On the Foundational Assumptions of Modern Physics by Benjamin F. Dribus

Dear Benjamin,

I found your essay to be one of the most all-encompassing in the contest. The paper paints a fairly complete picture of the current state of things and yet it is not lacking in details. It surely merits the high rating it has received.

One comment I can pick out that especially triggered a response is:

"Causality is often formalized at the classical level as an irreflexive, acyclic, transitive binary relation on the set of spacetime events."

I agree. Though the approach I wrote about is classical or semi-classical, and therefore embedded solely in U(1) topology, the rigorous consideration of rotations really requires formulation in SU(2) or higher topologies because of the difference in rotational characteristics of the electric and magnetic fields, path dependencies and the cyclic nature of waves. Then the algebra accommodates reflections and cyclic relations. And there the non-commutative nature of the algebra naturally leads to quantization.

It's hard to picture just what you mean when you make this intriguing statement:

"I will call the relation induced by these transitions the universal relation, and each of its subrelations a kinematic scheme. Under suitable assumptions, a pleasing fractal picture emerges, in which kinematic schemes share most of their abstract properties with the causal relations of their constituent universes, and quantization becomes an iteration of structure, at least locally"

Perhaps that is related to the point made in the essay at note 1. The statement conjured up reflections on an interesting but perplexing book "Fourier Analysis on Finite Groups and Applications" by Audrey Terras. I've not yet fully fathomed its nuances but the author demonstrates how Fourier Analysis and associated sets can be used in a surprisingly general series of applications where the domain can be interpreted as having some type of cyclic basis. She doesn't mention Quantum Mechanics, as I recall, but maybe there is a natural fit there.

Congratulations on a fine essay,

Steve

Dear Ben,

Earlier today I made a short comment (hard for you to to find) related to your conversation with Daniel Burnstein. Forget about it. What I wanted to say was that I'm hopefully beginning to begin to grasp your very interesting ideas. As you already know, I'm neither a physicist nor a mathematician. But re-reading your essay today, and following the above conversation, has been most instructive. It also gave me an idea, which I will come back to later, after more reading and thinking. I very much look forward to follow this conversation further. I have so much to learn!

Best regards,

Inger

Hi Benjamin,

I think I made an interesting discovery. Check out my post of 9/19/12. Let me know what you think!

Regards,

Steve

Hello Ben,

I finally responded to your comments on my forum page. I have also started reading your essay, which looks very interesting so far. I shall try to finish up quickly and have a few proper comments once I am done. I noted Lawrence's comments about the Fermi and Integral experiments above, and I think that addressing that data is going to be a crucial step for showing the viability of your theory.

Causal structures can be problematic, in terms of Lorentz invariance. CDT may have been ruled out by Fermi and Integral and I had thought it was quite promising. Most of what you see for that subject in Wikipedia was written by me, largely unchanged though now in need of an update. I had interesting discussions about this topic with Gerard 't Hooft at FFP10 and with some Loop Quantum Gravity people at FFP11.

I commented on my essay page that - concerning the summing over paths approach - you may want to learn about Hamiltonian Phase Space Path Integrals. The conventional Lagrangian PIs treat particles as things, in effect, or deal with them kinematically. Re-casting the problem in the Hamiltonian form focuses instead on the dynamics and allows for the uncertainty to be factored in up front, but reduces calculations to a simpler functional integral later on.

See the attached paper.

Regards,

JonathanAttachment #1: 0912.0006v2.pdf

Dear Benjamin,

I tried to read your essay but despite my interest in what you had to say by the time I got to new principles, the really interesting part, it was no longer at all comprehensible to me. I recognise it as English but not much more than that. That is not meant in an unkind way but an honest reflection of my personal experience. You seem to be doing very well in the ratings so perhaps it is only a reflection of my own intellectual shortcoming. You also appear to have had a lot of feedback on your essay, so you are obviously doing something right. Kind regards Georgina : )

Dear Pentcho,

You were right the first time. I do assume the causal relations to be fundamental. Minkowski space is not "deduced," but recognized as a large-scale approximation. No assumption is made (or needed) about the speed of light because it is not a fundamental concept. Take care,

Ben

Dear Jonathan,

Thanks for the feedback! You raise some excellent points that give me an excuse to talk about certain technical issues that might otherwise have been considered overkill. I must hurry to go teach my class, but will get back to you later today. Thanks also for the paper. Take care,

Ben

Dear Georgina,

Thanks for the message. The last two sections were a little compressed because of the length requirement, and I could only state short versions of my ideas in a rather formal way without much explanation. That part represents several hundred pages of my own work. You certainly should not feel any personal shortcoming from not understanding the details, because by itself that part raises more questions than it answers. Since the topic of the essay contest was which existing assumptions are wrong, I didn't feel justified in spending more than a few pages at the end introducing new theory. Anyway, thanks for persevering through it! Take care,

Ben

Then don't mislead the reader by saying in the essay that you will "recover" established physics from your new principles:

"Recovery of established physics at appropriate scales from these principles is a challenging problem due to their parsimony, with the standard model likely more dicult to recover than general relativityｮ ｨｮｮｮｩ ﾅmergence of ﾍinkowski spacetime is the first step toward the standard model as well as toward relativityｮｮｮ｢ｼｯpｾｼpｾﾁt least in my understanding this means that you first state your new principles and then physicsｬ ﾍinkowski spacetime in particularｬ somehow emerges from themｮ ﾔhis is tantamount to deductionｮ ﾉf it is notｬ you will have to justify your original ｨeuphemismｩ theoretical approachｮｼｯpｾｼpｾﾐentcho ﾖalev

Hello again Ben,

I have a lot of thoughts to share about causal structure, though I have not finished my first read-through of your essay yet. So I figured I should cross post a comment I left on Robert Spekkens' forum, regarding how we look at kinematics and dynamics. To wit..

The notion that kinematic states and dynamic evolution are separable seems to carry over from the subject-object distinction in English and other European languages.

It is a peculiar left-brain dominated preoccupation, which necessitates measures like Korzybski's "the word is not the thing." In Chinese, by contrast; one cannot describe a thing apart from its process, and even the individual strokes in a character tell the story of how that pictogram evolved.

So this gives you one more thing to reflect on. I'm just returning the favor, since you gave me a lot to think about - in terms of thoughtful questions about my essay content. I have been very busy, this past week or so, but I shall be interested and available to engage on this subject matter as long as there is something worth talking about.

All the Best,

Jonathan

Dear Ben,

You've got my highest note!

I hope you keep the first place and win the contest, 'cause you deserve it!

Good luck.

Gene Alexandrescu

Hello yet again, Ben and everyone;

I'm following my muse, by sharing a few more thoughts before reading further, as they respond to comments you left on my essay forum and Ian's. First, yes; Twistors are way cool, because they address the objection of Grothendieck, that geometric points omit too much essential information. In twistor theory, rays are more fundamental than points, which I believe are a special case. This strongly suggests a causal element, and incorporates the idea of forward motion in time, revealing that the fabric of spacetime is emergent. As I understand it; the paper by Witten - after his meeting of the minds with Penrose - showed connections with String Theory, but mainly proved the concept and paved the way for others. Work by Nima Arkani Hamed and Freddy Cachazo involving twistors and S-matrix theory has been especially productive.

But my intuition is that the emergence of spacetime and structure proceeds most simply or elegantly from the octonions, as I mentioned in my essay. One paper by Connes emphatically states "Noncommutative measure spaces evolve with time," but I came to believe that as the Planck scale is approached, geometry becomes non-associative as well - so we must examine the implications of this to have a full understanding of dynamism at the smallest spatial scales and at the universe's time of origin. We know that the octonions are the most general number type, where the quaternions, complex numbers, and reals are a subset thereof. If we assume, as suggested by my departed friend and colleague Ray Munroe, that the imaginary dimensions in octonionic space are at the outset space-like, and the real dimension is time-like - some things fall into place nicely IMO.

If we interpret the imaginary components of octonions as the freedom to vary by a specified amount, it is natural to consider those dimensions as space-like extents. But making the observation (ontological?) that structures must have a duration in time in order to exist; the last sentence of the preceding paragraph can be seen as a kind of procedural formula. In octonionic space, things can evolve through seven dimensions in sequential relation - as possible directions afforded by a specific range of play - but the next step is always time-like, and this creates specificity or definiteness. Briefly stated; non-associativity makes the octonions not only evolutionary (a la Connes' comments about NCG) but also procedural. Multiplying or dividing with octonions is sort of like putting together or taking apart a watch - where you have sub assemblies that must fit together in a specific way.

Intriguingly; I've been working on a universal theory of measurement or determination, and some of the behaviors noted above appear to be emergent. For example; the postulates of projective geometry have a connection or can be a generator...

More later,

Jonathan