Misinterpreting Reality: Confusing Mathematics for Physics by Robert H McEachern

Dear Robert,

if the slit geometry is/was the routing system that is/was responsible for the routing distributions (frequencies of the particles' impact), the inconsistency remains.

Because you write "Consequently, the slit geometry 'is' the routing system, whenever you change it, you change the routing". Obviously, following from your statements, in delayed-choice experiments the slit geometry must have changed *after* a particle succesfully went through the aperture with both slits open. Because the arrival distributions have suddenly changed for those cases - despite the fact that both slits were open.

But you assumed "The routing distributions are given by the Fourier Transform of the slit geometry". Even if i consider the system to be an analog computer in the classical fashion, this computer would be limited to only propagate its information with maximally the speed of light from the measurement plane ("europe") back to the slit geometry at the "east coast of the U.S.A." (double-slit geometry). If this would be the case, it would contradict the experimental observations obtained by delayed-choice experiments which exclude a backwards propagation of information with maximally the speed of light. The contradiction is, logically your routing system cannot at the same time be 'X' and be 'NOT X', if you think of it in classical terms like analog computers and such.

Consequently, you neither can think about the system as equipped with wave-like nor equipped with particle-like entities which "travel" between the U.S.A. and europe.

Best wishes,

Stefan

Dear Robert McEachern,

I strongly support your uttered elsewhere argument that the objective reality must not be confused with its mathematical description. See my Fig. 1.

What about your effort to explain the physics to physicists in a simplifying manner by means a crash course of the theory of signal processing, I see this attempt with mixed feelings.

Among the roughly 300 contestants you seem to be the one who outed himself as THE expert in the usual theory of signal processing. I see this theory affected by the same serious flaw that affects physics.

I ask you to look at my Fig. 2 and read the belonging text if necessary twice. Maybe some Figs. in my previous essays may also help you to understand my point. You will certainly know that MP3 works well on the basis of cosine transformation.

When you repeatedly wrote "sufficient but not necessary" then you might have understood the redundancies at least in part. Most experts I met at DAGA and ASA meetings were not completely aware of it.

I am curiously waiting for your comment on my Fig. 2.

Regards,

Eckard

Dear Robert,

i suppose that physicists all over the world which every day are concerned with QM experiments of the kind we discuss here, surely have investigated the simple picture of emitter and reveiver you have drawn.

The reason, - at least for me - that they haven't adapted this picture is also simple: It does not fit into the observed facts, despite the fact that it may or may not explain the classical double-slit experiment.

You wrote:

"An inconsistency does indeed remain. But that too is caused by additional misinterpretations of what is happening. Physicists have been using the wrong analogies, to think about this, for a very long time."

The question then is, what is the "right" analogy?

Please think about the use of your model when it comes for example to the double-double-slit experiment. Your desription then, consistently should be, that if at one double-slit you want to measure the interference pattern, but you don't do this in coincidence with what happens behind the other double-slit, you *don't* gain the interference pattern.

But if you do measure with the same devices at both sides (the same devices that are also used for the classical double-slit experiment), you gain the interference pattern by measuring it like described by me in a post above.

I wrote this post as a new thread, because there are contestants who are also interested in this discussion but sometimes it's hard to check all hidden replies.

Best wishes,

Stefan

Hi Robert,

As promised, I read your (very thoughtful and nicely constructed) essay.

You write, "physicists seek to predict how physical substances behave. But they could never have predicted that cars would stop at red traffic lights, anymore than they could predict that they would drive on one side of the road in England and on the other in the United States."

I would argue, however, that -- on the assumption of symmetry -- physicists could predict negative acceleration that compels stopping as well as going; and they could predict that a two-way channel compels cars to drive on one side of the boundary or the other.

On the other hand, we agree a great deal on information theory and its role in physics. Particularly, " ... physicists have lost sight of the fact that the math is devoid of information and thus has very little to say about anything *interesting*." Most mathematicians would agree, I think -- mathematics isn't "about" anything any more than the alphabet is more than arbitrary symbols plus their rules for combination.

As regards relativity, though, we'll have to remain in absolute disagreement. If there is an observer in a privileged reference frame, the whole edifice of Minkowski space collapses. The lack of such an inertial frame doesn't mean that "all systems are equivalent," as you claim -- it means that one system can be smoothly and continuously transformed into another. Big difference, and the support for this is the assumption of symmetry as referenced above.

Good read, though -- best wishes in the contest!

Tom

How about positive and negative curvature 2D copies of 3D space ?

See my essays:

http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/946

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1413

Dear Robert,

you wrote

"I pointed out that the delayed choice experiment, as described in the references I gave, was not merely badly designed, but badly conceived. The telescopes block the path from a slit just as surely as if the slit had been closed."

Robert, you say the telescopes block the path from a slit just as surely as if the slit had been closed. I say, if one slit would indeed be "closed", why are there two similar patterns behind each slits? Your "closed slit" approach would result in a different pattern, namely the pattern that is left over after one slit has been really *closed*.

I am sure you have a "mechanism" that explains how the two distinct telescopes do mutual exclusively indicate a hit, but never both at the same time.(I anyway don't have such a mechanism besides my interpretation i gave in my essay).

But that't not the point i want you to consider. The point is that for example the double-double-slit experiment (posted above) needs an explanation which fits into your explanatory scheme. Maybe you succeed, maybe not. Anyway it would, for the sake of better evaluating your model, be interesting what you can say about this experiment. That's all i wanted to remark.

Best wishes,

Stefan

Robert,

Don't confuse mathematics with physics. Mathematics has unfortunately become the bad habit to define anything at will. Physics is or at least should be bound to nature.

I think Dirac was not horribly wrong when he meant that there is no negative frequency in reality. Of course mathematicians do not have problems with anything negative. If there were 3 persons in a room before 5 left it then 2 have to come in as to make the room empty.

You might feel more familiar with some theories than me because I do not uncritically accept them. Didn't your attempt to explain negative frequency by means of the definition you mentioned just shift the question? Is there negative elapsed time alias absolute phase? My ears are unable to hear future signals because I am never drunk.

May I invite you to try and refute at least what one out of my five Figs. tries to tell?

Eckard

Robert

Superb essay. I was really lifted reading it. Perhaps there may be hope for us yet! I hope you'll read mine as I take the 'low road' of interpreting the findings themselves not abstracting them into numbers, and find a simple way of explaining CSL logically, consistent with Peter Jacksons brilliant anaysis and mechanism (which I don't think all have grasped). I see you saw some of the potential.

I hope you do well, my score should help, and also hope you'll also read and commnet on mine.

Regards

Rich

Dear Robert,

Very nice essay indeed. I think that the transition to a more "informational" physics is in its way. One can see it all over, specially in theories of quantum gravity but also in more traditional subfields. Even in orthogonal disciplines such as biology. I find very interesting the way you present the idea that initial conditions have more information content than the equations describing a natural phenomenon. The idea is not completely new although your treatment is better compared to what I had found before. A nice philosopher that has advanced similar ideas (with whom I may strongly disagree but he makes a good case) is James McAllister from Leiden. Your view, as so do McAllister's seem to suggest that most of the world information content is actually algorithmic random, hence not "capturable" by mathematical equations.

Computer programs may do better than mathematical equations in this sense, because unlike what your JPEG example suggests, there is no clear cut distinction between program and data in general (follows from Turing's universality). As you know compression algorithms compress the data and also encode the instructions for the decompression in the same file, making it undistinguishable from the original data itself until it self-decompress. But that applied to the real-world is of course already making the assumption that one can fully capture the initial conditions in some compressed form, which in agreement with McAllister it may just not be the case, given that all models we have of natural phenomena are approximatively and there is always some data that escapes to equations and eventually make our theories useless in the long run due to nonlinear dynamics. In this regard, the problem may not be the poor information of the equations, but the poor measure of the initial conditions at our coarsed grained macroscopic reality.

You also rightly point out that traditionally physical laws are seen like compression algorithms, this is an old idea advanced by Greg Chaitin in numerous of his books and papers, in the context of algorithmic information theory (my own research field). And I think is the working hypothesis of science, and no alternative seems better so far. The main divergence I have with your point of view (and McAllister's for that matter) is what is traditionally known as the The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, to quote Eugene Wigner. This translates in the world of lossless compression algorithms in the astonishing fact that we are able to compress many, if not most of natural data, up to some point, including initial conditions, and to predict, at least in the short-term, many natural phenomena. So even if some data is left out, laws seem to describe a good deal of the important (to us) behaviour of natural phenomena, that is the regular behaviour that can be synthesised for our advantage (e.g. for prediction purposes).

All in all a very nice essay, I only quite regret that information enthusiasts never go beyond Shannon's information theory, which is the theory as it was left almost 60 years ago, and which is a theory of communication. The cutting-edge theory of information is currently algorithmic information theory (Kolmogorov complexity, logical depth, algorithmic probability).

Hi Robert,

Here's another attempt at answering your question... "So what is the big deal? What makes this so significant?"

After reading:

- Your essay

- 'The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem' by Pierre Millette

- 'An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise' by John Pierce

- 'Communication in the Presence of Noise' by Claude Shannon

I am left with the impression that Shannon and Piece predicted that the holographic principle would become a naturally accepted concept in physics. They detail how the volume of the signal space "creeps" away from the origin of the space as the dimension of the space increases; how there is dimensional reduction in the message space when compensating for phase "differences" (same message, different phase) that can arise when sampling of the signal. Seems at first glance to be hint at how to get rid of singularities at the centres of black holes.

Perhaps it's not quite the same thing. On the other hand, if it's the same thing, then that's quite significant. In any case, I note that Shannon was not directly referenced in 't Hooft's first paper called 'Dimensional Reduction in Quantum Gravity'.

- Shawn

Hector,

Regarding the "Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics", in an earlier post, under Matt Visser's essay, and repeated somewhere under my own, I wrote:

"In your summary, you ask "Exactly which particular aspect of mathematics is it that is so unreasonably effective?" in describing empirical reality.

I would argue, that is not an aspect of mathematics at all, but rather, an aspect of physics. Specifically, some physical phenomenon are virtually devoid of information. That is, they can be completely described by a small number of symbols, such as mathematical symbols. Physics has merely "cherry picked" these sparse information-content phenomenon, as its subject matter, and left the job of describing high information-content phenomenon, to the other sciences. That is indeed both "trivial and profound", as noted in your abstract."

Regarding the effectiveness of "Shannon's information theory" as compared to "algorithmic information theory", I am very strongly of the opinion that the former is much more effective than the latter, in all the areas, like measurement theory, that have much real relevance to "an observer". The difference lies in the relative importance of "Source Coding" vs. "Channel Coding"; lossless compression algorithms, in spite of any "astonishing fact", are virtually useless in the realm of observing and measuring. One of the biggest problems hindering the advancement of modern physics, is that physicists "don't get it"; contrary to popular belief, observation and measurement are not about preserving source information, they are about distinguishing "relevant information" from "irrelevant information" as quickly and efficiently as possible. A lossless Source Coder, with sunlight as its input, would preserve huge amounts of information about the solar spectrum, that is absolutely irrelevant to any human observer, other than an astrophysicist. That is why the channel coder in the visual pigments in the retina totally ignore this "irrelevant information". The same is true of auditory information; well over 99% of the "Source Information" is discarded before the information stream ever exits the inner ear. While this information has great relevance to a modern telephone modem, it has none at all to a human observer.

Since, as Shannon demonstrated, all channels have a limited information carrying capacity, it is imperative for any multi-stage information processing observer, to remove capacity-consuming "irrelevant information" as quickly as possible. This presents a "chicken and egg" dilemma, that has been debated since at least the time of Socrates, 2500 years ago. How can you find what you are looking for, when you don't even know what you are looking for.

Nevertheless, as I pointed-out in the essay, when you do know, such as when you have created an experiment in which only a single frequency or energy exists, looking for (attempting to observe and model) a Fourier superposition, rather than a single frequency or energy, is a positively dumb thing to do. It is no wonder why there is so much "weirdness" in the interpretations given to such inappropriate models.

You stated that "Your view... seem to suggest most of the world information content is actually algorithmic random, hence not "capturable" by mathematical equations". That is not my view. My view is that much of the "world information content" is very predictable. HOWEVER, the function of any good design for a sensor, instrument, or observer, in other words, a Channel Coder, is to make sure that it's output is devoid of all such redundant predictabilities. Hence, although the world may not be random, any good channel coder will render all observations of that world into algorithmic random output. One does not need to observe the solar spectrum today, precisely because one can predict that it will look the same tomorrow. Evolution via natural selection has ensured that biological observers do KNOW what they are looking for, and actively and very, very effectively avoid ever looking at anything other than what they are looking for. Consequently, equations may very well be able to capture the "Source Information" about observed elementary particles. But they cannot capture the "Source Information" of a human observer, attempting to interpret any information. Such an observer has spent it's entire life recording outputs, and basing all its behaviors, on sensory channel coders that are attempting to produce algorithmic random inputs to the brain. The brain's function is then to look for "higher level" correlations between these multi- sense, multi-time inputs, in order to generate higher level models of exploitable, predictable correlations.

Unfortunately, for the better part of a century, quantum physicists have thought they should be looking for superpositions. But as Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw) once said:

"The trouble with people is not that they don't know, but that they know so much that ain't so."

Rob McEachern

Dear Robert,

You present a very interesting, and, I believe, useful point of view here. I particularly appreciate your remarks about Bell's theorem. I must confess that I am not yet quite sure what I think about all your conclusions, but I certainly agree that equations (at least, the usual differential equations that make up much of the language of modern physics) carry negligible intrinsic information, and that a legitimately information-theoretic view of fundamental physics is needed. Of course, fundamental physics (particularly quantum gravity) is already trending in this direction, but I believe that paradigms predating the information age still exert significant inhibitory influence. Personally, I think that covariance (Lorentz invariance, etc.) has more to do with order theory than with Lie group symmetry, and this viewpoint is more congenial to an information-theoretic perspective. In any case, I enjoyed reading your work! Take care,

Ben Dribus