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  • Post #30

Dear Anton

Thank you for your comments.

I am not so sure that your restatement

'I would rather argue that you observe the universe because of it's influence it has.'

of my opening sentence is so different. Though I do appreciate the fact that you move from one's knowing to observation. However, I would rather stay away from "observation" since it is a term loaded with a wide variety of preconceptions.

With regard to your question on Equation 5 and special relativity. We were studying how one could consistently quantify causally ordered sets. We realized that there were no symmetries in a general poset (unlike in lattices, one which my other research was based). At one point I realized that one could imagine an observer as a chain of events, and I considered how such an observer could quantify the poset. I realized that scalar measures of intervals would be based on quantities like dpdq and it was a flash of inspiration that allowed me to realize that this could be decomposed by considering symmetric and antisymmetric components. Now had I never learned of relativity, I would have still obtained the Minkowski metric this way. But I doubt I would have realized how one could derive the Lorentz transformation, nor would I have understood its deeper significance.

It all comes down to counting discrete events.

You can read more in our paper:

Knuth K.H., Bahreyni N. 2012. The Physics of Events: A Potential Foundation for Emergent Space-Time, arXiv:1209.0881 [math-ph]

and I should mention that Prof. Mauro D'Ariano has had similar ideas that he presents in his essay on qubits. Here is a link to one of his papers:

G. M. D'Ariano, On the "principle of the quantumness", the quantumness

of relativity, and the computational grand-unification, Quantum Theory: Reconsideration of Foundations, 5 ed. (New York) (A. Y. Khrennikov, ed.),

73 AIP Conference Proceedings, no. 1232, American Institute of Physics, 2010,

arXiv:1001.1088 [quant-ph].

Last, I look forward to seeing your essay on Michelson-Morley

Cheers

Kevin

Thank you for your kind comments.

I too think we can go further.

In my model, when a particle is influenced its momentum and energy are affected. This is a basis for force.

In the meantime, I look forward to reading your essay.

Cheers

Kevin

Dear Conrad

Thank you for your kind words and comments.

You present a very interesting perspective and I look forward to reading your essay. I will hold off commenting until then.

Cheers

Kevin

Dear Jim

Thank you for letting me know about your essay.

Your title was certainly eye-catching.

I look forward to reading it.

Cheers

Kevin

Dear Wes

Thank you for your generous words.

I was not aware that our paper was discussed on the forum. I am rather new here, so I will have to check it out.

Thank you again!

Kevin

Dear Wes

You wrote:

I am sincerely sorry to disappoint you at this level.

While I believe the work summarized in my essay to be well-founded, the technical details are spread over at least four papers, which results in a viewpoint that I thought to be sufficiently radical to risk being simply unbelievable. Adding a layer of metaphysical ponderings to that would risk tainting the practical message since the physics itself rests on just a few very simple foundational ideas. I find this way of thinking about influence to be compelling and if given a choice, I would choose this as my metaphysics---as simple as it is.

However, the metaphysics that follows as corollary or inference from this foundation is perhaps more exciting.

As I state in the essay, it is surprising that these physical laws can arise from the fact that particles influence one another rather than the way in which they do so. That something this simple can give you a concept of space, time, mass, energy, momentum, and even helicity, as well as the Feynman rules for computing amplitudes and probabilities in QM is simultaneously shocking and satisfying.

This cannot be the end of the story. If these ideas have any merit, then both charge and spin must somehow come out of this picture. Spin is a three-dimensional analog of helicity, and charge is required by CPT invariance (when it holds). It could provide a picture explaining why E&M is inherently geometrical.

While I did not have ample room to carefully discuss complementarity, one can see pretty quickly by looking at Dirac that particles cannot simultaneously be assigned a position and momentum. Confusion about this point is more readily had when focusing on Schrodinger, which is an approximation. This suggests that the conceptual difficulties that we have had with complementarity are due to this misconception that particles "possess" these attributes as part of what they are. In this picture we "assign" them properties as descriptions of what they happen to be doing.

I did not discuss quantum contextuality in this essay. But again, contextuality can arise from the fact that a particle does not change what it is when we interact with it. Instead, the particle either changes what it does when we interact with it, or more interestingly our interactions with it may probe different aspects of its behavior. I have not even begun to flesh these thoughts out, but on the surface I think that this is perhaps a reasonable way to approach the topic of contextuality.

And now for the more metaphysical ideas:

It would be good to know which laws and to what degree such laws are contingent or derivable. Could it be that they are *all* derivable? That is, God had no choice in the construction of the universe? For example, it may be impossible for there to be other universes with different fine structure constants. The laws of physics would have *had* to have been these laws!

Even more interesting is the fact that what I have shown here arises from particles that simply influence one another where the details of such influence do not matter. If one *could* derive *all the laws of physics* this way, then it would mean that particles could actually be almost anything that influences according to these simple rules. That is, the universe could be a simulation or a cellular automaton of sorts. It could be a high school student's science fair project where he or she has simulated 10^80 or so particles. If the laws were derivable this way, there would be no way for us to ever know if this was a simulation since there would be no experiment one could do to tell the difference. But even more interesting, it would not matter for it would be just as real. For what is an electron other than *something* that influences others?

Cheers

Kevin

Hello Again Wes,

I tried quoting you, but I used double \lt and \gt symbols, which then took my internal text as a comment.

Here is what I meant to quote above:

"So naturally I enjoyed your paper but I was a bit let down; I was hoping to gain a little insight into your metaphysics! Your imagination is readily apparent in a number of your papers but your analysis is always conservative and careful, as it should be. I can't help but wonder if you even allow yourself the luxury of a metaphysics."

Thanks

Kevin

Kevin,

Just read your essay. It clarified a number of aspects of your poset approach in my mind. You should definitely read the Coecke & Martin paper I showed you last week. I think there's possibly a relation here to Rovelli's relational approach (did we discuss this?). Anyway, I love your point about the fact that knowledge about any property that does not affect how a particle exerts its influence is inaccessible to us. This is essentially related to distinguishability, though I think there are some issues to be worked out regarding bosons as of yet (see van Fraassen's work on identical particles and exchange symmetry, for example).

A couple of other quick notes: I have always suspected, despite the fact that the two signatures are mathematically equivalent, that the particle physics metric signature was more physically correct than the signature used in GR. Also, I have long suspected that there is more to spin than meets the eye, but I'll e-mail you about that separately.

Cheers,

Ian

    Kevin,

    Thank you kindly for taking the time to flesh out some of your ideas. I certainly appreciate it and look forward to your future work! As you say, "this cannot be the end of the story."

    Best regards,

    Wes Hansen

    Hi Kevin,

    Interesting stuff! But as promising as this looks for relativity, I would have liked to see a bit more discussion of where you've taken this on the quantum side of things. Of course, I've seen your related talk on that topic, and I know you were space-limited, but for me that's where the question of "what does a particle do?" is far more fascinating and problematic.

    Are you really breaking the Newton's-third-law-style symmetry between the "act of influence" and the "response to influence"? Sure, I see why you need a partial order, but is there any deep reason why you can't have such an order and still treat both sides of influence in the same way?

    Finally, I suppose I'll take you to task for being overly even-handed on the main question. Your essay clearly supports the "Bit from It" perspective, but then at the very end you turn around and claim that we can use our Bits to build another "It*" (starred here to distinguish It* from the original It.). But in what sense is It* reality at all? Isn't It* merely our best-guess reconstruction based on incomplete knowledge, which means It*'s not really reality? So why is it fair to call It* "it"? Is there any particular reason why you aren't you fully in the "Bit from It" camp?

    Cheers!

    Ken

      Hi Ken

      > I would have liked to see a bit more discussion of where you've taken this on the quantum side of things.

      There are so many things to talk about and so few essay contests! ;)

      > Are you really breaking the Newton's-third-law-style symmetry between the "act of influence" and the "response to influence"? Sure, I see why you need a partial order, but is there any deep reason why you can't have such an order and still treat both sides of influence in the same way?

      That is great question!

      Its not quite clear that the "influence" that I discuss constitutes a force.

      I think it does, since when a particle is influenced, this affects the particles rate at which it influences others. So its energy and momentum change. Up until now I have focused on a free particle that influences others, but is not itself influenced. We have only just begun investigating what affect influence has on the particle and the inferences one makes about particles. If this truly is a viable fundamental perspective, then Newton's Laws should emerge along with a great deal more of physics.

      > Finally, I suppose I'll take you to task for being overly even-handed on the main question. Your essay clearly supports the "Bit from It" perspective, but then at the very end you turn around and claim that we can use our Bits to build another "It*" (starred here to distinguish It* from the original It.). But in what sense is It* reality at all? Isn't It* merely our best-guess reconstruction based on incomplete knowledge, which means It*'s not really reality? So why is it fair to call It* "it"? Is there any particular reason why you aren't you fully in the "Bit from It" camp?

      Fair enough. This is my first essay, and I felt that the concepts I was introducing were probably sufficiently radical.

      I am right square in the "Bit from It" camp.

      However, the "It" in this picture is not the usual that you think of when you think of the foundations of physics. Here there is only influence---that's it. From information about such influences, we construct a picture of reality, which I called It*. This is the physics we are familiar with: space, time, mass, energy, momentum, etc. But the "It*" is not real. The reality is the "It", which is simply not completely knowable (as I point out since the observers cannot possibly reconstruct the particles behavior).

      I hope that this helps clear some things up.

      If not, please feel free to "take me to task" again!

      Cheers

      Kevin

      Dear Kevin,

      my congratulations for your excellent essay. Please have a look at http://vixra.org/abs/1306.0226 where, I think you will find the first steps in developing of a new conception of Nature that leads to your every conclusion following a different (but very similar) route.

      " Any existent appears in dual form: Real (IT) - What it is, and Virtual (BIT) - How it works.IT is caused by "past" and causes "future" while BIT is caused by "future" and causes "past" ("past" and "future" are in accordance to real world). Hence, future and past are included in existent' s present."

      Finally I think you are right that spacetime is only our way to conceive thinks, a kind of arbitrary dimensions we give in order to interpret and express interactions.

      My best wishes

        Hi, Kevin,

        Ever since I saw Sorkin's presentation with his take of how partially ordered sets may lead to emergent spacetime, ever since 2002, it haunted me what should those point events be, so that we get the quantum side of physics. I guess, this is what Ken Wharton asked you about.

        Last year Giovanni Amelino-Camelia wrote essay, in which he stated an obvious fact that we have never (highlight never) detected an empty point of space(time). All we have ever detected are particle events, which are collected in experiments like LHC into statistics.

        If we take this seriously, then particle events (now vertices in Feynman diagrams) are elements of the set. Partial temporal order is dictated by particle creation happening before its annihilation. Spacial order, specifically its 3D nature, might be related to spin relations (SU2 connection with O3 groups), and/or there may be something which you mentioned in Q&A part of your talk at Perimeter. Types of vertices, places where incoming particles are annihilated and outgoing ones are created, as well as types of fundamental particles are given by Standard Model. So, there are already lots of known-to-work on experiment elements here, i.e. the is a starting ground to recreate a spacetime, which should approximate to Minkowski thing. Let's not forget that with higgs all fundamental particles are simpler, i.e. none has mass.

        When there is an event (in QFT), involving an electron, one cannot say for certain in how many self-energy loops were in its past. This incompletness of information at a fundamental level (QFTs) nicely implies relational nature of information at QM level, expressed in Rovelli's current essay.

        I put the physical part of above arrangement in http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1597 with clear mention of where poset-like math should be applied. By the way, when we say (as is done in QFT class) that electrons are effective particles, and are maid up of many events involving fundamental particles of Standard Model, then, composition of effective particles makes them indistinguishable. This is shorter, than Philip Goyal's arguments in his recent piece.

        Please, let me know, what you think about this.

        Cheers,

        Mikalai.

          Dear Kevin

          I read your essay with interest. You start with the electron as you might well do since in our computers it is the most familiar example of a particle mediating Its and Bits. Beyond that the discussion gets rather too technical to assimilate completely in one reading, but I think I understood your intention to describe causality in a network. This is excellent, as it shows you have an image of the workings of the Universe at fundamental scale that are linear, local and causal.

          Here and there your vision wavers, threatened by the complexities and uncertainties of space-time and of probability. Have no fear, the Universe may well be just a simple network of influences of an ordered lattice of energy, and both spacetime and probability are emergent physicist-invented mathematial concepts with no real physical connection to what is happening at the smallest scales.

          This is what I have tried to present in my 2005 Beautiful Universe Theory also found here and defended in my last year's fqxi essay "Fix Physics!". Regretfully my work is qualitative and incomplete and lacks the professional touch with which you have presented your vision of reality.

          With best wishes for your success

          Vladimir

            4 days later

            Hi Kevin,

            The main reason for joining this contest was not to win, but to see if I can get any professional physicist with interest in foundational issues, to evaluate my idea. I appreciate any criticism no matter how harsh, although I do prefer constructive ones. I have rated you fairly high ( I follow up on your work regularly in FQXI), but as I said I don't care for rating mine, but that is your prerogative. I will also ask you some basic questions about your theory a bit later.

            Many thanks

            Adel

              Dear Kevin,

              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

                Hello Kevin,

                Just a few encouraging words. Your essay is good but appeared a bit technical for me to follow. Nevertheless, someone referred me to Feynman checkerboard model and I feel yours is very similar and a bit clearer. I don't know whether to call mine a checkerboard model, it appears a bit too simple or what do you think?

                Then, if I may ask since Δx appears in your essay, do you envisage a minimum possible value? Or the value has no lower limit?

                Lastly, since your essay is information-based and you are a specialist in this area, would you consider existence/non-existence as a binary choice, i.e. information?

                Regards,

                Akinbo

                  Hello again Kevin,

                  Sorry it has taken this long to comment.

                  Excellent essay! I like the way you utilise networks of influence. The whole idea feels logical and right. I especially like that you have It from Bit AND Bit from It, as I think the examples you cite are very good. Also, I think that each are as fundamental. Moreover one cannot exist fully, as we know them, without the other.

                  Best wishes for the contest,

                  Antony

                  Dear Ioannis

                  Thank you for your kind comments.

                  I will be sure to take a look at your website and paper.

                  Cheers

                  Kevin

                  Dear Mikalai

                  Thank you for your comments and questions.

                  When I began this work, I simply considered a casually ordered set of events. It wasn't clear to me what an event was either---in Sorkin's approach or even Einstein's for that matter. This is one thing I have tried to clear up.

                  The way I think about it at present is that entities can influence one another. The act of influencing and the act of being influenced are two events that can be ordered by virtue of the fact that there is a difference between influencing and being influenced. What is this influence? I don't know, and I am not sure one could know. Its like asking what an electron is.

                  What I do think is that different patterns of influence is what gives rise to forces (perhaps all the different forces?). Here is why I think this. As I explain in the essay, the energy and momentum of a particle reflect the rates at which the particle influences others. Now if during this process, the particle is itself influenced by another, this necessarily changes the rates, which changes its energy and momentum. Hence this influence has the effect of a force. Its a very different model that has the aim of actually elucidating the nature of these fundamental properties that we have become so familiar with that we feel we understand them.

                  I had not read Giovanni Amelino-Camelia's essay. But he is right, no empty point in space has ever been observed. This idea of space as reflecting relationships among entities is an old idea that goes back to the muslim theory of Kalam and later Al-Ghazali. This was actually the idea that was held by scientists, like Leibniz, on the continent during the time of Newton. The problem is that no one really knew how to do anything with a theory of space that is defined by the entities themselves. This is similar in spirit to the idea proposed by Wheeler and Feynman when they considered direct particle-particle interactions. Since the particles set up the fields, why do you really need the fields. Their program was abandoned because they needed interactions that went backward in time.

                  I have not given particle creation and annihilation much thought in this context. I have some ideas on how to arrive at something like field theory, but these are half-baked at present. As for self-energy loops, I am not sure what these would look like in this context either, or even if they are necessary.

                  I will check out your forum entry.

                  Thanks again!

                  Kevin