Dear Tom, I knew I would enjoy reading your piece but I never expected that your essay is so well written and so well thought out. It is a pleasure to read, although I have to read it slowly and several times. Here are the few quotes that I like: "The arrangements, 010 and 101 resemble an I Ching2 oracle where tossing three coins produces two heads and one tail in one case and two tails/one head in the other. Of course, all possible combinations are actually eight-- 000, 111, 010, 101, 110, 001, 100, 011-- and an I Ching reading takes six tosses of the coins (or yarrow stalks, or 0s and 1s) to make a complete "hexagram" composed of two "trigrams" one atop the other (fig. 3)" If I may say, KQID also cites Fu Xi as the founder of bagua or 8 trigrams, precursor of I Ching as well as Pythagoras were the founders of digital Existence that bit is it and it is bit: bit = it. And another, "Isn't this what Wheeler is telling us? - "The situation cannot declare itself until you've asked your question. But the asking of one question precludes the asking of another." "It" - the answer to a question - whether one addresses one's inquiry to the I Ching oracle, a quantum computer, a favorite deity, or the universe itself - is only "it" for that moment," Fantastic! But this one I strongly disagree, "A rarely spoken assumption of both quantum mechanical formalism - and the I Ching - is that time itself has no physical reality beyond a probabilistic moment." whereas, KQID says that time is real and time is the mother of space-in-time. Everything happens with, through and in time.

However, I love your insightful wisdom embedded with healthy Descartes' doubts: "Even the most primitive of oracle predictive techniques is judged against collected lore stored in the heads of shamans or in some book or books of "hidden" knowledge. We tend to think that only numerical implementation is a precise fit to "reality," and more "scientific" because it is constrained by the rules of arithmetic--we neglect the fact that we created the (self consistent) rules of arithmetic, as surely as generations of shamans and intelligentsia created the self consistent rules of their own predictive systems." Wonderful essay and I hope we continue our discussion later. I will rate this essay the highest that I have given so far. Please look and give me your erudite comment on my essay and grade it accordingly. Thanks, Leo KoGuan.

    "Without a "viscous medium", what else is there to enforce the laws (of nature) and physics constants? What else is there?"

    Jason, who says there needs to be some medium to enforce the laws of nature, as if those laws were written on magic stone tablets and subject to judgment by some omnipotent deity? Einstein discovered more than a century ago that a luminiferous ether is not required to propagate electromagnetic phenomena -- likewise, your idea of a singular point of control over all natural phenomena is only a sufficient condition for the reality we experience, not a necessary one.

    Tom

    "Without a "viscous medium", what else is there to enforce the laws (of nature) and physics constants? What else is there?"

    Jason, who says there needs to be some medium to enforce the laws of nature, as if those laws were written on magic stone tablets and subject to judgment by some omnipotent deity? Einstein discovered more than a century ago that a luminiferous ether is not required to propagate electromagnetic phenomena -- likewise, your idea of a singular point of control over all natural phenomena is only a sufficient condition for the reality we experience, not a necessary one.

    Tom

    Thank you for the kind words, Leo! I think that what you are disagreeing with, however, is not a disagreement at all. The statement from my essay above refers to Carl Jung's observation that "Whatever is born or done in a moment of time has the properties of this moment in time." You can glean from my other works that a great deal of attention is paid to time as a real phenomenon.

    As a continuum of spacetime, it and bit are mutually dependent; however, the fundamental quantum bit (Qbit, or in your terms KQBIT) is primordial only because it cannot exist independent of the continuum. If the continuum could not exist on it own, though, the bit could not be fundamental. I think this perfectly comports with your recursive model: "Space is the child of time and time is the mother of space."

    We have a lot to talk about.

    All best,

    Tom

    "Jason, who says there needs to be some medium to enforce the laws of nature, as if those laws were written on magic stone tablets and subject to judgment by some omnipotent deity?"

    Is there any place in the universe where the speed of light is not guaranteed to be constant? Or the Planck constant? Or the gravitational constant? It is literally an act of faith that nobody questions these values.

    "Is there any place in the universe where the speed of light is not guaranteed to be constant? Or the Planck constant? Or the gravitational constant? It is literally an act of faith that nobody questions these values."

    You might say that it's faith to "believe in" the principle of uniformity (that the physical laws are the same in every part of the universe), only because we can't observe every part of the universe. If this principle isn't true, however, *nothing* that we know about physical science is true. So if you prefer to believe in the supernatural, that's fine with me. Personally, I'm not giving up on science until I'm finished exploring its potential.

    Tom

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    • Post #44

    Tom,

    I think that the wave-function is describing a real phenomenon of nature. After all, why would opening a second slit create an interference pattern, one photon at a time, if the wave-functions of two slits were not interfering with one another. Some have suggested that individual photons are somehow interfering with themselves to create the interference pattern. But if that were true, then someone would have to come up with the mathematics to describe a photon interfering with itself. But why would you need that if you already have wave-function mathematics as QM solutions to the double slit experiment? Parsimony of explanations, right?

    Jason,

    Do you understand my explanation of the two slit experiment in the essay?

    Tom

    Tom,

    I took another look at your explanation of the two slit experiment. Sorry, I couldn't really follow it. But I did notice this paragraph,

    "What both the Hilbert space quantum

    mechanical model and the I Ching cannot do,

    however, is to reproduce the continuous

    function of field dynamics, Einstein's choice

    of Minkowski space which gives meaning to

    the metric tensor because it includes a time

    continuum."

    What caught my eye was that it sounded like you were saying that quantum mechanic models are not continuous. I'm not sure what you're referring to because one of the characteristics of wave-functions is that they are continuous and singlevalued.

    What I didn't see (or maybe overlooked) is the idea that wave-functions are describing a real phenomena of nature. Yet such a phenomena is not made of standard model particles or anything that we know of as a real substance. Heck, even the Higgs field is more real then wave-functions. At least we found indirect evidence of a Higgs particle. But the wave-function, which has this peculiar ability to enforce the Pauli Exclusion principle (Hydrogen atom), and interfere with other wave-functions, is nevertheless not any kind of physically tangible substance that we've experienced.

    And yet, whatever this e^i phenomena is, it permeates literally EVERYTHING.

    "What caught my eye was that it sounded like you were saying that quantum mechanic models are not continuous."

    Of course they're not, Jason. Quantum mechanics, like statistical mechanics, describes the behavior of discrete particles.

    "I'm not sure what you're referring to because one of the characteristics of wave-functions is that they are continuous and singlevalued."

    You're confusing the quantum mechanical wavefunction, which is probabilistic and therefore describes particles in superposition, with classical wave propagation. The latter is the collective motion (consisting of peaks and troughs) of particles though a medium, like water waves. The motion is continuous, but not -- unless the wave is a soliton -- single valued. I think what you mean by single valued is what the conventional interpretation of quantum mechanics calls collapse of the wave function. A continuous wave potential does not collapse -- which is how we get alternative interpretations of quantum mechanics, such as Everett's many-worlds hypothesis.

    " . . . the wave-function, which has this peculiar ability to enforce the Pauli Exclusion principle (Hydrogen atom), and interfere with other wave-functions, is nevertheless not any kind of physically tangible substance that we've experienced."

    The Pauli Exclusion principle refers to particles, not waves. Waves always interfere with each other; they reinforce and destroy. Statistics governing this kind of motion are called Bose-Einstein, because massless particles (bosons) act as an ensemble -- any number of them can simultaneously occupy the same point in spacetime. Fermion statistics govern discrete particles that have mass (fermions), and the Pauli Exclusion principle is what allows us to tell one from another -- no two fermions can occupy the same state at the same time.

    All of this is a part of our physical experience, the continuous wave and the discrete event. The foundational question is that of whether any "tangible substance" exists at all; space and time may be all the substance we need to have mass and energy.

    Tom

    Dear T H Ray,

    Thanks for writing a highly interesting article and it takes its readers spell bound from the first line to the last one. You essay starts with the quotation, "Your task is not to foresee the future, but to enable it", seems to me to reflect what I have said in my essay on quantum physics; where I have said, reality is not discovered (as in the classical world) but it is rather 'invented' in the quantum world. In your essay, you have tried to describe the quantum world through the eyes of Quantum Computing and relating it, in a novel way, to the I Ching oracle. It is good to note that, 'discrete Bits come from a continuum of Its', there by claiming priority of It over Bit as in classical physics. But it appears curious to compare predictions of QM to I Ching oracle and thus indirectly saying that measurement results of QM spring from nowhere to correlate with the predicted ones. In order to overcome this unphysical attitude of QM in physics, you have tried to derive the whole of QM from the basics of classical physics (i.e. the continuity of space-time) there by uniting former with the latter and this automatically leads to the long sought theory of QG. Likewise, you have tried to merge fermion statistics with the boson statistics and there by showing that' the entire universe is not other than locally real'. But, in the end there is no such theory of QG and there is again the 'uncertainty' of the quantum world prevailing not only in QM but also in classical arithmetic as it is having a 'degree of built in computational uncertainty'. So this uncertainty is there even in the classical world as it is based on the continuity of numbers and even quantum computing does not reach that level and a rational research program is at loggerheads.

    I hope, you try to fix this unsolved problem in the future and become guiding light to all those who seek an answer to this perplexing problem of QG.

    I wish you all the best in the essay contest and urge you go through my essay and post your invaluable comments on it in my thread.

    Sincerely,

    Sreenath

    Tom,

    I believe that the wave amplitude, Psi, this thing that interferes with other wave-functions, is the SUBSTRATE of REALITY. The wave amplitude is what has the physics constant c attached to it.

    The probability of (psi*)(psi) is what we measure as probabilities.

    All this Hilbert space mathematics is just overhead above and beyond what nature is really doing. Physicists have to use mathematics to solve QM problems. Nature doesn't have to solve problems. It just acts the way it would naturally act.

    In my view, this wave amplitude phenomena, the substrate of reality, permeates all things, and is indistinguishable from what some people call spirit. If there was such a thing as a soul or a consciousness that survived the death of the physical body, it would have something to do with this inter-penetrating substrate of reality that, at the quantum level, interferes like water waves.

    Jason, before Antoine Lavoisier showed that fire results from the chemical process of rapid oxidation, chemists theorized that a substance that might well be described as an "inter-penetrating substrate of reality" that they named phlogiston, was responsible for causing fire. Then they discovered that "positive phlogiston" caused combustible substances like wood to lose matter and non-combustible substances, like iron, to gain matter (rust). They were unbothered by the contradiction.

    The lesson here is that when one tries to explain everything from a first and final cause, one explains nothing. The more rewarding path is the enlightened realization that "Nature doesn't have to solve problems. It just acts the way it would naturally act."

    The problems are ours to pose, and to solve. Not nature's.

    Tom

    Dear Sreenath,

    I wish I could have hired you to write my abstract! :-) It is such a pleasure to receive feedback from one who truly understands what I am saying, because I (as many others, I'm sure) am never quite sure if I have made my points as clearly as they can be made. Thank you.

    You can be sure that I'll put your essay at the top of my reading list.

    All best,

    Tom

    Dear T H Ray,

    Thanks for your kind comments on my essay and I am too going to rate your entertaining essay with maximum score.

    All the best,

    Sreenath

    Dear T H Ray,

    I have rated your essay with maximum score.

    best,

    Sreenath

    From phlogiston to gravitons, which were never found, to Higg's particles, which are not compatible with big bang/inflation theory. Plug in a wrong answer, grind through the calculations, and discover that things don't fit. It's the scientific method.

    You know what's funny? I didn't even know there was anything wrong with Higgs inflation, until I wondered when Higgs particles were created during the big bang/inflation period. It's that interpenetrating aether that flows through everything that alerted me to the problem, like a sixth sense.

    http://www.nature.com/news/higgs-data-could-spell-trouble-for-leading-big-bang-theory-1.12804

    Thanks Thomas -

    "Maybe if we all got together and compared our simple sets we might conclude that they are identical" That is very probable - one of my main gripes in physics is that mathematics and theorizing allows us to make very different theories about the same phenomena (Schrodinger wave & Heisenberg matrices for example) - but one is always 'closer to nature' and can lead to new developments.

    Thanks

    Vladimir

    You make a really good point, Vladimir -- and it's why I have high esteem for Christian Corda's support for 't Hooft's universal application of the Schrodinger equation. No room for ambiguous interpretations and misinterpretations there.

    I haven't forgotten you -- there are always a few essays I save for the end, because I expect to be delighted, being familiar with the authors' previous works; yours and Professor Corda's are among those.

    All best,

    Tom