An Acataleptic Universe by Philip Gibbs

Hi Philip,

I really like your approach that spacetime and matter should emerge in a natural way. I also like the idea that the key is mathematics of information redundancy bringing symmetry through algebraic geometry. I wouldn't disagree with your approach at all - my essay also has the Universe exist naturally.

Well done and keep up the great work with Vixra.

Antony

Philip,

You have a very refreshing writing style. Informative, non-confrontational, friendly and clear. For example you note [in 9506171] "This style of argument tends to be convincing only to those who already believe the hypothesis. It will not make many conversions." So modest, and gets it out of the way up front. There's nothing wrong with laying out the logic for those who pursue a particular path!

Thanks very much for the link to your 9506171 paper. I found it wonderfully informative. I've made notes and hope to organize them in a comment. You've clearly been considering "It from Bit" for quite some time, as well as the "Theory of Theories" I believe you and I were addressing essentially the same problem: Wigner's "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics for physics".

From the 1950's I was fascinated by computers, and in the late 60's the appearance of Medium Scale Integrated circuits (MSI) followed by the microprocessor, pulled me away from physics and in 1975 I moved from physics to computer design, but did not cease working Wigner's problem. From your essays, your comments, and 9506171, I gather you took more of a 'soft logic' approach, based on mathematics, whereas I took more of a 'hard logic' approach, based on logic underlying math, and physical reality underlying logic. Now, in 2013, we are still addressing the same problems, but we tend to come down on different sides based on our historical paths. The 'soft' side tends toward 'It from Bit' and the 'hard' side toward 'Bit from It'.

I hope you find my essay as fascinating as I found yours and your 'Small Scale Structure..' paper.

Best,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Philip,

I forgot to mention -- in response to Rodney Bartlett you wrote, on May 5 at 07:59:

"One bit I especially like is that the idea of particles from gravitational fields may return."

My model derives particles from gravity (not done in my current essay) and I provide references to related links (such as Burinskii).

Best,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Hey Phil,

When I read your essay from the "Digital or Analog" contest I started thinking about something Ben Goertzel had written about some time ago which he calls "infinite-order probabilities on a causal network." So then when I read this current essay with reference to Weizsacker and your demonstration of the Necklace Lie algebras my antenna really started to twitch (did you know a couple of engineers have developed a small pack they strap to the backs of hissing cockroaches which allows them to stimulate the cockroach's individual antenna with a small current hence causing the cockroach to turn left or right? They're able to steer the roaches through rubble on search and rescue missions; how cool is that?). Anyway, it turns out that Ben Goertzel published a short paper Modeling Uncertain Self-Referential Semantics with Infinite-Order Probabilities on his "infinite-order probability" concept in 2008 which was followed by a 2013 paper A Consistent Set of Infinite-Order Probabilities in the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning by David Atkinson and Jeanne Peijnenburg. I thought perhaps you would find these papers interesting, all things considered . . .

Hi Phil,

Just to let you know, there's another "viXra" entry in the competition, namely the essay of mine that got posted yesterday; I hope its ratings don't drag down the average for viXra papers by too much! I hadn't originally planned to enter; but after reading your excellent essay, in particular your discussion of the Holographic Principle and its relevance to the topic of the contest, I felt motivated to try and connect this principle to this topic in my own way; you are, of course, absolved of any responsibility for the results!

So, thanks for your essay, and for all your work (and blogging) at viXra!

-Willard Mittelman

Philip,

In saying, "Simplicity has its role but the only hard principles are logical self-consistency and consistency with observation" you certainly stand with me on common ground...

But would you also join me in the school of realism... e.g., that there is an objective reality independent of our observation of same, that a faithful representation of that external reality is presented to the mind by the senses,that what is presented to the mind by the senses has its foundation in reality, so there is nothing in the mind that did not enter through the senses?

Also, in a realistic metaphysics that includes the principles of non-contradiction and causality?

Causality may be a stumbling block, depending on whether 'emergent causality' refers to some causes of natural effects to be simply unknown... until discovered; or whether it refers to non-existent causes of such effects. If your position is the latter, then prediction with scientific laws is impossible.... Used in this sense 'emergent' becomes for science a fatal emergent-cy. Acceptance of the above means we have minimum common ground for discussion.

If the ground rules above are accepted, then consider:

I take GTR to be an extension of SR to include acceleration and gravitation, that reduces to STR in the 'neighborhood' of an observer. According to MTW, this is true in the tangent hyperplane to an observer's world line. IOW, space is locally flat near any observer.

But STR is an inconsistent system whose first axiom of covariant relative motion is experimentally refuted by the tests of Sagnac, Dufour&Prunier, Ruyong Wang et al, and the second axiom is logically disproved by light beams in opposite directions.... c c = c , with corollary 1 1 = 1. As logicians would say, "An inconsistent system is worse than just being wrong".. For by proving anything is true (or false), nothing can be proven true.

GTR is inconsistent .... whether linearized or not, whether energy is conserved or not, is moot.

Are black holes really credible, Phil? What solution to the Einstein field equations supports the existence of black holes in reality? Two issues to bear in mind are the following:

* All alleged BH solutions to the Einstein field equations pertain to a universe that is spatially infinite, is eternal, contains only one mass, is not expanding, and is asymptotically flat.

However, the hot big bang model pertains to a universe that is spatially finite (one case) or spatially infinite (in two different cases), of finite age, contains radiation and many masses (including some BH said to be primordial), is expanding, and is not asymptotically flat. Thus the BH model and BB cosmology contradict one another; they are mutually exclusive.

* There are no known solutions to the Einstein field equations for two or more masses and no existence theorem by which it can even be asserted that his field equations contain latent solutions for two or more masses.

Re: "...but the evidence for black holes is as good as anything we have in cosmology."

Is the evidence as good as the CMB anomalies in the recent Planck temperature survey that challenges the LCDM & Copernican principle with the Axis of Evil, the multiple multipole alignments with the local directions in space, etc?

Re:" the observation that the universe began from a hot dense state."

Not an observation, Phil, but an interpretation of data collected now, not when the universe began.

Re:"The laws of gravity, quantum mechanics and thermodynamics apply everywhere"

... if 'everywhere' means everywhere on Earth... Elsewhere is unknown. One example: The inverse square law of gravity does not seem to apply to galactic rotation predictions...

Re:"...non-locality does not violate the causality principle. More besides I do not agree that causality is an essential feature of predictive science." ......" Most people think that causality is fundamental. In these ways and others not covered in this essay my thinking is radically different from any other physicist."

To me causality is a self-evident principle of reality.... Give us an example of violation of causality, Phil, where a real event can have no cause.

Re:"I hope you will submit an essay that explains what you mean by that [aether] because it is not part of any theory I am familiar with."

The essay is on aether as an information channel, addressing the topic specified, not the nature of aether.

From other responses:

Re:"..but I don't think the answers require any kind of physical process like a soul to explain consciousness."

I'm wondering.... how would consciousness, memory and other activities of the mind be explained in physical and material terms?

All the best,

Robert

Hi Philip,

Just read your submission and I have two comments concerning it.

First of all, I want to thank you for the history lesson you gave concerning Noether's paper "Invariant Variational Problems". I am trying to study it, but your submission now gives me a place to place the paper in relation to GR.

My second point is more along the lines of Necklace Lie Algebra 101. I quote your submission; "A necklace lie algebra is a lie algebra built from copies of vector spaces strung together in chains. If the vector space is 2 dimensional you can picture elements of the algebra as necklaces of qubits, and more generally of qudits." The picture I am getting from your description doesn't exactly make sense. I will try to explain. My understanding is that qubits and qudits are one dimensional things. You are putting them in a 2 dimensional vector space and stringing them together. That adds up to three dimensions. Where is the fourth dimension?

I've read very few papers trying to digitize reality and the problem I keep running across is the encoding of spacetime. Yours is the first paper I've read that has gotten beyond the second dimension.

Jim Akerlund

Hi Philip,

Though ''observational evidence for the existence of black holes in our galaxy is highly convincing'' nothing indicates that a black hole actually does have an event horizon. If nothing can escape from behind the horizon, no photons nor gravitons, then you'd say that the mass inside the horizon cannot be expressed as gravity outside of it. If an outside observer cannot interact with what's inside of it so to him all positions within the horizon are physically identical, then you'd say that its diameter cannot be non-zero, that is, if a physical spacetime can be defined as a space where the lengths of rods and the pace of clocks is different at different points, however slightly.

Another point is that though energy is quantified, that does not mean that there is a universal minimum building block of energy or space.

According to Planck's law, in blackbody radiation there are more energy levels per unit energy interval at higher energies, temperatures, so we need more and more decimals to distinguish successive energy levels, the energy gap between subsequence levels can become arbitrarily small: though energy is quantified, there is no minimum limit to the size of the quantum, so the Planck length and Planck time etc. have no special significance. The Planck constant h is like the number 1 in mathematics, encompassing all values between 0.5 and 1.5, so if we can improve the accuracy of the measurement of the Planck constant at a higher energy and can add a further decimal to it, then we can write that number as 1.0, which encompasses all numbers between 0.95 and 1.05. So if in our equations we set h = 1, then every time we add a decimal to the Planck constant and set it again at 1, then we increase the magnifying power of our microscope with a factor 10.

Though there is no smallest distance, to what extent spacetime itself is detailed somewhere depends on the energy density in the area: the higher, the more detailed the spacetime area is or the higher the 'information density' is, whereas the emptier it is, the less defined it is, the smaller its information content is.

Though ''Energy conservation in general relativity is real, exact, non-trivial and important'' indeed, the problem is that its creation at the big bang (if and when we actually do live in a big bang universe) constitutes a huge serious violation of the same law.

As to ''Redundancy is in fact the key ingredient of the holographic principle'', if the distance and relative motion of particles affect the properties they 'observe' each other to have, the 'bits' they exchange, then a particle at all times is completely informed about the nature, position and motion of all other particles within its interaction horizon, its universe. A particle then is like a hologram fragment which contains all info of the entire hologram: like the information of a hologram fragment is vaguer as it is smaller, the information a particle carries or represents is smaller, less definite as its properties are less defined, that is, as its energy is smaller, as its interaction horizon, its universe is smaller, less defined, in which case there's no redundancy.

As the observer and his observational devices are part of the particle's universe so are themselves depicted in the hologram fragment he inspects, he cannot but affect what he observes as he involves it in an observation interaction. If an experimenter can affect whether the answer he asks a system with some device is yes or no, then answers aren't as unequivocal, as absolute as Wheeler wants to believe is possible.

''But no amount of philosophizing can tell us if this is how the universe works. There is no point in asking where the information comes from, or where it is stored.'' If the universe would only contain a single charged particle so it wouldn't be able to express its charge, then it cannot be charged itself, meaning that a property (it) only exists, is preserved in interactions (in the exchange of bits) between charged particles, so the bits are no more fundamental than the its.

By regarding the universe as an ordinary object which has particular properties as whole, as 'seen' from the outside, so to say, we in fact say that it owes its properties to something outside of it, interacts with, i.e., that it has been created by some outside intervention, in which case the holy grail Wheeler is looking for is beyond his reach.

I think that the universe can only be comprehended from within, if we realize that particles and particle properties, its, are as much the cause as the effect of their interactions, of the exchange of bits.

Regards, Anton

Dear Philip,

I have read your article, but afraid I understand it not so well. The universe really accelerates (I mean its expansion that maybe only with acceleration, that I got with own methods.)

I just asking you to look mine article, hoping it will interested you. I will very thankful to get some your comments.

Best wishes,

George

ARTICLE

Dear Philip Gibbs

The essay is very interesting.But when It from bit - where are bit come from?

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1802