Dear William,

Excellent and well written essay! I found your statement, "...beauty in equations does not make a theory true - or relevant. Only experimental investigation - and the ability of a theory to be falsifiable can do that" to be reflective of the findings of a 12 year experiment I have recently concluded. Although you have a different approach to the topic than I do, I found your essay to be insightful and intuitive and most worthy of merit.

I could go on and on... perhaps another time.

Best wishes,

Manuel

    Dear Manuel,

    Thanks for your kind words. I really enjoyed your essay, as well, and I rated it highly. Since time is short and the server seems to have slowed down to a crawl, I'll respond more fully later.

    Cheers,

    Bill

    Dear George,

    Thanks for your comments. I was late is getting started with my answers and have simply become overwhelmed. I did read your essay and rated it very highly. I'll respond more fully to your above comments in a day or two.

    Best wishes,

    Bill

    Dear Margriet,

    THank you very much for your lovely comments. I truly appreciate them. And I must say your are very astute and have a lot of common sense -- it gives a breath of life to this contest.

    I read your lovely essay, and I agree with your views. (I also rated it highly.) As you gleaned from my essay, I am strongly in favor of an ontological, realistic view of Nature -- I come down strongly on the side of Einstein in his debates with Bohr. And if quantum mechanics were to contain significant nonlinearities, it could well do away with the distinction between it and classical mechanics, which (almost!) all of us agree is ontological. Because time is short and the FQXi server seems to be slowing down, I'll reserve further comments both your your letter and to your essay until things have quieted down. (I think we can still make comments after the voting has ended.)

    If by Antipodean you mean Australian, I spent a marvelous month there last fall, traveling to Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Port Douglas for the solar eclipse. A marvelous, beautiful -- and friendly -- country!

    Best wishes,

    Bill

    Dear William,

    I have now finished reviewing all 180 essays for the contest and appreciate your contribution to this competition.

    I have been thoroughly impressed at the breadth, depth and quality of the ideas represented in this contest. In true academic spirit, if you have not yet reviewed my essay, I invite you to do so and leave your comments.

    You can find the latest version of my essay here:

    http://fqxi.org/data/forum-attachments/Borrill-TimeOne-V1.1a.pdf

    (sorry if the fqxi web site splits this url up, I haven't figured out a way to not make it do that).

    May the best essays win!

    Kind regards,

    Paul Borrill

    paul at borrill dot com

    6 days later

    I received the following e-mail message from Dr. Klingman on 8 August:

    *Dear Bill McHarris,

    *I made the mistake of waiting until I had read your other papers before commenting on your essay. This put me near the end of the comments on your page. After you returned and began diligently answering each comment, I watched daily for you to reach mine. But we ran out of time.

    *I am therefore using email to say that I very much enjoyed your essay and found it stimulating. I hope you are correct in your suppositions. I also believe that you will find my own essay very interesting. I have recently developed a technique for non-linearizing Einsteins' linearized (weak field) equations. While this may sound nuts, it actually does two things: It makes it possible to actually solve the equations, and it allows one to use the analogy with Maxwell's equations in intuitive fashion (which intuition simply does not exist for the full field equations).

    *For this reason I still invite you to read my essay, and I would still appreciate your comments, either on my essay page or by return email.

    *http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1779

    *Thanks for participating in the contest, for so diligently answering the comments, and for the decades you have spent attempting to educate physicists about the implications of non-linearity.

    *My best regards,

    *Ed

    And here I take the opportunity to reply:

    Dear Ed,

    Thank you for your very kind words. Unfortunately, I ran out of time before answering you properly, but I hope this belated response will partially make up for it.

    I read your essay, and I was overwhelmed with it -- especially the first part, "Why Do Physicists 'Believe' Current Theories"! You eloquently and succinctly sum up many of my own thoughts on the subject, so I fully agree with you. Physicists are human like anyone else, so they are not impervious to allowing themselves to be swept along by current fashion. Besides, many of the far-out ideas are far "sexier" than more prosaic explanations, such as nonlinearity. (I never thought I would refer to any aspect of chaos theory as "prosaic," but I guess, compared with string theory and interactions at the Planck scale or the Many-Universes Theory, it doe sound less far out and exciting.) The semi-popular press aids and abets these tendencies. For example, the latest issue of "Scientific American" contains an article, "Quantum Physics: What Is Real?" that makes all sorts of speculations without much hard physical basis.

    Not being much of an expert on General Relativity, I must admit that I couldn't follow much of your reasoning -- I'm sure the condensed, "nine pages" also contributed to this. But the interplay of linearity and nonlinearity seems well worth pursuing. I make a few more comments under your thread.

    Again, thank for your remarks and for your e-mail.

    Best wishes,

    Bill

    Dear Bill,

    Thank you for your gracious response. I knew that we shared several ideas about the current state of physics, having read your essay and some of your other publications. We apparently share an understanding of human foibles and fashion. But primarily I'm excited about your perspective on non-linearity as potential source of 'weirdness' in QM.

    From your comment on my thread I'm uncertain as to whether you are familiar with gravito-magnetism or mistake it for gravity plus electromagnetism. The 'magnetic' aspect of gravity is analogous to but completely separate from electromagnetism. As indicated in my essay, the gravitic C-field is sourced by mass density (in motion) and electrons and quarks are arguably the densest mass in the universe. This seems generally to have been ignored, along with the nonlinear nature of the field. If the nonlinearity is not taken into account the field is considered too weak to have much effect. However I believe the nonlinearity, combined with the extreme density, do produce effects, and I am optimistic that my approach will produce quantitative results, not just a qualitative explanation of current anomalies. If you read my previous essay, The Nature of the Wave Function (also suffering from a nine page limit) you may find a better explanation of how the C-field relates to QM. As a result of questions and comments I've received about that essay, I've extended the approach and hopefully improved the theory. If the nonlinearity works as my preliminary calculations suggest, then it plays a greater role in particle physics than has been supposed. I hope to solve several specific problems in this area within the coming year.

    Briefly, Einstein's full nonlinear field equations deal with almost 200 derivatives with 20 constants to be solved for. This, on top of the nonlinearity, makes the topic extremely nonintuitive. But the linearized equations resemble Maxwell's equations sufficiently to permit analogical thinking, upon which much intuition is based. I intend to be guided by this analogical thinking while adding the nonlinearity back into the problem in (what I hope to be) a computable approach to the problem.

    I would very much like to keep in touch with you.

    Thanks again and my very best regards,

    Edwin Eugene Klingman

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