The Universe - An Effect Without Cause by Philip Gibbs

Roger Penrose conception about the Second Law

of thermodynamics and Big Bang.

http://accelconf.web.cern.ch/accelconf/e06/PAPERS/THESPA01.PDF

Yuri, this is a very good extra reference for my essay. Penrose has been the one who has most clearly highlighted the paradox of low entropy at the big bang. The first two pages give a readable summary of the problem and the last two describe his solution (Conformal Cyclic Cosmologies) which is much more controversial. His solution fits into the collection of attempts to explain cosmology in causal terms which is what I am criticising.

My solution as described in my essay is that there is a very large and rich symmetry in nature that is restored at singularities such as the big bang. It is a complete symmetry, meaning that there is one dimension of symmetry for each field degree of freedom making everything in the bulk redundant. This explains the hologrpahic principle and Penroses low entropy paradox. It is an incomplete theory but it is a natural conclusion from holgraphy which is driven by the need for consistency rather than wild speculation.

Frank, thank you it is a beuatiful idea

Emergence of cause is what my essay is about. I am concentrating on temporal causality rather than ontological causality a.k.a reductionism and emergence does not have to be a temporal process.

Phil,why you criticize any attempts to explain cosmology in causal terms?

Please answer me by one or two sentences.

Very large and rich symmetry in nature that restore at singularities.

I introduced and call metasymmetry. See my essay in the last competition.

S.Weinberg:

One could imagine "... that specifying the symmetry group of nature may be all we

need to say about the physical world, beyond the principles of Quantum Mechanics."

Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics, The 1986 Dirac Memorial Lectures

What is difference between temporal causality and ontological causality?

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. There is especially no reason to think that we need a cause to explain why the universe started at the big bang. The physical extraploation based on consistency tells us only that time and space break down at the big bang. Instead we should just be looking for theories that are consistent. It is a good enough constraint that we dont need to look further.

Of course there is no reason why people should not speculate about cosmological models of all kinds but if they are not required for logical consistency or observation than I am skeptical that they have much likelihood of being correct.

Yuri, It is because causality is an emergent phenomema

How do you know it? From Ellis?

Dr. Gibbs,

"It is because causality is an emergent phenomema. There is no indication that it is built into the fundamental laws of physics..."

I gather that by "...the fundamental laws of physics..." you don't mean beginning equations such as f=ma. With regard to the implication of "There is no indication that it (cause) is built into the fundamental laws of physics...", it is a state of affairs that leaves physics permanently incomplete and permanently lacking understanding of the nature of the universe.

Cause is not dispensible from a body of empirical knowledge that consists only of effects, not even by sophisticated mathematical theoretical manipulations and theoretical speculations. If it isn't included from the beginning it cannot emerge from theory.

There is no basis in the body of empirical evidence for declaring anything about cause other than that effects require it. The major missing part of your program is the origin of order. You accept order for free: Orderly stuff happens because order exists? Presumably meaning that order emerges from orderly stuff.

James

Definition: causality

The relation between causes and effects.

Definition: phenomenon

Any state or process known through the senses rather than by intuition or reasoning.

Phil

You're confusing process itself with relations within process or between processes.

Acausal view of time mean that time is eternal.

I am agree with you, because the Universe is cyclic and eternal.

Finally we can finding common point.It is very good.

Now i would like to concern James Putnam reminding about Newton Second law

My favourite book in physics ХИДЕКИ ЮКАВА ЛЕКЦИИ ПО ФИЗИКЕ

"Lectures on Physics"of Hideki Yukawa, translated to Russian from Japanese.It is a brilliant book is a clever and witty.I can't find out translation in English and therefore I will try to used Google translation.

Yukawa cites the opinion of the Ernst Mach on Newton's Second law:

"In the XIX century. German and Austrian physicists, especially Mach and Boltzmann, very fond of philosophy.

Max engaged in reconstruction of Newtonian mechanics is not in the sense of creating another new theory, but in the sense of a different interpretation of the old. In particular, he said that he introduced the concept of irrational forces: the force, according to Mach, is not an independent physical quantity, it is simply the product of mass and acceleration. In other words, he believed that Newton's equation of motion F = ma - no more than the definition of the left side through the right side.

The acceleration can be accurately measured by observing the motion of bodies. But the question of what weight, you can not give a specific answer, saying that the mass by its nature is inherent in matter. A force, thought Max, are obtained by multiplying the acceleration by the mass.

Max wanted to get rid of the concept of mass. He was not satisfied that the observation of the collision of two bodies can determine only the ratio of their masses."

Phil

Get rid notion "emergent" and "causal", when you are thinking about time.But time is tricky and i wrote above my complementary opinion.

Now about space.I think contrary to dogma about 4-dimensional space-time we need

in some situation see 3:1 relation.

Once(Fri 8/1/2008) 1:21 PM) I am asking:

Dear Dr Weinberg

If space is discrete and time is continue,4-dimensional space-time

lost its sense or not?

Sincerely

Yuri Danoyan

Yes(weinberg@physics.utexas.edu

Dr. Gibbs,

I am not certain who the 'you' is that your message was directed to, but taking a part of it and expressing my view:

"We observe that past causes have future effects but this is not built into the laws of nature. ..."

It is built into the laws of nature or it would not exist. It is not built into the laws of physics because experimentation cannot be performed upon cause. There are no effects that are cause. The laws of physics are not the laws of nature. They do not account for cause. They do not account for existence. They do not account for any level of explanation or prediction of intelligence.

"It is a statistical phenomenon governed by the second law of thermodynamics..."

Which itself (the second law of thermodynamics) is not for free or underserving of explanation for its existence. Givens represent our lack of understanding and not beginnings that, when properly understood, are not beginnings. They are beginnings without explanation or understanding. They are universal gifts to which the theorist cannot claim sovereignty over.

"...which is an emergent law valid for macroscopic processes. It works only because of the influence of the past big bang singularity which was constrained to have a low entropy due to fundamental symmetries in the laws of physics. The entropy of the universe then increases with the flow of time away from the big bang."

The entropy argument is theoretically useful but lacks connection to its original thermodynamic derivation. Clausius' discovery is not explained. It was skipped over and made into something different, something else. The Clausius' entropy is not statistical. Its solution is exact. Further information can tell us that the solution should be treated statistically for the real world.

However, it is unknown what it is that Clausius discovered, and, making it a statistical problem does not answer: What is the thermodynamic entropy that Clausius discovered? The definition of entropy relied upon so heavily today does not have a connection to that discovery. The new definition is a different type of derivation of a different physical problem. The nature of Clausius' entropy remains unexplained.

The evolution of intelligent life is part of the laws of nature, but, not part of the laws of physics.

From another message above:

"You cannot do foundational physics without following some kind of philosophical ideas about how to proceed."

You cannot do 'theoretical' physics without following some kind of philosophical ideas about how to proceed. Theoretical physics includes the addition, to the equations of physics, of theorists' guesses about the nature of cause, space, and time among other guesses beginning with the nature of mass. It is the theorists' philosphies that those altered physics equations tell back to us.

James

Temporal causality is causality related to time. If you set your alarm clock and it goes off in the morning that is temporal causality. It went off (effect) because you set it (cause) The cause precedes effect.

Ontological causality is when something is seen as a reason for something else but there is no time element. For example. The proton is heavy because it is composite. Ontologival causality is just reductionism. Everything should be explained in terms of more primitive or fundamental laws (but I dont think this holds either)

James, I was using the generic "you" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_you

We will have to agree to disagree about causality. I think more people would agree with you than me but that is because I am ahead of my time :)

Clausius' idea of entropy applied to steam engines and his energy was limited to heat and work. Now we know much more about what these things are and can define them in much more general contexts but our idea of the entropy and energy in a steam engine still give the same result. The entropy of a black hole is given by the area of its event horizon. This is crucial to my train of reasoning. Obviously Clausius would not have been able to say much about that.

Dr. Gibb's,

"Clausius' idea of entropy applied to steam engines and his energy was limited to heat and work. Now we know much more about what these things are and can define them in much more general contexts but our idea of the entropy and energy in a steam engine still give the same result. The entropy of a black hole is given by the area of its event horizon. This is crucial to my train of reasoning. Obviously Clausius would not have been able to say much about that."

"... Now we know much more about what these things are and can define them in much more general contexts but our idea of the entropy and energy in a steam engine still give the same result. ..."

But we do not know what the result of Clausius' derivation means. We do not have an understanding of what was calculated. Clausius discovered something defined ideally but rigorously. I suggest again that we Clausius' discovery cannot be explained. If the result you are speaking about goes to probability entropy or statistical entropy or information entropy, then they do not give the result that applies to the original derivation of thermodynamic entropy.

"... The entropy of a black hole is given by the area of its event horizon. This is crucial to my train of reasoning. Obviously Clausius would not have been able to say much about that. ..."

This entropy is not the same thing that Clausius discovered. The thermodynamic foundation of which you spoke, with regard to entropy, has not yet been laid.

"... We will have to agree to disagree about causality. I think more people would agree with you than me but that is because I am ahead of my time :)"

Thank you for remaining patient. I think that you should be able to make your case without my interference. However, when you use words such as 'sad' or 'need for reprogramming' it begs for rebuttal. It is not sad for one to have a different view about the meaning of the same empirical evidence. Acceptance of a different theoretical viewpoint is sufficent to support a different view.

Reprogramming is not called for so long as answers are missing. When and if we learn the nature of the universe, then perhaps authoratative dispatching might have a place. The search for knowledge moves in different directions for good reason.

Your paragraph from an earlier message:

"Our brains are also like computers (classical computers this time) but nobody sat down and wrote the prgrams and typed in the intial data before pressing the return key. Our brains evolved to run the way they do in response to our environment and this is possible because of the second law of dynamics which is an emergent law."

No programs, no initial data, yet we could learn? What first step is there that makes learning possible?

From another of your messages:

"James. I would not call F=ma fundamental because it is a classical Newtonian equation which has been replaced by more fundamental laws from relativity and quantum mechanics. ..."

Except that f=ma, before the theorist decides to guess about the nature of either force or mass, is theory free. It teaches us about the meaning of empirical evidence. The latter 'fundamental laws' are not devoid of empirical meaning but are repleat with theoretical ideas representing the imaginings of the theorists.

"However, even in classical Newtonian mechanics temporal causality is not a necessary assumption. You can state a problme by giving initial positions and velocities which you would call causes and work out later positions and velocities which you would call effects. ..."

The problem as you have stated it does not justify my calling 'initial positions and velocities' cause. They are not cause. Cause is unknown to all.

"But you can also start from final positions and velocities and work backwards as we do when working out where the planets were in prehistory. The only requirement here is consistency. ..."

Consistency comes from order.

"Causality only appears when thermodynmaics is taken into account and then there is an asymmetry between future and past, but the laws of thermodynamics are emergent and are not written into the fundamental laws."

Causality appears at the very first instance of an observed effect.

My words quoted by you: "Cause is not dispensible from a body of empirical knowledge..."

"You have just stated this and not given a reason for it so it appears to be your assumption that it is true. It is the point of my essay to say that the assumption is unnecessary. ..."

Cause is not dispensible from a body of 'empirical' knowledge because empirical knowledge consists of effects. Effects are naturally theory free although the theorist can intervene and add on their preferred interpretation. Cause, or I suppose time and other properties, can always be made to appear to be dispensible by adding on theory and manipulating those equations derived to represent that theory. If cause disappears, meaning really does disappear as opposed to replacing it with other names, from equations it is because the theory to which those equations have become subjugated didn't contain it.

"You say that the origin of order is missing from my explanation. Order is low entropy..."

Order is what makes usefullness possible. Order is what precedes results. Order is what dictates all effects that have ever occurred or will ever occur in the universe. Order is what contained all of that potential right from the beginning. Order does not emerge. There is nothing from which it can emerge other than a more complete order.

You have remained very patient. I think I have said enough. I would not think of rating you low because of disagreement. Your willingness to discuss these matters with me rates very high. Thank you for sharing your views here.

James