Hi Than,

Nice work and I rate it highly.

I particularly like your ending paragraph:

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.

I too have this notion, take a little time and space, then add a little h, shake it consciously and you can make anything!

Thanks for visiting my blog,

Don L.

Thank you Than

You left an interesting note on my page concerning Feynman and simplicity, and you also summarized by example your analogical argument. Yes it is amazing how we can express different ideas in physics in very different mathematical models. I have noted that independantly too long ago during my diffraction research - but I think it is important to hold on to the idea that some of these models are 'closer to nature' than others usually the simpler ones are the ones!

Your analogical arguments are a sort of clever intellectual exercise to categorize various ideas in physics. I see nothing wrong in that per se. I am not against that - but when you do that it creates artificial divisions. Some of us are trying to unify physics to show, for example, that both classical and quantum ideas are causal, linear and local. If that is so, i.e. if quantum phenomena are not actually probabilistic at heart, and if there is no duality, then putting these ideas into an analogical mold becomes unhelpful.

Of course it it all depends which aspect of physics one is working on. I wish you the best.

Vladimir

Dear Than Tin,

Thank you for reading and commenting on my essay. I like your enthusiasm and your explanations reach out to a wide audience. I think the analogy approach is good, after all we use them to describe the quantum world all the time. I remember my Chemistry professor explain duality as throwing a ball at a wall - in the quantum world, half the ball passes through the wall, half bounces back. But once we observe which, then this is the single result.

Anyway congratulations on a super essay - I think you deserve to be higher so I hope my high rating helps.

Best wishes,

Antony

    Dear Than,

    I am fully agree with Fenman's genius observation (and with you also) that everything must gone to one general principle, which may be not so complicated to comprehend. Einstein, Schrodinger and others luminaries also has came to analogical/similar conclusions. The same thing saying me also in my work, and not only because to much famous people saying this.

    There are a lot of weighty arguments on this direction, and anybody, who has the healthy brain, may to came to this idea. So, you and me can be happy - with correctness of our viewpoints and (with our healthy brains too!) I have rating your work on high core, and I thinking suggest it to my attherants also.

    Best wishes,

    George

      Dear Than,

      Following your post on my webpage

      I found an excellent link to your topic

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

      As a fun of group theory, the analogy/isomorphism is especially important.

      Also in category theory that starts tobe widely used in quantum mechanics

      "Category theory takes the idea of mathematical analogy much further with the concept of functors. Given two categories C and D, a functor F from C to D can be thought of as an analogy between C and D, because F has to map objects of C to objects of D and arrows of C to arrows of D in such a way that the compositional structure of the two categories is preserved."

      But your topics also touches the idea of dialectic

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

      Your point is

      "Quantum is analogical, and classical is rational."

      that resonates with

      "Analogy is about sameness, while rationality is about difference."

      I don't know, on this matter the philosophical language may help.

      For sure, we are always making use of analogies in exploring the world.

      In my view, trichotomy makes sense as well

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

      I hope you will analyze my essay as well

      http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1789

      All the best,

      Michel

        Than,

        thank you for leaving comments in my blog and inviting me to read you essay. I appreciated the quotes and the links in your essay, especially Jim Al-Khalili - Quantum Life: How Physics Can Revolutionise Biology. I should have incuded how birds use the earth magnetic field for navigation in my essay. The full lecture is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwgQVZju1ZM

        You have an unusual, for modern times, scientific approach. Analogies are very useful in introducing novel concepts, but are difficult to apply in practice. I largely concur with Armin's comments above and have read your thorough response to him. I agree with you that "we have not fully understood the full meaning of the quantum, wave-particle duality, or the problem of quantum measurement" and that " To wit, analogies are efficient for first forays into the unknowns, and for a person with good solid experience, they are no more error prone than reasoning. After all, analogy and reason are not absolute strangers, but members united by a single constant of Nature. Like wave and particle!"

        Well said!

          Vladimir?

          You said "Your analogical arguments are a sort of clever intellectual exercise to categorize various ideas in physics."

          I chose physical ideas as a gold standard of accuracy and trust, but at no time do I consider other ways of knowing as being inferior, or less trustworthy.

          Actually, I first saw a pair of dualities, viz. mind-body from philosophy and wave-particle from quantum theory, and came to recognize that there is an analogy between the two dualities, like "what mind is to body" is similar to (~) "what wave is to particle." From then on as they say, the dam burst: gene-protein; freedom-determinism; same-difference; variation-selection, bit-it; etc. etc.

          You said "I am not against that - but when you do that it creates artificial divisions. Some of us are trying to unify physics to show, for example, that both classical and quantum ideas are causal, linear and local."

          Well, I am sorry if I had created "artificial divisions", but I thought I was just reporting only what I saw, and recording what follows indubitably from the symmetry principles that is synonymous -- and at home -- in physics.

          I am not a physics major (and give me ropes here! ), and my understanding as such is that there is a thin line between noncausal and causal, between freedom and determinism, between linear and nonlinear, between connection and noconnection, between global and local, between etc. and etc.

          And I don't see the "thin line" as a barrier. I see that as the Nature's way of saying that we are free to choose the sides without incurring large penalties of losing lifes or limbs for either. I see the "thin line" as a blessing, an opportunity to exercise free will.

          I have left out this passage from the essay I submitted to FQXi Contest, but I should have included it for more clarity:

          'We have two fundamental laws of physics, the QUANTUM and the CLASSICAL. The quantum deals in chance and probability, in uncertainty and in freedom, while the classical revels in the power of its Laplacian determinism, demonically fixing the destinations of planets and the destinies of people from now to eternity, leaving nothing to chance or willfulness. There is no place for our humanity in this Laplacian cosmos of classical physics! But we know we are willful creatures, and the sense of freedom and the flexibility we obviously needed and enjoyed do conflict with the deterministic claims of classical physics.

          What is more, the determinism defined within classical physics is also not - I believe - compatible with automaticity characteristic of the analogical, mainly because the determinism of classical physics is parasitic on the precision of the input variables for it to work, while the strength of analogy is that it works from small hints and vague inputs.

          How does Nature deals with this dichotomous competing worldviews? By forcing both to work together simultaneously on one small thing!

          One can 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 the Bleep is all about.'

          I believe dualities are Nature's way of saying that there are two sides to the same coin. The coin is the Planck constant with light of low and high frequencies, or as I generalize it as the Mother of All Dualities.

          Vladimir, I hope to have more exchanges like this, and in the meantime, I wish you the best.

          Than Tin

          Dear George

          I appreciate your very kind observations, and thank you for saying it.

          I believe in simplicity, the kind of simplicity involved in walking for instance. When you put your left foot down, the weight is on it, and so you move with your right foot, and when the weight is on the right, you move with the left. All is done with feelings, and we cannot tell it to a robot to emulate us even with hundreds of thousands lines of code. A child does not need instructions to start walking!

          Feynman is famous for saying that what's in textbooks is not new, and therefore he must think for himself. There is another iconoclast named Bob who said/sang "Don't follow leaders, Watch the parkin' meters." (I wish to amend the parkin' meter to pocket meter!)

          Wish you the best,

          Than Tin

          Dear Antony

          First of all, I want to thank you for your very encouraging high praise and high score to a newbie like me.

          I can't say I knew the etiquetts or the proper ways to conduct Q&A and other housekeeping necessary for managing the demands of the contest such as this.

          However, thanks to the unexpected extension of a week for the contest and encouragements from persons like you, I breathe a little easier.

          Best wishes to you too!

          Than Tin

          Dear Michel

          The links you provided are invaluable, and I hope to study them ASAP!

          So far, out of necessity and personal limitations, I'm staying close to the ground with commonsense as my theory of everything. If I remember it correctly, you are the second person to suggest that I can firm up my results and/or thesis with disciplines that are more grounded in rational and mathematical bases.

          I thought analogy and rationality are orthogonal to each other. Like quantum and classical. No?

          I wonder if we try to "rationalize" the analogical mode of thoughts, are we not going through the same route as A.I. people who have been doing it for sometime, and without noticeable results. The question also is: Are we not be throwing the baby with the bath water?

          The issue, I believe, is tied up in the larger issue of ultimate UNIFICATION in physics, and on that topic, I dare not make any pronoucement other than state my belief, which is:

          'We have two fundamental laws of physics, the QUANTUM and the CLASSICAL. The quantum deals in chance and probability, in uncertainty and in freedom, while the classical revels in the power of its Laplacian determinism, demonically fixing the destinations of planets and the destinies of people from now to eternity, leaving nothing to chance or willfulness. There is no place for our humanity in this Laplacian cosmos of classical physics! But we know we are willful creatures, and the sense of freedom and the flexibility we obviously needed and enjoyed do conflict with the deterministic claims of classical physics.

          What is more, the determinism defined within classical physics is also not - I believe - compatible with automaticity characteristic of the analogical, mainly because the determinism of classical physics is parasitic on the precision of the input variables for it to work, while the strength of analogy is that it works from small hints and vague inputs.

          How does Nature deals with this dichotomous competing worldviews?

          The jury is still out.'

          For a more, you can check out my reply to the Anonymous on this site.

          All the Best,

          Than Tin

          Vasilyeva,

          Thanks for paying attention: I appreciate it more than I can say.

          The issues of: wave-particle, unification-nonunification, connection-noconnection, gene-protein, variation-selection, spooky or not, information escape or does not escape, etc-etc are being debated and analyzed for so long that we can begin to wonder whether these states of "inconclusions" (Professor Mermin's word, not mine) are in fact the natural states of beings.

          However, from the single-minded pursuit of unification all through these years, I am confident that we will be rewarded with fresh crops of new and interesting dualities.

          With best regards,

          Than Tin

          Dear Than,

          Thanks for comments on my blog. Pardon my starting another thread as this matter is unrelated to your essay:

          Is it being implied by the relational view of space and as suggested by Mach's principle that what decides whether a centrifugal force would act between two bodies in *constant relation*, would not be the bodies themselves, since they are at fixed distance to each other, nor the space in which they are located since it is a nothing, but by a distant sub-atomic particle light-years away in one of the fixed stars in whose reference frame the *constantly related* bodies are in circular motion?

          NOTE THAT in no other frame can circular motion between the bodies be described in this circumstance except in the 'observing' sub-atomic particle.

          Regards,

          Akinbo

          *I will come back here for answer.

            Dear Than,

            You gave me some valuable insights, and conforted my thoughts.

            On first reading I thought to myself, this is someone who thinks like me, hear eDuality. But just after I discover that you fall into contradiction and you say that the eUniverse is analog.

            Your essay is excellent, you defend your point of view. But I still wanted to show your contradiction that takes you away from the eDuality that I defend.

            Why do you not agree with me that this eDuality is the universal principle, the first principle, the foundation and fundamental of all that exist.

            It is wrong to think that Nature is hiding something, Nature defend any secret and when It shows us motion, obviously for everyone, that we followed to arrive at the modern physical.

            The problem is, if there is one, in the interpretation.

            How do you deny all you see discrete and attach to your idea of an analog world ?

            First you admit that the eUniverse is made of opposites (eDuality), and at the first opportunity you refute everything.

            If after deepen your study, because you are on the right path, you will come to the same conclusion, that all opposites you see, these are the essential elements of information, which we call the 0 and 1.

            By following my intuition, I discovered the greatest theory, one of these theories that has never existed, one that summarize the whole universe, as many scientists have desired in their lifetime, including Wheeler.

            In any case, I tinkered a consistent eUniverse, that works, and all the laws and principles that we know have been applied with consistency.

            I will rate highly your essay, after that.

            Thank you and good luck.

            Please visit My essay.

              Dear Sir,

              We do not understand why scientists should use terms that are unscientific. Something weird means it is strange, odd, unusual, uncanny, eerie, creepy, bizarre, etc. It implies that the theory is unclear. Then how can it be called great? Is it not a contradiction? Is it not superstition? And when such statements are followed by comic/fantasy characters and their achievements, does it not denigrate science to fiction level?

              There are a large number of different approaches or formulations to the foundations of Quantum Mechanics. There is the Heisenberg's Matrix Formulation, Schrödinger's Wave-function Formulation, Feynman's Path Integral Formulation, Second Quantization Formulation, Wigner's Phase Space Formulation, Density Matrix Formulation, Schwinger's Variational Formulation, de Broglie-Bohm's Pilot Wave Formulation, Hamilton-Jacobi Formulation etc. There are several Quantum Mechanical pictures based on placement of time-dependence. There is the Schrödinger Picture: time-dependent Wave-functions, the Heisenberg Picture: time-dependent operators and the Interaction Picture: time-dependence split. The different approaches are in fact, modifications of the theory. Each one introduces some prominent new theoretical aspect with new equations, which needs to be interpreted or explained. Thus, there are many different interpretations of Quantum Mechanics, which are very difficult to characterize. Prominent among them are; the Realistic Interpretation: wave-function describes reality, the Positivistic Interpretation: wave-function contains only the information about reality, the famous Copenhagen Interpretation: which is the orthodox Interpretation. Then there is Bohm's Causal Interpretation, Everett's Many World's Interpretation, Mermin's Ithaca Interpretation, Brukner-Zeilinger interpretation, etc. With so many contradictory views, quantum physics is not a coherent theory, but is truly weird.

              String theory, which was developed with a view to harmonize General Relativity with Quantum theory, is said to be a high order theory where other models, such as supergravity and quantum gravity appear as approximations. Unlike super-gravity, string theory is said to be a consistent and well-defined theory of quantum gravity, and therefore calculating the value of the cosmological constant from it should, at least in principle, be possible. On the other hand, the number of vacuum states associated with it seems to be quite large, and none of these features three large spatial dimensions, broken super-symmetry, and a small cosmological constant. The features of string theory which are at least potentially testable - such as the existence of super-symmetry and cosmic strings - are not specific to string theory. In addition, the features that are specific to string theory - the existence of strings - either do not lead to precise predictions or lead to predictions that are impossible to test with current levels of technology.

              There are many unexplained questions relating to the strings. For example, given the measurement problem of quantum mechanics, what happens when a string is measured? Does the uncertainty principle apply to the whole string? Or does it apply only to some section of the string being measured? Does string theory modify the uncertainty principle? If we measure its position, do we get only the average position of the string? If the position of a string is measured with arbitrarily high accuracy, what happens to the momentum of the string? Does the momentum become undefined as opposed to simply unknown? What about the location of an end-point? If the measurement returns an end-point, then which end-point? Does the measurement return the position of some point along the string? (The string is said to be a Two dimensional object extended in space. Hence its position cannot be described by a finite set of numbers and thus, cannot be described by a finite set of measurements.) How do the Bell's inequalities apply to string theory? We must get answers to these questions first before we probe more and spend (waste!) more money in such research. These questions should not be put under the carpet as inconvenient or on the ground that some day we will find the answers. That someday has been a very long period indeed!

              Then how can it be a great theory? Is it so described to suppress the inferiority complex that has arisen because of lack of real progress? The technologists are doing an excellent job, but the theoretical scientists, who should be leading them, have taken to the back benches! They can only 'imagine' as a possibility - not envision a quantum theory - without weirdness.

              EPR is fiction, as the entanglement does not extend infinitely or "over distances that light can not even reach", but is over after a limited distance. Wave being continuous and ever moving and particle being discrete and stationary (when a particle moves, unlike waves, its mass moves in space), they cannot be the same. In our essay, we have explained it.

              The concept of length contraction suggested by Einstein in his SR paper is wrong. Two possibilities suggested by Einstein were either to move with the rod and measure its length or take a photograph of the two ends of the moving rod and measure the length in the scale at rest frame. However, the second method, advocated by Einstein, is faulty because if the length of the rod is small or velocity is small, then length contraction will not be perceptible according to his formula. If the length of the rod is big or velocity is comparable to that of light, then light from different points of the rod will take different times to reach the recording device and the picture we get will be distorted due to different Doppler shift. As a result, gamma is wrong. Hence SR is wrong. The inertial mass increase is wrong.

              Similarly, we have proved that the definition of simultaneity by Einstein in his SR paper violates the principle of relativity as his clock at A is a privileged frame of reference, with which, he synchronizes the clocks at B and C. We have also shown that the equivalence principle is a wrong description of facts, as it leads to the Russell's paradox in set theory.

              God is not Devil, who plays dirty tricks. Don't blame God for your lack of understanding.

              Those who criticize God often worship Devil. So no wonder, after discussing their ideas at length, you have landed up with a toy model.

              Regards,

              basudeba

                Dear Anton:

                I really believe that Nature is simple, "extremely simple" as you said, and may I add it is also on "autopilot." Sometimes, it says "Yes" and at other times, it says "No," and if we were to continue down this road of similarities, we might find that "action-reaction" is a Newtonian way of saying "Yes" and "No." Since our life experiences are different, we embody this verities differently, but if given enough time or diligence, we can begin to understand each other through these veils of differences.

                Thanks too for replying to my note, and I'm glad that we are on the same wavelength.

                Regards,

                Than Tin