The Tao of It and Bit by Cristinel Stoica

Hi Cristi,

I enjoyed your essay again. We have been in a few contests together.

Wheeler has what I call a genetic disease. He insists that quantum mechanical objects must move continuously with no gaps in space or time. And yes if this is true then he can have present events changing the past. This is reflected in your diagram of the delayed choice experiment.

Wheeler delays the removal of the second beamsplitter to insure that the photon is past the first beamsplitter. My objection to this is that Wheeler does not measure that the photon is beyond the first beamsplitter, he assumes it, given the way that photons move "continuously".

I believe there is good reason to believe that photons move discontinuously. A photon moves by appearing and disappearing. When the photon arrives at the first beamsplitter it disappears from space-time. It will reappear after a delay and at a distance that is its wavelength.

The conclusion that the present can change the past is then incorrect because the photon is not beyond the first beam splitter after the delay, it is actually non existent and waiting to enter existence again. When it does come into existence again, it is beyond the first beamsplitter.

Yes, this a different kind of QM. There is a logic behind it and experiments can be made. Please take a look at my essay. I would be interested in what you think of my attempt to destroy the uncertainty principle.

Thanks,

Don L.

Dear Cristinel Stoica :

I am an old physician and I don't know nothing of mathematics and almost nothing of physics,

But maybe you would be interested in my essay over a subject which after the common people, physic discipline is the one that uses more than any other, the so called "time". No one that I know ever said what I say over it and I am convince that I prove that with our clocks we measure "motion" and no "time.

Maybe you would be interested in my essay over this subject which after the common people, physic discipline is the one that uses more than any other.

I am sending you a practical summary, so you can easy decide if you read or not my essay "The deep nature of reality".

I am convince you would be interested in reading it. ( most people don't understand it, and is not just because of my bad English).

Hawking in "A brief history of time" where he said , "Which is the nature of time?" yes he don't know what time is, and also continue saying............Some day this answer could seem to us "obvious", as much than that the earth rotate around the sun....." In fact the answer is "obvious", but how he could say that, if he didn't know what's time? In fact he is predicting that is going to be an answer, and that this one will be "obvious", I think that with this adjective, he is implying: simple and easy to understand. Maybe he felt it and couldn't explain it with words. We have anthropologic proves that man measure "time" since more than 30.000 years ago, much, much later came science, mathematics and physics that learn to measure "time" from primitive men, adopted the idea and the systems of measurement, but also acquired the incognita of the experimental "time" meaning. Out of common use physics is the science that needs and use more the measurement of what everybody calls "time" and the discipline came to believe it as their own. I always said that to understand the "time" experimental meaning there is not need to know mathematics or physics, as the "time" creators and users didn't. Instead of my opinion I would give Einstein's "Ideas and Opinions" pg. 354 "Space, time, and event, are free creations of human intelligence, tools of thought" he use to call them pre-scientific concepts from which mankind forgot its meanings, he never wrote a whole page about "time" he also use to evade the use of the word, in general relativity when he refer how gravitational force and speed affect "time", he does not use the word "time" instead he would say, speed and gravitational force slows clock movement or "motion", instead of saying that slows "time". FQXi member Andreas Albrecht said that. When asked the question, "What is time?", Einstein gave a pragmatic response: "Time," he said, "is what clocks measure and nothing more." He knew that "time" was a man creation, but he didn't know what man is measuring with the clock.

I insist, that for "measuring motion" we should always and only use a unique: "constant" or "uniform" "motion" to measure "no constant motions" "which integrates and form part of every change and transformation in every physical thing. Why? because is the only kind of "motion" whose characteristics allow it, to be divided in equal parts as Egyptians and Sumerians did it, giving born to "motion fractions", which I call "motion units" as hours, minutes and seconds. "Motion" which is the real thing, was always hide behind time, and covert by its shadow, it was hide in front everybody eyes, during at least two millenniums at hand of almost everybody. Which is the difference in physics between using the so-called time or using "motion"?, time just has been used to measure the "duration" of different phenomena, why only for that? Because it was impossible for physicists to relate a mysterious time with the rest of the physical elements of known characteristics, without knowing what time is and which its physical characteristics were. On the other hand "motion" is not something mysterious, it is a quality or physical property of all things, and can be related with all of them, this is a huge difference especially for theoretical physics I believe. I as a physician with this find I was able to do quite a few things. I imagine a physicist with this can make marvelous things.

With my best whishes

Héctor

Hello Cristi,

We had a couple of interesting exchanges about June 1. Very much valued. I can now say I am now a "disciple" or "fan" of Wheeler. Following additional insights gained from interacting with FQXi community members, including you, I wrote on my blog the judgement in the case of Atomistic Enterprises Inc. vs. Plato & Ors delivered on Jul. 28, 2013 @ 11:39 GMT. I don't think you have read my essay yet but you can view the judgement.

Thanks,

Akinbo

Dear Cristinel,

I used taijitu sign in my work. I calculated the some value with bits. Yet I did not have the courage, to the symbol, draw anything. Is it in black point, bit in white, arbitrarily or has some meaning. Which? What is in the rest of symbol at the end of your article?

regards,

Branko

Dear Cristinel Stoica :

I am an old physician and I don't know nothing of mathematics and almost nothing of physics,

But maybe you would be interested in my essay over a subject which after the common people, physic discipline is the one that uses more than any other, the so called "time". No one that I know ever said what I say over it and I am convince that I prove that with our clocks we measure "motion" and no "time.

Maybe you would be interested in my essay over this subject which after the common people, physic discipline is the one that uses more than any other.

I am sending you a practical summary, so you can easy decide if you read or not my essay "The deep nature of reality".

I am convince you would be interested in reading it. ( most people don't understand it, and is not just because of my bad English).

Hawking in "A brief history of time" where he said , "Which is the nature of time?" yes he don't know what time is, and also continue saying............Some day this answer could seem to us "obvious", as much than that the earth rotate around the sun....." In fact the answer is "obvious", but how he could say that, if he didn't know what's time? In fact he is predicting that is going to be an answer, and that this one will be "obvious", I think that with this adjective, he is implying: simple and easy to understand. Maybe he felt it and couldn't explain it with words. We have anthropologic proves that man measure "time" since more than 30.000 years ago, much, much later came science, mathematics and physics that learn to measure "time" from primitive men, adopted the idea and the systems of measurement, but also acquired the incognita of the experimental "time" meaning. Out of common use physics is the science that needs and use more the measurement of what everybody calls "time" and the discipline came to believe it as their own. I always said that to understand the "time" experimental meaning there is not need to know mathematics or physics, as the "time" creators and users didn't. Instead of my opinion I would give Einstein's "Ideas and Opinions" pg. 354 "Space, time, and event, are free creations of human intelligence, tools of thought" he use to call them pre-scientific concepts from which mankind forgot its meanings, he never wrote a whole page about "time" he also use to evade the use of the word, in general relativity when he refer how gravitational force and speed affect "time", he does not use the word "time" instead he would say, speed and gravitational force slows clock movement or "motion", instead of saying that slows "time". FQXi member Andreas Albrecht said that. When asked the question, "What is time?", Einstein gave a pragmatic response: "Time," he said, "is what clocks measure and nothing more." He knew that "time" was a man creation, but he didn't know what man is measuring with the clock.

I insist, that for "measuring motion" we should always and only use a unique: "constant" or "uniform" "motion" to measure "no constant motions" "which integrates and form part of every change and transformation in every physical thing. Why? because is the only kind of "motion" whose characteristics allow it, to be divided in equal parts as Egyptians and Sumerians did it, giving born to "motion fractions", which I call "motion units" as hours, minutes and seconds. "Motion" which is the real thing, was always hide behind time, and covert by its shadow, it was hide in front everybody eyes, during at least two millenniums at hand of almost everybody. Which is the difference in physics between using the so-called time or using "motion"?, time just has been used to measure the "duration" of different phenomena, why only for that? Because it was impossible for physicists to relate a mysterious time with the rest of the physical elements of known characteristics, without knowing what time is and which its physical characteristics were. On the other hand "motion" is not something mysterious, it is a quality or physical property of all things, and can be related with all of them, this is a huge difference especially for theoretical physics I believe. I as a physician with this find I was able to do quite a few things. I imagine a physicist with this can make marvelous things.

With my best whishes

Héctor

Hi Cristi,

Thank you for a delightful description of quantum contextuality.

> Information may not be just what we learn about the world. It may be what makes the world.

In my essay Software Cosmos I construct a picture based on the simulation paradigm. This discrete computational model can answer many cosmological puzzles and has much in common with your "mathematical universe".

> This is why I think that the complete picture is not it from bit, but rather it from bit & bit from it.

My conclusion, "It from Bit, and Bit from Us" also takes in the important role of participating observer.

I hope you get a chance to read my essay, as I suspect you might find it to be a specific realization of your ideas about the cosmos; however, one that is not only mathematical, but computable.

Hugh

Dear Cristi:

Very nice essay! The idea that our world is fundamentally mathematical is very interesting but I always had one question: What is the role of time? Mathematical objects are timeless and it is not obvious to me how time would arise.

Also: Your axiom zero seems a bit too smart for me. Basically what it says is that the world is something. The fact that you use the language of logic then suggests that you are interested in logically consistent worlds. It would be nice to constrain the world a bit more, wouldn't it.

All the best.

Olaf

Dear Olaf,

Thank you for reading and commenting my essay. I remember reading and liking yours too.

About your question "What is the role of time? Mathematical objects are timeless and it is not obvious to me how time would arise."

Perhaps all physical theories we found so far can be described as dynamical systems. Knowing the state (and maybe a number of partial derivatives), the evolution equations give any future state, or the probabilities. Anyway, the evolution of a system is a path in the phase/state space. Our best theories so far admit such a mathematical description. The question is, should we add something to this, which is not mathematical, and would explain time? The state at this time contains you, and engraved in the cells of your brain, the memory that you asked me this question. Later, it will contain you, and in your brain, the idea that I replied. Both snapshots are timeless, yet both contain the memory and the anticipation of other snapshots. What else should be contained in these states, about time? A bookmark indicating the present moment, somehow similar to the needle of a pickup playing the disk on which is recorded the path in the phase space? I am not sure how this would help, since there has to be a bookmark at any moment, and they will become timeless too. Anyway, if there is a problem here, probably is the hard problem of consciousness. I am not prepared to discuss it.

About the axiom zero, I agree with you. The world is something, one of the possible logically consistent worlds. But I disagree with Tegmark's idea that a kind of anthropic reasoning can reveal that all possible worlds exist and ours is one of them. I think that our world is more than just one of them, and more constraints are needed. Doing physics means to explore these constrains, and if we will ever have the "final theory", it will be very constrained indeed. Perhaps we will ask, like Einstein, what choice had God when creating the universe? Yet, at this point, I feel that we know very little, and the things will take many unexpected turns until then, so I would like to be open to as many possibilities as I can.

Best regards,

Cristi

Dear Cristi,

What a lovely essay! It's as good a rendition of the delayed-choice experiment as I've ever seen.

My biggest worry is about the experimental verification of the violations of Bell-type inequalities. I worry that they are actually comparing correlated vs non-correlated probabilities rather than quantum vs classical mechanics. (See my rather lengthy answer to Mauro D'Ariano's comments under my essay.) For nonlinear classical systems can and do exhibit correlations that change their predictions for these inequalities so as to overlap with quantum correlations. (They, so to speak, are obeying Bayesian probabilities.) It this is really true, then I worry about the interpretations of the delayed-choice experiments.

Also, I'd be interested in your speculations about what Wheeler might have done had he been interested in nonlinear dynamics and/or chaos theory.

Again, congratulations on a wonderful essay.

Bill McHarris

Dear Cristinel,

We are at the end of this essay contest.

In conclusion, at the question to know if Information is more fundamental than Matter, there is a good reason to answer that Matter is made of an amazing mixture of eInfo and eEnergy, at the same time.

Matter is thus eInfo made with eEnergy rather than answer it is made with eEnergy and eInfo ; because eInfo is eEnergy, and the one does not go without the other one.

eEnergy and eInfo are the two basic Principles of the eUniverse. Nothing can exist if it is not eEnergy, and any object is eInfo, and therefore eEnergy.

And consequently our eReality is eInfo made with eEnergy. And the final verdict is : eReality is virtual, and virtuality is our fundamental eReality.

Good luck to the winners,

And see you soon, with good news on this topic, and the Theory of Everything.

Amazigh H.

I rated your essay.

Please visit My essay.

Late-in-the-Day Thoughts about the Essays I've Read

I am sending to you the following thoughts because I found your essay particularly well stated, insightful, and helpful, even though in certain respects we may significantly diverge in our viewpoints. Thank you! Lumping and sorting is a dangerous adventure; let me apologize in advance if I have significantly misread or misrepresented your essay in what follows.

Of the nearly two hundred essays submitted to the competition, there seems to be a preponderance of sentiment for the 'Bit-from-It" standpoint, though many excellent essays argue against this stance or advocate for a wider perspective on the whole issue. Joseph Brenner provided an excellent analysis of the various positions that might be taken with the topic, which he subsumes under the categories of 'It-from-Bit', 'Bit-from-It', and 'It-and-Bit'.

Brenner himself supports the 'Bit-from-It' position of Julian Barbour as stated in his 2011 essay that gave impetus to the present competition. Others such as James Beichler, Sundance Bilson-Thompson, Agung Budiyono, and Olaf Dreyer have presented well-stated arguments that generally align with a 'Bit-from-It' position.

Various renderings of the contrary position, 'It-from-Bit', have received well-reasoned support from Stephen Anastasi, Paul Borrill, Luigi Foschini, Akinbo Ojo, and Jochen Szangolies. An allied category that was not included in Brenner's analysis is 'It-from-Qubit', and valuable explorations of this general position were undertaken by Giacomo D'Ariano, Philip Gibbs, Michel Planat and Armin Shirazi.

The category of 'It-and-Bit' displays a great diversity of approaches which can be seen in the works of Mikalai Birukou, Kevin Knuth, Willard Mittelman, Georgina Parry, and Cristinel Stoica,.

It seems useful to discriminate among the various approaches to 'It-and-Bit' a subcategory that perhaps could be identified as 'meaning circuits', in a sense loosely associated with the phrase by J.A. Wheeler. Essays that reveal aspects of 'meaning circuits' are those of Howard Barnum, Hugh Matlock, Georgina Parry, Armin Shirazi, and in especially that of Alexei Grinbaum.

Proceeding from a phenomenological stance as developed by Husserl, Grinbaum asserts that the choice to be made of either 'It from Bit' or 'Bit from It' can be supplemented by considering 'It from Bit' and 'Bit from It'. To do this, he presents an 'epistemic loop' by which physics and information are cyclically connected, essentially the same 'loop' as that which Wheeler represented with his 'meaning circuit'. Depending on where one 'cuts' the loop, antecedent and precedent conditions are obtained which support an 'It from Bit' interpretation, or a 'Bit from It' interpretation, or, though not mentioned by Grinbaum, even an 'It from Qubit' interpretation. I'll also point out that depending on where the cut is made, it can be seen as a 'Cartesian cut' between res extensa and res cogitans or as a 'Heisenberg cut' between the quantum system and the observer. The implications of this perspective are enormous for the present It/Bit debate! To quote Grinbaum: "The key to understanding the opposition between IT and BIT is in choosing a vantage point from which OR looks as good as AND. Then this opposition becomes unnecessary: the loop view simply dissolves it." Grinbaum then goes on to point out that this epistemologically circular structure "...is not a logical disaster, rather it is a well-documented property of all foundational studies."

However, Grinbaum maintains that it is mandatory to cut the loop; he claims that it is "...a logical necessity: it is logically impossible to describe the loop as a whole within one theory." I will argue that in fact it is vital to preserve the loop as a whole and to revise our expectations of what we wish to accomplish by making the cut. In fact, the ongoing It/Bit debate has been sustained for decades by our inability to recognize the consequences that result from making such a cut. As a result, we have been unable to take up the task of studying the properties inherent in the circularity of the loop. Helpful in this regard would be an examination of the role of relations between various elements and aspects of the loop. To a certain extent the importance of the role of relations has already been well stated in the essays of Kevin Knuth, Carlo Rovelli, Cristinel Stoica, and Jochen Szangolies although without application to aspects that clearly arise from 'circularity'. Gary Miller's discussion of the role of patterns, drawn from various historical precedents in mathematics, philosophy, and psychology, provides the clearest hints of all competition submissions on how the holistic analysis of this essential circular structure might be able to proceed.

In my paper, I outlined Susan Carey's assertion that a 'conceptual leap' is often required in the construction of a new scientific theory. Perhaps moving from a 'linearized' perspective of the structure of a scientific theory to one that is 'circularized' is just one further example of this kind of conceptual change.