It from Bit from It from Bit... Nature and Nonlinear Logic by William C. McHarris

Dear Dr. Harris,

I have read with genuine pleasure your essay and your suggestion that deterministic chaos can inject into quantum theory essential features of nonlinear dynamics which can help understand the problems of quantum mechanics. Could you kindly guide me to the mathematical literature of your work on this subject, vs a vis a vis the application of chaos to quantum theory, with the intent to explaining say the quantum measurement problem, and the proof of the Born probability rule. I work on stochastic nonlinear quantum mechanics, and have a background in classical chaotic dynamics, but I had not thought of putting the two together - hence your advice in this regard would be of definite interest to me.

As you would know, extensive work on stochastic nonlinear quantum theory [ GRW / Spontaneous Localization] has been done over the last three decades or so, to explain the quantum classical transition, the collapse of the wave-function during a quantum measurement, and the Born rule. I am a little puzzled why you do not make mention of it, although its essence - random determinism, perhaps bears some semblance to deterministic chaos. Admittedly, theories such as GRW are phenomenological in nature, but given so, I think they are quite successful at what they set out to do, and are being subjected to stringent experiments, and are also perhaps relics of underlying fundamental theories such as Adler's Trace Dynamics [To beat my open trumpet, may I advertise here my recent review article with my colleagues on this subject, published in Reviews of Modern Physics 85 (2013) 471, available also at http://arXiv.org/abs/arXiv:1204.4325]

I would be seriously interested in application of nonlinear chaotic dynamics to quantum foundations, and will be grateful to hear from you.

Best regards,

Tejinder

Dear Dr McHarris,

I commend you on your excellent work and essay, cutting straight through confusion to bring unity and clarity to and from chaos.

I particularly agree; "Mathematics can state things with certainty; physics cannot."

I find this conclusion in my essay from a coherent episto/ontological 'discrete field' model resolving nonlinear optical effects but the idea has been subject to criticism. I also propose that the Law of the Excluded Middle, and assumption A = A do not apply in nature, leading to a resolution of the EPR paradox consistent with Godel's n-valued 'fuzzy logic'. I would greatly appreciate your views and advice on those propositions. The Intelligent Bit

I also particularly agree and support your important comments;

"nonergodic behavior can easily ape "action at a distance."

"strongly nonlinear effects at the heart of quantum mechanics."

"Einstein and Bohr both could have been correct in their debates."

"nature is far more intricate and beautiful than we could imagine."

"physicists consider (nonlinear dynamics and chaos) to lie in an obscure corner of science."

"it is impossible... to determine a set of initial conditions with... enough precision... to produce a predetermined final state."

I believe your essay stands head and shoulders above most, and that the work is of great import. I don't however agree that 'statistical predictions' are the correct solution, but do find that using the proposition A~A, implying layered noncommutativity, should allow closer mathematical approximations and a logic freed of paradox. Again I'd greatly value you view. The mathematics would need development.

Congratulations on your essay, which I hope will become a landmark.

Peter

Dear William,

I would be curious about the chaos-based mechanism leading to violations of Bell inequalities. Can you report it in brief? The fact that there are diffraction patterns is irrelevant. What is relevant is the existence of instantaneous correlations, versus a choice of the observable that is measured locally. What plays the role of the direction of the spin measurements? Sorry, but my opinion is that chaos plays the role of the little monster explaining everything. We need to understand mechanisms, not to put them under the carpet of chaos.

My best regards

Mauro

Dear Professor McHarris,

Beautifully illustrated and well written essay. A pleasure to read. It does indeed seem odd if chaos theory answers so much elsewhere in nature to not apply to the quantum world.

The infinite regression section I particularly enjoyed, as cosmogony is a favourite area of research for me.

Time permitting, I'd be honoured if you could take a look at my essay based around Fibonacci sequence and entropy.

Best wishes,

Antony

Dear McHarris,

For me your essay is near delicious.

My question: when we think of any initial condition in chaos theory as rather the "phase-space" (what I've called "the observer" and maths/science calls the "invariance" or "conservation law") is it then likely that it is this "phase-space" that constitutes the "none" in non-linear dynamics (i.e. the Markov property)?

Implication is that a "feedback" (think, a "sensory modality" or "irritability" or "measurement") is actually a phase space and vice versa. This eliminates in your own words "part of the problem of determining the border between observer and observed." (in the sense now of Huygens' Principle).

That is,the de facto "observer" determines uniquely the de facto observables or predictability/determinism?

I always end by asking the pro like you are to please read my essay too: What a Wavefunction is, not elegant perhaps but will prove very useful insight. A promise!

All the best,

Chidi

Dear Prof. McHarris,

Perhaps, you are interested in my essay as it deals with biology too along with physics and mathematics. Just as you have thought of applying nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory to solve problems in physics, so do I think of applying them in the field of biology to solve the problem of the evolution of Life.

I have down loaded your essay and soon post my comments on it. Meanwhile, please, go through my essay and post your comments.

Regards and good luck in the contest.

Sreenath BN.

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1827

Mauro,

I hope Bill will engage, but I've just found a more expansive Bell proof consistent with the one in my essay, in his excellent 2011 J. Phys. Conf. paper.

Quantum paradoxes explained.

This doesn't offer the physical analogy as my essay (also see my post to Matt Leifer) but does extend Sisskind's 3 disc analogy. Bill even also gives the Cardano sample space analogy!

Put very simply; we can find more observables if we look 'between the lines' (for the elipto-helical 'Intelligent Bit' freedoms). So we're not limited to asking red?/green? but can also ask 'how bright' of each.

I did get the impression you missed that in my essay. Perhaps not all better explanations must come from 'little monsters'.?

Best wishes

Peter

Dear Prof. McHarris,

Your essay presents some very interesting points. With respect to explaining the quantum from classical chaos, Chapter 16 from Ian Stewart's Does God Play Dice? The New Mathematics of Chaos makes a similar point. Also, I was impressed by your struggle to work with two different communities of scientists, apparently little interested into each other's field. In particular, I can imagine you encountered many quantum skeptics, people who don't believe classical mechanics, being it chaotic, can explain the quantum, due to results like EPR, Kochen-Specker, delayed choice. I am among these, and like Prof. D'Ariano, I would be very interested to see a chaos-based mechanism leading to violations of Bell inequalities. On the other hand, classical chaos is still full of surprises, so who knows? I find myself thinking that some strange phenomena usually attributed to classical chaos, are in fact due to global consistency. But at this time I find this very unlikely, so I don't entertain such thoughts.

At first sight, it may seem that quantum mechanics can't provide support for nonlinear chaos, but this is not quite so. And I am not thinking here at the position defended so well by Prof. Tejinder Singh above and in his essay. I am thinking that even the linear quantum mechanics doesn't contradict nonlinearity at the classical level. The reason is the following: although most classical equations are nonlinear, after quantization, we get linear equations. Why? Because quantum linearity happens in a much larger space, an infinite dimensional Hilbert space. It is known that nonlinear equations can be linearized, i.e., expressed as linear equations of higher order, but in quantum mechanics, something even better happens. Each nonlinear degree of freedom is replaced by an infinite number of linear degrees of freedom. Nonlinearity remains hidden in the Hamiltonian.

Could you please provide some links to your papers, and other papers showing the analogies between quantum mechanics and chaotic phenomena mentioned in your essay?

Best regards,

Cristi Stoica

Dear William (if I may),

You have written an intriguing and engaging essay, and I can only agree with your main point that one should keep the possibility in the back of one's mind that nonlinear dynamics might explain some aspects of quantum mechanics that are currently not so clear.

Even so, there is an elementary point about which I am not sure, and I would appreciate if you could clarify. Suppose that nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory is behind the interference pattern one observes in the double split experiment with a beam of particles. Shouldn't the sensitive dependence on initial conditions imply that under some initial conditions the there will be noticeable variations in the interference pattern from one experiment to another in which the set up is almost but not quite identical?

I can understand that in the case of a single-particle beam, one might ascribe the inability to predict where each individual particle lands on the screen to such sensitive dependence. My question is about whether it is not possible that under some initial conditions the overall pattern is changed, somewhat analogous to the chaotic structures you presented in which order presents itself within disorder. I can't see why this would not be possible, and if that is correct, then it seems to me that this could be used to test the idea. But I'm not sure about this, so I hope you can provide an answer.

I wish you all the best on your endeavor,

Armin

Dear Prof. McHarris,

I enjoyed your essay and thank you for some interesting new ideas and enabling me to recall others. My Ph.D. focused on nonlinear dynamics in the mid-1990s but I veered into neuroscience, machine learning, astrophysics and now theory. So its been a while since I have thought in these terms.

I wish that you had provided a little more insight into how you think nonlinear dynamics is coming into QM. Perhaps you can point me to some of your key papers (or I could of course just go dig them up).

In our symmetry-based derivations of the Feynman rules

(Goyal P., Knuth K.H., Skilling J. 2010. Origin of complex quantum amplitudes and Feynman's rules, Phys. Rev. A 81, 022109. arXiv:0907.0909v3 [quant-ph].)

we find that associativity of combining measurement sequences in parallel results in additivity. So I am left wondering where nonlinearity would come in. With such a basic symmetry forcing linearity, it is hard to imagine room for nonlinearity. Though as Cristi Stoica points out in his comments above, the classical equations can still be nonlinear, and nonlinear equations can often be broken into linear ones in sufficiently high dimensions.

Despite this, your essay reminded me of work by Pedrag Cvitanovic where he used (classical) periodic orbit theory to derive the energy levels of the Helium atom. I have not kept up with this work, so I do not know where it has led. But your essay made me remember this. At the time, I felt it was quite impressive, and should have shaken the quantum foundations more than it has seemed to.

I also remember coding fractal generating programs based on Barnsley's book Fractals Everywhere. It was always interesting to me that you could think of these processes in two ways: one by an deterministic iterative process and second by a random iterative process. Watching fractal ferns appear on my Amiga computer dot by dot reminded me of electrons appearing on a screen after passing through a slit apparatus. I always wondered whether some nonlinear or iterative process could be behind such confounding behavior.

And now you have sparked a thought for which I thank you and the FQXi people for setting up this essay contest. In my essay, I discuss a new way to think about electron behavior in terms of interactions. Perhaps I should take some time to consider an electron "moving" through two slits by influencing atoms along the walls of the barrier. Could it be that these simple patterns of influence lead to rules guided by the boundary conditions to give rise to the diffraction pattern electron by electron. I have considered this before, and worked for a short while to see what I could work out. But now I am once again emboldened by the fact that I now recall the fractal ferns coming into focus. Perhaps with this perspective, I can make some headway.

Thank you again

Kevin

Dear Prof. Harris,

Thank you for a very lucid explanation of how correlations arise in non-linear systems.

You mentioned how non-linear dynamics in QM leads to a smoother transition between observer and observed. This is also reflected in quantum information theory. The knowledge of the observer (classical spacetime) arises reflexively from iterative feedback and erasure of quantum entanglement information. (See my essay "A Complex Conjugate Bit and It".)

Best wishes,

Richard Shand

Mauro,

No 'changing meanings'. Theorems are indeed theorems, but they're all included in the greater 'theorem' that all science is provisional and no 'absolute' proof of anything exists. Bell uses assumptions just as all theorems do. Even the most solid foundational 'Laws' of Physics can be violated. Look what happens to Snell's Law at kinetic reverse refraction - the nonlinear 'Fraunhofer refraction' appears instead!

The measurements are detector angles and 'positions' along the x axis of a cosine curve distribution between 0 an 180 degrees. Consider my torii as entangled particles translating along the polar axis with opposite spins. They meet detectors as 'planes' A and B tilted at varying angles (or tilting donuts if you prefer!). 'Detection' is of the interaction point at A and B, which is say in the top half ('up') or bottom half ('down').

We now have another 'dimension' that Bell did not assume existed. We can easily show that when A and B are parallel the results are opposite, and when anti parallel the results are identical. But half way between, when A or B are vertical the donuts hit face on so the result up/down is at maximum uncertainty! But over many samples it is of course ~50%.

Now the killer; When intersecting at 90 degrees, tilting the detector say 5 degrees will have virtually no effect on the 'position', but when face to face, a 5 degree tilt angle has a major positional effect! So 30 and 60 degrees give results of 75% and 25%. This is Malus' Law in action, and reproduces the predictions of SR at EACH detector (just as von Neumann proposed) as well as when correlated between the two.

All this is as published in my essay and expanded in the Blog. Aspect did find this "orbital asymmetry", but with no theory to fit it to he discarded that particular ~99.9% of his data! (only discussed in his follow up French paper).

This is very consistent with Prof McHarris's findings and I believe Gordon Watson's essay, with similarities with Ed Klingman's. I'll re-post this on your blog so you don't loose it. Do ask any questions on mine.

Best wishes

Peter

(I still hope the author will 'report in').

Dear Sir,

As the contest in Wheeler's honor draws to a close, leaving for the moment considerations of rating and prize money, and knowing we cannot all agree on whether 'it' comes from 'bit' or otherwise or even what 'it' and 'bit' mean, and as we may not be able to read all essays, though we should try, I pose the following 4 simple questions and will rate you accordingly before July 31 when I will be revisiting your blog.

"If you wake up one morning and dip your hand in your pocket and 'detect' a million dollars, then on your way back from work, you dip your hand again and find that there is nothing there...

1) Have you 'elicited' an information in the latter case?

2) If you did not 'participate' by putting your 'detector' hand in your pocket, can you 'elicit' information?

3) If the information is provided by the presence of the crisp notes ('its') you found in your pocket, can the absence of the notes, being an 'immaterial source' convey information?

Finally, leaving for the moment what the terms mean and whether or not they can be discretely expressed in the way spin information is discretely expressed, e.g. by electrons

4) Can the existence/non-existence of an 'it' be a binary choice, representable by 0 and 1?"

Answers can be in binary form for brevity, i.e. YES = 1, NO = 0, e.g. 0-1-0-1.

Best regards,

Akinbo

Dear Prof. McHarris,

I inspired a bit through your essay and it is my previlage to have a humble comment in support of you. What you wrote: "It from Bit or Bit from It?" is a bit like the problem of chicken and egg ..." in your last sentences,I think, I might have an answer in my submission. Where I expressed that "chicken" and "egg" are inseparable and in some scale of observations are nothing but mirror images to each others with the help of some new fundamental constants in the quantized nature.

If you please manage to have a time to read my essay and make a comment and if possible can rate on it I will be obligated very much.

With regards

Dipak Kumar Bhunia

Dear William. Hello, and apologies if this does not apply to you. I have read and rated your essay and about 50 others. If you have not read, or did not rate my essay The Cloud of Unknowing please consider doing so. With best wishes.

Vladimir

Dear William. C. McHarris:

I am an old physician, and I don't know nothing of mathematics and almost nothing of physics, I read your essay and if you think I did not understand anything, you are right I did not, because I lack all the necessary knowledge to do it. What I learned was the kind of mind you possibly have, that could be the ideal to understand the value for physics of my essay. What I did result from a kind of mental accident, because I was not seriously searching. Physics, specially theoretically physicists are really needing at least for the last fifty years the experimental meaning of, as I use to say the so called "time". I think my essay can land real physics down to earth. The only thing I possibly understand of your essay is: When you say "non linear dynamics into quantum mechanics...does not lead us into" "the quagmire of assuming hidden variables" I refer to them in my essay

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