Hi Robert:

I thoroughly enjoyed your interesting and deeply philosophical essay. The main conclusion of your essay states that mathematical descriptions provided by QM do not represent physical reality but rather "Made-up" or "Slapped-on" fiction. These include many well-known quantum paradoxes - uncertainty principle, measurement paradox, multi-verses, multi-dimensions, entanglement, superposition, and so on.

Then you state the reason for this this that the equations contain very little information; most of the information is contained in the initial conditions. Further, the equations of QM were designed to model the behavior of memoryless particles.

Not only the above conclusions are vindicated in my paper - -" From Absurd to Elegant Universe", it is shown that the QM is incomplete, inconsistent and paralyzed by several paradoxes due to the missing fundamental physics. Hence, the QM paradoxes are not only artifacts of equations containing little information, but they suffer from missing physics that describes the memory or history of particle dynamics from their birth to propagation and then measurement by an observer. My paper proposes a new equation for this missing physics that explains the inner workings of QM and demystifies the quantum observations resolving many of its paradoxes and inconsistencies with relativity theory. As you point out, this has never been done, and hence, the QM mysteries and misinterpretations continue to prevail.

My paper provides a new fundamental understanding of the QM particle, classical, and the observed universe behavior. The current paradoxes and inconsistencies are shown to be artifacts of the missing (hidden) physics of the well-known phenomenon of spontaneous decay. A new Gravity Nullification Model for Universe Expansion (GNMUE) is proposed that integrates the missing physics of the spontaneous mass-energy conversion into a simplified form of general relativity. The model predicts the observed expansion of the universe and galaxies and other data. The model provides answers to key fundamental questions and resolves paradoxes among general relativity, quantum mechanics, and cosmology. It also bridges the gap between quantum mechanics and relativity theories via revealing relativistic understanding of the inner workings of quantum mechanics. The impact of the new understanding on widely-accepted fundamental assumptions is discussed and a new wholesome perspective on reality is provided.

I would greatly appreciate your comments on my paper.

Best Regards

Avtar Singh

    It is an attribute of the particles themselves. For example, the "handedness" of a glove, can only be one of two possible "states", "right-handed" or left-handed", which can be represented by a single bit of information, in the "states" "1" or "0".

    This lack of information is the reason why observations become "quantized" in the first place.

    Avter,

    You stated:

    "The main conclusion of your essay states that mathematical descriptions provided by QM do not represent physical reality but rather "Made-up" or "Slapped-on" fiction"

    Not quite. The mathematical descriptions do a good job of describing the observations. My point is that they do little else. Thus, they provide few hints as to whether or not the "meaning" that has been slapped onto these descriptions, is even remotely correct.

    For example, I noted in an earlier post, that the uncertainty principle amounts to little more than a peculiar way of stating that "The number of bits of information that can be extracted from an observation, must be greater than or equal to one."

    Stated in that fashion, it seems rather odd to suppose that this self-evident statement would ever allow one to deduce things such as "The uncertainty principle enables quantum fluctuations of the vacuum, etc."

    Typo Alert.

    In the last sentence of my previous post, in this thread, "yet it makes like difference" should read

    "yet it makes little difference"

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    • Post #45

    Robert,

    I agree the wave effect is a consequence of the slits, as the quanta are a function of the energy absorption properties of the atomic structure of the "particle" detector. These are effects of the interaction of light with the material structures we use to judge it, much as the color of a shirt is an effect of how the material interacts with the light. I suspect light might best be thought of as an expanding field of energy and it is only interaction with mass that condenses out as particular qualities, the information of which are more a function of the mass, while the light is more of an energetic medium, so we seem to be speaking the same language there.

    My point is that we are using the built up principles of historical experience, "the mind of the observer," to deduce information from present actions, when the original process of acquiring those principles was inductive. We are bringing the past to bear on the present, but our interpretation tends to be linear and quantifiable, while the present reality is fuzzy and not linear. It is foundationally energy, with information as the fractured surface.

    We tend to think in terms of cause and effect as a series of events, but that is an illusion. Did yesterday cause today? No. The rotation of the earth, relative to the sun, creates a series of events we refer to as days. Does my punching these keys cause letters to appear on the screen in front of me? Yes, because there is a causal transfer of energy, even if very tiny amounts, through the various circuits of this machine, from keyboard, to screen. The distinction is that cause and effect is a consequence of the flow of energy, not a sequence of events. Information, of which our collection of principles are an example, are truisms, which emerge from energy flows.

    My point here is that I'm not an expert in information theory, so I'm trying to translate your views into my understandings. As I see it, what is present is energy, so it is information which is "the passage of time," as it is created and dissolved.

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    • Post #46

    John,

    My point about the interference pattern of the double slits is this.

    You can represent the geometry of the double slits by a one-dimentional, mathematical function, with a value of zero, wherever the slits are opaque, and a value of one, where they are transparent. If you then compute the magnitude of the Fourier Transform of that function, you obtain another function, that looks just like an interference pattern.

    This is purely a mathematical relationship. It has nothing to do with particles or waves striking the slits. It has nothing to do with physics. It is pure math.

    The geometry of the "boundary conditions", that is, the geometry of the slits, contains almost all the information content of the observed "interference pattern", the waves or particles striking the slits merely act like waves or particles striking a bell; they induce a "response" from the bell, that in turn is detected as a sound wave. But this sound wave contains little information above either the waves/particles striking the bell, or the air that the sound wave propagates through. The vast majority of the information observed within the sound wave, is about the "normal modes of vibration" of the bell, the structure of the bell. Similarly, the "interference pattern" is mostly about the structure of the slits. By misattributing it to the waves/particles striking the slits, physicists have misinterpreted what is happening.

    Your concern with energy is instructive. What exactly is energy?

    I first became really interested in that question, forty years ago, when I was a graduate student in Physics. I had a teaching fellowship, which required me to teach an introductory physics lab class, designed for life-sciences majors, not physics majors. It was a required class, so the students had to take it, even though few had any real interest. One day, a student, who was a bit of a "slacker", came into my office, during "office hours" for the class. He wanted to know what energy was.

    The more I tried to answer his question, the more I realized that I did not really know. Sure, I could do all the math, but what, exactly, did it really mean? Why is the fact that it is conserved (constant) significant? It finally dawned on me, many years later, that being constant, is its significance. It is its only significance. It is nothing more than a set of variables, whose combination was deliberately constructed, such that it would be a constant. There is not a physicist in the world who would care about it if it were not constant. Great "significance" has been slapped upon constants, in physics, simply because their future value is so easy to predict. But a single, constant value, contains very little information. Hence, in Physics, "significance" is directly tied to low information content phenomenon. It is a manifestation of the old line about "Knowing more and more, about less and less, until you know everything about nothing."

    For an "observer", it is not so much the flow of "energy" that matters, but the flow of "symbols". Consider the old story about a butterfly flapping its wings, on the other side of the world, and thereby causing some highly unpredictable event to occur, thousands of miles away. Which do you suppose to be a more probable "cause" for such an occurrence?

    1) The physical interaction of the air molecules, disturbed by the flapping wings, are transmitted (flow of energy) across the world.

    2) A young girl makes a video of the butterfly, uploads it to You-Tube (flow of symbols), it goes viral, and thereby causes millions of people to stop whatever they are doing, and watch the video.

    Any entity, from a hydrogen atom on up, that can change its internal structure, and thus form a "memory", can use that memory to respond to other entities "symbolically", rather than "physically". And the more memory they have, the more complicated (high information content) these responses (behaviors) may become. Physicists behave this way. The entities they prefer to study do not. Consequently, the theories they devise to explain the behaviors of the latter, are woefully inadequate at explaining the behaviors of the former. By assuming the contrary, they have misinterpreted reality.

    The last Anonymous post was from me.

    Once again, the system logged me out, before it was posted.

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    • Post #48

    Robert,

    I agree fully with what you say, but that makes the energy the medium, while the information is the message. Yes, the information is far more interesting, but without the energy, information doesn't exist. There is no platonic realm of information. It arises as descriptions of states and actions of energy.

    In life science/biology, the body contains to primary systems; The function of the central nervous system, of the brain and sensory organs, is to process information, while the function of the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems is to process energy. As they say, some people eat to live and some live to eat.

    Energy is constant, thus it is what is always present, while information is constantly changing. There is no blocktime of all events existing in some fourth dimension. It is the fact that the event of the butterfly flapping its wings which transmitted the energy onto other situations which makes it part of the dynamic, but the event of the particular flapping ceased to exist when the energy was transmitted. That particular event recedes ever further into the past, as the energy continues on its progression to the weather event it affected.

    My point about inductive versus deductive is that inductive is experience, the cat sitting on the hot stove, while deductive is our interpretation of that experience, the cat never sitting on the stove again, hot or cold. The first is energies coalescing into an event. The future becoming past. The second is our linear, cause and effect interpretation of that event. Prior events leading to subsequent ones. Past to future. Events are inductive. Physicists are deductive.

    I know this isn't necessarily the focus of your argument, but I'm just trying to place it in a network of context, in order to create a larger argument of where physics has gone off course. I think the possibility exists to put together an alternative description of reality, combining lots of views, to present a cohesive view, rather than lot of different views, which can be individually ignored.

    Late for work....

    John,

    Of course, abstract symbols must exploit some aspect of physical reality, like energy, to ever become symbolized. But consider how different digestive tracts respond to the same toxin. Why is the toxin poisonous to some, but not others? The energy, the symbolization, is the same for all. It is the same substance. It is not simply the case that all entities respond merely to their energy inputs. Differing a priori information content, embodied within them, enable them to respond very differently, to identical inputs. This may be true for symbolic inputs, like equations, as well as physical ones.

    I would describe reasoning processes somewhat differently than you have. As examples:

    Deduction:

    All swans are white. Ben is a swan. Therefore, Ben must be white. This is a Certainty. Because any other conclusion results in a contradiction.

    Induction:

    Ben is a swan and is white. Bill is a swan and is white. Tom is a swan and is white... Therefore, all swans are white. This is not a Certainty. It is merely Probable.

    Abduction:

    All swans are white. Ben is white. Therefore, Ben is a swan. This is neither Certain, nor even Probable. It is merely Possible.

    The problem in Physics, in Science, and Logic, in general is as follows:

    Assumptions, the subject matter of all these essays, cannot be deduced, so they cannot be certain. They can only be supported by the weaker forms of logic, Induction and Abduction.

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    • Post #50

    Robert,

    The problem with deduction is that is is an assumption, based on experience, that all swans are white.

    With induction, only white swans are encountered, so the assumption arises that all swans must be white. It is only when we forget deduction arises from experience, that we start to think there must be some fundamental law which requires swans to be white.

    I agree all we have to work with is assumptions. The question is which assumptions best explain the evidence, ie, Ockham's razor. That is a bit of a trial and error process. Even our gut, using immune responses evolved over generations of interaction with the environment, makes assumptions as to what is safe and what is not. So while some may react to a toxin, others may not.

    John,

    Assuming no gross errors in logic have been made, then:

    For deduction: If the premises are certainly true, then the conclusion is certainly true.

    For Induction: If the premises are certainly true, then the conclusion is probably true.

    For Abduction: If the premises are certainly true, then the conclusion is possibly true.

    It is not quite correct to say that deduction is based on an assumption. The issue of whether or not the initial premises, assumptions etc. are true, is quite independent of the fact that the reliability of the conclusions, generated by the three methods, are not equal.

    Consequently, in any well reasoned argument, based on deduction, if the conclusion is wrong, it must be because an initial premise was wrong. The same cannot be said of Induction and Abduction.

    In other words: Initial premises and assumptions are generated, via reasoning based on induction and abduction only, deduction plays no role. Then and only then, deduction may be applied to these premises to generate some conclusions.

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    • Post #52

    Robert,

    "Consequently, in any well reasoned argument, based on deduction, if the conclusion is wrong, it must be because an initial premise was wrong."

    Garbage in, garbage out.

    The question is as to what assumptions and premises are open to question. What is today's version of the geocentric premise?

    I've argued it's that treating time as a measure emphasizes the effect of sequence, rather than the cause of action, but there are lots of other aspects of physics, which upon closer examination, seem to crumble to dust, or sprout wings and fly off in the most unexpected directions, as expressed in these many essays. I would say, though, that the future is not where the information points, but where the energy flows. Too often, I find, information points to itself, when visionaries give way to craftsmen, who are more concerned with the craft, than the bigger picture. Philosophy, religion, politics, economics, etc. Why would physics be any different? The "It from bit" syndrome has to go, as you so well argue.

    Yet gloves have other characteristics than handedness: number of fingers, material composition, stitching, etc. Can we ever be sure we have accounted for all properties? How can we distinguish between the reduced information of the quantum realm, compared to the classical realm, and the sort of limited information that belongs to conceptual systems that are simply defined in that way. In other words, how to distinguish the real attributes of gloves from those, like handedness, we have defined or specified?

    Hi Robert:

    Thanks for your reply.

    Please also respond to my second comment as to how I address the problem of "memory-less" particles in my posted paper -- -" From Absurd to Elegant Universe".

    I would greatly appreciate your comments and rating on my paper.

    Thanks

    Avtar

    Dan,

    You asked: "In other words, how to distinguish the real attributes of gloves from those, like handedness, we have defined or specified? "

    First, Handedness is a real attribute of a glove. But more importantly, real attributes will always be determined to have the same "value" no matter how you look at it. If you look at a glove from any angle, it will always appear to have the same handedness, either left or right. An object like a coin is different. If you view a coin from different angles, it may change "state" from Heads to Tails.

    The "state" of a coin is not an attribute of the coin. It is an attribute of the relationship between the coin and the observer.

    You also asked: "Can we ever be sure we have accounted for all properties?" No. We cannot. We don't know what we don't know. On the other hand, we do know what we do know. That fact can be exploited in many very interesting and sophisticated ways. At the very least, it should be exploited, as in the case of "spin", to recognize that the observed phenomenon, "spin states", behave more like the "state" of a coin, than the state of an actual attribute of the particle.

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    • Post #56

    Robert,

    You stated: "In a very real sense, Newton's law of gravity is perfectly analogous to the JPEG image compression algorithm. It is a "lossy" description of the original data, no more no less; the reconstructed, predicted "image" is slightly different from the original. In contrast, Einstein's theory of gravity appears to be a "lossless" compression algorithm."

    I think that this sentence might be counter to everything else you are stating in your essay. By definition, the process of anti-differentiation (which Newton used to map gravitational force into his law of gravity) is a reduction of possible information into one interpretation of the data and which likely has passed into GR (i.e. still lossy). My essay has some questions but a sketch I just posted may be a simpler visual explanation.

    Regards,

    Jeff

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    • Post #57

    Hi Robert,

    Being an old copywriter, I cannot help to try to catch yor wonderful essay in a one-liner: "Confusing Mathematics for Physics is to Complicate the Simple and Simplify the Complex."

    We are several authors in this contest who - from different points of wievs - question the role of mathematics in physics. Mathematics has for long been its lingua franca and the "shut up and calcilate" promotors are not just a few. The funny thing is that during the same period of time, since the mid seventies, when calculation capacity has been exponentially increasing, physical theory-building has been comparatively meagre. More is less, it seems.

    Best regards,

    Inger

    Robert

    "The speed of light is not directly observable; it is not an observable phenomenon at all. There is always a "privileged" observer."

    "...When a light wave is first created, it is created in the reference frame of this privileged observer. It is created at the frequency observed by that observer, not the Doppler shifted frequency of an observer in a different frame of reference. And the privileged observer is always at rest with respect to itself."

    "...Hence, when all other observers transform their actual observables to the privileged observer's frame, they too must infer the same constant speed of light."

    These phrases and meanings are precisely common to our essays. But I'm awestruck by your logical analysis of mathematical limits. I abandoned the study of maths from intuition about it's shortcomings modelling reality, for which you now give the precise reasons, beautifully argued and written. I now far better understand WHY the Fourier transform fails, though I even wrote of FM receiver mechanisms some time ago.

    My route to this end was logic and ontology, also observational from optics and as an astronomer. I dare to suggest I've also pushed a little further than you, in maverick style, to find curved space-time and even pre big bang conditions. Though I hazard that you too report far from all your findings.

    I hope you'll find time to read my essay. Quite different to yours as it simply analyses the mechanistic evolution of real systems without abstraction, avoiding the limitations you so brilliantly identify. I'd like to cite you, but saw no references. Do you have anything on this published?

    There are a couple of areas we diverge, and I'd like to scrutinise those, along with a couple of new kinetic considerations I consider, such as the relationship of f and wavelength for different observer frames, and the severe limitation I derive for spatial limits of the emitters frame.

    Very Best wishes

    Peter

      Sorry, I didn't mean to say that handedness is not a real property, only that it is not the ONLY property of gloves. The question remains for me: why do quantum entities possess/reveal so little information?

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      • Post #60

      Dan,

      I totally agree with you....