It from Qubit by Giacomo Mauro D\'Ariano

Dear Dipak

thank you for your very nice compliments, and thank you very much for your rating. I will read and rate your essay soon.

I don't believe in the specularity between It and Bit. As you have seen in my essay, for me Bit is fundamental, and It is emergent. In order to put the It to the same level of the Bit, one should precisely define what is the "elementary It", and we know that it cannot be the elementary particle.

My best regards

Mauro

Dear Janko

thank you for your interesting post. Yes, my approach is close to that of Fotini, in the sense that we reach the same conclusion, namely that, as she says:

"the problem of time is a paradox, stemming from an unstated faulty premise. Our faulty assumption is that space is real. I propose that what does not fundamentally exist is not time but space, geometry and gravity. The quantum theory of gravity will be spaceless, not timeless. If we are willing to throw out space, we can keep time and the trade is worth it. "

The supporting technical material you are asking is given in the following Refs. in my essay:

[7] G.M. D'Ariano and P. Perinotti, arXiv preprint 1306.1934 (2013) http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.1934

[8] M. Kapovich, Cayley graphs of finitely generated in- finite groups quasi-isometrically embeddable in R3, http://mathoverflow.net/questions/130994 version: 2013-05-17

To say something more Alice and Bob and how space emerges from systems, the logic is the following. You start from relations between systems. If you assume that they are homogeneous, then they are described by a finitely-generated infinite group. From that group you get the manifold that embeds it quasi-isometrically. Therefore the manifold emerges from relations. The striking thing is that the quantum cellular automaton achieves the embedding "physically", in the sense that all the continuous symmetries are recovered from the discrete in the limit of small wave-vectors (the relativistic limit). It is the quantum nature of the related systems that allows this, and this is exactly the idea that I wrote in my previous essay in an embryonic stage, namely that the quantum superposition of paths solves the Weyl-tiling issue of recovering continuum geometry from the discrete one. Therefore, the quantum nature of systems and relations is crucial for the emergence. This new way of having space-time as emergent from a purely relational framework is amazingly interesting, since it also opens crucial new problems (e.g. if there are QCA that are quasi-isometrically embeddable in non euclidean spaces!). I'm now in Chicago where I will meet some mathematicians expert in the field, and I hope to find answers soon.

As regards consciousness, I never seriously addressed this problem. I saw your essay, and it looks interesting, but I need time to read it. I will doit, hopefully in time to rate the essay.

My best regards

Mauro

Dear Kyle

I am sorry if I alarmed you. Please, consider that you will be perfectly safe in a digital universe!

My best wishes

mauro

Dear Amazigh

thank you for your post. I also rated your essay.

Good luck to you.

Mauro

Thank you Jeffrey for your compliments.

In writing my essay I've been especially concerned with its readability, and with being myself convincing. It will take time to make my quantum cellular automaton framework more popular, but I've already witness a large increase in popularity from the last year, whereas in the academic environment it immediately got much interest since the very earliest ideas.

Thank you for your post. I really appreciated it. And I also enjoyed reading your essay on robots.

My best regards

Mauro

Dear Hugh,

I thank you for your beautiful compliments and your appreciation of some of the main points in my essay. I think that the simulation paradigm is taken very seriously in my essay, in the sense that reality should be in all sense indistinguishable from its (quantum) simulation. What you call the "explicate" order is the classical information that we can tap from the quantum automaton, whereas the "implicate" order is the secret quantum information precessed by the automaton. I also had a read of your essay, and I found it very clearly written and with interesting ideas inside (and I rated it high), though I'm not completely sure for the moment that I share the "Bit from Us" part of your thesis.

Thank you again

My best regards

Mauro

Dear Satyavarapu,

not "production", but "emergence", of matter from information. This is very different.

There are phenomena that can confirm the quantum cellular automata theory, such as blurring of images at (with increasing frequency) of ultra-deep space quasars. The whole phenomenology of "relative locality" that is implied by the distortion of Lorentz covariance at high momenta should produce observable consequences. We are studying the phenomenology with other more expert authors.

Cheers

Mauro

Yuri

I read your essay. Yes, I found your empirical law for masses interesting, but we need at least a rough reasonable motivation for it. Don't you think?

My best regards

Mauro

Dear Dr. Laurence,

thank you for your provoking post.

For me "reality" is definitely not a mathematical structure. You should specify better what you mean by reality: if reality is what you see (the shadows on the Plato's cave) or what you believe is out of there (the bodies projecting the shadows). In my essay I clearly stated that the main point in the scientific method is to clearly distinguish between theory and experiment. Such a distinction, far from being trivial as it may appear at first sight, is in my opinion the main reason for the stubborn attachment of many scientists to the view of space-time as "a stage where particles move"--a theoretical landscape that has been proved to be foundationally inconsistent, and it is the origin of the apparent paradox of the GR-QT conflict. We are taking about "theory" here, namely what we believe is out of the cave, the mechanisms by which we explain what we see. But what we believe is not what is "actually" out there (this is a nonsense: who is the Referee to assess reality of what we believe?) We shouldn't forget that we are the ones that build-up the "ontologies" as convenient tools for reasoning.

Now, at this point, you should agree that what we are talking about is "theory". And theory is written in the language of mathematics. Therefore, it is not "reality" that is an abstract mathematical construction.

Thank you again for the opportunity given to me by your post

Mauro

Franklin

I am surprised that at MIT students don't know what is R^3. Even in Italy at high schools students know it! Besides, I clearly defined R^3 in my essay as "the usual Euclidean space", and I personally studied Euclidean spaces at a Literature high school. I have many friends at MIT since ages (and even got my PhD students having a postdoc there), and you do not seem a standard MIT-educated person. You are just kidding.

Anyway, talking more seriously. I wrote an essay deliberately with many levels of reading, to satisfy all different kinds of audience. I devoted only one page to the technical level, and used the most standard notation and most elementary notions. (Every science-graduated should know notions as field, dimension, metric, isometry, isotropy. Maybe he is not required to know GR, but he definitely must know the basics of quantum theory.) Having in mind the possibility of a Scientific American publication, I also put the technical part between definite boundaries within the essay.

If we want to talk about serious real physics here--not mere random speculations--at least, there must be a page giving the precise technical definitions. Not only this is allowed by the rules of the contest, but also it is logically mandatory. Otherwise, one can e.g. claim gravity as a force between dipoles, forgetting that it would not go as the inverse square law.

Paradoxically, the Corda paper (which is not an essay, but a technical paper that needs a long list of references to be read) found the consensus of the Community. Therefore, it seems to me that not only you are not a standard MIT-educated person, but not even a standard member of this Community.

I understand your frustration.

Don't worry, be happy

With my best regards

Mauro

Dear Jonathan,

thank you for your beautiful compliments. I know Paola Zizzi, but I didn't know that she used the "It from Qubit" modification of J.A. Wheeler's paradigm: it has been so natural to me for years. Paola is not in Pavia, she is in Trieste. I also know Seth well, I will ask him. Seth inspired me a lot in these last years.

It is interesting that Gerard 't Hooft said that Lorentz covariance " is very difficult to achieve with CA based theories". This makes my result stronger. The fact that I achieve Lorentz covariance is a tautology, since the quantum automaton leads to Dirac! And, the fact that the automaton has been derived without using SR makes indeed the result striking. But the point is that--as also explained shortly in my essay and proved in full extent in Ref. [7]--Dirac equation and Lorentz covariance are obtained in the relativistic limit of small wave-vectors (here small means compared to the Planck ones, namely huge!). For ultra relativistic and/or Planck regimes there are distortion of Lorentz covariance a la Smolin/Maguejo and Amelino-Camelia, and there is a full range of physics, from the Planck scale to the macro. The fact that Gerard cannot achieve Lorentz covariance is because his CA is classical! Right, you need quantum superpositions to recover continuous symmetries from the discrete. Paradoxically quantum theory is needed to recover SR! (I say paradoxically, in view of the GR-QT clash). So, in a sense you are right in your essay when you say that we have both discrete and continuum: discrete is in the denumerability of systems; continuum is in the set of joint states of the systems.

You are also very close to my vision when you say in your essay:

"Therefore; the dance of information with form is best seen as a constant interplay where not only do the dancers interact with each other, but there is a continual exchange between dancers and the dance, where each is featured in turn. General information and open possibilities lead to actualities, then specific conditions engender new possibilities - and this cycle repeats - without end."

This is the perennial cycle of the quantum cellular automaton, and the dancers are the quantum cells.

Thank you for your rating and your wishes. I also rated well your essay.

Best wishes to you

Mauro

David

I thank you very much for your high opinion of my essay.

I share your statistics about the contest. I share also many of your points in your essay (which I've not rated it, as you asked). What I do not agree with is your point:

"Quantum entanglement opens the window for locally noncausal phenomena. We have to think wholly and incorporate global informational field - web of BITs - with links embedded in the quantum field."

Causality is perfectly respected by entanglement. Indeed causality is the first of the six Pavia axioms (see my Ref. [3]). Nonlocal correlations are non causal, exactly in the sense that cannot be used to transmit information (Einsten's sense). They can be used to do teleportation and many other nice things, but not for communication.

Thank you again,

My best regards

Mauro