An Insight into Information, Entanglement and Time by Paul L. Borrill

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

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.

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

Hi Paul,

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 Paul, 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, votes are vanishing again.

Dear Paul ,

As I promised in my Essay page I have read your interesting Essay. Here are my comments/questions.

1) Concerning your statements that "reversible computation occurs within an entangled system. Only when the entangled system decoheres into the environment of other entangled systems (through the exchange of photons) does time emerge as progressively irreversible, providing persistent evolution of information at the macroscopic scale", dont' you think that we could have information loss during the passage from reversibility to irreversibility?

2) I think that your "principle of retroactive non-discernability" could have some implication also in the issue of my Essay, i.e. the black hole information loss paradox.

3) Concerning Information and Entanglement I would like to bring to your attention another important behavior: in general the term entanglement means that the quantum state of a quantum system composed by two (or more) subsystems depends on the quantum state of each subsystem even if they are spatially separated. When one sums up the information in the two subsystems the result will be less than the information in the original system.The apparent information loss results hidden inside correlations between the subsystems. This should have some implication also for my comment 1).

4) A recent paper by Pierre Fromholz, Eric Poisson and Clifford M. Will correctly stresses that Einstein's general relativity is built based on the principle of general covariance. This basic principle implies that coordinates are seen like simply labels of space-time events. Thus, one can assign coordinates completely arbitrarily. Therefore, the only quantities that have physical meaning, i.e. the measurables one, are those that are invariant under coordinate transformations. One such invariant is the number of ticks on an atomic clock giving the proper time between two events. Do you think that your idea of "background-free conceptualization of time" could be connected with such a proper time?

In any case, I find your Essay very interesting and also bite provocative. I had fun in reading it. Then, I will give you a high rate.

Cheers,

Ch.

Hi Paul,

Thank you for your very nice comments on my site.

I think that your concept of "subtime" is what I call "Universe time" and your "classic time" is what I call "world time". If you read the "coherent spacetime continuum" paragraph of my 3D Universe Theory, you will see what I mean.

I look forward to some more feedback from you once you've read my theory.

All the best.

Cheers,

Patrick

Paul,

It occurred to me that, "... the quantum stroboscope: 'brief flashes of reality with long periods of darkness in between' ..." like Kepler's orbits and time conservation, also has classical analogs:

1. Per Bak's theory of self organized criticality*, the "avalanche model" which describes long periods of stasis in a system, punctuated by periods of rapid change. (Bak's mathematical model supports Gould's and Eldredge's punctuated equilibrium description of biological evolution.)

2. Also, in complex systems science, Braha and Bar-Yam** showed that in communication networks, activity observed at short time intervals reveals often radical change in hub to node activity, while the system at comparatively longer time scales shows hardly any change at all.

All best,

Tom

* Bak, P. How Nature Works

** Braha, D. & Bar-Yam, Y. [2006]. "From Centrality to Temporary Fame: Dynamic Centrality in Complex Networks." Complexity vol 12, no 2, pp 59-63.

Dear Paul,

thank you for this impressive essay.

I fully agree with your background-free conceptualization of time. Barbour did something similar on a classical level in deriving time from celestial motion. I would even go a step further pleading for a background free concept of space-time. In my view space-time is only an abstract mathematical parameter space that is used to represent relations between objects. Therefore, I cannot see any physical reason to consider space-time as an independent entity.

You can certainly base time on the exchange of photons between two atoms. (Atomic clocks use the exchange of photons between two energy levels of an atom.) For me it is interesting that you relate this exchange to entanglement, which, if I understand correctly, is your description of interaction. In two recent papers of mine I have described the electromagnetic and gravitational interactions as a consequence of momentum entanglement, which in turn is a consequence of irreducibility of the state space of isolated systems. So we obviously share a similar view.

I hope, in pursuing your concept, you will be able to cast your ideas into a mathematical form. This will help to make your ideas more understandable for the physical community.

Good luck and kind regards,

Walter

Dear Paul

Thank you for a very interesting and well-written essay.

I like your idea of using photons to generate a background-free concept of time. I myself have something similar in my essay and papers, expect given the fact that gravity can deflect photons (along with the fact that they have an inherent frequency and its not clear why that particular mediator should be singled out aside from the fact that it is massless), I have reasoned that it is something else altogether. I simply call the effect influence, and work to show that one can indeed develop an emergent spacetime from this as well as various particle properties.

I am a little fuzzy on subtime, since I don't really know what it means for someone to be looking. I would imagine that each photon reversal would result in an event that basically constitutes a change in time, which certainly affects the entangled particles. I will have to give the paper a closer look since I may have missed something.

Thank you again for an excellent essay with different ideas.

I gave you a high score, but the average at this resolution didn't change.

Hello,

You just posted a supportive comment on my essay, thank you very much!

I was wondering if you wouldn't mind rating my essay, as I think one or two big ratings will hopefully allow my essay to reach the finals like yours.

Thanks

http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1616

Cheers Paul,

I liked the idea. Yes entangled photons make more sense this way. Great thinking!

Antony