Dear professor D'Ariano,

In response to your interesting Essay, I would like to discuss Bell's theorem. For in my Essay, Bell's theorem is refuted.

For example, you write: "The lesson spelled loud and clear by the Bell theorem is that 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. In a word: being operationalist."

But with Bell's theorem refuted, this justification for your "operationalism" is invalid.

The case might change if I have erred. But no error has yet been identified in my Essay. So, to resolve our differences, I would welcome discussions with you and your team of collaborators.

With best regards; Gordon Watson.

    Dear Giacomo Mauro

    Thank you for presenting your nice essay. I saw the abstract and will post my comments soon.

    So you can produce material from your thinking. . . .

    I am requesting you to go through my essay also. And I take this opportunity to say, to come to reality and base your arguments on experimental results.

    I failed mainly because I worked against the main stream. The main stream community people want magic from science instead of realty especially in the subject of cosmology. We all know well that cosmology is a subject where speculations rule.

    Hope to get your comments even directly to my mail ID also. . . .

    Best

    =snp

    snp.gupta@gmail.com

    http://vaksdynamicuniversemodel.blogspot.com/

    Pdf download:

    http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/essay-download/1607/__details/Gupta_Vak_FQXi_TABLE_REF_Fi.pdf

    Part of abstract:

    - -Material objects are more fundamental- - is being proposed in this paper; It is well known that there is no mental experiment, which produced material. . . Similarly creation of matter from empty space as required in Steady State theory or in Bigbang is another such problem in the Cosmological counterpart. . . . In this paper we will see about CMB, how it is generated from stars and Galaxies around us. And here we show that NO Microwave background radiation was detected till now after excluding radiation from Stars and Galaxies. . . .

    Some complements from FQXi community. . . . .

    A

    Anton Lorenz Vrba wrote on May. 4, 2013 @ 13:43 GMT

    ....... I do love your last two sentences - that is why I am coming back.

    Author Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta replied on May. 6, 2013 @ 09:24 GMT

    . . . . We should use our minds to down to earth realistic thinking. There is no point in wasting our brains in total imagination which are never realities. It is something like showing, mixing of cartoon characters with normal people in movies or people entering into Game-space in virtual reality games or Firing antimatter into a black hole!!!. It is sheer a madness of such concepts going on in many fields like science, mathematics, computer IT etc. . . .

    B.

    Francis V wrote on May. 11, 2013 @ 02:05 GMT

    Well-presented argument about the absence of any explosion for a relic frequency to occur and the detail on collection of temperature data......

    C

    Robert Bennett wrote on May. 14, 2013 @ 18:26 GMT

    "Material objects are more fundamental"..... in other words "IT from Bit" is true.

    Author Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta replied on May. 14, 2013 @ 22:53 GMT

    1. It is well known that there is no mental experiment, which produced material.

    2. John Wheeler did not produce material from information.

    3. Information describes material properties. But a mere description of material properties does not produce material.

    4. There are Gods, Wizards, and Magicians, allegedly produced material from nowhere. But will that be a scientific experiment?

    D

    Hoang cao Hai wrote on Jun. 16, 2013 @ 16:22 GMT

    It from bit - where are bit come from?

    Author Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta replied on Jun. 17, 2013 @ 06:10 GMT

    ....And your question is like asking, -- which is first? Egg or Hen?-- in other words Matter is first or Information is first? Is that so? In reality there is no way that Matter comes from information.

    Matter is another form of Energy. Matter cannot be created from nothing. Any type of vacuum cannot produce matter. Matter is another form of energy. Energy is having many forms: Mechanical, Electrical, Heat, Magnetic and so on..

    E

    Antony Ryan wrote on Jun. 23, 2013 @ 22:08 GMT

    .....Either way your abstract argument based empirical evidence is strong given that "a mere description of material properties does not produce material". While of course materials do give information.

    I think you deserve a place in the final based on this alone. Concise - simple - but undeniable.

      • [deleted]

      • Post #13

      Dear Giacomo,

      Congratulations- well done - you have taken the materialistic "It" particle bull by the horns, armed with an impressive array of philosophical and mathematical weapons, knowledge of the relevant physics, in addition to having the rare courage to adopt new approaches bypassing Einstein. As I read your essay I was mentally cheering you on, since my own essay concluded that our theories of physical reality should not be confused with reality itself. More importantly I conclude that It=Qubit (see my fqxi essay THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING & THE ITSY QUBITSY UNIVERSE).

      Permit me to say a few words about my Beautiful Universe Theory (BU) which led me to the quibit conclusion, and to agreement with you on several, but not all points raised in your essay. Without quibbling about whether the Universe is made of information or a 'thing' we both agree that a cubic lattice of quibits can describe relativity and quantum mechanics. In (BU) the nodes have angular momentum in units of Planck's (h) and orientate in any direction in 3-space. The interactions are all local and linear creating a self-developing cellular automata, much like the ones you describe in your paper. In (BU)chirality emerges from the qubits because they have polarity, and there is no time dimension - nevertheless relativistic effects such as those in SR and GR occur naturally from the elementary quibit-qubit network. In (BU) I supposed a Face Centered Cubic lattice, mainly because in addition to its being a dense packing, it agrees with the FCC lattice used by Norman Cook to describe his theory of nuclear dynamics - described in his 2012 fqxi contest essay. Is the difference between your BCC and FCC crucial?

      I do not agree with you that only Relativity needs revision - QM needs drastic conceptual re-examination, based on abandoning particle-wave duality and probability as fundamental. These are naturally emergent from the exquisite order of the lattice in (BU). I discussed this and other issues in my 2012 fqxi contest essay "Fix Physics!"

      I am in the LXX age category, besides being an non-academic autodidact, so I can only take my ideas so far. I hope that younger and smarter researchers will examine (BU) and if possible develop it to whatever promise it may possess.

      With best wishes

      Vladimir

        Sorry I was not logged in - that 'Anonymous' was my post above.

        Vladimir Tamari

        Dominico

        The 'an artificial delay in each point of lattice' Exactly!! That means a slower speed of light (a natural result of curvature, as Einstein himself admitted, contradicting his SR.) Eddington(1920) suggested treating the gravitational field as an optical medium with a gradient index of refraction. With that, and forgetting about SR because Lorentz transformations occur naturally in an absolute lattice, GR reduces to a ridiculously simple theory. I adopted this idea and incorporated it into my 2005 Beautiful Universe Theory .

        With best wishes.

        Vladimir

        Hi Mathew, I support the ansatz that special relativity should be derived from a more fundamental truth. The most fundamental approach would be to consider a particle as a closed wave system adhering to the Maxwell equations and the derived wave equation, the only mathematical description that exists to transport energy. This I have addressed in my 2012 FQXI essay paragraph 2.2 and paragraph 2.3 is simply repeated as subject for this year's essay; this time keeping it simple and to the point on two pages only.

        Special relativity (and GR) I class as a discrete-particle-space-time-geometry theory, and QM tries to fit into this. I clearly show in my essay, using the landmark Michelson-Morley experiment, that the contemporary paradigm fails when substituting the discrete-particles with continues-waves. The continues-wave-space-time-geometry has problems when applying relativistic corrections, thus it is not surprising that GR and QM cannot find a common ground.

        In the spirit of this contest, I would appreciate your comment why the problem I highlighted in my 2013 essay is not a problem to the contemporary way of thinking

        Regards - Anton

        Hi Prof D'Ariano,

        First, may I congratulate you on your well structured and thought provoking essay. I really enjoyed reading it.

        Teleportation as you describe could be flawed by the very QM theories that make the idea feasible, I am thinking of entanglement. Suppose that the process of living, growing, and learning entangles groups of atoms; then when we assemble these in the growing or duplication and learning phases. Would you envisage that when restoring two atoms taken from a pool of atoms, that by duplicating their QM states that you also entangled them?

        By entanglement, I understand that two particles are part of the same wave-function and I cannot envisage the possibility that two particles belonging to two different wave-functions with unknown entanglement to replicate to the desired. Furthermore, during the teleportation preparation, for each atom that is remotely entangled to another atom outside the human you need to teleport that remote atom as well and taking that process to its conclusion you need to teleport the whole universe.

        Change of subject: Regarding special relativity and quantum mechanics please refer to my comment to Mathew Leifer's earlier comment above.

        Regards - Anton

          Giacomo,

          From the first words of your abstract, I was prepared to resist having my mind changed about realism. My fear was laid to rest early in the body of the essay:

          "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."

          Exactly. This is the metaphysical realism that Popper espoused, abstracted from Tarski's correspondence theory of truth and aimed at settling the Demarcation Problem.

          Yours is an excellent essay, packing a lot of careful thought into one elegant package. It's a stroke of genius to associate quantum mechanics with an operational type of realism -- I don't agree with it; however, if the anti-realism of QM could be rehabilitated, this is probably the only path available.

          Best wishes for deserved good luck in the contest.

          Tom

            Dear Akinbo,

            thank you for your compliments and interest. Just a brief response to your main point, we'll continue later after I will have read your contribution.

            If you make space emerging from pure topology, there is no space separator, as each system has no volume. All these notions have meaning in a pre-existing space. If Stephen Hawking says that before the birth of the universe there was no space and time, everybody agrees. If he says that the universe was so small to be comparable with a pin point, nobody asks "where" the pin was. Well, here it is the same. If space can be curved, nobody contests that such curved space must be inside another flat one. Here there is no space to start with, space is emerging. Reducing space to an emergent entity arising from quantum systems in interaction is a way to reduce dramatically the starting ingredients of quantum field theory. From the Occam's razor point of view this is very good. The continuity of states of quantum theory restores the continuous symmetries starting from the discrete ones, but only in the relativistic limit of small momenta. At the Planck scale everything looks quite blurred and oscillating, and relativistic covariance breaks down.

            My best regards

            Mauro

            Dear Domenico

            thank you very much for your compliments. Just a temporary fast reply for now (I just came back from a conference in Nottingham). I also want to read the interesting contributions from the other submitters.

            What the automaton does is to evolve an input state, exactly as quantum field theory does. In order to understand what we see we need also the input state: this is a separate problem. I have some ideas in mind, but it would be too long to discuss them here. Curvature of space will be at a higher level of emergence, whence there will be also gravity in the theory. Here the discrete world is flat, and gravity should emerge as a pure quantum effect (see Sakarov, Jacobson, Verlinde).

            Definitely you can have entanglement between the spinors of particles here. In the relativistic regime narrowband states here behave exactly like usual Fermions. I will post some movies on this web site soon.

            Until next

            Thank you again,

            My best regards

            Mauro

            I don't dispute the idea that it might be a good idea to derive relativity from something more fundamental. I am simply querying how this is compatible with D'Ariano's explicitly operational philosophy.

            Dear Prof D'Ariano,

            While you focus on predictions, as opposed to "what is out there as it is", you postulate a group of agents with "buttons to push". I've yet to see an argument for "information only" reality that did not, at some level, rely upon objective reality. Even though you may consider throwing away the buttons in the end it appears impossible to get software off the ground without hardware at some level. So, beginning with real physical buttons, you finally abstract your way to a mathematical 'group'. This is the nature of abstraction, but it did not occur without physical buttons [or your physical brain]. Only by assuming the Platonic nature of math as existing in a separate realm or reality does this seem relevant, and then one must show how to derive physical reality from mathematical abstractions. Belief in the Platonic reality of math seems no different from any other religious belief in unseen things -- simply a product of the imagination. Even your 'feedback' seems to require a medium.

            I would also point out that, while the utility of quantum field theory is unquestionable, the assumption of the 'reality' of 'electron fields' and 'neutrino fields' is quite a large assumption. There are other approaches to particle physics that do not assume a 'field per particle'.

            And, as Gordon Watson implies above, the key to your whole approach seems to rely on "Bell's theory coming to help us." I wonder if, had Bell never lived, is there ANY other argument by which physical experiments would "prove" non-locality (which I think is really the basis of your attack on local reality). I don't think there is. I have looked at Gordon's first arguments that Bell made an error, and do not find a problem with Gordon's logic. [I haven't had time to analyze his main arguments.] I would hope that you and perhaps Matt Leifer would look at Gordon's attack on Bell's logic. He does not start off with a topological argument as did Joy.

            As for teleporting humans, I failed to see how you can capture both position and momentum, let alone the phase of the wave function, and restore each 'particle' to its original state. I view the phase as critical. As Anton Lorenz asked above, how will you "entangle" the atoms, which were almost certainly entangled in the original human? In other words, this fictitious argument is not very convincing.

            I will not repeat the arguments about relativity made by earlier commenters, but I am very interested in your answers to them.

            I recall being extremely impressed by your previous FQXi essay. This essay is not very convincing, except to those already convinced, which, judging by your high score, are many. No one can argue that it is not important to focus "on what we observe and not on what we believe is out there", but you have not given us any thing to 'observe' except a web of relations based on questionable assumptions. Somehow, kicking a hard rock, or jumping off a tall building still seems much more objectively "real" to me than your mathematical 'groups' or other abstract 'web' of interactions from which 'space-time' supposedly emerges.

            Looking forward to your response,

            With best regards,

            Edwin Eugene Klingman

              Dear Giacomo and Domenico

              Following the discussion above of gravity as a gradient optical medium:

              I forgot to add this interesting reference from my (BU) paper about an Italian gradient index of refraction experiment, demonstrating the Hamiltonian Analogy between light and gravity. In this paper it is mentioned that a renown Italian physicist said the H.A. goes back to an idea to Al-Hassan Ibn Al-Haytham. Any information about that connection would be appreciated as I am a fan of Ibn Al-Haythm.

              Ambrosini, D., et al, Bouncing Light Beams and the Hamiltonian Analogy Eur. Journal of Physics. 18 (1997) 284-289

              Best wishes

              Vladimir

              Dr. D'Ariano,

              Hi. I enjoyed reading your essay and think your type of reasoning where you try to develop "subroutines" for the universe that "stringently derive from few very general principles" is exactly the type of minimum assumption, start-with-the-basics type reasoning that I wish more physicists and philosophers would use. That's what I advocate in my essay as well. I do have some comments and questions but don't want these to distract from my overall very favorable impression of your essay. The comments are:

              1. In regard to holism:

              A. I completely agree. My view is that a thing exists if it's a grouping defining what is contained within. Based on this, a cloud, for example, is not just the component water molecules inside the cloud. Each of these molecules exists on its own, but the grouping of them all together creates an entirely new existent state called the cloud. So, the cloud as a whole and the component water molecules are different existent states. Because of this, the properties of the cloud are not necessarily the sum of the properties of the component water molecules. This is as you said for the holism idea.

              B. I think that our universe must have some kind of a most fundamental existent state as its foundation. Whether this is called an it, a bit, a particle, a quantum field, etc. doesn't matter. They're all just different names for an existent state. Also, the most fundamental existent state would have no subunits and no component parts (otherwise, it wouldn't be the most fundamental existent state). In this case, I think the properties of the whole (holism) are the same as the properties of the parts (reductionism) because there is only one part.

              2. In my thinking, I don't distinguish between "physical", "material" objects and "immaterial support", "abstract" states. "Physical" and "abstract" are just words for existent states existing outside the mind and inside the mind, respectively. Even the "immaterial support" quantum systems and their probability distributions that you mention are existent states in that they are embodied in or derived from existent states. Also, if they didn't exist, why are we talking about them? So, I think it's more useful to focus on the idea that there's an existent state at the heart of our universe, and whether this state is called a quantum system, probability distribution, physical object, etc. doesn't matter; instead, we should try to derive a physical theory from the properties of this existent state. And, you did this with your qubit idea. This type of reasoning is why I like your essay.

              3. In regard to objects:

              A. You mention on page 5 that "an object must be located in space and time", which seems to imply that different objects have different locations in space and time. This then seems to answer the question raised by the Theseus' ship and teleportation paradoxes. The copied ship and person are not the same objects as the originals. They exist in different spatial locations and times. Also, the statement on page 6 that "matter is everywhere the same" isn't quite accurate, I think. A particle of matter may have the same properties in all locations, but if two seemingly identical particles exist in different spatial locations and times, then they're still different objects. Or, I'd prefer to say that they're two different existent states. Every existent state exists within a certain domain (location).

              B. Also, about the phrase "an object must be located in space and time", I think that the existence of the most fundamental of existent states/objects is what creates space. That is, space is just a collection of existent states/objects, each of which would then specify a location within this space.

              Anyways, very good essay. Thanks!

              Roger Granet

                Dear Giakomo,

                You are a master as a lector and writer!

                You will be surprised perhaps but I am seriously thinking that holy fathers had burned heretics not in vain! I find very simple justification to it. When some stupid was killed, others have sighed with relief - the Glory of the Lord, now we got rid of malicious person!

                When they killed a talented thinker (which was more often), he consoled himself before death - Glory to Lord I will rid of the stupids forever!

                It will be pleasure to fight with you in open discussion, although I am very afraid it will be dialogue blind with the dumb. Anyway please just try read my history. I have smallest hope: after reading, you will go to nearest Church to pray for sins, I mean spoiling of future of your young students!

                Sincerely,

                George

                ESSAY

                  Dear Giacomo,

                  Nicely written essay, which was very comprehensible, easy to read and relevant. Interesting approach too.

                  All the best,

                  Antony

                    Dear Professor D'Ariano,

                    very interesting and well-written essay. I must read it again.

                    I agree with in particular about the concept of a 'state'. So, as Pauli wrote it on a letter to Heisenberg: only boring agreement.

                    Maybe one point is different: My knowledge of differential topology of 4-manifolds enforces me to chekc whether quantum mechanics could be have a geometric root.

                    If you like please look into my essay.

                    Best wishes

                    Torsten

                      Dear Giacomo,

                      This is one of the better essay in the lot. The particle as an eigenstate of the field is the operational aspect of the field that emerges in measurement. The field is the deeper underlying aspect of the universe, but this is something which exists everywhere even if locally defined by Wightman causality conditions --- equal time commutators etc.

                      I think the discrete aspect to spacetime emerges under certain types of measurements. The long baseline observations of different wavelengths of light from burstars billions of light years away have found no dispersion predicted from granular ideas about spacetime. I do think though that spacetime has what might be called an internal structure, substructures that obey certain cobordisms as with Thurston's work in 3-dim and the results of Donaldson and others with 4-dim, that have the content of particle physics or what we might call a bit or qubit. I think whether spacetime exhibits this sort of granular or qubit-ish structure or not is a matter of a type of duality.

                      Cheers LC

                        Dear Cristi

                        Thank you for your encouragement. You share my opinion that Quantum Theory is too rigid to be changeable just a little, whereas General Relativity is more flexible to changes, e.g. depending on the physical scale. Let me distinguish between Quantum Theory and Quantum Mechanics, the former being the theory of abstract systems (states, observables, transformations, in terms of Hilbert spaces and operator algebra), the latter containing the "mechanics" (i. e. the explicit operator form of the momentum, the particle Hamiltonian, quantization rules, etc.). The "mechanics" is also more flexible to changes, as for GR. In a sense this flexibility is almost a tautology, since Quantum Theory is an abstract theory of systems, hence more general and fundamental, holding for any kind of physics, a sort of "logic" (von Neuman, Mackey and Varadarajan were the first ones to think of it in this way). The "mechanics" and the GR, instead, may have a more restricted validity, e.g. to a physical scale ranging from Fermi (or probably larger) to the galactic one. And I believe that they are both emergent from a more fundamental theory at a tiny Planck scale. What I showed in my joint paper with Paolo Perinotti is that for SR and for the "mechanics" such emergence can be indeed achieved, and, astonishingly, from very basic principles. This is the way of combining the theories that you are mentioning. And SR must have a limited validity, for small momenta (small here means still huge, much larger of those of UHECR's). At a scale approaching the Planck one one start having a space-time that is really quantum, with coarse-grained events, events that delocalize depending on the boost (the relative locality of Giovanni Amelino Camelia and Smolin), and deformed Lorentz transformations, or dispersive-Lorentz (i.e. that depend on the wave-vector).

                        Thank you again for stimulating this discussion.

                        My best regards

                        Mauro

                        Dear Matthew,

                        Thank you very much for your interesting and seriously provoking comments. It is always exciting to discuss with you, since you are always touching interesting points at the basis of the full framework and of the way of looking at things.

                        Why the quantum automata theory is a continuation of my work on QT with Giulio Chiribella and Paolo Perinotti? Simply because the starting point is exactly QT, to which I add simple principles of unitariety, locality, homogeneity, and isotropy. Therefore, to the original six informational axioms I'm just adding these new simple ones (unitariety is reversibility).

                        The philosophical schizophrenia is indeed only apparent. You can understand how complete consistence is recovered based on the following main three points:

                        * My operationalism differs from that of Bridgman. Let me call it "informationalism", the basis of the Pavia axiomatization of QT. Beware that my operationalism may currently differ slightly from that of my young coauthors--though I was the one responsible of corrupting them.

                        * I am not against onthologies, but only against naïve ones;

                        * SR is operational. But, operationally, the relativity principle is not logically mandatory. On the top of this, GR is no longer operational.

                        Let's now analyze point by point.

                        *My operationalism differs from that of Bridgman*

                        Bridgman was indeed largely influenced by Einstein's SR, and when he started operationalism he was too ahed of his times, and because of this he burnt too fast the whole philosophy, becoming himself responsible of a sudden decline of his own ideas. As his conceptualization gained acceptance at the beginning, and became shaped into a general philosophical doctrine (becoming very influential outside physicists, e.g. in psychology) operationalism started to be regarded as an old-fashioned extreme position, well before it could express its full potential. The method went so far as to become a new extreme "theory of meaning", stating that every concept has to be identified with a set of operations-a protocol. Surely this was not Bridgman's intent, who was primarily interested at articulating the scientific method from a first-person physicist point of view. However, the operationalist approach weakened, and some scientists and philosophers of science came to dislike it. Another strong case against operationalism was that of another of its advocates, Ernst Mach, who got the extreme position of refusing anything else was not just a description of the same observations, denying any value of a description in terms of new ontologies. This led him to his stubborn refusal of the idea of atom and his consequent opposition to the new atomic theory of Ludwig Boltzmann. With the atom soon becoming the greatest paradigm-shift in science, the Mach's obstinate opinion casted a dark shadow on operationalism, putting many physicists on the side of the realist Einstein in his long debate with the operationalist Bohr. We should remember that Einstein himself started as an admirer of Mach, and was operationalist at the beginning of the theory of relativity (the relativity of simultaneity is indeed based on a notion of time corresponding to a precise synchronization protocol of clocks), but years later, when he laid down his equations of general relativity, he betrayed his original operationalism.

                        My operationalism differs substantially from that of Bridgman, in the sense that what really matters to me is the distinction between the notions that have the "objectivity status" (these are the experimental data, the preparation of the experimental set-ups, the data-reading protocols) and those that, instead, are only part of our theoretical description, and, as such, are not required to have an operational definition in terms of a protocol. This is the case e. g. of the notion of "atom", or that of "particle": their are useful and precisely defined physical objects, but they are not truly operational in all respects. They are useful onthologies, practically quite concrete in the domain of energies and momenta of contemporary physics, however, they are only temporary. As such, ultimately they may emerge from more fundamental theoretical notions, e.g. Gaussian wave-packets of qubit-states at a tiny Planck scale.

                        (CONTINUES)