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

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

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.

Dear Frank,

I did not define information in the essay or any of the other words used though I did offer a very brief explanation of the word "phenotype" in brackets, as I was aware that the essay would be read by non biologists who might be unfamiliar with the term. I have tried in the essay this year to keep the language simple and the sentences short and not overly complicated.

I have written word lists giving the definition of words, as I use them, with the framework to overcome problems of misunderstanding. The rules did not permit supplementary pages of written definitions, which I might otherwise have included. "Information" has not been on the word lists I produced prior to this essay competition. As I deliberately did not use it. I have, in my numerous blog comments over the last couple of years, avoided the term "information" because it does have certain meanings to physicists that I have not necessarily intended by its use. In this essay it is meant in a very broad sense.

Structures and patterns are destroyed and so anything "contained" that might generate data, or that might have been later learned from such data -ie. inform is lost from the Object universe. Structures includes neural structures permitting memory of events or facts. EM and other sensory data can persist in the environment after the source objects have ceased to exist but it is a "data pool" and not the space-time continuum past, present and future from Bang to Crunch (or whatever) in which everything is conserved. That is what was meant.

Dear Edwin,

thank you for reading my essay and writing such a glowing appraisal. It does feel good to be understood. I am glad I have communicated the ideas clearly.It's also good to hear that this has put some of my blog comments into a context where they make more sense.

I agree with your slight reservation -I personally see no reason to assume the Object universe does not have an eternal history. To assume otherwise, it seems to me, just makes nonsense or insoluble problems. However I can't speak for everyone else. There may be people who wish to disagree and require, according to their reasoning, a beginning however problematic.

Thanks again, I really appreciate your very positive feedback.

Georgina,

It's really very good thinking of you. You explained the problem successfully.But the question here from where to start. There is a contradiction between quantum and relativity in concepts and principles. So, will we modify relativity theory of Einstein in order to be accepted with quantum theory concepts and principles? Or we modify quantum theory to be accepted with relativity theory concepts and principles. Einstein tried in his last years of life to proof the inconsistency of quantum theory, and then tried to interpret the physical phenomena which interpreted by quantum to be interpreted by his relativity concepts and principles, but he false. From that time, scientist did not try to interpret relativity theory by the concepts and principles of quantum....why? In 1996 I adopted the first proposal, and I modified the relativity theory of Einstein to be accepted with quantum theory (Copenhagen School) concepts and principles. I found I could solve the most problems in physics regarded to quantum and relativity. I found in 1996 it is possible measuring speeds of particles or light ray to be faster than light according to my MSRT without violating Lorentz transformation or causality, and thus according to that it is interpreting, the quantum tunneling and entanglement, without violating the Lorentz transformation or causality. Also I could solve the Pioneer anomaly exactly according to modified GR. My proposed solution relative to modified general relativity and gravity is agreed with what proposed in quantum field theory. Please can you read my paper http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1272

then we discuss?