The Universe - An Effect Without Cause by Philip Gibbs

I like Price's ideas about the arrow of time but I am not convinced that backward causation can resolve the measurement problem. Interesting idea though.

I look forward to seeing your essay Laswrence.

Vladimir, it is nice to see that you have entered the contest again, good luck.

Thanks Phil,

I'm not sure how you get up the rope that wasn't there to begin with, but I think I get your gist. I also agree that "Consistency with experiment is not proved rigorously of course but checks can be improved", which is pretty much what I meant by the net. This year six inches, next decade five inches, etc.

Operational tests of consciousness or free will seem very unlikely to me, since such tests are better suited to purely objective reality whereas these are almost purely subjective. So I suspect consciousness will be one of those things that gets talked about but will never be hardcore physics. But I doubt anyone is assigning low marks based on comments accompanying an essay.

Yes, nicely put. An interesting point of view which isn't well known about I imagine.

Phil,

From your essay, "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."

Space-time has become a distorted abstraction precisely because it did not have a proper mathematical structure. We have possessed the necessary knowledge, mathematical for 2,000 years, and physical law for 200 years, to establish the mathematical structure for space (distance) and time (event duration).

Some sixty years ago, the final piece of knowledge came into our possession that allowed the integration of space-time into a well established mathematical structure. The mathematical process, which I refer to as the "Methodology", was published in the July/August 2011 IEEE Potentials, titled, "A methodology to define physical constants using mathematical constants".

IEEE Methodology

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

Post-print Methodology

The concept in the Methodology is not taught in text books.

Phil

You didn't comment my Complementarity approach and ignoring Dirac's prognosis about sacrifice.

Price idea is boring.

For me interesting, than Ellis

C. D. Froggatt, H. B. Nielsen "Influence from the Future" hep-ph/9607375,

because the past,present,future connected hard from Parmenides point of view.

Dr. Gibbs,

Thank you for your response. My question had to do with clarifying the meaning of 'an effect without cause'. Perhaps physicists accept some effects as not having a cause or perhaps I do not understand the physics use of the word emergence. I wanted to avoid interjecting my own view. I fail to see justification for classifying an effect as acausal. I think I see a trend in the foundational science of physics where artificial end points are adopted into theory. An example would be 'self-organization' and another appears to me to be 'emergence'. My meaning of artificial-end-point is the practice of accepting an effect free of fundamental physical justification. The effect appears to me to be accepted as its own cause. Since my opinion is not really relevant to your essay, I say this only to clarify why I asked the question. I wondered if you accept either some effects or perhaps even all effects as their own cause. Is an acausal universe one that justifies itself?

James

Hello Mr Gibbs,

I am insisting on the fact that the Universe possesses a central sphere !! so it exists a center.In fact all possesses a center. The Universe is causal indeed and is a kind of evolutive computing.But the qbits are more than our simple human perceptions. The singularities and their codes are causal and permit the geometrical building. The spheres permit to create all forms. The convergences with strings can be relevant if and only if the convergences respect our universal foundamentals. That said the oscillations seem relevant when we correlate with the rotations spinal and orbital.You can see also that the tori of stability are correlated with the volumes of the serie of uniqueness.

Regards

Well it's all interesting. Dirac I think was talking about what we now call determinism. Hope of restoring that are slim as I explained in the essay, but it is no longer considered a rebuke to causality. That was restored by redefinition. The only sacrafice was a little integrity :)

I hope to read other peoples essays in time and comment in their own areas if I have anything to say.

I have russian translation Dirac's book,p88

Just before above mentioned quote he wrote:

"It seems very likely that sometime in the future there will be an improved quantum mechanics, which will include a return to the causation and which justify the view of Einstein. But such a return to the causality may be possible only at the cost of failure of some other fundamental ideas, which we now accept unconditionally ."

Hi Philip, Very interesting essay, it is as if you are emerging from a deep thought, you and I fully agree, the end of infinie reductionism and the beginning of free emergent thinking, I hope you will have some time to read "The Consciousness Connection", which is my essay. Of course I do not have the proffessional scientific approach that you have, but it is just an interpretation that you may like. Good luck with your essay. Wilhelmus

Dear Philip Gibbs,

In a cyclic-universe the sequence of cause and effect is cyclic, in that, cyclic groups and subgroups are perceptible.

With best wishes,

Jayaker

Dear Doctor Gibbs,

Although I am a layman and did not fully understand many of the esoteric abstruse points of your brilliantly written essay, I would like to humbly offer an uneducated guess about causality. As best as I can tell, opposite physical and human mental states do seem to be attracted to each other. Similar physical and humanly devised imaginary states undoubtedly abide. Yet human theories and all physical conditions that seem to be on the point of becoming identical, after first attempting to swap constituencies collapse into forming a new state that has never existed before. As I have thoughtfully pointed out in my essay Sequence Consequence, although there are clearly attracted physical states of space and matter, it is the similarity in the nature of stars and space that allows them to persist. Yet like snowflakes, no two stars of the trillions that have been observed in the firmament are identical, and no two of the intervening spaces between all of the stars can be identical. Although I doubt that they actually happen, before two stars collide in a supernova, they would have to be on the point of becoming identical. I think they would have to swap energies a moment before the actual collision that would allow a new star with differing potential to emerge. I do hope you are not a Rangers' fan.

I apologize for wrong quoting Dayson.It is belong to Lawrence Bragg.

Freeman Dyson writes on pages 221-222 of his 2008 book The Scientist as Rebel that the Heisenberg-Bohr based "entanglement" of the wavefunctions stems from the dualistic interpretation which

"Says that the classical world is a world of facts while the quantum world is a world of probabilities. Quantum mechanics predicts what is likely to happen while classical mechanics records what did happen. This division of the world was invented by Niels Bohr, the great contemporary of Einstein who presided over the birth of quantum mechanics. Lawrence Bragg, another great contemporary, expressed Bohr's idea more simply: 'Everything in the future is a wave, everything in the past is a particle'. "

Dr. Gibbs, interesting proposal. But from a purely logical and phenomenological honestly can not see it.

First, if the universe is acausal, not cause it generates, then, I would like, if I might respond: mathematical laws governing the universe are sequential algorithms with inputs and outputs are observable properties, etc.

Any algorithm, even if it is of quantum type (qbits), you need a first cause, which are the inputs that allow the calculation later. The latter requires computation times. Infinite qbits require infinite memory to calculations at time zero. Where to stay, and that machine turin, which is causal, this computation is developed hypothetical and impossible?

On the other hand, I find a contradiction, that one, not cause there is a universe with space and time and causality.

The key is in the computability: any computable algorithm, ie, that with inflows generate a throughput, calculations. And this process itself is the causality of any possible universe, as if no algorithm can not be calculated, and therefore neither observable nor any possible universe.

With all due respect, is how I see it

It seems the cause every new cycle of the Universe are fragments of Big Crunch from previous cycle.

Yuri,

There is no escape from acknowledging two things. No one knows what cause is. The existence of cause for all effects is an inexplicable given. If the concept of acausal merely is recognition that our knowledge is limited to effects and that analysis and prediction depend only upon that knowledge of effects, then I accept acausal as meaning that cause is not naturally included in the equations of physics.

I was interested in Dr. Gibb's meaning of the word acausal. My own view is not necessary in order for him to explain why emergence is acausal.

James