it could be practically used to send a signal faster than light. Unfortunately because your model has causal linkage between the wave and particle properties, when you obtain the non-locality of identity required for comparison with QT you also acquire non-locality of causation. So Joy Christian is right and the model as given in the essay does fall victim to the non-locality issue, as encountered via Bell-type analysis.

        However, our physical intuition is based upon the assumption that the physical concepts we use are absolutely defined, whereas they are actually defined relative to a background, as is explicit in GR. This generally doesn't make any difference as the normal space background on which our physical intuition is based generally doesn't change dramatically enough. There is however one scenario in GR where the change in the background metric of space-time is dramatic enough to upset our expectations, and that is the ergo-region of a rotating black hole where the time component of the metric reverses sign. This change would affect what we define as being local and non-local. Consider two events with time separation dt and space separation dx - such as a causally linked particle and wave property - which would have a time-like separation ds2 = -cdt2 dx2 < 0 in normal space. Now change the background metric by simply reversing the sign of the time component - as occurs in the ergo-region - and the separation becomes space-like ds2 = cdt2 dx2 > 0. The actual time and distance separations haven't changed, but the change in the background metric has changed local causation into apparently non-local causation. So in a compound model of particle and wave with what our physics intuition would call local causal linkage in normal space, the inclusion of this sign reversal effect on the scale of the wavelength of the particle would give a non-local identity to the compound object. But because the metric is as per normal beyond the wavelength of the compound object, it wouldn't have non-locality of causation and so could be expected to avoid falling victim to Bell-type analysis.

        My essay discusses this effect in the context of deriving quantum field theory via a change in mathematical representation because the wave expansion about a particle-like black hole on the Planck scale can be proven to be mathematically incomplete in terms of countable particle (black hole) numbers. However, it does suggest that an approximate causal model of a particle-wave compound object could be possible if it included this effect of sign reversal in the time component of the metric.

        Hope this is helpful.

        Michael

          Hi Joy,

          I'm glad that you agree with the spirit of remarks in 'the rabbit hole'. As I noted, you disagree with Bell and have presented your arguments on arXiv, blogs and in a book.

          However... even if my heart is in the right place, you believe I don't understand either Bell or your disproof of Bell. Because I use your Geometric Algebra framework in my essay, I felt that it was your right to comment on this on my blog thread. But I see little need to argue with you about whether I understand what Bell was about. You have argued in a dozen papers, thousands of comments, and your book, about quantum correlations as you understand them. I do not wish to consume my blog with those same arguments. They are available to everyone elsewhere.

          I did not mean to imply that the community of physicists is stupid, only to show what belief in Bell's theorem leads to. Before Bell, if a measurement showed local real properties that were consistent with a later measurement and with concepts of conservation of momentum and energy, physicists would simply say, of course! Post-Bell, brilliant physicists say the early measurement displays evidence of a choice that the experimenter hasn't even made yet.

          And we all appear to agree that Bell was wrong. You have a strong interest in saying exactly why he was wrong in a way that supports your program. For those not dedicated to your program it is most important to understand that he *was* wrong. As I mentioned above, there are numerous proposals that suggest *why* he was wrong, and yours is an important one.

          Edwin Eugene Klingman

          Hi Tom,

          As you know, I disagree with your view of the world as based on Lamport, and often fail to agree with you. I don't see that as my problem or as your problem, but it clearly has kept us from being in full agreement.

          In the above comment you claim that while classical theory cannot be derived from principles of QM, nothing prevents QM results being derived from classical. That is interesting as that is basically what I have been writing about since my very first FQXi essay, and you have, for the most part, argued with me. So I'm glad that you now point it out -- in a fashion that fits with your ideas.

          Best,

          Edwin Eugene Klingman

          Hi Jason,

          As much as I agree that your heart too is in the right place, I do not think that 'spooky' physics is the path to your goal.

          You might want to re-read my earlier essays.

          Best,

          Edwin Eugene Klingman

          Dear Michael James Goodband,

          Thank you very much for giving my essay thought and for your extensive comment. I have not yet re-read your essay and I believe your comment will be very helpful to me in understanding it better next time.

          As noted, I have more faith in physical intuition than in mathematical abstraction. Not mathematical logic -- that's fine, but the application of mathematical abstractions to the 'real' world of Nature. And if you have not already read them, I recommend Dan Bruiger's and Ulf Klein's essays as thought-provoking.

          The century-long history of quantum theory has covered wave functions, with and without particles, and non-locality, understood (or not) in various ways, and has sometimes ventured as far as consciousness and many worlds, while also attempting to cover particle physics and nuclear physics, as well as cosmology. My earlier essays have touched on consciousness and particle physics and cosmological aspects of my model, while my current essay specializes in one aspect of QM, the wave function, without other distractions. Yet although I have not published in detail all of the particle physics aspects of the model, I successfully derive all known particles (except the Higgs) and at least qualitatively answer dozens of questions that current physics appears unable to answer. It is this, going far beyond the wave function, that keeps me on this path, despite Joy's insistence that I have not suitably understood or accounted for Bell's (mistaken) arguments. I believe there is more at stake than Bell.

          So I will cogitate on your paragraph about models with causal linkage and I will also try to understand your use of time-like and space-like separation to change local causation into apparently non-local causation. It is exciting to see a new idea applied to a century old problem.

          Thanks again for your insightful comment.

          Edwin Eugene Klingman

          • [deleted]

          Mr. Klingman, this is something particular interest to me of how energy and time related to 1 another. I am rather unfamiliar with this concept. Where might a good resource be that I could look into this more? Thanks.

          Dwaynefries1@gmail.com

          Hi Dwayne,

          When things in physics are related to each other in a special way, like position and momentum, or like time and energy, they are called 'conjugate variables'. So I suggest that you start by googling "time and energy conjugate" (without the quote marks). Then probably start with the Wikipedia link and go from there. The arXiv links are usually fairly complicated but you should be able to find just the level you're looking for by scanning ten or twenty links.

          That's a very good place to start in physics.

          Good luck,

          Edwin Eugene Klingman

          • [deleted]

          Hello Edwin,

          I've never disagreed with your emphasis on continuous functions. I just never have seen a way for your program to satisfy the completeness criterion, which of course is my chief concern.

          Lamport's contribution is a strict local barrier to completeness; overcoming it requires a global solution.

          Tom