Dear Pankaj Mani,

Thank you for the comments. The use of complex numbers in quantum theory is a very interesting case, which needs a lot of discussion. My own work here is just on space-time structure, so does not touch on quantum theory directly. But I think it may help to recall that time-revesal is implemented in quantum formalism by taking the complex conjugate of the wave function. This immediately suggests a connection between the use of complex numbers and the temporal structure, indeed a connection with the direction of time.

It is harder to deal with quantum theory because there is no agreement at all about just what physical entities the theory is committed to, particularly what Bell called the "local beables" of the theory. The observable behavior of laboratory apparatus should be determined by the behavior of these local beables at microscopic scale. If you don't even know what these are, then interpreting the significance of the mathematical apparatus becomes essentially impossible. Pure space-time theory is a bit more straightforward.

Regards,

Tim Maudlin

Dear Tim,

Concerning you criticisms in my Essay page, some clarifications could be needed. For rotating frame in my Essay I mean the frame in which the observer sees the detector at rest (the absorber orbits around the source). Clearly, in that frame photons propagate in the radial direction. You are of course correct in highlighting that Equivalence Principle has local behavior. On the other hand, rotating frames generate the centrifuge acceleration in the radial direction cited above, which, in turn, defines a locally accelerated frame. Thus, it seems to me that the application of Equivalence Principle is completely legitimate. I also stress that the use of the Equivalence Principle in rotating frames in general and in the Mössbauer rotor experiment in particular has a long, more than fifty-year-old, history. In the paper of Kündig, i.e. ref. [3] in my Essay, which is dated 1963, one reads verbatim: "when the experiment is analyzed in a reference frame K attached to the accelerate observer, the problem could be treated [7] by the principle of equivalence of the general theory of relativity". Reference [7] in the paper of Kündig is the historical book of Pauli on the theory of relativity dated 1958. Thus, it seems that you were wrong in those criticisms. Here the key point is not the viability of the Equivalence Principle in treating this problem, but the issue that previous literature did not take into due account clock synchronization.

I will read, comment and score your Essay soon. I wish you best luck in the Contest.

Cheers, Ch.

Dear Tim,

I was reading your excellent essay with growing interest as you were getting closer and closer to the geometry of spacetime. You argue that standard geometry has been built on the wrong conceptual foundation to apply optimally to spacetime and you propose an alternative geometrical language. That is really promising as I am just looking for such languages. You finally claim that the Theory of Linear Structures (TLS) is capable of describing the geometry of continua [...]. Is TLS designed exclusively for a specific spacetime description or is it possible to describe e.g. Thurston geometries (the geometrization conjecture, proved by Perelman)? This is double-dealing question because the Thurston geometries, in my opinion, we can treat as a space-like, totally geodesic submanifolds of a 3+1 dimensional spacetime. In three dimensions, it is not always possible to assign a single geometry to a whole space. Instead, the conjecture states that every closed 3-manifold can be decomposed into pieces that each have one of eight types of geometric structure, resulting in an emergence of some attributes that we can observe. 3+1, in turn, means that the constant curvature geometries (S3, H3, E3) can arise as steady states of the Ricci flow, the other five homogeneous geometries arise naturally where the dynamics of the Ricci flow is more complicated and where topological changes (neck pinching or surgery) happen. That way the space flows with time and becomes a dynamical medium - spacetime. Then if TLS can really suit, what is the profit from that approach in comparison to the standard?

I agree that "Physicists seeking such a mesh between mathematics and physics can only alter one side of the equation." However if we use a proper correspondence rule with the empirical domain than it is really sufficient to discover the set of geometric structures isomorphic to physical reality. Details in my essay.

I would appreciate your comments.

Best regards,

Jacek

    Dear Jacek,

    As I mentioned in the appendix, there are topologies that cannot be recovered from any underlying Directed Linear Structure, but I am morally certain that these have no bearing at all on Thurston's conjecture, which deals with manifolds. I see no reason at all to doubt that every one of the manifolds that the conjecture deals with is generated by at least one (and in fact infinitely many) distinct Directed Linear Structures. (Indeed, by infinitely many Linear Structures, with no direction). And the way to implement the analog of surgery theory in the Theory of Linear Structures is completely straightforward: one specifies how two Linear Structures are to be combined by specifying which lines in one are continuations of lines in the other.

    As for the profit: the Theory of Linear Structures describes geometrical structure in finer detail than standard topology: that is why many distinct Linear Structures typically can generate the same standard topology.

    I'm not sure what you mean when you say that one cannot always assign a geometry to the whole space. I think you must be using that term in a non-obvious way. As you say, the theorem is about decomposing closed 3-manifolds into a set of pieces, each with a specified geometry. But there is obviously a geometry (in the sense of a topological and differentiable structure) assigned to all of these objects: that's why they count as 3-manifolds.

    Regards,

    Tim

    Thank you Tim for inspiration and clarifying as the TLS is new for me. I do not feel it yet and I have to catch up.

    When I say that one cannot always assign a (single) geometry to the whole space I mean this is not possible in three dimensions. This is specific feature of three dimensions pointed out in the geometrization conjecture. Differently, for two-dimensional surfaces you can freely assign a single geometry to a whole space. It was really not clearly stated.

    Best regards,

    Jacek

    Nicely argued essay, Tim!

    I believe your idea that time (motion) imposes linear ordering on space is fundamental. I suppose you know that the idea was fundamental to Newton's fluxions. And you have convinced me to look at your book on "The Theory of Linear Structures."

    In regard to geometry, I submit that your arguments may benefit from the Geometric Algebra mentioned in my essay. It may help you with the notion of areas defined by linear ordering of line segments, and volumes defined by linear ordering of areas.

    Respectfully....David Hestenes

      Thanks David! I have always been an admirer of Geometric Algebra...one of my students (Doug Kutach) became much more adept at it than I did. I hope to be able to understand it more deeply. And on a different note, I have recently been looking into Zitter theory. It looks like if one uses Linear Structures to model discrete Relativistic space-times something like Zitter theory must be the right picture of matter. (The fundamental structure of the discrete models is all light-like, so all particles have to follow light-like paths at micro scale.)

      Cheers,

      Tim

      Dear Tim,

      just a quick first reaction to your enjoyable text. We are all very pleased to live in a physical world not completely described by fluid mechanics, but in one where chairs, tables, even living bodies are possible. The step from the physics of this type of world to the mathematics of natural numbers is short and reasonable. But in this reasoning (which I am not questioning) one is actually going form physics to math, from object to description, from territory to map. The reversed scenario - from math to physics - is also interesting, and more challenging. For example, the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH) does that: it puts math at the roots of the physical world, which would neatly explain why math is also good at describing the physics: math--(is)-->physics--(described-by)-->math. However, MUH does not specifically address the key question of why there are objects (thus natural numbers) rather than just fluids, a circumstance that scientists should also put in the box of 'unreasonable' facts about the universe (nice topic for next year Contest...).

      In my opinion, the most convincing explanation for the emergence of distinguishable 'objects' in our universe, thus of natural numbers for their mathematical description, is, currently, the one that attributes a fundamentally algorithmic nature to the dynamics of spacetime, or of whichever discrete structure one figures sitting at the bottom of the universal architecture. We have today plenty of experimental evidence for the 'miraculous' emergence of distinguishable-denumerable 'objects' - object/background patterns - from the computations of even the simplest programs.

      Best regards

      Tommaso

        Hi Tim,

        After reading Tommaso's comment (but before I've read your essay), I wanted to chime in to say that the piece he describes as missing is precisely what I found almost 30 years ago, and touch on in my essay. The attached JPEG shows explicitly the quantum hydrodynamic analog within the Mandelbrot Set, showing where objectified forms appear just past the primary Misiurewicz points. This image is my Mandelbrot Butterfly figure, everted about (-1, 0i) such that concentric circles are laid flat.

        When I sent this image to John Bush, he replied that he found it 'quite interesting,' which I suspect is because the analogy with quantum hydrodynamics is pretty obvious. This research is still a work in progress. But if it turns out there is a robust connection, where M reveals the process of pinch-off and nucleation by which fluids form droplets - this raises the issue that Tommaso raises above. How could this be, unless the physical reality flows directly from the Math - rather than the other way around?

        All the Best,

        JonathanAttachment #1: Plateau.jpg

        ... and another point.

        You are against attributing an abstract mathematical status to democritean atoms: for being mathematically tractable (e.g. counted), they need some physical properties, that european mountains to not possess. You conclude that attributing a mathematical structure to physical items is not the same as postulating that they are mathematical entities.

        I do not know which precise physical properties can be attributed to democritean atoms (probably not color, volume, spin...), but let us consider an atomic event, or atom of spacetime, as conceived in a causal set, a model mentioned higher up in this blog. These are points, with no other attributes than those you assign to the ideal mathematical/geometrical point. They are countable - crucially, for recovering volume information - and yet totally featureless. I would say that their nature (their ontological status?) is mathematical, not physical. And yet, when collected in a causal set, or a superposition of these, they are conjectured to originate, by emergence, just about Everything - I mean the physical Everything.

        I find irresistible the argument that the deeper you go in magnifying the 'fabric of the cosmos' the more the familiar physical properties we are used to recognize tend to vanish. Brought to the limit, this means that physical reality pulverises into mathematics, or 'baggage-free', purely abstract objects.

        I guess you disagree with this, If I understand your points correctly...

        Sorry for the length

        Tommaso

        Dear Tommaso,

        I am a Platonist about mathematics, in the sense that I think there are objective facts about abstract mathematical objects, including facts that lie beyond our abilities to prove. (For example, Goldbach's conjecture is certainly either true or false, and if it is true we may never be able to prove it.) So there are all of these non-material mathematical structures, whose existence is independent of the physical world. (The physical world could not come out one way that makes Goldbach's conjecture true and another way that makes it false.) As I understand Tegmark's hypothesis, every single one of these abstract mathematical structures is a concrete physical world. I think that there are very, very severe problems of different sorts with that hypothesis. One is that the vast majority of possible mathematical structures are not regular enough to be described simply (think of all possible sequences of integers: for most there is no compact way to specify it). So if all mathematical structures are physical, most physical worlds are not compactly describable. And it would be almost a miracle that ours is.

        That is a completely different matter than the one about algorithmic dynamics. Here I think we agree: indeed, relatively few structures can be generated by a compact algorithm, just a relatively few sequences can be generated by simple rules. The search for such an algorithm is a form of the search for simple laws. And the simplicity of the laws should explain the comprehensibility and predictability of the physical world.

        Regards,

        Tim

        Dear Dr. Maudlin:

        I have downloaded a fair number of FQXi-2015 Contest Essays, and tried to read through as many as I can manage. Needless to say that my understanding of the essays is based on the framework I used to view them, and that framework is described in my essay http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2456 .

        Simply put, I view the world "analogically," as contextually sensitive set of duals: i.e. I frame Wigner's Refrain of mathematics and physics as freedom and determinism (among others I can choose) and then try to understand Dr. Maudlin's:

        (1) "Wigner's question is this: why is the language of mathematics so well suited to describe the physical world? A proper answer to this question must approach it from both directions: the direction of the mathematical language and the direction of the structure of the physical world being represented. In order for the language to fit the object in a useful way the two sides have to mesh."

        (2) "Physicists seeking such a mesh between mathematics and physics can only alter one side of the equation. The physical world is as it is, and will not change at our command. But we can change the mathematical language used to formulate physics, and we can even seek to construct new mathematical languages that are better suited to represent the physical structure of the world."

        Given my formulation of Wigner's Thesis, there is nothing that I can disagree with Dr. Maudlin's views as expressed in the two paragraphs above, but I like to know how the "meshing" might be accomplished in the project.

        Regards,

        Than Tin

        Dear Tommaso,

        I missed the second post, so a comment. I am perfectly happy with the sort of ideas in causal sets, or with point-particles or point-events. Mathematically, an infinitude of different causal graphs exist as abstract objects. If one of these accurately describes the physical universe, it is because the physical universe is composed of physical point-like entities. If one denies the difference between the abstract mathematical objects and the physical objects, then I suppose one ends up with Tegmark's view, which has insuperable difficulties. There are all sorts of mathematical objects (e.g. operators) that can be used to describe physical things (e.g. time evolutions) but are not themselves physical things.

        Physical point-event are certainly stripped down: they have little in the way of intrinsic physical characteristics. But that does not make them abstract in the sense that mathematical objects are. It just makes them have few physical characteristics.

        Regards,

        Tim

        Hi Tim,

        Nice essay. I will have to read more about your Theory of Linear Structures at some point. It seems to have some similarity to what Kevin Knuth has done with posets, and with some of the things I'm doing right now with information orders on domains (building on the domain work of Keye Martin -- not sure if you are familiar with any of it).

        I think you also hit on something interesting in regard to this idea of counting and how it relates to a physical ontology. One could argue that, even if the universe is entirely continuous, our ability to measure it to arbitrary accuracy is necessarily discrete and thus the integers match up well with that discreteness (which interestingly links back to a previous FQXi essay contest). Just a thought.

        Anyway, I nevertheless must admit that I didn't find your argument convincing in general. It seems to miss some subtleties. Perhaps these subtleties are addressed in your larger work on the topic, however. For instance, I disagree with you on a key point: I do think that how different branches of mathematics relate to one another, has a direct bearing on how mathematics relates to the physical universe. How could it not? If you are familiar with category theory or topos theory, think about how such theories describe both mathematics and physics and their inter-relationships.

        I had a few minor quibbles as well. In the example you gave of a universe describable entirely via fluid mechanics and dynamics, you would still be faced with the distinction of "something" versus "nothing" which maps quite naturally to 1 and 0 respectively. Integers are an elementary extrapolation from there.

        I also am not particularly awed by the fact that results in semi-stable elliptical curves were used to prove Fermat's Last Theorem. While I am not deeply familiar with the details of Wiles' proof, in some sense both elliptic curves and Fermat's Last Theorem deal, on some level, with polynomials. Certainly the connection is not obvious, but neither is it all that shocking, at least to me.

        Cheers,

        Ian

          Dear Ian,

          Thanks for the comments. Let me try to address some of them.

          There are surface similarities to how one treats discrete spaces or space-time using this formalism and what is done in Causal Set theory (which also uses posets), but the actual details turn out to be quite different. Of course, I did not have the space to go into that here, and it is not even in the book that is out, which deals solely with the math. The second volume will apply the math to physics, and it will be done there.

          I friend of mine pointed out that for another reason there are countable things even in a fluid mechanics continuum: there can be discrete vortices. (There will be problems counting when they merge, but still they can be stable and discrete over long periods.) So the claims about fluid mechanics is too strong.

          I think you misinterpreted the claim about the bearing of different branches of math on one another. Of course that has implications for the connection between mathematics and the world! My point was that if one branch has unproblematic relation to the physics, then any other mathematical structure which connects to the unproblematic one will inherit a comprehensible bearing on physics. In this case, I said that Wigner's problem is solved without remainder. I just wanted to separate puzzlement about why one branch of pure math bears on another from the question of why any math bears on physics.

          The example of Fermat was just illustrative: maybe the connection is not so obscure. Like you, I do not know the details. Take the Moonshine conjectures then: certainly mathematicians were surprised about the connections between group theory and the Fourier expansion there. But if the physics were using the group theory in some obvious way, the purely mathematical connection would make the Fourier expansion relevant to study.

          Cheers,

          Tim

          Dear Prof. Maudlin.

          Despite some interesting ideas, you paper pressuposes what it was supposed to explain. As I see it, there is nothing, absolutely nothing intrinsically mathematical in brute nature. Take for instance number. Given any, any!, amount of objects, no matter how sharply distinct one from another, from a certain perspective, there's no number naturally attached to it independently of a unit determination, or, which is the same, a concept which tells us what is it that we are numbering. So, numbering is a conceptual operation and concepts are creatures of ours. In my paper ("Mathematics, the Oracle of Physics") I approached the question of the applicability of mathematics in science from a transcendental perspective. Since nature "out there" has nothing intrinsically mathematical about it, how come that mathematics has anything to do with our theory of nature? From my point of view, the answer to this question requires showing how by a series of constituting acts a suitable mathematical representation of nature is constituted from brute sensorial data. Once this is done the applicability of mathematics in physics is, as I've argued, just an instance of the applicability of mathematics in mathematics itself (in your paper you explicitly reject this identification). In short, I don't think your perspective is radical enough from a truly philosophical perspective. You take too much for granted and embrace too many idees recues. Thank you! Best! Jairo Jose da Silva

            Dear Jairo Jose de Silva,

            The main contribution in the essay does not concern the application of numbers to physical states, but rather the application of geometrical descriptions. I used enumeration as an example, but it is not the main focus. So the issue of a "unit determination" never arises. Perhaps you do not find the ideas radical enough--one can try to be more radical--but the notion that space-time has an intrinsic geometrical structure is coherent and consistent. Given the right geometrical concepts, one can also see how temporal structure can generate such a geometry.

            The problem with "transcendental" arguments, at least as Kant deployed them, is that they were supposed to explain how we can have various sorts of a priori knowledge. But as it turns out, we just don't have that knowledge. So the transcendental approach does not fit with what we now know.

            Regards,

            Tim Maudlin

            Tim,

            You say that "If there are physical items so constituted as to be solid objects, held together by strong internal forces and resistant to fracture and to amalgamation, then they will be effectively countable"; and that "The relevance of the theory of integers for physics is unproblematic so long as the way that physical items are being counted is conceptually sharp."

            But counting implies making distinctions (1) and counting is necessarily a multi-step procedure, - so who or what is performing the counting procedure?

            Lorraine Ford

            1. "What is a Number?" by Louis H. Kauffman, http://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/NUM.html

              Dear Lorriane,

              I would not say that a sharply defined enumeration requires any agent or anyone performing anything at all. What is required is the existence of a well-defined map from a physical situation to the integers, and the question is what physical characteristics the situation must have for the map to be well-defined. If I put a bunch of jelly beans in a jar and say there is a definite, exact number of jelly beans in the jar, that is true whether or not anyone ever counts them or goes through any multi-step procedure. It is because there already exists a definite number of jelly beans in the jar that if we want to find out how many there are, it does not matter who does the counting as long as they count correctly, or how they do it. The number they come up with will be the number that is already there before they start counting. If the jelly beans start to melt and merge then (again quite apart from anyone doing anything) the conditions required for a definite number may no longer obtain.

              Regards,

              Tim