The Nature of the Wave Function by Edwin Eugene Klingman

Hello Edwin,

Thanks for liking my essay. I read the essays you mentioned, and yours. Thought yours was one of the best I've seen so far. In relativity I'm often suspicious of views in which the weirdness in the theory is removed by pointing out errors that everyone else failed to see for a century. Usually when physicists allow a theory to be weird for that long, it's because they couldn't go anywhere else, and not from lack of trying.

But your bringing in the Lundeen experimental evidence is one of several things that make it look different from that, and I felt that unlike many, you were grasping at an underlying reality by looking at the clues. That's what makes a paper of interest to me these days, if it's looking for ways forward for physics - it's not enough for it to be trying to rejig existing theory into something it wasn't before. Like you, in my essay I'm grasping at an underlying reality by looking at the clues, and the real clues are external things like observations, not internal things like elements of existing theory.

To me, for an approach to be relevant in the present situation it also has to be open to there being bits of the jigsaw missing, that we haven't yet found. Many of the essays I've read have implied within them the idea that the pieces we have are enough to finish the puzzle, if we can only organise them in the correct way. And yet a careful look at the clues shows that this idea is unavoidably wrong - new conceptual elements are needed. And the exciting thing is that we can infer a certain amount about the missing pieces - this (for those who can let go of the framework a bit) is a very worthwhile excercise.

So in the Heisenberg quote "the question [is] whether [the wave function] should be seen as a 'spread-out' entity, a 'guiding field', a 'statistical state', or something else" - we should always be open to the 'something else'.

Thanks for your kind comments on my essay - as you suggest at the end, I'll read yours again.

Best wishes, Jonathan

Hello Edwin,

I agree with a lot of what you say. It's hard to know which elements of physics are fundamental, and which are emergent. So the approach I've taken tries to bypass that question, and see what can be deduced anyway. Time is a good place to look, not only because of the present need to solve that puzzle, but also because the deepest cracks in our picture are where the best clues about what the true picture looks like might be found.

To me the two levels of time we seem to find, block time and the apparent motion through time, can't both be real, because of the unpredictability implied in quantum theory, which means they disagree about whether the future is pre-decided. So assuming that only one is real, then you look at both, and try to work out which is real, and which isn't. All of these steps, for those who accept the premisses underneath the reasoning, can be made without knowing what things in physics are basic and what things are emergent. Hope this makes sense... Jonathan

Hi Edwin,

thank you. I don't think we have any reason to do away with causality, as long as we don't assume block time to be right. Block time is what has put this essential principle at risk - and all of science is based on it.

If block time is wrong, you get a dynamic universe. We don't immediataly know how many dimensions it has, but we can explain a lot of what happens in it. We can't yet explain why it has motion through time, but we might, once the shackles and cul-de-sacs of block time have been thrown off.

Logic, to me, is a facet of our minds which allows us to get a handle on things, for instance by ruling things out and limiting the possibilities. I think if you try to see how logic arises in the universe, you're asking some very complicated questions about the mind, which physicists don't need to ask at present. I know you've arrived at these questions via quantum theory, but I think until we have a complete solution to the mystery of how to interpret quantum theory, we won't know if we have to ask those questions, and I suspect we'll find that we don't have to, which would be a relief.

And mathematics works wonderfully well as a way of describing the universe, even if ultimately it's only a set of approximations. Why can't we depend on it? Because a half-solved puzzle suggests we might not be able to? I'd say again, it's too early to assume we have that problem.

Best wishes, Jonathan

I agree with a lot of that. I think people who try to make mathematics fundamental are wrong. It's a description of things, and extremists like Max Tegmark who think it may be the most fundamental thing of all, are in fact reacting to the trouble we've had with the conceptual side of physics in the 20th century - which is nevertheless very important as well.

You may very well be right that mathematics and logic are emergent rather than fundamental, and appreciate that you've studied it in detail. But I don't see the problem with that if it's true. As long as we see them as the tools that they are, which allow deduction, reasoning, theory and calculation, all of which help us to describe and understand things, and find out the underlying rules and patterns, we're ok aren't we? I agree that we mustn't elevate them to anything beyond that.

best wishes, Jonathan

Dear Jonathan,

As I have understood Max Tegmark's mathematical universe idea he means by mathematics the relationships between abstract entities. Also (which I feel less comfortable about he seems, to me, to be saying if a relationship can exist mathematically it can exist as a reality in this universe or another.) I can see that when we try to describe the very foundation of reality, everything comes down to relationships between the properties we have identified and how they change. That doesn't seem particularly extreme to me but it is highlighting what is really important. I think that means not the stuff we imagine to exist, not what we think about it but just how properties interact and how relationships change.

We can express ideas about that verbally or we can express it mathematically. Max Tegmark argues that human verbal language is superfluous baggage and that therefore the relationships should be expressed mathematically. I agree, at least that some kind of uniform, symbolic, unambiguous representation is desirable, if succinctness and precision and uniformity are the aims. I don't see that proposition as extreme either.

Though if the aim is widespread human comprehension then many different verbal descriptions, in many different languages, as well as many different kinds of symbolic representation are desirable, in my opinion. That however is about teaching rather than what is the best or ultimate form of representation, of the universe (or multiverse).

Hello Georgina,

I'm sure Tegmark is an extremist only in some ways, not in every way. But saying that in some cases all sets of possibilities exist is extreme. It's tough for creatives, because whatever you might come up with, there's the worry that he thinks it exists already. But creatives can have fun thinking up absurd things, and then realising that Tegmark believes that exists - I've played this game with friends occasionally, though only in a loose way.

Anyway, I do think that our conceptual picture is simply incomplete, and instead of facing up to that, and trying to make progress within our existing way of doing physics, many are now messing around with the underlying principles, and trying to reset the whole playing field. I see that in quite a few of the essays here, but to me that's a bit desperate and a bit premature - we haven't finished exploring with our present system yet. There's a need to look carefully at the holes in the jigsaw, and see what we can work out about the missing pieces - that's what I've been trying to do anyway.

Best wishes, Jonathan

Jonathan, Edwin,

sometimes ideas that are expressed can be provocation intended to make people stop, take notice and think rather than a statement of conviction that this is how things are-definitely. Whether you or I like what Max Tegmark has said or not he makes people think about it.

My views on what a multiverse is and how they can be a part of reality have changed radically as a result of listening to what Max Tegmark has said in his papers and lectures. I've gone from saying its just mathematical nonsense to thinking it really is a good way of describing what we are dealing with, (if the multiverses are thought of in a particular way).

Now thinking about what an object is I have had to concede that it is all of its possibilities simultaneously and not just what one observer will perceive it to be from his perspective. I doubt I would have got to there without someone demonstrating that there are vastly greater possibilities than I was imagining.

Edwin,

I think he is being serious too and playful. Edward de Bono wrote :"Hypothesis, speculation and provocation allow us to play in our minds. We try out new things. We carry out the thought experiments that Einstein used to develop his powerful ideas." (1992). IMO Whether it is correct or not is not as important as breaking new ground, finding new ways of thinking about the problems.

Edward de Bono also wrote: "The analysis of data is not enough. We also need the creative ability to speculate and use provocative hypotheses. If we can develop these skills in scientists, science will advance more rapidly.The new hypothesis or provocative idea provides a scaffold on which to organise our information and with which to seek new information." (1992)

I'm not disagreeing with your judgement Edwin just expressing what I think. Max Tegmark knows what his intentions were and I'm not a mind reader. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." It would be a dull world if we all liked exactly the same things.

Dear Edwin:

I hope you don't mind, but I'm copying a comment that I just left on Johathan Kerr's topic over here because it draws on parts of this current discussion. Also, Edwin, Jonathan, and Georgina, thanks for the interesting and insightful discussion. Georgina, I really like those last Edward de Bono quotes.

Dear Jonathan:

I like your essay. I think you present an interesting analysis of a concept that is very muddled. In particular, I was glad to see you repeatedly bring up the problem with the supposed illusion of time in a block universe. You might like my favourite quotation from Milic Capek, which I think expresses this problem beautifully:

"We shall deal only briefly with an extremely serious epistemological difficulty which arises when time is deprived of an ontological status and reduced to a mere appearance. For in relegating time into the phenomenal world an intolerable dualism is created between the realm of appearances, occurring in time, and the realm of timeless noumena. All static systems from Parmenides to Bradley and McTaggert are plagued by the same problem: If true reality is timeless, *where does the illusion of succession come from?* If time has no genuine reality, why does it appear to be real?

"No solution can be found which would not introduce surreptitiously the reality of time *somewhere*. If the illusory reality of time is nothing but a gradual rising of the curtain of ignorance which separates our mind from the complete and timeless insight, then at least *this process of rising is still a process which unfolds itself gradually without being given at once*; but, by conceding this, we admit the reality of time either in our mind or *between* our mind and the allegedly timeless reality."

For it is this surreptitious element of "time" that enters into the description of a block universe that leads to the intolerable dualism that you've also discussed, which leads to all kinds of paradoxes in working with and interpreting the theory. As you've correctly noted, "in taking that view, the number of phenomena that must be demoted to unreal is large. It amounts to anything that could be called a *process*, and that includes a lot of our world."

But, for this reason, I also think that your description of a block universe doesn't get all the way down to the heart of the issue with it, although I'm certain you do know what that issue is. You described: "The universe is a motionless 4-dimensional block, with no moment called 'now' moving through it anywhere. Instead it has many events and equally important 'now' moments, all sitting alongside each other in a static spacetime grid. This unchanging object it is just *there*." But the thing is, that although we can't avoid the use of verbs in describing what a thing "is", every verb that is used in describing a block universe actually falsely represents it. It's a true dilemma, and I'm not saying anyone could describe a block universe better than you have, but I think that any description of a block universe, which will inevitably require words like "is", needs to be supplemented by saying something like "although we say that a block universe physically 'exists' in its absolute entirety, from the beginning to the end of all four dimensions of spacetime, 'existence' is clearly the wrong word to use in describing a block universe, because although it contains within it a timelike dimension, it no more 'exists' in a temporal sense than a block of wood that comes in and out of existence in an instant; it is temporally singular."

And this is really why any attempt to reconcile the illusion of time with the block universe, as in perdurantism, is a false-start. And it's also the biggest indication that the block universe theory has to be incorrect, because no matter how we try to avoid it, we do commonly get a sense of temporal existence that can't really be reconciled with that singular block. Since the requirement of a block universe can be deduced directly from special relativity theory, something must be wrong at the heart of the theory.

This is all very closely related to the problem that's at the heart of the essentially paradoxical notion of time travel, in which science fiction writers begin with the idea of things actually existing throughout spacetime, (sort of) as in a block universe, but then allow that the events in that "spacetime" are also able to change. Clearly, the notion of a physically existing spacetime that changes requires another temporal dimension---and this is where that surreptitious Newtonian concept of an absolute time comes in; i.e., because the changes that are thought to be able to occur within spacetime, due to a time traveller's influence, are also thought to simultaneously effect all of spacetime. If you could go back in time and kill your grandfather before he met your grandmother, then you never would have been born, so you clearly can't do that---a well-known paradox. But as I see it, my grandfather doesn't exist before he met my grandmother: the event is no longer real. What's real is my typing this right now, which will be past, and therefore unreal, when you come to read it.

Elsewhere on this blog, you've made comments that indicate to me that you think I haven't carefully thought this problem through, and that you think I've been too quick to suggest what I think lies at the heart of the problem with the relativistic implication of a block universe, when I say it is the problem that, along with the assumption that there can be no privileged observers, it is the interpretation that synchronous events, described by constant values of the time-coordinate in any frame, truly occur simultaneously according to observers who remain at rest in those frames---which is what leads directly to the *inference* "that an event can be both past and future in two different viewpoints". Or else, when I say that there must instead be an absolute (global) simultaneity-relation amongst *all* observers in a three-dimensional enduring (i.e., flowing) universe.

This is a difficult stance to argue for, which involves not only having to reconcile with the principle of relativity and the relativity of simultaneity, but also having to justify the need to forsake the principle that there can be no privileged observers (which seems to agree so well with both the principle of relativity and the Copernican viewpoint), and show that the scientific evidence does actually support this.

This is what I concentrated on accomplishing in my essay; but I assure you that I have subjected the problem of the nature of time to rigorous analysis, dedicating nearly eighty pages of my (184 page) thesis to an analysis of the historical, philosophical, epistemological, and physical factors associated with this great problem. Although it may appear that I have presented something that simply works (I can hope you at least saw it that way), I have by no means simply chosen, without a great deal of thought, to reload assumptions that were previously cast off with good (but I think imperfect) reason. This is my response to your remark that "In relativity I'm often suspicious of views in which the weirdness in the theory is removed by pointing out errors that everyone else failed to see for a century. Usually when physicists allow a theory to be weird for that long, it's because they couldn't go anywhere else, and not from lack of trying."

You also wrote to Edwin: "I felt that unlike many, you were grasping at an underlying reality by looking at the clues. That's what makes a paper of interest to me these days, if it's looking for ways forward for physics - it's not enough for it to be trying to rejig existing theory into something it wasn't before. Like you, in my essay I'm grasping at an underlying reality by looking at the clues, and the real clues are external things like observations, not internal things like elements of existing theory.

"To me, for an approach to be relevant in the present situation it also has to be open to there being bits of the jigsaw missing, that we haven't yet found. Many of the essays I've read have implied within them the idea that the pieces we have are enough to finish the puzzle, if we can only organise them in the correct way. And yet a careful look at the clues shows that this idea is unavoidably wrong - new conceptual elements are needed."

I agree with you here, except for the part where I fear you're considering me with the "many" who are unlike you. To use your analogy, if we think of physics as closing in on the completion of one area of a puzzle (say, just for instance, with about ten pieces left to put together), you know that without fitting the remaining loose pieces into the puzzle correctly you can only jam about half (say, five or six) of them in the remaining space. These few pieces are all connected at points, and touch on the completed part that surrounds them in a number of places, but the picture is obviously imperfect and sparse. However, the pieces that have not been carefully fit into their right places *can* be put there by taking a careful look at their shape; but this may require one or two of the other pieces that were set aside because they didn't fit when the first five or six were jammed in without enough care.

Just because I have, in my essay, attempted to take a piece of the puzzle that I think was out of place, and fit it into its correct spot, that should not be taken to indicate that the argument has implied within itself "the idea that the pieces we have are enough to finish the puzzle." To my notion, space-time is, by the definition I've given of an enduring three-dimensional universe, *not* real. It is a graduating map of the events that occur in the universe, which contains within it the effects of things that occurred in the (absolute; purely *ideal* or mental) past. Now, in general relativity, space-time is described as a four-dimensional physical field that is moulded by mass which in turn follows geodesics, so that there is a reciprocal interaction. "Space and time are now dynamic quantities: when a body moves, or a force acts, it affects the curvature of space and time---and in turn the structure of space-time affects the way in which bodies move and forces act. Space and time not only affect but are also affected by everything that happens in the universe."

In my opinion, this quotation from A Brief History of Time poses just as paradoxical a notion as the theory of time travel---which Hawking also considered realistic enough, according to standard relativity, that in 1992 he invented the chronology protection conjecture. For the idea is the same: four-dimensional space-time exists, and bodies dynamically move through it, shaping it moment-by-moment in their presence. Since it is in fact space-time that's warped in the presence of gravitational mass according to general relativity theory, then according to the cosmological interpretation of relativity that I've discussed in my essay, all that might actually be warped is the perception of that unreal coordinated map of events.

If we choose to postulate absolute time in place of the postulate of the absolute world (according to Minkowski, since the relativity-postulate "comes to mean that only the four-dimensional world in space and time is given by phenomena..., I prefer to call it the *postulate of the absolute world*"), at the sake of having to accept that there *is* a fundamental rest-frame in our Universe, as cosmology came to demand anyway, many of our previous notions will have to fall. But the empirical facts still have to remain the same, so it's true that we will still have to reconcile the physical theory---our interpretation of the mathematics---with the evidence. Therefore, this requires a certain amount of "re-jigging" in order to maintain consistency.

I hope you don't mind this long note: I've found both your essay and your comments to be thought provoking, and I had a lot that I wanted to say in response. I hope you've found my comments to be thoughtful, and that we can continue to have intelligent discussion if you've got anything to add or criticise in response. I think we do have a common goal in mind; therefore, for now, I'd like to leave you with a quotation from Bertrand Russell, which I included in my thesis as an epigraph to the chapter "Against Einstein's Relativity: A Doxographical Analysis":

"I cannot believe---and I say this with all the emphasis of which I am capable---that there can ever be any good excuse for refusing to face the evidence in favour of something unwelcome. It is not by delusion, however exalted, that mankind can prosper, but only by unswerving courage in the pursuit of truth."

Daryl

Dear Edwin:

Thanks very much for the opening, and the heartwarming comments about my essay. I haven't voted on any essays yet either, but yours must be amongst the finalists in my opinion.

Your question about how "some observers will see an event while the same event will lie in anothers 'future'" can be understood by referring to Figure 2 in my essay. Draw two past 45-degree null-lines extending from A in either direction in both frames, but ending at some "past event of photon emission" that's above B's x'-axis. In both frames, those null-lines describe the paths of photons that "will be emitted in B's 'future'", that are presently being observed by A, since the present is, by definition, A's x-axis. This funny result has only to do with the requirement that light has to travel at the same rate in either direction in the proper coordinate system of any inertial observer, and can therefore be understood without also considering the hyperbolic scaling between local coordinate frames that's associated with the Lorentz transformation. The latter is of course necessary to ensure that the speed of light is the *same magnitude* in all frames, and it's important for time-dilation and length-contraction.

The crucial thing to understand is that, along with any one event, it is possible to define an absolute set of other space-time events that occurred simultaneously with it in the three-dimensional universe. Therefore, although the event at which A observes these photons may in one sense be said to lie in B's "future", that's actually false by definition, since simultaneous events all lie along x. This agrees with the "man on the street's" Newtonian intuition about the passage of time: all inertial observers may well consider themselves as being at rest in a three-dimensional universe that exists now---where "now" refers to ever-flowing present space. However, there's a catch: since we're saying that B is *really* moving through the universe, two photons incident on B at one event, coming from either direction, which were emitted at *truly simultaneous* events, will not have synchronous emission times in B's proper coordinate system: the photon that B was effectively "running away from" will have a later emission time, while the one that B was "racing towards" will have an earlier emission time. However, this has to be the case if B is to describe light as moving at the same speed in either direction, since the relative absolute distance covered by the former photon will be less than that of the latter. In contrast, two events that are described as synchronous in B's frame won't actually have occurred simultaneously.

This is why A is called a privileged observer, because synchronous events in A's frame really do occur simultaneously, due to the fact that A has zero absolute motion. But as I've argued in my essay, this aspect of the theory should not actually be at odds with intuition. Putnam's argument hinges on the principle that there can be no privileged inertial observers because any one is as well suited to the position that they "now" exist in a three-dimensional universe; therefore, because everyone has different "nows", and none of them should be special, all "nows" integrate to form a block. However, as I've said in my essay, the "now" doesn't have to be the time that's read on anyone's watch, since there's no intuitive reason to require that anyone's proper time coordinate is orthogonal to space "now"---we don't have a sense of flowing an a direction orthogonal to space, but of space *existing*. Therefore, "now" can be one and the same enduring space for all observers.

I'd sure like to be able to talk with you sometime about whether logic, math, and the emergent physical universe that we observe are parts of a puzzle to be completed.

Best regards,

Daryl

I thought I might add, because the statements I made above, about events that are really simultaneous not being perceived as synchronous in B's frame, may sound a bit mysterious,---that this is demonstrated in my essay by the fact that observers B and C' are totally causally disconnected, so what B describes as synchronous with the event illustrated by the red dot in Figure 2 is not the blue dot, where C' is "simultaneously in its own separate universe", but C (the yellow dot) at a *later* absolute time---i.e., when it gets to the blue dot as the universe (x-axis) evolves. C could emit a photon towards B at that (cosmic) time, which would travel through the one-dimensional "universe" evolving in absolute time, until it's observed by B; and B would infer that that event, which *really* occurred at a later cosmic time, was synchronous with the event that's illustrated by the red dot.

The thing is, that relativity theory doesn't tell us a priori the location of an observer along its worldline that coincides with the emission of a distant photon, nor the location of the emitter along its worldline that coincides with the later event when the photon is observed: all it describes is the space-time separation between any two events. We are left to infer the rest for ourselves, and the common practice is infer that such coincident (i.e., simultaneous) events in space-time occur at the same "time" in any frame---i.e., synchronously. This is what leads to Rietdijk-Putnam-type deductions that there has to be a block universe. But then those who want to deny this inference, often appeal to the fact that the theory can't really tell us a priori which sets of events were *actually* coincident---and claim, e.g., that the observer could really have been anywhere along its worldline in the region outside the light cone associated with the emission event, in the region known as "absolute elsewhere", thus denying the existence of an objective reality.

Many problems arise as a result of this inconsistency of thought, because when not backed into the corner of the block universe implication, everyone does commonly assume that synchronous events really are simultaneous in any frame, even in general relativistic solutions. And that's where the really new pieces of the puzzle come in when we do make the assumptions of absolute space and time that are consistent with the theory.

Dear Eugene

I apologize for not having seen your gracious and interesting post. If you find my diffraction paper interesting you might enjoy similar ones and things about my inventions etc. on My website . I did most of my researches in the days before the Internet - now that so much interesting material for study is available, I regret being less energetic than before (having joined the grandpa set) to make use of these opportunities. I've heard Joy's work being mentioned a lot here, and will study it. The algebraic geometry sounds very interesting, I will look at the reference you kindly provided.

Thanks and best wishes,

Vladimir