Phil,

I am digging deeper into your essay, and getting a better understanding of the necklace algebra you are proposing: "it can be interpreted as the emergence of

string field theories in continuous space and time from algebras based on quantised information,"

I think I am in agreement with the general idea. In my definitions, I associate information with uncertainty (which is consistent with Shannon). I am associating knowledge with what most people view as information, which is the sense of Wiener. In any case, the relative information, e.g. shared knowledge is what we are interested in. That is limited by quantum mechanics. In my interpretation of what you are saying, the idea is that we could build algebras based on the quantization of mutual information, which must be limited, which I am taking to mean there is a least element that can be defined. I like the idea of algebra building in general, so I find your essay to be very helpful.

On another note, what are your thoughts on the apparent similarity of ideas that seem to be popping up from different corners?

    I must add one more response. You say that symmetries relate to something else. This is not necessarily the case. A Lie algebra can act on itself via the adjoint representation. This is what I have called complete symmetry. It means that the field that generate the symmetry are the same as the fields they act on so it is simply a principle of unification. It also implies that the degrees of redundancy match the degrees of freedom. This is exactly what is required for a holographic principle.

    Notice that I am following a train of logic to draw a conclusion (with assumptions that are reasonable but not watertight) I think this is better than just looking for something that is simple according to our tastes.

    Harlan, I already read and liked your essay. I am going to read it again.

    Dear Phil,

    I seem to agree with your flow.

    I am wondering might you consider this essay What a Wavefunction is by any means a none string theory version of your arguments. I mean does its approach simplify or demonstrate the general bent of your arguments?

    Chidi

    Dear Philip,

    I had the alias name QSA before, my essay has been finally posted.

    http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1877

    As we discussed before and after some research I am convinced that your theory is nothing but mine in disguise, however it may be hard to see. I will discuss that some other time once you got some good feel of my theory. I think my advantage is that time has been taken out naturally, and after some thinking I feel that it can be incorporated in the end.

    The rating is low but I am not concerned at all in that respect. I am only looking for few good people with deep understanding of physics plus some programming skills to run and test my programs to check that what I claim is true. The programs are so simple and should take you 15 minutes to figure them out. These programs are listed(can be downloaded) in section 11 of my website with additional detail in my postings

    http://www.qsa.netne.net

    I am specifically looking for the following:

    1. Can you understand the derivation of the model

    2. I claim that the model produces some results of QM, do you see it.

    3. the mass of the electron appears using the same model

    a. do you believe the result

    b. assuming that is the case ,do you think that can be significant.

    I will soon add the programs that you can run to see the Bohr model, the mass of the electron and how the fine structure constant is produced naturally within the system with only three lines of code. The code separates the number of hits between all the successful accepted hits and divides by the hits that happened only in the particle(electron) Compton wave region. That is very similar to the probability interpretation of the FSC.

    I am really counting on you because I feel that my chance is very small with others. Besides my theory is very close to yours as I said earlier. But If you can't find the time, I understand.

    Thank you.

    Adel

    Dear Philip

    I vaguely remember hearing the name Weizsacker as a president of Germany, but not as a theorist of matters quantum. JAW was the one who led me into the labyrinths of quantum mechanics. It was through his contributions in "Some Strangeness in the Proportion", a book of essays from the Centennial Celebration of the Achievements of Albert Einstein that quantum mechanics became alive for me. Before that only the catechisms of Schrodinger Equation and Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle!

    In my essay "Analogical Engine" I tried to draw the parallels between Analogy (as a thought process) and Quantum Mechanics (as a physical process) from a premise "What quantum is to classical" is similar to "What analogy is to rationality." With the help of a thought-experiment, I came to this conclusion: "Planck constant is the Mother of All Dualities, and a necessary condition for the existence of thoughts and things."

    Then entering the FQXi Essay Contest I found your essay, and wow you are saying: "With multiple quantisation the values of the probabilities themselves are replaced with further wave-functions ad infinitum." and "Bringing together different theories often forces almost unique conclusions."

    Very deep and very interesting I said to myself. Unable to jump the maths huddles, I can feel only the resonances that I can barely articulate. I do not like to impose, but I am curious to know what do you see from your side of the fence if you were to look at mine.

    Good luck!

    Than Tin

      Dear Philip,

      It is clear you have worked long and hard on remarkable essay, but I have a few comments and questions:

      A clear and concise definition of the "holographic principle" was never given. What I get from context: the holographic principle - all information within a closed surface can be reproduced by knowing the flux of all the fields going through that same surface.

      A clear definition of "information" is needed.

      Is the same information bit used for all fields? If there is just one type of bit then how does one know which field the bit is producing? If there is a different bit type for each type of field then how does saturation in one field (gravity as seen in a black hole) saturate another field such as the electrical field?

      Why do we not see a black hole-like saturation due to other types of fields?

      Any volume of space could have many streams of information going through it at any given moment. At the shopping mall, you can buy glass paperweights with an imbedded pattern of tiny bubbles made crossing laser beams which over-drive phonons in the material. Over-driving phonons is many orders of magnitude less than the Plank density, but in theory, we could reach that information flow density. Could we create a black hole by beam crossing?

      Pions violate chiral symmetry. We have more matter than anti-matter, so charge symmetry is violated. Symmetry breaking is sometimes said to define a field, yet you declared that entropy is declared not fundamental because it violates time-reversal symmetry. Entropy might not be fundamental, but violation of symmetry cannot be the reason it is not fundamental.

      All the best,

      Jeff

        In ancient Greek philosophy acatalepsy ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acatalepsy )was the antithesis of catalepsy ( or Katalepsis to avoid confusion with the medical condition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalepsis ) catalepsy was the philosophy of the stoics such as Plato who thought there was an absolute reality that we experience through our senses but existing independently. The skeptics contested this an proposed the acataleptic philosophy instead. It is sometimes defined to mean that reality is incomprehensible but I dont think that is accurate. I think what they meant is that reality is uncertain. It is not fully knowable but to say that it is completely unknowable or incognizable just contradicts our sesnes.

        In the Bayzian worldview we only know things by probabilities that are never zero or one. There is always some doubt no matter how small. Our a priori probabilities are continually updated as more information reaches our senses. According acataleptsy precise reality is not just unknown, it is unknowable. The standard view of quantum mechanics supports this view. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle tells us that if know some things with a high level of certainty then other things are fundamentally unknowable with any degree of accuracy.

        The Greek skeptics said more than this, They also said that even the amount of uncertainty is uncertain. It is true that we do not really carry Baysian probability values around in our head. We have a more vauge sense of how certain or uncertain things are. In my interpretation of acatalepsy I assume that this is also true of physical reality. The wavwfunction amplitudes that give us levels of probability must themselves be quantised and replaced with wavefunctions that describe the uncertainty of their state. This must be repeated ad infinitum through a process of iterated quantisation.

        This does not lead to a reality which is completely unknowable or incomprehensible. On the contrary it is this process of multiple quantisation that builds the emergent structures of physics that we experience. At the macroscopic scale of our ordinary experience the world seems very real and almost completely certain. It is only when we look at microscopic scales that the acatalptic nature of reality is apparent.

        German President Richard von Weizsacker was the younger brother of Carl. They came from an incredibly successful family who made their mark in politics and a wide range of academic fields. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weizs%C3%A4cker_family

        Thank you for your comments. I will read your essay.

        Thank you for your good questions

        The definition os the holographic princple I used in the essay is "The

        amount of information in any volume of space must be limited by the area of a surface that encompasses it" Stringer and weaker version of the principle exist.

        Information is just answers to questions we can ask about the world around us, such as the state of a particle.

        Ina unified theory there are not really different fields. They are all different aspects of one field, so the type of information is also unified.

        The gravitational field seems special because it is connected to geometry of space-time. All fields interact with gravity to information is all fields is limited by the holographic principle. A black hole must form when informnation density exceeds the holographic bound no matter what form it takes.

        P and CP symmetry are broken in nature but CPT symmetry is always valid.

        Breaking T symmetry is therefore the same as breaking CP symmetry but this is a very small effect and probably cannot account directly for the arrow of time. Some people might dispute that and we do not know enough to be sure.

        However, the bigger point is that space and time themselves are emergent and the second law of thermodynamics cannot make sense at a level more fundamental than the emergence of time.

        I hope this answers your questions. If not please ask again.

        Dear Philip

        Thank you for explanation.

        Do you know Who is Warren McCuloch?

        Dr. McCulloch's researches uniquely exemplify the modern interdisciplinary approach. During his long and distinguished career in neurology

        and related disciplines he has also applied his talents in modern

        mathematics, symbolic logic, information theory, cybernetics, medicine, the classics and the history and philosophy of science.

        This is one among his many interesting articles.

        http://www.vordenker.de/ggphilosophy/mcculloch_what-is-a-number.pdf

        Yuri

        Philip,

        Thank you for your reply.

        What is "holographic" in the holographic principle?

        Just to be clear, you confirmed that a volume of space with enough signals passing through it could become a black hole.

        if this volume has a material in it could this information be sound as well as EM? Could this space be a vacuum?

        Jeff

        Hello Philip,

        You are right: «What we need is a consistent theory built on mathematical logic that accounts for all known observations». Your revolutionary ideas and revolutionary open vixra - the highest grade.

        Good luck and best wishes, Vladimir

          As I go on to explain in the essay the entropy bound means that the information in a volume of space must be described by states on the boundary. This is the sense in which it is holographic, just as a hologram can build a 3D picture from a flat surface.

          The information can indeed be included in sound waves but the information in the medium carrying the sound waves will be much more than the information in the sound waves themselves.

          Whether it can be a vacuum depends on what you mean by vacuum. If you mean an absence of matter then electromagnetic radiation can travel through a vacuum but sometimes in particle physics we take the vacuum to mean flat space with no matter or radiation of any kind. In this case it contains no information.

          Thanks and its good to see you well up in the rankings.

          Hello Philip, What an excellent essay! Very deep and elemental in nature with a lot of killer maths. I learned from you about Carl von Weizsäcker and his theory "that builds infinite dimensional symmetries using layers of quantisation from information" I have similar idea that in KQID, our Ancestor FAPAMA Qbit can split itself up infinitely without cost to itself and to our Multiverse. However, I concluded that Wheeler did not go far enough that not only "it from bit" but also that "it is bit and bit is it." I did rank highly of your essay, if you have time please look at and rank my essay Child of Qbit in time. Best wishes, Leo KoGuan

            Thank you, yes I see some n ice parallels between our essays

            Philip,

            "However, the bigger point is that space and time themselves are emergent and the second law of thermodynamics cannot make sense at a level more fundamental than the emergence of time." By more fundamental do you mean smaller scale of size and larger energies? Quantum Mechanics is statical in its results as is statical mechanics. We can run particle interactions very high energy densities; we currently cannot run something like a stream engine at gamma ray blackbody temperatures. The law of thermal dynamics should hold at the scale of nuclear reactions in the core of stars were temperatures and densities are at this level.

            Jeff

            Dear Philip,

            I completely agree with your overarching point that we need consistency to guide our approach to help us gain further insights into the fundamentals of nature. It struck me, though, that when you gave the examples of Maxwell, Einstein and Dirac, these were in a sense completely different situations from the one that relies on arguments pertaining to black holes to derive new consistency-based insights.

            In each of the historic cases, there was at least a prospect that the assumptions on which the consistency-based arguments rested could eventually be checked by experiment. What prospect do we have for that when it comes to black holes? The power of the consistency-based arguments we derive from these assumptions is only as great as the consistency of the assumptions themselves. It seems to me that if we cannot check our most basic assumptions about black holes experimentally, then there is a real danger that we could have overlooked inconsistencies in them, and will continue do so. This could then lead us to derive false arguments even though they are consistent with the assumptions. Instances like the recent firewall debate only strengthen my suspicion that this may in fact be the case.

            It seems to me that a more reliable way to use consistency as a guiding principle would be to apply it to a situation that has at least a fighting chance to be eventually subjected to experimental test. I agree that it is not easy to find such situations where both GR and QT come into play, but consistency-based arguments based on that kind of a situation would seem that much more compelling.

            As you may know, I am also pursuing an idea based on the notion that spacetime emerges from a lower-dimensional analog, namely that quantum theory tells us that pre-measurement states are spacetime manifestations of lower-dimensional objects and that a "measurement" is really the mechanism by which actual spacetime objects emerge out of these. Several people have told me that this reminds them of the holographic principle, although I am myself remain skeptical of that. It is good, though, that you explore the holographic principle from an angle that others have apparently neglected, as hopefully this will increase the chance the whole issue will be more clearly defined. Why do you think is it the case that over the last 20 years, the application of necklace lie algebras has not been taken up by the string theory community?

            All the best,

            Armin