Which of Our Basic Physical Assumptions Are Wrong? by Georgina Parry

Hi Georgina,

I like this! I feel that for the first time I truly get you. I love the organization, the clarity, the style, the "hats" didactic, the ease of reading. High marks all around.

As you would expect from our previous exchanges over the years, I can't agree with everything. We've talked a lot about the paradoxes, and I don't feel any need to rehash that dialogue. I only feel compelled, in defense of Einstein, to say that space-time curvature is not presented in general relativity as the cause of gravity; in fact, that's where GR fails, at the singularity of infinite curvature. Einstein acknowledged this, and general relativity was intended to be an intermediate step toward a theory without singularities and without the need to specify boundary conditions.

No matter, though -- you've done a masterful job of exposing the big questions. I especially appreciate the "magic" section, drawing attention to the reliance on our bias that "what you see is all there is." Is that not, in fact, the basic assumption of experiments that "prove" nonlocality in quantum mechanics?

Good luck in the contest!

Tom

Georgina,

I try to read every FQXi essay to determine if aspects of my essay (topic/1294) have been covered by another essay. It is inevitable that there could be some crossover with the number of issues involving assumptions.

At the bottom of page 6 of your essay, you present postulates, and postulate 3, "Time is not a dimension of independently existing Object reality but is a dimension of observer fabricated Image reality." is mathematically contradicted by the concept presented in the July/August 2011 IEEE Potentials article cited in my essay. I am sure you were not aware of the article in the IEEE publication, and your postulate 3 statement would have been correct if the concept in the IEEE paper had not been identified.

The dimension of a duration of time is one of the mathematically defined units of measure revealed in the "methodology", thus, it is part of physical law reality.

Frank,

Temperature is also a defined unit of measure. Why is it ok to conflate the measure of rate of change/time, with the measure of space, but no one conflates the scalar measure of activity/temperature with that of space? Considering there is no space without some degree of temperature and if we used ideal gas laws, it would be as easy to correlate temperature with volume, as it is to use the velocity of light to correlate duration and distance.

Time is a measure of change. Distance, area and volume are measures of space.

John,

I addressed the issue of the unit of time in the essay, temperature is not mentioned anywhere within it.

The current SI definition for temperature, the Kelvin, is not based upon any physical constants, it is based upon the characteristics of a particular molecular compound. "The kelvin, unit of thermodynamic temperature, is the fraction 1/273.16 of the thermodynamic temperature of the triple point of water."

Kelvin

It is my opinion that the scientific unit for temperature should be defined as an energy level, but SI does not have a base unit of energy to even consider a starting point.

Hi Tom,

thank you very much for reading my essay and leaving such positive feedback. Having finally written something that meets with your approval feels to me like I have jumped a big hurdle. Really appreciate your comments. I'll be smiling all day, at the very least.

Dear Frank,

I do not know if you read my essay in its entirety or just skimmed through to identify similarities /contradictions with your own. If you read the essay carefully you will see that the postulates given are not assumptions but emerge as consequences of the structure of the explanatory framework, that is necessary to incorporate the known facts and overcome the numerous physical and philosophical/theological problems.

You are correct I have not yet read your IEEE paper.

..that should have said the IEEE paper you have cited in your essay.

Frank,

Sorry for not reading your paper yet, due to a lack of personal time.

Yes, temperature is generally thought of in terms of molecular activity, but it's only institutional bias that radioactive processes are not normally included. Step in a pool of radioactive water and while you may not immediately sense the burn, you will still be definitely burned.

What is the base unit of time? Some cycle or vibration of a cesium atom? So a particular duration of this atomic activity is a constant, but a scalar measure of its action wouldn't also be a constant?

The point I keep making is that while we think of duration as a kind of temporal distance from one event to another, along which the present moves, logically it is the changing configuration of what is present, so that it is the events going from being future to being past. Time then being a measure of actions occurring within the present, not external to it. Duration is a bit like the moonwalk; action without actually moving forward.

Georgina,

Sorry for not getting to your essay yet. Working two jobs....

Dear Georgina Parry,

Marvelous! You have been hard at work for a few years, and it shows. I have read a few of your comments over the last year and I thought that you were going off the track, but I now see that you were just exploring various pathways.

I think you have produced a winning essay and I hope you do. Your analysis covers a very broad spectrum, including paradoxes which you handle well. I also find interesting your observations that "Information is not conserved in Object reality." Generally speaking, I agree with most of your "wrong assumptions." Because you have done such a masterful job presenting the data as a complete picture (the essay, not the diagram) I agree with things that I would probably argue about if presented in an isolated comment, so it is very important that you have had the opportunity to paint a nine-page picture. I still have some slight problem with "no reason to assume that the Object universe does not have an eternal history", but if space-time is 'emergent' in your sense, I don't think it's worth arguing about the semantics. Also, you cover so much area that I think you chose wisely to make lists, rather than waste words in prose.

I definitely agree with your well stated paragraph on the Object universe as "...actively participating creator... preserver and destroyer of all structures and patterns." You finished with a quote from Feynman, but I think you said it better.

Congratulations, well done.

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Georgina

Both Relativity and QM attempt to explained what is 'observed' (ie measured), they are just both based on incorrect presumptions as to how physical reality (the very thing they are trying to measure), occurs. In other words, Relativity is no more a theory about observation than QM is. The point about Relativity is the use of references (frames of reference, etc) to ascertain a relative calibration, because there are no absolutes, and (allegedly) matter alters dimension and light curves under certain conditions. It is not, or at least was not meant to be, a theory about the observation of physical reality. QM, because it is dealing with quantum, does not presume from the outset to be able to 'observe', so it pursues measurement (ie observation) in terms of probability, ie all the features in a given circumstance cannot be observed/ measured, because the very act of doing so affects it, etc.

Now, the problem with all this is that what is sensed (observation being just one example) involves the physical receipt of a physical phenomena (it is passive and it is a physical event). And that is not the physical reality. It is the result of a physical interaction with that particular reality and other physical phenomena. That is all it is, physically. The evolution of sensory systems has involved the development of the functional use of it, but that is irrelevant to its physical existence. Or put another way around, no amount of sensing alters any form of physical existence whatsoever. Except that, upon receipt the physical phenomena cease to exist, just like they do if they hit a brick wall instead of an eye.

Paul

Hi Georgina,

I was increasingly impressed with your essay. A nice take on the differnet ways of analysing the big problems of modern day physics and it's many assumptions. Excellent work and I imagine very useful to a lot of people. I found a few title headings which sounded like my own imagery-simulation-like methodology, so I was happy at the end of it. Well done and thank you for your effort.

Dear Ms. Georgina,

I enjoyed reading your essay ever so much.

"H-h-h-hat's all folks."

Avid cartoon watcher, Joe Fisher

Hi Georgina,

Bravo!! A virtuoso presentation if ever I've seen one! Congratulations on a big job well done! I'm totally blown away by your essay.

I hope Edwin will excuse me for latching onto the coattails of his laudatory comments, as it were, but I definitely wanted to echo his words of praise for your essay (and what better place to do so?). If you don't win some sort of recognition for this essay it will constitute absolute, irrefutable proof that there is, indeed, no justice in the universe! Moreover, if such an unimaginable outcome were to occur I suspect that all the other essayists would band together and hold a ceremonial burning in effigy of the competition's judges. Just kidding, of course; we're *far* too mature and sensible a group for such a childish stunt, maybe.

All that said, and while I agree with by far the lion's share of what you've written, I was puzzled by a few things. One which leaped out at me was your statement (point 13 under the heading 'Yellow hat-What works and why/advantages') ". . . Nested *if* the historical sequence is considered, as the iterations of the Object universe exist in sequence not in a continuum." If I'm reading this correctly, it sounds as though you've just unilaterally declared that reality is digital rather than analog (the topic of last year's essay competition)? Did everyone finally agree to that conclusion, or am I not reading you correctly? Not a major point, to be sure, but one on which I'd like some clarification. Thanks!

I very much like the many excellent quotes you've included, especially the Tegmark quote, "Evolution has endowed us with intuition only for those aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, such as the parabolic trajectories of flying rocks." As someone else (Richard Dawkins perhaps?) has commented, evolution has prepared us to operate at peak efficiency in a primitive hunter-gatherer society. Modern science, on the other hand, has armed us with nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons rather than stones and clubs. A dangerous mix. Advances in science and technology have, unfortunately, far outpaced advances in wisdom and common sense. We know how to promote the advancement of science (FQXi is a brilliant example), but how do we promote the advancement of wisdom and common sense? Anyone who can answer that one has a Nobel Prize waiting with his or her name on it.

Thank you again, Georgina; your clarity of thought and presentation are refreshing beyond words. I'll undoubtedly have more to say later, but already have rambled on too long here.

Best Regards,

jcns

I have replicated John Merryman's posts, that are relevant to my essay topic 1294 to my topic area. I have responded to John's last post in my topic post.

Georgina,

I have reviewed other parts of your essay in some detail, but my original reply was limited to the statement you made concerning time.

You have a lot of interesting material in your essay to provoke discussion. You quoted Max Tegmark, and I quoted Sir Arthur Eddington in my IEEE paper, "My conclusion is that not only the laws of nature but the constants of nature can be deduced from epistemological considers, so that we can have a priori knowledge of them." There is a nuance of difference between intuition and priori, with both Tegmark and Eddington giving our species some unusual capability.

Your approach is quite different from the way I used to describe assumptions. I had never heard of Edward de Bono's thinking hats, so I had to learn what that meant in the context of how you presented material concerning assumptions.

Your approach to describing assumptions by using Color Coded Thinking Hat Logic (CCTHL) sets exposes you to the consequences of the completeness and validity of the material in the sets. A postulate is supposed to be based upon the factual validity of some preceding material. You stated in the preceding logic set, that item 3, "Time is a dimension of external reality", is a "wrong assumption." Earlier, in the Magic paragraph, you made this statement, "the human tendency to draw strong conclusions from incomplete information." A postulate is a rather strong conclusion about the validity of the facts it is based upon. In the item 3 postulate, I am aware you made a statement that can be mathematically contradicted, because you have "incomplete information." I just happened to have knowledge about the mathematical process, although published, that hasn't been widely or properly disseminated, even though it was distributed to 405,000 IEEE members.

When I came to the diagram on page 4, I had an expectation to see some logic diagram based upon the CCHTL , which would match the colors. I did not find the diagram helpful.

In your section," What is an object and what is a clock?", you make the statement, "Independent inanimate objects such as rods and clocks do not change in response to being observed in different ways." A clock is a specific form of an object that provides a function and depending upon its form, it is quite easy to get a different result depending upon the method of observation.

As an electrical engineer, I have a particular bias on how a photon should be described, and your Yellow hat section, item 14, has a close fit to my bias. Physicists tend not to use the terms polarization and frequency.

Edwin Eugene Klingman,

You emphasized a particular statement from Georgina's essay, "Information is not conserved in Object reality." That statement bothered me when I first read it in the essay because the term "information" was not defined. We have a very limited viewpoint as to the information contained in the universe and we have "insufficient information" to state, or make the assumption, that the universe, as a system, does not have a feedback mechanism that exploits/processes information from some event, and adjusts.

Dear Frank Makinson,

This is a very complicated topic, and I agree that it was not defined. I view information as contextual, and as dependent upon a codebook (which may be implemented as specific neural structures that our brain has learned from experience) and as that which literally 'in-forms' or creates 'formation' or formal structure 'inside' the brain. I view relativistic momentum (energy and 3-space momenta) as physical realities, and information as an overlay or map that is largely brain-dependent. I realize that many physicists today believe that information is physical, and some even believe that physical reality somehow 'derives from' information, but my belief is closer to what I've said in this paragraph. I just found it interesting that Georgina appears to arrive at a similar conclusion.

Thanks for your comment.

Also, I noted in jcns's comment that he picked up on a remark that "sounds as though you've just unilaterally declared that reality is digital rather than analog". If he is correct in his interpretation, then I too have reservations about that, as explained in my essay last year. Regardless, Georgina has done an excellent job, and one can agree with her without endorsing every conclusion she comes to.

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Thanks Alan, glad you liked it.

Thanks Joe.