FQXi January 25, 2013 Podcast

Really enjoyed this podcast. This was the first I have listened to of this series, and I plan to subscribe. I have to confess I didn't fully grok Anders Albrecht's idea about the choice of time in the early universe and the physical laws, but it is a fascinating idea. I think,

Hi Paul,

Thank you for your kind words! We hope you enjoy future editions too.

I think Andreas Albrecht would admit that even he didn't fully grok the implications of his work immediately! You can read more about it in this article by Bob Swarup: "The Accidental Universe." There you'll also find a discussion thread about his theory. Occasionally, our physicists dip into those threads and answer questioned posed to them there.

I too thoroughly enjoyed this short talk. Like Andreas Albrecht I have long been satisfied with Hugh Everett's many worlds hypothesis -- not at all a fantastic or preposterous notion -- and requiring fewer ad hoc assumptions than conventional interpretations of quantum theory.

Albrecht finds that clock ambiguity "deeply undermines" the "concreteness of physical laws." Perhaps -- however, when one discards a probabilistic wave function for continuous measurement functions, concreteness ceases to be an issue, because concreteness was always the product of probabilistic theories; statistical mechanics and its extension to quantum mechanics.

Albrecht asks whether our input assumptions might be wrong, and I agree that it's a critical question. The idea of random Hamiltonians strikes me as identical to a continuous range of input variables. I addressed the issue in similar terms in conference papers from 2006 & 2007 .

Zeeya, I don't know if you saw the compliment I paid to you on a Nature article written in 2011 (in the thread you closed for comment):

It was a happy result of my looking into the current unpleasantness of the Bell's Theorem debate that I found a link to your June 2011 Nature article, "The Power of Discord." I have done some investigation into Shor's algorithm and quantum discord -- your article is tops, and reinforces my opinion that FQXi hosts some of the best science writers in the world.

Thinking further into the non-quantum-entangled Discord Model, I am reminded of L.E.J. Brouwer's much-neglected Intuitionist philosophy of mathematics of a hundred or so years ago. Brouwer's philosophy rejects the law of the excluded middle and the admission of nonconstructive mathematical proofs built on it. This set of proofs includes the mathermatical proof of Bell's Theorem.

Tom