What a Wavefunction is by Chidi Idika

Chidi,

If given the time and the wits to evaluate over 120 more entries, I have a month to try. My seemingly whimsical title, "It's good to be the king," is serious about our subject.

Jim

Chidi, It is a very important idea to try to define what the observer is and I congratulate you on your brave attempt as someone who confesses to lack formal knowledge. Nevertheless you say many things that make sense. The ideas presented are very relevant to the contest. I hope you will enjoy reading other essays and will learn from the experience.

best, Phil

Dear Chidi,

No forgiveness needed. Good to explain these interesting concepts. I like your line of thinking and wished other's had the "outside the box" thinking you do.

Best wishes for the contest,

Antony

Dear Chidi,

I have down loaded your essay and soon post my comments on it. Meanwhile, please, go through my essay and post your comments.

Regards and good luck in the contest,

Sreenath BN.

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1827

Dear Chide,

I read your essay with great interest. I appreciat that you nicely presented your view of observers in the Gödel sense and with a formal treatment. Your results seem to make sense and I would like to thank your for the effort.

Best wishes,

Brian

Dear Chidi,

Sorry I misspelled your name in the previous post.

All the best,

Brian

Hello Chidi,

Just read your essay. Looks like a professional job coming from a non-physicist. I was getting lonely and you know why.

I have an essay here, you may take a look. Not as professional as yours though.

You can rate if you think it has some meaningful ideas. 9ja no carry last.

Regards,

Akinbo

Dear Chidi,

I liked your essay not only because of its content and its format but also because of the purpose and aim behind it. You have attempted to combine 'whole' of physics under one banner called 'wave-function', where observer himself is the wave-function and you have ascribed some 'potential' to him; and thereby you have tried to derive both quantum theory (QT) and general relativity (GR) on the basis of quantum gravity (QG) and it is this attempt of yours, I appreciate. You have done this on the basis of your 4 axioms, and have derived your 4th axiom from the first 3, but this is not allowed in logic because then the first 3 axioms become fundamental but not the 4th one (for an axiom to be fundamental, it must not be derivable from other axioms). So the first 3 axioms are enough to derive the whole of physics from your point of view. In my previous 2 essay contests, I too did the same thing of deriving both QT and GR from QG.

I would like you to read my essay and post your comments on it in my thread. After that I will rate your innovative essay with a very good score. http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1827

Best regards,

Sreenath

Chidi,

Tremendous essay, I believe much undervalued. Not just from the good clear writing style and organization, but way ahead of that for your conceptual analysis and proposition.

I came to; "The idea again is that spacetime (simultaneity or equality by any name) is simply the uncertainty or cut-off i.e. the observer per se and which observer per se as the phase-space is a non-trivial attribute..." and then smiled when I read; "...This may sound like a wild claim." No Chidi, not to me. You have just described a completely original view of a 'discrete field' model, (DFM) where not only each 'observer' but all inertial system of matter particles instantaneously localise light speed to their own c, conserving Snell's Law.

We must think similarly. I also discuss Godel, Huygens, psi, uncertainty etc. and define detection and observation. Having studied quantum optics I take a more practical mechanistic approach and show how a thesis founded (loosely perhaps) on your own has the power to resolve the Bell inequalities EPR paradox without FTL and spookyness.

The part closer to your own is better covered in my previous two essays (both Community 7th but passed over.) I hope to do better this year with important findings. I think my model proves your concept mechanistically, and included deriving curved space-time last year. That may sound like a very wild claim!, and you'll see I don't shy from other departures from common assumptions. I do hope you can read (and score!) mine soon and greatly look forward to your thoughts.

Yours has certainly earned a well deserved 10 score from me, with no 'allowance' needed for not being a 'professional' physicist. I have lots of qualifications but none mean anything more than my primary education and later work and research. You 'are' a physicist and an exceptional conceptual thinker. Those are the skills we need to extract us from this dark labyrinthine 'rut'. Congratulations on your work.

And sincerest best wishes in the competition.

Peter

Dear Chidi,

I appreciate your kind comments and would like to rate your innovative essay with a score of 8 and above if you like. Rate my essay and inform me soon.

All the best,

Sreenath

Dear Chidi,

Thanks for rating my essay and I too have rated your essay with maximum points possible.

Regards and good luck in the essay contest.

Sreenath

Hello Chidi -

I'm interested to see that you focus on the observer as crucial. This point is often overlooked, even in treating of information.

I take a more descriptive and structural approach to developing a uniform treatment of the natural events of nature: I describe a cosmic paradigm of correlated energy vortices that include the evolving observer and naturally create a quantum/classical correlation. The evolving observer, I show, is the missing link in many of our quests. I think it is this that impels Physics' expansion into Bio- and Neuro-Physics - and that we must accept that we exist in a Species' Cosmos, and develop the necessary systems to interpret this fact usefully.

You might find in this a way of further unifying the formative and spatial realms you describe. Of course - like you - I expand the definitions of It and Bit far beyond those signified by Wheeler.

I found the text challenging, but engrossing; I have rated the essay, of course, and hope you'll soon have time to look at mine.

All the best in the competition,

John.

Hi Chidi,

Thank you for your attention on my work. Early I open your work because it devoted to interpretation of wave function, which was my hobby also. But, I delayed detailed study of question because of time. I see you have clearly divided the events as OBSERVABLE and UNOBSERVABLE. That is very important to be understand actual essence of quantum phenomenon. I was trying to do it in my works (after of this battle you can open references in my work - if you see interest) I will rate your essay surely within 1-2 days. I will recommend my friends also.

Good wishes,

George

Dear Chidi,

Thanks for writing a very interesting essay. I'll pick out a few things to remark on:

You say "conversely, the observable is definable strictly only in inverse-observer values...". That's worth contemplating. For example, James Putnam objects to the vagueness and circularity of the force definition F = ma whereby force is defined in terms of mass and mass is defined in terms of force (assuming acceleration is measurable.) If instead one rationalizes forces to dimensionless ratios, the mass becomes inverse acceleration m~1/a. I've played around with this in a number of key equations and everything seems to work [as one would expect, but one must always check.] I'm not sure that this is analogous to your statement, I only point it out to note there's value in such statements.

You also mention Peano's (and Noether's) notion of "the constant". I tend to think that physics is based around the notion of "the invariant", with energy being the prime invariant. Likewise your position that 'observer' implies superposition of natural unit and natural limit is intriguing. It also requires cogitation. In your endnotes you specifically note "this function of being at once the unit-and-limit is the essential utility of such as Planck's constant h, Newton's G, and Einstein's c." You then map this into the term "observer". As I said this requires cogitation.

I view information as what is stored following a threshold crossing which changes ('in'-forms) a physical structure. Until this threshold crossing and consequent change of physical structure occurs, there is only energy flow. Information "emerges" in "structure" or "context".

Once one "standardizes" such thresholds (as in silicon electronic gates) then one can construct 'logic gates' and connect these in simple structures to accept sequential inputs and produce binary (or other) coded outputs. This 'counter' circuit is the hardware implementation of Peano's Axioms, and it really doesn't matter whether the counter is implemented in DNA, silicon, or neural networks -- numbers result. Kronecker attributed these natural numbers to God and claimed that all other math is the work of man.

You seem to have something like this threshold in mind when you attempt to derive the "action potential" of 55 mV. I'm unsure whether you attach significance to this value, or simply to its function. You follow this with "the observable-ness of a number as a thing represented by the successor function of Peano's Axioms...". Again, I'm uncertain of your final point being made, but I would note that I elsewhere present the counter as the essential basis of physics, both in instrumentation and as creation-annihilation summation-of-particles counter in QED.

In summary, you've taken some very high-level abstractions, and, as far as I can tell, attempted to raise the level of abstraction. You tie this into specific numbers in a way that I do not understand. Your complete picture is impossible to understand in one or two readings, but some of your statements are worthy of reflection. I think you have covered too much ground, in a very unorthodox way, to accomplish in nine pages what you hope to accomplish. I would suggest that you pick a few key points and try to make them clear to an "average" physicist [whatever that may be.] Your point about the observer and the observable being inverse is fascinating, but I believe you will lose most people by going too far, too fast.

I hope this comment is useful to you.

Best,

Edwin Eugene Klingman