Hi Chidi,

Thanks for reading my essay and your good questions. In *physics* macroscopic objects follow essentially the classical path. The non-classical quantum paths do not contribute much. However for quantum systems paths which deviate from classical path can have a greater influence.

Now in my essay I was using the path integral as a loose metaphor for the idea that in the context of social, political, economic problems one should emulate the path integral and try different paths to see which gives a good or "classical" solution to the specific social, political, economic, question. But the metaphor should not be pushed to far. And in fact your question has I think uncovered a weakness in the metaphor (but not the basic idea I hope). The path integral in *physics* only really tries many paths on the small (quantum scale). Once you go to large scale you essentially get locked into just the classical path of the system. However maybe I could still save the metaphor with the additional statement that unlike physics questions where we know how to weight each path, in the realm of society, economics, politics we don't have an idea which path (or paths) will be best or "classical" thus we should try many directions to these non-physics questions. Also note that for the non-physics questions I indicate there might be more than one good or "classical" path.

The path integral approach *was* already used to some extent in some countries earlier. For example in US society it seemed there *used* to be a bigger willingness to try different paths. My view is that this is becoming less the case. In an example from science/engineering let me mention the old Bell Labs. A few years ago Dr. Doug Osheroff came to give a talk at an Society of Physics Students meeting I was helping to organize to give two great talks -- one dealing with his role in the Columbia Shuttle investigation and one on what made him decide to become a scientist (as an aside if you have a chance to see Dr. Osheroff talk take it -- great speaker, great person). Anyway I had a chance to chat with him and he had spent part of his career at Bell Labs. His description of Bell Labs circa 1970s/1980s was a scientist's paradise. They were given time, money and other support to pursue their scientific curiosity without having to justify what they were researching in terms of a corporate bottom line. My understanding in talking with him was that few if any companies today operated in this way. Today there was always (according to Osheroff) much more pressure on short term company financial interest. He actually got out of Bell Labs and took a position at Stanford because of the changing climate in research in industry. Thus in science/engineering terms (and I would argue in terms of social, economic and political issues as well) we are moving away from a path integral (try many paths) approach to things.

Anyway thanks for reading and I will try to have a look at your essay oin the coming week.

Best,

Doug

Hi Judy,

Thanks for reading my essay and I do agree with the statement that I think there would be more breakthroughs scientifically, economically, socially, etc. if we diversify our approach to trying solutions to address the various questions/problems that come up in these areas. This is the essential statement/point of my essay. Now this "try many different approaches" idea has surely been successful in science/engineering. This is one of the themes behind the brilliant TV series and book by James Burke which I mention in my essay. Big advances often/always come people trying different, unusual, unexpected approaches to science questions. And often at the beginning the researchers themselves do not see the end point of their initial investigations. their genius of course lies in that *eventually* they realize the importance of what they have stumbled on to. It's more rare that some big, grand project is tried from the outset and found to work as advertised right of the bat.

I'll have a look at your essay in the coming week.

Best,

Doug

Hi Georgina,

Your essay was already on my "to read list" (which is now becoming longer) so thanks for reading my essay and for your excellent question about the more important issue of clean water versus hot water.

In fact in the house of my wife's family, who lives in the rice farming region of Northeastern Thailand close to the Laotian border they do in fact catch rain water in addition to getting water from wells. And the rain water is really great -- it has a totally different, cleaner, better taste compared to the water we have here in the central part of California where I currently live (California is undergoing a severe drought so we would have trouble getting water from rain here, but this rain water solution is definitely workable in some parts of the world, and in fact it is used). To be sure during the dry season in Thailand they use just the well, but during the rainy season they can enjoy water from the sky. One does have to clean the rain water which is caught in this way since they let it run down the slanted roofs (designed for this purpose) and any dirt on the roof will get in the rain water. But they have methods of cleaning the rain water once it is captured in the containers (they have large holding vases for this purpose). Also the dirt issue is largest in the transition between dry and rainy season when the roof has accumulated a lot of dust.

I'll look at your essay soon.

Best,

Doug

Thanks, Doug. Your mention that your wife is Thai reminded me of an economist (I don't remember who) at the University of Michigan who had married a Japanese woman, and drove around Ann Arbor -- (this was the late 70s or 80s, IIRC, when Japan was handily overtaking the U.S. auto industry) -- with a bumper sticker that read, "Buy American, marry Japanese!"

When we can all freely choose our own boundaries -- whether social, political or economic -- hierarchies die of their own unnecessary weight.

Best,

Tom

Hi John,

Thanks for reading my essay and your good questions/comments. What you describe above (the connection between time and temperature) is what one gets when one does a Wick rotation (lets time --> -i*time_E where the "E" stands for Euclidean) so that one has a Euclidean path integral. Then one makes a comparison between this Euclidean path integral with the statistical mechanical partition function and thus finds a very powerful analogy between time and temperature (actually I think the connection is between time and inverse temperature but in any case there is a strong connection). Also in his comment on my essay Torsten Asselmeyer-Maluga made the point that it might have been more correct if I had phrased things in terms of the Euclidean path integral vs. Minkowskian path integral, which is probably true, but as well I am only using the path integral (either Euclidean or Minkowskian) as a loose metaphor to suggest that like a thermodynamic/QFT system people should try out different approaches to societal questions. The one difference is that (even though I think people have at present only a very crude ability to steer things) people should take and active role in deciding which societal path or paths are good or "classical". By the way in Torsten's essay there is also some type of thermodynamic evolution but with some input/control from people/society (this is the "g" coupling in his essay). Anyway you might find his essay of interest and hopefully I got the gist of his point correctly.

I'll have a look at your essay in the coming week.

Best,

Doug

Doug,

Thank you for taking the time to put that in a broader context.

Don't feel obligated to read those prior contest entries, I just put them up for reference.

There are other aspects of this which I see as worth noting. For one thing, if time were a vector from past to future, you would think the faster clock would move into the future more rapidly, but since it ages/burns quicker, it actually falls into the past faster. The tortoise is still plodding along, long after the hare has died.

As an effect of physical actions, the reason it is asymmetric is simple momentum. Actions don't stop and go the other way, whatever the entropic effects.

As probability precedes actuality, determinism isn't an issue, since the input into any event can only happen with its occurrence. Equally we don't need to presume the past remains probabilistic, by branching off into many worlds, as physical actions determine the fate of the cat.

As I often describe it, the earth isn't traveling some dimension from yesterday to tomorrow. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the world turns.

Thanks,

John

Douglas,

I commend your words highly. I've found quite the opposite attitude is often prevalent. Commonly fine words are spoken but not practised. Any hypothesis beyond the ruling paradigm causes a sprint for cover within the brackets of conformity. A minor example was the top two peer scored essays last year, including mine, entirely ignored in the judging.

I note and agree your comment above that; "Big advances often/always come (from) people trying different, unusual, unexpected approaches to science questions." Which is well documented as being the case, but many fail to make it or take years, while often banal repeats of present doctrine flood the journals with information overload. Dan Shecktman's rejection for 40 years is typical of the few that do emerge.

I believe my own essay this year is self evidently groundbreaking; showing that a classical derivation of quantum mechanical predictions is possible allowing convergence with SR and fundamental advancement across a broad range of a sciences. I predict all those schooled in the present nonsensical QM will again run for the nearest brackets or beach, as do editors. Are you really any different Douglas? A top score coming if you are, or were they really just words? That is human nature. I agree with Judy above and suggest thinking outside the Earth centred frame may help intellectual evolution.

I look forward with interest to you comments on my, rather different, essay.

Best wishes

Peter

    Douglas,

    Such deliberate reasoning in solving the problem of steering a future seems quite foreign in American society. Reason is not a guiding force in the overall social structure, not in business, not in government, maybe in science. But then again motivations and goals are different. Business has profit. Government leaders have election and re-election and science perhaps discovery. This simplistic statement of goals and motivation in itself shows the multifaceted problems our problem poses.

    How do we come together and actually decide the path we move toward? I speak of solutions but have a sketchy idea of how to get there. Your practical experiences speak of cultural differences and expectations in supplying hot water, which too suggests the difficulty of reaching goals.

    Jim

      Hi Peter,

      Thanks for your comments and I will definitely take a look at your essay. I wasn't aware of the Dan Shecktman case so googled it and as you imply he got (initially) pretty bad treatment. Quasi-crystals of course now are "well respected" science and I think Penrose even discussed them in mathematical terms. There are so many stories like Shecktman's (Alfred Wegener and continental drift theory comes to mind since this was just on "Cosmos" episode last night) that maybe this is inevitable, bad side feature of the scientific method -- one needs to have some way of deciding which new proposals/hypothesis in science are good/correct so one must critically exam each of these new proposals and think of tests which would either confirm or refute the proposal/hypothesis. However during the criticism phase the person proposing the new hypothesis or the critic, or both become "invested" in the theory or the criticism of the theory and then objectivity is lost. I'm not sure what can be done about this (one does need to critically exam new ideas and keep those that agree with experiment and discard those that don't). From what I understand of the Shecktman case he just stuck to his guns and eventually people came around. Wegener was not as lucky -- he died in 1930 during an expedition to Greenland to make measurements of the ice thickness and weather. People eventually started to come around to the idea of continental in the 1950s. Anyway I'm not sure if there is a good answer to this question.

      Best,

      Doug

      Hi Jim,

      Thanks for reading my essay and your question/observation. Yes many parts of our society -- politics, business, to some extent even science -- are not driven by logical reasoning and following data/experiments, but are driven by self-interest. The example I give at the end of my essay where as part of an APS delegation I went to DC to lobby congress members to support science tries to make this point in regard to government i.e that it is not strongly data driven. When we had a chance to meet with the representatives of the various senators or representatives from our state/district they were most interested to hear "human interest stories" which they would collect in the story bank for the congress member. They were not interested (or did not appear so) in discussing data with us. I was later told when I asked about this that human interest stories, which the congress member could use to make a point with the electorate, where perceived by the congress members to be more effective at getting them re-elected vs. a detailed discussion of data on a given issue. Now most/many of the congress members probably do know how to look at data and come to some kind of more or less informed decision, but if they don't see this as helping get them re-elected they will value this mode of decision making less. Pay attention next time to speeches of politician from either party in the US and some individual human interest story will come up. You can bet this is probably a real story that was collected in a story bank.

      My suggestion for how to choose a path for some particular societal question would be to run as many small scale "experiments" as possible and see which ones work best and then scale up to see if they still work at a larger scale, etc. For example if one wants a health care system try various health care systems at a small scale and see which works best according to criteria such as mortality rate, cost effectiveness, timeliness, patient satisfaction, etc. and then expand those health care experiments to a larger scale which work best according to the criteria that are picked. Of course unlike physics the choosing of criteria will be a bit subjective and different groups may weight things differently and thus choose different systems/paths.

      Best,

      Doug

      Doug,

      I suggest there IS a good answer, which is to actually apply the scientific method (SM) not just pay it lip service and use instant 'front cerebral cortex' judgements to ignore things, which is what really happens.

      What I do is construct coherent hypotheses and test them to destruction, but NOT against prior beliefs and assumptions, which is what most do. Sometimes surprising new results emerge, often falsifying other assumptions and resolving a number of anomalies. I then try to present them and ask the world to test and falsify.

      But that's not what happens. They're either entirely ignored or dismissed because they 'don't seem consistent with this or that' assumption. Physicist simply don't bother with the SM. I work to explain anything not understood, but that's dismissed as the partisan view most others have! I also speed-read, over 20 papers a week, so I'm right up to date in many areas. I find many read NONE! so simply cite out of date nonsense to instantaneously dismiss anything new. And we simply don't use 'joined-up-physics' as few study all the parts. Physicists often talk a good game but don't play one.

      If some 'big name' has a silly unfalsifiable idea it's instantly accepted and published, taken seriously a priori, so leaving no room or time for real scientific advancement. Physics has severe problems. They're all solvable but human nature means they're not as we don't use our on-board quantum computers to anything like the good effect they're capable of. Even clear advances in understanding are recognized (my essay scored 2nd last year) they're instantly forgotten, or those who 'know better' (judges for example) ignore them.

      This year I give a very clear cut self evident geometrical result, falsifiable and with novel predictions proven. It has massive ramifications for unification and major advancements right across science. Yet that seems almost entirely invisible to most! I await your response to my essay with hope and fascination.

      Best wishes

      Peter

      Hi Doug,

      Been following you eventually and I like your combination of candour and expertise; most "experts" are way too mortified by fear of being per adventure caught wrong that they speak from both sides of the mouth or they play dumb. I will very much appreciate your honest critique of my essay taking seriously the equations supplied therein.

      By the way, I don't find that the rating pattern in this essay contest is free of most of the bias accused of establishment science. People vote their "favorites" here however disconnected this may prove to be with the issue of content. Also people fear retaliation with low rating. And people (myself inclusive) tend to read top-rated essays first. After all it is NOT often that the rejected stone turns to be the chief cornerstone; it happens in fact RARELY.

      In short I came here hoping I may get your combination of expertise,candour and responsiveness.

      Thanks for being there, Doug.

      Chidi

        I discuss the Kardashev scales of technological collectives (civilizations) in my essay, but with a different take. I argue there are limits to this; probably anything beyond level II is highly improbable. This means it is not likely our observable universe is a simulation or "matrix."

        The climatologists who simulate the future climate of this planet are performing in some ways the sort of scheme you propose. The quantum superposed amplitudes of course are replaced by a stochastic ensemble of paths or possible outcomes. It is not hard to imagine something of this sort being applied to other systems on Earth, including ourselves.

        LC

          Dear Professor Doug,

          Your article is a proof of your wealth of experience. Your thought is original. It held my interest through out and wish you an astounding accomplishment in this competition.

          Kindly read my article as well and give it a rating. Here is the direct link considering the enormous entries STRIKING A BALANCE BETWEEN TECHNOLOGY AND ECOSYSTEM http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2020

          Best wishes

          Gbenga

          Hi Peter,

          I will definitely look at your essay. I took a peek already and the prose is very strong and I like Bell's Theorem stuff although it can be tricky to understand -- for me at least. Therefore I look forward to reading your essay.

          By the way you may be interested in some recent work related to Bell's Theorem. First there is the EPR=ER (Einstein-Rosen) proposal of Susskind and Maldacena in "Cool horizons for entangled black holes" arXiv:1306.0533) where from what I read the proposal is there is some entanglement via wormholes (which then seems somewhat classical). They claim this resolves the "firewall paradox" of Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski and Sully (AMPS). One can find a discussion of Bob, Alice and the firewall at

          http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20121221-alice-and-bob-meet-the-wall-of-fire/

          [Also note in terms of priority Friedwardt Winterberg had a proposal for a BH firewall already in 2001 http://www.znaturforsch.com/aa/v56a/56a0889.pdf. I have not looked into this in enough detail to understand if Winterberg's firewall is the same as the AMPS one -- there do appear to be some differences -- but this does make the point that a lot of times things are a matter of luck, timing, or the right affiliation :-/].

          Second there is the Nature Physics article from about 3 years ago "On the reality of the quantum state" Matthew F. Pusey, Jonathan Barrett, Terry Rudolph, Nature Physics 8, 475-478 (2012). We discussed this article in our Friday theory group meetings here for 2-3 weeks and never could exactly understand why this was such a great advance (the reason we came across this work in the first place was because it was written up in some popular science magazine as "the most important result since Bell's theorem). I think you can also find this article on the arXiv now. Also from the end of the abstract the authors say "..Here we show that any model in which a quantum state represents

          mere information about an underlying physical state of the system, and in which systems that are prepared independently have independent physical states, must make predictions which contradict those of quantum theory."

          Anyway I will have a look and comment on your essay soon.

          Best,

          Doug

          Hi Chidi,

          Many thanks and I will have a look at your essay soon. Also in almost any human undertaking there is always some unfair, subjective aspect to the undertaking. Also let me say I learned to "love" being wrong during my stays in Russia. If you give a talk there you'll be grilled very vigorously to see how well your idea holds up. This is a bit disconcerting at first coming from the US where people may think your idea is wrong but will be afraid to engage you out of a false idea of niceness and also for fear that they may be wrong or ask a "bad/stupid" question. You learn a lot when people push your ideas. Also the Russians make you understand this is nothing personal (i.e. tearing into your ideas) since they'll invite you out for vodka and snacks after.

          Best,

          Doug

          Hi Lawrence,

          Nice to "see" you again in the FQXi contest. I already had on my list to look over your essay and comment. Yes in regard to the Kardashev scale I use this only to point out that at present humanity, while having plenty to be proud of, is not really that advanced. But we do have some ability to crudely steer a direction so we should have some semi-scientific way of doing this. But I only use the Kardashev scale since it is well known. As you say it could be there may be some barrier to ever developing into a Type III civilization. Also in reply to another reader I mentioned there is another scale based on amount of information a civilization can harness/acquire instead of the level of power it can use/control. But the Kardashev scale is better known.

          What you say about climatologist simulations sounds right (I don't know enough in detail about these types of climate models). In my area one might use the example of lattice gauge calculations which take huge amounts of computing power to simulate quark bound states (i.e. protons, neutrons, mesons, etc.)

          My suggestion in the essay is to try something like this (i.e. choosing different social organization paths) in the social context. Of course the number of paths on can try in a social context will be much more limited than in the context of climate simulations or lattice QCD simulations.

          Best,

          Doug