Hi Doug

Congrats, this is indeed an intriguing Essay. Here are my comments/questions:

1) I think you implicitly dedicated this work to Richard Feynman.

2) Has Kardashev's classification of civilizations any link with stellar classification? I suspect this because he was an astronomer.

3) I find the "Historical Path Integral" by James Burke which starts from the standardization of precious metals till nuclear weapons and energy very enlightening for clarifying what you point out in your Essay.

4) I agree with you that number of publications and citations are not great measures of actual scientific progress.

5) You emphasize that deciding on how to weight a particular societal path is very subjective and may lead to different groups choosing different paths as best or "classical". Is this the analogous of the probabilistic behavior of quantum mechanics in your nice metaphor?

6) I appreciated a lot the subtle irony that you used in some points of your Essay, in particular in the last discussion concerning the conflict between the non-scientific "cherry picking" of data which helps politician get re-elected and the scientific faceless data which, although being informative, will not help politicians get re-elected.

You wrote an very enjoyable Essay. I am going to give you an high score.

I wish you all the best in the Contest.

Cheers,

Ch.

    Hi Christian,

    Thanks for reading my essay and your complementary questions and comments. I'm a great admirer of Feynman's and certainly he did try a lot of different "paths" -- bongo player, safe cracker, bar fly (but without drinking), and physicist. The Kardashev scale is logarithmic as is the case of the brightness scale for stars so this may have been connected with Kardashev's background in astronomy (although the log formula I gave was a later invention (due to Sagan?). Kardashev originally had only a discreet range of civilization rankings.

    Someone else mentioned that James Burke's old programs can be found on Youtube but so far I have only been able to find "The Day the Universe Changed" and "Connections 2" (which in my opinion was good but not as good as "Connections"). Anyway that is a good way to describe Burke's narrative -- a historical path integral.

    Good luck as well with the contest. Best,

    Doug

    Dough,

    You are a fine human being I can sense it. You have adventure soul. We have many in common. I also admire Feynman and he is a great scientist and even more admirable that he is a great human being as well. I also use his "sum over histories" idea in my KQID theory. You summed up your suggestion: "one should loosely adopt this quantum mechanical approach of trying "all paths". Those societal "paths" which are judged best/classical would be given the highest weight in steering humanity forward."

    I wish you the best, if you have time please comment on mine. Good luck on this contest.

    Leo KoGuan

    Doug,

    I like your comment to John: "Anyway if one were to follow the "path integral" proposal one should look at how wealth is distributed in countries that have a low Gini index (which means more fair wealth distribution)" also your comment to Joe's comment on light: "But light is rather odd in that respect. For example in the rest frame of a light beam is infinitely time dilated with respect to some non-light ray outside observer and thus it takes zero proper time for a light ray to travel any distance. Let's assume Minkowski space-time i.e. no cosmological expansion to complicate things. Thus in some sense one could say a light beam is "everywhere at once" in this Minkowski space-time -- at least in the coordinate direction in which it travels which is infinitesimally length contracted. .However in an outside laboratory frame (say the Earth with the light beam going by it) the light beam definitely moves and it takes finite Earth time for it to travel over a fixed distance (again measured in the Earth frame). Thus what I think you are saying about light may be true in the light's rest frame but certainly not in other frames (at least all experiments up to now do show that light moves if one takes a general frame)."

    Thanks for your generous effort to make humanity to be human. I share your goal. I hope we can be friends. If you have time please read my essay.

    I rated your essay ten (10).

    I wish you well,

    Leo KoGuan

      Doug, I like you "metaphor" of the path integral. It is good that you manged to get some real physics into your essay as we are supposed to. I am sure you know that when Dirac first though of a path integral in physics he saw it is more of a metaphor than a real theory. Feynman realized that it really works and is not just a metaphor. perhaps the same is true of your idea here.

      I appreciate the idea that it is not just the classical path that counts. We need some thinking away from the mainstream to contribute its part. It is just a case of getting the right Lagrangian so that everything has the right weight and leads to the correct unbiased answer. I think some AI technology will use this kind of technique to get the right conclusions from the sum of human thinking and help steer humanity

      Hi Leo,

      Thanks for reading my essay and our comments. Yes Feynman is a very good and interesting physicist. I will try to have a look at our essay especially as you mention that it has some connection to "sum over histories" which at least on the surface would appears to give some connection to one of the themes of my own essay.

      Best,

      Doug

      Hi Phil ,

      Man thanks for reading my essay and your comments. Yes, my invocation of the path integral is to be taken as a very loose metaphor -- and as you reminded me this was in fact the spirit in which Dirac put forward the idea. I could have written the whole essay without the path integral metaphor, but I wanted to bring some connection to physics into the essay. The basics thrust of the essay is that humanity should be open to trying different paths *and* then should select those paths as "best" which lead to a good outcome based on objective criteria. Also I want to emphasize the suggestion is an experimental one in that one should try these paths out on a small scale and those which prove to be good then scale up.

      Physics/science for example used to be more open to trying different approaches. At the beginning of the 20th century SR, GR and QM showed that that idea that humanity almost knew all there was to know about the natural world (modulo some "i" dotting and "t" crossing) was wrong. Moreover these theories were almost immediately validated up to a certain limit by experiment. At present none of the small number of ideas of what comes next (string theory, loop quantum gravity, large/warped extra dimensions) has any unambiguous experimental support. For this reason my proposal is experimentally based -- if some societal path does not give good results based on some objective criteria it should be abandoned. A lot of bad results have occurred when people have tried to do top down social engineering and the refused to abandon a given approach when it was proven experimentally not to work e.g. Pol Pot sticking with his odd agrarian version of communism even when it was apparent to everyone that this was a very wrong path.

      Anyway thanks for reading my essay and best of luck in the contest.

      Doug

      Doug,

      Judy pointed out my reply re electrons/photons could be misconstrued as assuming photons as spin 1/2. I'm sure you didn't read it as that but I wasn't clear Invoking OAM for spin 1/2 merely put electrons under the same laws as photons, each of which may be 'observed' as either clockwise or anticlockwise subject to observer (simplify to 'photomultiplier') electron field spin orientation.

      Weihs, Zeilinger et al used a PAIR of photomultipliers. They found a 'rotation' from the filter (in their case an opto-electric 'analyser' so voltage dependent), which implicitly meant the findings were REVERSED at beyond 90 degrees. Of course there's no direct proof of that unless each pair is identified, but the circumstantial evidence is irresistable and resolves the (vast majority) anomalous data in Aspects findings.

      It's really then just a case of 'joined up' science. Finding a more consistent description in one field that then also resolves problems in the one next door. Hannes Alfven described how he had to FORCE scientists in one lab to speak to those down the corridor as between them they solved each others problems. But they still hated doing so!

      This solution leads direct to Unification (did you pick up on how?) Seemingly the only clear direction we should be steering, though most are still not looking or seeing. Is anyone prepared to act rather than just semanticise to make it happen? What else could I do?

      Best wishes

      Peter

      Dear Douglas,

      no doubt your essay scores high in terms of originality, although, based just on the title, I had hoped for some deeper connection between the path integral concept and some novel way to look at the business of steering our future. However, you are honestly declaring that the metaphor is loose, which, in a way, makes the reader (or this reader) more relaxed and more willing to appreciate the several interesting examples that you mention. Your prose is fluent and, occasionally, pleasingly humorous. The idea to keep the reader under a multi-continental shower for such a long time is quite effective.

      One small criticism. I liked the idea to distinguish (in the first section) between large and small events, and the associated dualism of known unkowns and unknown unknowns; there are unpredictable small events which can have a large positive impact on the course of humanity (this made me think of complex systems, emergence, and the antipodal butterfly that I mention in my essay, which is, however, malicious). I got the impression that the rest of the paper would concentrate on these events - the most interesting type, of course! However that distinction is basically lost in the remaining three sections, where nothing seems to relate to it, at least not explicitly. What you do is basically support the idea of trying many alternative implementations of small projects, while somehow forgetting that dualism. In fact, it seems to me that these projects could only deal with the `known unknown` case, and not with the more attractive (and difficult) alternative. But maybe I have missed some intended logical link. In this case, I`d appreciate your reply.

      Best regards

      Tommaso

      Hi Peter,

      No I didn't think you were mixing up spin 1/2 of the electron with spin 1 of the photon, or that you thought the photon was spin 1/2. It is true that since the photon is massless it has only two polarization states (the longitudinal state that is found in massive spin 1 gauge bosons is missing for the photon since it is massless) which is the same as the electron (it also has two polarization states +1/2 and -1/2). Your point that you can view the spin of teh electron as fundamentally the same as the spin of the photon is correct in the sense discussed in the H. Ohanian AJP article "What is Spin?" which I mentioned earlier. In fact this article shows that electron spin is connected with a rotational energy flow in the Dirac field that describes the electron, just as for the photon one can obtain the spin via a rotational energy flow in the E&M field as described by Maxwell's eqns. (and a simple Bohr-like quantization requirement at the end).

      Also I think it would be a great idea to do the EPR type experiment with electrons rather than photons since electrons carry not only spin but also a gauge charge (i.e. electric charge). As far as I know the Aspect type experiments have not been done with particles carrying gauge charges.

      Best,

      Doug

      Hi Tommaso,

      Thanks for reading and commenting on my essay. Your criticism is on point. I was not able to weave the idea of unknown unknowns (and how one avoids negative examples of these and steers toward positive examples of these) into the essay as much as I would have liked or should have. This is discussed in much more detail in the book by Nassim Taleb "The Black Swan" which I reference. Taleb's point is that one should try to build a society which is accepting and encourages good "black swan events" (i.e. events for which one can not even begin to calculate probabilities) and which is hardened against bad "black swan events". My path integral metaphor (i.e. try many paths approach) is a way of trying to access the good "black swan events". My essay does not give much/anything in terms of how to harden society against bad "black swan events" (and in this regard Taleb also does not give much advice -- more than I was able to do but still not much -- since his view is that since these events are fundamentally unpredictable it is hard to prepare for them. He does make some suggestions, but nothing very concrete. If a bad "black swan event" occurs because of it's unpredictable nature one can not say definitely if one could ever prepare enough. This is a bit fatalistic and Taleb gives some more insight into how to harden society against bad unknown unknowns.

      Anyway thanks for reading and for your very good and perceptive comment. I will try to have a look at your essay before the 30th. I am traveling for a day to my summer position at UNAM, but hope to settle in quickly and get back to reading the various essays I promised to read and had listed to read.

      Best,

      Doug

      Dear prof. Singleton,

      Wonderful essay! I enjoyed your path integral analogy very much, and I strongly agree with your opinion. Humanity should try as many paths as possible to reach the most successful one.

      You write "If on the other hand one funds many small scale projects there is a better chance one or more of these approaches will prove beneficial." This brings to my mind the rising importance of small science projects vs. big projects, which I discuss in my essay. I would be honored if you read it and told me your opinion.

      Best regards,

      Mohammed

        Great essay, Douglas. The path integral metaphor is beautiful and evocative (and among other things reminds me how much I loved Feynman's little book on QED). I completely agree with you on the advantages of social experimentation. I think Diamond is right to argue that Europe's fragmentation gave cities and states the space to experiment that eventually produced modern liberal democracy and capitalism.

        You anticipated and addressed almost all the caveats that struck me. As you say, institutional structures may not scale up (or down--it's easier in many ways, for example, to address the entire US health care market at once than in pieces). And politics constrains what's possible, since we aren't governed by technocratic utility maximizers.

        I would also add that while we may not have the ability to control which black-swan events befall us--this is what I write in my own essay--we can nevertheless make society more resilient to unexpected shocks. We can't prevent lightning from striking, but we can ensure ourselves against damage. In general, I think we should prepare not just for our median, best guess about the future, but for as much of the space of potential futures as possible.

        Again, great essay. It deserves to do well.

        Best,

        Robert de Neufville

          Doug,

          I agree with an electron experiment, but not sure it's doable. Photons do fine to verify my thesis, o consistent with the links you give and many others. It ideally needs a 'range' of settings, filters and p-multiplyers to give enough data points to prove it's an elephant not the present camel! I'd have thought predicting the unexplained Aspect and Weihs data may have carried some weiht! (lol) but it seems old doctrine needs to be crushed to death before anyone will even look. I'm not sure that's possible.

          Victor Vaguine's essay is interesting, including the Bell interview excerpt from 'Ghost in the Atom'; Question: "And you can't imagine a more elaborate arrangement that might expose these defects in quantum mechanics?"

          John Bell: "I cannot, but I hope that's only because of my limitations. I think it is very probable that the solution to our problems will come through the back door; some person who is not addressing himself to these difficulties with which I am concerned will probably see the light. An analogy that I like is that of the fly buzzing against a window when the door is open. It can be extremely useful to stand back from your problems and just wonder about for a time, and it is quite possible that those of us who are somewhat fixated on these questions will not be those who see the way through".

          He was almost certainly right. But unfortunately it seems even if a large butterfly shows the way in the flies will still insist there isn't one because the glass is still intact. How can that be overcome? I suggest a paper with a dozen or more authors may be needed to be taken seriously be editors. What do you think?

          Peter

          Glad to see your essay bouncing back after a probable sneak assault with 1's. I'm still getting them too. Hold tight for the roller coaster!

          Hi Doug,

          I'm very pleased that you liked my approach, as you appear to be the only other author to apply a physics metaphor to the problem.

          We do agree on the central point of your essay, which is to 'try all paths' instead of a centralized command and control.

          You mentioned that the path integral approach is a very close connection to thermodynamics/statistical mechanics. I have recently re-awakened to the fact that the Wick rotation will convert the partition function into a path integral and vice versa. I've spent some time on this amazing fact, and I plan to spend more.

          Perhaps we can continue this discussion offline.

          Congratulations on your current well-deserved high ranking in the contest.

          By the way I received the 23 May 2014 issue of 'Science' in the mail this morning. It has a whole special section dedicated to "the Science of Inequality". There may be a new field budding.

          My best regards

          Edwin Eugene Klingman