A Universe Made of Stories by Philip Gibbs

Hi Philip,

I like your open and expansive compilation of ideas on what is fundamental. A Universe Made of Stories resonates with me.

I made an essay that explains "the speed of darkness". Take a look and let me know what you think. You may want to add it to your collection of "fundamentals".

Thanks for introducing me to Muriel Rukeyser,

Don Limuti

Dear Phil,

Thanks for your response. We agree on so much. Not to beat a dead horse, but local energy is ubiquitous. Information requires structure and context/decoding. Description is secondary (in my opinion), not fundamental. It requires a 'model' or image of whatever is fundamental.

You find matrix models more interesting, but didn't the Heisenberg/Schrödinger equivalence show they are different perspectives on the same thing?

I agree that there is no fundamental structure from which everything else emerges. The continuum is not a 'structure' (I don't think.) I certainly agree that "it is important to avoid the statement that mathematical structures are the fundamental elements of nature." I formulated my comment as an attempt to address your specific requirements. The self-interaction equation does lead to momentum, spin, and charge (given the appropriate physical assumptions to interpret the math.) I don't think either energy or time emerges from the equation, but are inherent to the primordial field "described" by the equation. I think energy and time are dual and have no separate existence or meaning.

I'm glad you find the Platonic realm the wrong philosophy. I used to think you were a Platonist. I asked the "history without time?" question to see how you would answer. I expected your answer and I agree with it. We're getting closer in our old age.

Your comments and replies to people are a model for how this contest should operate. You have a very generous nature (probably accounts for viXra.)

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Dear Philip Gibbs,

Admittedly I mistook you for a while. With stories you meant histories, not levels, and the thoughtless use of "made" doesn't necessarily imply a creation.

The universe (in the sense of everything) consists of histories. Well, this was Shannon's and is my most fundamental point too. Therefore I rate your essay high.

Nonetheless I would like you to respect arguments that fundamentally differ from what you correctly called your "speculative view":

Shannon didn't speak of "past, present and future". As did he, I too exclude the fuzzy middle "present" between past and future.

You wrote: "Reality is relative to the observer." Doesn't already this differ from Shannon's opinion that in the assumed reality, the past is unchangeable?

Isaac Newton was born in the year when Galileo Galilei's live got history, independent from chosen point of view.

While I respect your almost mandatory view concerning symmetries, I can also not hide my suspicions concerning this topic.

Eckard Blumschein

Dear Philip,

Once again, you deliver a great essay. You start with one of my favorite quotes, "The universe is made of stories, not of atoms", so how could it be not great? ;)

Since we share very similar views on many things, I agree on a lot of what you said:

- Fundamental physics is barely more fundamental than the workings of biology, since our stable vacuum is only one of the possible options that can sustain a physical universe

- Feynman's sum over all possible histories approach is more fundamental than particles, fields, space and time

- Information about the events of our world and conscious experiences are stories, and there is a very strong case to be made that stories are fundamental --- reality is relative to the observer, and any story is real for its own characters

- Our existence is consistent with not one, but many stories (in my 2015 FQXi contest essay "My God It's Full of Clones", I used the analogy of the same highway carrying different road numbers)

- Ultimate fundamentality shouldn't be in any way accidental or arbitrary

- Nothing and everything are fundamentally equivalent (I love how you put it: 'What would it mean to have no information about the universe, to know nothing about its laws or its history? It would simply mean that all logically consistent possibilities are still options. With no information the universe is the sum of all possible histories, described by all possible laws of physics. In terms of information "Nothing" means "everything." ')

- The endgame of fundamental physics and metaphysics would be to show how our universe could have emerged "from the ensemble of all possible universes with no other fundamental principle to guide its choice of physical law".

I found the second, more technical part of you essay intriguing, but I must confess that it was hard to follow in its details.

Great job overall! I would also like to commend you on the time and effort you make in engaging with other participants in the contest. As I mentioned when I answered Jochen Szangolies' comment on my own thread, I found particularly interesting the discussions you had with him on your thread and his... some of the things that you discussed being sometimes even more interesting and pertinent to this year's topic than what you wrote in your essays... Wouldn't you agree that in an ideal world, each FQXi contest would be followed by a "rematch contest" where we could submit revised essays (or new ones) that take into consideration what we learned by reading and discussing each other's essays?

I am glad that you essay is doing well so far with the community voting. I wish you well in the final judging, and hope you get the recognition you deserve.

All the best!

Marc

"Ultimate fundamentality shouldn't be in any way accidental or arbitrary."

In physics, the commonly agreed reference t=0 is an arbitrary choice.

Dear Phil,

You have a gift for expressing your ideas in a thoroughly engaging way, so that even if I may not agree with some of them, it causes me to consider them again.

A few comments;

1. The metaphor of stories as the building block of the universe is striking. I genuinely wonder why no one seems to have thought of it before.

2. Beginning at the bottom of page 3, you write:

"What would it mean to have no information about the universe, to know nothing about its laws or its history? It would simply mean that all logically consistent possibilities are still options. With no information the universe is the sum of all possible histories, described by all possible laws of physics. In terms of information, "Nothing" means "everything."

This is almost the same as a description of what I have called the default specification principle, and tried to implement as a fundamental principle guiding the starting point for a derivation of the Feynman path integral from a novel kind of mathematical object which I call an incomplete spacetime vector in the essay I submitted here in 2015 (topic 2474, see sections 2,3 and 6). I believe the default specification principle, which I usually state as "the absence of an explicit specification entails all possible default specification outputs" is at the very heart of quantum theory.

I believe that the way you formulated it ( i.e. "nothing" means "everything") neglects a key ontic distinction between the first and the second, making it sound rather similar to something like "zero equals infinity" which is bound to get it immediately dismissed by many. Although I do not see the principle as an information-theoretic one, I believe the ontic distinction also holds for information. A reformulation which respects the ontic distinction is "Nothing actual means everything potential" but I realize that because formal ontic distinctions have no place (yet) in early 21st century physics, that this would not be on the radar screen of many, including yours.

3. I always have had difficulties understanding the reification of symmetry in theoretical physics. From my vantage point, the role of symmetries in physics is to represent regularities in nature which involve invariances under transformations. What represents to me a more fundamental level of understanding than that of a given symmetry is that of the object displaying the regularity represented by that symmetry. Consequently, even if it turned out that there was a universal symmetry, or a "huge symmetry in nature that unifies the symmetry of spacetime and gauge theory", and we understood it but not regularities in the physical structures represented by those symmetries, I would find that state of affairs still quite unsatisfactory. I would feel no different than Feynman's ancient Mayan astronomer who could predict the position of Venus but had no concept of a planet. What is your view of this point?

4. I was unfamiliar with the Lebesgue problem, congratulations on your solution. Now if one could only put the problem in a correspondence with the hierarchy problem to obtain guidance on solving it, ha!

5. On the last page you write: "The biggest difficulty faced by theoretical physicists of this generation is that positive experimental input on physics beyond the standard models is very hard to come by." I know this is the party line in HEP and I disagree. I believe that the conceptual building blocks to understand the both quantum mechanics and, to some extent, the standard model more deeply are already there, but have not yet been recognized for what they are. In other words, I see as the biggest difficulty discerning the deeper or more fundamental meaning of concepts we already think we understand.

This is, of course, easy to claim without concrete evidence, but it turns out that my own paper does serve as just such evidence. In it I try to show that length contraction, something surely most theoretical physicists feel they understand more or less completely, has a more fundamental intepretation which leads to novel realizations and deeper understanding. My entry is actually the first of a 2-part series, and the second part (regrettably not yet finished) will relate a deeper interpretation of time dilation (in combination with its analog for length contraction) to the default specification principle.

Dear Phillip,

You have quite an inquiring mind and put forth an oblique argument for ".. tensor product .. mapping ?(?) âŠ-- ?(?) â†' ?(?)" to replace SU(3)xU(2)xU(1) of the standard model. Of course such a group involves a set of particle which could (and certainly should!) be compared to those which we know to exist from collider experimental observation.

While you consider that step, you might also want to note that a subgroup of a cross product of two wreath products works well to replicate QC/ED particles and interactions. Perhaps you'd like to exercise your group theoretic skills and better describe the correctly symmetry-broken "subgroup"? I have a lot of notes on the subject ...

Anyway, your inquisitive essay seems to have wandered closest to a new insight as above. I am glad you wrote and hope your inquiries turn to more productive questions...!

Wayne

Dear Phillip,

You have quite an inquiring mind and put forth an oblique argument for ".. tensor product .. mapping T(V) âŠ-- T(V) â†' T(V)" to replace SU(3)xU(2)xU(1) of the standard model. Of course such a group involves a set of particle which could (and certainly should!) be compared to those which we know to exist from collider experimental observation.

While you consider that step, you might also want to note that a subgroup of a cross product of two wreath products works well to replicate QC/ED particles and interactions. Perhaps you'd like to exercise your group theoretic skills and better describe the correctly symmetry-broken "subgroup"? I have a lot of notes on the subject ...

Anyway, your inquisitive essay seems to have wandered closest to a new insight as above. I am glad you wrote and hope your inquiries turn to more productive questions...!

Wayne

Very nicely written, MR. Gibss!

Read and rate it.

Further comments are useless.

If you do have the time and pleasure for another essay, you can check this one

Respectfully,

Silviu

Dear Philip

You are just a nice master-writer in first, and also truly thinking man! I felt it is my duty always support you. Be well!

Best Regards

George Kirakosyan

Dear Philip,

I highly appreciate your beautifully written essay.

Your essay allowed to consider us like-minded people.

I agree with you. «We know that some physical phenomena can be derived from a more basic substratum». «Heat is a manifestation of the kinetic energy of atoms».

«Fundamental laws are not in any way accidental or arbitrary».

I hope that my modest achievements can be information for reflection for you.

Vladimir Fedorov

https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3080

Stories and Mechanisms

In the comments section of my own essay I have made the point that it may be helpful to adjoin to your 'stories' concept the idea of mechanism, as stories are underpinned by mechanisms (e.g. the use of FM signals involves complicated mechanisms to make it work) while mechanisms also have explanations involving what might be called stories. This just makes everything a bit more explicit. From this perspective, in regard to symmetry one might argue that this has its own mechanisms, a nice example being the creation of spherical mirrors by a grinding process which translates spatial symmetry into the symmetry of the mirror. Then I guess symmetry has its utility in the grand scheme of things, e.g. wheels work better if they are round!

Phil,

I am reminded of a poem I wrote for a close friend some time ago:

To Candy.

You are your own puppet,

A marionette

Whose moves

Have not been invented yet.

You are your own story,

A novelette

Whose words

Have not been written yet.

So I certainly agree that "Reality is relative to the observer."

Yet I also agree with Josephson that a mechanics must support reality, or all our work in mathematics is nothing but recreational, and our story is only that of a wasted life.

No doubt in my mind that your essay is the most meaningful in this "contest." You write: "Time then is not fundamental and if time is out then so is space." I agree. Time is fundamentally inseparable from spacetime.

All best,

Tom https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3124

Dear Philip,

Thanks for taking me on a pleasing little ramble through a series of intriguing ideas. I was sorry you didn't get back to your thought about stories, at the end... but I agree with you that there's still a lot to be learned from the strange combination of broken and unbroken symmetries in the laws of physics.

One thing I found striking here, which well describes the point of departure for the second section of my current essay: "With no information the universe is the sum of all possible histories, described by all possible laws of physics. In terms of information "Nothing" means "everything."

For me, the problem is that when everything is possible, there's no constraining context in which anything in particular is even definable, let alone measurable. So the question is, what story leads from here to the situation of our current universe, where so many different kinds of information are all definable and measurable in terms of each other?

There are two sides to the meaning of "fundamental" - one of which you emphasize: "a level of reality that is not derived from anything else. Fundamental laws are not in any way accidental or arbitrary. They must be as they are, because they could not be any other way." It's not clear whether this actually applies to anything in the physical world. Bu the other side certainly does apply - that is, things are fundamental insofar as they provide a basis for other things.

I argue that the complex structure of atoms is the basis for all observable information in our universe. Since that structure clearly depends on many deeper layers, I tell one possible story, taking an "archaeological" approach, digging out features of our currently well-established physics that require the least complex contexts to define them, and ordering them in a sequence of "pre-historic strata."

Though I haven't developed this thought in my essays yet, I think the reason so many different kinds of symmetry appear in physics is that symmetries mark a boundary between two levels of definition - a point where one type of information can be defined, but no context yet exists to define a related kind of information. If that makes sense, then this gives us a powerful tool for sequencing the strata.

I hope you get a chance to look at my essay and let me know what you think - not necessarily before the deadline for ratings. The feedback is more important to me.

Thanks again -- Conrad

Dear Philip,

I came to your essay just after unloading some thoughts on Bell's beables: me believing that they are (for Bell) the existents in any universe of discourse -- thus, for Bell, not always physically real -- though they are real for me in my favoured universe of discourse = spacetime, itself a real physical beable. Which is my excuse for thinking, before I'd left your first page: my other universe of discourse consists of stories, ideas, observations, etc. mathematics. The former in my native tongue (generally); the last [the best logic] in a universal tongue for us all.

I then stopped feeling guilty for my distracting thoughts when I saw your underlying math finally burst forth! (Though I'm still wrestling with p.7.) So, to cut to a few short stories: (i) You should expect a Xmas bonus from my highlighter supplier.

(ii) "If young researchers are all corralled into one pen it could turn out to be in the wrong place. The chances are they are going to be influenced only by the highest profile physicists." Like Bell and Aspect using a straight line to denote a NAIVE (and now ubiquitous) local HV theory when a simple classical theory [with a very elementary correlation] gives an informative curve equal to one-half the correct EPRB value: thus rendering the corrective remedy [a similar elementary correlation at source] devoid of false mystery. (See recent comments near the foot of my essay-thread.)

(iii) "It just requires mathematicians and physicists to bring their knowledge together" -- just like engineers! Mundanely, have a look at modern pressure-vessel codes.

(iv) Or, apropos your "just" requirement, just see the PS (below) in this [from my essay-thread]:

Background to my theory: Wholistic Mechanics (WM)

Whereas QM emerged from the UV-catastrophe ca1905, WM emerges from the locality-catastrophe typified by John Bell's dilemma ca1965: ie, seriously ambivalent about AAD, Bell adamantly rejected locality. He later surmised that maybe he and his followers were being rather silly -- correctly; as we show -- for WM is the local theory that resolves Bell's dilemma [there is no AAD] and proves the Bellian silliness.

So WM begins by bringing just one change to modern physics: rejecting naive-realism, true realism insists that some beables change interactively, after Bohr's disturbance-dictum. Thus recognising the minimum-action associated with Planck's constant, WM then recognises the maximum speed associated with light: for true locality insists that no influence propagates superluminally, after Einstein.

The union of these two classical principles -- the foundation of WM -- is true local realism (TLR). Under TLR, EPR's naive criterion for "an element of physical reality" is corrected, then the Laws of Malus and Bayes are validated in the quantum world. Then, via the R-F theorem ca1915, Born's Law is seen to derive from elementary Fourier theory. This in turn allows us to understand the physical significance of Dirac's notation; etc. Thus, beginning with these elementary natural principles, WM's universe-of-discourse focuses on beables in spacetime: with mathematics taken to be our best logic.

NB: Formulated in 1989 in response to a challenging article by David Mermin (1988), many leading Bellian physicists and philosophers have committed to review the foundations of WM and its early results. Since no such review has ever been delivered, I am not yet aware of any defect in the theory. Further, WM provides many ways to refute Bell's theorem (BT): one such is provided on p.8 of my essay.

PS: To those who dismissed my essay due to an alleged typo in the heading, I follow C. S. Peirce (absent his severity): "It is entirely contrary to good English usage to spell premiss, 'premise,' and this spelling ... simply betrays ignorance of the history of logic." [End of background story.]

Philip, assuring you and your collaborators that critical comments are welcome at any time,

With best regards: appreciating your thought-provoking essay, and (as always), thanking you for viXra.org;

Gordon Watson More realistic fundamentals: quantum theory from one premiss.