An Acataleptic Universe by Philip Gibbs

Philip Gibbs

qsa, thanks for looking at my work and asking so many good questions. I am going to answer each point in a separate message.

You said "It is interesting that you have proposed a mathematical universe( which is exactly what my theory proves) long before Dr. Tegmark formalized the notion."

I don't think I can claim to have had this idea before Tegmark but I thought about it independently. There are also differences in our views. A key part of my idea is universality and I think others are starting to pick up on that idea now.

The paper you cited was actually a book so it was deliberately not too mathematical but no publisher would take it. I should try to write up the universality idea and put some maths behind it.

Have you written up about how your theory proves it?

Philip Gibbs

1. I am surprised that none of your colleagues discuss your theory here or elsewhere. Can you point to places where such discussions have taken place in case I am wrong.

My ideas have not been discussed much at all. I have been cited a few times but not as much as I would like. This raises an interesting point.

When I was young and naive I thought it was the proper thing to survey the literature and cite any prior work of a similar nature, especially for new radical ideas. I thought everyone did this both as a courtesy to people who had earlier ideas and as a courtesy to their readers who would find it useful to see similar work if they wanted to build on it. When I first started working on space-time structure I got carried away with this idea and ended up writing a bibliographic review with hundreds of references. It actually got cited quite a few times even by some influential people.

Now I know that most people do not work that way. Citations are too important a commodity to throw about like that and citing prior work can undermine their own claims to have done things independently. Most people follow the principle that they only cite other work that is needed to understand the present paper. They often wont cite prior similar work even if it was an important influence. Sometimes people are even open about this and think it is the most correct and honest thing to do. Perhaps they are right. See this article on backreaction for example http://backreaction.blogspot.co.uk/2008/02/peer-review-iv.html

What this means to you and I is that it is critically important that we make sure all our ideas are recorded in papers that are stored in permanent repositories from the earliest date possible. That is why I started viXra. If some outsider has an interesting idea I don't think they should lose their claim to priority just because they are excluded from repositories.

It is important to identify your key ideas to yourself first and make a point of writing about it as explicitly and clearly as you can. If is an important idea that nobody has written about before then write a whole paper about it and introduce suitable terminology. Don't bury it in long papers as an aside and certainly dont forget to mention it because it is so "obvious" Apparently the Higgs boson was so obvious to Englert and Brout that they forgot to mention it and Higgs nearly did too.

Coming back to the original point, no, nobody discussed my main ideas much, but I know that the onus is on me to develop the ideas further. A rough and vague idea wont count for much if someone else comes along later and publishes a more polished version with a better mathematical finish.

Philip Gibbs

"2. What is your opinion of Eric Verlinde entropic gravity theory, you seem to hint at it indirectly."

I like the idea of entropic gravity. It goes well with the idea that qubits are fundamental. However I dont like his explanation for the cosmoloical ratio of dark energy to cold matter. He predicts it to be constant when standard theory and observation says it increases.

I will answer more later. Going to watch Feynman film on BBC2 for rest of evening.

Philip Gibbs

"3.does this paper relate to your work

http://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0406200v2.pdf"

That was a different Necklace Lie Algebra to mine, but similar idea and very interesting.

Philip Gibbs

"4. In my theory I derive these crazy simple formulas that fall out of my system which sort of ties them to Knots and Alexander polynomial trefoil similar to your idea

1/m_e= (27/2)*(1/alpha -2 -alpha )= 1822.88747

where alpha/FSC =.007297352568, charge ^2=3, 27=3^3, m_e, m_p are electron and proton mass

moreover,

M_p/m_e= (27/2)*(1/(alpha) -1) -1/3 = 1836.152654

looks fantastic, I wonder if there is any link to knots/Alexander polynomial trefoil."

Interesting but the trouble with producing formula for such mass ratios is that the proton is composite and its mass is the combined effect of many unconnected processes. Why would the answer be something you can easily calculate? To be convincing enough to make people take notice you would need accurate formulae for all hadron masses with similar expressions so that it becomes obvious that it cannot be a numerical fluke.

The knot stuff could be interesting but you would need to tell more.

[deleted]

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, I also had many misconceptions when I was young and naïve. I have an MPHIL in EE from Sussex, but since I have had many careers like in engineering, applied scientific research, business and many other activities.

I spent a year dealing with products from Silicon Graphics and Texas Instrument (speech), I was appalled in the end at what I found about the people. Only very (and I mean very) few people knew what was going on, even then I was not happy with the span of their knowledge and techniques. Before that I had a God like image of the people in these ultra-high tech companies. The same happened when I got involved in business.

I have always loved math and physics and read as much as I could which was limited considering my responsibilities. Then few years back when I got to a semi-retirement situation, I decided to give my real love much more attention. And surprisingly it wasn't long before I had a hit with my theory. I did not know Tegmark, Wolfram or Conway or many others. I knew the older ones like Wheeler and Guth. I had again this super god image of physicists. I thought to myself now here are the smart with high integrity people that I belong to. After some experience, I had to come down to earth and face realities, again for the last time.

We are all humans display all the negatives like inaptitude, jealousy, laziness, treachery and so on plus all the circumstances that control us. But we do have the good parts also which some people like to display like compassion and honesty, we do exist in a superposition!

Philip Gibbs

Physicists such as those you mention are very smart people, but it is true that there are no Gods. The foundational problems they (and we) are trying to solve are very hard and our limited human capacity is not adequate. It is only by working together and exploring all directions that progress can be made. The issue is that some ideas are ignored when they come from the wrong people.

It is always assumed that scientists do their best work when they are young. The truth is that if they dont do good work when they are young they are thrown out, and if they do do good work they are then burdened with teaching and admin duties.

The ideas are more important than the people and should be judged on their power and consistency alone.

[deleted]

agreed. I attribute my results from the intense vibe I got from all those who gave all they got.

My favorite from my own culture is Omar Khayyám

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Khayy%C3%A1m

Myself when young did eagerly frequent

Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument

About it and about: but evermore

Came out of the same Door as in I went.

And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky,

Whereunder crawling coop't we live and die,

Lift not thy hands to It for help--for It

Rolls impotently on as Thou or I.

[deleted]

As for my theory I will try not to say much until I have written the paper. The reason that I am late is that I have not put in all the other important results in my website and I have just came up with a method to do interactions in higher than 1D and hoping I can get new or more accurate results.

As for these formulas, you could say they might very well be a fluke if it wasn't that these fall out of simulation and there is more than one as you saw. And here I add another one all from the same system.

electron g-factor=(4m_e/3eh)*(2/(3*m_e*alpha) - 2*e^2 -1)

=2.00231934...

.. e=3(charge square),h actually h_bar=(e/alpha)^.5=20.2758.. m_e=.00054858

Of course, I know the standard theory of proton, but my system seems to only show the STABLE particles only as simple formulas.

But you are right I need to show the whole thing in one coherent system, and the onus is on me. The problem is that my system is based on simulation, although simple, but most people don't find the time to verify. I hope I can make much better presentation soon to ease all these difficulties.

More about your theory later. Reading that long book of yours.

Philip Gibbs

You dont need to rush but the main advantage of being early is that there is more time to discuss before the barage of essays arrive at the last minute.

[deleted]

Thanks for the good advice. If I make it in time good, if not I will be just as happy if you win.

[deleted]

In your book

http://vixra.org/pdf/0911.0042v1.pdf

You say this (notice the Highlighted third line)

"I imagined what might happen if the fixed linkage structure of the lattice was discarded. It could be made dynamic allowing any site to link to any other nearby site at random.

** Why not even allowing linkage to any site no matter how far away?**

For maximum simplicity each site should have no preferences for which other sites it likes to link to. When doing lattice gauge theory calculations, the path integral of quantum mechanics becomes a sum over different configurations of the field variables weighted by a factor related to the action. Dynamic links changing at random fit into the sum quite naturally. It now includes a sum over all the ways of linking up the lattice sites as well as a sum over the values of the field variables. You can even look for interesting physics in models where there are no field variables, just random links between events. This paints a rather strange image of the universe. Events and links between events would be fundamental objects but there would be no built in structure to space-time, no continuity, no dimension. The dynamics would be determined by the form chosen for the action as a function of the way the events were linked up. It might take into account the number of links meeting at each event, the number of triangles which form and other similar quantities which depend on the network of connections. For the right choice of action, lattices with a four-dimensional structure might be favoured and the structure of space-time could be determined dynamically. In some appropriate limit a continuum might emerge. If it could be done it would show how the laws of physics, including the nature of space-time, could be derived from much simpler equations than those normally used to specify them. Such speculations are often naive and unlikely to work out right, which is why Wheeler likened such models to a bucket of dust. Nevertheless you have to try these things out because if you do not make a few mistakes you never learn anything. The attractive thing about the idea for me was that you could simulate such systems on a computer and watch what happened. The results I got were not overly encouraging. There is no simple and natural way to specify the dynamics of the lattice so that it tends to form structures like space-time, unless you build in some preference for which sites want to join up. To go further it would be necessary to think more carefully about how space-time is expected to behave."

In my theory this is exactly what I do. Do that and you are basically done !!

That forth line and coupled with a rotational invariance scheme are the reason for nonlocality( which leads to spin just like Dirac discovered it by integrating relativity). But don't worry you also get the usual reason for causality.

A side note, I get the feeling that nobody is reading, do you?

More later.

[deleted]

Even before reading that last passage I had a strong gut feeling that your idea seems to somehow translate to mine but I could not pinpoint.

Here is just a quick explanation for my system as compared to yours.

In mine the links are random, their start(naturally random) defines some general particle position area (generally Compton length) and their end goes to other particles and randomly to all positions in-between. I interpret the sum of the line lengths as energy (after normalization). These lines only go from particle to particle and space is where the lines cross (i.e. created from particles). No space is defined outside the area directly of the opposing particles, otherwise the system becomes rotationally not invariant.

So in my system the particle positions can only be defined relative to others. So, I think the major difference is that my starting points are random themselves (and directly part of the link) unlike yours which seem to have been fixed and the links artificially attached to them.

Philip Gibbs

This was describing random graph models which were a good starting point for my ideas. They are good for understanding how space and time could be emergent. I originally hoped that space and time would emerge fairly naturally from random graph models but the simplest local interactions are not enough. It takes something more contrived or perhaps something less local such as long loops. There is still a lot that can be done with those ideas though.

A graph can be described by an adjacency matrix so it is natural to move on from random graphs to random matrices and extend the permutation symmetry [math]S_n[/math] to [math]U(N)[/math] gauge symmetry for large N. The next step from there is to Necklace Lie Algebras.

[deleted]

As a matter of fact I have seen few systems similar to the random graphs that we are taking about. The main reason why I think all the others "appeared" as non-workable is that time in space-time picture really complicated the issue, and rendered it difficult.

Example one:

http://www.fqxi.org/data/essay-contest-files/Shing_Connectivity_1.pdf

Example two:

In LQG paradigm, Smolin has a paper

The Plebanski action extended to a unification of gravity and Yang-Mills theory

http://arxiv.org/abs/0712.0977

says this

"The proposal of matter as the ends of long distance links needs more development."

The reason why my system works (I think), is that I started by saying what elementary elements I can have (for designing the universe) and after identifying them and possible operations using them and on them then I will map them to the physics. And it turned out that only lines constituting particles and their crossing naturally constituted space and time became clear that it is unphysical but represented the change of state. Empty coordinates have no meaning.

My advice is to get rid of time if you want your system to work at a fundamental level.

I will continue on to matrix and necklace later. And Knots.

[deleted]

For the sake of completeness. I must say that time as a fantom as it is, might have some treacherous role under certain conditions. Like Big Bang or the "start" of the universe. But I am not exactly sure at this time.

Philip Gibbs

The idea of wormholes being responsible for particles at each end with charge due to flux lines goes back to Wheeler himself in 1955 http://mediathek.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/mediathekPublic/dms/mediathek/pdf/Department1/Quantum-Gravity-Workshop/o1955Geons.pdf

The random graphs can use this idea if you have flux lines running along links. No need for charges then, just gauge fields

[deleted]

Yes, good old GEON. I have looked at it before but I have not had the time to analyze it and match it to my construction. What I have shown were just examples. There is another interesting one that may also be of an interest to you. Notice fig.5.

The Dirac - Kerr-Newman electron.

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0507/0507109v4.pdf

The author has even a recent paper that revolves around the same idea but adds superstring theory to it. And Twisters.

Complex Structure of the Four-Dimensional Kerr

Geometry: Stringy System, Kerr Theorem, and Calabi-Yau Twofold

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1211.6021.pdf

He even revives GEON in this paper (section 4)

Gravity vs. Quantum theory: Is electron really

pointlike?

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.0225.pdf

As a matter of fact my theory is nothing but a generalization of Buffon's needle which connects to other main concepts used in physics, but I am not exactly sure of what the connection exactly is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffon's_needle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_geometry

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_transform

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radon_transform

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_transform

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twistor_theory

[deleted]

In your matrix construction couldn't you assume that there are only two particles and see what happens then. Maybe you have to do some other simplifying assumptions.

Philip Gibbs

I like the Buffon's needle puzzle. The key observation is that the expected number of crossings when you drop a curve of any shape depends only on its length. So you replace the needle with a circle whose circumference is the length of the needle. The solution is then easy. Sometimes generalising a problem to something that looks much harder actually leads to the solution.

[deleted]

That quote is from page 167-168. I forgot to mention that.

Lev Goldfarb

Hi Philip,

Now that I'm here and am looking at your essay, I have the following two questions.

1."Acatalepsy . . . in philosophy, is incomprehensibleness, or the impossibility of comprehending or conceiving a thing." (Wiki)

Why do you want to emphasize the present messy state of affairs in physics, when the role of science is to seek transparency and insight? (I do remember what Einstein said about "simplicity".)

2. I found the following summary you give at the end of introduction.

"From layers of quantum uncertainty built upon fundamental information there is hope that spacetime and matter emerge in a natural way."

In my essay I stressed the "unacceptable ambiguity" of the term "information". So how does one understand your one-sentence summary (without going into the technical details), if its first half is quite ambiguous? ;-)

Philip Gibbs

Hi Lev,

I dont think thst definition of Acatalepsy reflects what the ancient philosophers were saying, although it is hard to be sure because there are no primary records. The definition I prefer is the one I gave at the top of the comments

"noun Philosophy. An ancient Skeptical view that no more than probable knowledge is available to human beings."

One form of Acatalepsy would be Bayesian logic, but I think you have to go further and accept that even the probabilities should be treated as uncertain, In the physics context we use quantum waver functions instead of probabilities. This does not mean that the world is incomprehensible, just that nothing about the world is certain.

I dont think the state of physics is messy, but perhaps you should give a specific example of what you mean before I can elaborate.

I dont regard simplicity as a hard principle, whatever Einstein may have said. Simplicity has its role but the only hard principles are logical self-consistency and consistency with observation.

I agree that "information" is an ambiguous term. If I could write a 20 page essay I might have said more about what I think of as information, but I had to chose to concentrate on matters where I think I have something original to say. I am using a very basic idea of information. It is just what can be said about the state of the universe. I am glad that others like you have tackled other aspects of the question.

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