Dear Paul,

I just saw your post on my essay thread stating that you had read all 180 essays, and invited me, in true academic spirit, to review you essay and leave my comments. Paul, I had previously made a cursory review of your essay, but because I am not a physicist and was unfamiliar with some of more technical references, I felt rather unqualified to assess yours, and I did not wish to be intellectually dishonest or allow my mind's ignorance to be exceeded by my ego's arrogance. However, because you went to the trouble to read all of the essays, including mine, I spent the last hour reading and re-reading your essay, and I do now feel as though I can offer some honest feedback and a genuine assessment.

I found your essay to be exceptionally well-written, particularly considering the highly technical aspects of both the subject and your assertions. You stated, "Time is change. When nothing changes, time stands still, when something changes, and then changes back, it is indistinguishable from time standing still, at least locally." I don't know if you're the first to say this, but I agree completely; it is a profound observation.

You also pointed out, "We rarely hear the logically equivalent that there is no time without space which is equally concludeable from Einstein's original postulates and argument . . ." and, "There is no common meaning to time separately from motion. They are inextricably tied together." Again, I find myself in complete agreement with those statements.

I found your hypothesis fascinating. While I have absolutely no basis other than my own intuition (which has served me wrong on more occasions that I care to admit), it has always seemed to me that our ability to measure the time frame(s) are too large (if that is the proper way of stating it) to notice the photon's speed 'back and forth' and as such, we draw incorrect conclusions based upon inaccurate data/measurements.

At any rate, I fear if I go on, I shall reveal even greater depths of my ignorance, so I will conclude by telling you that I found your essay to be of exceptionally high quality and rated it accordingly. Best to you, Paul, and were it not for your post, I would not have taken the time or had the courage to evaluate and rate yours.

Sincerely,

Ralph

    Greetings Paul,

    I appreciate the kind remarks left on my essay page. I'll make every effort to read your essay and rate it before midnight, but your comments may have to wait until tomorrow - unless they are urgent and short.

    Regards.

    Jonathan

      Hey,

      I've often thought of ticks on a clock and wondered how much time really happens, or what the interval actually is. The ticks may occur at the same rate, or be taken as that which motion, or events macroscopically take place, like say the rate of ticks corresponds with the motion of the container, and it has such a time interval over all. But the possibility of something happening in between the one interval which is different from the next, something that would not change the motion of a body in trajectory much, is divinely intriguing. So is it correct to say that the amount of "time" in between ticks differs depending on the oscillations of photons that don't interact with or click with detection screen?

      I've also never thought this idea could be applied or taken anywhere besides time, like was done with entanglement in this essay. Maybe this was what Einstein was thinking. I know scientist don't wish, because they doubt it changes the future, but I would that Einstein was around for an interview.

      Best of luck with this here contest,

      Amos.

        Hi Paul,

        OK, I just read your submission and you have done a good job. I liked reading about the proposed experiments to prove t_s. I myself have thought along those same lines but I couldn't conceive of any experiments. Anyway, the point in your submission where you say; "Many di fferent con figurations are explored in subtime and only those well suited to their environment would (with higher probability) persist as (what would appear to be) irreversible change in T_c." Should actually say, many differnent configurations are explored in subtime and the only one realized is the one that follows the "principle of least time". Feynman did may wonderful things with the concept of "least time". Which as I just looked up is actually called Fermat's principle of least time. It basically says that the path a photon will take between two events will be the one that involves the least time between the two events.

        On other things. A U of Washington physics researcher by the name of John Cramer has also written a paper that you may be interested in reading.

        Cramer J. G. (1986). "The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics." Reviews of Modern Physics 58, 647-688.

        and An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation anyway, Cramer's ideas seem to be inspired by your reference # 13 to the Wheeler/Feynman paper.

        In the next FQXi contest I hope to see a paper of one of your proposed experiments realized. Good luck in the contest.

        Jim Akerlund

          Patrick - thank you for your comment. There seems to be a great deal of interesting information on your 3D Universe site, so I will take a look at that after I have recovered from reviewing over 180 essays on this site.

          Kind regards, Paul

          Walter, thank you very much for your kind comments. Julian Barbour is one of the key influencers in my work.

          We appear to agree strongly. I argued that Minkowski spacetime was superfluous at best and harmful at worst because it implies change can occur along the time axis independently of change on the spatial axes. Instead, I identified "subtime" with information transfer as a photon traverses the one-dimensional path from one atom to another, and is reversed in all ontological respects when the photon traverses back to the originating atom (can be generalized to any fermion/boson interaction).

          Quantum particles are deaf dumb and blind. They are "surprised" in a Shannon sense when new energy/information arrives (or particles bump into each other in the night). This corresponds to Bohr's intuition of quantum jumps: they appear instantaneous (like sudden change between flashes of a stroboscope). The classical time that we see (measure) is the vector sum of subtime in an entangled system (which grows to any size).

          It is important to realize (and this is a simplistic description) that there can still be "motion" in the sense of atoms moving around in space (the void?). They can still bump into each other, but there is no manifestation coordinates, in space or time that we can see or measure. It is only when we interact with something (via photons) that our quantum states mix and we "share" information with what we are measuring. Information accumulates only when the scaffolding of entanglement binds matter together. The accumulation of this information up the scales from the microscopic to the macroscopic leads to what we as humans perceive as time.

          I concur that space-time is an abstract mathematical fiction. The recent paper by Fromholz, Poisson and Will [1] (provided to me by Christian Corda) essentially argues your case for a background-free concept of space-time in their recognition that a Schwarzschild geometry can be described in infinitely many coordinate systems.

          Please send me the references to the two recent papers you referred to regarding momentum entanglement, I would be delighted to read them and continue our conversation.

          As I mentioned in an earlier post, the reason this essay is completely devoid of mathematical formalism is because I wanted to begin with a describable phenomenon, and not with an argument over deficiencies in current formalisms. I plan to follow up this paper with a fully mathematical description, but I wanted people to read and understand this description first in order to pave the way to a new understanding.

          The mathematics to describe subtime is very straightforward, almost any college graduate who understands the Euler equation and vector algebra can derive it as a homework exercise. How it evolves up the chain to the macroscopic world however, is a more challenging mathematical task, which might require a different form of mathematics [2].

          In my view, before adding further "weight" to the mathematical frame we view nature through, it would be better to step back and explore the unexamined beliefs in the hidden assumptions behind current mathematical formalisms, and our inadequate interpretations of their meaning that is hindering our understanding of nature.

          Kind regards, Paul

          [1] Fromholz, Pierre, Eric Poisson, and Clifford M. Will. The Schwarzschild Metric: It's the Coordinates, Stupid! ArXiv e-print, August 1, 2013. http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.0394.

          [2] P. Borrill, L. Tesfatsion. "Agent-Based Modeling: The Right Mathematics for the Social Sciences?" http://www.econ.iastate.edu/research/working-papers/p11674

          Kevin - thank you for your kind remarks.

          I focused on photons and atoms only to get the idea across. The principle (a reversible vector of combined time/information) should be generalizable to any boson/fermion interaction. Since photons are the fastest things we know of in the universe, they set the maximum rate of evolution that we see in our classical world.

          I'm not at all sure how gravity comes into the picture. Gravitons (and gravity waves) are predicted by Einstein's General Theory, but they have not yet been observed. It might be more suitable to call it something like "influence" until we have a better handle on it. There are many others on this site who are far more qualified than I am to discuss this.

          What it means for "someone to be looking" was a paraphrase of Einstein's remark to Abraham Pais when Einstein asked him whether he really believed that the moon exists only when he looked at it. Each photon reversal is a reversal of time also (remember this is the unique subtime between bipartite systems, there is no universal background of time).

          Let me know if you have any further questions after you have had a closer look at the paper.

          Kind regards, Paul

          Michael - thank you for your comment. I have reviewed and rated all 180 essays on this contest. I did not have time to leave detailed comments on all of them.

          Kind regards, Paul

          Brian - thank you for your kind comments. After working in the dark depths of concurrency issues in computer science for most of my life, it seemed obvious to me that nature could just as easily "multiplex" its multiple universes on the same physical "hardware" of entangled matter in one universe.

          Thank you for your hopes for a good review. I plan to publish the essay formally.

          Kind regards, Paul

          Dear Angel Garces Doz - thank you for your comments. You clearly understand the implications of my subtime postulate: "The photon is the carrier of time, and the Universe is a network automaton".

          I found your essay interesting, and set it on the special pile to be read again in depth. Although I did have a hard time wrapping my head around "imaginary mass states" and "vibrations in the fabric of space-time, at speeds exceeding that of light".

          I do not subscribe to the idea of "information content independent of the observer". I prefer the view that observers are part of the same network, as described in the excellent essay by Kevin Knuth in this contest.

          My view is that causality is symmetric. There is no privileged role or direction for the observer-observee relationship. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Just as effects must have causes for them to exist, causes must also have effects for them to exist. Measurements of information will thus be different (and opposite in sign) for each observer from their vantage point.

          Kind regards, Paul

          Georg - thank you for your comment. I have reviewed and rated all 180 essays in this contest.

          Kind regards, Paul

          Jim - you are welcome. I reviewed and rated all 180+ essays in this contest.

          Yes this idea is out of the box; this is why I described it as absurd. I spent years trying to find a hole in my argument, and decided it would be easier to publish it and get shot down in flames if I am wrong.

          Subtime is the vector of energy/information that travels with the photon. I describe entanglement as the constant passing back and forth of this energy/information, resulting in no net change for an even number of traversals, and a net change of 1 being indiscernible from n+1 traversals.

          This is "dark" because this photon energy/information is "trapped" until something else (a 3rd party) breaks entanglement by making a measurement on one of the atoms taking energy out of the system.

          All photons travel at the speed of light, whether or not they are entangled. The difficulty lies in our ability to measure time intervals against a background of time, because such a background does not exist, and therefore cannot be measured. As far as results of measurements are concerned, the following paragraph from my essay pretty much sums up why we appear to see evidence of superluminal propagation in the experimental record:

          Since time does not move forward until the arrival of a photon, entanglement can occur over arbitrarily large distances. There is no limit. The only constraint is in our imagination: it is difficult for us to imagine that as humans at the macroscopic scale, that we are living like the flashes of the quantum stroboscope are smoothly joined together. They are not. there are brief flashes of reality during decoherence events with long periods of darkness in between.

          Kind regards, Paul

          Janko - thank you for your comment.

          Occam's razor is the most important principle I live by. It seems to me that subtime is far simpler than any other interpretation so far, so I don't understand your comment. Maybe you mean "for Occam" instead of "against" ?

          If anything, subtime is too simple, simplistic even. However, I wanted to get the basic idea on the table for debate first before discussing "optimizations".

          Time is indeed symmetric inside coherent (bipartite) entanglements.

          Thank you for the complimentary comment on my editing. I am not at a University, I do not get any form of compensation for this work. I have only myself as an editor, although my assistant has been know to find mistakes in my spelling and grammar.

          I look forward to more comments when you have read it again.

          Kind regards, Paul

          Jim - thank you for your message. I followed the instructions on the help page. However, after a fair number of attempts, I was unable to create a link that worked properly when I clicked on it. This why I revered to text url's in my postings.

          I didn't have time to go into this any further, so I reported the problem to the fqxi administrators. I am waiting for them to get back to me and point out what I was doing wrong.

          Kind regards, Paul

          Ralph - thank you for your comment. I tried to write the paper in a style that could be accessible to those who are not professional physicists. I am interested in comments from everyone. You don't have to be a specialist in the field in order to have interesting questions.

          Kind regards, Paul

          Jonathan - you are welcome. Thank you.

          Kind regards, Paul

          Amos - thank you for your kind comments. I'm glad you found the idea divinely intriguing.

          There are deep issues in the fundamentals of physics regarding what a clock really is. Even Einstein's photon clock considered time only within the boundaries of the clock. The concept of subtime exists only along the photon path between the atoms, not in the empty space beyond both ends. The rate of the ticks is arbitrary, depending only on the distance we choose between the atoms. Of course, nature may choose its own minimum distances according to the Pauli principle, which is what makes an atomic clock such an interesting device.

          To answer your question: the amount of subtime (ts) oscillates in sympathy with the bouncing back and forth of photons. Classical time (Tc) appears the same (frozen) to an outside observer. This is indistinguishable from being "dark", i.e., not observable. In this interpretation of entanglement, photons do interact with the screen, but instead of being absorbed (detected) they are reflected back to the source an arbitrary number of times.

          I also have a suspicion that this is what Einstein was thinking. However, he was waylaid by Minkowski who insisted that time is built into the fabric of space in his famous 4D-spacetime interpretation of SR. I think this was a huge error.

          Kind regards, Paul

          Best of luck in the finals Paul.

          I'm not sure if my rating was counted, so near the final bell, but you made it into the finals either way.

          Have Fun!

          Jonathan

          Jim - thank you for your kind comments and wishes for good luck. I read Cramer's original 1986 paper a long time ago. The overview you provided in the above link is a great. Thank you.

          Cramer's Transactional Interpretation (TI) uses both a retarded and an advanced wave together as an outgoing "offer wave", and then another (180 phase shifted) retarded plus advanced wave as a "confirmation wave". Cramer's concept of an interaction is a "transaction" a one-off completion of a "contract" between an emitter and absorber which localizes only one of a "pair" of conjugate variables from the offer wave. The offer wave and confirmation wave are sequentially ordered on a classic background of time (Tc). Cramer talks about past and future and issues of "retrocausality": committing essentially the same "background of time" fallacy discussed above with respect to Feynman and Penrose.

          Cramer stresses the point that the interpretation of a mathematical formalism cannot be tested experimentally and must be judged on other grounds. TI does not therefore have any experimentally verifiable distinctions to other interpretations. Subtime, on the other hand, does have distinctions that can be tested experimentally.

          The subtime interpretation (SI) identifies forward and backward photons (not waves) as "time incrementing" and "time decrementing" tokens of information depending on the perspective of the sender or receiver. Unlike Cramer's interpretation, there is no external background of time on which to express these events in sequential order. Retrocausality is a non-issue for SI because it fully incorporates the reversal of time in bipartite interactions. This is why we can account for violations in Bell inequalities (in the "time averaged" experimental record) without sacrificing locality.

          In SI the wave nature of a photon is expressed through the helicity of its traversal (clockwise when viewed from the sender, anticlockwise when viewed from the receiver). These helicities are reversed as the roles of sender and receiver are perpetually reversed in the hot potato of entanglement.

          In a nutshell: the photon travels one way, then travels back, removing all evidence that it ever traveled there in the first place. The wave nature is expressed in the helical path of the photon (Poynting's rotating shaft) without having to assume a "wave function" that pervades all of space.

          Subtime entanglement conserves energy and information in a perpetually alternating "hot potato" protocol. This manifests as an indefinitely "frozen moment" in classical time (Tc). The reality that we assume and perceive in Tc is really a quantum stroboscope: brief flashes of reality with long periods of darkness in between.

          Kind regards, Paul