Is Bit It? by Jennifer Nielsen

Dear Jennifer,

I think you have gift for writing in a style that is accessible to the lay audience. As I was reading your essay, the thought crossed my mind several times that this could have been an article in a popular science magazine.

I was not previously familiar with Penrose's concept of 'quanglement', also the term 'inter-it' seems quite appropriate for a description of the components of an entangled system. This was a refreshing read.

All the best,

Armin

Dear Jennifer,

The conventional proof of CHSH is given in Sec. 3.1 of the essay. It applies equally well to all squares of four n-qubit observables. The example provided is without entanglement. A step further you get the famous Mermin's square of Fig. 3a that contains 9 such CHSH proofs, and so on. As there are 10 such Mermin's square, there are 9x10=90 distinct two-qubit CHSH proofs. There are 30240 CHSH proofs with thre qubits, this number has to do with the 12096 3QB pentagrams, each of them containing 15 CHSH proofs, corresponding to the edges of the Petersen graph. The 15 CHSH proofs (that are 1x1 squares can be seen at the edges of the line graph of the Petersen graph, not shown in the essay).

The significant step in the essay is being able to see the geometries (Fano planes, Mermin's squares and so on) as being controlled by the dessins d'enfants). Don't refrain to ask me the questions you like when you study the paper.

Thank you again for your interesting essay.

Best wishes,

Michel

Hi JENNY,

01001001 01110011 00100000 01000010 01101001 01110100 00100000 01001001 01110100 00111111

On fantasy island, that's how to say 'probably' nice in binary language.

You can check me out on reality island and see if we speak the same language.

10101+101=000

Akinbo

Jennifer,

What an excellent essay; I tend to agree with Roger Granet above and the physics community could certainly use a few more feminine perspectives . . .

In your conclusion you state, "[...] It is not at least in the classical sense a 'put up job'; if we ever find it resembling one, it's generally because we put up the 'job' ourselves, and IT"S ALWAYS WISE TO CHECK FOR WHAT OUR LANGUAGE IS REALLY REPRESENTING." In order for models, mathematical or otherwise, to be ontologically meaningful, all variables must have a real-world referent! Certainly one learns this in Differential Equations and Daniel Schwartz delves into the subject rather formidably with his dissertation on approximate reasoning. So since the inseparability of Hilbert Space describes Quantum entanglement and Quantum entanglement is robustly supported by the Aspect experiments, the Mach-Zehnder experiments of Herzog et. al., and now the multi-simultaneity stuff, what real-world referent does the Hilbert Space refer to?

I posed this question to Phil Gibbs on his section of this forum but he doesn't feel the Hilbert Space needs a real-world referent. Thinking William Tiller's proposed "Deltron Moiety" might fit the bill, I asked Dr. Tiller, in a private correspondence, how the Hilbert Space fit into his theoretical framework. His response: "Since my duplex space model has both mathematically real and imaginary parts, it would seem to have to have a relationship with Hilbert space but I have not yet explored that." Perhaps he will explore it in the future . . . In any event, it seems to me the question deserves a bit of imagination thrown at it!

I thought the Crichton quote at the end of your essay was a really nice touch. I'm originally from Nebraska but after a stint in the Marine Corps I fell in love with the sea (I'm an old-school diver); so allow me to share a favored quote from Steven Callahan:

"I wish I could describe the feeling of being at sea; the anguish, frustration, and fear, the beauty that accompanies threatening spectacles, the spiritual communion with creatures in whose domain I sail. There is a magnificent intensity in life that comes when we are not in control but are only reacting, living, surviving. I am not a religious man per se. My own cosmology is convoluted and not in line with any particular church or philosophy. But for me, to go to sea is to glimpse the face of God. At sea I am reminded of my insignificance - of all men's insignificance. It is a wonderful feeling to be so humbled."

Best regards,

Wes Hansen

For whatever reason the link to the dissertation of Mr. Schwartz doesn't respond in the proper manner so: http://dr.archives.pdx.edu/xmlui/handle/psu/4542. Yeah, this one works; I didn't include the preceding "dr" in the previous HTML tag . . .

Well no wonder you're so brilliant - you're Dad is a lawyer!!

Whew . . . I understand the 'blank' expressions, blank mind, etc. If anyone had taken a picture of me the first couple of days after I 'tried' to begin writing, they might have mistaken me for 'a cow straddling a railroad track staring at an oncoming train' . . .

Again, I really enjoyed your essay. If you are so inclined, I would enjoy keeping in touch. (If nothing else, I can whine about the cost of having 2 sons and a daughter in college at the same time . . .)

Best,

Ralph

Dear Jennifer Nielsen:

I read your essay and your answer to Dr Corda I underestand you are a physic student. That it is why I writing you, because I did not understand one bit of your essay. Why I writing you? Why I sent my essay to the contest?. I am an old physician, I don't know nothing of mathematics and almost nothing of physics. But your discipline among the sciences, it is the one that make more use, of what everybody call's "time" and it is being used, without knowing its definition and which is more important the experimental meaning, by the way is just a remnant word without physical existence.

So I sending you a summary of my essay "tHE DEEP NATURE OF REALITY" because I am convince you would be interested in reading it. ( nobody understand it and is not just because of my bad English) "Hawking, 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

Sorry about that. The link to my essay is here

http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1789

Michel

Hi Jenny,

I'm glad to see you got the details straightened out. You now show up as author, and I assume can rate, etc.

I wanted to thank you for your comments on my page, and also follow up on one of your questions. Specifically, you asked me: "Are you familiar with the idea of Roger Penrose that gravity and mass is what causes decoherence? Was wondering how you would interpret his ideas." My answer, in brief, was: "I don't buy his idea of gravity and QM nor his and Hameroff's idea of consciousness as the QM of microtubules...".

But that is my opinion. I noticed yesterday that Phys Rev Letters just published Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 021302 (12 July 2013) "Effective Field Theory Approach to Gravitationally Induced Decoherence", to the effect that: "Adopting the viewpoint that the standard perturbative quantization of general relativity provides an effective description of quantum gravity that is valid at ordinary energies, we show that gravity as an environment induces the rapid decoherence of stationary matter superposition states when the energy differences in the superposition exceed the Planck energy scale."

If you are interested in that topic, you may wish to check that out.

Thanks again for your comments and good luck in the contest.

Best,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Hello Jennifer,

You obviously appreciate the relationship between (it) and (bit) in the classical computer science sense, that is, where (it) must precedes (bit), and Wheeler's proposition that (information-bit) precedes (material-it) in the quantum mechanical or primordial sense. Apart from the nature of the primordial bit I see no contradiction in these two positions because I see them as complimentary.

You define "quanglement" as (nonlocal state sharing), but may I ask how absolute you believe this state sharing is? I ask this because it seems to me that two entities, whether material or not, and whether entangled or not, which are at a distance to each other, can not have the same state if the environment within which they exist is different in any way. In other words, are you talking about an absolute abstraction, or something which in reality would most likely be seen as the hidden inclinations of two quantum entities being entangled such that they are seen to have an external and identical nonlocal response to a change in the others state, even though these hidden inclinations after entanglement are not identical, but simply constitute a conclusive tendency?

I would also like to point out that the actual contribution of a neuron to a greater state is determined by a number of discharges which attempt to associate a set of like inputs with one or more output paths in a strong fashion, each post synaptic neuron resisting according to its own possibility of translating input into output in a strong fashion, thus giving rise to a hierarchy of resistance. And so even in neuronal translation of input into output there is a probability of success or failure dictated by a hierarchy of probabilities. When we remove a neuron from its natural environment we find it behaves in an "on/off" fashion, but that completely misses the point that its true nature and its information contributing power is only discernable within its neural arrangement, i.e. within its environment. I find myself agreeing with Prof. Unnikrishnan who in his essay (1883) brings to bear on the reader the relationship between the quantum's information carrying capacity and its environment, and how any measurement can not but effect both the entity and its environment. And in this I hope you see where the above question comes from.

Zoran.

Hi Jenny,

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

*If you want to pose same questions on your facebook forum do let me know the most popular binary answer.

Hi Jennifer,

As promised in my Essay page, I have read your pretty Essay. Congrats, I have found it fantastic! I strongly appreciated your ability to join and mix profound physical concepts together your intriguing sense of humour. From the pure scientific point of view, I liked both your invoking Godel's theorem concerning the limitation of binary code and your discussion on Quanglement.

Thanks for giving me such a enjoyable reading, I am going to give you an high rate.

Cheers,

Ch.