Dear Douglas,

Very interesting and enjoyable read. Humanity has had time to try a very large number of paths. With the result that we are HERE. I think a Kardashev value of .76 for our civilization to be very, um, flattering. First, does the earth qualify as 'a' civilization? And second, clearly the 'entropy' of a society, or perhaps more directly the free energy of a society, bears on how much a society has control of those resources.

One of the characteristics of the late evolution of a society, (the present state of ours?) seems to be the closing off of alternative paths. Instead of open competition, with its many paths, we have oligopoly; instead of social mobility, we increasingly have oligarchy. Instead of Congressmen open to evidence and data we have those whose choices are dictated by measures other than the actual success of a path. Clearly the best paths, or even viable paths will not likely be selected in such a situation. So one of the first tasks presented humanity, us, may be how to open more paths. And this may involve increasing the free energy available, as was done, for instance, in WWII.

You made the important point that paths do not always scale in a simple manner. This is especially be the case when responding to global issues, when the metric is not the same as smaller scales. The world is round. Yet we must start somewhere, and adjust as we go.

You've made important points with simple examples. Excellent.

I remember the Connections series. The episodes I saw were excellent. Some are available on YouTube. They are also available on DVD.

I hope you find time to read my essay.

I wish you good luck in the competition.

Charles Gregory St Pierre

    • [deleted]

    • Post #56

    Dear Douglas Alexander Singleton,

    You mentioned the path of what is called Energiewende in Germany. My essay addressed a quite different subject that was more important for me personally: peace. Having dealt with power electronics and batteries, I know the importance of energy and its connection to politics. Instead of considering single paths from A to B and intentional steering, I rather asked how to contribute to more basic influences; I arrived at the insight that there might be imperfections in the traditional notion of humanity, cf. my requests to Mohammed Khali and Sabine Hossenfelder.

    You will certainly agree that hope for cold fusion is irresponsible, and the promising project DESERTEC almost abandoned. Germany's decision to give up nuclear power was mainly an ethical rather than profit-oriented one.

    The territory of Germany is simply to small as to cope with possible nuclear disasters. Not even a final place for nuclear waste has been found.

    What about the various academic paths, I realized at MEI how close Moscow related to old German tradition. When I was a member of AWS, I often also felt like at home. However, close relations like for instance between Wilhelm II and Nikolaus II in 1914 don't guarantee good decisions. I will read your essay because I expect expert details.

    Curious,

    Eckard

      Doug,

      Not just you, I'm sure it's tricky for anybody in reality. You may need to forget most of what you've read and return to it's foundations.

      The concept "collapse of superposed spin states to a pure singlet state" was never meant to represent a physical model, and no proof of such an actual 'thing' as a 'singlet state' has ever been offered. 720^o spin can be derived classically so lets look at classical OAM. If we take a spinning sphere, cut it in half on the equatorial plane and send each half in opposite directions, then BOTH halves will have both north and south poles (clockwise and counter clockwise spin) but only one can be measured at a time ('Measurement' as transfer of OAM to detector field electrons).

      Now also invoke a few other things found in the last 100 years and classical joined-up-physics can re-produce the quantum correlations (but only to a quantum gauge limit so a Godel 'fractal' uncertainty remains)

      Unfortunately that's a bit too shocking for those steeped in Bells theorem, which is circumvented by using a different starting assumption. The cosine derivation is geometrical and dynamic, relating circumferences (so rotational velocity) at different latitudes. It's actually quite self apparent! Also note how the mechanism removes any bar on convergence of QM and SR.

      The tricky bit is, how on Earth does one get it published when editors put up the barricades and run away screaming with hands over everything! (and reviewers would probably do the same). The only option may be to get Neils Bohr to submit it, or at least a group of respected professors.

      I look forward to your views and ides.

      Best wishes

      Peter

      Hallo Eckard Vielen Dank, dass Sie meinen Aufsatz gelesen habe. Ich werde weiter auf Englisch zu schreiben, da mein Deutsch ist, dass von einem Schüler der fünften Klasse.

      I very much admired the German Energiewende. When I was in Potsdam on sabbatical we lived in guest housing of the Fachhochschule Potsdam and just a short distance from the campus. On our way to the Volkspark we would pass a solar power project being run by the students which supplied some power to the campus. By the way what is the opinion of Germans in regard to the Energiewende? My impression was overall favorable but since I was only there for 4-5 months I did not maybe get a complete picture. By the way in the US when the media reports about the initiative they generally point out what is not working about the the Energiewende, which then is in stark contrast to my limited observations. But long ago I realized a good part of what one reads/hears in the news is slanted to one particular view point or the other. US News is especially bad about this. BBC is OK and PBS news in the US is good (but no one watches because it's less "entertaining" than watching Fox News. Also Deutsche Welle seems good/balanced). Also I had never heard about DESERTEC so googled it. This looks like a great idea, but it seems you are indicating it is being abandoned. By the way the US had large stretches of desert in the southwest which might also be useful for such a project.

      Again thanks for your comments and I will have a look at your essay soon.

      Alles beste,

      Doug

      Hi Aaron,

      Thanks for your comments and your article sounds interesting. Do you have in mind some actual future viewing machine (i.e. something like a wormhole time machine) or is the idea "Suppose we had a machine that would allow us to view the future. This is what we should do with it." Anyway I'll have a look and leave a comment if I find anything useful/clever to say. I don't generally say if I voted and I don't say what ranking I gave since this gets into another shady aspect of this contest which is vote bartering. But usually if I make some comment I'll also take the time to vote since I did read your essay so I should have some opinion. But I do agree down voting without reading is not good.

      Best,

      Doug

      Hi Doug,

      You got it man, something like a wormhole time machine. The actual technology that the machine I identify would be based upon is not of central importance. The discovery is that there is a specifiable kind of future-viewing machine which is logically possible which can only be found when one proves that a naive kind of future-viewing machine is not logically possible. You'll see when you get a chance to read my paper. Now, before you comment on my page or rate my work, please read my conversations with Michael Allan, Tommy Anderberg, and Robert de Neufville on my page. A great deal of clarification is available there. I now have you in my spreadsheet to read and rate your essay. Have a good one.

      Warmly,

      Aaron

      P.S., I will use the following rating scale to rate essays:

      10 - the essay is perfection and I learned a tremendous amount

      9 - the essay was extremely good, and I learned a lot

      8 - the essay was very good, and I learned something

      7 - the essay was good, and it had some helpful suggestions

      6 - slightly favorable indifference

      5 - unfavorable indifference

      4 - the essay was pretty shoddy and boring

      3 - the essay was of poor quality and boring

      2 - the essay was of very poor quality and boring

      1 - the essay was of shockingly poor quality and extremely flawed

      After all, that is essentially what the numbers mean.

      Douglas,

      I think, those pioneers who built first wind and solar power plants and the government that fostered them did steer humanity toward the better although the economy was rather bumpy. China's cheap solar modules benefited from agreed subventions to be payed by Germany's costumers of energy. You are right, the natural conditions are certainly better elsewhere. However, it turned out that the calculated costs of nuclear power didn't correctly include the need to get rid of nuclear waste and cope with possible risks. Presently, the stability of supply with gas seems to be at risk due to political crises. Environmentalists don't like the use of coal although the damage caused by digging and burning coal is perhaps more benign than by freaking. Anyway, people were told and believe that fossil sources will run out earlier or later, and sustainability is important. Many people did also not forget WWII and are in particular opposed to nuclear weapons. They organized resistance against transport of so called Castors with radioactive wast. I as an old engineer felt mainly challenged by the persisting lack of storages. My elder son has to do with protection of power grids that must be reconstructed in order to optimally distribute electricity.

      What about my essay, I see it an unwelcome challenge to anybody who was educated to believe in Einstein's relativity up to consequences that were shown in Schlafly's essay, who feels emotional in terms of his own nation, and who is not ready to accept really basic question in mathematics, physics, and other fields including ethics. I will appreciate criticism.

      All best,

      Eckard

      Hi Ajay,

      Sorry for the delayed response. This is finals week and giving finals is *almost* as nerve racking as taking them (almost :-)).

      In regard to the amount of investment from institutions/governments my suggest would in fact be at first to fund a lot of small scale projects. Usually when one makes a big investment in a single or small number of projects this can easily fail (and often does). My suggestion is the try as many different paths/approaches to different problems as possible and then based on certain objective criteria decide which path or paths are best. And I agree that in societal terms there may be more than one path since people have different ways of weighting things. In my health care system example some society's may be OK with a slightly lower cure rate for certain rare diseases as long as the system is cost effective and treats as large a number of people as possible. Other societies may be willing to pay more for health care and treat more of the rare diseases. So yes if there are different weightings in different societies one will get different "solutions" or paths. I talk about this toward the end of the essay.

      I'll try to get to your essay soon.

      Best,

      Doug

      Hi Charles.

      Yes I will definitely read your essay since you very well understood and criticized my essay (i.e. you found some of its shortcomings). First I agree that at present it is not the practice to try many different paths and that paths are being shut off. And of those few different paths/approaches that are tried there the choice of path is often not take based on objective measures. In terms of science I there are two examples: (i) Bell Labs used to give scientists/researchers a free hand to research what interested them. As a result the old Bell Labs produced some great advances in science and engineering. This anyway was the description I got from Doug Osheroff of Stanford. He worked at Bell Labs for a long time and his description of the place during his time there was a scientist's paradise -- decent funding and free reign to satisfy ones curiosity. He said he left partly because requirements that ones research produce some widget that the company could quickly make money on. And this seems to be generally the case with many industrial labs now -- your work needs to produce money or you don't get time/money to work on it. Another example is the cancelled SSC (Superconducitng Super Collider). It would have been cheaper to build this in Batavia, Ill (home of FermiLab). The idea would be to use the existing FermiLab facilities to greatly reduce the cost. Instead the site for the SSC was in Texas. The reason for this was Bush Sr. was president during this time and Texas was his "home" state while Illinois was held by Democrats. Also there was accusations of waste by the project management.

      So in fact the current trend in society (science, politics, etc.) is not to try many different paths but to try one or a few large paths and then stick to them even when they prove less than optimal.

      Thus it is a big question if there is some way to force/encourage governments, society to be more open to trying out different approaches. As you mention some events like WWII do exactly that -- increase the free energy available to the system. The Black Death/Plague in Western Europe is another example of a free energy releasing event. My suggestion is that society should be more open to trying different approaches to solving societal problems but without the necessity of a World War or a plague that kills ~20% of the population (or more). But in this regard (how to encourage this type of open experimentation) my essay does not give any firm answer.

      Anyway yes I will read you essay but it may take some time.

      Best,

      Doug

      Hi Aaron,

      Ah ha a scoring rubric. Yes this kind of thing is a good idea. My colleagues who teach courses that require essay writing (Yes there are courses like this in physics -- mainly the intro astronomy course since it's part of the general education component which usually requires some writing. Also our critical thinking course -- aka "Why Big Foot and Loch Ness monster are not real" -- requires some substantial writing. The instructors for these courses always have some kind of scoring rubric as above). Actually it might be a good idea if the next FQXi essay contest required each participant to turn in a rubric or maybe if they supplied some rubric that one was required to turn in with ones vote. Of course it's still possible to just mark the rubric low/high -- i.e. essentially ignore it -- but I think it would actually make people think a little more before voting and this would make the voting more reflective of the actual worth or not of a given essay. Anyway thanks for sharing this and I will try to get to your essay soon.

      Best,

      Doug

      • [deleted]

      • Post #65

      Hi Doug,

      because you wrote "Also if one wanted a weightier question one could ask how one supplies clean drinking water to society" I found this article about drinking water it offers many kinds of contamination for consideration but does not mention, at all, that these sources of contamination can be avoided by collecting and drinking rainwater from roofs.Contaminants in drinking water In places that have a rainy season the water tank should ideally be large enough to contain all of the rain that falls on it, for use later in the year. The global groundwater depletion problem is also relevant Groundwater depletion a global problem,(click look inside)Instead of community bore holes or reservoirs open to contamination individual families could construct or buy their own covered rain water tank for private use. It could be under the house or nearby.

      You wrote "The point of this mundane example of how to supply hot water to a society illustrates that when deciding on how to weight a particular societal path one needs to choose a set of criteria e.g. efficiency, convenience, safety, ease of implementation, etc. by which to judge any given path. This part of the societal path integral proposal is the most subjective and may lead to different groups choosing different paths as best or 'classical'"I think rainwater collection wins in efficiency, safety and ease of implementation in rural and suburban environments. The only problem being when it runs out.I don't have to pay any water rates, the rain is completely free. I think there may be the perception that the water is dirty because it has come off of the roof when it is less contaminated. I only have a rainwater tank, under the house. The water is filtered once for general use and a second time through a micro-filter for drinking.

      Quote "The main thrust of this essay has been, that in so far as it is possible for humanity to steer a course, it can try to steer a best or 'classical' course by at first trying out, on a small scale, as many different paths as possible."You have also mentioned that some projects would not scale up. It is also the case that some projects only work if they are full scale. I don't know how it would be possible to try out on a small scale obtaining water from reservoirs, (such as this- Birmingham England is supplied from Wales,via an enormous endevour constructed during the industrial revolution Elan Valley water, Amazing!)( works brilliantly but is huge), for comparison with obtaining water from bore holes tapping ground water or rainwater collection or even desalination. It might be necessary to construct models to analyse the pros and cons and to compare and contrast, rather than being able to carry out a small scale trails of all of the possible projects.

      A thought provoking question, Thank you, Georgina

      Doug - Thanks for the QP primer and thoughtful essay. I was interested in your description of the process of small scale experiments and selection through a path integral process, and realized that it is similar to the mutation / selection / propagation process exhibited in evolutionary dynamics. The key, of course, as you point out, is the process by which options are chosen / fit to "the classical path." In evolutionary terms, this is analogous to selection in the fitness landscape. If you have a chance, I'd appreciate any comments on my essay The Tip of the Spear - we are dealing with a similar concept from different perspectives.

      Cheers - George

      Hi George,

      Yes I'll have a look. I'm working through the essays I promised to read. Thanks also for you comments on my essay.

      Best,

      Doug

      Doug,

      I replied (above and) on my blog but re-post it below for your convenience. I didn't explain entanglement; The only actual relationship required is that the common axis of the ('helical') paths of the particles is conserved. The equatorial plane of the sphere is then common to both. That's all that's needed. The Bloch sphere 4-vectors (setting angles) are than related ('entangled') allowing the classical cosine^2 curve. EM field electron 'spin flip' then completes the picture, entirely circumventing Bell's theorem. That should be a sensational 'outlying' finding, which if you followed your thesis would be noticed and analysed. Yes? Will you?

      post.. ~

      "Thank you. You didn't comment on the central point, the classical derivation of QM's predictions circumventing Bell's (tautological) theorem. I suggested that all will avoid even addressing this, because, despite your good words, current physics is based more in belief than the SciMethod. Good words then remain only words. Is that not a fair assessment? Just the predicted solution to the major anomalies found by Aspect and Weihs (first announced in last years essay discussing gauged helices) should make major lights flash and draw attention to the hypothesis. Do you guess it did so? No.

      On specifics, I agree 'spin' has moved a long way since Pauli. I cited recent Planck institute and other work showing the recursive quantum helicity and spin/orbit gauges revealing the solution. I've seen Huang's work etc, but more important are the implications of invoking OAM. I read the Maldecina Suskind paper and find no evidence that wormholes are more than fantasy distracting from reality. (My joint paper on AGN's and galaxy evolution is accepted and in print using the same discrete field dynamics, but not in a major journal).

      My classical derivation of entanglement (beyond local resonance) doesn't require spookyness. The simple mechanism of electron signal modulation, to the electron spin and rest frame (local) c, when consistently applied to both Relativity and QM removes the main barriers to theoretical convergence. SR's postulates are conserved in absolute time. Uncertainty retreats to the next quantum gauge down (see prev. 3 essays, all top 10 finishers but ignored in the judging!). The galaxy paper will also be ignored as it shows that modifications to the SM are required to produce the more coherent model.

      The hypotheses is logical, predictive, empirically supported. Falsifiable but unfalsified. Is anybody in academia perceptive or courageous enough to actually evaluate it!? Even just review collaboration would be useful. All I'm interested in is advancement of understanding. However I suspect your own hypothesis may be pie in the sky because physics simply isn't done that way. Can you demonstrate that my analysis is flawed?

      ~

      I think your idea is good Doug, but like most here it seems entirely unimplementable so little more than hot air. You've so far confirmed that to be the case with yours, so real and important discoveries remain ignored and subjugated.

      Oh that your thesis could be viable. Or do you think it may be for the best that it's not? Perhaps if man really understood more that the "1,000th of 1%" (AE) he almost does now he may become too dangerous!?

      Best wishes

      Peter

        I think you're close to identifying the problem with the voting design, Doug. It's too isolated from its proper purpose = to decide a fair evaluation for each essay. For this, it would be better if peers rated the evaluations, not the essays. Picture an evaluation as a short, written review and (in summary) a numeric score, perhaps derived from a general rubric. The job of the peers would then be to compose, discuss and rate these in order to discover the single best evaluation of the essay, which alone would determine its "community" score. - Mike

        PS - If we compose and rate the alternative evaluations dynamically, then it's kind of like quantum path selection, as you describe it.

        Hi Peter,

        I'll reply on your thread. I did have some more things to say (hopefully useful or interesting) although I have to admit I still do not feel I completely understand all the issues. But again as I said this is mostly connected with the subtle issues (at least for me) in Bell type arguments -- not only your work but also Bell's original paper and most other things on this topic. But again let me reply more fully on your thread.

        Best,

        Doug

        Hi Mike,

        I didn't think of this -- yes maybe the voting process has some feature of the path integral. But in the "real" path integral nature decides how to weight each path (by the Action) and in a social context (those described in my essay or as you point out the rating system for the essay contest) the weighting is more subjective (some might say it is completely subjective). And in terms of my essay I mention this as a weak point of the whole process. My idea would be that for every different social question one should beforehand come up with some way of weighting each social path that was tried. In reality what might happen is that people/administrators/government officials in charge of implementing a given program or path might come up with criteria "on the fly" to either stick with a given path or abandon a given path. For example the administration of George W. Bush decides to get the US involved in fighting in Iraq and when they are questioned as to if this is a good approach/ a good path they invent data to support their position -- "Iraq has a nuclear weapons program. We must stop them." all of which was invented data (i.e. a lie).

        Anyway back to your original comment/question about the rating system of the FQXi contest -- it is probably no better or worse than other systems. I can't think of any system that would be considered completely fair by all the contestants. Also note the rating system for the FQXi contests now is much different from the first contest, thus there has been an evolution or a path integral selection of evaluation methods.

        Finally let me emphasis again that my "path integral for society" is just a metaphor that in society as in science it's good to try out different approaches to things since people in general are not good at guessing the correct answer to scientific questions and I think they are also not so good at selecting (at first try) the best societal solution. I could as well have called the essay something like "Try as many different possible approaches to social questions and then use some objective or semi objective criteria for selecting those approaches which are best." I put the path integral in there since I do quantum field theory and physicists generally will describe things in terms of the language they are familiar with.

        Best,

        Doug

        Dear Douglas Alexander Singleton,

        I very much enjoyed your application of a key theme of physics to the essay topic of 'steer the future'. I fully agree with the applicability of it and the implication that one should try "all paths". This is a bottom-up approach that explores a wider variety of approaches and allows comparison between realities, not just ideals.

        You use the path integral as a "loose" metaphor. I do the same with the thermodynamic concept of free energy. I believe these are valid metaphors. I do not address astronomical catastrophes, so much as societal catastrophe such as another Pol Pot arising to enforce "equality" on all of us.

        This approach also suggests that 50 states experimenting with any problem, such as healthcare, offers the same advantage that decentralized Europe enjoyed over centralized China [per Diamond].

        I find we arrive at very similar positions based on the imaginative application of physics paradigms to humanity. Yours is worth a 10, since that's all I can give it. It's actually worth more.

        I hope finals are over and you find the time to read my essay and comment on it.

        My best regards,

        Edwin Eugene Klingman

          Dear Douglas,

          I think we may have to work out for the transformation of a path integral in Corpuscularianism into three definite line integrals in notation with three eigen-rotational states of a string-natter segment, while in accordance with the Principle of stationary action in calculus of variations.

          Thus with this aspect, the probability of Societal steering in the right path may be more definitive while we work on a holarchial approach with the society.

          With best wishes,

          Jayakar