Dear Amazigh

Quantum physics says "Yes" and "No" are indistinguishable at the start, when everything is small, like atoms. Maybe that's what Schrodinger meant when he talked about live and dead cat in a box.

Other expositors of QM have used different words to describe the states of: "Up" and "Down" (J. Bell?); "Here" and "There" (S. Weinberg?) as being superposed in quantum theory. Measurement gives the classical results (Bohr) by cancelling the interference terms in the probabilities (as amplitudes) to give clear answer to the ambiguity and randomness inherent in superposed states. Think two-slit experiment.

It's difficult to keep track of the terminologies, let alone able to resolve the contradictions and inconsistencies in our seemingly divergent approaches. (The director of FQXi organization Max Tegmark's recent polling survey of physicists' view of "quantum measurement problem" has found no unanimity at all!)

However, there is one thing I am grateful about, and that is Nature is tolerant: it allows us to be the same and different at the same time, if we were to wear a quantum mask. In classical physics, it is "Here" or "There", not "Here-There" together!

If I have time, I will return to you again: It is all very interesting!

Best and thanks,

Than Tin

Than,

I found your essay to be very clear and thoughtful.

Thank you for reviewing my essay "A Complex Conjugate Bit and It". We are very much in accord regarding the Planck constant as the "Mother of All Dualities".

Your concept that "quantum is analogical" resonants with the global iterative process which "selects" a particular path out of an ensemble (via path integrals). Locally, we participate in this self-reflexive process by splitting into "self" (the observer) and "non-self" (the observed). In this way, the ontic "analogical quantum" is also dual to epistemic "rational classical" reality.

Best wishes,

Richard

    Richard,

    People already may be tired of my "analogies", but I can't resist from introducing them wherever and whenever I can. Like Banquo, thoughts appear at the at the oddest moments, not when we try to summon them.

    With that no-apology apology, I like to say that your essay is a banquet of ideas that need days for us mortals to digest. But I do not worry because people like E. E. Klingman and the two Vladimirs (you know who they are!) have done a thorough job of analytically rigorous reviews, which clarify and enlighten us further.

    There is very little for us to say more, and yet I have a few things left to say. Bear with me if you heard it before.

    A major aim of my essay is to remind people that analogy and its bretheren automatic ( therefore unconscious) thought processes are as valuable as conscious rational thought processes, which often in this day and age usually come dressed with the armors of logic and math. As I said in my essay, analogy is the flag ship of rationality. As quantum is to classical or as wave is to particle, they are inseparable elements of thoughts. We may argue how they are paired, but the pairing itself cannot be doubted. As mind is to body.

    Analogy is our theory of everything (TOE), because fundamentally it is all about sameness, (about the wholeness), and rationality is fundamentally about differences (about the parts), and we must have been talking about it since the days we have the language for it. We now have the mathematical and physical languages to talk about it more precisely and accurately.

    I can't help noticing that the theme running through our essays and commentaries is of unity in diversity, and my heart is glad when I was recognized as part of the fraternity.

    Feynman might well be applauding at our mutual admiration society!

    All the Best,

    Than Tin

    Dear Dr. Basudeba

    "God is subtle, but He is not malicious" is a famous quote from Einstein, and Google found 132,000 instances of it in 0.31 seconds on my computer. (Bing gives me 2,050,000 results, but not the time!).

    Your "God is not Devil, who plays dirty tricks. Don't blame God for your lack of understanding" is a facsimile of the same sentiments. (I put it a little differently as "Quantum is Analogical." Or "Nature is Analogical." Or "Nature is Tolerant.").

    I think we all are on the same wavelength as far as the central ideas are concerned, but we are finding ourselves facing different directions as we climb this helical stair case, be it in life or in physics, or in any other realms of thought. When we try to reconcile the difference, we end up with a different kinds of differences! An example: wave-particle and boson-fermion of Bose-Einstein condensate.

    Yes, there are too many interpretations of QM, and Yes, there are logical holes in SR, but many of us are blissfully unaware of it for the longest time. Thanks for reminding us.

    Best Regards and Good Cheers,

    Than Tin

    Dear Than,

    I suppose that Physics as a science tries to establish truth but not poetics and political sense of argument.R.Feynman also suggested that physicists have a way of avoiding the politics and subjective tastes in science : if you have an apparatus which is capable of telling how many bits of information given thermal energy ( "termal information" )must contain in the terms of physical measurement, then you can say scientifically about entity information, indeed. Because there is no such thing as physical measurement of the bits of thermal information, then Hawking-like law of information conservation (' The information remains firmly in our universe. Thus, If you jump into a black hole, your mass energy will be returned to our universe but in a mangled form which contains the information about what you were like but in a state where it can not be easily recognized '( Hawking ,2005 )) and its consequences might be considered, unfortunately,as popular illusion.

    respectfully

    Michael

      Hi Than Tin,

      I still did not fully read in complete detail your essay but wanted to give some comments on the parts I did get to. Your split of approaching things/problems via analogy and via rational reason reminded me a bit of Robert Pirsig's discussion of the intuition/romantic approach to the world vs. the analytical/scientific approach to the world in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (a great book despite the somewhat funny title). Part of the book is trying to find or describe the balance between these two modes of thought. Anyway if you have not read this book you may find it interesting.

      The second comment -- you discuss some constant on the last page of the essay and from what I understand you do a thought experiment to vary this constant ("A value of zero is certain to produce a fantasy world, but we could go just as wrong by going too strongly away from zero."). Then at the end you associate this constant with Planck's constant. This is an interesting thought experiment -- how would the world look of hbar, Planck's constant, where different? Taking hbar to 0 is generally called the classical limit since the world would be classical at all levels. If on the other hand if hbar were very large, quantum effects would/might become noticeable on large scales e.g. one might be able to "see" quantum tunneling. There was a paper by Adler and Santiago where they considered a variable hbar but I'm not sure what become of this. The original paper is available in the arXiv "On a generalization in quantum theory: Is h Planck constant?", Ronald J. Adler and David I. Santiago e-Print: hep-th/9908073.

      Best of luck,

      Doug

        Dear Akinbo,

        I am sorry in the delay in replying you. I did not check the replies.

        It was my proposition, it was not an inference to your essay. What I mean is that we should be more close experimental results for our propositions.

        I think we form a picture of anything in our mind, and keep them in our memories. We communicate about that picture to others, which we call information. When we die we loose all these pictures and memories.

        Now in this context, can we create material from information...?

        You can discuss with me later after this contest closes also.

        Best

        =snp

        snp.gupta@gmail.com

        Dear Sridattadev:

        Thanks for the kind appreciation. I have visited your blog briefly, and what I get out of it is that you are concerned with the generations of duals with arithmetics and number theory.

        You said "Truth is simple, accepting is not." My own take is "Understanding is difficult" because it takes time and experience.

        With Metta,

        Than

        Dear Sreenath,

        I appreciate your generosity, but your generosity would be wasted on me because I am not a physics major who is capable of using such an advanced text.

        Also I'm at a stage in life that unloading the stuffs of life is a proper thing to do. A close-at-hand example would be my essay in this contest, which I had it in my "possession" for a longest time, and only now I am "unloading it" to all by entering the contest for the first time.

        I have downloaded your essay and read it, and the style of presentation is the one I am at home with - no mathematical symbols or equations.

        And you have clarified the many senses of that nebulous word "Information", and I believe it will prove to be a big help in future discussion of the topic. Right now, I may not be the only one who is confused about the meaning or the many manifestations of that word.

        With Metta,

        Than

        Dear Michael

        You said "I suppose that Physics as a science tries to establish truth but not poetics and political sense of argument".

        My take is "truth" can be approached from all sides, like Feynman's all-path formulation of quantum mechanics. I do not believe there is a "soft" truth and a "hard" truth, but I have a preference of a path - poetics -- in trying to reach it. My essay in that sense can be characterized as "poetics" because it is full of analogies.

        Thanks for taking the time to make a comment on my site.

        Best Luck,

        Than

        Hi Doug

        I'm going to check out "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" pronto. A hell of a title too: no wonder everyone is talking about it, and I am beating myself for not even browsing through it. And how can I call myself a book lover straight face after this admission?

        Yes, I have seen in the physics literature a statement saying "hbar" is zero in the classical limit. In my thought experiment, I have assume that as long as the universe is filled with light, the "hbar" or the Planck constant can never approach zero. It is a constant after all, not a variable.

        Didn't physics say in SR (special relativity) the velocity of light is constant in all inertial (uniformly moving?) frames of references? And if the universe is filled with light, where can Planck constant go to be zero? Into the black hole? I have read that eminent physicists like Hawking and Susskind are on the opposite sides of the issue concerning black hole and radiation.

        I am confused, and when I do, I go back to my instincts, and trust my intuition, buttressed sometimes by a little thought experiment when I can think of one.

        I imagine a slightly different thought-experiment to clear my heads of all this accumulated and second-hand knowledge.

        I start with myself: with my biology teacher's tale of my father's sperm entering my mother's egg, and dividing it and dividing it until a little me was formed. Sound wonderful, and I'm here in this universe filled with lights, or photons as physicists are wont to say. since I am grown up, I want a simpler story.

        And I imagine a circle, and then begin cutting it into two parts that are exactly, absolutely, and precisely alike. I can't do it however much I try. A circle remains a circle, exactly, absolutely, and precisely the same. To get what I want - i.e. the two parts that are practically similar -- I have to abandon the absolutist position and accept the inevitable difference of one Planck constant obtaining between the pair.

        When we do that, we get a circle consisting of the two halfs that are slightly different from each other. As time goes on, with further divisions of parts that are in relative positions to each other, the definitions (individuality) begin to emerge. We label what emerges under different labels: some (like cognitivist Hofstadter and philosopher Dennett call it "I", physicists call it "clasicality," and I call it "consciousness," the theoretical minimum required for discriminations and identifications between parts that are whole at the beginnings.

        I am not familiar with cosmology and black hole physics, but your use of the word "self-similarity" at the beginning of your essay intrigues me. I hope I can return it in the time remaining.

        Just out of curiosity, is this game a Survivor games-like or a Hunger-games like? (My ratings are in the cellar, and going up and down like a yo-yo!)

        Cheers and Best of Luck

        Than