On The Road Not Taken by Akinbo Ojo

Dear Akinbo,

You must have had a hard time in your youth deciding whether to be a philosopher, lawyer, physicist or physician. :-) I hope you agree by now that the world is most in need of caring physicians.

Your intellectual journey down the fork less traveled (Frost is my favorite poet; "The Road not Taken" may have been the first poem I learned by heart many years ago) is rich with promise. One doesn't hear of Leibniz's monads that often anymore -- I do recall Hermann Weyl's agreement with Leibniz that nature can only be truly understood in the behavior of the very small, so you're in good company.

I would make a note that the mathematical point at infinity is actually realized in the compactification of the complex plane, which shifts the discrete and probabilistic measure functions of the complex Hilbert space to the continuous and deterministic functions of a topological model. You might want to look into that to help further strengthen your argument.

Something else that caught my eye in regard to Newton's idea of spatial translation: " ... unless we postulate that there are two spaces that everywhere coincide, a moving one and one that is at rest, so that the movement of a part of the moving one involves a translation of that item from the corresponding part of the resting one to a different part of the resting space ... That is crazy (translator's inclusion) ... " I have to disagree with the translator's editorializing -- Newton's conception is not crazy; it follows directly from his belief in absolute space and absolute time. The duality is necessary -- which Einstein fixed, with Minkowski's model of continuous spacetime, in which neither space nor time are independently real, but rather preserve physical reality in a union of the two.

Thanks for your comments in my forum, and expect an appropriately high score from me.

All best,

Tom

Hi Akinbo,

I have answered some of your questions in my blog

Cheers,

Patrick

Greetings Akinbo,

I want to take a moment in this e-mail to address the key question you left me in a general way, here rather than on my forum. I've still not made it through your essay, but your intriguing and delightful questions bear some attention, and have been unavoidably a part of my contemplations of late. I'll talk here about learning how to count and measure. This is a key part of the cognitive science research I've been engaged in the last 8 years or so. As I point out in my essay, an early cognitive landmark is grasping object constancy, but children up to a certain age have an endless appetite for games of peek-a-boo, where you hide and then appear to the child's delight. So there is a transitional period for learning to distinguish clearly between none and one, and to understand the persistence of objects (and people).

Just so we are clear (addressing the topic of your essay); I've never quite bought into the point-particle concept, and have always thought things had to have an extent and/or underlying structure - to exist in spacetime. In order to exist, particles and composite objects must possess duration or extent in time, as well as being extended in space - in my view. So I don't adhere to that part of Plato's reasoning. So to continue...

Distinguishing none from one, while it is a prelude to counting, also evokes a different but related skill - the ability to distinguish none from one, or a few, or from many, and from a very large number - magnitude range estimation. During this same developmental stage, however, children are also learning distance range estimation - through triangulation. There is a natural connection in this to principles of constructive and projective geometry, getting a sense of whether various things have size or thickness or depth. Children must learn the rules of dimensionality. In a lecture I attended by Alfie Kohn; I heard a wonderful story about how a group of children learned by being guided to playfully discover for themselves about standard units of measurement. At first; the teacher didn't provide rulers or tell the kids how to measure, but instead they posed a challenge - the boat had to be big enough to fit everybody in the class - and let them figure out how to do it.

There is a connection between the developmental or learning processes above and the hierarchy of smooth, topological, and measurable objects and spaces. Smooth relations admit fields and waves, topology is for objects that have a face, surface, or hypersurface, and the property of measurability arises only when you have two or more such objects to compare sizes. So there is a natural progression from continuity to distinct and separate identity, and for the verifiability or knowability of same. In my view, the way we learn about these things parallels how nature unfolds form. And it is certain that learning the difference between none and one helps the child to then learn how to count as well as to estimate magnitude, but that is grasped in stages.

All the Best,

Jonathan

Akinbo,

Thank you for a great submission. Very well structured/readable. Interesting parallel between 1,0 and what I understood to be Monad Pairs (?). I think the idea that space substrate itself could be a giant Boolean Network of Monads is a model that may prove to be fruitful. Correct me if I'm a bit off here.

I also responded to your questions under my submission if you care to take a look @ that as well.

All the Best,

John

Akinbo My Friend,

I want you to understand me rightly, and out of respect I am posting it here. While I acknowledge that sometimes life reduces chices down to either/or decisions, the tendency to assume this applies more generally is a harmful logical flaw prevalent in modern society, because it fails to ask "Is there a middle path?" In more detail; sometimes the middle is excluded erroneously, in other cases the fact there are multiple choices is not considered, and in some cases there is a virtually continuous range of choices - where sometimes our choice among these cases is determined by how we interact with the system. According to an article in August's Scientific American by Meinard Kuhlmann; that sometimes applies for the choice of 'particles vs vacuum' which begs the question "Is there a particle or no particle?"

I first read about the hierarchy of objects and spaces as a point made in passing by Alain Connes, in one of his papers about non-commutative geometry. Measurable is a subset of topological, which is a subset of smooth - in relating the categories of well-defined spaces. This point has more than passing importance, however, to people who study differential geometry and topology. In some cases; one can assert that the boundary between stable conditions or well-defined regions is a fractal. That is; there are interpenetrating regions of yes and no, or black and white, as in an M.C. Escher artwork. So while sometimes a simple yes or no will suffice; sometimes a more subtle answer is called for.

The studies begun at Tübingen, and run by the German Psychological Association for a number of years, showed a marked decline in the perceptual acuity in discerning shades of gray and other colors, for people at the end of the study vs the beginning. Early on more than 200 shades were easily distinguished, and later participants could discern half that - focusing mostly on bright colors. I would hate to imagine a world where everything had to be reduced to yes or no, black or white.

All the Best,

Jonathan

Dear Akinbo,

You have made the relationship between It and Bit quite explicit in your elegantly argued essay and finally have said that both are from each other and hence of equal importance for us. This is also what I have said in my essay while concluding. You have logically based your argument on the concept of 'monad' as fundamental indivisible entity and listed some of its attributes and also have identified it and its attributes with both It and Bit. You have historically analyzed the origin and development of the concept of monad and its current application to contemporary problems in physics and successfully explained the notion of motion with the help of diagrams. It is good to note that there are 10^180 bits of information in the universe derived from the concept of monad. I would like to rate your lucid essay with an excellent rating after you read my essay and post your comments on it in my thread. http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1827.

Best regards,

Sreenath

As you might imagine, ...

That should be 'sometimes life reduces choices.' I'm sorry for any confusion.

Jonathan

Dear Akinbo

I rated your essay july 11 5 grade.

Hi Akinbo,

Thank you for reading my essay. While it is hard to tell what you precisely have in mind( I have read yours many times), there seems to be some similarity between our theories in a specific area which is particle propagation. My theory follows standard QM which does not have easy interpretation in that regard. However, I am researching this issue in my system which seems to somehow include a concept that is called Feynman checkerboard, which has a sophisticated version of your idea.

just google " feynman checkerboard model", you will find loads of information, but you have to read a lot to see the similarity to your system.

My essay is all about how this interaction arises, please read carefully the first 3 sections. Of course, my essay was written for an academic person with extensive experience in QM in mind, so I have not spelled out everything clearly. Now, in classical physics the charge e is just a numbers assigned to a particle that enters the equation where 1/r is postulated via experiments. In QFT a similar but more sophisticated in the sense that now 1/r law is not postulated but derived (through the notorious virtual particles concept). Zee in his QFT in a nutshell book called that the greatest discovery in physics. Other theories like String and others describe charge as again a sort of abstract math like windings and such.

In my theory charge is a dynamic quantity that arises from the interaction and not the other way around. There is no positive and negative particles as such, it was forced upon standard physics because of the experiment and model strategy. It is all about the line intersection concept which is the basis of interaction and hence the rise of charge and the associated expectation value change corresponding to force.

Gravity is a bit harder because the weak force it produces making the numbers fluctuate highly. However I state my conjecture in the essay, which is when the lines meet head on at Lp. But why Lp? I leave that for the second season episode!!

Finally I have rated your essay very good for your nice try and good active participation.

Adel

Dear Dr. Ojo,

Your essay offers a very fascinating approach to information and fundamental reality. As I mentioned in reply to your interesting questions on my page, I like discussions about monads and infinities, and think these to be very fundamental. Although the infinitesimal and the infinite may seem as opposites, that in fact really links them. I also very much enjoyed the poetry and theatrical setting you provided, while still being very clear and scientific. Have you had a chance to check out Lee Smolin's new book, 'Time Reborn' ? It also offers insight into some of the concepts you mentioned, like the platonic idea of the world composed of imperfect versions of perfect models, and also Leibniz's viewpoints.

Also, I wanted to address that second question you asked about the binary possibilities in Wheeler's quote, in view of inspiration from your essay: perhaps another way of casting the binary choices, is that they represent the infinite and the infinitesimal. The choice of '1' or 'on' or 'yes' all mean the same thing - completeness. It's there and it's whole. But this is an infinite change from being 'off'. Likewise, the choice of '0' or 'off' or 'no' all mean the same thing - an absence of wholeness or there-ness. It may sound similar to non-existence except that the "acknowledgement of the absence of something" is yet something too, but only as a starting point and that's it. This is I think similar to the monad ideas you brought forward, and it relates to the infinitesimal, that is, the starting point per se.

Fundamentally, this describes why only two states are logically possible, and how they would relate to each other. It also could lead to the nature of dualism in physics which touches on so many topics.

Thanks for an inspiring essay, and I rated it highly. Also, I'm not sure if you also had a chance to rate mine after you reviewed it but I hope you get a chance if not already. Thanks again,

Steve Sax

Hello again Akinbo,

I wanted to mention a few things. First off; as with Tom, Frost's 'The Road Not Taken' is one of my favorite poems and I also like the musical arrangement by Randall Thompson, which I have performed many times. And secondly; I told a story above of attending a lecture by Alfie Kohn, where he told the story of children learning to measure through guided play.

Though that evening was the first time I ever went to the James Earl Jones theater, and I was not certain exactly where to go, but for the most part I did not travel by the road. I went through the woods (not yellow, but...). There is a road in the woods too, that once carried horse-drawn carriages. To be honest, I took the road the last part of the way, but not the whole distance.

At the same event where I met 't Hooft, there was a lecture by Marni Sheppeard about the value of Ternary logic in QM - which of course sends us down the middle path sometimes. Right now I am sad, because Marni (Kea in the blogs) is struggling - but she is brilliant! So every once and a while; I wish those was a victory for those who travel the untrammeled road, walk the middle path, or insist that it is best to consider the third option.

Regards,

Jonathan

Akinbo,

Very nice article. I read it with great interest and ranked it accordingly. For writing your program with monads, your may find the following invention of magnetic racetrack memory to be interesting, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racetrack_memory

Best wishes,

Brian

Sorry my friend..

Marni was a participant in the very first FQXi contest and said; never again. I met her at FFP10, the same conference where I talked to Gerard. Let me just say that she is a brilliant physicist, and her PhD advisor was John Baez, but Kea has not found her niche, and no Physics related positions appear to be available to her right now. This is very sad, and a loss for the community, in my opinion. You can find some of her papers on viXra, if you are interested.

I have answers to the questions you left for me, and I'll try to enter them on my page tonight or in the AM.

All the Best,

Jonathan

Your answers are there, Akinbo.

You can find them on my essay page. Thank you for your kind interaction.

Have Fun!

Jonathan

Dear Akinbo,

Very good realistic argument on the topic.

I think monads have extensive applicability to integrate discrete with continuum. For example, natural transformation of strong monads may express the gravitation as a tensor product in string-matter continuum scenario, while three-dimensional structures of tetrahedral-branes emerge on eigen-rotations of string-matter segments. In that, to define the unit of mass we have to adapt Planck length as the length of fundamental string-segment that may be a monad in this continuum scenario that ascribes an eternal universe.

With best wishes

Jayakar

Dear Akinbo

I'm sorry I couldn't comment on your essay before. My duties at work demand considerable time. I found the topics of your work very interesting, I'm glad you had called my attention to your work. The notion of space is still one of the most debated in both physics and the philosophy of physics. From the ontological point of view, there are many conceptions of space. There is more less a wide consensus that space is either a substance or a mesh of relationships of objects. One can spend a lot of time discussing this two apparently irreconcilable viewpoints but at the end what matters for theoretical physics is to give a mathematical and consistent formulation of space.

I don't follow the current view of space represented by non-Euclidean geometry. Rather I upheld the view that space is a substance, a material field. In order to make this view consistent, the key is reconceptualize the notion of particle in terms of the notion of quasiparticle or solitons. In my view space is like an ocean and particles are only excitations of the ocean. This ocean is the medium for the quasiparticles and electromagnetic fields to move and interact. From this ocean quasiparticles are created and so on. The theory assumes that space is a continuous fluid in the sense of Descartes aether.

You may wish to see this video so you have an idea of what a particle is in my view.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyjwZ39EDmw

I wish you good luck in the contest

Best Regards

Israel