The Tao of It and Bit by Cristinel Stoica

Eckard

"Of course, as an EE, I am familiar with the impossibility to measure something without disturbing it"

There are two aspects to that statement:

-the practical which you allude to, ie the degree to which measuring accurately and comprehensively captures what actually occurred

-the more fundamental point that measuring/observing/etc, cannot affect what occurred, because it has already occurred. And, whilst that is sufficient to dispense with this false notion that observation/consciousness/etc has a physical role, suffice it to say that the interaction involves a physically existent representation of what occurred anyway, and not the occurrence itself, which is usually light.

Paul

Cristi

"If by "happened" we understand..."

Well it is not possible to observe something which has not happened. And my concept of observe includes valid hypothesis, ie virtual sensing. That is, what demonstrably could have been observed had it been possible to do so.

The concept of time revolves around the rate at which alteration occurs. That is, there is no time (because there is no alteration) within a reality. Time relates to a feature of the difference between realities, ie speed of 'turnover'. Timing being the measuring system whereby we calibrate it by comparing different rates and identifying the difference. Events can only occur in a sequence. And presuming that something very bizarre does not happen to light in its travels, then we will receive a light based representation of the sequence in the right order. The frequency is more likely to be affected. Existence can only occur this way, which again points to the fact that whilst 'classical' is not understood properly, QM is based on a flawed premise. Nothing can occur 'out of sequence', it is impossible. Neither can something be in different spatial locations at the same time, or in different states at the same time. They must be different. The problem is with our inability to observe/discern what is actually happening at the existential level. Reality does not guess or choose anything. We are the problem, and people should stop adjusting reality to overcome it.

"But each one of them, including mine, had to start from a point which contradicts common sense"

And there is the alarm bell for the fact that the theory is wrong. What is, physically, a wavefunction, it is certainly more than one physically existent state.

Paul

Rob

Re cars: exactly. There is an understandable human view that the future can be affected. But there is no existent future to be so affected. What is actually happening is that the outcome is different from what otherwise would have occurred, because the causes were different from what otherwise might have prevailed. Which is really a meaningless statement in so far as, by definition, any outcome is the result of preceding causes, but it is imperative to dispense with this notion that physics can occur out of sequence.

Paul

Cristi

The answer to your specific question is I do not know. But the point is that something happens, ie it is knowable if we had the wherewithall to discern it. Put the other way around, nothing happens which is contrary to how existence occurs, ie there is no pre-existent future, neither does observation cause a particular existence from a range of options, etc, etc.

Paul

Cristi

There is no mystery, I am not a physicist, never claim to be one, and never make assertions about what is physically happening. I speak in the generic, and at a simple level, which is not philosophy. How what I am saying, generically, manifests physically, is an entirely different matter. But what I do not do is alter the rules whereby existence occurs and we detect it, in order to get a metaphysical theory to work.

Paul

Hi Eckhard,

thanks for the link, the paper is interesting for me too.

I read it and i think it is yet too technical for the average reader to understand. At least i didn't understand what is the "true" reason for the interference pattern to disappear in the case the screen is moved out of the experimental setup (Appendix A: Wheeler's thoughts).

Can anybody explain it to me in more intuitive words, with destructive and constructive interference instead of conditional probabilities and all that stuff. Means, that stuff is highly abstract but i want to know how one can put it in terms of physical processes (be it with or without time ordering).

Thanks in advance,

Stefan

Dear Christi,

your essay was an interesting read. I think your realization that ultimately, all we know of the world are relations is very deep, and is in a certain sense at the foundation of my own thinking, as well. However, I am less certain about the 'book containing every truth': this seems to me to run into trouble with the Kochen-Specker theorem (and related ones). In particular, if such a book existed, it would imply the existence of a global probability distribution such that its marginals give the outcomes for every possible set of observations; but this is known to be at variance with quantum mechanics. Put differently, while classically we can identify every object with a list of properties, of propositions true about this object, in quantum mechanics, no such list can exist. Any theory for which such a list exists necessarily obeys Bell's inequalities (and Kochen-Specker and Leggett-Garg inequalities, which are from this point of view just variations on a theme). (I think this connection was probably first worked out by Fine.)

Nevertheless, your big book seems to be very much a 'hot idea' in philosophy at the moment, after having been somewhat maligned after the 'noble failure' of Carnap's "Der Logische Aufbau der Welt"; three books have appeared in the past year dealing in various ways with the possibility of deriving all truths about the universe from some 'compact class' of basic truths: David Chalmers' "Constructing the World" (which is the only one I've read... well, I should say 'almost read'), Theodore Siders' "Writing the Book of the World", and John Heil's "The Universe as we Find It", so you're certainly at the bleeding edge in that respect! (Just in case you're interested.)

In any case, as a fellow PhD student in physics, I wanted to emphasize one point you made, though only somewhat implicitly, and only tangentially related to the main thrust of your essay: that of the necessity for courage in the scientific endeavour. Building on the Kuhnian model of scientific revolution, one might say that the ordinary, stick-to-the-mainstream method of science fails to produce the most important new ideas: it only clusters around local maxima, so to speak. For true innovation, one must sometimes leap beyond what seems reasonable, or even sensible within the current paradigm. Of course, many, if not most, such leaps will lead to nothing, which is why one needs courage to make them---a courage which John Wheeler certainly possessed, as you have shown in your essay.

Cristi

No, it means I have not got the knowledge to explain it, that does not make it a mystery. And no experimentation can differentiate one physically existent state, because of the degree of complexity and duration involved, along with the fact that we only receive a light based representation of it anyway, which makes it more impossible than it already was(!).

So even if I had more knowledge, I would not be inclined to junk what must be how physical existence occurs, for an alternative explanation which cannot possibly support existence, in order to accommodate what appears to be the result of experimentation, when experimentation cannot differentiate existence at the existential level.

Paul

Dear Cristi,

"it comes from experiment, not from a metaphysical theory." Wasn't Wheeler's original experiment just a Gedankenexperiment intending to support his theory?

I understand your intention to not get suspected as someone who questions Einstein's theories while you simultaneously maintain your desire to explain what are so far mysteries to you. Yes, George Ellis and many others were successful trying the same in the contests. However, in reality being a bit pregnant is impossible. I have to admit that I was mislead e.g. by Feist's experiment. The truth is sometimes unexpectedly simple.

Paul,

I am not interested in quarreling with you. We agree in many decisive points. However, I still tell you that in any (stationary) electric measurement the non-ideal impedance of the instrument disturbs the voltage or current to be measured. The instrument correctly measures a quantity that in reality belongs to the disturbed case. Knowing the error, we may exactly calculate the undisturbed reality. The latter possibility also holds for two-way non-Poincaré synchronization.

Eckard

Eckard

I agree with you, as I said in my post. But this practical problem is not what QM alludes to. It does not start with the premise that physical existence occurs independently, in a sequence of definitive discrete physically existent states. And then accept that trying to identify those experimentally is fraught with practical issues. Indeed is it impossible for us to differentiate such states experimentally. Rather QM asserts that there is some form of indefiniteness inherent in phyical existence. Which is quite obviously wrong, because existence cannot occur that way, apart from the fact that observation/measurement can have no effect on the physical circumstance because it has already occurred.

Paul

Jochen

"while classically we can identify every object with a list of properties"

But we cannot. There is no object, physically. That is a conception at a much higher level than how reality occurs, based on certain superficial physical attributes. Which is why the classical/intuitive view has been denigrated, because it has not been followed through to its proper logical conclusion,But left at the ordinary everyday way of seeing things. And usurped by an incorrect view. Physical existence only occurs in one form.

Paul

Christi, yes, I think I missed the importance of your 'global consistency principle'. Indeed, if you intend for the big book to contain truths that include their proper (measurement) context, then you avoid the difficulties with Kochen-Specker etc.

I think I see two ways how this might work: one is a kind of 'superdeterminism', where what measurements are performed is fixed for any given instance; the other amounts to the book containing truths that are conditional on the performed measurements. It seems to me that you advocate the former strategy: the world is, in a sense, given by an action principle; it is like the famous catenary problem, wholly determined by initial and final conditions. The latter strategy is essentially what I've argued for: the book only contains relative facts, of the form 'if such-and-such a measurement is performed, the outcome is this-and-that', which then sort of co-exist peacefully. So maybe our perspectives are not that far from one another!

Also, somewhat amusingly, both solutions have a distinctly Leibnizian character: yours pertaining to his notion of the 'best of all possible worlds', while mine relates to his overall relational philosophy.

Paul, in a classical world, you can certainly always draw up a list of properties, and then clarify by that what you mean when you talk about 'an object'. What happens at the foundational level doesn't really have a bearing on this.

Hi Cristi,

In your essay you have touched the roots of science. Excellent and interesting. I have read it twice and I would like to comment barely every sentence but I don't want to torment you so much. So let me please to leave only a few comments of my choice.

1. You find compelling the idea that our universe is mathematical in the sense of relations. This is widely accepted that only waves or rather wavepackets give an information about the universe, the information which is accessible to observers (e.g. gamma rays, sound waves etc.). Then let us assume that Axiom Zero sounds like that: primordial conformally flat spacetime is the 'fabric' of everything. Everything could be derived from the spacetime and everything could vanish in it. Assuming then that a wave is only a spacetime dynamic deformation (also Clifford's and Wheeler's concepts) then the mother of all possible worlds could be our conformally flat spacetime (details in references to my essay concerning relations between it, bit and reality). Consequently the observer is also a wavepacket (deformed spacetime) so its participatory role is his own wavepacket's interference with another wavepackets. If we assumed that any spacetime deformation is unlimited (to some extent it deforms the entire spacetime e.g. in Gaussian distribution mode, due to its elastic and homeomorphism properties) than we could say that this is our participation without a need for many worlds interpretation!

The geometry is a part of mathematics and is completely about relations. But does the spacetime need a mathematics to exist? Or only we (observers) need a communication tool? This tool helps us to replicate our genes successfully (Darwin's survival of the fittest). I have touched the spacetime / geometry issue truly because my memes (information) try to replicate.

I know that this is only your essay's intro and not the point where you have noticed that Wheeler and his students wanted to obtain the mass and the electromagnetic field as effects of the topology of spacetime. They failed. But I have to comment shortly. Their problem was they were chasing geon solutions to the vacuum Einstein field equation (partially made by Brill and Hartle in 60's). A major issue regarding geon was whether it was stable and it was not a quantum-mechanical entity. This wrong approach has buried the very idea that the mass and fields can be effects of the topology of spacetime. In order to combine statistical nature of QM with geometrodynamics (any kind) we need the general law of survival of the stable. Quanta are just that stable wavepackets so we are able to perceive them.

2. Regarding your version of the delayed choice experiment the most interesting from my point of view is what is going on at the mirror A. I have proposed a simple spin experiment to find out and at the same time to make my concept falsifiable (details in references to my essay).

3. '...it seems very plausible that there may be a (possibly infinite) collection of propositions which contains all the truths about the universe. In this case, we have a theory (of everything). To the theory we can associate a model, in the sense of model theory.'

Such a model would contain propositions that are computable and deterministic. But if the universe is SOC system? The universe evolution (naturally evolving self-organized critical system) is non-computable and non-deterministic.

Jochen

"Paul, in a classical world, you can certainly always draw up a list of properties, and then clarify by that what you mean when you talk about 'an object'. What happens at the foundational level doesn't really have a bearing on this"

Well, apart from the fact that I said the opposite is true, ie there is no 'object', why is it that the 'classical' view does not deal, or could not deal if properly understood, with the foundational level? Indeed, why are there two levels, somewhat wierd isn't it that physics has two explanations for the same thing, ie physical exstence?

Paul