Essay Abstract

Enigmas and suspected basic flaws in physics evade mathematical scrutiny if they relate to intuitive pre-mathematical fallacies. This essay focuses on notions and tacit assumptions that are basic to theories. For instance it questions the assumptions that the distinction between past and future is an illusion, time is something a priori given in which objects may move like in space, and any mathematical structure has a correlate in reality. Because it is not biased by an intension to brutally rescue holy grails, it does not question causality, c, or time. Instead it is driven by curiosity about how we go about doing what we do and by the confidence to eventually reveal typical human fallacies. Some key tenets of mathematics and physics proved to be at variance with its results. They include putative realism of future space-time, perfect mirror-symmetries, naïve set theory, singularities, and possibly even Lorentz contraction.

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See http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/369

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Hello Eckard,

Good to see your essay appear. It looks very interesting based on the abstract, but I insist on reading the rest before forming a full opinion. It should be fun for me, as it looks like you touch on some of the early childhood stuff I am examining; it appears that very young children make no distinction between themselves and their environment. But once we do start making distinctions, to make sense of things, it's hard to go back to oneness. I guess it's the same for Math and Physics. I wish you luck in the contest, and many interesting conversations on the forum.

Regards,

Jonathan

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  • Post #3

Eckard,

Everyone has the impression that time does not have a fundamental mathematical link to physical law, it has to be defined locally. You made the following comment on your earlier essay, topic 369, (Eckard Blumschein wrote on Dec. 21, 2008 @ 21:26 GMT):

"Aren't functions of time and functions of frequency/energy equivalent?"

You made that statement before publication of my July/August 2011 IEEE Potentials article "A methodology to define physical constants using mathematical constants".

I identified the relationship between time, frequency and energy well before 2008, but it took awhile to get the concept published; it experienced a few rejections from a number of traditional journals.

I am aware of the significance of the concept presented in the IEEE paper, but I had to limit what I could include in the text to avoid editor and peer review rejection. The only negative peer review comment was the appropriateness of that type of paper in IEEE Potentials. I was asked by the editor to provide a Benefits section, which was published verbatim; I was careful what I put in that section.

The paper can be accessed through:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?isnumber=5962021

Since Jan 2011, IEEE does not allow authors to post their IEEE published papers on their academic or personal websites. A postprint is available at:

http://www.vip.ocsnet.net/~ancient/Constants-Version%20Postprint%20Rev%201.pdf

It is now possible to mathematically define the basic units of measure. I would think the physics community would be interested in the concept.

    Dear Eckard Blumschein,

    I think we all know these points you make, but they merge in confused fashion into habitual use of 'point'-based notions and ideas. We hold the mathematical concepts, set theory, calculus, etc., in our heads forgetting where the logical holes are located. It is very good that you continue to remind us that holes exist and show us where some big ones are located. You do so in such pleasant and easy to understand manner. As you say, "Lacking awareness to the limits of idealization implies a lot of logical inconsistencies." I agree with your following statement, "Tolerating an overlap of mutually excluding models is certainly no satisfactory solution." I have several times quoted Norman Cook on this point:

    "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."

    I do agree that the usual "dualism" between particle or wave, typically assumed to mean it is one *or* the other based on when and how you look at it, is nonsense. I hope that my essay, The Nature of the Wave Function, will provide you a new way to look at this problem, based on physically real particles *and* associated waves. My model is not 'point'-based, but I do not go into spin in this essay.

    You will find a number of 'intuition' based essays in this current competition. I think that Daryl, Janzen, Michael Goodband, Israel Perez, and others make some reference to intuition as the basis for questioning certain assumptions. I particularly liked your discussion of the continuum under the topic of intuition. Finally, you provide a large set of references to papers that look to be fascinating.

    Thanks for a well thought out, well written, well referenced essay. It is excellent and I wish you good luck in the contest.

    Edwin Eugene Klingman

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      • Post #6

      Dear Eckard,

      I have read your essay.It is very clearly written,in masterly, beautiful, English language, that many native speakers could not even hope to achieve. There was only one sentence in the whole essay in which the word choice stood out as rather unusual to me. Though it was still completely comprehensible.

      I found the essay interesting, enjoyable, easy to read and very relevant to the essay question.It kept my interest and made me want to continue reading to the end.

      Very well done. I hope you get may interested readers who will be able to discuss the problems of mathematics with you in an informed way. Good luck in the competition.

      Hi Eckard

      In enjoyed reading your well written and easy-to-read essay. I agree with Georgina. I would like to make just a couple of comments.

      You mentioned some of the problems in physics, in particular, I would like to give a suggestion to the following:

      Hermann Weyl warned: We are less certain than ever about the ultimate foundations.

      - Feynman smugly declared quantum mechanics something that nobody understands.

      If photons did behave as do heavy particles then they should be expected subject to acceleration. This is obviously not the case. Light propagates in vacuum like to be expected from a wave with constant velocity c.

      With respect to the first two issues, I agree and I believe my essay offers viable solutions to them. Since the beginning of the XX, physics became so abstract that the physical and intuitive sense were demoted to a second plane. By the 1930s Heisenberg himself gave up trying to find an intuitive picture of quantum mechanical phenomena. He concluded that it was impossible to understand quantum mechanics intuitively; Schrondinger, Born, Bohr, Neumann, Feynman and others agreed with him. I believe that the reason for this is because they no longer had in mind some physical concepts that are crucial to accomplish the intuitive picture that they were looking for, namely: the PSR, the aether, the idea that particles are actually waves, and the notion that a field is a state of the aether. Once these concepts are restored in the physical conception of reality all the mysteries of quantum mechanics automatically disappear.

      The last issue is also explained by the aether. As it is well known the speed of the wave is determined by the density of the medium. If we assume the aether at rest, at a constant temperature and homogeneous, the speed of light has no other option but to be constant since its generation.

      Good luck in the contest

      Ps. You missed reference 6 in your essay, could you please tell me the reference. As well, in my entry I replied to your comments about Descartes' aether, Bernoulli, Gibbs and the vacuum, please take a look at my thread.

      Regards

      Israel

        Hi Israel,

        Ref. [6] is to be found in the line of [5] because the contest allowed just one page of references. The original sapere aude seems to be no longer available via http://www.btinternet.com/~sapere.aude . An impressive list of those who signed [5] and some papers by Paul Marmet also disappeared.

        I already replied to your very comprehensive reply to my comment that mentioned Gericke as someone who made very convincing as well as fertile experiments. Perhaps you know that von Essen called Einstein's 1905 paper on moving bodies the worst one he ever read mainly because Einstein did not perform experiments.

        While I am not a physicist and I did not deal with Einstein's relativity for all the more than 40 years when I was teaching at Otto-von-Guericke-University, I cannot hide that his method of synchronization looks naively subjectivist to me.

        I consider the method by Poincaré (Potier) only convincing in case emitter A and receiver B do not move relative to each other.

        Regards,

        Eckard

        PS: Being short of time at the moment, I promise to reply more in detail and to all others later.

        Dear Georgina,

        Having looked in vain for the word choice, I suspect you meant chosen which occurs twice on p. 3 and once in Appendix B. In the latter case one has the choice between looking at the plane +, +i either from above or from below. Accordingly one sees the phasor exp(iwt) rotating anti-clockwise or clockwise, respectively.

        Fig. 1 on p. 3 might be a blasphemy because it calls the birth of Christ an arbitrarily chosen event from which on we are calling a year either a positive AD (anno domini) or a negative BC (before Christ). If I hurt feelings, I apologize for that.

        Regards,

        Eckard

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          • Post #11

          Dear Eckard,

          I'm sorry for causing confusion.I just meant the words you chose to use in that one particular sentence would not have been chosen by someone with English as a first language. The rest of the essay is so very well written, demonstrating great linguistic skill.

          You wrote :"Let's call most basic assumptions pre-mathematical as to remind of how children get familiar with elementary notions." It would have sounded more natural if you had said "reminiscent of "instead of "as to remind of". Also "children become familiarised" (or -ized) would have worked better than "children get familiar". The meaning of the sentence is still clearly conveyed.I intended the observation of so few errors to be a compliment rather than a criticism. Re. mentioning the birth of Christ, you certainly have not hurt my feelings

          Its very well written, fascinating and, for me, educational essay. Well done. Regards, Georgina

          Hi Eckard

          Ok, thanks for the explanation about the references. I did not know about the comments on Einstein's paper, thanks for the information.

          I made a comment in reply to you in my thread regarding the one-way measurement according to Gift. His experiment has no scientific validity.

          Best regards

          Israel

          Dear Eckard Blumschein,

          Thus, coherently-cyclic-universe is asymmetric and dynamic as the mathematical representation of universe in entirety is a pre-mathematical intuition, when we ascribe a cycle of it in potential infinity that has actual infinity of cycles.

          With best wishes,

          Jayaker

            Hello Steve,

            Nice to see you again. Perhaps you managed reading a lot of essays. I am mainly interested in what I consider reasonable outsiders like Janzen, Kadin, Kerr, Perez, Reiter, and Merryman whose essay I will look at next.

            Regards,

            Eckard

            Dear Georgina,

            My mistake is obvious: When you wrote "word choice" you meant choice of words. In German we would write in this case wordchoice or word-choice. I mistook "word choice" as the word "choice".

            My essay tries to show that similar mistakes in science are still to be found. I will read your essay because I consider the meaning of the notion reality utterly important. Einstein referred to the perspective of an observer. This might be a key mistake.

            Regards,

            Eckard

            Dear Jayakar Johnson Joseph,

            Admittedly, I am facing difficulties when I am trying to understand your sentence. English is not my mother language. I have no idea what "Thus" refers to. I would write either "the" or "a" coherently-cyclic universe. Perhaps you meant "a" in the sense you are suggesting it. Well, such assumption is clearly speculative. What did you mean with "ascribe ... in"? I only know "ascribe" in connection with "to". If I ascribe a cycle of a cyclic universe to infinity, shouldn't this infinity then be actually infinite? In my humble understanding a genuine cycle is actually endless. The spiral of (nearly) identical cycles you seem to imagine is potentially infinite. Please accept that I am not interested in such perhaps futile speculations.

            Regards,

            Eckard

            Hi Israel,

            I do not share your positive attitude toward intuition to which your comment of Aug. 9, 5:30 GMT refers. Reality might differ from intuitively interpreted abstraction. Devlin is certainly correct when he reveals that while epsilontics is rigorous, the interpretation as continuity is intuitive, in other words a questionable petitio principii.

            What about S. Gift, may I ask you to briefly explain in what and why he is wrong? Admittedly, I did not yet deal with his claimed measurement. Teaching at the Westindies he seems to be an outsider. However, I only judge on the basis of factual arguments. The reason for me to quote Bruhn [29] was to show how those who used to prejudge simply ignore experimental results and infer from their generalizing intuition that Einstein was a genius who was always correct that anything else must be wrong.

            Regards,

            Eckard

            Dear Edwin Eugene Klingman,

            I admire your brilliant ability to emphatically comment even on mutually contradicting essays, and I feel your comment on mine more fair than I could expect after I quoted Kadin who plausibly at least to me explains why he does not consider photons particles. You might blame my lacking qualification for my failure to immediately grasp your slightly different concept.

            While I do not deny that intuition can provide the basis for questioning certain assumptions, my essay tries to show to what extent science has been based on rather shaky intuition.

            Well, on the first glance my essay seems to just reiterate well known deficits. My lists of enigma, suspected basic flaws and confessions coincides by chance and only in part with my criticism of arbitrary decisions made from a more or less intuitive background.

            I am the nobody to whom even a Norman Cook is a nobody. I recall Jont Allen admitting something similar more briefly: No model (of cochlea) fits all data.

            Dear Eckard,

            You are correct that I find mutually contradicting essays interesting and to some degree convincing. There are a few arguments here that I am unable to decide between, and others in which I wonder if some middleground is possible.

            As for Kadin, I do not recall his exact stance on photons as particles. I certainly do not envision photons as material particles like electrons. The question is whether there is any 'local' energy packet (and hence equivalent 'local mass density') as Einstein and Dirac and many others concluded. If so, then this will induce the C-field circulation I have described in my essay. It is my assumption that such localization does apply, as the implications of the alternative seem completely unrealistic to me. And it seems indisputable that photons carry momentum, which is the 'source' of the induced circulation. I hope you might reconsider my approach with this in mind.

            You say "on the first glance my essay seems to just reiterate well known deficits." Re-reading my comment I realized what my first sentence sounded like and I disliked my own wording. A good part of the reason that I am mindful of the basic problems with math is because of your previous essays and arguments on FQXi. So I would soften that sentence in favor of the third sentence.

            You state that "No model (of cochlea) fits all data". I am not an expert on physiological structure and function, but I believe that biological reality is so many more orders of magnitude more complicated than elementary particle physics, gravity, etc, that multiple models of biology are more to be expected.

            What I would NOT change is my final sentence, "Thanks for a well thought out, well written, well referenced essay. It is excellent and I wish you good luck in the contest."

            Edwin Eugene Klingman

            Hello Eckard,

            Thank you. I am always happy to see your deterministic road.

            There are several relevant essays. Your line of reasoning is rational, it is the most important. I am going to read yours still one x and the other essays also. It is cool this year. I play like a child, after all, the innocence is our best friend.

            I wish you good luck for this contest.

            Regards