A Universe Made of Stories by Philip Gibbs

If we are instructed by your essay we may stray from scientific methods. Why should governments and universities fund endeavors if nature is relative to the view of each observer? They can just say "tens of thousands of people have been trained in the sciences and you guys are more confused than you were a hundred years ago". But you say some very important things. There is a structure to consciousness and it draws on information. The information it uses is not always relative. For example most believe that atoms and the quarks they contain are the same every time they are measured. Electronic structure may be probabilistic and complex but it is consistent. I believe you would say that some symmetry causes this. I couldn't tell for sure but you might also believe that the structure of consciousness may cause this consistency. This is a very productive line of thought. I associate what MIT calls the unitary operator 1=exp(iet/H)*exp(-iet/H) with the structure of consciousness. My essay deals with the quark "quantum circles" that this operator describes. The quantum circles can be either information based or real time and energy based. The operator and its quarks are a symmetry. The consciousness that contains quarks, atoms and electronic structure has access to consistent information that it can shape into what it pleases including relative thoughts.

Thank you again for creating viXra (but I notice that you are able to use arxiv). My December 2017 paper vixra: Information and Reality, viXra:1602.0219v2 follows the line of thought above.

Phillip, I posted the above with too much haste. I re-read it and want to clarify that I meant no disrespect to you or your fine, thought provoking essay. I was reacting to only one of your thoughts, not your essay in general. I am sorry if it came across wrong. I don't know if you saw Tyson's concern that we have some leaders who ignore science as "fake news". I was thinking about damage control if there is criticism that science doesn't appear to be converging.

I was aware of the Bagina results and Mann, McLoud, Von Derau, but not the complete set by Rao. I suppose I should have done more of a heads up on this, but I have this small stack of drawings with calculations that are almost high school level.

This seems in some ways a bit similar to the covering problem. If I want to tessellate a plane with pentagons I have to deform them. If I have a dodecahedron I can form a plane by sending a point to infinity and the pentagons are deformed and I have an icosian. This gives metric data near the origin, but far out there is little data. I might think of then piecing icosians together to create a regular pentagonal tessellation of the plane, What then are the deformations necessary? I have to perform transformations on the pentagons, and what are transformations or deformations are required?

The vacuum is I think a sort of quantum time crystal. Wilzcek worked this up, where there is a periodicity of a discrete system in not just space but time. I make mention of this in my paper that will be coming soon. It is a part of my question with respect to tessellation of space with pentagons.

Cheers LC

I noted your comment to Gene Barbee's comment in Scott Gordon's essay.

Yes. We independents do it for our amusement. But, if one of us does get the beginning of a TOE a breakthrough, society and science will not know it. Or, will they?

A breakthrough means a new paradigm which the money people (the powers that be in science funding) wold consider it a challenge to their authority. So, society suffers because an advance means the society gains.

How does society become aware of the new paradigm? There are so many out there (just look at viXra) and most have almost no data or solved problems let alone predictions made and found.

I've been published in peer reviewed journal, on arXiv. But Now my model is just too radical (apparently). I no longer try.

But the model (STOE) has made predictions that were later found, explained problems standard models consider problems, the STOE suggested 2 experiments that were performed and it rejected wave models of light (a photon model produced diffraction and interference). Well, I still talk about it when I get a chance.

Hodge

"... a group with one dimension for every degree of freedom in physics ..." If nature is infinite, then it is plausible to assume that physics has infinitely many degrees of freedom. If nature is finite, then nature might have only 78 degrees of freedom. Consider 3 copies of a model of 26-dimenional bosonic string theory, yielding 78 dimensions of bosonic waves. There might be a boson/fermion duality theorem derivable from Wolfram's cosmological automation. There could be 6 "barks" or "big quarks" each carrying a barkload of 12-dimensions of information, yielding 72 dimensions controlled by Fredkin's 6-phase clock, thus 78 dimensions of fermionic information. Each 12-dimensional barkload might represent 4 dimensions of spacetime, 3 dimensions of linear-momentum density, 3 dimensions of angular-momentum density, 1 dimension of quantum-spin density for matter, and 1 dimension of quantum-spin density for antimatter. By redundant representation of information, it might be possible to derive an 11-dimensional model of M-theory and a 12-dimensional model of F-theory -- the idea is that the interior of the multiverse would be 72-dimensional in terms of "barkload" data, and the measurable universes would all be 71-dimensional and located on the boundary of the multiverse.

Phil,

"I expect to find this symmetry in a pregeometric meta-law that transcends spacetime."

That says it pretty well. Like the shape of a Lotus petal bespeaking the whole form of the opening blossom. In spite of the possibility that not even the universe always works perfectly. Merry Christmas and a Happier New Year. jrc

quote

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. That situation could change or

it could continue for much longer. Without empirical data how is it possible to tell if the answer is

string theory, loop quantum gravity, non-commutative geometry or something else? The theorists

can still progress by working with the few clues they have, but success will depend on guessing

correctly the answer to questions like 'what is "fundamental"?' If they don't know then they must be

prepared to consider different philosophical options, letting the mathematics guide the way until the

experimental outlook improves. 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. If those leaders say that symmetry is unimportant because it is emergent or that

geometry is more fundamental than algebra, other possibilities may be neglected. It appears to me

that there is a clear program that would combine the ideas of algebraic geometry with quantum field

theory. It just requires mathematicians and physicists to bring their knowledge together.

You nailed it !!!!

Dear Phillip,

I knew there's a reason I always prioritize reading your contributions to these contests. Excellent work, and you certainly succeeded in your aim of provoking the readers' minds.

I particularly like this sort of theory-independent view in terms of events: whatever the fundamental theory may turn out to be, it has to have events within it in some form, be those worldlines crossing, particles of all conceivable kinds interacting, string splittings or whatever. So let's not worry about those details for the moment, but rather, think in terms of those events, and the stories that can be told with them.

One tiny bit of criticism I have is that there's many deep and possibly controversial ideas that aren't developed in the way they deserve (although that is likely owed to the length restrictions, and I'm also aware that this is a criticism you could probably lob straight back at my own essay if/when it gets posted). In particular on topics where I perceive some confluence with my own thinking---like the relative nature of reality, or the idea that in terms of information, 'nothing' and 'everything' are really the same---I would have liked more discussion, just to see how somebody like you develops these notions.

But these are the complaints of one having been hooked by your ideas, and now finding themselves jonesing for more. Which, as you said, is really all you intended with this essay.

All the algebraic stuff has re-awoken that curious sense that if you could just take one further step back, you'd just see the big picture pop out. There are so many tantalizing hints and connections, it's hard to believe that there isn't some fundamental story to be told in these terms.

But I think that's for someone smarter than me to discover. I may get back to meddling with this some day (although my love of the octonions means that I'm skeptical of requiring associativity---alternativity is really all you need!), but for now, I'll concentrate on other matters.

"The mind itself is not fundamental. Neither are the biological processes by which it works, but the principles of information by which it functions are"

The central principle of Shannon's Information Theory is that, in order to reduce the length of any transmitted message, to the least possible number of encoded bits, it is imperative that the transmitter never send anything that the receiver already knows. For example, I don't need to keep telling you your name. But everything that you can predict, is a subset of the things you know. It follows, that everything that you can predict, is not even considered to be information, in Shannon's theory. That fundamental reality is enough to make most physicists apoplectic. They are searching for the truth, but as the movie said "You want the truth, you can't handle the truth." Because the truth is, the information content of most physical processes lies almost entirely within the unknown initial conditions, required to solve the equations of mathematical physics, not the long-sought equations themselves. This is what "emergence", emerges from.

Rob McEachern

Philip Gibbs

I thank you for this interesting article. I have been provoked in my thinking. We should, as you say, regard science as finding better, and better, approximations. You are also right when stating information as fundamental in the field of physics. It is dangerous to listen to only one guru, as you say.

Best regards ___________________ John-Erik Persson

Good luck.

Phillip & Andrew,

There is an implicit assumption when depending upon mathematics "to guide the way" for new directions in physics. That assumption is that our current mathematics is adequate to the tasks we attempt to use it for. If it is not, then we will find it very difficult to make much progress. Mathematics likely suffers from the same effect as you describe for physics - the pen and corral situation.

I will suggest that this is actually the problem physics, which tends to lead other scientific disciplines so all of science, is faced with: The mathematical tools we currently have are not adequate to the task science has put to it.

The limitations of our mathematical tools might actually be keeping us from seeing aspects of our universe, which would be even more reason to consider fundamental reviews of mathematics and its limitations (especially on how it is applied).

I believe we will find a guide to a new direction this way.

Don

Phillip & Robert,

There is an interesting assumption in information theory - that there is a limit to what can be compressed or represented by a 'unit' of information. There might be a limit, given today's mathematics, but will that always be the case?

How efficiently can I represent pi? Using decimal notation, it is an infinite non-repeating sequence. If I use pi as the base of the numeric system, then pi is 1 - possibly a tremendous compression of information, although not without its problems for other values. What if a new numeric system, that used different bases in the same representation of a number were found - might this supplant our current system?

If context and perspective can make such a difference in the presentation of information, can we be sure that the limitations of our current representational structures will not be radically altered in the future? Is a positional numeric system the optimal way to present the value of pi? Like optimization concerns in general, there might not always be an optimal solution. This could suggest there is no limit to what can be represented as (a unit of) information.

This also appears to be the implicit assumption of any final Unification Theory - that there is an optimal way (usually assumed to be mathematical) to characterize all phenomena in the universe. If mathematics cannot present an optimal solution then likely neither can physics.

Don

Phillip:

"The information that described the state of the universe is holographic, so it can be represented on a surface. This is the compressed form of the data. What we observe in the bulk volume is an uncompressed form with lots of redundancy in the form of gauge symmetry."

The information content of an emission, is not the same as the information content of the emitter that produced the emission. Every emission must travel through every spherical surface surrounding the emitter and with a radius less than the distance between the emitter and the receiver, if it is to ever be received in the first place. Thus, the entire information content of every long-range emission must be observable on those spherical surfaces. This is why the holographic principle exists, and why all long-range forces are inverse-square. It has nothing to do with the information content stored within the emitter or with data compression used to produce the emission. Assuming otherwise is a major misunderstanding of Shannon's Information Theory, within the physics community.

Rob McEachern

Don,

"There is an interesting assumption in information theory - that there is a limit to what can be compressed or represented by a 'unit' of information. There might be a limit, given today's mathematics, but will that always be the case?

How efficiently can I represent pi?"

There are two branches to information theory:

(1) Shannon's original theory has to do with how many discrete (quantized) samples are needed to perfectly reconstruct an arbitrary continuous function, such as those which might be solutions to the equations of mathematical physics. Shannon's Capacity Theorem specifies both the number of required samples and the number of required bits per sample, required to achieve perfect reconstruction. Thus, it provides the missing-link between the the worlds of continuous functions and quantized results. It is easy to show, for example, that setting Shannon's Capacity equal to a single-bit-of-information, will yield the minimum value of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. In other words, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle simply means that all observations must contain one or more bits of information. Otherwise, it is not an observation at all - just noise. That is why you cannot determine the values of two variables like position and momentum - in the limit, they only encode a single bit of information, between the two variables! This is also the cause of the so called "spooky action at a distance" and the correlations observed in experiemnts attempting to test Bell's Inequality Theorem.

(2) Algorithmic Information Theory, which deals with data compression, AFTER the data has been represents in quantized form.

The physics community has been mostly interested in (2), which is very unfortunate, since it has little relevance to physics, since it deals only with already quantized observations. But (1) addresses the question - Why are observations and measurements quatizable in the first place? - which is of direct relevance to the correct interpretation of quantum theory.

Rob McEachern