Dear Jonathan,

Thanks. I'm also happy to see that you made it. In fact, most of those that I hoped would make it did so, with the exception of a few very excellent essays, that did not. It is hard to understand how excellent essays do not make the cutoff, but that happens every year.

As occurs every year, the stimulation of new ideas and interactions with great people make this contest worth the time and effort it requires.

Best to you and all of my FQXi friends,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

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

    Dear Bill,

    Thanks for your response and your kind words. I knew that we shared several ideas about the current state of physics, having read your essay and other publications. And apparently about human foibles and fashion. As I noted, I'm excited about your perspective on nonlinearity as potential source of 'weirdness' in QM.

    I can't tell from your comment whether you are familiar with gravito-magnetism or are confusing it with gravity plus electromagnetism. The 'magnetic' aspect of gravity is analogous to but completely separate from electromagnetism. As indicated in my essay, the gravitic C-field is sourced by mass density (in motion) and I claim that electrons and quarks are arguably the densest mass in the universe. This seems to have been ignored, along with the nonlinear nature of the field. If the nonlinearity is not taken into account the field is considered too weak to have much effect. However I believe the nonlinearity, combined with the extreme density, do produce effects, and I am optimistic that my approach will produce quantitative results, not just a qualitative explanation of current anomalies. If you read my previous essay, The Nature of the Wave Function (also suffering from a nine page limit) you may find a better explanation of how the C-field relates to QM. As a result of questions and comments I've received about that essay, I've extended the approach and hopefully improved the theory.

    Your worry about overgeneralizing is understandable, but if the nonlinearity works as my preliminary calculations suggest, then it plays a greater role in particle physics than has been supposed. I hope to solve several specific problems in this area within the coming year.

    As for electromagnetism and gravity, there have been famous failures in this area, with Wheeler's Geometrodynamics being one of them. Nevertheless, others in this essay contest and elsewhere continue to probe this theme. It's currently probably the weakest aspect of my theory.

    Briefly, Einstein's full nonlinear field equations deal with almost 200 derivatives with 20 constants to be solved for. This, on top of the nonlinearity, makes the topic extremely nonintuitive. But the linearized equations resemble Maxwell's equations sufficiently to permit analogical thinking, upon which much intuition is based. I intend to be guided by this analogical thinking while adding the nonlinearity back into the problem in (what I hope to be) a computable approach to the problem.

    I would very much like to keep in touch with you.

    Thanks again and my very best regards,

    Edwin Eugene Klingman

    7 days later

    Recent comments on Daryl Janzen's thread caught my attention.

    In particular, I really like Daryl's statement:

    "The way for relativity to make sense is to assume that time truly passes and simultaneity is absolute, regardless of the fact that simultaneous events won't be described as synchronous in just any given reference frame."

    Simultaneity is the fact, synchronicity is the communication of the event over distances at the speed of light, obviously synchronous only for equidistant observers, or other equivalent special relations between frames.

    I have put enough thought into it to convince myself that there's absolutely no way our universe could "hold together" in stable fashion for 14 giga-year unless simultaneity spans the universe. This is why the "ict" formalism is appropriate (despite MTW). The orthogonality of time is a different order of orthogonality than that between the three spatial dimensions. Thus the signature: (-,,,).

    I also agree with Daryl's realist position that things should "make sense". I've often heard that "our brains evolved" in the classical world and we shouldn't expect to make sense of a quantum universe, or relativistic universe, etc." But if consciousness is as I propose in my essay, an inherent property of creation, then one would expect things to make sense.

    I've begun reading a new book, "Bankrupting Physics" by Unzicker and Jones, which I recommend other realists.

    I'm glad to see some comments going after the voting has closed.

    Edwin Eugene Klingman

    2 months later

    Dear Edwin,

    I read with great interest your latest essay, and this I can write now without asking for a rating, I mean it.

    There are some important parallels with my perception of reality and of course also great differences.

    We have one thing in common : The Consciousness Field. Your consciousness field can be compared with my non-causal consciousness that triggers the causal consciousness and so is the cause of excitations in the field that is the originator of ALL particles. The difference is that my excitations are lasting only one Planck moment. It is our causal consciousness that is entangled with its non causal part (together forming the Consciousness Field) that is pasting these Planck moments together into a understandable "history".

    This is only part of the picture so I would be oblidged if you could spent some time to read and comment my essay.

    Best regards

    Wilhelmus

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