Dear Jennifer.

I enjoyed reading your essay because I felt you have an intuitive dissatisfaction with the fundamentals of physics. Welcome to the club. As an academic you have the advantages of knowing the subject and the math in depth, but the disadvantage is that you are expected by professors and colleagues, to 'toe the line' of accepted theory - very basic things that are now accepted without question. Freewheelers like me can dare to question these fundamentals openly not being accountable to the system.

You said "quanglement implies something more, a connection that doesn't rely on codified information at all". In my current essay I concluded that It=Qubit. For me these were not just words but are based on my work-in-progress Beautiful Universe Theory also found here. The theory proposes a universal lattice made up of qubit-like nodes exchanging angular momentum causally and locally to describe all of physics. These nodes may well be the 'something more" you mentioned?

With all best wishes for your success

Vladimir

    Dear Jennifer,

    I agree with what Roger says. Excellent style, charisma and content. You've done a great job with quanglement and I like that you question the fundamental nature of the Universe with such passion and humour. I am working on a cosmogony theory away from the essay, that I think ought to (partly) unify the four forces of nature. It relates the mass of the proton, neutron and electron to 99.99999% of prediction and is testable given a suitable computer simulation. Anyway, the offshoot of this is may essay which only touches upon my main theory via simplexes. I'd be grateful if such a rising star could take a look at it. I'd love to collaborate with somebody like you in future!

    All the very best,

    Antony

      Thank you Antony -- I greatly appreciate your comments!

      I'll check out your essay and be happy to chat more about your theory.

      Cheers,

      Jennifer Nielsen

      I think it's important to realize that an essay isn't going to come to the final conclusions about the universe but I am hoping that properly defining "it" and "bit" and "Information" and "quanglement" may help us get started on something more final than what we have now!

      Thanks for your comments. I just received my voting code and am going to start reading and commenting on others' papers.

      Cheers and good luck.

      Ms. Nielsen,

      I thought your essay was utterly fascinating. It was written in such a clear expository fashion, this old reader who knows nothing about physics or video games actually understood every one of the points you were making. You were not trying to make points. Your arguments looked solid to me, and your poetic ending was sublime.

      Thank you for submitting your essay.

      Perhaps you might have to settle for voting in the general community box.

      Joe

        Thanks Jennifer,

        I very much look forward to that and further discussing your work

        Cheers,

        Antony :)

        Dear Jennifer,

        I too think it's very cool that we can say all that in binary lol. Good to see yet another woman on board -- and I hope you won't mind me burdening you with certain responsibility by pointing out that out of the handful of us taking part this year in this traditionally male-dominated discussion, you're the most qualified. I loved how you summarized our typical female sensibility and pragmatism in the concluding quote from Michael Crichton. Thanks for all good laughs! I dare say that I too have a few laughs in my essay. I invite you to read and comment on it :)

          Dunno if I'd classify it as a dissatisfaction with the foundations of physics but I have a dissatisfaction with considering any explanation (or at the very least any of our current explanations) final. I came to science because I am big on empiricism (somewhat obviously, I guess) but I do think science is about exploring reality on a fundamental level, and I appreciate that FQXi is encouraging this side of the "ballgame" so to speak. Obviously more immediately practical areas will garner more funds, but paradigm shifts become inevitable after lots of information is gathered and I think formalizing how people are processing all the new information through essays is extremely important and can lead to "aha" and (heheh) "Eureka!" moments.

          I will check out your essay and am interested in your concept of a "something more." While I took a relativist approach in the end of my essay (I don't literally think that photons and electrons are mythical as Crichton indicated, although I do think that they are essentially models not the deepest reality), I believe that we are going to get closer to understanding it in the near future. It's been a while since the last major shift in understanding (relativity & quantum mechanics). I do suspect people who think about it deeply are going to be rewarded again soon.

          Cheers...

          Jenny

          Laughter is the best medicine for all of us, sometimes especially physicists! :D

          I will read your essay soon. Excited to finally have a community code so I can take part in the ratings etc!

          I hardly feel the most qualified but I have at the very least put in a lot of (sometimes awkward) thought! :D

          Glad to see there are other "gggrrls" in here-- high five and mega kudos!

          ^_^

          Cheers!

          Jenny

          Another possible point I thought of later is that Aspect and Wheeler were contemporaries ^_^ But I do think it took a while before the result of the Aspect experiment and the others like it thereafter were generally accepted (correctly or incorrectly) as a hard-to-dispute win for non-locality.

          It's definitely true that we need more physicists with imagination; if somebody could reinterpret Bell's logic that would be quite a development.

          Cheers and good luck -- I have my code now so I will be reading and rating :) I'm excited to be part of the community.

          Best of luck!

          Jenny

          Joe,

          Thanks so much for your comments -- I'm delighted that you found it understandable. I teach physics in the summers to incoming freshman pre-medical students, and my deepest hope is that some of them leave having internalized the scientific method and made it their own. To me the power of science is that any person can use the scientific method to make discoveries for themselves once it is taught to them, and is thus one of the most empowering approaches to participating in "reality" (whatever that is). So science, to me, is a universal thing, not something that should be reserved to a few people who have studied intense mathematics or are going for PhD's. :) I like that FQXi is opening the playing field and potentially rewarding people who give deep thought to these things regardless of whether science is their profession or not.

          Will browse for your essay, or you can link it to me if you have written one! Otherwise (if you are just a reader) kudos for reading and learning with us and submit next time :D

          Jenny

          Hi Jennifer,

          Very cool essay! You made several excellent points and not once did I become dizzy with words I couldn't pronounce or mathematical symbols I've never seen before. (AND, you have a sense of humor . . . so . . . are you really a physicist ? ? ?) If you teach half as well as you write, then your students are indeed, very fortunate. Two pho-thumbs up from me on your essay.

          Would you also consider reading mine? I was deeply struck by your comments about, "the power of science is that any person can use the scientific method to make discoveries for themselves once it is taught to them, and is thus one of the most empowering approaches to participating in "reality" (whatever that is). So science, to me, is a universal thing, not something that should be reserved to a few people who have studied intense mathematics or are going for PhD's. :)"

          I'm beginning to wonder if stating my author credentials as simply, "a non-specialist member of the general public" was a mistake; so far, I've not even had a response to questions and comments I've made on other people's essays. (Although I still think that mentioning I'm a lawyer would have been far worse . . .)

          Here's the link to my essay (and I promise I won't sue, or tell anyone if you read it.)

          http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1910

          Best to you,

          Ralph

          Thank you, Ralph! Don't worry about your bio -- the "III" after your name was enough to convince me you were someone important ;)

          I will definitely take a look at your paper, and thank you for commenting (and forgiving my early AM facetiousness!)

          I am glad that my comment stood out to you and I appreciate that you enjoyed my essay; I certainly had a lot of fun with it myself after I began writing it, despite much staring at a blank computer screen with a more blank expression and even more blank mind before anything finally came out.... :P

          My dad is also a barrister--you guys deal with the law, this is natural law -- close enough, right? :)

          *clicking paper now* Good luck in the contest !

            Jennifer - grateful as we are for fqxi to give opportunity for potentially left-of-field ideas to be heard I think they do not go far enough - they are too worried about supporting the wrong horse. That the fundamentals need to be challenged is their whole raison d'etre but they have shown no willingness to support researchers like Eric Reiter's unquantum work who has experimentally proven that the point photon concept is wrong.

            You said "It's been a while since the last major shift in understanding (relativity & quantum mechanics). I do suspect people who think about it deeply are going to be rewarded again soon." Yaaaaay!! Its been some 30 years! I think you have not tried to challenge one of those foundational issues, or even a simple theory about why diffraction occurs, to say that! The current impasse is becoming obvious to more and more people, though, so you may be right after all.

            See My last year's "Fix Physics!" essay for an outline of what I think should be done.

            BTW What is the difference between an "Aha!" and a "Eureka!" moment? The former elicits responses like "well, well!" - the latter "A towel! A towel!"

            Vladimir

            Dear Jennifer,

            Nicely written and deep.

            But I don't see 'quanglement' as a primary concept.

            If one refers to non-locality, one can violate GHSH inequality without entanglement as explicitely shown in in Sec. 3.1 of my essay.

            Anyway, there are a lot of potential quantum structures to deal with that

            can lead to quantum Gameboys and further FQXi's.

            Have a nice not too binary day.

            Michel

              If you can prove that CHSH can be violated without entanglement that is quite an accomplishment! Kudos for trying and having the confidence you succeeded -- good luck in the contest. I'll study your proof. Would like to know what the "potential quantum structures to deal with that" refer to, perhaps a perusal of your essay will help.

              Cheers and take care,

              Jennifer

              You know, it would be cool if our names auto-linked to our essays when we posted :) Would make it a lot easier to click and read all of your papers. (But I am searching through the list when FQXi loads in...it's been a bit splotchy probably because so many people are logged in...)

                Hi Jenny,

                It *is* an exciting community. There are academics here, and also those who have been out of academia for long enough to have escaped the very real constraints that apply. For example, a surprising number of essayists have dealt with the fact that 'meaning', 'knowledge', 'awareness' and other aspects related to information inherently imply consciousness. Very few academics will touch this topic, at least not physicists.

                You have read my essay and have some idea of my built-in bias, which is that numbers and 'bits' are derived from physical reality, not the other way around.

                Wang Xiong's treatment of information as symmetry breaking, Mark Feeley's treatment of probability in QM, McHarris' essay on non-linearity, Janzen's treatment of time and relativity, Gordon's analysis of Bell's inequality and Vishwakarma's essay on the stress-energy tensor are examples of why FQXi is a great place! There are many, many more.

                Best,

                Edwin Eugene Klingman

                Jenny,

                My essay is called BITTERS. I do hope you can find a bit of extra time to comment on it.

                Joe

                Jenny,

                I have just checked my essay and I was delighted that you did leave a comment.

                Because I believe that the real Universe consists of unique, once, there are no measurements in it.

                Thanks again,

                Joe