The quantum does not reduce to discrete bits by Roger Schlafly

Roger,

While I find nothing I can disagree with in your essay, I think you're far too sober. You do not tolerate mystical views of non-observable "entities" that form the basis of much, if not most, of today's physics. How can you not be obsessed about whether information is lost in black holes? (based on the yet to be proven existence of black holes as singularities behind event horizons.) What's wrong with you? Maybe there's something wrong with your imagination (as with mine).

So I thank you for your impeccable logic and your being grounded in the sanity of real territory versus abstract maps and sophisticated fairy tales. You clarify concepts that are muddied and confused by long habits of "rigorization" of math (per James Beichler) and "ephemeralization" of matter.

I hope you will find the time to read my essay and comment upon it.

Best wishes and good luck in the contest.

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Mr.聽Schlafly,

You wrote an interesting essay, and I agree to what you wrote about matter. Although we have a better insight into matter with contemporary physics but still we have long way to go, and in fact we can't never make sure if we could have a true understanding of the reality. But we can agree whatever is in the background, and no matter what size the elementary particles may have, one thing is clear that, the matter creates fields and interactions.聽

The other facts is that we see is trace of something that in fact is not visible, what's your view on that?

Regards

Koorosh

Roger

You seem to put forward a number of propositions as being commonly regarded as true, then state that they are not. But I am not sure that they are commonly regarded as true in the first place.

For example:

- "but the suggestion has been made that information is more fundamental". Where is this the case, when not translated as 'information is all we have with which to discern the it'. Similarly...

-"The history of science could be viewed as systematically denying the substantiality of matter". Again I am not aware of any mainstream thinking that has ever argued that 'there is nothing there'. "It is now commonplace to say that modern physics has proved that there is no such thing as solid matter because it is almost entirely empty space". Indeed, but this is not the same as saying there is no substance, just that there is less than we thought/appears.

By definition, if we physically receive something, which we do, then it physically exists. Indeed we physically exist. The issue is that our ability to receive what is there is limited. And if something exists then it is comprised of something. And to exist inherently involves a discrete physically existent state of that something. To deny that is to deny existence as manifest to us. What may or may not be 'asctually' happening, e can never know.

The issue with QM is that it asserts a form of indefiniteness in existence, which then, because that presumption is wrong, has to be rationalised by other incorrect assertions, for example, the role of observation.

Paul

Hi Roger,

I agree that there is no way to reduce physics to information theory. But I think that it is possible to reduce physics to pure geometry. You should like that view as a mathematician.

But then matter is just an empty space or rather deformed region of the conformally flat spacetime (so every entity is a wavepacket and we are close to Schroedinger and Einstein at the same time).

I think my publications could help you change your mind because my concept generates clear predictions that can be falsifiable by experiment. If the experiment falsified my idea than of course Standard Model and your concept would win.

Best regards

Roger, I fully agree with your sentiments and your statement "Whatever uncertainty there is may be entirely due to our lack of knowledge about the state, and the discreteness imposed by the measuring process." and I would add that our mathematics is not complete (Gödel) to describe quantum processes.

I can add support in with a simple analogy: These guys can control their spinning tops but can we model deterministically the motion of two spinning tops after they collide? I bet you the best we can do is a QM like probabilistic calculation - the reason there are simply too many variables.

The only critique I have, after raise doubt in the field of QM that this doubt is not carried forward when you raise the subject of black holes and quantum information, black holes in my opinion are figments of our imagination and artifacts of general relativity.

I personally believe in the power of the mathematics; in my essay I present a simple problem in physics, other may call it a paradox, mathematicians would call it a counter example. I am curious of your profession reaction to my essay.

PS. I just discovered your blog, excellent work!

PPS. To counter the cowardly 1 that every new essay seems to be given by some joker a 10 to even things out will not harm.

In my concept I am looking for an universal, distance scale invariant metric. QM does not offer any metric as far as I know. Maybe you mean another geometric structure in QM?

Doctor Schlafly,

I found your essay to be superbly constructed, exquisitely written with all of its major points meticulously analyzed and dealt with perfect thoroughness and clarity.

Please bear with me; I am a creaky old self-taut (thinking makes me tense) realist. I am uneasy about the assertion that just because the physicists can break some purified matter down into particles that occupy skads of empty space at one time and that means that me and the chair I sit on have to be made of the same sort of particles. The chair and I obviously occupy a different part of the Universe than your particles do. Where does the reality lay sir? Is it in my head and my seated bottom, or is reality located in your spaced out particles? It cannot be in both places can it? How can I know about the space of your particles and not know of the supposedly only empty space surrounding the particles you are suggesting are contained compactly in my brain?

The "free willers who are convinced that only determinism or randomness could exist are completely wrong. As I have pointed out in my splendid essay BITTERS, Only unique exists, once. Unique cannot be determined. Unique cannot be random. Unique cannot be probable. Unique can only ever be inevitable.

I agree with you that the determinism or randomness dichotomy is incorrect.

It is very refreshing to read a well written skeptical essay and I share much of your skepticism. However, in my view, there are a few misconceptions in your essay.

- The so called "free will theorem" does not establish that particles have free will or exhibit genuine stochasticity, whatever those terms may mean. It is just another proof of Bell's theorem, pure and simple. Of course, Kochen and Conway do not conclude this, stating instead that measurement outcomes must be undetermined prior to measurement. However, they fail to note that this is incompatible with the other assumptions they have made. In particular, TWIN implies that measurement outcomes on the two wings have to be perfectly correlated and the only way this can happen in a hidden variable theory is if it is deterministic. Therefore, undetermined measurement outcomes is not an option unless you give up at least one of their other assumptions, with locality and realism being the obvious choices.

- In quantum cryptography, or more accurately quantum key distribution, the goal is for Alice and Bob to end up sharing correlated secret bits that are uncorrelated with and eavesdropper. It is not to share some kind of ill defined quantum information. The laws of QM show that they can do this, or more accurately that they can expand an existing secret key into an arbitrarily long one if we are relying on a classical protocol for authentication. This is not something you can do with classical systems, so I do not understand what your criticism of this is about.

- There are secure quantum authentication protocols. Of course, one would need a quantum computer to implement them, and you may be skeptical of that.

- Speaking of which, I don't understand your skepticism of quantum computing. Surely the free will theorem has nothing to do with it. If the mathematics of QM says that we can efficiently factor integers then we can do so, assuming we can get over the engineering difficulties. What precisely is the problem with Shor's algorithm.

Dear Sir,

Mathematics explains only "how much" one quantity accumulates or reduces in an interaction involving similar or partly similar quantities and not "what", "why", "when", "where", or "with whom" about the objects involved in such interactions. These are the subject matters of physics. The validity of a physical statement is judged from its correspondence to reality. The validity of a mathematical statement is judged from its logical consistency. Your essay is logically consistent.

Because of the over-dependence on mathematical modeling, the cult of incomprehensibility, search for easier and faster ways like reductionism, and superstitious belief in the established theories, progress of science has been hampered. Hence there is a need to look afresh at the prevailing theories in a logically consistent manner based on the data now available and make necessary changes wherever necessary. One such area is the division by zero. Because of your mathematical background, we are putting these before you.

Division of two numbers a and b is the reduction of dividend a by the divisor b or taking the ratio a/b to get the result (quotient). Cutting or separating an object into two or more parts is also called division. It is the inverse operation of multiplication. If: a x b = c, then a can be recovered as a = c/b as long as b ≠ 0. Division by zero is the operation of taking the quotient of any number c and 0, i.e., c/0. The uniqueness of division breaks down when dividing by b = 0, since the product a x 0 = 0 is the same for any value of a. Hence a cannot be recovered by inverting the process of multiplication (a = c/b). Zero is the only number with this property and, as a result, division by zero is undefined for real numbers and can produce a fatal condition called a "division by zero error" in computer programs. Even in fields other than the real numbers, division by zero is never allowed.

Now let us evaluate (1+1/n)n for any number n. As n increases, 1/n reduces. For very large values of n, 1/n becomes almost negligible. Thus, for all practical purposes, (1+1/n) = 1. Since any power of 1 is also 1, the result is unchanged for any value of n. This position holds when n is very small and is negligible. Because in that case we can treat it as zero and any number raised to the power of zero is unity. There is a fatal flaw in this argument, because n may approach ∞ or 0, but it never "becomes" ∞ or 0.

On the other hand, whatever be the value of 1/n, it will always be more than zero, even for large values of n. Hence, (1+1/n) will always be greater than 1. When a number greater than zero is raised to increasing powers, the result becomes larger and larger. Since (1+1/n) will always be greater than 1, for very large values of n, the result of (1+1/n)n will also be ever bigger. But what happens when n is very small and comparable to zero? This leads to the problem of "division by zero". The contradicting result shown above was sought to be resolved by the concept of limit, which is at the heart of calculus. The generally accepted concept of limit led to the result: as n approaches 0, 1/n approaches ∞. Since that created all problems, let us examine this aspect closely.

Now, let us take a different example: an = (2n2 +1) / (3n + 4). Here n2 represents a two dimensional object, which represents area or a graph. Areas or graphs are nothing but a set of continuous points in two dimensions. Thus, it is a field that vary smoothly without breaks or jumps and cannot propagate in true vacuum. Unlike a particle, it is not discrete, but continuous. For n = 1,2,3,...., the value of an diverges as 3/7, 9/10, 19/13, ...... For every value of n, the value for n+1 grows bigger than the earlier rate of divergence. This is because the term n2 in the numerator grows at a faster rate than the denominator. This is not done in physical accumulation or reduction. In division, the quotient always increases or decreases at a fixed rate in proportion to the changes in either the dividend or the divisor or both.

For example, 40/5 = 8 and 40/4 = 10. The ratio of change of the quotient from 8 to 10 is the same as the inverse of the ratio of change of the divisor from 5 to 4. But in the case of our example: an = (2n2 +1) / (3n + 4), the ratio of change from n = 2 to n = 3 is from 9/10 to 19/13, which is different from 2/3 or 3/2. Thus, the statement:

limn→∞ an = {(2n2 +1) / (3n + 4)} → ∞,

is neither mathematically correct (as the values for n+1 is always greater than that of n and never a fixed ratio n/n+1) nor can it be applied to discrete particles (since it is indeterminate). According to relativity, wherever speed comparable to light is involved, like that of a free electron or photon, the Lorentz factors invariably comes in to limit the output. There is always length, mass or time correction. But there is no such correcting or limiting factor in the above example. Thus, the present concept of limit violates the principle of relativistic invariance for high velocities and cannot be used in physics.

If we divide 20 by 5, then what we actually do is take out bunches of 5 from the lot of 20. When the lot becomes empty or the remainder is below 5 (divisor), so that it cannot be considered a bunch and taken away further, the number of bunches of 5 are counted. That gives the result of division as 4. In case of division by zero, we take out bunches of zero. At no stage the lot becomes zero or less than zero. Thus, the operation is not complete and result of division cannot be known, just like while dividing 20 by 5, we cannot start counting the result after taking away three bunches. Conclusion: division by zero is mathematically void, hence it leaves the number unchanged.

Mathematics is also related to the measurement of time evolution of the state of something. These time evolutions depict rate of change. When such change is related to motion; like velocity, acceleration, etc, it implies total displacement from the position occupied by the body and moving to the adjacent position. This process is repeated due to inertia till it is modified by the introduction of other forces. Thus, these are discrete steps that can be related to three dimensional structures only. Mathematics measures only the numbers of these steps, the distances involved including amplitude, wave length, etc and the quanta of energy applied etc. Mathematics is related also to the measurement of area or curves on a graph - the so-called mathematical structures, which are two dimensional structures. Thus, the basic assumptions of all topologies, including symplectic topology, linear and vector algebra and the tensor calculus, all representations of vector spaces, whether they are abstract or physical, real or complex, composed of whatever combination of scalars, vectors, quaternions, or tensors, and the current definition of the point, line, and derivative are necessarily at least one dimension less from physical space.

The graph may represent space, but it is not space itself. The drawings of a circle, a square, a vector or any other physical representation, are similar abstractions. The circle represents only a two dimensional cross section of a three dimensional sphere. The square represents a surface of a cube. Without the cube or similar structure (including the paper), it has no physical existence. An ellipse may represent an orbit, but it is not the dynamical orbit itself. The vector is a fixed representation of velocity; it is not the dynamical velocity itself, and so on. The so-called simplification or scaling up or down of the drawing does not make it abstract. The basic abstraction is due to the fact that the mathematics that is applied to solve physical problems actually applies to the two dimensional diagram, and not to the three dimensional space. The numbers are assigned to points on the piece of paper or in the Cartesian graph, and not to points in space. If one assigns a number to a point in space, what one really means is that it is at a certain distance from an arbitrarily chosen origin. Thus, by assigning a number to a point in space, what one really does is assign an origin, which is another point in space leading to a contradiction. The point in space can exist by itself as the equilibrium position of various forces. But a point on a paper exists only with reference to the arbitrarily assigned origin. If additional force is applied, the locus of the point in space resolves into two equal but oppositely directed field lines. But the locus of a point on a graph is always unidirectional and depicts distance - linear or non-linear, but not force. Thus, a physical structure is different from its mathematical representation.

You can visit our essay:

"INFORMATION HIDES IN THE GLARE OF REALITY by basudeba mishra

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1776".

Regards,

basudeba

Dear Roger Schlafly,

Since you already called Einstein overestimated, it is not a surprise to me that you called a spade a spade and ridiculed Wheeler-related ideas: "as if the universe were a giant ghostly digital computer without the hardware".

Your essay was enlightening and enjoying to me but certainly not to everybody. Let me just add one more aspect. You mentioned: "Einstein ... later became dissatisfied with a theory of observables, and wanted a more "complete" view of reality." I am the one who argues that future data are not observable in advance and this restriction provides a more complete view of reality. Please try and jump over Singer's shadow.

Best,

Eckard

Roger,

If find your opening statement, "I consider different ways in which physics might be reduced to bits of information, but argue that none of these is more fundamental than quantum mechanics." true to the content of your well presented and logical essay. Although I agree with you position the QM is about 'predictable' measurable variables, I did not find an answer from you to 'how' these variables come to existence in the first place? Herein lies the chasm created by QM when it assumes measurements (effects) without its cause.

I appreciated your coin analogy comment, "The coin itself may be deterministic. Likewise a quantum mixture of two eigenstates could be a deterministic object that only seems like a coin toss because of the way that it is measured. Whatever uncertainty there is may be entirely due to our lack of knowledge about the state, and the discreteness imposed by the measuring process."

This lack of knowledge you speak of has indeed been identified in my essay using the coin-in-cup analogy which I invite you to rate: [link:fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1809] http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1809 [\link]

There you will find how this 'knowledge' can be used to unify gravity with the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces as one super-deterministc force. Good luck with your entry of which I have rated highly.

Regards,

Manuel

Dr. Schafly:

I like what you write, and cannot argue 0's or 1's. But, tell me, do electrons flowing in a wire move by jumping from atom to atom, and are these jumps quanta of negative charge with a charge of -1? And, do these transitions generate electromagnetic waves? And, would not such waves, if they exist, be at an ultrahigh frequency, but occur randomly adding up to a single wavefront which we call a magnetic field, whether AC or DC?

And upon what do these waves ride, if not the Dark Mass, a mass which is gravitationally responsive and is therefore real, and to which, in my essay, I assign the permeability and permittivity of space. This Dark Mass fills the interstices of the atom as well as of all of space, so gives us a handle with which we can do wonders.

Jim Wright