Essay Abstract

A quantum theory without the sobriquet of weirdness can be imagine. Based on a premise that "what quantum is to classical (or equivalently what wave is to particle)" is similar to "what analogy is to reason" (or equivalently what analogical is to rationality)", this essay argues that quantum mechanics is "analogical." By following this line of arguments to its logical conclusions, we can bring fresh perspectives to the meanings of wave-particle duality, of entanglement, of Born's rule, of constant speed of light, and last and certainly not the least, of Planck's constant. I have argued that Planck's constant is the Mother of All Dualities, and a necessary condition for existence of thoughts and things.

Author Bio

Than Tin is a graduate of science and engineering, and a scholar engaged in the study of physical understanding of mind.

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Than Tin

You are touch old problem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_universals

Hi Yuri:

Thanks for your interest and the link, but I'm afraid that philosophy is not my strong suit. I know Descartes from his famous quote: "I think, therefore I am" and his meditations on consciousness and/or mind-body duality. In my contest essay, I treat mind-body (from philosophy) as an analog of the wave-particle duality from quantum mechanics.

Than Tin

Than,

I found your essay to resonate very well with my findings. As you pointed out, "We can choose to carve up Nature at many different points, yielding answers that differ with the scales we probe and the premises we adopted. But Nature itself is quite agnostic and mum and plays no favorites. The lesson is clear: In the case of physical processes, we have indirect access, i.e. only through the rationalism of our minds."

I appreciate your argument that "Planck's constant is the Mother of All Dualities" although I have found this to be only a fundamental 'part' of reality. I found your essay well worth the read and have rated it accordinly. I hope that if you decide to read my essay that you will find it worth rating. I believe you will find it relevant to your perspective as well:

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1809

Good luck with your entry.

Regards,

Manuel

    Dear Than

    I enjoyed reading your well-written essay full of new ideas and reflecting an original and creative mind. Like most people I do not think about how I think, but watching my baby grandson develop, learn and communicate is an amazing experience - doubtless he is using some of the mechanisms like analogy that you describe.

    It is commendable that you try to find a 'solution' to the weirdness of quantum mechanics. Most physicists, like Feynman and Greene want us to close our eyes and take their word for it. Do I understand you right, that the weirdness is an artifact of our analogicial thought processes?. I may have misunderstood you. But one thing I can definitely say is that quantum weirdness is simply due to the weird theories and incorrect notions human physicists have concocted.

    Having developed a ToE free of weirdness ( Beautiful Universe Theory also found here) I can confidently say that there is no particle-wave duality in nature. Everything is causal, local, logical, linear at the equivelant of the Planck level. I reflect on these matters in my fqxi essays of this and last year. See also how a modern experiment has demolished the Born Rule: Eric Reiter's website .

    With best wishes,

    Vladimir

      Dear Than,

      You have clubbed together thinking and Planck's constant with nice way of saying it... 'Planck's constant is the Mother of All Dualities, and a necessary condition for existence of thoughts and things. '

      How did you come to that conclusion?

      and.....

      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.

        Dear Than,

        I almost did not read your essay but thank God I did. Very philosophically true.

        Now for some comments:

        -Thanks for those online references

        - Yes, I agree Great theories are built from duals. But I dusagree Planck constant is the Mother of all Dualities. How? Planck constant is a physical value, can it have more than one value or duality?

        - I like, "How Nature does strikes a balance between ... ceaseless and meaningless activities... AND ... a situation where everything is silent, predictable,unchanging, or unchangeable". This is the riddle to solve.

        Then, two questions for you based on your essay:

        1. CAN REALITY BE REACHED BY ANALOGY OR BY REASONING? In answering this, consider what can be analogous to Non-existence.

        2. You mention Discrete-Continuous as an example of duality. Somewhere in your essay you described discreteness as separation by space. IF SPACE TOO NOW HAS A DISCRETE NATURE, BY WHAT WILL THE DISCRETE REPRESENTATIONS OF IT BE SEPARATED?

        Answer these, before having a look at my perspective, where I suggest that Space unlike other things can have it both, literally having its cake and eating it!

        Best regards,

        Akinbo

          Manuel,

          I very much valued your comments: they really touch on the heart and soul of my essay. And I am also glad that our respective essay entries have resonances between them. And before this forum is closed, my hope is that there are many more in the same vein.

          Analogical minded that I am, I can't help recalling the great physicist Richard Feynman's all-paths formulation of quantum mechanics, the meaning of which I think can made to be consilient with what we are finding.

          I have just downloaded your essay, and I will respond with the same serious care and attention that you had paid me.

          Until then,

          Than Tin

          Dear Vladimir

          I appreciate your generous commendations, but I am embrassed to accept even a tiniest portions of them.

          Children are the best candidates for studying the analogy-making power of the human mind. Noam Chomsky, a famous linguist from M.I.T., was the first to notice that children "grow" their respective native languages, not "learn" it as B. F. Skinner and other empirical minded scientists generally had presumed. Chomsky practically said it is "genetic" or "biological", which I take it to mean "automatic". I was interested in the physical basis of "automaticity". For me, automaticity is everything that is the opposite of learning.

          I saw analogy as the flag ship of automatic thinking, and I use the term for all other kinds of thinking that are also automatic. I chose quantum mechanics as a vehicle for understanding the meaning of the "physical", not as a project to banish "weirdness" out of quantum mechanics or its disseminations as such. "That quantum mechanics is not weird" is a logical consequence of the analogy I make: "What quantum is to classical 'is similar to or is analogical to' what analogy is to reasoning or logic or rationality". If someone can disapprove or destroy the aforementioned analogy -- or analogies similar to it -- then a whole foundation of my essay would crumble, and needless to say that I am not looking forward to such an outcome!

          Thank you again for your best wishes, and I'll check into the links you have provided.

          Than Tin

          Than,

          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

            Dear Satyavarapu,

            In your comment you wrote: "You have clubbed together thinking and Planck's constant with nice way of saying it... 'Planck's constant is the Mother of All Dualities, and a necessary condition for existence of thoughts and things.' How did you come to that conclusion?"

            Good question, and I'm glad to answer.

            In my essay, the conclusion that you quoted follows from the premise: "What quantum is to classical 'is similar to' what analogy is to rationality." May I assume you do not challenge the premise.

            Now suppose I changed the premise to "What quantum is to classical 'is similar to' what subjective (mind) is to objective (body)." If you had not challenge the first premise, you are unlikely to challenge this second premise either. The second premise, as they say, is "intuitive." (The topic of subjectivity and objectivity or of mind-body duality is vast, and within quantum mechanics itself, it exists in the form of "quantum measurement problem". I do not want to go into it in this thread. It deserves several separate forums!)

            Embolden, I change my premise again to "What wave is to particle 'is similar to' what subjective is to objective." If you had not challenge the previous premises, I will consider that you will not challenge this one either.

            With time on my hands, I continue changing the premises like Lady Gaga changing her outlandish costumes, and it is possible that you will continue agreeing to each and everyone of those changes.

            However I will admit that some of the analogical strings I can change to may be also outlandish when compared to the ones I use above, but so long as the "form" of the premise remains, the strings will be valid. If you think of "form" and "content", and better yet, of functionalism (as in philosophy) or "gene" and "protein" (as in molecular biology), you'll see what I meant. Example: The analysis of hair or toe nail samples from the same person will yield the same identical gene.

            The fun part in these kinds of changes is the changes never stops: even within the quantum theory proper, changes tend to occur in ways that are unpredictable due to their contextuality, i.e. of locaity and framework: the concept of wave-particle duality (of Feynman's famed 2-slit experiment) giving away to the phenomenology of boson and fermion (of Bose-Einstein condensate), or to Einstein-Poldosky-Rosen (EPR) thought experiment, which again led to the subject of entanglement (and then to the tangled webs of connection-noconnection, spooky action at a distance, and the associated problem of what is real and what is not).

            The reason or the inescapable fact of Nature is dualities begetting more dualities, and the existence of each and everyone of the dualities -- of necessity surely -- has to be mediated through the existence of the Planck constant or a simulacrum of it. See the logic in my thought-experiment on how it all came about.

            Ergo, the conclusion!

            I am sorry I may have telescoped the premise to the conclusion in my essay.

            Thanks

            Than Tin

            Dear Akinbo:

            Thanks for coming to me on my soap box!

            Answer 1: Reality is the truth you find with the tool you used. We use analogies to find partial truths; and we use logic and reason to find a more precise and reliable truths. In the framework I had adopted in my essay "Analogical Engine", ANALOGY and REASON are separated by CONSCIOUSNESS, which in a physical model might be represented by a value, not dissimilar to the Planck constant.

            Answer 2: Dualities are like a changing cast of characters in a play, and they tend to change with the scenes. As you know, we associate space-time with Theory of Special Relativity, and wave-particle with Quantum Mechanics.

            However, naïve analogy will not work with space-time and wave-particle dualites, but if we dig deeper there is a relation (definitely for sure if you ask me) between SR and QM! Frame-independent constant velocity of light in SR and the Planck constant from QM are definitely related. Based on the coincidence, I say SR and QM are friendly (close?), but in the context of EPR (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen thought-experiment), SR and QM are no longer friendly (separation?). SR does not allow "spooky-action-at-distance" where QM seems to revel in it.

            It's a CONUNDRUM, but I am not complaining: It keeps us talking far into the night, and for someone as creative and enterprising as Bryan Greene of Columbia and NOVA, it's just a god-send! (Recently, he has a sold-out play on Broadway based on the theme of "spooky action." Can you imagine PHYSICS on B'way, NY,NY?)

            Cheers!

            Than Tin

            Hi Joe:

            I appreciate you appreciating my essay style. I loves word-smithing. May be too much!

            Pauli (a physicist otherwise known as the "conscience of physics") said about the pecularities of quantum theory thus: "You can look with a p-eye or q-eye, but not with both" (not exact quote!), similar to what Heisenberg had been saying about measuring the position or momentum of a particle.

            Incurable analogist that I am, I would put it like this: To go any where, we use the left foot and then the right foot, alternatively and never at the same time. Similar situation obtains in the case of an idealist and a realist with a slight twist that in the quantum universe, neither the one or the other can be presumed as previously existing.

            Another example. When we are born, the world must had been a big blurr, and when the world slapped you, you gave a sharp cry because you suddenly realized that there is another - not you - along side of you. You and the world. At the earliest moments of birth, we and the world are one (i.e. the same), but later we and the world are no longer one (i.e. different). The irony is when we think we are one, we are two, and when we think we are two, we are actually one. Like climbing a helical staircase: we face East and then West, like Janus!

            Quantum theory uses superpositions, and similarly Analogy uses suppostions, but they are the same if you look at it one way, and are different if you look at it another way.

            It's a good thing that these paradoxes never did get solved once and for all. If they were, we might have nothing more to do, and that's a pity. (We might not have FQXi to send our musings to!)

            David N. Mermin of Cornell U said it best (not the exact quote): "We have reached the INCONCLUSION."

            Good luck with your entry.

            Than

            Hello Than,

            A very interesting essay and radical ideas. The nature of the main fundamental constants is an extremely important task for physicists. Good conclusion: «One can only marvel at what a small constant can do, creating an impersonal cosmos of unimaginable dimensions out of nothing as it were, while not forgetting to populate a corner of it with conscious human beings like us, brimming with desire to know what it is all about. »See my essay. I think we are close in spirit and direction of research. With best regards, Vladimir

              Dear Hoang

              Much appreciation for reading my essay.

              The presumption that the "constant" obtained from my thought-experiment and the actual Planck constant are "one and the same" comes from my interpretative understanding of black-body radiation formula.

              In the text-books, the historic formula is obtained by interpolating low- and high-frequency regimes of the radiation. Physicists have interpreted low frequencies as waves and high frequencies as particles.

              Than Tin

              Hello James

              The current entries have reached 181, and it's a large track of individual musings for anyone to slog through. Even if I could imagine myself as the speed-reading champion of the world, I can manage just a few. Besides, there are other problems.

              One of the problems is the fact that we are NOT on the same page even with the title of the contest essay "It from Bit." I have seen essays with the title "It from Qubit"! So which is it?

              "It" is definitely and positively "classical", and so "Bit" must be quantum. Then, is "Qubit" a quantization of "Bit"?

              I have troubles thinking about the first quantization, let alone to really know what we are talking about in the second quantization.

              I can read the first copy so to speak, but copies of copies are too faint for me to see, let alone reading and understanding them!

              In real life, I have the same feeling about concocted derivations of stocks and bonds, known as financial derivatives!

              I wish someone authoritive from FQXi Community could say something about the normenclatures. Without the standard normenclature, we will be arguing our nights into days!

              Than Tin

              Hello Vladimir

              Thanks for reading my essay. I also try to reciprocate, but generally I do not have much to say beyond what I had already said in my essay.

              Than Tin

              Than, this is a very smoothly written essay that makes some nice points.

              I like "What quantum is to classical ≈ what analogical is to rational" You use the idea of analogy to make a deeper analogy, very good.

              I also take to heart your point about the central rolw of Planck's constant.

                Philip

                I value your kind generosities. Very please also.

                Than

                Hello Than Tin,

                I look forward to your comments and fair evaluation of my ideas. With best wishes and regards, Vladimir