It from Qubit by Giacomo Mauro D\'Ariano

Dear Giacomo,

I don't need to be convinced by you that the "it from qubit" concept is very powerful. But you manipulate it with a great expertise. I guess you will also be attracted by my essay that deals about "it from qubit" in the contextual perspective.

Best wishes,

Michel

Giacomo,

I have been interested in quantum codes and the related matter of sphere packing. This connects up with E8 and Leech lattice Λ24 for quantum codes. The Leech lattice embeds into a 26-dimensional Lorentzian manifold. This space has a number of interesting features, the first being it is the space of the bosonic string and the second it is automorphism group/space for the Fischer-Griess group or Monster group. The iterations of these with MINIMOG is a sort of cellular automata.

My take on string theory is that I suspect it is too deep and profound to think that nature has absolutely nothing to do with superstrings. On the other hand, I don't believe in being dogmatic about string theory as the "TOE." There is the minority report considered to be contrary to string theory with loop quantum gravity. The odd thing about this is that it is too closely tied to pure general relativity to be completely wrong. The prospect for an inter-relationship between string/M-theory and LQG is something I have pondered at times.

Cheers LC

Process philosophers, based upon Alfred North Whitehead, have argued for an event ontology for decades. It seems both an object ontology and an event ontology must make way for the new state ontology so useful here. As an aside-As the old English cliche goes, "You are a gentleman and a scholar."

Giacomo,

Nicely written and argued proposition with some agreeable concepts, but I still found myself worrying about where the wardrobe doors were to step back into reality at the end. There were a number of assumptions I disagreed with, particularly the Bell's theorem implications that snipped the tethers and launched us on our fascinating trip. But you may see from my essay I have good reason for not using the same assumptions from the EPR case. I agree Bell MAY imply what you infer if correct, but, as Bell suspected I found "no boundary" between relativity and QM, finding von Neuman's logical solution correct, and consistency with Godels n-valued logic.

I don't dispute the validity of your case, as all should be argued, and may have been happy I was unconvinced.

But to identify those parts I very much DO agree with;.. I agree we should trust observation, but not our naive belief based 'interpretations' of the data!

That matter is not made of 'matter', and Heraclitus of course, but at a far deeper level where NO two observable 'entities' are identical (I have a challenge out for even two snowflakes or grains of sand).

That "motivations for adopting the new ontology must always be its additional explanatory power in accounting for the behaviour of the observed shadows on the cave walls, and, more important, the logical solidity and consistency of the theoretical principles embodied by the ontology."

I'm not sure why you consider QM to 'rigid' to change, as 'interpretation' can always change, and there are anyway so many of them! I find that small changes to understanding of both QM and Relativity derive one directly from the other, in a 'bottom up' but holistic way ('holism' in it's original sense).

So I propose and build an ontological construction od an uncertain but relative reality, which I'd be fascinated by your view of. I thank you very much for a well argued case for the opposite view, which is always essential to understand. Scoring of course should be for the work itself and evidence argued more than any matching of beliefs.

Very best wishes for the contest.

Peter

Thank you for your long and detailed response. Your position is a lot clearer to me now.

Regarding the lack of logical necessity of frame independence, I concede the point, but I think it is a rather weak argument. Almost nothing we think about physics is a logical necessity. After all, we can choose to think of quantum theory as a perfectly ordinary realist theory in which there are nonlocal influences if we want to. There is no logical necessity to rejecting that picture. Instead, the question is more about whether we think this violates the "spirit" of the theory, i.e. the intended meaning of the principles behind the theory. On this ground, I would argue that the relativity of simultaneity is good grounds for denying the significance of particular frames, and to go against that is a violation of the spirit of relativity. Of course, since the spirit of a theory is a rather vague concept, there is room for different people to view things differently. Ultimately, the position that leads to the best new theory is the correct one, and the future will be the judge of that, but in the meantime we need these intuitions to guide us. It seems to me that the core of our disagreement is simply that you trust the picture of the world that quantum theory gives us more than the one that relativity gives us, whereas for me it is the other way round. Neither position is a logical necessity, but my view is at least motivated by the fact that we have so may problems interpreting quantum theory but relatively few interpreting relativity. Sure, you have the argument that relativity is "not quantum", but what of it? Neither is quantum theory general relativistic.

I can if you want go into this with greater detail. A good mathematics book is Conway & Sloane "Sphere Packing, Lattices and Groups." String theory constructs a partition function that is equivalent to the integer partition function, and in approximation the Hardy-Ramanujan function. These functions are connected to Jacobi theta function which are crucial to the mathematics of lattices and groups. While this has connections to string theory, it also is a theory of tesselations, which in four dimensions is LQG-ish in nature.

My thinking is this. String theory is incredibly rich and it would be very surprising if it had nothing to do with physics and cosmology. On the other hand LQG is too close to general relativity for it to be completely wrong as well. I have thought LQG might serve as some type of constraint in string/M-theory. As such these things are structures which we can work with with the intention of working towards a better theoretical and it is hoped an empirical understanding of the universe.

There is a bit of hostility beteen the string and loop camps. This little cartoon makes a bit of fun with the string-loop war.

Cheers LC

Hi Giacomo,

I have yet to read an essay which treats the question where all information comes from. If there would be only a single charged particle among uncharged particles in the universe, then it wouldn't be able to express its charge in interactions. As it in that case it cannot be charged itself, charge, or any property, for that matter, must be something which is shared by particles, something which only exists, is expressed and preserved within their interactions. If particles, particle properties (its) are both cause and effect of their interactions, of the exchange of bits, if particles only exist to each other if they interact, exchange information, then you cannot have one without the other nor can one be more fundamental than the other.

If particles cause, create one another, if not 'knowing' what properties to assume to survive, they evolve in a trial-and-error process, then the information as embodied in their properties and the associated laws of physics, their rules of behavior, can only evolve, survive and become actual information when tested in practice, in interactions between its carriers, between actual, physical, material particles, whatever 'material' may mean. If when particles are both cause and effect of their interactions, then a particle has no border separating some content, mass, say, from its effect on the environment, of its gravitational field, 'its' from bits so they aren't independent, then we cannot accuse one of being the cause of the other. As I discuss in my not very good essay, it's time to forget about causality as it is arguably the single most insurmountable obstacle to the progress of physics.

What strikes me in all the essays I read (also of previous contests) is that everybody, without exception, thinks about the universe as an object which has particular properties as a whole and evolves in time, as something we may imagine to look at from the outside. However, if a particle cannot exist, have properties if there's nothing outside of it to interact with, then the same must hold for the universe. The fallacy of Big Bang Cosmology (BBC) is that we can only speak about the properties and state of the universe if there's something outside of it, something it can interact with, and, like the charged particle its charge, something it owes its properties to: if it has been created by some outside intervention. For this reason BBC is an even worse 'theory' than creationism which at least honestly states that, yes, there is Someone outside of it Who created the universe. If a universe which creates itself out of nothing, without any outside intervention has to obey the conservation law which says that what comes out of nothing must add to nothing, then everything inside of it, including space and time must cancel, add to nil, meaning that it has no physical reality as a whole, as 'seen' from the outside, but only exists as seen from within. If in that case it doesn't make sense to speak about the properties it has or the state it is in as a whole, then it also makes no sense to make such statements from within. As I argued in a previous essay, this means that we can no longer conceive of the speed of light as the (finite) velocity light moves at, but that c just refers to a property of spacetime, which is something else entirely. In regarding the universe as an object we can imagine to look at from without, a Big Bang Universe (BBU) lives in a time realm not of its own making: as it is the same cosmic time everywhere, here it takes a photon time to travel so here c does refer to the velocity light moves at. In contrast, a Self-Creating Universe (SCU) does not live in a time realm not of its own making: as it contains and produces all time within, here clocks are observed to run slower as they are more distant even if they are at rest relative to the observer. As in a SCU it is not the same time everywhere, here a space distance is a time distance so in this universe a photon bridges any spacetime distance in no time at all, in contrast to a BBU where the photon covers a space distance in (a finite) time. The difference is as subtle as it is crucial to comprehend our universe. Evidently, in a universe where the communication between particles over any spacetime distance is instantaneous, things like the double-slit experiment, the EPR paradox become obvious. The problem is that nobody seems to be able to escape the essentially religious narrative of BBC and start to try to understand the universe from within. Frankly, I'm appalled that everybody takes the word of the saints of physics as a God's word instead of trying to see whether a different interpretation of observations might solve some of the most glaring contradictions of physics. Well, I have much more to say, for example, why it is general relativity which is flawed, not quantum mechanics, but this comment already is lengthy enough.

Regards, Anton