Jochen, thanks for your comments. I am glad you also appreciate Weizsäcker's work. He is much less cited than Wheeler yet he went much further in trying to formulate how "It from Bit" could actually work. After he won the Templeton prize he was able to supervise students who furthered his work.

For the moment I am working on the principle that the holographic principle applies for any surface bounding a volume. I know this would have cosmological implication. A spatially closed cosmology would be ruled out because a surface encloses both the inside and outside which does not make sense if the surface is small. A flat homogeneous universe is also problematical, but hyperbolic universes and in-homogeneous universes are fine. Perhaps a more complete version of my ideas would imply only the covariant entropy bound but as it presently stands I think I need to believe in the more general rule.

I agree that symmetry can be seen as "some kind of redundancy" but I don't agree that this should be preceeded by the word "just". Consider a toy model where the content of the universe is described by a single NxN hermitian matrix and the dynamics have a U(N) symmetry. There are N^2 degrees of freedom and the symmetry Lie algebra is also of dimension N^2, yet the system is not quite all redundancy. There are N real invariants modulo the permutation group S_N. When we talk about symmetry being a redundancy we need to think about what is left when it is integrated out. With gauge fields there may also be topological invariants as well as conserved charged. I think this is consistent with what you are saying about its comprehensibility.

As to how quantisation builds symmetry, in Weizsäcker's work he starts with a bit which has Z_2 symmetry. The first quantisation is a qubit with SU(2) symmetry. The next quantisation is a larger object that includes larger symmetries and so on. The right definition of quantisation is still lacking but the version that came up in my work builds bigger necklace lie algebras from smaller ones. (I connected this to Weizsäcker's work later after a communication with David Finklestein) I did not have space to describe the details here. I think the anomalies will not kill the important gauge symmetry in the real theory otherwise you can lose unitarity and become inconsistent.

Thanks for you comments which have made me think. I have already noted that your essay is another technical one so I will read it carefully next.

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  • Post #8

Philip

"then you are in the company of Einstein", oh heck, but then one must presume from all his output some of it was correct!!

"but I do not accept that such certainty is a logical necessity and nobody has provided any such argument that I am aware of"

Here goes then. Referring to a para over in my response to you on my blog. The form of existence knowable to us can only occur as sequence, ie one physically existent state at a time. There cannot be any form of non-definitiveness or alteration within that state, otherwise it cannot exist. There cannot be 'vague' existence. Perhaps it was here or msaybe over there, maybe it was this shape or perhaps that! It is us who cannot differentiate it adequately. But instead of accepting that, there has been this wierd notion that there is something 'wrong' with reality, it is counter intuitive, relative, subject to influence when we sense it, etc, etc.

Paul

Paul, that is not a bad try. I think many physicists who seek a deterministic theory use the same kind of ideas as you have expressed here.

Hi Philip!

You did a great job with your essay. I work in ICT sector and I love to use my "golden hammer" everywhere, KIS(s), you know... keep it simple. I don't like that last s (=stupid). Do you honestly think that a common people understand your theory? I mean this in a good way.

And how space, time and matter can be secondary? After all, space and matter are the fundamental building blocks of universe.

    Kimmo, it is good to see you over here.

    Yes, the key to getting high scores would be the right balance of interesting text that is easy to understand plus a few equations and nice pictures. I have probably gone too far to the technical side this time, but I prefer to say what I want to say and risk some low marks. I would really like to make the final this time though, and perhaps you underestimate common people too much :-)

    And yes, space time and matter can really be secondary. They don't have to be the most fundamental building blocks. Already there are many physical theories with dualities where these things change characteristic depending on how you look. I have found that an algebra with no obvious connection to continuous space or time can be mapped exactly to states of material objects in a continuous space. The explanation is somewhat mathematical and it needs more space to elaborate than the one page I gave it in the essay, but it really is a neat and non-trivial trick that physicists need to be aware of.

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    • Post #12

    Philip,

    I'd play a devil's advocate here :)

    Continuing on your "What we need is a consistent theory built on mathematical logic that accounts for all known observations.", how do you look at current apparent lack of any hint of SUSY in LHC data? Especially, since without SUSY, there may not be strings either. May your mathematical arguments be applied somewhere, in case of no strings?

    A. Wheeler talked about super-strings, because in absence of experiment, this was hoped as the best theory. I wonder, what he would've said this, if he were alive.

      Phil,

      A superb essay. Your brief but coherent history of the key ideas evidences superior understanding of how this view fits together. I don't subscribe to the view, but I gained insights from your presentation. For example you say, "If there is redundancy, there must also be gauge theory." I've been focused on Yang-Mills for many months and have not seen it this way. Very thought provoking.

      I completely agree with you that the arguments are not watertight, and, if not correct, "some other deeply held assumption must break down." I've tried to understand the key to the radical difference in our views, and I think it may be your belief that "a consistent theory built on mathematical logic that accounts for all known observations" is a useful concept, except for a very closed set of observations. Perhaps, if one excludes observations of awareness and experience, but when one hopes to replace physical matter by logical chains of which one has become aware, I do not see how one can ignore this awareness, and if one does not, then I contend such mathematical schemes are hopeless.

      With the topic, "It from Bit" or vice-versa, it was clear that essays would come down on both sides. You have certainly presented a strong case for one side. I doubt that anyone will do a much better job. I hope that when I submit my essay you will find it as enjoyable.

      I'd hoped to comment on your many ideas, but you simply cover too much, so I'll make a few remarks. First, at a Stanford symposium last month Joe Polchinski and Leonard Susskind agreed that physicists are very confused by the 'firewall' and the question of information conservation, things that seemed resolved for the last decade or so. I think the current structure is coming unglued.

      Your conclusion based on the second derivative formulation of Noether's theorem that "energy is a relative quantity that cannot be separated from this field" is fascinating. I believe it's relevant to work I've been doing; I need to digest it.

      I won't try to summarize any of my arguments here, but in my essay. Nevertheless, while I believe strings, holography, infinite towers of spin, super-symmetry, multi-dimensions, and multi-verses are supefluous, I do want to understand their proponent's arguments, and you do a simply remarkable job compressing these into a short essay. Congratulations, and thanks.

      Best,

      Edwin Eugene Klingman

      I really love this setup here. Different paradigms shouting out in a market place. Kind of Monty Python movie scene comes to my mind. Again, in a good way :)

      Interesting to see which one prevails in this contest.

      Miklai, thanks for these questions which are very important to answer fully.

      Two years ago the case for SUSY at the TeV scale looked pretty good. This was partly due to electroweak fits which suggested a light Higgs (115-120 GeV) supported by hints seen at LEP. Suxh a light Higgs would have required something very like SUSY to keep the cavuum stable. This turned out to be an illusion and the correct Higgs mass is 125 GeV. At that mass we dont really need SUSY to stabilise the vacuum so the case is weakened. There were other reasons to believe in SUSY. It provides solutions for dark matter, proton stability etc, but none of these things say that SUSY is necessary. It looks like nature fooled the theorists this time and it is the first time they were caught out like that. Of course SUSY could be waiting at the next energy range to be searched at the LHC in 2015 or it could be at a higher energy anywhere up to the GUT scale which is a big range of energies, but the higher it is the more the standard model looks fine-tuned. It is a strange mystery but those are the cards we have been dealt and we have to play them.

      String theory is really another matter. If we see SUSY it will support string theory but not seeing SUSY only weakly affects the case for strings. String theory is a theory of quantum gravity that tells us about physics at the Planck scale. Expecting it to have observable consequences at the TeV scale is like expecting the top quark to be relevant to biology. They are worlds apart. The main motivation for string theory is that it provides the only perturbative framework for a consistent theory of quantum gravity. This is a non-trivial observation, but it is not a 100% watertight argument that string theory must be right. If it isn't then theorists have been caught out in an even bigger way than with SUSY, but maybe that is the new trend.

      I am open minded but I think string theory plays some role and we have to at least understand how it works before we make progress. I am all for looking at alternative ideas either in their own right or as new ways to look at strings. My own work is quite radical and is not the way conventional string theorists see things.

      Much of what I have said in this essay is fairly generic and could play a role even if string theory is irrelevant. It does seem to point more naturally in the direction of strings but the black hole information puzzle is a problem for any theory of quantum gravity to explain and the possible implications for symmetry that I have outlines are equally generic.

      Edwin, It is good to see you around and I look forward to seeing your essay enter into the debate.

      I think that "a consistent theory built on mathematical logic that accounts for all known observations" is a reasonable requirement. If such a thing does not exist I don't know what replaces it. I didn't go to school at Hogwarts :-) Of course I look forward to your solution and I am sure that your view will get some sympathy.

      I do agree that understanding awareness is important. Jochen Szangolies already had some interesting things to say about consciousness in his essay. I do think about such things even if I have not written about them. The role of information in this issue must be important and I hope that I may learn something about it from these essays, so I look forward to that. I do think that mathematical analysis will have some bearing on it but there is also a meta-physical side that can/must be discussed without the maths.

      The firewall issue is something else that is very interesting and it an essay could be 50 pages long I would have tried to deal with it, but perhaps it is better that we are forced to concentrate on fewer points. I don't think for one minute that a firewall is the correct description of a black-hole horizon but the arguments that lead to it have to be addressed. They rely on the assumption that entanglement is an essential part of black-hole complementary. If I am right that information is described by charges from a huge symmetry then those arguments may be circumvented, but I think that is too premature a claim for me to make. Entanglement entropy is a useful idea for small black-holes in string theory and the distinction between classical and quantum is blurred when you introduce iterated quantisation so the solution may be more subtle. If anyone brings up the subject of firewalls in their essay we may get an interesting argument going about it.

      I look forward to your essay.

        Philip

        Understanding awareness/consciousness is only important in that it enables the unravelling of the process which converts physical input to perception of that physical input. It is not a physical process, because it does not involve an alteration in physical form, and the process has no impact on the physical circumstance. Both because of the latter point, and because of the simple fact that physical existence occurs before perception. Physical input has to be received first, in order to enable a perception of it to be created, and a necessary condition of physical influence is sequence order.

        Paul

        Philip,

        I read your essay with interest, even though I was not familiar with the term "acataleptic". The online dictionary I used defined this as "incomprehensible", although I now understand that you are referring to fundamental uncertainty. And indeed, quantum uncertainty is universally believed to be a fundamental aspect of nature. On the other hand, I argue in my essay ("Watching the Clock: Quantum Rotation and Relative Time") that one can obtain a consistent description of microscopic reality based on real-space relativistic quantum waves, without uncertainty - there are no point particles.

        Further, I show that one can obtain the effects of general relativity directly from these microscopic quantum waves. But a self-consistent application of this picture eliminates divergences, so there are neither event horizons nor black holes. Yes, this is heretical, but I argue that the observation of compact high-mass objects does not prove the existence of black holes per se.

        Finally, thank you for your creation of viXra.org, which enables one to evade the tyranny of anonymous gatekeepers.

        Alan

          I agree that awareness/consciousness is not a physical process. It could be viewed as just a psychological process of no importance to physics, but I think it is a little more than that because it is linked to entropy and information. It is an important aspect of understanding the interpretation of physics. It may tell us something about why we see the universe the way we do. If the laws of physics are holographic why do we not experience life as if we are living on a 2D boundary rather than the extended 3D world that you get by adding in lots of redundancy?

          It may also become a practical consideration in the future if it becomes possible to accurately simulate our brains on a computer. A simulated brain would claim to have awareness because it is simulating a real brain and that is what a real brain would claim. Should we accept that? Would you transfer your brain patterns to a computer as a form of immortality? If yes, then what happens if the function of the simulated brain is modified or duplicated etc.? What if someone simulates out brain without telling us? What if we are simulated in another universe? Doesn't that happen somewhere because the universe/multiverse is so large?

          I think that making sense of such questions must tell us something about how the world works, but I don't think the answers require any kind of physical process like a soul to explain consciousness. Do you agree?

          Thanks for the explanation, Philip; I also had a brief look at Lyre's article on multiple quantization. I think the concept is a little different from the intro-to-QM 'promote observables to Hermitian operators' quantization, but then, the intent is different, as well: one doesn't really want to start with a classical system to find the quantum analogue, but build up physics from the ground from 'abstract quantum theory' (a point of view I'm very sympathetic to). I guess we both appreciate Weizsäcker's work from different angles: I was initially drawn to it as an explanation for the three dimensionality of space (which I see reflected in Finkelstein's space-time code and Penrose's original spin networks; indeed, the whole concept has recently be revived in a modern setting by Müller and Masanes, who considered the abstract case of two agents attempting to establish a common reference frame by exchanging quantum information, but this only parenthetically), you emphasize the multiple quantization.

          The straightforwardly ur-theoretic perspective might be somewhat difficult to align with your work anyway, since at least naively, it would seem to suggest a closed (S^3) universe, which would conflict with your views on holography (but I was never entirely convinced by these cosmological arguments anyway). This is actually one thing I've been wanting to investigate for some time: the relationship between ur theory and the holographic principle. I seem to recall some partial successes by either Görnitz or Lyre, who computed the amount of information lost to the universe by removing a particle from it, and found it to be consistent with holographic expectations (maybe it was in Görnitz' 'Abstract Quantum Theory and Space-Time'-series?). But I also seem to recall some tension...

          Anyway, I'll have to check out some of the work you reference---I hadn't previously heard about 'necklace Lie algebras' (though the way you describe and use them reminds me faintly of the concept of 'string bits' that was floating around some years ago, but that might be a false association), and while I had previously dipped into your work on event symmetry (you might have noticed that I reference Greg Egan's 'Permutation City' in my essay), I can't really claim to have the necessary background to understand it all. Sometimes, there's just too much interesting stuff to read...

          Other online dictionaries give better definitions for acataleptic. Some commentaries on the philosophy emphasize that not only are answers uncertain, but even levels of uncertainty are uncertain. This makes me think of the multiple quantisation idea and also Wheeler's comment that the probability values in quantum theory are also human inventions. It sums up some of what my essay is about and makes a cool title.

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          • Post #23

          Hi Philip,

          After our very brief exchange (some time ago) somehow that led me to reread your last year's essay. I was glad I did, even more with your new essay; I finally think I understand (in general) what you are trying to say. You are definitely on the right track in my opinion . All that, are in line with my own ideas which I hope I can submit, time permitting. But let me ask you the following (for now):

          1. How does the necklace Lie algebra relate to information theory

          2. What does this mathematical structure represent (why this math and not others), since you say it is the origin of matter and space. Do you believe in MUH?

          3. Does this theory have anything to do with your last year essay?

          4. Will your theory clearly derive QFT or gravity or calculate the SM constants or CC to name a few.

          5. Speaking of consistency. Are you really content with the three main forces of SM. The carrier of EM force is "virtual photons" then the weak force you get REAL particles W/Z then the strong is carried by "virtual quarks/gluons" where they all unite at GUT ! Can your theory figure out this mess?

          So far you have done a good job engaging, not like last year, where all the top prize winners were silent, a deafening silence.

          Philip

          "but I think it is a little more than that because it is linked to entropy and information"

          The sensory/thinking process is not physically linked to anything. It cannot have any form of physical impact on the physical circumstance. [Obviously one could depict the process as a physical one, in itself, ie the brain, eye, etc, is physically existent!, but this is not the point]

          It is, obviously, important that the processes are fully understood, because it is the start point for an analysis of the physical circumstance. Or put another way, if we could get rid of it, that would really help! So we need to understand how this process converts physical input to a perception so that we can reverse engineer the process and discern what was received.

          We would not want to simulate the process. The aim would be to eliminate it with technology which established accurately and comprehensively what it received.

          The point here is, leaving aside detail which does not impact on the argument. The brick wall behind you received the 'same' light, indeed so did your mouth, etc, ec, as your eye which caused you to be aware of a bus in front of you. But the brick wall, mouth, etc, cannot process the physical input received by that interaction, the eye can. The physical circumstance was not affected.

          Paul

          qsa, thanks for reading the essay. I look forward to seeing your essay. Let's take your points one by one

          "1.How does the necklace Lie algebra relate to information theory"

          The Lie algebras are pure symmetry. They are not embedded in any space or time and are not particles, The symmetry represents redundant information and the invariants are real information. space, time and matter should emerge from these structures and this is demonstrated by the mapping using interated integration which shows they have an equivalence to string states. Alternativeley these could be particle trajectories if you dont like strings, but I prefer strings. Some of the necklace Lie algebras I have defined in the past take the form of strings of qubits making the information element more explicit.

          "2.What does this mathematical structure represent (why this math and not others), since you say it is the origin of matter and space. Do you believe in MUH?"

          The structures are just infinite dimensional Lie algebras. While finite dimensional algebras can be classified as Lie groups the infinite dimensional versions are largely unexplored territory and have a rich and complex range of possibilities. I can build higher dimensional structures by a iterative process that I identify with quantisation, but I have not described that in detail here. In a more advanced version I expect these to be q-deformed (another part of quantisation) and it may require higher dimensional algebras like n-categories to get the full workings, I am not sure.

          I do go along with the MUH (Mathematical Universe Hypothesis) as postulated by Tegmark and have been writing about similar ideas myself for at least 20 years under the title "Theory of Theories". One element that I add myself is that the mathematics that describe our universe could emerge from the MUH through some principle of universality that applies to the grand ensemble of mathematical possibilities. It could be an algebraic principle of universality rather than a purely statistical process (whatever that means) I don't think anyone else has taken up that idea. The details are of course far beyond what we currently understand.

          to be continued...

            By the way, I prefer not to use the word "believe" which makes it sound like a quasi-religious idea. I would say that in my opinion this could be a useful way to understand how things work.

            "3.Does this theory have anything to do with your last year essay?"

            It is related to work in my previous three FQXi essays. I have added a more detailed argument in favour of "complete symmetry" from the holographic principle by relating it to the converse of Noether's second theorem, and I have introduced the iterated integration mapping which is a recent development. these are relevant to the "It from Bit" topic.

            "4.Will your theory clearly derive QFT or gravity or calculate the SM constants or CC to name a few."

            I hope it will derive QFT and gravity. I am not confident that it will calculate SM constants or dark energy. This is a theory about quantum gravity which is relevant to the Planck scale. the standard model is a theory of the TeV scale and below which is many orders of magnitude lower in energy. The theory at the Planck scale should include all of physics in principle but I think that expecting to derive SM physics from QG is like expecting to derive chemistry or even biology from SM physics but even harder. There is probably a lot of physics in between to account for dark matter, inflation and other stuff we have not yet seen.

            "5.Speaking of consistency. Are you really content with the three main forces of SM. The carrier of EM force is "virtual photons" then the weak force you get REAL particles W/Z then the strong is carried by "virtual quarks/gluons" where they all unite at GUT ! Can your theory figure out this mess?"

            The difference between photons and gluons vs W/Z is that the former are massless and the latter have mass due to Higgs. gluons are also confined so not seen on-shell. All of them manifest as virtual particles and all exist as real particles (in the case of gluons in deconfined phase). That much is well understood. There are many questions including "why so many parameters" "why is there fine-tuning" "what happens at higher energy" etc. I have no idea what happens at the GUT scale, we have along way to go to answer that. In principle a unified theory at the GUT or Planck scale may answer these questions, but it may also be too difficult to calculate what goes on in detail (as in chemistry, nuclear physics etc.) or there may be some arbitrary element (as in biology, geophysics etc.) such as a vacuum selection that can only be determined by experiment. My aims are ambitious enough but they are not so ambitious as to answer all these questions.

            "So far you have done a good job engaging, not like last year, where all the top prize winners were silent, a deafening silence. "

            This topic is of more interest to me and there have been good essays already so I am keen to engage where I can. It is always hard to get the professionals involved and we should respect any contribution they make. The change of rules may encourage more of them to join in the commenting, or it may put them off entering, we shall see.

            Thank you for your excellent questions. I hope I have gone some way towards answering them.