Gill's wordy reply support's Karl Hess's claim that Gill "makes himself a pretzel" to defend his views while disparaging constructive alternatives with irrelevant misdirection.

" ... Bell was very aware of the role of time, and gave specific experimental instructions so that one would *not* be able to blame a violation of his inequality on time".

Uh ... yeah. That's the core of what Hess-Philipp (and I) have been saying. The Bell-Aspect program does no more than prove its own assumptions.

Gill's "friend" Han Geurdes is cited (not quoted) as an example of a trivial proof that "The free will to choose both a proposition and the negation of that proposition is contradictory of free will in any physical sense." And I have discussed this with Han -- it is in fact, Gill himself who characterized the proof as 'trivial,' in the PubPeer discussion to which he refers, and I happen to agree with the characterization. The fact that it is trivial only underscores its importance to measure theory.

I have never "plugged" Joy Christian or anyone else. It is Gill who is so enamored of personality cults that he confuses science with scientist. At any rate, Joy Christian's program does not contradict the contents of the essay -- I just didn't need it to make my point.

Time and events to follow will reveal whether "the essayist knows what he is talking about." And whether the voice of authority is stronger than rational science.

Tom

Hi Fred,

Yes. Except that one cannot realize the full rotation in less than 4 dimensions. Early on, what made Joy's framework attractive to me is that it is compatible with Minkowski space. I tried every way I knew to create discontinuity in the result and thus falsify it. This is the same approach Gill uses in "finding" a nonexistent algebraic error.

And even though David Hestenes has been silent on the issue -- I cannot justify an alleged error based on quaternion algebra, when Christian clearly extends the measure space to octonions. "Spacetime algebra," therefore, fulfills time evolution without having to refer to time, given the extended measure space.

Best,

Tom

I have never doubted Richard Gill's sincerity and expertise in defending Bell's theorem orthodoxy. He is certainly misguided, though, in his assumption that Bell's Bertlmann's Socks analogy eliminates the issue of a missing time parameter.

Consider Bell's illustrations 4 & 5. Bell (and Gill) would have us believe that the Stern-Gerlach magnet rotation produces separated groups (quantum mechanical pattern) of particle detections as a result of fundamental quantum non-locality.

Einstein, however -- using the mathematical convention of Minkowski space -- never considered this spatial parameter independent of the time parameter. The problem arises in the microscopic scale. Every point of spacetime in relativity carries its own clock independent of scale, a point that Karl Hess and Walter Philipp made quite elegantly to apply on the quantum microscopic scale, and which Gill's (with Weihs, Zeilinger and Zukowski) criticism -- despite his claim -- fails to refute.

A modified version of the 2-slit experiment (Young), where particles are sent one at a time through the slits -- and nevertheless arrange themselves in the classical wave interference pattern as if each particle "knows" where the other went -- is local and time dependent. It is unmotivated, other than by mere assumptions of quantum entanglement and non-locality, that measurement scale affects hidden-variable continuity in the spacetime subspace of local measure. (I have an existence proof of this claim that I am not yet ready to discuss publicly.)

In the words of Hess-Philipp " ... a properly chosen sum of what we call setting dependent subspace product measures (SDSPM) does not violate Einstein-separability and does lead to the quantum result ..."

Tom

Bertlmann's Socks link: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/jpa-00220688/en/

Tom,

I thought your approach to the essay topic via the mathematics of probabilities was rather challenging in the first place, and it is provocative of further questioning of what we *do* with math. On the surface its quite a simple thing to correlate probabilities to a space frame, like throwing darts. But having come to understand some of your theoretical thinking, you are reaching well beyond that concept.

I have known a number of people for years whom, once I dealt with it enough working with them, I came to recognize that they don't see things in a geometric sense though they are quite adept at shooting pool, operating cranes, or racing automobiles. They might rough out a sketch on a scrap of paper of how they want a site laid out for a small footer and spacing pilasters, but there will be no proportion at all in the sketch and it will as likely show the short dimension of a rectangle as the longer length. It is the numerical relationship that they see and the actual spatial relationship only in a moment to moment instinctive reaction. The final result, here to there.

There have been recent advances in brain mapping and studies of mathematic abilities that make me wonder. Even though algebra comes from geometry, do we as a species have an inherent disjunct between our spatial perception with its temporal dimension, and the perception of mathematical relationships in an abstract dimension? Brain scans of 'math whizzes' at work show areas larger than common, consuming high levels of oxygen. But is that only in the abstract, does it correspond to a sense of spatial environment?

That correspondence at a foundational level is what you seem to be driving at in your essay. And a perceptual lack of such a correspondence almost guarantees a perception of non-locality as the reality. Good luck getting that across, jrc

John, you are leaving your footprints on my mind, and I do appreciate it.

I am at work on a paper -- partial draft attached -- that shows rigorously and conclusively how Gill et al, fail to refute Hess-Philipp. They got it wrong, because their assumptions based on Bell's theorem are wrong.

Gill claims, "They forgot one of three subscripts somewhere deep in the computations and failed to normalise a measure to be a probability measure."

Gill fails to realize that normalization of a complete function in spacetime -- which is deterministic -- is not equivalent to normalization of an algebraic function in probability space. The attachment explains.

All best,

TomAttachment #1: Special_relativity_and_the.pdf

Dear Tom

Thanks for adding the link to Bertlmann's socks! Required reading for anyone interested in Bell and all that.

You mentioned: Hess-Philipp " ... a properly chosen sum of what we call setting dependent subspace product measures (SDSPM) does not violate Einstein-separability and does lead to the quantum result ..."

Unfortunately, their mathematical proof contained a fatal error. As of course it had to: if their model had been correct, it would have contradicted Bell's theorem. Of course, not many people actually worked through the pages and pages of computations using all kinds of advanced math stuff.

Before promoting the Hess-Philipp construction you should take a look at http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0204169 (Europhys. Lett. (2003) 61, 282-283) and http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0208187 (PNAS 2002, 99: 14632-14635). Hess and Philipp did acknowledge their mistake in one of their many later publications and came up with an incredible story about some elements of reality not being elements of reality and how hard it was to decide what was real and what was not real! Because they did need a *nonlocal* hidden variable to get their maths to work. Hence it was obviously not an element of reality. (I guess that Walter Philipp, the mathematician, realised that there was a mathematical error; I suspect that Karl Hess, the physicist, left the hard math stuff to his friend and colleague).

Well that sounds to me like BS. But of course, people like those guys must always be right.

Richard, I do not share your disparaging opinion of Hess and Philipp.

Computability is an issue separate from elements of reality. I understand the difference between nonlocal hidden variables (string theory is a theory of nonlocal hidden variables) and local realism. If we take Einstein on his own terms ("all physics is local") then metaphysically real elements are also local.

Our latest posts crossed. My attachment explains why I think you are wrong about the Hess-Philipp program. I don't see that you even addressed separability -- it is not at all a matter of experimenter choice.

Best,

Tom

A good example of how Bell (and Gill et al) confuse local realism with non-local probability is the abuse of terminology, Gill's "non-local distribution."

There is no such thing as a non-local probability distribution in a physical model. In fact, a demonstration of this fact is integral to Hess-Philipp's introduction of the time parameter.

John Cox has an elegant way of bringing the issues in line with everyday experience.

Having devoted part of my misspent youth to the pool table, John's reference to the relation between shooting pool and moment-to-moment instinct got me thinking about Hess-Philipp's timelike correlated parameters (TLCPs) .

Because initial condition changes with time, moment-to-moment action (event by event in QM simulation terms) avoids action at a distance " ... by letting the probability measure be a superposition of setting-dependent subspace product measures with two important properties: (i) the factors of the product measure depend only on parameters of the station that they describe, and (ii) the joint density of the pairs of setting-dependent parameters in the two stations is uniform."

The multiple time scales of a pool game range from the interval of contact of hand with cue, cue with cue ball, cue ball with object ball, ball with rail, etc. These are well understood causal events whose outcomes are all dependent on initial condition and energy content in the specified interval.

Gill, et al, criticism of Hess-Philipp completely avoids the causal framework -- they claim, " ... "(Hess-Philipp) forgot one of three subscripts somewhere deep in the computations and failed to normalise a measure to be a probability measure" -- which is completely irrelevant to the point made by H-P above (and well supported by the mathematics of the paper). Normalization of probability density in a time dependent causal relation is independent of energy density and initial condition. Hess-Philipp show that initial energy condition determines joint probability -- while Gill et al avow that (" ... because of Bell's theorem" as Gill claims) probability is prior to measurement. The measurement protocol of Bell-Aspect merely demonstrates its own prior conclusion.

While Gill et al are completely off the mark in convincing themselves that they have refuted Hess-Philipp -- the science of complex systems, in line with Bar-Yam's theory of multi-scale variety, supports timelike correlated parameters at multiple scales: http://home.comcast.net/~thomasray1209/ICCS2007PP.ppt

Tom

Tom,

I had meant to get back and discuss more about your fine essay. But time is running out, so at least I can give you an appropriate score.

Best,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

More should be said about why the Karl Hess and Walter Philipp PNAS paper of 2001 is a breakthrough in our understanding of time dependent systems, because it accents the physical identities among time, information and energy that characterizes complex systems -- and as the authors make explicit, the problem of decidability between Einstein and Bohr.

Criticisms of Hess-Philipp have failed to even address the key issues of Einstein separability and special relativity that drive the paper's conclusions. The critics know that these issues cannot be confronted head-on, because they are well-understood physical principles that cannot be refuted.

Let's return to a point I made in my essay (p.6), that Einstein's original quest for E = mc^2 substituted the Lagrangian (a system's energy content) for the E term, where E was then generalized to rest energy, so we get that famous equation. The continuous values of the Lagrangian, however -- vary with mass -- local measured. In reply to critics, Philipp-Hess simplified their explanation of the model (attached), such that " ... Imagine the time axis wrapped around a circle of circumference that corresponds to a time interval related to a simple measurement and normalized to 1. We suppose that for a fixed N each interval [(m в€' 1)/N, m/N ], m = 1, 2, . . . , N of arc length 1/N on the circle gets about its proper share of time measurement points over the measurement period." The authors go on to show time correlations that the critics ignore, and reproduce quantum correlations in a complete framework of distributed time-dependent energy/information. These results satisfy Einstein separability and special relativity in a way that the critics do not and cannot:

Because a continuous range of time-dependent energy values attends every classical measure, normalization of the time interval locally does not imply a global normalization (as Gill claims) -- because of the special relativity limit. Each measure carries its own time stamp, and it is always local.

TomAttachment #1: Walter2002.pdf

Tom,

I'm glad I managed to get to your essay. Again I found little to disagree with, but then I'm now down to speed-reading so resolution is reduced! There's also now little time for discussion, which I suspect may be a blessing, though our fundamental views may have more in common than is often apparent. Certainly I found the essay beautifully 'bookended' with Bronowki's quote (always a guiding star for my own work) and your concluding paragraph.

"In聽 this聽 game聽 of聽 unlimited 聽possibilities called mathematics, our bet is 聽 on聽human聽imagination."

As you're a mathematician I'm particularly impressed with that. I see you're struggling to make the break point so I hope my score helps.

best wishes.

Peter

    Peter,

    Thank you, that's very kind. There's no mystery to why my score languishes below the cut -- never in my memory, from the first time I entered these competitions (which dates from the very beginning), has a fully relativistic viewpoint in foundational physics gotten due respect, while some of the fringiest views in quantum theory have won big prizes. So I have long abandoned any illusions I might have had. It is enough that the FQXi forum gives voice to a minority viewpoint that it de facto opposes, and I am grateful to the Institute for that, even when I think it could do more.

    There is an even lower score than mine, given for a far better essay by Vesselin Petkov, and -- I expect -- is low for the same reasons. I am going to do a lazy thing, and quote Vesselin's reply to a recent forum participant, because it matches my opinion: " ... if Minkowski had lived to see the advent of general relativity, he would have realized, as a mathematician, that the mathematical formalism of general relativity implies that gravitational phenomena are merely manifestation of the non-Euclidean geometry of spacetime (not an interaction). Einstein made a gigantic step by linking gravity with spacetime geometry, but even he was unable to overcome the seemingly self-evident 'fact' that gravitational phenomena are caused by gravitational interaction (which, unfortunately, is still the accepted view in physics)."

    Things are changing. I got an Email from The Minkowski Institute Press just a few days ago that they are publishing Cristi Stoica's PhD thesis (congratulations, Cristi!) , which is relativity-based, with a perturbative path to quantum gravity (my own solution is non-perturbative, but we are pretty close).

    In regard to your own defense of conventional quantum theory in the Bertlmann's Socks analogy, I applaud your expansion of the pedagogy, and give high marks for that. It is deservedly among the best of Bell's output.

    If you don't mind, I am going to do another lazy thing, and reproduce this reply in your forum.

    All best,

    Tom

    We don't agree most times but we get to exchange ideas. It is good to rate those who are here come rain come shine and who have also contributed a nice essay. We continue our arguments (or 'quarrels') after the contest. You should now be able to make the list.

    Akinbo

      Dear Tom,

      I'm sorry but it's late and I don't have time to comment properly, except to say that I really enjoyed your essay a lot; I hope to be able to comment properly tomorrow if the system still allows. I believe too that Vesselin should have received more attention. For what it's worth, you have my vote.

      Alma

        Dear Tom,

        I kept some of the most beautiful essays for the end. Yours is really nice. I agree with many of your viewpoints, and you presented them so good. Many make confusion between Tegmark's MUH and mathematical Platonism, and it is great you clarify this. And the rest of the essay contains so many intriguing remarks. I hope your essay will do fine!

        Best regards,

        Cristi

          Thanks, Akinbo. Looking forward to it. :-) You got my upvote, too.

          Best wishes,

          Tom

          Alma,

          Your essay is an absolute treasure, as I commented in your forum. Thanks for reading mine.

          By the way, though the spelling is different, you wouldn't be related to one of my favorite playwrights, Eugen Ionesco, would you? :-)

          All best,

          Tom