An Alternative Paradigm for the Universe by Royce Haynes

James Hoover

Royce,

If given the time and the wits to evaluate over 120 more entries, I have a month to try. My seemingly whimsical title, "It's good to be the king," is serious about our subject.

Jim

Royce Haynes

Thanks for reading the essay Antony.

Royce Haynes

Thanks Jonathan. I was puzzled by your comment, "You missed a big opportunity...". On page 6 I wrote, "..imagine that at least once in eternity, one atom in 10^80 atoms underwent a spontaneous electron spin flip. This makes it the ultimate "bit to it", where a single atomic transition precipitated a universe". Perhaps you missed that statement in skimming the essay.

I had already checked out Steve Kauffmann's paper in reviewing the regular FQXi blog that you had requested Zeeya Merali to start earlier this year. I have a problem with two assumptions that Kauffmann makes. First, he assumes (as do the great majority of physicists) that there is a "force of gravity" between objects in the universe ("..gravity exerts force on energy,.." Kauffmann). I tend to side with the few renegade physicists who consider gravity to be a "pseudo force". The way I interpret General Relativity, and what I believe Einstein showed, was that what we perceive as a gravitational force, is actually an optical illusion created by a misperceived reference frame, when viewing the motion of matter through curved space. On Earth, we unconsciously assume that what we are seeing is in a static rest frame, when actually the Earth's surface is on a spinning sphere (accelerated rest frame), orbiting the sun (accelerated rest frame), traveling around the Milky Way (accelerated rest frame). No wonder we have a problem interpreting what we see! The other issue I have is with his assumption of a static rest frame in his calculations. EVERYTHING in the universe is in motion relative to everything else. As stated above, if gravity is all about the motion of matter in space, then calculating anything in a static rest frame might make the math more simple, but it is ultimately unphysical and could be dangerously misleading.

I will check out Tom Ray's essay when I see it posted.

Ram's essay is a reprise of his recent paper in The Open Astronomy Journal, which I had already read. I am not that great at GR math so I had a problem following his argument. However I plan on writing to him separately to see how his GR interpretation squares with my take on GR gravity.

Thanks again for the comments.

Best Wishes,

Royce

Royce Haynes

Thanks for your review and comments Peter.

First, I would like to correct one misinterpretation; my essay included an "observation", and not an "accusation", regarding physicists not questioning the model when dealing with observational data which does not "fit" the accepted paradigm. I noticed a surprising number of papers on arXiv where the conclusion included a statement like "These observations do not fit the prevailing, accepted model", or something to that effect, and then just leaving it at that.

Secondly, regarding "scrape into consideration for a prize", for me this is not about winning an essay contest; it is irrelevant. My aim is to get these ideas out there for a critical review, by scientists far smarter than I. I don't expect members of the "establishment" to seriously consider my ideas or even waste their time reading the essay. However, I do hope that some young physicists, just starting their careers, and not wedded to the status quo, will take some of these ideas, explore them more thoroughly, and decide for themselves whether this alternative paradigm has any validity.

Thirdly, regarding the time frame. I think that 10 years for a change in thinking is wildly optimistic. General Relativity is now almost 100 years old, and yet cosmologists still stick with Newtonian gravity, where gravity is a "force" between objects, rather than the Einsteinian motion of matter through curved space, which gives the illusion of a force. One also has to be realistic, and realize that mainstream physicists have 20, 30, 40 year academic careers tied to preserving the status quo, and vigorously "defending" the Lambda CDM paradigm, so any change will not come either easily or quickly, especially coming from a non-physicist. One also has to avoid being bitter about rejection. After all, this is about ideas and not people. It is not about winning or losing, but about working together in a search for the "truth", whatever that happens to be.

Thanks again for your comments.

Royce

Jonathan Dickau

Howdy Royce,

I just wanted to comment that instead of complaining, Peter is offering sage advice above. It takes an odd blend of tactics to weave oneself through the maze of conflicting ideals in a contest like this, but the main thing is that if you are derogatory or disparaging about the state of the scientific establishment, you best have a better idea to offer and leave a small attack surface for naysayers to pick at.

One can talk about the Einstellung effect within hierarchical systems, and only offend a few scholars, but if you make an accusation that the establishment is being short sighted by not acknowledging a better model; that is not as likely to be well received in this venue, and a seasoned contest veteran like Peter is right to call you on it. Of course; you can see how well it works (or fails to work) for Elliot McGucken, whose Physics might be brilliant - but he comes across as crazed and offish.

So it is tough sometimes to separate the notion of your idea, its presentation, and its relationship to the larger body of work or the mainstream of Physics. I have commented that this idea shows promise. But it is not yet a well-developed physical theory; at this point it is a well-formed toy model, which has the potential to become robust theory.

All the Best,

Jonathan

Thomas Ray

Dear Royce,

I like and agree with your realist philosophy -- " ... the universe has traveled on a single trajectory; events have occurred in a unique sequence, whether someone was there to measure them or not. To believe that the early universe had no reality, just because we were not there to measure it, seems the height of human arrogance" -- and I appreciate the cosmological model you have constructed.

Nevertheless, you confuse me on a couple of key points. You say you reject the idea that the universe came from nothing, and yet your proposition of a frozen hydrogen atom at zeroK is also a representation of "nothing." That is, a singular ground state with no excitation potential (spin oriented relative to what?) is not a quantity measurable in principle and so not consistent with Wheeler's maxim that "a phenomenon is not real until it is observed."

Further, though, by making the Bose-Einstein condensate fundamental, you create in principle a continuum of "nothing." There are no particles in BEC statistics that can be differentiated from the spacetime in which they interact, because an infinity of bosons can simultaneously occupy the same point and eventually will (the singularity problem).

So I'm not so much disagreeing with what you wrote, as suggesting that it doesn't go far enough. That is, if one's aim is to show the least excited state in which reality can continually exist, change and evolve, meaning the world we observe which consists of things that can be differentiated, I think one must advance to a fermionic phase of superfluidity, where the Pauli Exclusion Principle saves us from an eternally static model. That's the subject of my essay, and I hope you get a chance to visit.

Thanks for a good read and best wishes.

Tom

john selye

Dear Dr. Haynes,

It was most interesting to see how you place the evolution of ZKBB in the context of the history of modern physics. A very informative and well written essay.

At the beginning, you mention the nature of mind - how we reconstruct reality in our reflective minds. I write about this in some detail - how every species ultimately perceives the underlying reality in its own way, thus spinning its own Species Cosmos over evolutionary time.

It would appear that the human mind is evolving in correlation with its field of observation, and changing contiguously with it - thus establishing the relationship of Bit and It as one of correlation.

This is an important and daunting point - for it means that Information is in perpetual flux, and facts can never be absolutely nailed down, nor can they be extrapolated consistently to the same conclusions.

I understand that you want to express ZKBB purely in terms of physics, but I think there's great value in also contextualizing physics in a cosmic and biological evolutionary paradigm. It can help us to new conclusions. An objection that could raised to your paradigm is that it begins with one electron and one proton, and that assuming stable particles as a point of origin naturally configures into the system a great tangle of parameters that only emerge later - in the context of the fully formed Cosmos.

The solution to this might be to set the point of origin, as I do, in an omni-dimensional energy field, within which there must exist other cosmic systems - and to account for the primal particles of the original BEC in terms of this energy field's complete freedom in creating variant dimensional systems.

The Big Bang is then replaced by the perpetual equilibrium shifts of this Field, offering many interesting conclusions concerning the nature of your primal cosmic fabric, and of particles themselves.

There is no way to summarize this here, but hopefully you'll find as much to interest you in my essay as I found in yours.

I look forward to hearing your views, and wish you all the best,

John

Hugh Matlock

Hi Royce,

You wrote:

"In cosmology, dark matter has not been identified, dark energy (the accelerated expansion of the universe) and inflation are unexplained, galactic haloes remain unverified, the concept of super-symmetry has been discredited, and the "flatness problem" and why omega is exactly 1 remain unresolved."

I appreciate that you are taking up some of the unsolved problems of observational cosmology, as I have so far found few essayists who have. I very much like your account of how it all could have gotten started.

In my essay I take a different approach to these problems, but with the same end in mind, to explore a new concept for cosmology. Perhaps in Software Cosmos you will find something of a kindred soul who questions today's dominant paradigm, even though I start from a different perspective (the simulation model) and come to the opposite conclusion, It from Bit.

Looking at both I can see how our two accounts might naturally co-exist, as your initial state seems (to me anyway) analogous to a software structure initialized to all zeros.

Hugh

Hugh Matlock

This is to correct the link to my Software Cosmos essay.

Sreenath N

Dear Royce,

I have down loaded your essay and soon post my comments on it. Meanwhile, please, go through my essay and post your comments.

Regards and good luck in the contest,

Sreenath BN.

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1827

James Hoover

Royce,

Thanks for the interesting read. I too tend toward the "Bit from It" view and believe your somewhat technical description of ZKBB might involve something like the "virtual particle" (actually disturbance, not a particle) concept I mention. I do not have a definitive concept to explain the BB or specifically debunk Wheeler's Anthropic Principle as you do. I need to reread your essay to understand the foundations of the ZKBB process.

I would be interested in your view of "It's Good to be the King"

Jim

eAmazigh HANNOU

Dear Haynes,

We are at the end of this essay contest.

In conclusion, at the question to know if Information is more fundamental than Matter, there is a good reason to answer that Matter is made of an amazing mixture of eInfo and eEnergy, at the same time.

Matter is thus eInfo made with eEnergy rather than answer it is made with eEnergy and eInfo ; because eInfo is eEnergy, and the one does not go without the other one.

eEnergy and eInfo are the two basic Principles of the eUniverse. Nothing can exist if it is not eEnergy, and any object is eInfo, and therefore eEnergy.

And consequently our eReality is eInfo made with eEnergy. And the final verdict is : eReality is virtual, and virtuality is our fundamental eReality.

Good luck to the winners,

And see you soon, with good news on this topic, and the Theory of Everything.

Amazigh H.

I rated your essay.

Please visit My essay.

Paul Borrill

Dear Royce,

I have now finished reviewing all 180 essays for the contest and appreciate your contribution to this competition.

I have been thoroughly impressed at the breadth, depth and quality of the ideas represented in this contest. In true academic spirit, if you have not yet reviewed my essay, I invite you to do so and leave your comments.

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).

May the best essays win!

Kind regards,

Paul Borrill

paul at borrill dot com

Antony Ryan

My pleasure Royce!

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