Gravity and the Nature of Information by Edwin Eugene Klingman

Dear Edwin,

I made two more responses to your thoughts in my own blog, and continue here on the connection between science and religion, which is touched on both above and below in your blog. It seems that we are ultimately driven to religious issues when we try to sort out the meaning of life.

[Note that my concerns that one of my responses to you had "disappeared" prove to be false, (or, at least, it reappeared) so ignore my comment in the second article about the previous one disappearing .]

As I have already said, I am hindered from fully understanding your essay because I do not understand the meaning of your equations, etc. But hopefully I can sense the direction you are working and raise meaningful issues and comments.

There are three major religious or metaphysical options, I think: the biblical, the secular, and the pagan views. Our natural tendency seems to be toward the latter two (which have a similar general pattern), not the biblical. And indeed, the Hebrew community, and then the Christian, have tended to slip continually back into a secular or pagan mode of believing. Yahweh is quite pointedly described as a "jealous" God, chastising us for wandering away from faithfulness to Himself. That would make sense only if the biblical view were true and the others false.

I remember being surprised when Carl Sagan indicated that he leaned toward Hinduism for his cosmic inspiration. Others in this contest have shown similar proclivities. My assumption up to the 1960's that paganism was dead proved to be quite in error. Secularism, I think, has proven to be the least stable of the three - being too impersonal and thus depersonalizing. The original Buddhism was atheist, in a way "secular", no personal gods, but people yearned for personality, and so ended up inventing thousands of them.

The question I want to address is whether one of the three cosmological options (pagan, secular, or biblical) has a better chance at making sense of life, with a reasonable cosmos in which science would make sense and flourish. It seems to me that the biblical worldview has the best chance at winning that cup.

Five reasons: (1) Pagan philosophy never produced a flourishing science of the empirical world because it inherently favored the intellectual world of abstract reason - Platonism, neo-Platonism, etc.

(2) Although the Greeks produced the science of epistemology (thinking about how to think), it tended to shun using that to understand the world of time and space, which they wanted to transcend - because it seemed to them too chaotic and unfriendly to invest time and energy to understand.

(3) Also Eastern religions, with their drive to transcend the violent and sad world of time and space never produced anything like empirical science.

(4) The empirical sciences took off only under the biblical worldview during the late Middle Ages.

(5) The cosmological argument for God provides a way to integrate the major issues of metaphysics, such as: possibility, existence, causality, epistemology, truth, personhood, community, the meaning of life, etc. I suspect that those things cannot be integrated outside the biblical worldview.

Your intent has been expressed as making no claims about original beginnings, though your comments tend to be Eastern-religion-friendly. I think that will happen whenever philosophy of science tries to find its own stability from within the circle of phenomenal existence. So, I do not think one can separate metaphysics (first beginnings) from physics - if metaphysics is the undergirding and explanation of physics, as I understand it to be. Your notion of gravity having awareness would itself raise metaphysical issues and have metaphysical implications, would it not?

So, my essay is a very foreshortened version of my explanation for that aspect of the biblical view of things, providing a metaphysical explanation for the rise of science, and thus whether its or bits are more fundamental. My answer is that neither are really fundamental, they both presuppose the biblical creator ex-nihilo, and that there is no way to reasonably explain either the cosmos or science (which requires the reasonableness of the cosmos) apart from the biblical cosmos.

One can restrict the field of inquiry to the secular view, as you do, for the sake of convenience, but the wider issues will assert themselves nevertheless.

I hope to get more into the discussion (before things close up) on whether things like gravity can be "aware". I am absolutely delighted at the spirit of the essays and authors generally, an attempt to find the truth of a serious matter before us, all with a good spirit and willingness to learn from each other.

BTW, I have mentioned a few times another website, "Common Sense Science", at www.commonsensescience.org. They believe themselves to be doing (with all the math included) a fundamental adjustment of relativity and quantum mechanics to fit a more traditional view of physics. I heartily recommend folks like yourself who understand the math taking a look at it. I would like to get responses as to whether they are doing a credible job or not. Their stuff would impact on the issue of this contest very directly, I would think. Philosophically, at least, I think they are doing well, addressing concerns I have had for a long time about the direction of physics (as indicated by the question of this contest).

Blessings, Earle

Greetings Ed,

I enjoyed being able to push your rating up a bit. Well done. Your high standing is well-deserved. I wish you the best of luck in the finals.

Have Fun,

Jonathan

I am late in commenting your article because I come back to it several times. I rate you 9. Just look formulas in my essay and comment it. That would be enough. Regards,

Branko

Dear Edwin Eugene,

As I promised in my Essay page, I have read your beautiful Essay. Here are my comments/questions.

1) As I told in my Essay page, I worked and still work on gravito-magnetism. Thus, I have a personal interest in your Essay.

2) You extend General Relativity by adding your C field. This theory reproduces GR equations, but it represents a Yang-Mills gauge theory of mass. I think that similar results could be, in principle, re-obtained in some extended theories of gravity like scalar-tensor gravity and f(R) theory. You could be interested to extend your non-linear approach in those cases too.

3) Recently, Fromholz, Poisson and Will reformulated the MTW's statement that "any physical theory originally written in a special coordinates system can be recast in geometric, coordinate free language" as "The principle of general covariance, upon which general relativity is built, implies that coordinates are simply labels of spacetime events that can be assigned completely arbitrarily (subject to some conditions of smoothness and differentiability). The only quantities that have physical meaning - the measurables - are those that are invariant under coordinate transformations. One such invariant is the number of ticks on an atomic clock giving the proper time between two events", see http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.0394.

4) I agree with your statement that all energy gravitates, but the problem is that, based on Einstein Equivalence Principle, the gravitational energy cannot be localized! This is in perfect agreement with Yau's statement and is also connected to Kauffmann's work recently noted by FQXi.

5) I think that solar system tests of gravity should put some constrains to the C-filed. In general, deviations from standard GR must be weak for a theory to be viable. Thus, I suggest you to extend your work in this direction too.

6) Concerning the linearization process, do you think that the C-field should enable more gravity-waves polarizations than the two standard polarizations of GR?

In any case, I found your Essay a bite provocative and also interesting. As I appreciate people who "think outside the box", I will give you a high rate.

Cheers,

Ch.

Hi Edwin,

I think yours is a terrific essay in so many ways, and so learned.

Your section entitled "Why do physicists 'believe' current theories?" was a bit of an eye-opener. But I must say I was amazed at the many similarities of viewpoint between your essay and my essay. But there are other similarities too. E.g. I was pleased that you mentioned "the concept of 'false' information", which I've often thought must be accounted for in a picture of reality. Also the idea that "only one real field existed initially...[that] could evolve only through self-interaction" - very interesting that there now seems to be evidence that gravity really does interact with itself, which seems to back up the idea behind your master equation.

I'm not sure what your "Number Generating System" numbers are. I wondered if they were in any way similar to the non-Platonic physically real numbers I tried to make a case for in my essay.

Another interesting point you make is: the fact that the universe naturally self organizes "is an anti-entropic characteristic that only gravity seems to exhibit-and living beings!"

I think your essay deserves to win a prize. Best wishes,

Lorraine

Dear Edwin Eugene Klingman,

And if the eUniverse was a work of art ?

The eUniverse conceiving the woman and the man, the flowers and the smiley faces, is a recognized Artist.

The evidence is there and will remain forever. The motion was obvious for Aristotle, also for Galileo, Newton and Einstein. What has changed is the understanding and interpretation.

For the eDuality the same thing : wave-particle, space-time, matter-antimatter, and so on ..

Everybody recognize that duality is everywhere. But without generalization, some do not agree that our eReality is binary. They refuse to believe, to recognize in the eReality of the eDuality, and that eDuality is our eReality.

The question is how to see, to understand and to interpret this eDuality, this blatant evidence, this shrill obvious fact.

Our eReality is made of evidence that we must know how to read.

The eUniverse is such as It is. We cannot fundamentally change It. It is our approach, our conception that must change.

Here comes a One Theory of eDuality, which is the most modern, and which concerns the whole eUniverse in its entirety, and in its smallest details, and that applies to all domains of human knowledge.

The Theory that is going to revolutionize the world of ideas. A new Science, quantitative and qualitative is going to emerge.

Such a statement has something shocking for the one who discovers or who hears for the first time about it. For me it is a eReality that I live since I discovered it, for years now, and I will publish soon.

The contest ends and I did not come to occupy the top rank. In all cases not with three pages of poetry as you say. In addition there was inside only remarks and not scientific declarations.

But what I assert results from my current work concerning this famous Theory of Everything.

But I took the opportunity for testing the ground and seeing of what the scientific community thinks on this subject.

Now that it's done I have yet to publish and prove.

So good luck to the rest of the program.

And sorry if something is badly translated by Google.

Good luck and best wishes,

Amazigh H.

Wonderful to see you finish in the top 10!

Good luck in the finals, Ed. May the expert panel find as much to like about your essay as I did. You deserve to win a prize this year. Very well done.

Have Fun!

Jonathan

Dear Edwin Eugene Klingman:

I am an old physician and I don't know nothing of mathematics and almost nothing of physics. As you can see my mind it is probably the opposite of yours, 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".

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

Dear Ed,

Thank you very much for your kind remarks concerning my essay and for your e-mail. I responded to some of this under my thread.

You write convincingly, eloquently, and overwhelmingly! I especially liked -- and, naturally, agreed with -- your first section. Physics in general does seem to be stuck in a rut. One of the most positive aspects of this contest is that it allows for the introduction of ideas that are "out of the box," and which provoke deeper investigation of what science is all about. Your essay does an admirable job of this.

I fear that my knowledge of General Relativity is somewhat superficial, so I don't have any sort of solid, "gut" feeling about its concrete, experimental aspects. (I'm still an experimentalist at heart!) Thus, I couldn't follow your arguments to much depth, but it seems that the use of the interplay between linearity and nonlinearity is well worth following up. My only worry at the moment is that it might be too general in coupling relativity with electromagnetism (and quantum mechanics?). Could you comment on this -- at your leisure, of course?

Now that the commenting and voting is past, I should have time to pursue things further. I'll look up your previous essay, and especially your books. Give me a few months, and I can respond more intelligently.

Best wishes,

Bill