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

    Than,

    Thank you for your comment on my blog. I posted the below to you there, but my last paragraph was correct (it had asked me for my name), and it also fooled me by suggesting that I had not rated your essay when in fact I found had when I went to do so. The new server does not seem to have resolved the systems problems.;...

    P

    Post;

    Excellent, yes. And the angels have dresses sewn by needles on which we can also dance with the angels with their white dresses...

    I note I did't rate your essay with my first comment so have done so now. I still love your perceptive comments imagining QM without weirdness, and "Any slice through nature gives "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 screen tells me I'm logged in, but I suspect, like much of current physics, it is there only to fool, confound and confuse.

    Best wishes

    Peter

    Dear Than,

    I have read your beautiful Essay, as I promised in my Essay page. Here are my comments:

    1) I disagree with your statement that "quantum theory is the greatest scientific theory ever invented by Mankind". In fact, in my opinion general relativity is better, but this is very subjective.

    2) The statement that "Einstein's Relativity theory forbids that nothing travels faster than light" is questionable. I suggest you to read this paper on Extended Relativity by my friends Recami and Mignani.

    3) Your analogy "Without the benefits of automaticity accompanying the common sense and the analogy-making power of the mind, our behavior would be like a robot mindlessly following rules and instructions to do the simplest of tasks that a child of two instinctively know how to do. " is very beautiful.

    4) Your idea to represent the state of one's mind through a transcient configuration of duals is intriguing.

    5) Your idea of the Planck Constant as the Mother of all Dualities is fascinating, but I think that it can really work only for the microscopic world. Which is its connection with macroscopic dualities like some that you cited, for example Special Theory of Relativity-General Theory of Relativity, Linear-Nonlinear, Chance-Necessity, etc.

    6) I do not think that Inertial-Gravitational is a duality. Einstein Equivalence Principle implies that they are the same think!

    7) What do you think about my statement on the it-bit duality: "Information tells physics how to work. Physics tells information how to flow"?

    In any case, I found your Essay very interesting. Reading it gave me a lot of fun. Thus, I will give you a high score.

    Cheers,

    Ch.

      Dear Christian

      I very much appreciate your detailed point by point analysis of my essay, and as people say I needed that. And I wish I had the background, especially the time, to reply to your questions with as much seriousness as you put into them. Anyway, here're my tries:

      (1) You are right that I gone way over board on that sentence. It's an equivalent of a purple prose in the scientific literature, I guess.

      (2) I have being hearing about superluminal light, but I couldn't figure it out how light could have chosen to travel faster than itself, when it is already there. It is not physics, but "light and its meanings or its manifestations" remind me of W. Somerset Maugham's version of "The Appointment in Samarra."

      (3) and (4) Thanks for the kind remarks: I am grateful beyond words.

      (5) I believe there is only a thin line between microscopic and macroscopic, between quantum and classical, between unconscious and conscious, between same and difference. The nature of the thin line is a major obstacle in resolving the tension between dualities we are speaking about. It's a problem since day one of quantum theory, and it may turn out to be the main obstacle to the technological achievements of quantum computation. I wish we could go back to the ferment of the old days when QMP (quantum measurement problem) was a rage.

      (6) I was thinking of flat space-time and curved space-time, which kinda implies linear and nonlinear.

      (7) Can I skip it for now? I promise to return to it even after the contest is over.

      Cheers to you as well

      Than

      Dear John,

      I've planted this particlular question "How comes the Two-ness?" at a few sites where I might find the answer.

      I am glad to know that your essay also deals with two-ness, although your terms of reference is the binary nature of Hydrogen as a harbinger of Life.

      But how does Nature comes to this very method of division in the first place?

      Despite Feynman's warning not to go beyond two-ness of wave-particle duality in QM, I am still curious to know.

      Thanks for taking the time to reply as we rushed to finish before the deadline.

      Than

      Dear Amazigh

      I have downloaded your essay and now sits with the essays from other contestants on my computer. I have read it, and I also hope to read all of them, perhaps not all in the time given to us.

      The reason I wanted to read not only 2013 batch of essays (and also those that have been submitted to FQXi in the past 3-4 years) is that I really wanted to know "How comes the Two-ness?". We found two-ness as you have listed in your essay and mine. But where do they come from originally?

      Thanks for the rating, and Good Luck to You too.

      Than

      Dear Than Tin,

      I have now finished reviewing all 180 essays for the contest and appreciate your contribution to this competition.

      I have been thoroughly impressed at the breadth, depth and quality of the ideas represented in this contest. In true academic spirit, if you have not yet reviewed my essay, I invite you to do so and leave your comments.

      You can find the latest version of my essay here:

      http://fqxi.org/data/forum-attachments/Borrill-TimeOne-V1.1a.pdf

      (sorry if the fqxi web site splits this url up, I haven't figured out a way to not make it do that).

      May the best essays win!

      Kind regards,

      Paul Borrill

      paul at borrill dot com