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

      Dear Than,

      Thanks for your nice comments on my essay and I read your essay once and I liked your motto behind writing this nice essay. After going through your essay once more I will post my comments on it and would like to give an excellent rating. Mean time, if you have any questions regarding this you can feel free to contact me at any time in my above address.

      Best of luck,

      Sreenath

      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