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  • Post #137

Giacomo,

You obviously have a talent for conveying and contrasting creative ideas. Your explanation within Plato's cave left me a bit confused. It would seem that deciding to be a pragmatist and accepting hidden variables is a difficult thing to do. It seems to me that some explanatory tools, even though they are recognized as just tools, are summarily rejected. What do you mean that Ernst Mach was proven wrong about the existence of atoms? I had not run across this yet so any references towards his thoughts on that would be appreciated.

I am trying to develop a metric theory of Gunnar Nordstroem's gravitational theory based on a modification of calculus, meaning that matter and energy are integrals (information), which we process as derivatives (bits). You can find it here. Any thoughts your creative mind might have would be greatly appreciated.

Kind Regards,

Jeff Baugher

    Dear Jeff

    thank you for your compliments. Yes, if you are a pragmatist, you don't care too much about ontic hidden variables: you care about ontologies that have a scientific value as explanatory tools. That Ernst Mach, being an operationalist, was against the notion of "atom" is so well known that it is almost a cliché. It can be found on any book (just look on wikipedia for references). It is even often said that Mach was the one who drove Ludwig Boltzman to his suicide (which is probably not true). I had a look at your manuscript, but I should say that I'm still too far from your problems. I'm only at the Dirac equation and SR, not gravity and GR. Gravity will come later. I have some ideas in mind, for a gravity that emerges from the automaton as a quantum thermodynamic effect. I hope I will be able to tell you more next year.

    My best regards

    and thank you for your interest

    Mauro

    Dear Adel

    I have seen your essay, it is full of simulations and results from your theory. But, unfortunately, there are not for me sufficient elements to understand even your framework.

    In any case, an easier task for me would be to answer to questions about my theory. You are welcome to ask.

    With my best wishes.

    Mauro

    Dear Ken,

    I'm happy that I succeeded in getting a realist follow my logic, at least for a while. Now, coming to "field as an ontology", which ontology is that? Very funny, don't you think? I know that there are some quantum field theorists that like this ontology, but it is more a matter of fixing logical problems of QFT, most arising from the continuum and from the localization issue. But, tell me, which ontology is a field, so evanescent? Once Richard Feynman was asked by a journalist who was interviewing him (you can find this on a youtube) "what is this thing that makes me feel this force between two repelling magnetic north-poles? I cannot see anything there. Feynman was enormously embarrassed, and started explaining "what does it mean to explain" in science.

    The field is not an ontology in the usual sense, as an "object". It is more an ontology in my sense: a nonmaterialistic ontology, and an explanatory tool. But, unfortunately, it needs a background, it needs quantum theory, it cannot survive alone.

    Regarding holism, yes, I have entities in different places (technically events on a leaf of a foliation). I believe in Quantum Theory as the deepest theoretical level, and since causality is one of the axioms [see Pavia axiomatization Phys. Rev A 84 012311 (2011)], I then believe in causality. For me entanglement makes sense only on a leaf: entanglement between different leaves makes no sense. But the reconciliation between holism and reductionism due to the local-discriminability axiom, is highly non trivial, since, e.g. it doesn't work in other causal theories, as, for example, quantum theory with superselection rules, or fermionic theory, or just quantum theory on real Hilbert space. It seems to me that realism and causality are very different issues, since e.g. you can have causality without determinism and vice-versa. And, definitely quantum theory is not realist.

    As regards the path integral, it is much closer to my view than what you can imagine. I have paths of information flowing on the automaton. I can write a path-integral over the automaton, with a classical-information Lagrangian, if you want. I'm not sure it is useful. I like a theory that is quantum ab-initio, and which recovers classical theory as an emergent approximation. This minimizes the postulates, and will makes the Occam's razor happy.

    Thank you for your beautiful compliments and your interesting and thought-provoking post.

    I have your essay (beautiful and well written) in my collection. I want to think about your point of view, exactly because it is so far from mine.

    My best regards

    Mauro

    Dear Giacomo,

    Wow! This, in my humble opinion, is the best essay I've read so far. It is so well written and comprehensible, yet you made numerous deep observations. I'm tempted to re-quote to you much of your essay, but I'll limit myself to just a few sections (after all, you wrote it!).

    "It is not easy to abandon the idea of a universe made of matter and embrace the vision of a reality made of pure information. The term "information" sounds vague, spiritualistic, against the attitude of concreteness that a scientist should conform to." So true! Even scientists who are very open-minded understandably find it difficult to overcome concepts that have been deeply ingrained. It's not a criticism - simply an observation (an operationalist perspective!)

    "Quantum Mechanics has taught us that we must change our way of thinking about "realism", and that this cannot be synonymous of "materialism"." I couldn't agree more. And I don't think that it would take that much of a shift to gain a different perspective.

    "What matters is our ability of making correct predictions, not of describing what is out there as it is - a nonsense, since nobody can check it for us. We only need to describe logically and efficiently what we see, and for such purpose we conveniently create appropriate "ontologies", which nonetheless are just tools for depicting mechanisms in our mind."

    Yes! Our view of what's 'out there' will always be limited, and what's 'out there' is constantly changing. So we need to, as best as we can, utilize our minds as the tools they're supposed to be (and get our minds to mind 'us' rather than the other way around!) and shape our thinking around what we can logically and efficiently see and describe such observations in a manner our minds can comprehend and make sense of.

    Thank you so much for your contribution. It's the best I've read so far!

    Sincerely,

    Ralph

      Dear Ralph

      thank you very much for your marvelous compliments. I really appreciate them. I'm happy that you share my point of view so closely. I read your essay, which is full of enthusiasm and positive thinking, which explains your success, especially with with the Public.

      I'm pursuing the information paradigm, because I am convinced (and have already proved it in some relevant situation, as for the Dirac equation) that is going to reveal us great new physics.

      With my best regards

      and thank you again for your sincere compliments

      Mauro

      Dear Ralph

      thank you very much for your marvelous compliments. I really appreciate them. I'm happy that you share my point of view so closely. I read your essay, which is full of enthusiasm and positive thinking, which explains your success, especially with with the Public.

      I'm pursuing the information paradigm, because I am convinced (and have already proved it in some relevant situation, as for the Dirac equation) that is going to reveal us great new physics.

      With my best regards

      and thank you again for your sincere compliments

      Mauro

      Dear Jayakar,

      the fact that information has an intrinsic probabilistic nature, has nothing to do with the countable nature of the (q)bits. We want to see now what this new paradigm can tell us more than what continuous field theory (including string theory) has already said. It is very promising: let's it have a try.

      My best regards

      Mauro

      Patrick,

      thank you very much for your compliments and your rating. I read your idea in your essay about the state of non-existence, but it cannot work. The system supporting the state must logically exists, and has different states, say two of them for the classical bit. Somebody in the past also considered the case of a system that can or cannot exist, but this needs an additional state, i.e. the bit becomes a kind of a "trit".

      Thank you again,

      My best regards

      Mauro

      Dear Gordon,

      sorry, but our points of view are clearly in contraposition. Apart from this, you will understand that we are not here for refereeing papers. I strongly suggest you to consider a peer reviewed journal for this.

      My best regards

      Mauro

      Mauro,

      I would like to hear your critical views of my essay, "It Great to be the King." It argues against the "Anthropic Principle" at a very basic level, with little mathematical anchoring.

      Jim

      Dear Giacomo,

      On june 27 I wrote a short post on your excellent submission.

      Forgive for being cheeky, I understand that you have lots of things to do, but I am really curious about your perception of the parallels in our thinking, of course there are differences but I think we both try to come to a new perception of reality.

      here is the link to my essay

      (The Quest for the Primal Sequence)

      respectfully

      Wilhelmus

        Hi D'Ariano,

        When observation is stressed as the starting point for theory building, is there prediction power in a resulting theory for phenomenon not yet observed? On would think that a theory matching the facts with extreme and fantastic precision might miss some underlying factor and come into conflict when new observations are mad that the theory was not based on. so Is it validated only by fitting observational data?

        Also, do you have a short hand mathematical example of the statement "it anticipates a bound "for the rest-mass for the Dirac particle?"

        have the best,

        Amos.

          Dear Professor Giacomo

          Richard Feynman in his Nobel Acceptance Speech (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1965/feynman-lecture.html)

          said: "It always seems odd to me that the fundamental laws of physics, when discovered, can appear in so many different forms that are not apparently identical at first, but with a little mathematical fiddling you can show the relationship. And example of this is the Schrodinger equation and the Heisenberg formulation of quantum mechanics. I don't know why that is - it remains a mystery, but it was something I learned from experience. There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn't look at all like the way you said it before. I don't know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature."

          I too believe in the simplicity of nature, and I am glad that Richard Feynman, a Nobel-winning famous physicist, also believe in the same thing I do, but I had come to my belief long before I knew about that particular statement.

          The belief that "Nature is simple" is however being expressed differently in my essay "Analogical Engine" linked to http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1865 .

          Specifically though, I said "Planck constant is the Mother of All Dualities" and I put it schematically as: wave-particle ~ quantum-classical ~ gene-protein ~ analogy- reasoning ~ linear-nonlinear ~ connected-notconnected ~ computable-notcomputable ~ mind-body ~ Bit-It ~ variation-selection ~ freedom-determinism ... and so on.

          Taken two at a time, it can be read as "what quantum is to classical" is similar to (~) "what wave is to particle." You can choose any two from among the multitudes that can be found in our discourses.

          I could have put Schrodinger wave ontology-Heisenberg particle ontology duality in the list had it comes to my mind!

          Since "Nature is Analogical", we are free to probe nature in so many different ways. And you have touched some corners of it.

          Best regards

          Than Tin

            Dear Giacomo,

            We corresponded before and I appreciate your frankness and your difficult to shake relational views of space. As I am not a professional physicist and just to be clear and learn from professionals: Is it being implied by the relational view of space and as suggested by Mach's principle that what decides whether a centrifugal force would act between two bodies in *constant relation*, would not be the bodies themselves, since they are at fixed distance to each other, nor the space in which they are located since it is a nothing, but by a distant sub-atomic particle light-years away in one of the fixed stars in whose reference frame the *constantly related* bodies are in circular motion?

            You can reply me here or on my blogmy blog. And please pardon my naive view of physics.

            Accept my best regards,

            Akinbo

              Dear Professor D'Ariano,

              I am happy that so excellent essay as yours is top rated among some others that are also close to my ideas. I dare to express your "It is not easy to abandon the idea of a universe made of matter and embrace the vision of a reality made of pure information" in a paraphrase: It is not easy to abandon the idea of a universe made of matter and embrace the vision of a reality made of a pure (conformally flat, isotropic, elastic, homeomorphic and self-organized) spacetime.

              I would like to fill your beautiful ontology with details that are able to reconcile, in a sense, Einstein with Bell. The details are powerful because they generate clear predictions. I will also add a real experiment to get ability to falsify that details.

              "failures in explaining relevant phenomena-e.g. gravity or dark matter and other astrophysical observations-phenomena that even a reasonable revision of the particle notion seems unable to explain. An ontology that works perfectly well in accounting for a large class of phenomena may later prove having not the same power in explaining other phenomena, e.g. those occurring at scales that are much larger or much smaller than those where the ontology is successful"

              That revision of the particle notion is a kind of geometrization of matter. I have tried to apply the geometrization concept not only to the "matter" but also to all "force fields" i.e. electromagnetic, strong and weak nuclear. The gravity would then be emergent as a superposition. The job is not easy so I have proposed an experiment to be sure this is not a huge waste of time. As you know Einstein GR failed outside the Solar System distance scale ( so some physicists try to save GR by means of dark things) and Wheeler-deWitt geometrodynamics has the well-known flaws: the problem of time, the problem of Hilbert space and others. QM's Standard Model in turn does not offer any metric. The other theories using canonical approaches (connection dynamics, loop dynamics etc.) or covariant approaches (perturbation theory, path integrals etc.) and string theories also have not acceptable flaws or generate no predictions.

              I also do not use any lattice as it seems to be too limiting. Instead I use deformations of spacetime (wavepackets). Any spacetime deformation is unlimited (to some extent, it deforms the entire spacetime in Gaussian distribution mode, due to its elastic and homeomorphism properties). Than Quantum nonlocality becomes GR type locality by the emergence out of Gaussian distribution.

              I am looking for that one, universal, distance scale invariant metric (eventually reducing to Einstein GR metric within Solar System distance scale) and having ability to generate predictions. The first prediction of that geometrization concept is the spin experiment outcome. Depending on the outcome we shall look for a proper metric or give up.

              ===========

              "we should trust observations, even against our intuition, and ground our knowledge on the logic of the experiment, focusing theoretical predictions on what we actually observe."

              Einstein has asked: could we not reject the concept of matter and build a pure field physics? Paraphrasing him let us assume that what impresses our senses as matter is really a strong deformation of spacetime.

              Let us start out with our simple thought experiment: we emit a wave to observe that small region in spacetime (the size of an elementary particle radius). That region is deformed to the grade that the wave actually detected (observed) comes back to us along a geodesic ("straight line" in differential geometry). In fact we observe only a strongly deformed spacetime region and redirecting our wave but apparently... we perceive a particle. "We perceive" means that our measuring instruments and our language out of the force of habit say so. The fact that deformation of spacetime exist is generally recognized as a part of general relativity theory (e.g. gravitational lensing). In contrast to GR's distance scale the metric under consideration refers to the quantum scale [3].

              Before we proceed (in future, depending on the outcome of our real experiment) to calculate the proper scale invariant metric we need to take some assumptions regarding the spacetime properties to decide what could possibly emerge out of our reasoning:

              a) the spacetime is continuous, i.e. not perforated, not torn and has a homeomorphism property

              b) the spacetime has elastic properties (possible to calculate)

              c) the elastic properties of spacetime are isotropic

              d) any spacetime deformation is unlimited (to some extent, it deforms the entire spacetime in Gaussian distribution mode, due to its elastic and homeomorphism properties). Quantum nonlocality becomes GR type locality by the emergence out of Gaussian distribution

              e) the spacetime is a dissipative coupled system that exhibits self-organized criticality. That assumption is necessary to use the general law of survival of the stable for the evolution of spacetime deformations)[3]

              The spacetime here is not the infamous ether which was rightly rejected because it was to be a frame of reference and a background for all events. The spacetime is not the background, but the material (fabric) of matter and energy itself and then it is quite natural that energy and matter can be transmitted as waves/wavepackets.

              The real experiment

              A source emits a right-handed photon, the photon impinges almost perpendicularly a mirror being reflected to a detector set up to measure the spin of particle. The photon shall be a low-energy photon to avoid a photoelectric effect, Compton scattering or pair production.

              According to Standard Model of QM the reflected photon's spin is the opposite to that of the photon emitted at the source.

              According to our thought experiment carried out above the "reflected" photon's spin is the same as that of the photon emitted.

              According to Standard Model the photon does not go "around" along a geodesic but it is simply reflected and as a cause of that reflection the spin is changed.

              We try to prove that the photon is not a point particle (like in Standard Model) that is reflected from another point particle (one of the many creating our mirror) but instead it travels around a "particle" being a part of the mirror and comes back along a geodesic. The way it goes is a geodesic because the mirror's "particle" is the spacetime deformation only. If our photon goes along the geodesic (straight line) it does not change its spin.

              So it is a realization of the thought experiment.

              =========

              My next proposal is to exchange the emergence of spacetime from Qubits into the emergence of Qubits from the conformally flat, isotropic, homeomorphic, self-organized and elastic spacetime.

              My answer to "What is then the teleported human?": He/she is a wavepacket.

              My proposal for your holism is to narrow it down to emergentism that is the direct consequence of any evolutionary approach.

              Finally my comment for the Quantum Cellular Automata issue. To me the universe is a dissipative coupled system that exhibits self-organized criticality. The structured criticality is a property of complex systems where small events may trigger larger events. This is a kind of chaos where the general behavior of the system can be modeled on one scale while smaller- and larger-scale behaviors remain unpredictable. The simple example of that phenomenon is a pile of sand. When QM and GR are computable and deterministic, the universe evolution (naturally evolving self-organized critical system) is non-computable and non-deterministic.

              I am sorry for that long comment.

              Anyway your essay deserves the highest rating.

              I do believe you will win the contest!

              Dear Jacek,

              your post is much longer than your essay!

              If I understand your point of view, in synthesis the similarity with mine relies in the notion of physical "object" as emergent. However, in your case the underlying software is a (conformally flat, isotropic, elastic, homeomorphic and self-organized) space-time. In my case is a countable set of quantum systems in relational unitary interactions. The quantum superposition then plays the major role in the emergence.

              On the contrary, if I understand well, the main departure from our points of view is that in my case the universe is evolving unitarily, though dissipation can emerge (in a different sense from the previous case), and then can exhibit self-organized criticality. For me everything is (must be) computable.

              However, essentially my whole philosophy, or scientific methodology if you want, is that I like to assume the minimum number of principles, principles that are almost indisputable, as the axioms of geometry, and derive all the physics that follows from them, as a theorem. In my case the principles are locality, homogeneity, isotropy, unitariety. At least from my work with Paolo Perinotti we have seen that from these principles we also get SR as an approximated covariance. So, we can conclude that there is something more fundamental than SR, and SR is just approximate. Whether the physical world is made like that-namely it is really discrete and relies on these fundamental principles-will then be subjected to experiments.

              But my general message is: don't be afraid of discreteness. It works absolutely well, without the hurdles of the continuum, and with all the aids of the continuum in the relativistic regime!

              You will see the full power of the automaton at work for QED, when it will authomatically sum-up all Feynman diagrams.

              Thank you very much for your wonderful compliments and your:

              "I do believe you will win the contest! "!

              As you can imagine, I really hope so! It would be unique opportunity of diffusing these ideas to the public, and allow this new theoretical approach to have a try.

              My best regards, and thank you again

              Mauro

                Dear Akinibo

                you are touching the apocryphal principle of Mach, which Einstein was so fond of, but, unfortunately he couldn't achieve in his GR. Its space-time metric played the role of a kind of ether. In his Lecture in Leiden he said that he believed that the rotating Newton bucket would have the water pushing up the bucket walls, even in an empty universe (see the masterpiece Einstein's biography of Walter Isaacson). Do we have the absolute inertial frame, or even the rest frame, as an ether? In practice we have an ether: it is the background radiation. It is a frame with respect to which we can check that we are moving. And, in practice, we define the inertial frame only relying on fixed stars. In an emergent space-time from an automaton Lorenz covariance is distorted, meaning that the principle of relativity does not hold in a ultra-relativistic regime.

                I will post this also on your blog, as you asked me.

                Thank you for raising the issue.

                My best regards

                Mauro

                Dear Than

                I'm happy that we both think, as Richard Feynman did, that "simplicity" is the key of theoretical research.

                As a matter of fact, my general principle at the basis of the quantum automaton is the minimization of its quantum algorithmic complexity. Locality, homogeneity, and isotropy reduce enormously the algorithmic complexity of the physical law represented by the automaton.

                My best regards

                Mauro

                Dear William

                thank you for raising these issues. Indeed, in my framework "observation" is stressed only in the sense that I want to make clear the difference between theoretical notions and observed events. Usually we confuse the two. For example, we take the notion of particle as a concrete object, whereas it is just a theoretical one.

                Regarding the bound for the mass, this is something that I discovered more than three years ago on the d=1 Dirac automaton (see arXiv), and can be found in some proceedings and published recently in PLA A 376 697 (2012). It is now confirmed with the automaton in 3d. It is just a consequence of unitariety. In the row (or column) of the unitary matrix there is a term that plays the role of the inertial mass in the relativistic limit of small wave vectors, and, due to normalization of the row, must be bounded by 1. In the digital-analog conversion one has this bound corresponding to the Planck mass. See also my 2011 and 2012 FQXi essays. A consequence of unitariety is also the fact that one has a "refraction index for vacuum" depending on the inertial mass, and the speed goes to zero at the Planck mass. Very like the mini-black-hole, but without using GR!

                My best regards

                Mauro