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

    Thanks Hector! Apologies I've been away from the contest a few days -- I will definitely check your paper out.

    Cheers and best wishes!

    Jennifer

    Thank you Wes! I appreciate your kind comments and am happy you found the essay readable. I will check out Phil's thread in more detail and consider this Hilbert space real world referent problem; I think it does need at least some connection to how the real world operates, but whether the space itself is physical in and of itself rather than representative of some more abstract component of reality is debatable I think. It's interesting to see this being brought up as part of it it/bit debate and I think it's highly relevant.

    Cheers and I would love to check out your paper -- link me, but I'll also search for it!

    Cheers,

    Jennifer

    My email is JLNielsen@KU.edu and like most of the "youth" I'm on all too often logged in on facebook at http://www.facebook.com/JennyLN. I run a little physics forum/group on there known as "Jenny's Think Tank and Holistic Comedy Bar" (the "holistic" being a reference to Doug Adams book, "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency"). Anyone who likes is quite welcome to saunter over there :)

    Cheers and thanks for the comments!

    Jenny

    Thanks Michel! Will check it out. Been really busy past week but will try to spend some more time in here reading, learning and evaluating! Good luck in the contest!

    Oh indeed, I'm not one of the "magical thinkers" -- while I enjoy the sometimes apparently quasi-mystical topics such as nonlocality you'll note I backed all of my references with actual experiments such as the ever well known Aspect experiment and the recent tests by Gisin's team of "multisimultaneity."

    I basically am arguing in my paper that "bits" are made of "its" and that "its" are possibly made of "inter-its". I think that you can easily argue that you need "it" to have "bit" but that it is much harder to argue that "it" can arise without "inter-it" -- ie nonlocality/quanglement as a resource. In my thinking nonlocality is a primary concept and is not mystical but rather just a fundamental resource/aspect of reality that isn't yet understood very well (and which cannot be reduced to "bits"). I argue that quanglement may help build up spacetime itself, but that "bits" flow in time and are limited by spacetime restraints such as the light barrier. Thus classical information is a result of matter, but matter may be more than it seems. The argument is a bit subtle and I'd like to explore it in more detail in both original research and in a longer piece.

    Thanks Armin -- while I've been keeping up with entanglement research and thinking about it on my own for many years, I only recently encountered Penrose's "quanglement" concept. I've been playing with the idea that there are two kinds of information -- "normal" info limited by the light barrier and quanglement, which is nonlocal and is not limited as such. I think the types of info differ in how they behave in time, but I didn't have a lot of room to expand on my ideas on time here.

    Cheers and thanks for commenting -- if you have written a paper I will definitely check it out.

    Good luck,

    Jenny

    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.

      Dear Madam,

      Discovery of the Higg's particle has not yet been confirmed with 100% certainty as the mass difference between the Atlas and CMS is huge. It does not provide mass to the universe, but is supposed to provide mass only through weak interaction. Most of the mass in the universe comes from the strong interaction.

      Cutting across the clumsy jargon, it can be said that a bit represents whether something matches a concept or a product by signaling 1 or 0, where the answer yes or 'on's are coded (written in programming language) with 1 and the no or 'off's with 0. The superposition of states is really not a 'state' - there is nothing like an 'undead' cat - but indicates our lack of precise information in a sensational way. Every quantum phenomena including entanglement, spin, tunneling, and so on have macro equivalents. There is no quantum weirdness, but only weird ideas to be discarded. You can read our essay: "INFORMATION HIDES IN THE GLARE OF REALITY by basudeba mishra http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1776" published on May 31.

      EPR sensationalized entanglement by stretching it to infinite distance, though in reality, it never exists beyond a limited distance. We cannot impose our ignorance or inability to measure to describe time evolution of the universe. The Moon will continue to exist and the up-down quark conversion will continue even when we are not looking at it. There is nothing like observer created reality, as observer is not part of any equation. It only observes and may be cognizes or communicates the state; but does not affect it.

      The concepts of "information that isn't information", "outside of time" and "going backwards in time" are good fiction, but not physics. Consider: A + B → C + D.

      Here a force makes A interact with B to produce C and D. The same force doesn't act on C and D as they don't exist at that stage. If we change the direction of the force, B acts on A. Here only the direction of force and not the interval between the states before and after application of force (time) will change and the equation will be:

      B + A → C + D and not B + A ← C + D.

      Hence it does not affect causality. There can be no negative direction for time or cause and effect.

      "Quantum correlation is a basic (i.e. primary) concept", because macro objects like molecules and above do not have creative chemical capability that micro objects like atoms or below have. The quarks combine to produce an object with different characteristics from that of the individual quarks. Hydrogen and oxygen combine to produce water, whose characteristics are different from the individual components. But molecules combine like mixtures: linearly adding their characteristics. But the characteristics of quantum particles are also ordered and not random.

      The problem with Gödel and others is that, they relied on abstract mathematical structures to build physical theories. But mathematical structures are different from physical structures. Mathematics is related to the measurement of time evolution of the state of something. These time evolutions depict rate of change. When such change is related to motion; like velocity, acceleration, etc, it implies total displacement from the position occupied by the body and moving to the adjacent position. This process is repeated due to inertia till it is modified by the introduction of other forces. Thus, these are discrete steps that can be related to three dimensional structures only. Mathematics measures only the numbers of these steps, the distances involved including amplitude, wave length, etc and the quanta of energy applied etc. Mathematics is related also to the measurement of area or curves on a graph - the so-called mathematical structures, which are two dimensional structures. Thus, the basic assumptions of all topologies, including symplectic topology, linear and vector algebra and the tensor calculus, all representations of vector spaces, whether they are abstract or physical, real or complex, composed of whatever combination of scalars, vectors, quaternions, or tensors, and the current definition of the point, line, and derivative are necessarily at least one dimension less from physical space.

      The graph may represent space, but it is not space itself. The drawings of a circle, a square, a vector or any other physical representation, are similar abstractions. The circle represents only a two dimensional cross section of a three dimensional sphere. The square represents a surface of a cube. Without the cube or similar structure (including the paper), it has no physical existence. An ellipse may represent an orbit, but it is not the dynamical orbit itself. The vector is a fixed representation of velocity; it is not the dynamical velocity itself, and so on. The so-called simplification or scaling up or down of the drawing does not make it abstract. The basic abstraction is due to the fact that the mathematics that is applied to solve physical problems actually applies to the two dimensional diagram, and not to the three dimensional space. The numbers are assigned to points on the piece of paper or in the Cartesian graph, and not to points in space. If one assigns a number to a point in space, what one really means is that it is at a certain distance from an arbitrarily chosen origin. Thus, by assigning a number to a point in space, what one really does is assign an origin, which is another point in space leading to a contradiction. The point in space can exist by itself as the equilibrium position of various forces. But a point on a paper exists only with reference to the arbitrarily assigned origin. If additional force is applied, the locus of the point in space resolves into two equal but oppositely directed field lines. But the locus of a point on a graph is always unidirectional and depicts distance - linear or non-linear, but not force. Thus, a physical structure is different from its mathematical representation.

      How long will we continue with such fiction? When will we end the superstitious belief in the 'established theories' and start applying our mind? Why must we continue with a 'cut & paste' job? When will we start doing some original work? Is there no future for physics?

      Regards,

      basudeba

        Dear Madam,

        We find you mentioning to Dr, Klingman that you are interested in perception and consciousness. We have dealt with this subject extensively in our essay, which was highly appreciated by Dr, Klingman (you can see it in his thread) and others. You are welcome to visit our essay.

        Regards,

        basudeba

        Jennifer,

        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