Hello Deepak,
Thanks very much & glad I read your super essay. So many still to go.
All the best for the contest,
Antony :)
Hello Deepak,
Thanks very much & glad I read your super essay. So many still to go.
All the best for the contest,
Antony :)
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
Hello Hugh,
I read your interesting and thought provoking essay. I think that you present some fascinating observations. If one is to seriously consider the Computational Universe Hypothesis (CUH) as a line of research, then your considerations would amount to an attempt to understand the phenomenological implications of viewing physical processes as computational processes.
Your identification of the implicate/explicate order view of the universe, as conceived by Bohm and Hiley, with the server/client architecture of modern computational networks is a deep observation. I am not sure about your suggested candidates for the mathematical structures which encode the implicate and explicate views.
All in all, it is a well-written essay with several poetic flourishes, and as such, comes much closer to being a serious exploration of the question at hand than many other entries in this contest.
Cheers,
Deepak
Dear Prof. Singleton,
Thank you for reading my essay and your appreciative comments.
The question of generations is very pertinent. One possibility is to assign colors to braids. Then one would have to consider braids where ribbons all have the same colors, but also braids with differently colored ribbons. Such a construction appears to naturally arise in Gurau approach to "Colored Group Field Theory" arXiv:0907.2582v1. A priori, all colors would have equal standing. In order to make contact with the observed mass gaps between the various generations of the standard model, one would then need some sort of mechanism to break the degeneracy allowing us to distinguish between differently colored braids.
Zweibach's book is the one place where I first found that something very similar to the preon model appeared to exist in string theory. This was an inspiration for me to believe in the correctness of my approach. The fact that the same (or similar) construction arises in both string theory and via the LQG route advocated by me, suggests a point of contact between the two approaches to quantum gravity. Apart from the naive observation that the structures used in loops and strings appear to be essentially identical, one also needs more concrete steps to bring the two together. The preon model is a candidate for providing such a concrete connection.
As for experimental predictions, as yet I have no idea how to go about performing any of the calculations which you suggest for preons. As is generally the case, the way forward will likely appear to be obvious once I find it, but till then it will seem to be an intractable problem.
Cheers,
Deepak
Dear Deepak Vaid:
I am an old physician and I don't know nothing of mathematics and almost nothing of physics,
But maybe you would be interested in my essay over a subject which after the common people, physic discipline is the one that uses more than any other, the so called "time". No one that I know ever said what I say over it and I am convince that I proved that with our clocks we measure "motion" and no "time.
:
I am sending you a practical summary, so you can easy decide if you read or not my essay "The deep nature of reality".
I am convince you would be interested in reading it. ( most people don't understand it, and is not just because of my bad English).
Hawking in "A brief history of time" where he said , "Which is the nature of time?" yes he don't know what time is, and also continue saying............Some day this answer could seem to us "obvious", as much than that the earth rotate around the sun....." In fact the answer is "obvious", but how he could say that, if he didn't know what's time? In fact he is predicting that is going to be an answer, and that this one will be "obvious", I think that with this adjective, he is implying: simple and easy to understand. Maybe he felt it and couldn't explain it with words. We have anthropologic proves that man measure "time" since more than 30.000 years ago, much, much later came science, mathematics and physics that learn to measure "time" from primitive men, adopted the idea and the systems of measurement, but also acquired the incognita of the experimental "time" meaning. Out of common use physics is the science that needs and use more the measurement of what everybody calls "time" and the discipline came to believe it as their own. I always said that to understand the "time" experimental meaning there is not need to know mathematics or physics, as the "time" creators and users didn't. Instead of my opinion I would give Einstein's "Ideas and Opinions" pg. 354 "Space, time, and event, are free creations of human intelligence, tools of thought" he use to call them pre-scientific concepts from which mankind forgot its meanings, he never wrote a whole page about "time" he also use to evade the use of the word, in general relativity when he refer how gravitational force and speed affect "time", he does not use the word "time" instead he would say, speed and gravitational force slows clock movement or "motion", instead of saying that slows "time". FQXi member Andreas Albrecht said that. When asked the question, "What is time?", Einstein gave a pragmatic response: "Time," he said, "is what clocks measure and nothing more." He knew that "time" was a man creation, but he didn't know what man is measuring with the clock.
I insist, that for "measuring motion" we should always and only use a unique: "constant" or "uniform" "motion" to measure "no constant motions" "which integrates and form part of every change and transformation in every physical thing. Why? because is the only kind of "motion" whose characteristics allow it, to be divided in equal parts as Egyptians and Sumerians did it, giving born to "motion fractions", which I call "motion units" as hours, minutes and seconds. "Motion" which is the real thing, was always hide behind time, and covert by its shadow, it was hide in front everybody eyes, during at least two millenniums at hand of almost everybody. Which is the difference in physics between using the so-called time or using "motion"?, time just has been used to measure the "duration" of different phenomena, why only for that? Because it was impossible for physicists to relate a mysterious time with the rest of the physical elements of known characteristics, without knowing what time is and which its physical characteristics were. On the other hand "motion" is not something mysterious, it is a quality or physical property of all things, and can be related with all of them, this is a huge difference especially for theoretical physics I believe. I as a physician with this find I was able to do quite a few things. I imagine a physicist with this can make marvelous things.
With my best whishes
Héctor
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
Dear Professor Vaid,
I regret I reached your essay so late. I found it authoratitive, incicive and assured. It should certainly make the final cut and I hope my top marks will help it do so. But far more important is the science;
My own essay has been lauded, (Blog comments include; "groundbreaking, "clearly significant", "astonishing", "fantastic", "wonderful", "remarkable!", "deeply impressed", etc. But I have no PhD in physics and it is a simple geometrically based discovery. What hit me was the constant stream of harmonic concepts from reading your essay, including in Sundance's 'twisted strands'. (unfortunately he hasn't answered my post).
I won't raise these here as you are far better qualified than me to analyse them, so I hope you'll read my essay and discuss them. I build an ontology including defining the difference between computation and natural evolution.
The foundations of the model underpinning the essay are described in my previous two, both top ten scorers but passed over by the judges as too far 'off doctrine' I suspect. I greatly look forward to any comments and advice you may give. It currently lies in the top few but I still suspect the fully implications have not yet been recognised. Do they still make new paradigms or are we now too late?
Very well done and thank you for yours.
Peter
Dear Deepak,
We are at the end of this essay contest.
In conclusion, at the question to know if Information is more fundamental than Matter, there is a good reason to answer that Matter is made of an amazing mixture of eInfo and eEnergy, at the same time.
Matter is thus eInfo made with eEnergy rather than answer it is made with eEnergy and eInfo ; because eInfo is eEnergy, and the one does not go without the other one.
eEnergy and eInfo are the two basic Principles of the eUniverse. Nothing can exist if it is not eEnergy, and any object is eInfo, and therefore eEnergy.
And consequently our eReality is eInfo made with eEnergy. And the final verdict is : eReality is virtual, and virtuality is our fundamental eReality.
Good luck to the winners,
And see you soon, with good news on this topic, and the Theory of Everything.
Amazigh H.
I rated your essay.
Please visit My essay.
Deepak - A serious piece of scientific work. Original, well argued, provokative and very well presented. Top marks. Thank you.
If you get the opportunity, I would be most honored if you were to review my essay.
http://fqxi.org/data/forum-attachments/Borrill-TimeOne-V1.1a.pdf (I have no idea why the fqxi web site breaks up this url).
Kind regards, Paul
Dear Paul,
Thank you for your kind comments. At first sight your essay also appears to be serious, scientific and well argued.
There are many aspects to the problem of quantum gravity. Understanding the structure of particles is only one of them. Understanding the emergence of time and space in the setting of a computational network - which you appear to address in your essay - is another one. As I said, at first glance, your thesis appears to be something quite innovative and intriguing. I'm reading through it and will get back to you once I have a better understanding of your thesis.
Best,
Deepak
Dear Peter,
"Deepak" will do just fine. "Professor" is a bit (no pun intended) of an exaggeration.
In looking through your essay, I failed to identify any central thread. There is a great proliferation of concepts and hypotheses, but nothing seems to stand out. You say that: It's been assumed that simple 0,1 spin states are all a photon has to offer. I don't see what you're talking about. The whole point of quantum computation is that it supersedes the binary choice of classical computation, by providing access to arbitrary superpositions of 0 and 1. It would appear that quantum computation in its traditional and universally accepted form already incorporates the "excluded middle" which you refer to.
You have made a commendable effort, but I cannot honestly say that I see anything new in your work.
Best,
Deepak