Edwin,

Thank you for reading my essay and thinking about it in so much detail. Your participation in this contest through your essay and your engagement with other authors is exemplary.

The following is how I see things, if it differs from your view I may be wrong :-)

I agree that a lattice is not a good pregeometry. Matrix models are much more interesting, but I expect some principle from algebraic geometry to provide the real answers.

You compare energy with information. Which is more fundamental? I think the answer is that these two things are of a different nature so it is hard to set one up against another. Energy is something you find in physics. You don't encounter energy in pure mathematics. Information on the other hand is ubiquitous. Everything requires information to describe it. It is important in physics but it is important beyond physics.

Energy is just one conserved quantity. If energy is important then it is in many ways still on a par with other conserved quantities such as momentum, charge and spin. Energy is linked to time, so if time is emergent then so is energy.

My point of view is that anything in physics is emergent rather than fundamental. there is no fundamental structure from which everything else emerges. If we find some principles which explain the universe then they must be natural principles of logic, information etc. I think it is important to avoid the statement that mathematical structures are the fundamental elements of nature. That implies a kind of platonic realm. That is the wrong philosophy. We need to talk in terms of logical possibilities and the relativity of reality to see it the right way.

You ask how a path integral can work without space an time. That is an interesting question. The path is the path integral is actually a path through the classical state space. For a single particle this is equivalent to a path through space, but for multiple particles or fields it is something higher dimensional. The path can easily be replaced by more abstract constructs in the absence of space. What about time? The path integral is a sum over all possible ways the universe could be. We often call these "histories" but it does not necessarily imply the existence of time. The terminology is a bit misleading in that respect. I have looked at path integrals which are sums over all configurations of random graphs or random matrices with no explicit time element. Time may emerge in such models if the parameters are just right. I don't consider time to be an essential fundamental feature of the universe. It seems much more natural to me that it would be emergent.

Thanks again for you extensive comment and good luck in the contest.

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

    I'm glad you like the Ruykeyser quote. I first used it 20 years ago to express some of these ideas and it seemed to fit for this contest.

    It is not surprising that you like many of my ideas. I nicked a few of them from you!

    I am with you on the rematch idea. As soon as the discussion starts and the questions come in I am reminded of all the things I should have included to make the ideas clearer. This is why the discussion is so important. As you know the winners are encouraged to expand their essay for the compendium publication but that is not seen by everyone.

    The ideas in the more technical section are not as difficult as they appear. The problem is just my inability to explain them in few words.

    As always the best solution would be to write a longer paper, and there is always the next contest.

    "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

        Wayne, thanks for your comment.

        I think the passage from the algebraic meta-laws I describe to the standard model at low energy will require some arbitrary choices from a landscape of possibilities. Because this happens at very high energy we will need some new experimental input to get the details. This could come from a new collider, proton decay, inflation, dark energy observation or something else. Unless experimenter's luck changes this will not happen tomorrow. Nevertheless I think there is a lot of exciting theoretical work that can be done in the near term, and of course I could turn out to be wrong about the landscape.

        Thanks for your feedback,#

        If you like the "nothing = everything" idea you should read the essays of Marc Séguin. I was inspired by his contributions in a previous contest. Perhaps he also expresses it better than I do avoiding the misinterpretation you point out.

        Hopefully I will have time to read your essay in the last few days.

        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.

          Thanks for your comment, you asked

          "what story leads from here to the situation of our current universe"

          I think it is necessary to think in terms of each persons experience rather than just the whole universe. My experience is different from yours. We are connected but not the same. We have some common information about the world, but there are also things you know that I don't and vice versa. We each have our own story, equally real.

          In quantum mechanics the world is described by a huge Hilbert space of possibilities. Many parts of that space are totally alien to us, yet when we do calculations we must sum over everything. We must consider all paths, all stories. If we don't then the sum is incomplete and the total probability of all possible outcomes is less than one. Whether people like it to not, quantum mechanics says all possible worlds must be counted and added into the sum. No possible story can be ignored. no matter how remote from our experience it is.

          I don't think anything we are familiar with in the universe is really fundamental. Everything is just a subplot in our story. It is information for us about our experience of reality, but not for all possible realities. Information is related to probabilities. All experiences are possibilities, reality is relative. There are even things that are real for you that are not real for me, but our lives are so strongly entangled that these things are barely perceptible. Other realities that are more remote from us can be very different. reality is a balance between the number of possible combinations that match are experience and the probability derived from the amount of information available to us.

          This leads to complexity, and in complexity a principle of universality emerges. This defines the algebraic meta-laws around which all possible experiences self-organise. It is the origin of the symmetries that make the world comprehensible. It means that the laws of physics can be the same at all places and at all times. Without such symmetry nothing would be predictable and our experience of reality would be nonsensical. spacetime geometry is emergent along with the spectrum of elementary particles and the physical parameters that make evolution of life possible. These are chance events but all possibilities are out there, and we are connected to them. It is this that gives meaning to our experience.

          Philip,

          The well-founded approach I use, and the algebraic group, replicate QC/ED quite well... no need for exploring an unknown 'landscape'.

          {I found the band-like solution at the conformal boundary of the string theory landscape! ;}