The Other Half of Physics by Michael James Goodband

Dear Michael,

Re-reading your essay. I must confess very informative essay and very readable. Deserving of a very good rating. In your essay, you said: "The external input of energy into a subsystem of objects causes the configuration entropy to increase, giving a positive thermodynamic temperature". Given an input of energy into a sub-system of positive but abysmally low temperature, say 10-30oC, how will the resulting astronomical configuration entropy manifest?

I agree that Object Physics can explain "bit from it" and Agent Physics "it from bit". In my essay I identify the 'it' as an extended point, but I have difficulty identifying the Agent. You may wish to comment.

Best regards,

Akinbo

Hello Michael

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 each of us surely must have touched some corners of it.

Good luck and good cheers!

Than Tin

Michael,

Jonathan pointed me here. I thank him. From a heavy start it built steadily to a great work and then brilliant crescendo. I punched the air in finding I really wasn't going insane. Your thesis describes and beautifully rationalises a central and key part of my own, just viewed from a different angle and aspect. I term is as the 'Dirac Line' discerning mathematical approximation and the layered higher order 'sample spaces' of physical entities and interactions, the evolution of which is described by continuous curves

I hope I also go on to show not only that you are correct but the power of this new paradigm, including resolving the EPR paradox without FTL. We're not alone, many other essays probe the same theme; Matlock, Gaisin, Planat, Dreyer, Perez, McGuire, Mijatovic, McHarris, Rogozhin, Durham, Watson, Kadin, Baugher, Heckman, Bennett etc. etc. It just needs all pulling together. Are you the man? For me it's simply a leg of a greater unifying ontological construction.

I pulled out a number of top quotes from your essay but won't repost them. Suffice to say very well done and certainly a top score earned. I think the heavy start may have put many off as I can't understand your poor rating.

I hope I can prevail on you to read mine and give me your views on my quite different and slightly more radical essay. I hope you find it all pulls together.

Very well done and thank you for yours.

Peter

Dear Michael,

You write

"Such switching from natural-numbers to real-numbers in theory and back again, is at the heart of what quantum theory is really about".

I tend to agree. I would say in a wider perspective: understanding the deep mathematical meaning of quantum theory is crucial to interpret it physically.

"And in fact, quantum theory predicts you will never measure a particle as both existing and not existing at the same time"

I think that I am close to understand this fact (and others) with Grothendieck's concept of 'dessins d'enfants'. In my essay, edges in a dessin are (multiple spin) quantum observables and their extremities are the two possible values that one can measure

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

Your essay reveals a well structured thought. You still say (after Henri Poincaré) "a mathematical theory in science is a description of reality in the language of maths, not reality itself", this perfectly fits my philosophy of science.

Number theory is considered the Queen of Mathematics but it is no longer my view after some practice of QM and the various branches of mathematics it involves.

Thank you for you well written and impressive essay.

I visited your chiral (Spin(3)xSU(2)xU(1))/Z3 quantum field theory too but may be the summer is too hot in France these days!

You can expect a high rate from my side.

Good luck,

Michel

Hi Michael,

Reading your great essay makes me regret not having made time enough to thoroughly read your book, which I think is requisite to understanding your final statement -- so I am not yet sure I can fully agree with your boldest claims.

Nevertheless, we still agree in principle on a great number of important things concerning relativity, and strongly with, "Stop the progression away from thinking about physics in terms of material objects and their interactions, and come back to reality." Even if I remain unconvinced that there is any reality to come back to; if not, the rejection of particle reality is complete.

I am happy to have given your essay a deserved rating boost.

My own essay overlaps with yours in significant ways, particularly concerning the behavior of fermions in a continuum theory. I hope you find it worthwhile.

All best,

Tom

I agree about the significant overlap with Tom, Michael..

His essay has my vote as one of the first you should read after returning from your vacation. And also Michel who commented above has much to recommend your attention. I hope your Summer vacation has been excellent!

All the Best,

Jonathan

Dear Michael.

I had to read your essay twice and it could well reward further reading.

You have hit upon an important way to tackle that old monster of physics: quantum weirdness. Agent physics seems to do with interaction, with measurement, with sensing and you are saying that the energy spent doing that is its important characteristic.

In my Beautiful Universe Theory also found here however, I have created the starting point of what you would call Object physics: A universal lattice of nodes that interact locally, causally and linearly to define particles, energy transport, etc. In such model Universe where would the Agent physics operate? There is no observer, no measurer, no frames of reference, and all the numbers are Natural. I have shown that in such a Universe probability is derivative. It is a physics wherein the background and foreground are one.

In my fqxi essay The Cloud of Unknowing I concluded that while we will not know for sure, we can guess that It=Qubit. The lattice node orientation is a physical state, not a numerical value. Your opinion about some of these notions will be most appreciated.

Vladimir

Dear Michael,

One single principle leads the Universe.

Every thing, every object, every phenomenon

is under the influence of this principle.

Nothing can exist if it is not born in the form of opposites.

I simply invite you to discover this in a few words,

but the main part is coming soon.

Thank you, and good luck!

I rated your essay accordingly to my appreciation.

Please visit My essay.

Michael,

I agree entirely, and understand about Wheelers views, which I think were designed to be controversial and have been taken too literally.

I recall commending your essay last year, which was one of the few with more comments than mine! I don't recall if you read mine. I'll re-read yours after the contest. I don't recall you managed to read mine. I hope you may be able to now as the last two are precursors to this, all deriving observation from mechanism.

I've applied a top mark to yours as I consider it even better and more pertinent than last years. I think mine supports and points to yours, as well as demonstrating the power of the approach, with a resolution or EPR I hope you'll analyse. (Also see the links in the first blog post). I also need points as I've been passed over from 7th twice, so need a better finish!

I might also add Heinrich and Lindner to the list. Q; How many physicist does it take to shift a paradigm?

Very best of luck,

Peter

Dear All

Let me go one more round with Richard Feynman.

In the Character of Physical Law, he talked about the two-slit experiment like this "I will summarize, then, by saying that electrons arrive in lumps, like particles, but the probability of arrival of these lumps is determined as the intensity of waves would be. It is this sense that the electron behaves sometimes like a particle and sometimes like a wave. It behaves in two different ways at the same time.

Further on, he advises the readers "Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it. 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get 'down the drain', into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that."

Did he says anything about Wheeler's "It from Bit" other than what he said above?

Than Tin

Hi Michael,

That was a great pleasure to read your very interesting essay. Reading so many essays I was waiting for something like that.

You say "Einstein was right in his vision that a purely geometrical theory could achieve physics unification".

We differ in details but we are very close. There is not a lot of entrants that I agree with so much.

My key concept for the unification in physics is scale invariant metric. I have proposed a simple spin experiment to find out if that metric exists. The details in references to my essay.

Despite the differences between our views (we could discuss them if you read my concept) your essay deserves the highest rating.

Best regards

Hi Michael,

I liked your essay and rated it as one of he best.

Your conclusion:

What Einstein was wrong about was his assertion that quantum theory could be replaced by a non-probabilistic theory. Instead, The incompleteness proof gives yet another proof that there is no complete physically-real scientific theory that replaces quantum theory.

Is correct.

However, I will say why not drop the "physically real" part. Then there is no uncertainty concerning position and velocity. Einstein was correct about QM. However, he may have some objection about how particles really move.

I think you will find my essay interesting. Please take a look.

Best of luck.

Don Limuti

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

Hi Michael,

Thank you for a very well written description of Agent vs Object physics. However, I wondered about one thing you wrote:

> Instead, the natural-number basis of physically-real scientific theories of object state changes identifies such theories as being exactly the type of arithmetic systems considered by Gödel [13]... Given its significance it should be taught to all aspiring physicists and philosophers, many of whom haven't grasped that Gödel's incompleteness is a feature of discrete logic over arithmetic natural-number systems.

Gödel states that the systems he is considering are those for which the axioms of Principia Mathematica hold. In a footnote he explicitly states that he is including the axiom of infinity. Such systems are sufficient to do arithmetic (addition and multiplication) but most importantly, to do arithmetic for *any* natural number (no matter how large).

Every actual computer does not meet this test because it has a finite memory size (as well as finite word size). Instead, actual computers can be models for Primitive recursive arithmetic, which is provably consistent in Peano arithmetic. Therefore, finite systems can be consistent. It is only the abstract infinite logical systems that come to grief by Gödel's hand.

> The computational universe paradigm implicitly raises issues of mathematical completeness and computability.

My essay Software Cosmos constructs an example of a (closed) computational universe (that appears as open), and shows how that this answers several puzzles in observational cosmology.

In such a computational model, your "Agent Physics" can be distinguished from "Object Physics" in terms of software architecture: they occur at different layers. The philosophical question that arises is whether the Agent layer is higher or lower than the Object layer; put another way, does Life emerge from Matter, or does Matter emerge from Life?

I am curious how you would place your Object Physics and Agent Physics within the model I describe. I hope you get a chance to read it.

Hugh

Just posting to sign this comment.

Dear Michael,

It is interesting essay. However, I have a question on the distinction between Object Physics and Agent Physics. Is it rigorous distinction> Or, is it flexible?

Best wishes,

Yutaka