The Perfect First Question. by T H Ray

Dear Thomas for some reason I missed seeing your comment on my page till today, and have answered there - sorry for the delay. I value your opinions.

Vladimir

Steve, you wrote in Ronald Bennett's forum, to which I offered to reply here:

"Indeed Tom , but apparently a lot of scientists do not really love the critics. Tom, could you help me to be accepted in an university in USA? I d like have my doctorate in physics. I could imrpove my works.I d like also learn engeniering and computing. I do not know all you know Tom, I have never said that I knew all.I am arrogant indeed but you know I am just a young searcher wanting to be recognized for his researchs and wanting to learn more in the good universities with the good mentors and professors. I have found an improtant thing Tom, you know it, I d like learn more and I d like test my models and inventions with good partners. Belgium is frustrating. Ihave already had a business angel from Paris, I must admit that I am a little parano.

I d like find the good university. I have always dreamed to learn in an american university.Like I have already explained, I was in geology at the FNDP of Namur Belgium. But I have had neurological probelms.It was difficult you know after.I have learned by myself. I have always this dream you know.

Regards "

LOL! I'm not an academic, Steve. I couldn't get you into Barber College. I do know something about neurological deficiency, however, having only fairly recently surmised that my lifelong dyslexia probably originates from an auto accident between ages 3 and 4. A bad one -- infant brother killed, mother and stepfather seriously injured -- though it appeared that I was the lucky one, having only been thrown from the vehicle, knocked unconscious and suffered a wound to the back of the head that was closed with a few stitches. I have learned that it coincides with the part of the brain that controls language skills.

I went through a childhood of isolation, with difficulties in speech, reading and comprehension. I tried to compensate by reading material over and over -- sometimes I would take away an entirely different meaning from one reading to the next (very frustrating). I had devoured two sets of encyclopedias by age 11 or so. About the same time, I taught myself algebra from the radio circuit design books my father had left behind (he was a radio technician who died when I was 2). That was a mistake -- I only managed to pass second year algebra in school with a promise to my teacher that I wouldn't pursue any higher mathematics. While I did manage to be admitted to college, I couldn't keep up well enough to keep my student deferment and avoid being drafted into the military (I ended up volunteering for the U.S.Navy) to serve in Vietnam. I withdrew into myself to do mathematics then and ever since, earning a living any other way that I could (and I haven't done badly, in fact, for myself and my family). My only ambition, by force of circumstance more than conscious choice, is knowledge for its own sake.

Today -- and this is only in my late years -- it is a feeling of great accomplishment and triumph to even participate in a forum such as this, and be able to hold my own. I don't just know what I'm talking about -- I know *how* I know, because I have of necessity studied it many more times and more intensely than most, closing gaps of understanding through many many repeated iterations of the same material. Even I would find that tedious, if I didn't have to do it.

Everyone has their own life to live and their ways of learning, and I don't consider mine any better or worse than anyone else's. All I can say to you is that if you wish a life in science -- then live it. Don't talk about it, don't expect anyone to give you a formal introduction to it, don't invest a lot of confidence in people or institutions to give you help. If it means enough to you, you'll find a way. Write papers, prove theorems, apply for conferences (most have scholarships for those without means, whose abstract or paper passes peer review).

I don't consider myself "self taught." Though one can be trained to behave in a certain way, no one is ever taught anything. Learning can only be acquired by meaningful study and exchanges with other scholars in the field, and this is the case whether one has much formal education, or none at all. Scholars aren't scholars because they earned a Ph.D. Scholars are scholars because they practice scholarship.

Take care. Here's hoping that you find the will to pursue your goals no matter what.

Tom

Hello Tom,

I thank you very much for this answer.It permits to better understand you.

You know Tom, me also I have had a difficult life more my health. But the most important like you say is to continue to learn more still and always. I have still a lot of parano and this and that but I try to relativate.

I d like continue my universities. I must found the correct places in fact with good teachers.

I am going to search a good university with the good professors and I will learn and I will imrpove my works. I have learned a lot on net ,here on fqxi or on other platforms. But I must learn more.

I thank you Tom still for your sincerity and your advices.

Regards

sorry it was from me

Hello Tom,

I thank you very much for this answer.It permits to better understand you.

You know Tom, me also I have had a difficult life more my health. But the most important like you say is to continue to learn more still and always. I have still a lot of parano and this and that but I try to relativate.

I d like continue my universities. I must found the correct places in fact with good teachers.

I am going to search a good university with the good professors and I will learn and I will imrpove my works. I have learned a lot on net ,here on fqxi or on other platforms. But I must learn more.

I thank you Tom still for your sincerity and your advices.

Regards

Hi Tom,

At this momment I study the p-adic numbers and the K theory. It seems relevant when the groups are well distributed.In a sphere of course, evolutive. I ask me how I am going to make detrministic correlations in a pure 3D and the proportions with rotations.I ask me how I can converge with Qp the commutative body of these p-adics numbers.The serie of uniqueness has its secret in this line of reasoning. The p-adic analyse seems relevant when the groups are finite in their pure general universal serie of uniqueness.

I believe strongly that a real taxonomy of spheres can be made.with a correct fractalization of our 3D. I see that the axiom of dimension is not verified for the Ktheory. I beleive that the correct superimposing is a 3d, there in logic it is ok at my opinion.

Could you explain me Tom why the non-commutative tori in superior dimensions have the same Ktheory.Is it due to the projective of irrational superimposings ?

Regards

Hi Tom

Having started to get to grips with Joy Christian's work, I can appreciate what a superb job you have done in producing such a well-written and easy to read essay that discusses the meaning of such complex issues.

All the best in the competition,

Michael

Dear Tom,

First, thank you very much for this well-written and thought-provoking essay.

I've been feeling a heavy guilt trip for not commenting on your essay before now, especially in light of the very kind and thoughtful comments you left on the blog for my essay. Not to make too big a production of it, but the reasons for my failure to comment here are a bit complex. I've now read your essay four times, and it makes me feel incredibly stupid/obtuse to say that I still cannot claim to fully understand it. Your thought processes obviously are very subtle and refined. My thought processes, by contrast, tend to be what I think of as being at the more naive and primitive end of the spectrum. I'm convinced that both modes of thinking are important and useful, and certainly not necessarily mutually exclusive. That said, the subtlety of the argument in your essay has left me perplexed.

To offer just one example of my obtuseness, could you please give a few specific, concrete examples of the sorts of questions which might be asked in Wheeler's version of "20 Questions"? Even that basic point has left me unsure that I comprehend the underlying concept. Any help greatly appreciated.

Btw, I've been following with great interest the discussions you've been involved in over on George Ellis's blog on top-down vs. bottom-up causation. Fascinating stuff! Don't know whether you might have noticed a couple of posts I left there on the nature of sentience as it may relate to that topic. How could anyone not be deeply intrigued by all this?

Good luck in the competition!

Regards,

jcns

"It turns out to be Bell loyalists who are the actual determinists, believing that reality is determined by probabilistic measure schemata, by which they assign equally likely outcomes to [']... the experiment not done...[']..., and thereby limit the questions that can be asked, to an assumed domain of perfect knowledge."

Not necessarily. Now here's a Bell loyalist who REALLY thinks outside the box:

"... In a truly non-causal world, Bell's Theorem cannot be formulated because in such a world elemental events are not stable enough for Bell-type non-locality to even be defined. ....

"Bell showed in 1964 that this cosine-squared dependence of polarization correlations is incompatible with a local reality. Therefore any reality (quantum reality) that lies behind these facts must be non-local. It is important to realize that Bell's Theorem is based solely on the facts not on the details of quantum theory so that if someday quantum theory is falsified or replaced by a better theory, Bell's Theorem will still be valid. Even if quantum theory is wrong, reality must be non-local.

"Although Bell's Theorem is based on facts, it goes beyond facts to make confident assertions about the reality behind those facts. Because it deals with reality, not facts or theory, Bell's Theorem is metaphysical, not physical, and hence is vulnerable to certain metaphysical assumptions about the nature of the world that are essential to Bell's proof. If we live in a world where these metaphysical assumptions are not justified, then Bell's theorem cannot even be formulated. Here I examine a class of worlds in which Bell's Theorem does not apply, and in which non-locality, in the way it's defined by Bell, does not even make sense."

NOTE: Nick Herbert's use of the word "reality" might need clarification. He employs it in the Kantian sense of "noumenal reality" -- i.e., the Whatever beyond or behind the phenomenal ("factual") world of our perception.

A SIMPLE REFUTATION OF BELL'S NON-LOCALITY THEOREM (CAUTION: VALID ONLY IN SOME WORLDS)

Interestingly, the guy also believes that in a singular manner Bell managed to stick a finger through the veil:

SEE SPOT RUN: A SIMPLE PROOF OF BELL'S THEOREM

THR: Where, exactly, did Bell define "nonlocality?"

nmann: I should ask what's your point? (one senses a game is being played here) but anyway he definitely defined "locality" --

"The direct causes (and effects) of events are near by, and even the indirect causes (and effects) are no further away than permitted by the velocity of light." (from "La nouvelle cuisine", 1990, in "Speakable and unspeakable in quantum mechanics", Cambridge, 2004, p. 239).

One of the assumptions, of course, built into BT. I'm not confident he "defined" nonlocality except inferentially or by referring to Einstein's "Spooky Action" or to Bohmian pilot waves. I'd need to look back over a lot of material. But he was, as we know, a Bohmian of a sort, and Bohm (plus Hiley) offer a definition in the Abstract of "On the Intuitive Understanding of Nonlocality as Implied by Quantum Theory" (1975, well before Bell's death):

"We bring out the fact that the essential new quality implied by the quantum theory is nonlocality; i.e., that a system cannot be analyzed into parts whose basic properties do not depend on the state of the whole system."

Think JSB went there?

John Bell defined non-locality as a negation of his factorizability condition for the joint observation AB(a, b, L) = +1 or -1 made by Alice and Bob,

AB(a, b, L) = A(a, L) x B(b, L),

where Alice's measurement result A(a, L) = +1 or -1 remains independent of Bob's measurement context b as well as his measurement result B, and likewise Bob's measurement result B(b, L) = +1 or -1 remains independent of Alice's measurement context a as well as her measurement result A.

John Bell then concluded that no realistic theory satisfying his factorizability condition can reproduce all of the statistical predictions of quantum theory, or even the strong EPR correlation -a.b observed by Alice and Bob.

In this conclusion John Bell was simply wrong.

Attached is an explicit model satisfying the above factorizabilty condition and yet reproducing the strong EPR correlation exactly. The second paper attached contains a completely general theorem that proves that, not only the EPR correlation, but ALL stronger-than-classical quantum correlations can be reproduced purely local-realistically, maintaining both the reality and completeness conditions of EPR as well as the locality or factorizability condition of Bell.

Yet, the myth of Bell's theorem is likely to remain with us, because we love worthless waffles in physics much more than concrete facts and explicit demonstrations.

Joy ChristianAttachment #1: 16_disproof.pdfAttachment #2: 10_Origins.pdf

In the Intro to the iconic 1964 paper we see this, which is what I had in mind when I said "inferentially":

"Moreover, a hidden variable interpretation [who else could this be but Bohm?] of quantum theory ... has been explicitly constructed. That particular interpretation has indeed a grossly non-local structure. This is characteristic, according to the result to be proved here, of any such theory which reproduces exactly the quantum mechanical predictions."

THR: So what IS your point? Bell used the term. His meaning is pretty obvious. The word was never put into his mouth by others.

Joy: You're starting the resemble "Outraged in Tunbridge Wells" in the letters columns of the old Daily Telegraph or summat. You're a extraordinarily bright guy. Ease up!

You are right about both of your points:

(1) Yes, Bell's motivation and inspiration for his theorem came from the non-locality in Bohm's theory, of which he remained a big fan throughout his life.

(2) You are correct to recognize that I am outraged. This is because of the kind of treatment I have received from some parts of the physics community during the past five years, and especially during the past few months. I don't know about you, but Tom has witnessed some of this mistreatment. Needless to say, what you see on the Internet is only a fraction of what goes on in the real world. But nevertheless I will try to "ease up" if I can.

nmann,

Happy to know that it exists rationalists !

Regards

Tom,

Bell's program was "classical" because his primary intellectual weapon was classical logic. That is the logic of our world, the embodied logic of our brains. It's the logic of macroscopic physicality (something JSB proved: the classically logical is also the classically physical). All formulations of QM are classical ... Heisenberg's matrices are classical even if noncommutative etc.

We have two choices: Classical and Classical-NOT. We use the first to identify the second. The second has no meaning except as a contradiction of the first. Smart people ... Putnam, Finkelstein ... have tried to craft a quantum logic but without success. There's a reason. We can recognize and describe (in our own language) superposition but we can't do superposition. Nor can we replicate quantum randomness (cf. John von Neumann on being in a state of sin when you try to do that deterministically ... you need to tap an actual quantum source).

Nick Herbert's right: we don't know whether underlying "reality" is classically deterministic or in some manner non-causal. If Bell's classical logic is a correct tool then reality's at least nonlocal. (Leggett tests suggest it's also counterfactually indefinite.) If Bell's logic is wrong then it means classical logic itself is inapplicable beyond the macroscopic world although in ways we may never recognize, much less understand.

Hi nmann,

Bell's logic is wrong but it doesn't mean that classical logic can't apply microscopically. Have a look at De Raedt et al's work. Bell just simply didn't consider all the elements of reality in his logic. That is real easy to see in Joy Christian's work.

Fred