Reality, No Matter How You Slice It by Ken Wharton

Dear Ken Wharton,

Just to let you know I have read your essay which I found really interesting and very clearly explained.I like the way you linked your discussion with the essay question making it highly relevant. Nice helpful diagram too

Good luck, Regards Georgina

Dear ken,

One single principle leads the Universe.

Every thing, every object, every phenomenon

is under the influence of this principle.

Nothing can exist if it is not born in the form of opposites.

I simply invite you to discover this in a few words,

but the main part is coming soon.

Thank you, and good luck!

I rated your essay accordingly to my appreciation.

Please visit My essay.

Hi Ken,

I hope the familiar greeting is OK. We met during the program review for SJSU a few years back maybe more than 5 years now). Anyway I may be back at SDSU this fall since Alej and I have agreed to exchange colloquium talks.

A very nice and deep essay -- not all parts of which I agree with -- but it bears careful reading and thinking about.

At the beginning of the essay you take a holistic view that one must view space-time in 4D blocks rather than 3D slices which one dynamically evolves forward. (By the way if you are teaching intro algebra based physics don't let your students get their hands on this essay since otherwise when you move from kinematics in the first few weeks of the course to dynamics some student will misrepresent your point and say "But Prof. Wharton in your essay you say dynamics isn't important".) This is reminiscent of a Wick rotation where one goes from Minkowski to Euclidean space by letting t-->it. One question I had in this regard is that there is some real difference between Minkowski and Euclidean space or more directly between spatial and temporal coordinates. Given enough time it is always possible to reach any spatial coordinate starting from x=0 -- either x=-N or x=+N. However starting from t=0 one can only access t>0. There are some subtle issues with this as your figure 1 indicates in terms of the relativity of simultaneity but essentially an observer can equally access left and right (unless one breaks parity symmetry) but past and future are not so equally accessible. I'm not sure if this is crucial to your argument or if it is already addressed in some way but it was something that I thought about.

Next I had a technical question in regard to you example in figure 2 (I did not see where this example was going until the nice connection with the two slit experiment in figure 3). In the example in figure 2 you use 3 colors, but it seems you could use either 4 or 2. 4 colors would seem to work in the following way: blue for H-H, green for T-T, red for H-T and yellow for T-H (i.e. the order of the opposite pair matters). 2 colors would seem to work in the following way: blue for H-H and T-T (i.e. the same color for both like pairs) and red for H-T and T-H. Would this change anything or would it simple alter the numerical values of the different probabilities you calculate?

Actually I have a few more comments/questions but will stop here. I should say the point that I disagree with is the statement "photons behave in a way that disagrees with the dynamical Maxwell equations". Actually this statement is correct but also we know that classical Maxwell's equations are superseded by the quantum version of Maxwell's equations i.e. QED. And in regard to QED there has yet to be any deviation between experiment and theory -- photons as far as we have tested behave exactly as predicted by QED. Some time ago there was some excitement when it appeared that there was a deviation between the calculated g-2 for the electron and/or muon and the experimental value. The deviation was jumped on as evidence for supersymmetry (supersymmetric particles were ignored in the calculation and including them with some given mass made the agreement better). However in the end it was found there was a mistake in the calculation which involved 5 or 6 loop Feynman diagrams!!) which when it was fixed brought agreement between theory and experiment. This does not really have too much bearing on your main thesis which deals with foundational issues rather than using the structure of quantum field theory to make calculations.

Anyway a thought provoking essay.

Best,

Doug

Dear prof Ken,

Am wondering if you could find the time to read What a Wavefunction is It probably looks like a wild claim. But it just may not be. I have a download and am going to read your essay. And i'll be back here to rate. But I'll appreciate if you could read and comment on mine. The text may be hard-going. The physics should interest you.

I define the observer as "wavefunction" or "configuration space".

Best,

Chidi

Ken - I have downloaded and am reading your other paper now. I am very familiar with Huw Price's work, and especially the book "Times Arrow and Archimedes' Point".

I would be honored to hear your thoughts on the potential unreality of Minkowski space in my essay, and perhaps the novel perspective of entanglement in 1 dimension of time/space. Please make sure to download the corrected version (V1.1a) - from the comments section. http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1897

I look forward to an on-going dialog.

Kind regards, Paul

Having read so many insightful essays, I am probably not the only one to find that my views have crystallized, and that I can now move forward with growing confidence. I cannot exactly say who in the course of the competition was most inspiring - probably it was the continuous back and forth between so many of us. In this case, we should all be grateful to each other.

If I may, I'd like to express some of my newer conclusions - by themselves, so to speak, and independently of the logic that justifies them; the logic is, of course, outlined in my essay.

I now see the Cosmos as founded upon positive-negative charges: It is a binary structure and process that acquires its most elemental dimensional definition with the appearance of Hydrogen - one proton, one electron.

There is no other interaction so fundamental and all-pervasive as this binary phenomenon: Its continuance produces our elements - which are the array of all possible inorganic variants.

Once there exists a great enough correlation between protons and electrons - that is, once there are a great many Hydrogen atoms, and a great many other types of atoms as well - the continuing Cosmic binary process arranges them all into a new platform: Life.

This phenomenon is quite simply inherent to a Cosmos that has reached a certain volume of particles; and like the Cosmos from which it evolves, life behaves as a binary process.

Life therefore evolves not only by the chance events of natural selection, but also by the chance interactions of its underlying binary elements.

This means that ultimately, DNA behaves as does the atom - each is a particle defined by, and interacting within, its distinct Vortex - or 'platform'.

However, as the cosmic system expands, simple sensory activity is transformed into a third platform, one that is correlated with the Organic and Inorganic phenomena already in existence: This is the Sensory-Cognitive platform.

Most significantly, the development of Sensory-Cognition into a distinct platform, or Vortex, is the event that is responsible for creating (on Earth) the Human Species - in whom the mind has acquired the dexterity to focus upon itself.

Humans affect, and are affected by, the binary field of Sensory-Cognition: We can ask specific questions and enunciate specific answers - and we can also step back and contextualize our conclusions: That is to say, we can move beyond the specific, and create what might be termed 'Unified Binary Fields' - in the same way that the forces acting upon the Cosmos, and holding the whole structure together, simultaneously act upon its individual particles, giving them their motion and structure.

The mind mimics the Cosmos - or more exactly, it is correlated with it.

Thus, it transpires that the role of chance decreases with evolution, because this dual activity (by which we 'particularize' binary elements, while also unifying them into fields) clearly increases our control over the foundational binary process itself.

This in turn signifies that we are evolving, as life in general has always done, towards a new interaction with the Cosmos.

Clearly, the Cosmos is participatory to a far greater degree than Wheeler imagined - with the evolution of the observer continuously re-defining the system.

You might recall the logic by which these conclusions were originally reached in my essay, and the more detailed structure that I also outline there. These elements still hold; the details stated here simply put the paradigm into a sharper focus, I believe.

With many thanks and best wishes,

John

jselye@gmail.com

Dear Ken,

We are at the end of this essay contest.

In conclusion, at the question to know if Information is more fundamental than Matter, there is a good reason to answer that Matter is made of an amazing mixture of eInfo and eEnergy, at the same time.

Matter is thus eInfo made with eEnergy rather than answer it is made with eEnergy and eInfo ; because eInfo is eEnergy, and the one does not go without the other one.

eEnergy and eInfo are the two basic Principles of the eUniverse. Nothing can exist if it is not eEnergy, and any object is eInfo, and therefore eEnergy.

And consequently our eReality is eInfo made with eEnergy. And the final verdict is : eReality is virtual, and virtuality is our fundamental eReality.

Good luck to the winners,

And see you soon, with good news on this topic, and the Theory of Everything.

Amazigh H.

I rated your essay.

Please visit My essay.

Dear Ken Wharton:

I am an old physician and I don't know nothing of mathematics and almost nothing of physics. maybe you would be interested in my essay over a subject which after the common people, physic discipline is the one that uses more than any other, the so called "time".

I am sending you a practical summary, so you can easy decide if you read or not my essay "The deep nature of reality".

I am convince you would be interested in reading it. ( most people don't understand it, and is not just because of my bad English).

Hawking in "A brief history of time" where he said , "Which is the nature of time?" yes he don't know what time is, and also continue saying............Some day this answer could seem to us "obvious", as much than that the earth rotate around the sun....." In fact the answer is "obvious", but how he could say that, if he didn't know what's time? In fact he is predicting that is going to be an answer, and that this one will be "obvious", I think that with this adjective, he is implying: simple and easy to understand. Maybe he felt it and couldn't explain it with words. We have anthropologic proves that man measure "time" since more than 30.000 years ago, much, much later came science, mathematics and physics that learn to measure "time" from primitive men, adopted the idea and the systems of measurement, but also acquired the incognita of the experimental "time" meaning. Out of common use physics is the science that needs and use more the measurement of what everybody calls "time" and the discipline came to believe it as their own. I always said that to understand the "time" experimental meaning there is not need to know mathematics or physics, as the "time" creators and users didn't. Instead of my opinion I would give Einstein's "Ideas and Opinions" pg. 354 "Space, time, and event, are free creations of human intelligence, tools of thought" he use to call them pre-scientific concepts from which mankind forgot its meanings, he never wrote a whole page about "time" he also use to evade the use of the word, in general relativity when he refer how gravitational force and speed affect "time", he does not use the word "time" instead he would say, speed and gravitational force slows clock movement or "motion", instead of saying that slows "time". FQXi member Andreas Albrecht said that. When asked the question, "What is time?", Einstein gave a pragmatic response: "Time," he said, "is what clocks measure and nothing more." He knew that "time" was a man creation, but he didn't know what man is measuring with the clock.

I insist, that for "measuring motion" we should always and only use a unique: "constant" or "uniform" "motion" to measure "no constant motions" "which integrates and form part of every change and transformation in every physical thing. Why? because is the only kind of "motion" whose characteristics allow it, to be divided in equal parts as Egyptians and Sumerians did it, giving born to "motion fractions", which I call "motion units" as hours, minutes and seconds. "Motion" which is the real thing, was always hide behind time, and covert by its shadow, it was hide in front everybody eyes, during at least two millenniums at hand of almost everybody. Which is the difference in physics between using the so-called time or using "motion"?, time just has been used to measure the "duration" of different phenomena, why only for that? Because it was impossible for physicists to relate a mysterious time with the rest of the physical elements of known characteristics, without knowing what time is and which its physical characteristics were. On the other hand "motion" is not something mysterious, it is a quality or physical property of all things, and can be related with all of them, this is a huge difference especially for theoretical physics I believe. I as a physician with this find I was able to do quite a few things. I imagine a physicist with this can make marvelous things.

With my best whishes

Héctor

Dr Wharton

How is your opinion about my essay?

Yuri

Hi Ken,

Hope you enjoyed my essay if you found the time to read it? Even if it's after the rating finishes I'd be delighted to have any feedback.

Best wishes,

Antony