It from Qubit by Giacomo Mauro D\'Ariano

Dear Giacomo

I found your essay very interesting and well structured. However, I have a view in opposition to yours. Just as Olaf and Maria Carrillo argue, I support the view that information has no meaning without objects (it). I'd like to express some critics on your work and I'd be glad if could make some comments.

As far as I could see you support the view that information (bit) is more fundamental than the substance (bit). To state your position you invoke pragmatism and operationalism whose bases, according to you, rest on what we "observe" and not on what we believe is out there. My first point is that I don't have clear what you mean by "what we believe is out there" if what is out there is supposed to be what we "observe" with our senses and instruments. Could you please clarify.

You also mention that what matters is making correct predictions and that we only need to describe logically and efficiently what we "see". I concur with you that theories should account for physical phenomena and I assume that by the words "observe" and "see" you mean "data collected by measuring instruments". It appears that many colleagues have forgotten that since the advent of QM and GR intuition and common sense (or ontologies as you say) were relegated to a second plane in physics and replaced by mathematical formulations. In my opinion operationalism is synonymous of the famous "shut up and calculate" approach. Operationalism has been practiced for many decades since the first quarter of the XX century, and without doubt is the cause that has brought us to the present state in physics. The fact that our understanding of the world has been restricted to ever increasing abstract theories is, in my view and the view of many other renown physicists, the real cause of not making progress in the last 30 or more years in theoretical physics. This is the reason why nowadays we found many different roads to "reality" or ontologies such as string theory, causal sets, LQG, including the one we are discussing in this contest. Therefore, the ontology of object has not precluded the progress of physics. Moreover if we consider that ontologies are tools to depict mechanisms of "what we believe is out there" (observations) in our mind, then we can assert that information and math can be considered in a certain sense as some kind of "ontologies", after all math is also a mental tool composed of pure logical structures and abstract objects that we humans have develop to help ourselves in understanding the world out there. We cannot deny that there are some colleagues who argue that the universe has mathematical structures, some even go beyond this asseveration and claim that the universe is pure math. If we acknowledge this, then the problem likely reduces to a mere problem of interpretation, language or thus of semantics. Whereas in the current view we assume that the main ingredients that make up the universe are matter, energy, space, time, and fields; the "it from bit" ideology suggests that the main ingredient is information in the form of states or bits. But what is a bit or information? And what physical meaning do they have without hardware? If they are states, they should be states of something tangible... the fact that they are states doesn't imply that they stop being objects.

Thus, I took your question: Why we should bother changing our way of looking at reality? And your answer is: Because the old matter-realistic way of thinking in terms of particles moving around and interacting on the stage of space-time is literally blocking the progress of theoretical physics.

The ontology that matter is a essential substance of the universe is neither deficient nor precluding the progress of physics but what is deficient is the conception of particle. The solution that you offer is to throw out the baby with the bath water. I wouldn't replace the "it" for the "bit", instead I would replace first the ontologies of particle and wave for only one ontology that encompasses both and to do so I have to reconceptualize the ontologies of space and field. This is what I discuss in my current and previous essays.

You say: The lesson spelled loud and clear by the Bell theorem is that we should trust observations, even against our intuition.

Again, "observations" means "data" and data can be interpreted by more sophisticated ontologies that go along with intuition and common sense and that keep the "it" as the fundamental ingredient. Some colleagues are working on showing that entanglement (and thus non-locality) can have an intuitive explanation (which is actually very simple if we change our notion of particle).

Later you talked about a field, but what is a field made of? You say: It is a collection of infinitely many quantum systems. But the "quantum system" is an abstract notion: it is an immaterial support...

That the field is a mathematical abstraction is due to Einstein since then most physicists believe so, but this doesn't forbid us to recover the notion of field as conceived by Maxwell. So a field can be considered a state of the quantum vacuum and we can postulate, without fear of falling into inconsistencies, that the vacuum is a material continuum. Therefore, we are left again with matter and hardware as the fundamental essence of the universe.

Finally, I'd like to invite you to read my essay, I'd be grateful if could leave me your comments.

Best Regards

Israel

Dear Mauro,

I think that you have stopped reading my essay when you saw that I started with only two states (existence and non-existence).

Please read it further, at least read the "evolution of a 3D world" paragraph, and you will see that the "bit" seen by an internal observer is determined by the state of two successive layers of bits, this, in a certain way, will give you the 3rd state you are looking for.

I really hope you will take the time to look at my complete theory. You said that you like theories based on very simple principles, that is exactly what I have done here and I came up with very interesting results, just from these very simple principles.

For example, I show that the proton's diameter is a scaled up version of the Planck length and that the proton's mass is a scaled down version of the Planck mass.

If you take the Planck length and multiply it by 1020 (the scale factor) and divide it by 1-1/8Pi, you get the exact value of the proton's diameter measured with a muon. If you divide that SAME value again by the SAME 1-1/8Pi, you get the exact value of the proton's diameter measured with an electron (solving the proton radius measurement problem ). This 1-1/8Pi is explained in my theory (it is (8Pi-1)/8Pi).

If you take the Planck mass and multiply it by 10-20(the scale down factor) and multiply it by 8-1/Pi, you get the exact value of the proton's mass. Again, 8-1/Pi is explained in my theory (it is (8Pi-1)/Pi).

The 8Pi-1 also appears in the proton/electron mass ratio formula that I present in my essay but also in a lot more formulae that I won't describe here but that you can find here.

I would love to have your expert opinion on my findings, I hope that you will take the time to read my theory and give me some feedback.

Best regards,

Patrick

PS: if you read my theory, you will understand why I said that your essay was "first class"

Dear Mauro,

Sorry, I am not very good at explaining things, especially I am lacking the proper scientific language.

When you have the time, it would be great if you could let me know what you don't understand in my logic, I will try to answer your queries. I can assure you that it will all make sense in the end, my theory was built up from very simple principles and everything is just plain logic.

I look forward to your comments when you come back from travelling.

Best regards,

Patrick

Dear Olaf

happy to hear from you! And to know that you still share some of the ideas we discussed two years ago at Pi and then in Pavia. As I promised, I now have the full derivation of Dirac in 3d from purely informational principles (see my recent arXiv:1306.1934 with Paolo Perinotti). There we showed how Dirac eq. is derived as emergent in the relativistic limit of small wave-vectors from countably infinitely many quantum systems in interaction, on the assumptions of interaction locality homogeneity, isotropy, and unitariety, and without using Special Relativity! We can now understand that there is something more fundamental than the relativity principle. Space-time here emerges as "relational", and all relations make a group: a system is connected to another by a group action. And, along with the Lorentz covariance of Direac, we get the Amelino-Camelia/Smolin/Maguejo distorted covariance, with an invariant energy, relative locality, etc. in the ultrarelativistic regime. I'm sure that you should like it. Just take a look at the 4 page PRL-style manus. without reading the technical supp. mat. I will move fast to gravity, and, in parallel, to QED. I will keep both promises, you'll see. I'm dreaming a MOND, as you inspired to me.

Regarding your essay, to be honest I should confess that I share essentially nothing! However, being really nicely written and provocative (and complementary to mine as Giovanni Amelino-Camelia says) I will rate it well.

What I do not share is the "linguistic" notion of information, i.e. with a "meaning". This may make sense for classical information, which is sharable. But what is the meaning of quantum information, which is not sharable, but is secret? If you don't thing that quantum information is technically a kind of information (and for you information is only classical), I strongly suggest you the Pavia axiomatics for QT (PRA A 84 012311 (2011) http://pra.aps.org/abstract/PRA/v84/i1/e012311). The difference between classical and quantum information, is that the quantum one is purifiable, namely is only apparently lost, it is always preserved as long as you have control of the environment.

I can accept your assertion that "meaning arises through interaction, it is dynamic, and it is internal". But you should be more specific about it. How do you qualify the meaning in terms of the interaction? You cannot deny that interaction is ultimately only quantum. What is the quantum meaning in terms of the unitary operator? Internal to what? You should be more specific. How I describe mathematically the meaning? In your post you say: "Think of the list of positions of the atoms and molecules that make up the river (or ship). What does this list of numbers mean? To give meaning to these numbers you have to give a procedure of how to position the atoms. This requires material objects (like the standard meter that used to be in Paris)." My answer is: There is no such a way of measuring position of atoms. There are only outcomes from an indirect inference of the atom position within a theoretical description. The only position measurement in your sense is the classical measurement: then the meter is emergent notion at the topmost level.

You say: "Without matter information is literally meaningless". Here we are really at the opposite sides. For me matter is emergent! You are talking of the usual linguistic information, with a semantic, the one that we are using here in the blog, Not the one made of bits or the qubits. What are the meanings of the bit values 0 and 1? Information is processed by a computer in a "meaningless" way as a binary code. It seems to me that you missed the meaning of the theme of the essay competition: "It from Bit or Bit from It?" Not information in usual semantic sense.

However, apart from our manifest disagreement, I liked your essay, and I rated it well.

Best wishes,

with friendship

Mauro

Dear Mauro

Thanks for your reply, I appreciate it. I would like to answer your questions and make some clarifications about your comments. Perhaps our views are not so different in principle.

You: which definitely is not a debate... ...opinion of two matter-realistic persons.

Indeed, it was never meant to be a debate between two opposite views because, as you can see, Alice has a few knowledge of the topic, actually she's not a physicist. In this sense she just represents an ordinary layman as one of the 7 billion on this earth and therefore she is an ordinary realist who thinks that physicists are getting out of their minds believing that the universe is only a huge computer dealing with bits. However, as any other layman who has vague ideas of how science is done, she keeps her mind open to probably accept these unusual ideas insofar as they sound "reasonable" (of course, if her knowledge of the topic is poor, they would not sound reasonable). On the contrary, Bob is a professional physicist who knows how both theoretical physics and science are done. He doesn't swallow all that he hears in the media or even among his colleagues. Although he is open minded, he is also very critical. He then exposes a general point of view of the case. Since what matters in contemporary physics is not to find physical descriptions of observations that satisfy our intuition but only to quantitatively reproduce data with mathematical models, he thinks that whether information or matter are considered as fundamental ingredients of the universe is just a matter of semantics or of convention, or even of commodity. He thinks that information (and even the whole of math) is just another sort of ontology, another mental tool among the myriad of options. However, as many other physicists, he's really worried about the present situation, because he understands that the way (pragmatic) physics has been done in the last century has led physics to an apparent dead end. He reflects that the old way of doing physics, based on ontologies, was so successful and he doesn't find any reason to discard it from science. So he thinks that is worth keeping with this tradition. Since for him, the "it from bit" approach is just another approach, he thinks that is worth continuing with the "bit from it" approach. And to show the power of such approach he gives an example that seems to be promising not only to get out of the present conundrum but also to build a theory that is in agreement with "common sense". The latter offers the advantage that is easily accessible to Alice (and the other 7 billion) because there is no need of changing her mind. So when you say: From this I infer that there is little hope of convincing you. I can only reply that I concur with Bob's view. As you can see he's not realist, he's scientist and open minded. He only sees that the "bit from it" approach has more potential to solve the present problems.

You: What we observe IS NOT what... ...we believe is outside the cave.

In seems that in essence we are in agreement, I'd like to add my view just for completeness. We should recognize that the ontology is constructed in the mind of a person based on the "shadow" alias "raw data". And as I said before, raw data can have many interpretations which depend in general on the theoretical framework where we situate the data. But without a doubt the theoretical framework is constructed from ontologies and/or abstract objects such as math. That's why math is also some sort of ontology. The theoretical framework has no meaning if it has no relation to observations, this is why physics is considered a factual science, otherwise it would be pure philosophy or applied math. The previous lines remind me of the famous subject-object problem from the theory of knowledge which can be summarized as follows: The knowledge of an object is subjected to the appreciation of the subject. In order to know the object the subject has to observe it and the process of observation (as quantum mechanics teach us) affects the pristine state of the object. At the end what we observe is not the object (i.e. reality) but the outcome of the interaction with the object (raw data). Therefore observations (the shadow) constitutes our reality (ontology, whether "real" or "abstract").

You: The shut up and calculate is on the opposite side of operationalism. Thanks for clarifying, I apologize for this, I misunderstood operationalism and confused it with pragmatism.

Thanks for the book recommendation. Indeed, I agree that the notion of particle is expiring and perhaps the quantum cellular automaton extension to QFT is a feasible solution but as I said that doesn't mean that we have to replace the "it" for the "bit". And I would like to insists that it is not necessary to throw out the baby with the bath water. That the notion of the particle needs some amendments is clear but from this it doesn't follow that we have to give up the idea that matter is the essential substance of the universe. I'd like to make clear that although particle is by definition related to matter the opposite is not in general true.

You: About "common sense"... ... explanation of the entanglement.

No yet, but the reconceptualization of particle offers a solution that will eventually lead to a general consensus. Some colleagues are working on this, you'll hear about it soon.

You: Yes, the quantum system--the qubit--is an abstract notion, as it the notion of bit. But nowadays, in the everyday life, it seems more practical than the notion of particle, don't you think?

If we leave the notion of particle untouched, the answer is yes, otherwise it's no.

Finally, I'd like to congratulate you in advance because I'm sure you are again one of the winners.

Best Regards

Israel

Dear Professor D'Ariano,

I am sorry for the delayed answer. It is not because I am afraid of discreetness. I will try to explain some points. In my concept (as you know) a particle is only a (Gaussian type) spacetime deformation so it can be called a quasi-quanta because Gaussian distribution is continuous however in good approximation it is discrete. We perceive it as discrete.

You claim: "For me everything is (must be) computable." When QM and GR are computable and deterministic, the universe evolution (naturally evolving self-organized critical system) is non-computable and non-deterministic. It does not mean that computability and determinism are related. Roger Penrose proves that computability and determinism are different things. So the actual universe is computable during Lyapunov time but its evolution is non-computable.

And later on: "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". I fully agree. So I have proposed only one universal scale-invariant metric.

Best regards and still good luck!

Dear Physician,

Mass ratio of neutrons and protons is fundamental in physics.

Maybe you do not have time to read essay of unknown authors. I encourage you, therefore, allow you to comment on the very essence of following formula:

[math]\gamma= 2^{(cy+p+3t)/(2+2a^{2}m)}=1.0013784192[/math]

Where mathematical constant are:

[math]2\pi=6.2831853, t=log(2\pi,2)=2.6514961295, cy=e^{2\pi}= 535.4916555248 [/math]

Physical constants:

[math]a=1/\alpha=137.035999074, \mu=1836.15267245,m=log(\mu,2)=10.8424703056[/math]

Also:

[math]p=log(Mu/mp,2)=cy/2-(\mu/a+1)/(\mu/a+2)-1=265.8107668189[/math]

An important physicist said it was a coincidence, or perhaps just a curiosity. Perhaps you feel the same. My opinion is opposite. I think that in terms of, such a significant relationship physicist should have an attitude.

Greetings Branko

Dear Mauro,

Given that my Essay proposed a small change to quantum theory -- eliminating "collapse" -- I challenged your expressed opinion "that Quantum Theory is too rigid to be changeable just a little."

Thinking that this would be the best place to discuss our differences, and given your status as an FQXi-member, I'm naturally disappointed at your continuing avoidance of the issue.

For the record, and doubting that our views are in contraposition, I did not request you to referee my essay.

Sincerely; Gordon Watson.

Caro professore D'Ariano,

Thank you so much for your gracious comments and high rating of my essay! This was a very nice surprise and coming from you, the entrant most likely to win this contest, I was on the seventh heaven!

And thank you for reading and commenting on the essays by Carolyn Devereux and Maria Carrillo-Ruiz (and by the way, I'm not a Dr in either physics nor medicine, but Carolyn has PhD in physics and Maria, a master's degree). Speaking of coincidences --or oddities in random distributions-- their two essays were uploaded one after the other (topics # 1892 & 1893) and Maria was the only one out of 60 essays that I've read so far who, other than you, also spoke about CA, while Carolyn had the best match ever to my personal vision of reality. The only non-random influence here was that I purposefully looked for essays written by women (since we are such a minority here, 7 out of 182, and I'm only worried that I may have missed Asian women, if any, not being able to recognize the femaleness of their names).

You wrote, "If you want, the quantum cellular automaton is a kind of ontological monism: space itself is a kind of "quantum stuff", and reality emerges from its dynamics. This maybe similar to also Carolyn Devereux point of view, where the vibration of a primordial substrate may play the role of the automaton, but I should see the complete theoretical mathematical framework to express a thorough opinion. Here I can remark some differences: in my case the notion of energy is quite different from the usual classical and quantum one."

First, could you please elucidate some more on how your notion of energy differs from the usual classical and quantum sense?

Second, I wanted to bring up some far-reaching implications of Carolyn Devereux's model (as I understand it) for your consideration:

1. The model simultaneously contains the aspects of continuum and discreteness -- here discreteness arises our of vibrations of space-time-energy continuum, with the implication that the minimal oscillation (presumably of 'Plank length') is not fixed globally (as for the whole Universe) but is an entirely local phenomenon, just like time is.

2. The model implies that this space-time-energy continuum comprises a medium that, in addition to carrying EMR and gravity, also transmits thus far undiscovered by physics 'vibrational force' (for the lack of a better term). It may be that the underlying _finer_ vibrations in this medium/substrate is what allows the EM waves to propagate. The other implication would be that the resonances of these vibrations, if we're able to detect them, can shed more light on quantum phenomena.

What do you think?

Thank you again for all your feedback -- and I'm reading now your seminal paper on 'Pavia axiomatization' :)

-Marina