Matter and its Configuration States in the Making of Information by CS Unnikrishnan

Dear CS Unnikrishnan :

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 prove that with our clocks we measure "motion" and no "time.

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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 sir,

I have posted the above general comment to everyone, but your essay has piqued my interest and I will return to it in two days and post a review. I will also rate it, of course.

Best wishes,

John Selye

Dear CS Unnikrishnan,

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.

Dear Unnikrishnan,

You have mentioned about Hawking's result in your essay. As we know, the quantization of the right hand side of Einstein's equations, in a given spacetime, has yielded the effects of the Hawking radiation. Though the role of back reaction has not been fully taken care of here, let's examine this result in another perspective. Recently it has been shown that the right hand side of Einstein's equations, i.e., the energy-stress tensor T^{ik}, has serious problems [arXiv:1204.1553]. Hence, the results obtained by using it also become doubtful. Would you like to comment on this issue?

Best Regards.

___Ram

Dear prof. Unnikrishnan,

In your highly intriguing article, you have clearly distinguished between matter and its physical states on one hand and also between bits and their information states on the other. You have substantiated it with your elegant logical arguments. According to you 'matter is more fundamental than information'. So we can know of matter only through its physical states but never directly. To substantiate this you have given the famous example of 'serpent and rope' which is illustrated in Advaita Vedanta. A confused observer sees 'serpent in the rope' as long as he is in that state, but once he realizes (Gnanodaya) that it is indeed a rope but not a serpent he acknowledges his mistake. But in your case it is not possible as one can never know matter (underlying reality) except in its physical states. In the words of Advaita, this is tantamount to saying that you can know of world as a 'phenomenon' but never as a 'noumenon', although Advaita allows one to know of reality (noumenon) in 'mystic experience' as it is. So your metaphor is valid in Kantian philosophy where he clearly distinguishes between noumenon and phenomenon and we can know of noumenon as phenomenon only but never as noumenon itself. That is we don't have direct access to noumenon.

The one question I want to ask is, when you say that "information is the physical state of the 'it', and in turn that of the 'bit'; we now see clearly that 'it' is indeed the 'bit'", how do you come to the conclusion that 'It' is indeed the 'Bit'? I need some clarification here. In my essay also I have come to more or less the same conclusion but in a different way as you have already seen.

In your essay, you have clearly elucidated the role played by information in different branches of physics. You logic, I feel, is flawless as conclusions follow from the premises inevitably. The role played by the observer is in physics as a whole and in QM in particular is clarified convincingly. Thanks for writing such an articulate essay and it is an eye opener for those who are puzzled by the role played by the observer in QM.

Best wishes,

Sreenath

Dear Sreenath,

Thanks for your kind message. First let me clarify my claim that It is Bit - it is in fact not a very deep statement. I am just saying that just as one should distinguish between Matter and its physical state one should distinguish between a bit and its information state (matter is one entity and states could be many - so the same material entity is capable of transformation within its states). If one says that a two state quantum system is a bit, in real terms one is just indentifying an ion or a quantum dot or something like that with the bit. To encode information onto that one needs to create a specific physical state, and even that is relative, since any information refers to a change from one configuration to another. So, at the lowest level there is some material entity capable of assuming different physical states (information potential) - it is this SAME entity that we call a bit. A bit is not yet information, unless endowed with a 'state' (like orientation of a spin), but that needs a reference orientation (another bit with a specific state, chosen by convention)! I have pointed this out to Carlo Rovelli as well, since he deals with relative information in his essay.

Now about the 'serpent and the rope'. Yes, what you say is correct as what is said in Advaita, but one should also recognize that the informational values of bot, in strict physical terms, could be the same whereas the fear goes away when one realizes that it is a rope precisely because ropes cannot bite and kill. They are sufficiently different in their MATERIAL properties to allow Gnaodaya. What if the difference was subtle? One will take more time and effort to realize the difference. Finally, it depends purely on whether there is knowable difference between the physical states of the two objects - that is all what counts. As long as there is knowable difference between physical states, the information is distinct, and the rope and the serpent are different. Otherwise, the difference is not knowable, even by mystic experience. Yes, that is my stand. (fear can go away by mystic practice, and one might not care whether it is a serpent or a rope, but that is a different matter.)

Unnikrishnan

Dear Professor Unnikrishnan,

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