Chidi,

I'm very glad you got to my essay and thanks for your comments. I'll answer there. Make sure the new shoes are big enough, I have a pair which are almost size 11 which I'll give to you. I gave up barefoot physics due to the hot sand and the need to move on. It seems many found cooler sand a foot down so are chilling their brains with it.

If you get a mo I offered definitions of detector, observer and measurement in last years essay (scored 2nd but no choccies) which I think is consistent with that of your own species. Do advise.

Very Best wishes.

Peter

(hold tight for a moment)

Dear Feeney,

You have said it all!

Meanwhile, I tend not to like automated communication simply because often the originator cannot in return AUTOMATICALLY and FAIRLY read, comprehend and rate all essays.

I'll do my best to read your essay because it appears an interesting angle. Personally, I think people should rate essays they can comprehend and leave those they can't.

Best,

Chidi

Hi Chidi,

Excellent! I look forward to reading your essay too. I agree with you about the strain of reading so many essays which naturally comes from sending out ~150 automated messages, but I think I will be up to the task after my semester ends. I assure you also that all the rest of our communication will be right out of my fingertips.

When you do get around to reading my essay, I suggest also reading some of the especially good conversations on my page. I highly recommend my exchanges with Michael Allan, Tommy Anderberg, and Robert de Neufville.

Lastly, I can tell from your bio that you are a fascinating person that I would like to get to know. I hope you do very well here, and that you create the life you have been dreaming of (not just on television).

Warmly,

Aaron

  • [deleted]

  • Post #24

Hi Chidi,

I find it difficult enough communicating in one language - it can't be easy communicating in 2 or 3!

Re "wordy": I just meant that as I was reading your essay I thought that the same ideas expressed in fewer words might have clarified your ideas for me, the reader. But that's just me, and perhaps this is your natural writing style.

Best Wishes,

Lorraine

Dear Lorraine,

Eventually I agree with you. There were certain portions I myself felt could have done better with shorter sentences. But we all wrote under one constraint or the other. I value your candid observation.

Also am surely coming back to rate your essay; you can guess what! Because I value your perspective.

Regards,

Chidi

Chidi,

This is an intriguing essay. You seem to be trying to slice through the Gordian Knot of modern sensibilities, but still end up tangled in them, as the light you sense shining through doesn't quite explain itself. So you trail tendrils of logic.

Part of the problem, as I see it, is that energy, life, consciousness is dynamic. Yet the concepts, words, models we have to describe it have to be static. So we assign meaning to that which is determinate, set, settled, organized, etc. Then everything in motion must be meaningless, indeterminate, unsettled, uncertain, organized only to the extent its motion can be quantified by direction and speed, rate, amplitude, etc. Even a moving car has no exact location.

Yet once we establish a fact, it quickly recedes into the past, as new facts keep sprouting up like weeds as all must ride those waves of action. We wish for humanity to be riding some monster wave of its own making and still steering it, but the more we push it and make it bigger, the less control we have, as it is driven from below and those on top only ride it.

Regards,

John Merryman

    Dear John,

    I appreciate that you read this essay, and commented.

    Am trying to get a specific picture what you mean. Do you actually think I myself got tangled in the knot I was trying to unravel? :) Could you may be ask a direct question that exposes my situation?

    The way I myself see it, I do not try to proffer some cure-all solution, rather I try to point out the SUREST of dangers hence.

    Many thanks, John. I'll get around to your essay very soon.

    Chidi

    Chidi,

    You do weave a lot of ideas into what seems to be a general theme, so I wouldn't pose a question, so much as make an interpretation. In my own entry, I distinguish between energy and information and go on to propose awareness as a form of energy, always expanding, moving, seeking. While knowledge is the form and information it encounters and gives it shape. Much as energy of youth pushes out, while knowledge of age presses in.

    So what you might describe as certainty, or a classical view, I would see as the structure of information and knowledge which presses in on and forms our awareness. Yet without that essential perception pushing it, it would just collapse, like mass collapsing into a gravitational vortex, but in reality is always radiating energy out to hold it constant.

    Right now the reality described by quantum theorists is like a cult, where you have to speak in the secret language to join, but eventually we will realize it is describing that reality we experience everyday, but which science thought it could distill down to some classic model, yet keeps chasing its tail trying to make it whole and now just obsesses over various contradictions between theory and assumption.

    As I said, even a moving car doesn't have an exact location, because if it did, it wouldn't be moving and the same applies to the subatomic particles making it up. If they were not moving, the car wouldn't exist, so they all must have a blurred position and that is normal. The fallacy was assuming there has to be some exact quality to everything that we can measure and fit into that classical, deterministic view.

    One of the points I keep making is that time is not so much a vector from past to future, as it is the process by which future becomes past. For example, the earth doesn't really travel some fourth dimension from yesterday to tomorrow, rather tomorrow becomes yesterday because the world turns. It is only because we exist as points of perception and so experience it as a sequence of events, that we think this 'point of the present' moves. Obviously it is the events being created and dissolved.

    This makes time much more like temperature, than space. Time is to temperature, what frequency is to amplitude. With temperature, we think of the average of lots of velocities/amplitudes, but with time we think of the specific measures of frequency, since we experience events as singular. Yet there is no universal rate of change, simply the overall effect of lots of little changes. That is why different clocks, like on the ground and a GPS satellite, can run at different speeds, yet stay in the same system.

    The faster clock doesn't move into the future quicker. Since it ages/burns quicker, it falls into the past faster.

    Events are not determined before they happen, because all the input only occurs when they do happen. Probability precedes actuality.

    I could go on, but the point I'm trying to make is that physics has created an elaborate structure on some questionable foundations and you seem to be making a lot of sense in trying to relate what they say to how the world really works and that requires clarity of vision.

    We all are tangled by this information. Even the words we use are a form of entanglement, but we try to see into them and sense their deeper meanings.

    Regards,

    John

    PS - Thanks again for reviewing my essay, Chidi. I'll be rating yours (along with the others on my review list) some time between now and May 30. All the best, and bye for now, - Mike

    Hi Chidi,

    I am trying to catch up with all the essays to read. Yours had spirit, and I like that. However, I will admit that it lost me. In my opinion, every sentence should be completely grasped by the reader, before another one is given. If I encounter more than two or three sentences where that doesn't happen--I get lost. Now, other readers above didn't mention that effect, so maybe it's not a problem, but I think you'll agree that it's a writer's job is to include and captivate as many people as possible.

    My rating should have brought you up a bit, as you deserve. However, to get a better flavor for what you were expressing, I ended up having to rely upon the work that Lorraine Ford did to extract quotations she felt were valuable. Remember her first comment? She said the article was a little "wordy." I feel that many of the sentences could have been presented more simply, and with greater effect.

    In my rating comments, I offer what I think will help a given author. I hope that my comments will be perceived as helpful, the way they were intended, and I hope I haven't at all offended you in the process. I commend you and thank you for offering your thoughts for the betterment of humanity. All the best!

    Warmly,

    Aaron

      Dear Feeney,

      In being frank you are most noble in your comment. The real reason we all are here is to GIVE and TAKE constructive criticism. Thank you for reading this essay.

      But you will agree with me too that: (1.) you are trying to read AS MANY ESSAYS as possible. (2.) the thesis I have adopted is not a common or even obviuos one to take. Sometimes the subject itself is obscure and NEED MORE patience than others.

      And that brings me to the next point why I chose such an obscure angle of attack: we are here to push boundaries IN PHYSICS, not literature. It is better not to choose between the two but if I have to choose I'll push boundaries than read sweetly. So I can only beg here for more patience.

      I value your comment, Feneey.

      Bests,

      Chidi

      Hello, Good People.

      Now let me add as we approach the end of this exercise that if I had a chance to improve on this essay I will (among other things) probably make the title much more self explanatory to read something like:

      DEFINING HUMANITY: BETWEEN UNCERTAINTY AND ENTITY.

      Hope that makes the physics and objective of this essay clearer.

      All the bests.

      • [deleted]

      • Post #34

      Hi Chidi,

      I read your essay (and now that we have an extra week the pressure is off a bit). Your essay has interesting point and I will touch on some of them below as questions or comments. However, on e general comment (which I see was already picked up by some other commentators above is that your tried to put too much into the essay so that it is hard to follow the logic thread at points.

      But there were interesting observations in the essay which I would like to point out to ask questions on.

      The first thing is actually a question as to what you mean on page 2 by "no two [quantum] measurements can yield quite the same results." If you measure the energy states of a hydrogen atom that is swimming in some thermal background, which can with some probability excite the hydrogen with some probability to various excited states, then as you measure the hydro gen atom at some points you will (with some probability) measure the hydrogen to be in the same energy state. Thus there are cases where the measurement of a quantum system will show that the system is in the same eigenstate. Now maybe you mean that no two fermions can be in the same quantum state? This is true but then it is not clear that this is what you mean. In any case the statement is a bit unclear and maybe wrong.

      I like the story about the chimps -- it reminds we of a similar story of a mathematician and his wife who were to leave on a trip but they wanted to check that they had the correct number of suitcase -- three suitcases. The mathematician would come back saying there were two suitcases and the wife came back with thee. When they both went back to count the suitcases together the mathematician starts "zero, one, two -- see I told you there were two."

      You talk about the fine-tuning of cosmology/origin stories of physicist/creationist. I was not clear of the point here, but one ting to note is that physicist general look for ways to avoid fine-tuning (for example inflation is supposed to avoid of the the fine-tuning issues of cosmology -- although it ends up introducing some other issues similar to fine-tuning). For a creationist fine tuning if fine, great even since in the fine tuning they can see "the hand of God".

      At several points in the essay you use h_0 which you say is the "threshold potential of the action potential in man precisely 55 millivolts." Where does this come from?

      Lastly your mention "Humanity is going to get technology (like lie detectors!)". In fact there was some article a few years back about an FMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) "lie detector". This device as I understood would give you a real time MRI image and by looking at blood flow in the brain you could tell if a person was lying or not. This was supposed to work 100% as long as the person knew they were lying. If they were delusional or didn't remember the act they were lying about. But if the lie were purposeful then this FMRI method was supposed to be fool proof.

      There are some good issues raised in your essay. My main suggestion would have been to focus it more narrowly (this is hard since the question is broad and the page/word limit is strict). Best of luck with the contest.

      Best,

      Doug

        Hi Doug,

        Thank you for finding the time to read and comment on this essay. As I expected your comment touches upon the more critical claims I make in this essay. Let me answer in the same sequence you ask, and permit me to answer in detail:

        1.) "...put too much into the essay so that it is hard to follow the logic thread at points."

        I was only trying for a poetic approach. Science writing wants everything said expressly, poetry would in fact leave the kernel for the reader to deduce, the best poetry would have the reader deduce necessarily what the writer wants deduced. I may be guilty of this artist's approach to scientific argument. But in this essay especially I do not attempt to show how to steer humanity, I focus on what I see to be the sure trap namely mans preference for realist (local; hidden variable) definition of things as against the emerging uncertainty principle approach.

        2.)"no two [quantum] measurements can yield quite the same results."

        This is my perhaps simplified view of the measurement problem in QM in so far as we may EXPECT the lay man to make sense of that issue. It boils down to the opposite of determinism. In my view claiming determinism is down to claiming a fixed space and time FRAME (as Newton did). Outside of such a claim the "path" of a particle (as your path integral approach well show) CANNOT be the same. To get such a result you must assume a FIXED space and time frame; a singular space-time continuum.

        3.)"...the mathematician starts "zero, one, two -- see I told you there were two."

        You get my point exactly. Actually I have not shown in this essay my reliance on the Peano Axioms in foundational mathematics. The issue of where/what to start counting from touches, in my opinion, upon the so-called naïve set theory; is the set of all sets an empty set...? So the mathematician starts "zero, one, two..." and the physicist starts "virtual particle (field?), boson, fermions (particles; spins), etc." The point is, WHERE EVER you start counting from must define eventually as the null event (zero). This is why Newton must start with the concept of inertia, and hence the utility of the concept of "force".

        Einstein dispels of the notion of an ether BUT rests instead on the notion of a universal constant (speed of light); he needs some functional simultaneity, even if that simultaneity be in fact a zero (a null-information).

        4.)"You talk about the fine-tuning of cosmology/origin stories of physicist/creationist."

        My great example of the necessity of fine-tuning is the Hoyle state (as predicted by Fred Hoyle). Whatever our preferred theory of cosmology, in so far as we must think of life itself as also a valid state of the nature we observe we MUST make a logical connection between the existence of man (the observer) versus the laws of nature it observes.

        5.)"At several points in the essay you use h_0 which you say is the "threshold potential of the action potential in man precisely 55 millivolts." Where does this come from? "

        Just the one question I so much wanted to go home with! I adopt this value to PHYSICALLY define man as our working observer (i.e. our quantum/threshold of observables, and hence our "uncertainty" if Heisenberg Cut). Now, to understand how I have arrived here you need to read the paper where I have developed my argument in full. The preprint should be ready within a month. Please send an address to my email and I will love to send you a link, because then I will also need your judgement.

        Dear professor Singleton, I will beg you to investigate this one claim most thoroughly. I think it unravels basic issues about PRACTICABLE quantum gravity. I define the observer PHYSICALLY as own quantum (threshold) of observables.

        This certainly is an outrageous claim to make in QM but the reason why we predict is to be falsifiable. So I ask you to deploy your expertise and investigate this one claim on your own. Try, for instance, to plug it into equations and have it in the appropriate dimension represent the graviton, photon or "virtual exchange" and then see what results you get. As for the literal value please see the subject ACTION POTENTIAL in any standard reference like the Britannica or the Wikipedia. Of course, you must have access to more specialized sources.

        Thanks a lot, Doug. Feel free to ask me more questions.

        Bests,

        Chidi

        Dear Chidi,

        Many thanks for your kind comments and support my ideas. I hope that the information age gives excellent technological resources and capabilities to control political bureaucracy at all levels. People - the source of power and it is necessary to proceed from this postulate of democracy. The time has come for "Democracy 3.0". Let's hope that the journey of Protogeometer and Humanity in the future will be more secure. Thank you very much for supporting the idea of relocation of the UN in Iceland.

        Best wishes,

        Vladimir

        Dear Chidi,

        impressively original and putting human existence so close to the basics. My thinking needs more protective layers- physics to chemistry to biology to psychology to sociology- but your approach is simply captivating. I wish you success!

        Peter

          Thanks, dear Peter. Yours is one of the most practicable essays I have seen yet.

          Chidi

          Hi Chidi,

          It seems I voted for your essay about a month ago. Usually I leave a post when I vote...perhaps a little crack in space-time? More likely another website glitch.

          1. I like your essay very much and wish I could vote again!

          2. The story of the chimps was excellent... and yes we are still counting :)

          3. CP Snow is interesting: You cannot win, You cannot break even, You cannot leave the game. However, I prefer Jerry Garcia: Small wheel moves by fire and rod, Big wheel moves by the grace of God, Couldn't you try just a little bit harder.

          4. I could quibble about the uncertainty principle (I am with Einstein), as I did in the last essay contest, however we are together in just about everything else. I will use a quote from you to summarize this: "Humanity must always make conscious effort to return back to the communal spirit, the notion of an ideal man as that state of being at peace with self and nature.

          Don Limuti