The direction of time in quantum field theory by Peter Morgan

hi Peter,

i enjoyed reading your paper. thanks.

iduhknow, something tells me you can cut a metaphysical two-step with the best of 'em and could have gone unscathed here.

re:

"I point out, for anyone coming by here, that the current issue of "Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics", Volume 39, Issue 4, Pages 705-916 (November 2008), is a Focus Issue on "Time-Symmetric Approaches to Quantum Mechanics". A number of articles that anyone thinking about the direction of time might expect to read."

thanks for that also, but i see they charge per article and there's lots of interesting reading here. i see they'd like us to vote. something tells me FQXi cold use some help. it'll take a while before i could get to the magazine.

regards,

matt kolasinski

Thanks Matt,

Some of the papers in SHPMP are probably obtainable in pre-print form, either from arxiv.org or from the Philosophy of Science archive in Pittsburgh. Search by author's name or by title. Occasionally authors post their papers on their personal web-sites, which is allowed by many journals; alternatively, e-mail to authors with a very brief, polite request for a PDF. Be clear what paper you want; don't try to engage them in conversation, but be friendly. The enclosure of published papers is part of how academia freezes out independent research, but you can develop strategies for obtaining papers. Public libraries sometimes have access to journals on a principle of public access, librarians often develop strategies for getting stuff for other research. There are local associations of independent researchers (usually mostly people on the arts side, but they know a lot about getting access). There's the National Coalition of Independent Scholars, to which many such associations are affiliated. These organizations are serious about getting (legal) access to library resources. Being an effective independent researcher is a serious, long-term business. If you can get your research to a high enough level, doors open more easily. Good luck!

There is perhaps a metaphysics to this? The Nature of Storage, Boundaries, and Access? Getting at it doesn't mean we understand it, sadly.

For something that could be seen as metaphysical, anyway it's a polemic against a metaphysical commitment to particles, see my "The straw man of quantum physics" pre-print on arxiv, cited in my FQXi essay. It's not much about time, however.

I enjoyed your essay a few weeks ago, but I regret that I can't see a way to use it --- I've become too focused on mathematics in the last few years. I'm likely going to vote for Gambini and for Jannes, but I haven't yet decided on a third (I commend these two papers to anyone who hasn't read them already). I can't see my paper making it into anyone's three restricted votes. A juried third prize also looks increasingly unlikely to me, which I want mostly for the associated invitation to FQXi membership. I'd better choose a third paper so I can stop being so interested in all this (or perhaps that should be obsessed), and get back to research.

hello again Peter,

thank you for the suggestions on accessing academic papers.

i still have a bit of reading i have an interest in accomplishing here.

re:

I enjoyed your essay a few weeks ago,

thank you very much.

but I regret that I can't see a way to use it

lol, yes, no 'hammer', no 'pry bar', no utility in that sense. just happy to get it read. the only 'utility' i might have hoped for in it was the possibility of stimulation of creativity through offering a slightly different perspective.

--- I've become too focused on mathematics in the last few years.

math's quite a romance. i'm particularly fond of geometries. wish i had more of a background in it. looking forward to a new form in the not too distant future, more fluid, doesn't look so much like a log jam on the platte river trying to describe simple things. those 'simple' things can get remarkably challenging to describe.

it's also remarkably easy to get lost in the math 'hardware store'. big store these days.

i may not vote. there's several here i'd like to vote for; setting a criterion for selecting one over another is proving challenging. i can see why some are interested in the contest aspect, but with the exchange of ideas here, i figure we're all winners.

best wishes,

matt kolasinski

Peter Morgan,

Those who hope I might be wrong in my essay would certainly appreciate you providing ammunition against it from SHPMP (39)4 special issue.

Eckard Blumschein

Dear Eckard,

Almost everyone who has entered this contest appears to have spent many years thinking about Natural Philosophy in one tradition or another. I would not want to have hopes that anyone else who has devoted a significant part of their lives to their research might be wrong. I hope I don't. As I said on your comment thread, however, I regret that I can't see how to use your methods constructively in my mathematical context. I'm afraid that extends to my also being unable to see how you might apply the (many) ideas in the SHPMP Focus Issue on "Time-symmetric Approaches to Quantum Mechanics" to move your own approach forward constructively.

Best wishes,

Peter.

Dear Peter,

When Peter Lynd admitted his hope my criticism might be unfounded, he understood that it has serious consequences. If time symmetry is an artifact then one needs no constructive suggestion for improving it.

Please find attached how everybody might check themselves whether or not he uses complex domains properly.

Hints to errors of mine are always welcome.

Regards,

EckardAttachment #1: 2_Microsoft_Word__How_do_negative_and_imaginary.pdf

Dear Eckard,

I'm sorry, but as far as I can tell your attachment says the same things as before, so I again do not see its application to my way of doing mathematics. I'm still not quite clear whether your comments are intended as Physics or as Mathematics.

If we are to have a conversation, I need you to engage with my constructive work --- cite sentences and equations from my FQXi paper and the papers that it cites and tell me why they are stinky bad --- because what I'm doing is not quite conventional. For example, I regard my algebraic approach purely as a way to generate probability densities, expected values, and correlations. I certainly intend my use of complex Hilbert spaces to be taken in an engineering way, much as complex numbers are taken by electrical engineers. Whether values in sample spaces associated with random variables are only positive-valued or may be negative-valued or complex-valued is not of much consequence for the role of an algebra for generating probability theory stuff for the sample spaces we use.

You might like Local Quantum Physics, because in that mathematics the (real-valued) sample spaces (that is, the eigenvalue spaces of operators) are bounded both above and below, not just bounded below (by zero), as you insist upon (although I'm not clear on the importance of this to you). The argument is that we only measure things on a scale, -5 to +5, say (or 0 to 10 if we add 5), +/- infinity are never experimental results. Boundedness of operator algebras plays a very important part in the analysis.

The relation of this kind of mathematical purism to the ordinary models of Physics is not completely understood, but, I would say, is only desultorily under investigation.

You clearly know something about signal processing, so let me ask you your opinion of Leon Cohen's work on Wigner functions? It's my impression that the mathematics of classical signal processing is rather firmly grounded in real numbers --- and when appropriate in only positive numbers, as when we deal with intensity rather than with field displacements --- with complex numbers only as a convenience. I look to this engineering tradition as much as I look to the mathematics of quantum theory.

Peter.

Dear Peter,

Thank you for your detailed reply. I will deal with it.

In the meantime, you might be surprised by implications shown in the attached part 2

EckardAttachment #1: 4_Microsoft_Word__How_do_part_2.pdf

This leads to the attachment.Attachment #1: 5_Microsoft_Word__How_do_part_2.pdf

Dear Eckard, I think that here you misspeak: "One must not simply add two complex physical quantities as if they were real ones. Real and imaginary parts are orthogonal to each other. Instead, one has to add their squares according to sin^2 cos^2 = 1." The addition of real and of complex numbers are identical in the mathematical sense that the respective definitions of the operations of addition and of multiplication for the real numbers and for the complex numbers form a commutative field (in the sense of elementary algebra). What you are referring to is, I think, the fact that the quadratic norm on the real numbers and on the complex numbers are different. One also has the fundamental algebraic difference that there is an element in the field of complex numbers that squares to -1 (of course, there are two, j and -j, to adopt the engineering notation you express a preference for), whereas there is no number that squares to -1 in the field of real numbers. The complex numbers are of course also isomorphic as a vector space to R^2, though not canonically; the latter, however, is relatively impoverished because it has no multiplication operation defined. The introduction of a norm is not strictly speaking essential to the complex numbers, although the topology it introduces is essential to complex analysis.

For what it's worth. I hope my doubts that the above will help are unfounded. Really abstract mathematical thinking is a foreign language that I can more-or-less understand, but that I'm not fluent in, so the above is not as nicely expressed as it would be by a native pure mathematician. Again, are you talking Mathematics quibbles or Physics quibbles? Peter.

Dear Peter, This is not yet my reply to what you wrote on Dec. 18. I just would like to clarify that your quibble detracts from the essence. Yes, I referred to a typical horror mistake of beginners to simply add measured magnitudes of two quantities, for instance voltage at R and at L.

I intended to say that one should use complex calculus with care. Fortunately nobody is a native pure mathematician who is unable to overlook things. When Bob the builder applies 345, he does not need the foreign language of allegedly abstract poor mathematics.

The next possible mistake I mentioned was to consider multiplication by j instead omega j as equivalent to d/dt. Doesn't one have to consider every frequency separately?

I only checked that Heisenberg, Dirac, and Schroedinger actually correctly considered n=1,2,3,...

I let it to everybody to ask for the meaning of x_4=ict.

Why do you call my criticism quibbles?

At first I found out that the inner ear performs a real-valued spectral analysis. I understood that the usual notion of time has been abstracted from the unilateral elapsed time. This turned out to be the key for unexpected simple explanations of seemingly murky matter in many disciplines including quantum physics.

By the way I came across with old deficits in the fundamentals of mathematics too.

May I ask you for help? I suspect that there is something wrong with the signal processing for single electron counting. Gompf et al. in PRL 1997 arrived at a result that was quite different from direct measurement with a streak camera and also unexpected. If you are interested, I will give you the details.

Eckard

Dear Peter Morgan,

I like your approach. I consider that some of the consequences, especially the hope of avoiding the renormalization techniques, by using Lie fields, show that your continuous random fields formalism deserves to be taken seriously.

Best regards,

Cristi Stoica