Edwin - thank you for your comment. I'm glad you liked my essay. Of course, any serious scientist should be downright skeptical at reading such an absurd idea! But there again, I wouldn't have published it if I could find something wrong with it. After more than a decade of having this in my head, and 5 years of intense Gedankens, I haven't been able to refute it, so I let it loose for people like you to find holes in it.

I'm pleased you raised the issue about a distant star emitting a photon. Such an idea was suggested, for instance, by Tetrode (1922) and also by Lewis (1926):

"An atom never emits light except to another atom, and. . . it is as absurd to think of light emitted by one atom regardless of the existence of a receiving atom as it would be to think of an atom absorbing light without the existence of light to be absorbed. I propose to eliminate the idea of mere emission of light and substitute the idea of transmission, or a process of exchange of energy between two definite atoms or molecules. (Lewis, 1926, p. 24)"

This was a central theme of the Wheeler and Feynman Absorber paper quoted in my essay.

The point is, free photons seek out "entanglement" with other atoms. Some find targets nearby, which is why we have condensed matter and the double slit experiment. Intermediate ones create rare reflections in planetary or stellar distances (don't forget entanglement swapping). Yet others fly off in the universe and go forever, perhaps exerting pressure on some distant galaxy to accelerate away from us. Where the boundary is is definitely a future mathematical exploration. Which is exactly what I would be doing if I were not running a company right now ...

I will definitely take a look at your essay.


Good luck in the contest.

Kind regards, Paul

LC - thank you very much for your thought provoking comment. I had hoped to gain the attention of those interested in quantum gravity (string or LQG). The lesson I would hope the string theorists would get is that a background assumption of time is a crutch they can do away with. The LQG folks already know this.

The idea I have proposed is very simple, simplistic even. My thoughts have gone beyond photon entanglement to considering its applicability to any bosonic particle. However, the resulting "massive asynchrony" under the hood is of the order of an Angstrom's worth of time interval for atoms, and many Angstroms for molecules. For the Nucleus, the answer would be a Fermi's worth of time interval ... It gets really interesting for gravitons.

If this first step is true, there is a lot more of this theory to be explored. I'm hoping someone will find a hole in my argument so I can get this out of my head and go back to my day job.

Good luck in the contest, I will be sure to read your paper.

Kind regards, Paul

Please see my response to this in the posting above. I have nothing further to add.

Kind regards, Paul

Amazigh - thank you for your comment. I have your essay printed and will be sure to rate it before the end of the contest.

Kind regards, Paul

John - thank you so much for the outstanding summary your posted here. You epitomized my views on many of the excellent essays on this site.

However, you may be mistaken in one aspect: I am not (currently) in the "It from Bit" camp. My current position is it is either "Bit from It" or they are both sides of the same coin, neither being more fundamental in their ontology than the other.

Good luck in the contest, and thank you again for leaving a comment on my page.

Kind regards, Paul

John - thank you for your comment.

Kind regards, Paul

Dear Paul,

Thank you for posting in my essay where I characterize "information" as the substance of fields, and consequently as a substantial element of nature.

I went through your essay and I rated it according to my first impressions: much appreciation for your interesting ideas and for the way you express them. I need more time to re-read it and will later formulate my in-depth comments.

Kind regards,

Antoine.

    Paul,

    While we differ on how we view entanglement somewhat, I found your paper excellently argued and thoughtful. Your concept of "subtime" has great appeal, and I will be pondering this for some time;l I believe you are onto something deep. Cheers and best of luck in this contest! I greatly appreciate your comments on my paper.

    Jennifer

      Antoine - you are welcome. I enjoyed reading your essay, and thank you for your comments. I will look forward to hearing more of your impressions when you have had chance to go through the paper in depth. Please make sure you download the corrected version (attached below).

      Kind regards, PaulAttachment #1: Borrill-TimeOne-V1.1a.pdf

      Jennifer - thank you for your kind words. Make sure you read my follow-on reply to your earlier comments (above) discussing Penrose's quanglement.

      I will look forward to further conversations after the contest closes.

      Kind regards, Paul

      Thank you, Paul.

      I said it badly -- what I meant to suggest, re the neutrino test, was that an average speed (velocity) of test particles if measured in one direction only tells us nothing about the instantaneous speed of a single body. As a classical analogy, Kepler's orbitals that sweep equal areas in equal times demand an acceleration curve that could not be measured as conservation of orbital angular momentum if the orbit were circular instead of elliptical -- a circular path of constant angle in curvilinear acceleration gives up no information on time conservation, because every point equidistant from the radius is in a state identical to every other, as if lying on a straight line.

      The attempt to linearly measure the speed of any particle without a 2-part average ("coming" and "going") therefore not only fails to conserve time, it fails the test of rational science. Suppose we measure an arbitrary number of neutrinos going and measure less than that number coming back -- (this is a thought experiment, of course, not possible to do) -- can we conclude that A minus B number of neutrinos broke the time barrier? Impossible. For if some neutrinos accelerated past others and out of "the orbit" of our speed-limited world, we couldn't have had any information of how fast the neutrinos were traveling when we first measured the speed.

      While this is a less technical explanation of the time = information argument than I (or you) am capable of giving, I think it adequately makes the point. One has about as much chance of falsifying special relativity, as falsifying the second law of thermodynamics.

      All best,

      Tom

      Dear Paul,

      I enjoyed reading your essay, which has some intriguing ideas, in particular that of subtime ("Subtime is what happens when we are not looking."). Quantum mechanics seems to have a self-protection mechanism, which forbids us to see how quantum things happen, when looking at them. This makes so many distinct interpretations to be undistinguishable, from experimental viewpoint. It is good when a new interpretation comes with the possibility of being falsified.

      Best regards,

      Cristi Stoica

        Christi - thank you for your kind words. Nature's self-protection mechanism has been extraordinarily resistant to penetration for the last 90 years.

        My theory is that our inability to penetrate nature is language constrained; preventing us seeing something truly simple, but completely non-intuitive to us. Lera Boroditsky (was at Stanford, now at San Deigo) has examined the different cognitive and language processes that different cultures use for thinking about space time metaphors. Personally, I'd like to see her examine the literature on quantum theory and tell us what she sees in our biases.

        If the subtime interpretation turns out to be even remotely true, it is easy to see how the instincts of other scientists can be subsumed. For example, Bohr's model reflects on the appearance of jumps during the flash of the quantum stroboscope. Everrett/Deutch's multiple worlds can now be seen as simply a multiplexing of the different universes "on the same hardware" (as I described in the essay). My next essay might be a table cross referencing all the interpretations and showing how they all relate to each other perspective.

        Thanks again for your comments. I would love to stay in touch.

        paul at borrill dot com

        Paul, this is a very ambitious attempt to unify various theoretical aspects as well as being daring in trying to "get around" various conventional tropes. I also like that you propose some empirical implications of your concepts, something that not enough essayists are doing here! In your Figure 4 I interpret that you are trying to expand Feynman et al's concept of "many paths" taken, in the "literal" sense of movement, to a sort of informational metaphor. This is much food for thought and can't be put into a little catch phrase, the latter being a popular but inferior goal of many thinkers.

          Neil - thank you for your comments. I didn't start out trying to be ambitious I just wanted to solve a thorny issue in computer science, and found I couldn't do that without taking a deeper look into the physics.

          Figure 4 is an attempt to depict subtime in a 2D diagram. Feynman diagrams represent space on one axis and classical time (Tc) on the other axis (this is how Feynman depicts a positron as an electron going back in time - which is not at all what subtime does). Figure 4 is space on both axes (imagine a 2-D view of a large molecule), with the colored "paths" going through the nodes; sometimes going directly, and sometimes echoing back and forth on the same path (a mini-entanglement). It's a bit crude, but I was trying to make it as simple as possible to understand.

          One way to depict subtime with Feynman diagrams might be to fold the paper to show the difference between 1 traversal and n+1 traversals. Pulling it apart like an accordion to show the difference between Tc and ts. But that wouldn't work for the general case, unless the reader was an expert in origami !

          This is nub of the issue: Feynman totally led the way with the path integral, and with the insights into reversibility that educated several generations of physicists, but so far I have not seen anything where he takes the next logical step, and considers a reversible path traversal that can be summed as a vector, compressing an arbitrary amount of subtime into a finite amount of classical time that we observe in our measurements in Tc

          I also discuss this issue of the background of time fallacy in the posting above with regard to Penrose's quanglement in response to Jennifer Nielsen's question (above).

          Kind regards, Paul

          Neil - thank you for your comments. I didn't start out trying to be ambitious I just wanted to solve a thorny issue in computer science, and found I couldn't do that without taking a deeper look into the physics.

          Figure 4 is an attempt to depict subtime in a 2D diagram. Feynman diagrams represent space on one axis and classical time (Tc) on the other axis (this is how Feynman depicts a positron as an electron going back in time - which is not at all what subtime does). Figure 4 is space on both axes (imagine a 2-D view of a large molecule), with the colored "paths" going through the nodes; sometimes going directly, and sometimes echoing back and forth on the same path (a mini-entanglement). It's a bit crude, but I was trying to make it as simple as possible to understand.

          One way to depict subtime with Feynman diagrams might be to fold the paper to show the difference between 1 traversal and n+1 traversals. Pulling it apart like an accordion to show the difference between Tc and ts. But that wouldn't work for the general case, unless the reader was an expert in origami !

          This is nub of the issue: Feynman totally led the way with the path integral, and with the insights into reversibility that educated several generations of physicists, but so far I have not seen anything where he takes the next logical step, and considers a reversible path traversal that can be summed as a vector, compressing an arbitrary amount of subtime into a finite amount of classical time that we observe in our measurements in Tc

          I also discuss this issue of the background of time fallacy in the posting above with regard to Penrose's quanglement in response to Jennifer Nielsen's question (above).

          Kind regards, Paul

          Hi, Paul,

          Your essay was excellent (and I gave it top rating). Hawking also proposed adding a second time axis, but he did not, to my knowledge, follow this up. It deserves to be. In your first footnote you state that you present the theory without much formalism, because the existing formalism does not allow it. I would say that the mathematics to do so exists; what runs contrary to it is simply the lack of this extra time axis as you propose it in existing physical theories (to my knowledge; more research would be necessary to check this). In an answer to a comment you write a more valid reason for presenting the theory without much formalism, saying that you wished to get the intuitive idea across. Added to that is that the essay was restricted in length, and was meant for the general reader. It would have taken a much longer essay to include the necessary mathematics. But, I repeat, the mathematical formalism which could serve as a framework for a development of the theory exists. Indeed, before the theory could proceed further, it would need to be formalized and undergo the usual tests: (a) internal (mathematical) consistency, (b) falsifiability, (c) external (testing against data and compatibility with theory deemed indispensible) consistency,(d) predictive power, (e) comparison with other theories that match it (a)-(d) via Okham's razor and elegance. But you have presented the first step, and I would encourage you to formalize it and launch it on its journey of these tests.

          I would have enjoyed discussing further points, but the contest is drawing to a close, and I will not have time to do so before the deadline. So it just remains for me to say: Bravo!, and hope that the judges recognize the merits in your essay, but more so, for the academic community, that you extend this essay and publish elsewhere. If you do, I would appreciate the appropriate source (preferably via an Internet link). If you would be so kind to do that, my email is reidnomad@gmail.com.(since the possibility of communicating via this forum will, as I understand it, expire in a few hours).

          Best regards, David

            Hi David,

            Your essay is very insightful, creative, and all around superb (and I rated it very highly). I really like how you brought out the concept of subtime. I've thought about this too, and I especially like how you utilized subtime to explain entanglement. Both our essays navigate very similar topics (as your question on my page suggest) and it's awesome how our approaches complement one another. (For example, we both look at entanglement analysis as an alternative to Everett's 'parallel universes.') And David, I very much appreciate your suggestions for experiments. It's essential to bring out real experimental evidence, and to suggest ways of testing our ideas further (and thus providing falsifiability), and you did that. And that's a very interesting twist on: "What would we see if we varied the distance between the source and detector in units of wavelength of the quantum particle in a Bell experiment?" which I'm eager to see performed. I want to think more about your question from my page, but briefly - I think we both start with different concepts involving entanglement and end up converging on a similar idea regarding what you would call dark photons. It's fantastic how that happened, and thank you. This is a great essay project. I look forward to seeing more of your ideas and work,

            Sincerely,

            Steve Sax

              Hi Paul,

              Thanks for a most interesting way to conceptualize QM. I won't call it absurd, as to me (a software architect) it seems quite natural! Your essay was a delight to read (and that's saying something... I have read over 80 of them now.).

              You conclude:

              > The photon is the carrier of time, and the Universe is a network automaton...

              You might find your concept compatible with the picture in my essay Software Cosmos, which outlines the design of a software system to simulate the cosmos. I also describe and carry out a test to see if we curently reside in such a virtual world.

              I think we could run my design on your virtual hardware... what do you think?

              Hugh

                Sorry, I meant to say "Paul" I accidentally addressed this comment to the wrong name "David". Silly mistake on my part! I'm going to email FQXI to correct for it. So to get it right - superb job Paul!

                (Also, no offense to any Davids on this site :) )