Deepak,

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 Hong,

    Thank you for your kind words. I wish you all the best.

    Cheers,

    Deepak

    Dear Michel,

    One of your co-authors is P. Levay. Presumably this is the same Levay who has also worked with Duff on the black-hole-qubit correspondence?

    Your work and that of Duff and collaborators critically utilizes three-qubit entanglement. That is also a central-element of my essay. I am presently reading your essay and will post my comments soon.

    Thank you for taking the time to read through my work.

    Best wishes,

    Deepak

    Dear Jim or should I say Your Highness,

    From this humble subject's perspective you need not read all 120 of them, but only the one written by yours truly :D

    Deepak

    Dear Deepak,

    Yes Peter Levay is one of my collaborators. You can see a recent preprint on ArXiv with him, Metod Saniga and me. One of our current questions concern the 12096 three-qubit pentagrams.

    Best wishes,

    Michel

    Dear Deepak,

    I liked your essay. The braid operations are something I touch upon in my essay . The thrust of my argument is that this is generalized into a form of quantum homotopy with associators.

    The Bilson-Thompson model and the use of braid groups in LQG seems to have an overlap with the Seiberg-Witten theory with string theory. I have been interested in whether there is some relationship between string theory and LQG. Either they "cooperate" in some way or they are formally contradictory and one (which ever ends up with empirical support) in effect falsifies the other.

    Cheers LC

      Hi Lawrence,

      Thank you for the compliment. I haven't yet read your essay, but the abstract is certainly interesting. Your statement 'a model of the physical universe encoded by algorithmic means will not compute reality' is something I agree with. That does not, however, mean that one cannot provide a computational interpretation of physics at the level of elementary particles. Whether or not the resulting processes (or "programs") which describe macroscopic physical reality are undecidable is something we have to investigate further.

      I also agree with your assertion regarding the relationship between strings and loops. To a lay person, arguing between "strings" and "loops" must sound like an argument between "pots" and "pans". It is inconceivable, to me, that string theory and lqg have no connection. They are like fraternal twins separated at birth. One day they will have to meet and reunite!

      I'm not sure what Seiberg-Witten theory is, exactly. Witten has his name attached to so many discoveries, it can be hard to keep track of all of them. I'm looking it up. Hopefully I will learn something new :-D

      Cheers,

      Deepak

      Dear Deepak,

      Where I think things go awry is with black holes and gravity in general. We seem to have no end of trouble making gravitation work with quantum mechanics. There are a number of reasons for this. It is standard to regard QFT as an infinite set of harmonic oscillators in space. If the oscillators pertain to gravity a propagator for that field propagates that field on spacetime, which is the field. As a result there is no general diffeomorphism invariant way to assign amplitudes for quantum gravity. String theory goes somewhat in this direction with a perturbative series in a Lagrangian

      L = sqrt{-g}(R α'^2R^{abcd}R_{abcd} O(α'^4)),

      where in the end this really is a low energy form of quantum gravity. It is background dependent, giving it a certain WKB quality. With LQG the Wilson loops are over SL(2,C), which is noncompact and then gives difficulties with finding a UV finite theory.

      The incompleteness I am thinking about is with gravitation and horizons. My argument is rather heuristic, for working up explicit forms of Godel's incompleteness is a daunting problem and there are only a few cases known --- one of them by Godel in his original paper.

      Cheers LC

      Dear Deepak,

      What an excellent approach using Braiding statistics. If fermions are the gates and bosonic fields carry the information, can either be more fundamental than the other? I like anything based around dimensionality, which you will guess if you get chance to look at my essay.

      I really think you are onto something here - well done!

      Best wishes,

      Antony

      Dear Antony,

      Thanks for your kind comments. I read your essay. You present some very interesting ideas.

      Best,

      Deepak

        Hello Deepak,

        Thanks very much & glad I read your super essay. So many still to go.

        All the best for the contest,

        Antony :)

        5 days later

        Hi Deepak,

        A very interesting proposal for a computational substrate. I think it has a great deal more flexibility than the cellular automata models that are rigid with respect to space, and indeed our current computer technology with fixed circuitry.

        And that flexibility may be a problem if you try to imagine how you might "program" such a piece of hardware. As particles interact, the circuitry changes, yielding a most unruly piece of hardware. I am not sure the "software" could be expressed in a formal language as we know them, but perhaps consciousness IS the software. Essayist Stephen Lee has suggested an analogy between consciousness and a software agent in the computational model.

        In my Software Cosmos essay I take a detailed look at the computational model and simulation paradigm from the top down. Perhaps there is a way to link the top down picture with your bottom up picture.

        Hugh

          Dear Deepak. Hello, and apologies if this does not apply to you. I have read and rated your essay and about 50 others. If you have not read, or did not rate my essay The Cloud of Unknowing please consider doing so. With best wishes.

          Vladimir

          Dear Deepak,

          Your essay is highly innovative in the sense that you are thinking of solving the problem of quantum-gravity (QG) from an entirely different ground, namely, quantum computation. Although my field is not quantum computation, I am doing my research work on QG and so I am curious to know how you are going to accomplish your mission. I would like you to have a look at my work on QG and my approach to solve the problem of QG is entirely different from other methods like, string theory, LQG, etc. According to me, the QG field is an "exponentially varying acceleration (gravity) field". I want to have discussions with you on this whenever you are free. In fact in the last two FQXI essay contests I presented my essays on QG.

          Coming back to your essay, it is good to know that you are trying to connect physics of elementary particles with the processes of quantum computation. I quite agree with you when you say that it is a novel way to "view the particles of the standard model as information processing objects, or more precisely, as gates for universal quantum computation". The various figures you have presented in your essay help in understanding your line of thought.

          I hope you succeed in your endeavor and wish you best of luck in the essay contest. Please also have a look at my essay (http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1827) and express your comments on it in my thread.

          Sreenath

          Dear Deepak,

          I cant pretend to understand the exotic physics in your essay but I can imagine how much intellectual input it contains. Mine is much simpler, not as sophisticated. Perhaps you may have ideas to help fine-tune the model.

          Regards,

          Akinbo

          Dr. Vaid,

          Please excuse me, I am an old decrepit realist and I wish to make a comment about your excellent essay. As I have pointed out and proven in my essay BITTERS, all reality is unique, once. Each real snowflake of the trillions that have fallen or that will ever fall is unique, once. If nature cannot produce identical snowflakes, it follows that each fabricated particle or energy wave must be unique, once also for law is consistent throughout the real Universe.

          What is not unique is abstract information. Please look at the graphics in your essay. One only sees identical circles, squares and trellises, and identical numeric and algebraic symbols implying that quantum theory is repeatable, and that is completely unrealistic.

          There is only one question Wheeler ought to have asked:

          Is the real Universe simple? Yes.

          Is the abstract universe simple? No.

          Is unique, once simple? Yes

          Is quantum theory simple? No.

          I wish you all the best in the contest,

          Joe

          Dr. Vaid

          Richard Feynman in his Nobel Acceptance Speech (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1965/feynman-lecture.html)

          said: "It always seems odd to me that the fundamental laws of physics, when discovered, can appear in so many different forms that are not apparently identical at first, but with a little mathematical fiddling you can show the relationship. And example of this is the Schrodinger equation and the Heisenberg formulation of quantum mechanics. I don't know why that is - it remains a mystery, but it was something I learned from experience. There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn't look at all like the way you said it before. I don't know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature."

          I too believe in the simplicity of nature, and I am glad that Richard Feynman, a Nobel-winning famous physicist, also believe in the same thing I do, but I had come to my belief long before I knew about that particular statement.

          The belief that "Nature is simple" is however being expressed differently in my essay "Analogical Engine" linked to http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1865 .

          Specifically though, I said "Planck constant is the Mother of All Dualities" and I put it schematically as: wave-particle ~ quantum-classical ~ gene-protein ~ analogy- reasoning ~ linear-nonlinear ~ connected-notconnected ~ computable-notcomputable ~ mind-body ~ Bit-It ~ variation-selection ~ freedom-determinism ... and so on.

          Taken two at a time, it can be read as "what quantum is to classical" is similar to (~) "what wave is to particle." You can choose any two from among the multitudes that can be found in our discourses.

          I could have put Schrodinger wave ontology-Heisenberg particle ontology duality in the list had it comes to my mind!

          Since "Nature is Analogical", we are free to probe nature in so many different ways. And you have touched some corners of it.

          Good Luck,

          Than Tin

          Dear Dr. Deepak,

          I have rated your innovative essay with full of bright points with maximum possible rating. I, hope, you in turn rate my essay accordingly and inform me in my thread.

          Best wishes,

          Sreenath

            Dear Sreenath,

            This is your third comment, so I should say something in response.

            First, it appears that you labor under the false assumption that entrants in the FQXi essay contest are under some sort of obligation to read and rate every entry to the contest. There is no such requirement under the rules of the contest and nor is this acceptable social practice.

            Secondly you have indicated earlier that you are from Bangalore and you seem to think I'm from Bangalore. I'm not originally from Bangalore, but even if I was, I would feel no obligation to read or rate your essay unless and until I felt it would be of interest to me. Nearness of geographical distance does not imply a similar closeness in one's beliefs or modes of thought.

            Third, it is very nice of you to have given my essay the "maximum possible rating". But that was your choice. I have never asked you (or anyone else for that matter) to rate, or let alone read, my essay. Once again, I feel no obligation to read and rate your essay as a quid pro quo. In fact, doing so would almost seem to border on being unethical.

            I hope you will not find my reply offensive. I am only trying to clear some misconceptions you seem to harbor, without myself generating any further doubts or confusions in your mind. Straightforward language would appear to be the best way to do so.

            Best,

            Deepak

            Dear Dr. Vaid,

            I only scanned your article but did spend a bit more time on preon model which you present toward the end. In some sense there is a strong indication that some kind of composite/preon model like this may/should be realized since the muon, tau, c-quark, s-quark etc. look for all the world like "excitations" of the first generation. I realize that the main thrust of your essay was the connection of this model with information/information processing, but is it possible in get some thing like the 2nd and 3rd family from this model? Also this model seems similar to the family model Zweibach presents in his nice intro book to string theory but this preon model is much more economical (if I remember correctly in the strong model Zweibach presents he needs a different D-brane for every generation and as well for quarks and leptons there should be separate D-branes. Here, from figure 4, it appear one needs only two "branes". One possible way to test such a picture would be if it were possible to calculate the magnetic moment of the electron and electron neutrino. If this is possible one could obtain a post-diction for the electron magnetic moment and a prediction for the electron neutrino magnetic moment (the SM predicts a small magnetic moment for the neutrino but at a level beyond current experiments). Anyway this is a nice and (for me) novel compositeness/preon model.

            Best,

            Doug