Patterns in the Fabric of Nature by Steven Weinstein

Thank you, Ben, for the compliment and also for the questions and comments. Here are some brief replies.

1) This is a subtle and interesting question you raise. The short answer is that the causal structure is unaffected. The reason is that if the world operates in this way, then any local "changes" to the data at one point, corresponding to a causal intervention of some sort, are subject to the constraints as well. In the EPR context, this has led some commentators to claim that violation of Statistical Independence (which is a consequence of the presence of nonlocal constraints) means that we would lack "free will". (See my "Nonlocality without non locality" paper for more discussion and references to related papers by 't Hooft, Conway & Kochen, and others.) My reply in brief is that there is no more of a problem for free will than there already is in our ordinary, fully local theories, in which we typically understand our actions to be constrained or determined by what has occurred in our casusal past.

2) I've been meaning to read Ken's essay - he's done some really interesting work - and I will do so ASAP.

3) Have not seen Dolce's paper, but will print it out and take a look. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!

4) Excellent question. I think that if one has a discrete graph, one has at least a hope of defining locality, though even there it is not clear how to treat neighboring points. My thinking is less radical, hoping that consideration of nonlocal constraints in classical theory will enable us to understand better how to think about quantum theory in general, and quantum gravity in particular.

5) Right - with a metric of some sort defined on a graph, we could have shorter and longer paths. It's not immediately obvious to me why two points with a short path between them might seem to be far apart when viewed at large scales, since this seems similar to the case in ordinary space where two points (Boston and New York, say) are connected by a short path but also by many longer ones (Boston east to Paris to Beijing to LA to New York). In that case, as in this, we'd say they're close together, despite the fact that there are long routes as well. All that said, your point (4) above raises real questions about the general notion of locality once one starts messing around with the spacetime background.

5a) Fractal spaces would seem to exhibit the phenomenon you mention: scale-dependence of distance.

Heaven Breasts and Heaven Calculus

http://vixra.org/abs/1209.0072

Since the birth of mankind, human beings have been looking for the origin of life. The fact that human history is the history of warfare and cannibalism proves that humans have not identified their origin. Humanity is still in the dark phase of lower animals. Humans can see the phenomenon of life only on Earth, and humans' vision does not exceed the one of lower animals. However, it is a fact that human beings have inherited the most advanced gene of life. Humans should be able to answer the following questions: Is the Universe hierarchical? What is Heaven? Is Heaven the origin of life? Is Heaven a higher order of life? For more than a decade, I have done an in-depth study on barred galaxy structure. Today (September 17, 2012) I suddenly discovered that the characteristic structure of barred spiral galaxies resembles the breasts of human female essentially. If the rational structure conjecture presented in the article is proved then Sun must be a mirror of the universe, and mankind is exactly the image on earth of the Heaven.

http://galaxyanatomy.com

Thanks. Having now read your paper, I find that I'm not clear as to which of the conditions of Bell's theorem that your "sub-quantum" theory (out of which quantum theory is supposed to emerge) violates. I.e., Bell's theorem says that in a world in which the Bell inequality is violated (like ours), the theory which accounts for the phenomena must either violate the locality condition, or violate the statistical independence condition (which I discuss in my paper). Which condition does your theory violate?

Dear Steve,

Thanks for the detailed replies, and I'll be sure to look up the references you suggested. By the way, I forgot to even mention my own essay On the Foundational Assumptions of Modern Physics. I fear you may find it too radical, but I would appreciate your thoughts nonetheless. Take care,

Ben

Dear Steve Weinstein,

Nonlocally of string-mattes in Coherently-cyclic cluster-matter paradigm of universe, is described with the continuum of stings in that the use of simplex is more commutative and quantitative to describe the fabric of nature in entirety, whereas the holarchy of universe is expressional as its factorizability in continuum.

With best wishes

Jayakar

Spelling error:

continuum of 'stings'

To be as,

continuum of 'strings'

Dear Steve,

Interesting essay. I think you may have overlooked that all "digital physics" theories are actually of the type you discuss, the kind of theories that prescribe determinism in the universe, and no free-will at all. Stephen Wolfram, for example, has proposed on several occasions what he calls the activity of "universe hunting", the idea of mining the "computational universe" of computer programs in order to find our own universe program and reproduce it. Zuse, Fredkin and Schmidhuber have also proposed fully deterministic theories of the universe. It would have been interesting to see a discussion in the context of quantum mechanics that you cover in your essay.

I agree with you.

Thanks for the comment, Hector. Actually, I think that the sort of theory I'm proposing does not preclude free will in any meaningful sense of "free will". There's more discussion of that very issue in my paper "Nonlocality without nonlocality", which may be found at http://arxiv.org/abs/0812.0349.

SW

Dear Steve,

The wave with space and time has an unique property. I am able to show in my essay that the wave generates probablities for quantization but with no real energy. Only the quantized oscillator carries energy. This seems to allow communication in the "sub-observational" level over distant locations through region that is "vacumm". Sudden changes e.g. wave collapse, shall not violate relativity because the wave has no energy except at the quantized locations. Although the approach seems different from your suggestion for statistical independence condition, your feedback whether this new idea is poosible will be very valuable.

Sincerely,

Hou Yau

"The divergence is a measure of the out‡ow of the fi…eld in the neighborhood of a point, and the two constraints tell us respectively that any such out‡ow of the electric …field is due to the presence of a charge at that point acting as a source, while the magnetic fi…eld can have no sources (there are no magnetic charges)."

In my work, I show there is a fundamental error in the assumptions of physics. First, charge is a dimension and not an object. Second, all charge is always distributed and is never a point. Even an electron has a surface. Third, there are, indeed, two types of charges. There is the electrostatic charge, and there is a quantifiable magnetic charge. Further, with the exception of electrostatic fields and magnetic moment, all other electrical units should be measured and notated in terms of magnetic charge.

The above understanding corrects numerous errors in physics, which lead to contradictory and unusual paradigms (like wave/particle duality and force particles). Further, the correct notation of charge as distributed, and the recognition of magnetic charge allows for a simple Newtonian unification of the fundamental forces. This is the subject of my paper:

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1531

Nobody would consider someone with only a high school GED to be able to make any meaningful contributions to physics. However, sometimes what the world needs is someone who can see things from a completely fresh perspective. I had the luxury of a clean mind, not polluted with incorrect assumptions, and was able to completely reconstruct the foundations of physics working only with known physical constants.

When I read your paper, and others like it, I can see valiant efforts to look beyond the mainstream, but you are still working within the fundamental assumptions of point charge and magnetism being quantified as moving point charge. These are fundamental errors, themselves.

I am certain that if brilliant minds, such as yours, could take the time to investigate the new foundations of physics I have formulated, you would be positioned to make significant and practical discoveries.

Dear Stewe

About false contradiction between free will and superdeterminism i would like reminding you :

As Yakir Aharonov's says: "...is somewhat Talmudic: everything you're going to do is already known to God, but you still have the choice." http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2012/aug/03/can-the-future-affect-the-past

See my essay http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1413

Hi Steve,

I read your excellent essay weeks ago, and have been meaning to write some comments... So here goes:

First off, I'm quite heartened to see you further develop this analogy you're building between Bell-inequality violations and the cosmological question of why causally-disconnected regions of the universe look so similar. I recall an off-hand mention of this point in one of your previous essays, but here you've really laid it out quite nicely.

Other points of contact with my thinking are your focus on violating "statistical independence" (as you know), and the idea that some gauge symmetries may be a mere "modding out" over important hidden variables (as you may not know). Have you considered U(1) in this context, and whether or not one might expect QM to fail at timescales approaching the inverse Compton frequency?

Next, some quibbles:

You set up your main point in terms of nonlocal correlations in physical systems, but in all your examples (and even in the first paragraph of section 2), you really always come back to nonlocal correlations in the *initial boundary conditions* of a system. After all, in order to carefully talk about separate systems being "independent", you're really using counterfactuals, in which case it's crucial to specify what's "given" in the problem. And what's given in your examples, is, apparently, no information before the initial boundary in question. After that boundary, you point out that correlations can evolve dynamically, which makes discussions of "independence" much trickier.

Sure, you then point out that you want your nonlocal correlations to be "conserved" by the dynamics, but in the case of the Big Bang, at least, that seems to be too stringent. Wouldn't you be happy with nonlocal correlations in the initial boundary conditions of the universe that no longer held true after the universe started evolving?

But that just raises the question of why you want the dynamics to automatically "maintain" such non-local correlations in the first place. After all, the correlations you propose seem more 'powerful' than mere dynamics. Why couldn't you start out by applying those correlations at all times, then use the dynamics to run all those correlations backwards to the initial state, and derive *new* non-local constraints that apply at the beginning as well? (Crucially, those new constraints will depend on the future dynamics.) Of course, this leads you right back to the retrocausal stories you're trying to get away from, but it gives you a lot more wiggle room where the dynamics is concerned. (Maybe you could even give up dynamics entirely, as I'm arguing these days... :-)

Finally, I have to say that from my viewpoint, you never adequately addressed the conspiratorial aspect that would be required for your version of Bell-inequality violations to work -- simply because the physical mechanism that sets a1/a2 need look nothing like the object being measured in the apparatus. (It need not even be the same type of particle.) There are *so* many ways to trigger the a1/a2 switch that forcing a correlation between lambda and every-possible-trigger seems conspiratorial indeed. (At least, without retrocausation.)

Maybe PBR would be a better test-bed for these ideas. After all, statistical independence is even more front-and-center in that experiment. That said, I have a gut feeling that PBR carries the seeds for a "no-go" result for a non-retrocausal violation of statistical independence. The non-local correlations you'd need for one PBR measurement might be provably different from the correlations you'd need for an alternate PBR measurement (say, where some of the signs were changed in the construction of the measured basis). Still, this would be a very interesting result, either way.

Hope we cross paths again soon! All the best,

Ken

Steve

did you left your comment or it was other Steve?

Hi Steve, Like the essay. Do you have any ideas on which sort of mechanism and what mathematical counterpart would account for "constraining the constraint" such that we retain (to some extend) relativistic separation. Also, do you know Aerts' constraint model for reproducing quantum correlations? In an earlier life I generalized this to arbitrary finite dim systems. quant-ph/0105093 quant-ph/0105094

If you do not understand why your rating dropped down. As I found ratings in the contest are calculated in the next way. Suppose your rating is [math]R_1 [/math] and [math]N_1 [/math] was the quantity of people which gave you ratings. Then you have [math]S_1=R_1 N_1 [/math] of points. After it anyone give you [math]dS [/math] of points so you have [math]S_2=S_1+ dS [/math] of points and [math]N_2=N_1+1 [/math] is the common quantity of the people which gave you ratings. At the same time you will have [math]S_2=R_2 N_2 [/math] of points. From here, if you want to be R2 > R1 there must be: [math]S_2/ N_2>S_1/ N_1 [/math] or [math] (S_1+ dS) / (N_1+1) >S_1/ N_1 [/math] or [math] dS >S_1/ N_1 =R_1[/math] In other words if you want to increase rating of anyone you must give him more points [math]dS [/math] then the participant`s rating [math]R_1 [/math] was at the moment you rated him. From here it is seen that in the contest are special rules for ratings. And from here there are misunderstanding of some participants what is happened with their ratings. Moreover since community ratings are hided some participants do not sure how increase ratings of others and gives them maximum 10 points. But in the case the scale from 1 to 10 of points do not work, and some essays are overestimated and some essays are drop down. In my opinion it is a bad problem with this Contest rating process.

Sergey Fedosin

The above post is on every essay today. Does that make it a pattern in the fabric of nature?

You mainstreamsians controle science for over 50 years. You mainstream and Hawking failed. The bad science is because of the Top-Down controle of the people like you. Why do you need money and fame from FQXI where the authors are mostly jobless, are mostly independent researchers, are mostly viXra.org authers? Do you need money and fame by controling jobless???

I want to rate you 0!

MAX PLANK:

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents; it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out and that the growing generation is familiarized with the idea from the beginning.