The Universe - An Effect Without Cause by Philip Gibbs

Personally, I think that causality is far more fundamental than the so-called "fundamental laws of physics" since:

Conventional physics requires that 26 fundamental parameters be put into the "standard model" by hand.

Conventional physics has not been able to resolve the vacuum energy density crisis.

Conventional physics cannot explain the fine structure constant.

Conventional physics cannot specifically identify the universal dark matter.

Conventional physics cannot predict the masses of fundamental particles.

Conventional physics cannot reconcile General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

Conventional physics cannot explain why galaxies exist, or why they come in radically different flavors like ellipticals and spirals.

And extensions of conventional physics have taken a severe beating at the LHC.

If you are basing your conclusions (such as that "emergence is more fundamental than causality") on the heuristic, model-building that nowadays passes for fundamental physics, then I suggest that you are building upon a foundation of plastic.

Note how willing the postmodern pseudoscientists are to discard something as elegant and well-tested as General Relativity in favor of rubbish like Verlinde's "emergent gravity" and related untestable blather like "backwards causation" and giving up spacetime for comic book fizzics..

Robert L. Oldershaw

Discrete Scale Relativity

As far as I'm sure that Time is a circle,I suspect that the Space obeys to tangent curve.No dimensions.Only angles.

Robert it is good to see you over here. Here are a few points that you are welcome to argue with.

- I agree about the unsolved problems you list. All theoretical physicists are aware of these things and are looking for further enlightenment to understand them better. There have always been further problems to solve in physics and it may be a long time before we reach the bottom of them.

- I am promoting consistency (not emergence) as a replacement for csusality. Many things become emergent in physics as we peel back the layers towards the more fundamental core. I dont think it makes sense to attack emergence as a general feature of physics because it is everywhere.

- I am not promoting Verlinde's emergent gravity. It has some interesting features but his comoslogical inetrepreations seems pretty wild to me and I have mentioned this on vixra log before now. The subject is not mentioned in this essay, neither is backward causation which I reamin skeptical about.

- None of the points you made explain why you think temporal causality is fundamental. I would genuinely like to hear why people think it is so fundamental. It seems to me that it is just an assumption that people are not willing to give up.

Hi Philip,

Don't take it too personally. Every time I see what I think is hype that over-sells our current understanding of nature I respond with a counter-balancing rant about how much we do not know. It has become reflexive behavior for those on both sides of the issues.

Here's one major question I have: Are causality and emergence (whatever that is specifically) mutually exclusive? What would be the reasoning for a positive answer?

You ask for people to explain their confidence in the fundamentality of causality. Well, everything empirically known through direct testing supports this confidence. Evidence for violations of causality are all tellingly in the unobersevable past (e.g., the beginning of the expansion of our metagalaxy) or in the microcosm where direct observations are impossible and we rely on inferences backed by copious suspect assumptions.

Please don't tell me that quantum mechanics demands acausality. I agree with Feynman that 'no one really understand what QM says about nature, even if it gives the right answers heuristically'. There are many mutually excusive interpretations of QM and the "experts" argue continually and with considerable heat about which version is correct.

How can you flatly say that "emergence is more fundamental than causality"?

That is the question. What motivates this conjecture?

For Robert and Philip

Freemen Dyson about unsolved problems in physics(The Future of Physics, Phys. Today 23 (9) (1970)

"To my mind there are only two things that would really would be disastrous for the future of physics. One is if would solve all of the major unsolved problems. That would be indeed be a disaster, but I am not afraid of it happening in the foreseeable future.

The other disastrous thing would be if we become so pure and isolated from the practical problem of life that none of brightest and most dedicated students wants any longer to study physics"

Robert, thanks but,

I have not said anywhere that "emergence is more fundamental than causality" I did not say it using those words as suggested by your quotes and I did not say it indrectly either. It is not in any sense something that I have said.

What I have said is that causality is emergent. This is a completely different thing to say.

Phil,

"Emergence of cause" mean "To put the cart before the horse"

I think that spacetime and unitarity are emergent. Unitarity is a special case where quantum wave functions are analytic everywhere. Singularities, such as with a black hole, introduce a pole which makes these wave functions meremorphic. Rather than being unitary they are modular. Unitarity is an approximation when the fields can be treated in a semi-classical setting. There has been some controversy over this of late with a paper by Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski, Sully http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.3123, where the holographic principle is found to have a problem. 't Hooft and Susskind formulated this with no treatment of the black hole interior, which I think means the unitary theoretic basis behind the holographic principle is approximate.

If spacetime and unitarity are emergent, then so is causality. Causality is meaningless if there is no time development or any fundamental construction of spacetime. Spacetime is probably an emergent structure where quantum gravity becomes semi-classical or transitions to a classical setting.

Lawrence

What mean unitarity is emergent?

More simple please.

Dear Philip

I enjoyed reading your very interesting essay. It is well structured and well written. I would not hesitate to give a high score. I agree with your view of causality, I think that causality it is just a construction of the mind to try to predict a forthcoming event. To achieve this, the mind tries to find correlations among possible factors that may lead to a particular effect. If the universe were causal if would be deterministic and thus predictable. This also presupposes that the laws of physics either existed before the creation of the universe or were created along with the universe.

You said: There is no general consensus yet on how to replace space and time but there is a widespread view that the space-time manifold as we knew it in general relativity is no longer the accepted starting point. It is just an approximation to some other unknown mathematical structure.

My essay has something to say in this respect though my thesis does poses a view that does not go along with the current trends in physics. Vesselin Petkov claims in his essay that gravity is not a force, this claim, I believe, would have profound implications in the present notion of space-time. My line of research is condensed matter. Within the literature of this field I have found a series of reports that hold that the vacuum resembles more a condensed state of matter, which suggests itself that space is more a material fluid than just geometry as modeled in relativity. I am in agreement with this view but I reached this possibility following another line of reasoning. In my essay I claim that when theoretical physics cannot move forwards is because it has to go backwards and reconsider some old conceptions that could be helpful to solve our present problems. Vesselin and many theoretical physicists holds that there is a crisis in physics and that in these moments of desperation any possibility is valid. I do agree. Though I am aware that my proposal can be amply view as heretic for contemporary physics I am confident that conceiving space as a material fluid is the correct path to get out of the present puzzle. So, I invite you to read my work and I would be grateful if you could leave some comments.

Best regards and good luck in the contest

Israel

Dear Philip Gibbs,

I just commented on your essay within topic 1364 because it makes my arguments hopefully easily understandable.

Respectfully,

Eckard

You are right, technically.

But when you say: "Yuri, It is because causality is an emergent phenomema. There is no indication that it is built into the fundamental laws of physics and therefore no reason to think that cosmological models that go beyond the observable universe are required to be causal.", what is one supposed to infer.

You are hardly saying that causality is fundamental. Looks to me like you are saying quite the opposite.

But I will move on to other issues.

If you look above I break this out in a bit more detail. Unitarity is a limiting case where wave functions are analytic everywhere. Physics based on modularity and nonlocality has no reference to spacetime. Causality in physics is based on propagators or Greene functions that push a field from (x, t) to (x', t'). Without spacetime this simply does not exist. The removal of the pole or singularity occurs when there are no black holes or in a region of spacetime that excludes big bang singularities.

One of the things I think comes from this is the universe contains only one of each particle. The universe has only one electron, one up quark, one muon, one photon, one Z, one higgs one... . What we observe as individual particles are the same particle within different configuration variables, whether spacetime or momentum-energy. Spacetime is in effect a sort of emergent property, in many ways an illusion, where particles we observe are mirror images of the same particles with different configurations. Baruch Spinoza wrote about something like this, which he called monads.

My essay should appear here in the next day or so. I break this part out in greater detail.

The "Monads" belong to Leibniz, The "Modes" coined by Spinoza.

Dear Philip

The Higgs boson and The COMALOGY http://vixra.org/abs/1206.0002

In my theory I consider the beginning of existence or the universe at t=0 is from energy not mass. Mass is created from energy. I name this state is the infinity state, it is the state of infinity energy and zero mass. At this state The spacetime length equals to zero. the light system is located at the infinity. At this state there is no past or future, there is only present. All the information that I live in my material world is coming from the infinity by the spacetime length. Since we have the mass, thus mass is creating the spacetime length greater than zero. Mass is a reluctance to receive all the information elements of all my life history in a zero spacetime length or at the same present. The higgs boson is creating this reluctance and creating the mass and the spacetime grater than zero. If there is no Higgs boson the particle will own rest mass equals to zero and thus its location will be in the infinity state same as the light beam. This illustrating why the particle without Higgs boson will move with speed of light in vacuum. The speed of light c is measured relative to a system which owns rest mass greater than zero, and c is locally constant. c is related to mass. The origin of the universe is not the mass, it is the energy. at t=0 everything in the universe was energy, and by existing the Higgs field it is created the mass and the speed of light c and the space and time what we know now, all of that are created at the time equals to blank time. Blank time is the time separation between the mass and energy. If I could leave my mass, and I transferred to energy, I'll find all my life history in the infinity state with me at the same present without future or past. The God particles forbidden me to reach that, they created my mass, time, space, and then past and future. Please read my paper http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1272 that interpreting what is the time and space according to our mass, and how I receive my information elements which are exited in the infinity state, and what is the meaning of the wavefucntion and the collapse of the wavefunction, all of these definitions are creater by mass.

Israel, thanks I will read your essay later.

Phil

Nice essay, I think. I hung on all the way until 'diffeomorphism invariance' emerged through 'geometrogenesis', so I fell at the last! a shame as I was trying to glimpse what you felt the solution looked like.

If it means the change between equivalent spaces has a structure based on matter centred frames and apparent causality evolves between them, then I entirely agree. If it means something entirely different then I may of course entirely not do so!

I agree space-time will have a different form to our current interpretation of Minkowski's conception, but this competition is not about what we may or may not agree with. Your essay is well written and argued and deserves a good score.

Can you give me an opinion on this; I've found a difference between real and apparent causality. Apparent is what is found on TV, where the image of what happened arrives later than the fact and any consequence experienced in real time. We find this in 'gravitational' lensing, where delayed light from a source arrives at the same time as light emitted later, so events may commonly appear to be reversed. Of course in reality causality holds, but apparent time may be different to 'Proper Time', by the standard definition. Is this the 'causality breach' you allow?, or do you suggest a real effect before a cause?

I also hope you may read and comment on my essay which I hope offers a fuller ontological foundation of what space time might really look like. It's dense and serious content given theatrical metaphors to also hopefully amuse.

Best of luck

Peter

Dear Phil and Edwin:

(You may have missed my reply above; hence I am posting it again here. I would appreciate your response. Thanks)

I would appreciate your review and feedback on the following thoughts on how to integrate Free Will or Consciousness into physics.

The clues to this come from some well-known phenomena that are non-causal or free-willed such as spontaneous decay/birth of particles, wave-particle duality, and free-willed physical laws that prevail in the universe without any external cause. I have tried to derive a deterministic model (GNM) of the spontaneous decay in my posted paper -" From Absurd to Elegant Universe" and integrate into a simplified form of general relativity to allow the free willed mass-energy-space-time conversion. Just allowing such provision in the integrated model (GNMUE) resolves many of the current paradoxes/singularities of physics, successfully predicts the observed universe and galactic expansion, as well as provides understandings of the inner workings of quantum mechanics.

Causation vs. Free Will - What is Fundamental?

The following arguments support the conclusion that Free Will or Spontaneity or Consciousness is the fundamental or root cause process of all physical phenomena.

An outcome of an event is determined by the input parameters and the governing law (or equation). The governing laws are the fundamental universal laws of conservation of mass, energy, momentum, space, and time which are existent at Free Will without any external cause. The input is also chosen at the free will of the observer or operator. In some cases, the input is determined by the outcome of a preceding event such as in the Domino Effect. But even in those cases, the originating or primary root input is always determined at the free will of the originator or source. Hence, the universe is not a Clockwork Universe wherein its fate is predetermined. The evolution of the material or manifested universe is subject to the free-willed laws and inputs.

The widely used assumption of bottom-up causation that particles or strings of matter are the most fundamental elements of universal reality is incorrect. The particles are known to be born spontaneously out of or decay spontaneously into the so-called vacuum or nothingness. Hence, the fundamental reality, both top-down and bottom-up, is vacuum (or the Zero point state of the mass-energy-space-time continuum as described in my paper. This state is synonymous with the implicit eternal and omnipresent laws of the universe.

The fundamental physical process that leads to spontaneous (no causation) birth or decay of particles is the free will or spontaneity in the universe. A universal theory that does not entail this free-will dimension allowing spontaneous conversion of mass-energy-space-time continuum will remain incomplete and unable to describe the universal reality. This is vindicated in my paper.

I would greatly appreciate your comment on my paper- " From Absurd to Elegant Universe".

Regards

Avtar Singh

Dear Avtar Singh,

Philip has stated that "As for "free will", I don't think it can be defined in an operational sense, same for consciousness." I tend to agree with him. One can, through subjective experience of consciousness, postulate a number of things, and perhaps reach some conclusion, but operational definitions are another thing. How does one distinguish free-will based action from random action? And how does one prove it, objectively?

I have my own definitions that I believe are appropriate to discussions of this topic and I presented these in my first FQXi essay on 'Ultimate Physics", so I am not opposed to discussion of these topics in terms of physics. But, lacking an operational definition, I suspect that one will persuade only the already persuaded.

I will try to read your essay.

Edwin Eugene Klingman