Cosmological Constant Problem, Holography, de Broglie Waves, and Dark Energy: The Relevance of Information by Willard Mittelman

Hello Willard,

Your description of Planck scale physics was interesting. I also make some arguments on that scale but using more of philosophy than physics. You may view.

Best regards,

Akinbo

I would like to correct a significant error in my essay. Instead of saying that the waves associated with spacetime "bits" become entangled with each other, I should have described these waves as soliton-like entities that may "merge" or "fuse" to form superpositions that are NOT characterized by entanglement. Properties of the "composite particles" that result from such superpositions -- properties such as mass, energy and momentum -- are obtained by simply adding together the masses, energies and momenta of the individual bits that constitute these compound particles. This sort of merger or fusion of individual entities has been described by Agung Budiyono in "On de Broglie's soliton wave function of many particles with finite masses, energies and momenta" (arXiv:quant-ph/0510117).

The idea of entanglement is the wrong one for describing the sort of composite particles that I have in mind here, due to the "monogamy" that prevents entangled systems from forming new entanglements with additional wave-particles. The effects of entanglement that are discussed in my essay -- namely, reduction in the number of degrees of freedom, and entropy arising from information-erasure at cosmological horizons -- are still present when the idea of entanglement is replaced by that of merger/superposition.

I shall be having at this one over the weekend, Willard..

Given your relatively low placement and my respect for your past work; I shall endeavor to read through and give an uplifting rating to your essay. I wish you good luck in the contest.

More later,

Jonathan

Hi Willard,

I finally had a chance to at least glance at your essay and it has some interesting ideas which I had some questions/comments on. First the jumping off point is is the work by Barrow and Shaw which I was not aware of but seems important in what I gather they say from your essay. In this model there is an effective c.c. Lambda which is the product of some effective lambda plus the (huge) QFT vacuum energy (I'm assuming they take the vacuum energy density from QFT in which case it will be huge). Thus in the present era lambda must also be huge in order to almost cancel the vacuum energy density leaving a Lambda which is small and positive thus giving the small observed cosmological constant Lambda which should drive the current accelerated expansion. My question "Is it possible that at an earlier stage of the Universe lambda would take a different value so that Lambda would be large -- much larger?" In other words could one explain the early postulated inflationary phase in this model? The Universe appears to have had two burst of accelerated expansion -- the current dark energy stage and the initial inflationary stage. However these two accelerated phases have vastly different magnitudes. It would be nice if some single mechanism could explain both.

One further unrelated question -- you have S ~ (N)^{1/2) where I think (correct if wrong) that N is something like a degree of freedom. If this is correct then wouldn't one expect S ~ Log (N)? However you mention you are considering entanglement entropy so this may explain the difference. Or maybe I am misunderstand what N is?

My interest is if this model provides both dark energy and inflation comes from a recent paper of mine "Inflation with a graceful exit and entrance driven by Hawking radiation", Sujoy Kumar Modak and D. Singleton, Phys.Rev. D86 (2012) 123515, e-Print: arXiv:1207.0230 [gr-qc]. In this paper Sujoy and I assume a discrete/non-commutative space-time a la Piero Nicolini's work. We had discussed this issue earlier since you pointed out this NC space-time will become incompatible with the self-similarity we use in our essay. Anyway as I mentioned it's good to "cover all the bases" and look at different options up to the point when experiment/observation gives us a more definite hint in which way to go. And Piero's version of discrete space-time gave a very natural "entrance" mechanism for our version of inflation.

Anyway I liked very much your essay. Best of luck,

Doug

Dear Willard,

I find your essay as one serious review/analytical work that I am inclined to rate in good score (after some more study). Main intriguing thing for me that you gives first significance of the real/material than the information (and moreover, to a binary encoded version of it, in form of ,,bits,,) I am working on some different direction (actually, somewhere between physics and philosophy.) But I am very hope that we have many common perception to right scientific methodology. I hope my work Essay text may be in your interest (despite its different task.) I hope we can soon mutually to complete our opinions. Welcome to my forum.

George

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.

Dear Willard - I enjoyed your essay very much and rated it highly.

I would like to home in on a particular issue that you raised in your essay regarding "Dark" photons. This idea is proposed in my essay on subtime as exactly what is going on in the process of entanglement. Photons do land, but they are then "returned" to the source, creating a perpetual "hot potato". I would love to hear your thoughts on my description of the two slit experiment as contrasted to your conclusion below:

"In the present context, this wave's close association with information suggests a different possibility: namely, the wave's energy is purely "information energy," which means [18] that it is not available for doing work - or more specifically, it is not able to affect anything other than the spacetime elements with which the phase wave itself is inseparably connected. This would seem to rule out the phase wave's having any observable, relativity-violating effects; but it does not support the idea that this wave is unphysical. (It should be noted that information energy's being unavailable for doing work is not tantamount to its being effectively "dark," pace [18], and hence it does not provide a basis for viewing information energy itself as dark energy.)"

I will follow up and read your reference 18 by Gough et al.

You can find the latest version of my essay here:

http://fqxi.org/data/forum-attachments/Borrill-TimeOne-V1.1a.pdf

(sorry if the fqxi web site splits this url up, I haven't figured out a way to not make it do that).

Kind regards, Paul