Joe,

I am sorry that the graphics ruined the argument for you. It is possible that the graphics are unnecessary but (IMHO) they do a better job of conveying meaning than a dozen sentences. Think of the graphics as semantic shortcuts rather than Platonic idealizations.

The graphics and the words of this essay represent a unique instance, like a snowflake, that will be perceived in the mind of the reader, then melt away.

Best wishes,

Richard

Akinbo,

Thank you for support. The basic argument, that epistemic entropy differs from and is reciprocal to ontic entropy, has (I believe) strong support in conventional, non speculative physics (i.e., unitary QM, Relativity theory and quantum information theory).

I placed a warning about the last section of my essay becoming increasingly speculative. However, the idea that expanding scale can be equated to time and contracting scale to gravity, with equilibrium at the scale of an elementary particle, flows naturally from my initial argument.

I look forward to reading your essay.

Best wishes,

Richard

Jim,

Thank you for reading my essay. I have to acknowledge that it does contain some heady stuff. I may have packed too much into 9 pages when perhaps an overview might have been more comprehensible.

When I speak of entropy, I mean the minimal amount of information needed to describe a state or system. In a cosmological sense, this would be how many bits can be encoded into the universe, which is maximally homogeneous for position/time space.

Later on, when I discuss the knowledge generation mechanism, I relate cosmological entropy to quantum information theory. Essentially, you have a universe full of possible paths of which only one is experienced by the observer, with a corresponding loss of quantum entanglement information.

The universe expands as knowledge is generated (i.e., paths selected) from an underlying quantum wholeness. Black holes are compactifications of position/time space with reciprocal increase in entanglement entropy. At minimum scale and at maximum entanglement entropy, all paths are equally probable and each corresponds to a parallel universe.

You might say that the universe we know has grown from the pruning and discarding of alternate branches (paths).

I look forward to reading and reviewing your essay.

Best wishes,

Richard

Dear Richard,

I have down loaded your essay and soon post my comments on it. Meanwhile, please, go through my essay and post your comments.

Regards and good luck in the contest,

Sreenath BN.

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1827

Dear Richard,

As promised, below are my comments.

I like the wide range of your essay, the arguments are not in the academic style but I don't worry. I think we have similar views about the meaning of knowledge and the pertinent mathematical tools.

"Information is contextual" as I also justify in my essay

http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1789

As I already coined, Klein anticipates Grothendieck and creates/uses the stereographic projection for deriving the invariants of platonic solids.

In Sec.6, you feature three-qubit entanglement. We (I an coauthors) spent a lot of energy for understanding these structures (a hint is in Sec. 3.3 of my essay).

Congratulations and good luck dor the contest,

Michel

Hi Richard

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 Richard,

    I appreciate your kind comments and I am going to post my comments on your essay shortly in your thread.

    Best wishes,

    Sreenath

    Dear Richard,

    You have nicely summed up the whole of physics from micro (quantum) to macro (classical) in a concise and elegant manner. The figures clarify what you want to say in a clear way. Your coverage of micro physics is highly convincing and you have made general relativity look simple and its cosmological implications easy to grasp. Your viewing of a black hole and a micro particle from its size look fantastic. The role played by brain in acquiring knowledge by cognizing the processes taking place in both quantum world and the classical world is exemplary. Information plays primary role in the world, siding with Wheeler, compared to matter; i.e. Bit is prior to It. You have clearly defined both information and consciousness and also the connections between them. Your knowledge of mathematical and geometrical skills in deducing all important equations in both micro macro worlds is commendable. Your final views as you have given in your abstract can be summarized as "We are perceptually contained in a virtual world projected by our brain and the It and Bit are actually reciprocal entities that together generate the phenomenal universe", thus agreeing with my conclusion reached by me in my essay.

    I am really glad for your appreciation of my idea of comparing a mathematician to a sculptor and would have been still gladder had you included the photograph of that statue carved by Michelangelo.

    Thank you very much for producing such a nice article and I would like to rate it very high (above 8) after hearing your response to my comments in my thread.

    Best wishes,

    Sreenath

      Dear Richard,

      As said I have rated your nicely written essay with high a score.

      Best wishes,

      Sreenath

      Than,

      I enjoyed reading your essay. We are certainly in agreement on the dual nature of quantum reasoning and classical reasoning, with the Planck constant as the Mother of All Dualities. It is easy then to extend the schema from the Planck constant to a generalized action principle incorporating both freedom and determinism.

      Best wishes,

      Richard

      Richard - some excellent summaries in here, and (mostly) well connected with coherent insights. Nice job.

      I did read all the way down the rabbit hole ...

      Your comment that "To a hypothetical massless passenger, a photon is instantaneously everywhere" is not quite correct. The proper time depends on Lorentz frame of reference. For example, if our hypothetical massless passenger happens to be in the atom, the proper time of a photon is zero. If she happens to be traveling with the photon, then the proper time for whatever is going on in the atom appears to be zero. Lorentz Transformations are symmetric. [See Peres & Terno "Quantum Information and Relativity Theory" http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0212023v2 for an excellent description].

      My favorite paragraph in your paper ... Well I have two:

      "Wheeler and Feynman, in their time symmetric theory [22], theorized that no particle is emitted unless it is absorbed somewhere later in the universe. All electromagnetic field equations are invariant under time-reversal symmetry. Consequently, a wave can be considered going both forward in time from the point of emission (retarded wave) and backward in time from the point of absorption (its conjugate advanced wave)."

      This [22] is (I think) where I got my original idea for subtime many years ago.

      My second favorite paragraph:

      2. "The process that selects the xt information encoded in pe waves is measurement. A recent experiment [29] showed that the measured spin state of an atom is correlated with the direction of the path of an emitted photon. Conversely, adjusting the orientation of the observed photon's polarization at the stop point alters the spin states of the atom at the start point, supposedly "after' the photon was emitted."

      Thank you for finding this reference, this is terrific, and ties in well with how I conceptualize entanglement. However, note that in a reversible subtime scenario, the ordering of individual events (before, after) has no meaning.

      This is discussed further in my paper: http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1897

        Dear Richard,

        I am sorry in the delay in replying you. I did not check the replies. FQXi also did not intimate about your reply

        I think we form a picture of anything in our mind, and keep them in our memories. Maya in other words 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 Richard,

        Well written and illustrated essay, with many intriguing ideas. I find it very on topic, by using the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory and Cramer's transactional interpretation (which, I agree with you, complement the view presented in my essay). Congratulations, and good luck with the contest!

        Best regards,

        Cristi Stoica

          Paul,

          Thank you for your kind comments. I am glad that you found my essay to useful and that you went down the rabbit hole!

          In my comment about the "hypothetical massless passenger', I was referring to travelling along with the photon. I should have made this point more clear. You are correct, of course, that the proper time depends on Lorentz frame of reference. You may be interested decoherence due to gravitational time dilation in Zych, Costa, Pikovski, and Brukner, "Quantum interferometric visibility as a witness of general relativistic proper time", http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.4531.

          I look forward to reading your paper very soon.

          Best wishes,

          Richard

          Cristi,

          Thank you very much for your considerate and supportive comments. I certainly enjoyed your essay!

          There is common ground in our ideas, which is best represented in the Tao.

          Best wishes,

          Richard

          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 Richard,

            Please look my essay! Your feedback and evaluation is very important for me.

            Thank you very much!

            Best regards,

            Vladimir