Dear Armin,

I have some addition to the idea of separation of quantum mechanics (QM) and general relativity (GR).QM uses wave function, summing of probability of events, quantization of physical values and so on. QM studies amount of similar atomic systems in order to find probability of events. GR can work with a single system and give right answer about it without any probabilities. The methods of both theories are different. On the other hand we can use quantum approach on the other levels of matter, for example, at the level of star. See my essay about the theory of Infinite Hierarchical Nesting of Matter and Similarity of matter levels. Also it is possible to use theory of gravitation in the atomic world. For it we must use Strong gravitational constant. From here I am not sure that QM and GR have mutually exclusive domains of validity.

Sergey Fedosin

    Dear Stefan,

    Thank you so much for your detailed feedback and kind comments. I actually think that most of my ideas are rather very simple, certainly much simpler than many of the sophisticated presentations I have seen here. In part, this may be due to an inherent bias in my worldview, according to which nature at the most fundamental level is simple. While this may or may not be true, it guides how I think about fundamental problems.

    There is a specific comment of yours on which I'd like to give feedback. You said: "First, it is assumed that the speed of light limit can only be attached to the light in our 3D-spacetime."

    Although I did not directly talk about the speed of light as a limit in this paper, I did say something very similar in the discussion section of my entry to the first FQXi contest. If you are interested, you can have a look, it is topic 329. I also hope to soon post a series of youtube videos in which I present some of my ideas in a more conversational way, beginning with the speed of light invariance.

    Again, thank you very much and I also wish you all the best,

    Armin

    Dear Armin

    I am replying here to say thank you for your comments on my essay because there because, for some reason, there was no place to make a comment there. I will make my comments on your essay separately after I have had the opportunity to read it.

    Best wishes

    Peter

      Dear Armin!

      You were kind enough to comment on my essay, and thereby lead me to your own - even though I would have found it anyway, because of its interesting title. I have now read and re-read your essay - and will have to read it at least once more before I - hopefully - will be able to come up with some concrete comments/questions. I have much to learn here - and it makes me happy! Just to mention one of my many underlingings and exclamation marks, when reading you ressay: You reasoning about actual and actualizable is fascinating, to say the least.

      Au revoir!

      Inger

        Armin,

        Doesn't superposition say that a net effect is equal to the sum of the individual effects. Common belief says that gravitational forces must be added vectorially to account for the total effects on an object. How does this figure in your concepts? Certainly gravity will have different properties if it can be cancelled as my essay asks.

        Jim

          Dear Inger,

          Thank you for your kind remark, you are of course under no obligation to make any comments or ask any questions, just the fact that you read it twice is an indication that some of my ideas were found to be worthwhile and I find that is a reward in and of itself.

          Thanks again and all the best,

          Armin

          Dear James,

          Well, in the generality you stated it the superposition principle could already be applied to the classical physics, such as Maxwell's or Newton's theories. In fact, your second sentence indicates to me that this is what you had in mind.

          What makes quantum superposition quite distinct is the fact that a state of a system is a linear superposition of 'measurement outcome states', and this something you just don't find in any classical theory.

          There is a quantum mechanical version of 'Force' which you can either derive in terms of a change in the expectation value of a system's momentum over time using Ehrenfest's theorem, or (in certain cases only) as as the change in the expectation value of the Hamiltonian of which the wave function is an eigenfunction with respect to a coordinate using the Feynman-Hellman theorem but these are nothing like classical forces because they do not refer to definite objects.

          I don't dispute the validity of either General Relativity or Quantum Theory, which actually makes my stance the most conservative one could take. The entire point of my essay was to show that if we realize that quantum theory and general relativity are fundamentally about different objects, then the seeming contradiction between them vanishes.

          As for your paper, I will leave an honest comment on your thread.

          Thank you for your remark and your question.

          All the best,

          Armin

          Dear Armin Nikkhah Shirazi,

          I completely agree with your statement of that a theory of everything is a myth. Precisely, I started my essay with a short historical introduction on how physicists, from Laplace to Witten, have claimed that they were close to obtain a theory of everything, but Nature has shown how wrong they were!

          Regards

            Armin

            I do indeed recognise the divisions between domains, but suggest most may be imposed by humans because we do not understand nature. For instance I don't accept in principle the division we have evolved between 'science' and 'the arts' but find so much overlap as to suggest a graded continuum, a little like a GRIN lens refracts light progressively due to graded particle density.

            I would not postulate this if I had not already tested it to the extreme and found much consistency. I hope you might read my own essay to gain an understanding of how nature may in fact be consistently unified, and comment. Despite falsifiability I crave falsification as I've failed to do so.

            Mine is not as well written and argued as yours, as I have to present a number of elements and use a logical foundations to construct a complex ontological structure that unifies whole tracts of apparently contradictory findings. In other words, suggests it is our assumptions and interpretations that were wrong and divided, not nature.

            I respect and admire your work and look forward to your comments.

            Peter

            Dear Armin,

            I think you make a fair and sound case against the idea of a ToE (yet I don't think the idea of a ToE is as generally accepted as your essay may suggest). I wonder what is your position regarding information theory as a possible mean to reconnect areas of physics currently disconnected, perhaps even creating an overlapping dimension between quantum mechanics and general relativity as it is turning out to be the case with some proposals of quantum gravity (specially around ideas related to black holes).

            Also, you make a fair historical account of previous unifications, but I wonder (and you don't seem to mention) whether back then they thought that these then unrelated areas had no overlapping whatsoever. I guess it was this was the case, but as someone interested in philosophy (and perhaps history) you could tell us something about it. If history tells us that it has always been the case that such connections were completely unforeseeable and that we have basically connected most theories of different natural phenomena, from the historical point of view it seems that thinking of a ToE is justifiable, to say the least.

              Armin

              Can you advise if I'm a scientist or artist? Astronomy perhaps is clear, but an Architect? and a racing yachtsman? In the former I am creating a sculpture which people view internally as well as externally, must sit harmoneously in it's context, and give confidence but also delight and inspire. Yet it is made of precisely specified materials, I must design or consider structure, heating, cooling, ventilation, natural and artificial lighting, renewables, sound etc. etc, which is all science. I see no distinction in my work as each is intermingled with the other.

              Similarly with sailing. It's an art intuitively steering a boat though changing waves and wind to maximise speed, but at the same time I'd dealing with aero and hydrodynamics, mast and sail shape and multiple instrument inputs. I can 'feel' the water over the rudder and know in advance of any flow separation. The superposed surface waves also appear random, but always have a hidden pattern allowing a good helmsman to anticipate and 'set up' each impact, or use each wave face downwind. Fourier transforms on the fly!

              I also part designed my current boat, she is both beautiful and very efficient. How can I draw a line anywhere there between art and science. I can only 'impose' a division to suit words we have invented. What is it I'm missing? Can you identify which of natures own natural divisions match ours?

              Having said that, I still agree entirely with the rest of your thesis as referred above. I can never truly anticipate the '7th wave' a priori from topology due to the massive complexity. Your essay should be higher and my score should help. I hope you're able to read and comment on mine.

              Best of luck

              Peter

                Dear Armin,

                I'm here to learn! So I have re.read your essay again. Your reasoning about size, dimensionality, actual and actrualizability excites my courisity.

                In your Appendix you write "For instance, of two 3-D objects of same shape but different size, the smaller one has more units of area per unit of volume than the larger one, which can be interpreted as the smaller object being more 2-dimensional than the larger one..."

                Does this mean that the smaller object is less acrual than the larger one, in a 3-dimensional frame of reference? This is how I intepret your schema.

                Analoguously, of two 2-D objects of same shape but different size, the smaller one has more units of length per unit of area than the larger one, which can be interpreted as the smaller object being more 1-dimensional than the larger one.

                Does this mean that the smaller object is less actural than the larger one in Flatland - and even less actual in a 3-dimensional frame of reference? Would this be the reason behind quark confinement?

                In your schema, you place dark energy in the fourth dimension of observed event (box 4.3). How would we, in our 3-dimensional frame of reference, experience a 4-dimensional phenomenon? I have read somewhere - but unfortunately forgot where - that we would experience its impact equally in all directions. The accelerating expansion of the Universe is equal in all directions. As is also the CBR.

                Would placing the CBR in the same box as dark energy (4.3) facilitate an alternative to the Big Bang theory?

                Best regards!

                Inger

                  Hi Ben,

                  I'm glad to hear that you came out alright (I somehow missed this post, hence the late post). Given that you have composed so many works, perhaps you might be inclined to share a few with world? I'd be certainly looking forward to hearing them.

                  On the Toccata and Fugue, well, given that you are a mathematician perhaps it is not so unexpected that (occasionally) complex interlocking melodic patterns might sound pleasing to you. I find this style very challenging to emulate, btw. It is truly astounding that Bach could compose (and by some accounts even improvise (!!!)) contrapunctal works with 5 or 6 independent voices.

                  All the best,

                  Armin

                  Dear Peter,

                  When you say that you have tested the idea that there are no clear distinctions between areas of human activity, I take it that you have thought about several concrete examples that serve as an epitome of such division and then come up with specific counterarguments to refute that view.

                  To help me understand your perspective better, it would be helpful if you could give one or two examples in which the division seems especially obvious and in which you have found that this was ultimately due to lack of sufficiently deep understanding or other factors.

                  Let me give one example that at least in my mind clearly divides the sciences and the arts, and you can provide a counterargument if you are so inclined.

                  In my view, the correspondence principle as the general idea that subsequent frameworks or theories in science need to subsume the domains of previous theories in addition to providing explanations for new ill-understood phenomena marks as a division between the arts and the sciences. I see no comparable compulsory requirement for an analog to the correspondence principle in the arts. Incidentally, should you be interested, several years ago I wrote a paper in which this was a key point, so if you like a greater elaboration of this argument, you can find the paper here:

                  http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/79042

                  All the best,

                  Armin

                  Dear Juan,

                  I just re-read your essay (I had read it once soon after it came out but wanted to refresh my memory).

                  I agree with several of the eight points you made, and indeed some of them are quite close to the arguments discussed in my paper.

                  In particular, the idea that spacetime is not fundamental (or "special" as I like to say) would seem to be an unavoidable consequence of attributing quantum phenomena to the spacetime manifestation of objects that actually exist in lower dimensional analogs.

                  Also, I agree with the notion that unitarity is not fundamental, but it appears to me that this is for a different reason than given in your paper: In my framework, the mathematical requirement of unitarity arises ultimately from a simple symmetry that serves as a mechanism for comparing two distinct proper time dimensions: the proper time of the underlying onject in areatime, and the proper time associated with each path that is part of the path integral. Since objects we observe in spacetime do not require this "comparison mechanism" this would seem to refute the notion of unitarity being fundamental.

                  My knowledge of black hole thermodynamics is insufficient to be able to give sound evaluation of your argument, but let me just say that I am a bit suspicious about whether any of the seemingly reasonable assumptions that had to go into combining quantum theory with general relativity will in the end turn out not to be reasonable.

                  You raise an interesting point under your "quantum state vectors are not fundamental" section: If one has a multiparticle entangled state, how sensible is it to consider each describable by its own "state"? Probably due to my own prejudices, I tend to shy away from claims that descriptions that are even more mathematically abstract than this as being the "fundamental" description (such as the state operator in Liouville space) because at least in my view, whenever one abstracts, one loses some part of the thing one tries to model, and the extent of that loss defines how much less fundamental the abstraction becomes. To me, path integrals are the most fundamental description. They may seem abstract, but as far as I can tell, they are the most concrete models of quantum object in that they describe objects directly in spacetime rather than in some abstract phase, state or configuration space.

                  The point that GR is not an ordinary field theory is congruent with that presented in my paper, although again for different reasons. In my view, the notion of a quantum field captures in the greatest generality the idea that there is some lower-dimensional fundament from which spacetime is continuously emerging, and that close to that limit where, as it were, the "phase transition" occurs, there is a constant flux between the "phases" perhaps not so unlike what can observe in certain thermodynamic regimes. Since GR is about "equal dimensional" objects in relation to the observer's dimensional frame of reference, GR cannot, according to this view, be an ordinary (quantum) field theory.

                  Finally, I suspect that dark matter may be related to gravity somewhat as gravity is related to electrodynamics: In the proper limits there may be some similar or even formally identical relations (say, Newton's vs. Coulomb's law) which may confound our observations and lead us to believe that there is a gravitational explanation for it, but these might reflect totally different underlying conceptual entitities.

                  Milgrom's relation does not seem in contradiction with this view, for one could imagine an analogy in which Newton's law was replaced with a special kind of "Coulomb's law" that holds only under certain circumstances (e.g. it is only noticeable at very large scales, it is always attractive, it even holds for entities in which all electrical charges cancel etc. etc. ). I suspect that Milgrom's relation is something like this special "Coulomb's law".

                  Incidentally, if you did not see the appendix to my paper, you may find it interesting to see the proposed schema of the metahteory.

                  So, overall it seems that we agree on many of the points albeit for substantial different underlying reasons. Thank you for reading my essay,

                  All the best,

                  Armin

                  Dear Hector,

                  Thank you for raising some extremely interesting questions. I would love to discuss them without the restraints of space and time, but this is not always possible, so I will attempt to give reasonably concise answers.

                  1. Re: Information theory. Given that I don't have much knowledge in this area, I am agnostic on your specific question, mainly because I don't trust myself to know what has yet to be imagined in the future.

                  I can perhaps give a more satisfactory answer about my point of view on the interpretation of information as a foundation for reality, a view one does find occasionally, particularly in the area of quantum foundations (If I am not mistaken, Anton Zeilinger is a prominent proponent of such a view). I am sympathetic to this view, for if this turns out to be true, then, it seems to me, it would effectively unify mathematics with physics.

                  There are, however, two profound problems that I see, and I'm not sure due to my lack of a deep understanding of the subject matter whether these are genuinely original objections or problems solved a long time ago, or even worse, non-problems or reflections of my personal misunderstanding. Should the latter be the case, please do let me know, so that I can correct my mistakes.

                  1) The problem of the "map": Suppose Wheeler's "it from bit" is true, it seems to me then that there is a "map" which leads one from "information" to "substance"(using this term to stand in for concrete physical quantities like matter, energy, space and time). The reverse "map" seems to be pretty well understood: we can think of "information" generically as some pattern of distinctions in otherwise formless "substance" , but I have difficulty envisaging the "map" that leads the other way around. Of course, an extreme proponent of "reality is information" might say that the map is a simple isomorphism, but to me that seems merely a case of "defining the problem away". What does it really mean to claim this? How does it contribute to the understanding that purportedly a quantity of "substanceless" information is equivalent to a quantity of "substance"? Moreover, if there really was such an isomorphism should it not be impossible to draw distinctions between the knowledge about a system and the reality of the system itself? The mere fact that we can easily conceive of situations in which such distinctions occur would seem to serve as a counterexample to this argument. One can also turn this around: Consider a scenario in which a quantum system has undergone one of those "measurements" in which the observer could "in principle" know the state of the system but in practice doesn't. The state collapses, and its information is known, but by whom? A hypothetical observer? If so, and information is reality, then a hypothetical observer, who only exists as an "informational construct", as it were, would seem to have to be every bit as real as an actual one. Is this a tenable position to hold?

                  I suspect that if we better understood the "map" that leads from information to substance (assuming it really exists) then many of these problems would suddenly become resolved in an obvious manner.

                  2) The information vs. Substance chicken vs. egg problem: Let us suppose the map exists and we are able to describe its nature satisfactorily. Then we would have grounds for claiming that there is a certain type of "fundamental" information (namely the kind which does not depend on any kind of "substance" in order to exist) which leads to "substance". But we know that there is also less fundamental information, namely the kind which does depend on substance for its existence. If so, could it not be the case that there exists also a more "fundamental" kind of substance which underlies our original "fundamental" kind of information? And if that is the case, is it not possible to continue this on in the manner of an infinite regress?

                  Again, I'm not sure how worthwhile these arguments are but they are at least the hurdles that strike me as the ones that need to be overcome before one can seriously consider information as a basis for reality.

                  Finally, on your question on whether the connections were completely unforeseeable. I'm not sure that this is completely right. Let's take E&M as an example: Oersted discovered the induced magnetic field in 1820, and Faraday surely had already a good conceptual picture of the relation between the fields at least in some settings well before Maxwell's treatise. So I would argue that the unification was, at least for over 40 years prior to its occurrence, not completely unforeseeable.

                  There is, however, a more interesting angle which adds some support to your point of view. It was only with the advent of special relativity that people could appreciate that it is not the fields that are the fundamental objects of the classical electromagnetic theory but the electromagnetic field tensor, for, as you know, that is the true spacetime object underlying the fields. I completely agree that before SR, this more unified understanding of the fields was indeed completely unforeseeable. Now, the irony here is that, since relativity is profoundly concerned with the concept of a reference frame, in this case, a deeper understanding of this concept led to a more unified picture.

                  But as I argue in my paper, our current conception of a reference frame is still not the deepest conception, and the unexpected nature of expanding this aspect leaves the door open for future developments in our understanding to be different from past ones in regards to unification.

                  Furthermore, as I pointed out toward the end of my essay, one can have multiple deeply significant trends in the history of science the resolution of one of which may well portend the termination of the other. It seems rather arbitrary to say that one trend is more important than the other, which is what would have to effectively do in order to ignore the consequences of this interplay between the trends.

                  I included the historical discussion in my essay precisely because I wanted to give the reader a greater sense for these broader considerations that surround the question of the existence of a theory of everything.

                  I hope that I was able to usefully address your questions,

                  All the best,

                  Armin