Michael,
Ouch! I bet you didn't even read my essay :))
Cristi
Michael,
Ouch! I bet you didn't even read my essay :))
Cristi
Professor Stoica,
[First my pledge: goo.gl/KCCujt ] The positives for your essay are:
-- This is one of the best and most accurate quick summaries of both the basics and the edges of particle physics that I've seen. You manage to get to Clifford algebras in just a few pages, and to do so in a way that I think gives general readers a fighting chance to follow your points and arguments.
-- Your knowledge of the underlying physics and math appears to be both precise and well-researched, though I admit I did not try to check up on a few assertions with which I was less familiar. But your expertise is persuasive, and you clearly know what you are talking about.
-- I admit it: I really liked that you went towards geometries and topics such as Clifford algebras towards the end of your essay, rather than taking the Deep Dive into the Planck world that is so common these days even after 40 years of abject failure. That to me says you are facing the problem in a clear and thoughtful way.[1]
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Negatives for your essay:
-- I was really looking forward to seeing where you were going with your holomorphic (holographic?) Indra's net idea. But alas, your essay seemed to keep deferring that part in favor of summarizing the history of particle physics, until Indra's net became just a page of mostly definitions and assertions at the end.[3] Since I pretty much "got" your holographic encoding idea way back when I first read your title and subtitle, the paragraphs defining what you meant didn't really add much, at least for me.
-- You did at least take a good shot at justifying why an essay on your particular concept for unifying physics was "sort of" an explanation of what fundamental means, which of course was the real question of this essay contest. But for comparison you might want to take a look at the superbly on-target essay by Crowther, topic 3034.
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Thanks again for a really nice read! I am already planning to keep a copy of your essay in my library, and to explore all those summary points you made in more detail.
Cheers,
Terry Bollinger (topic 3099)
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[1] I am not much impressed by any version of Planck-level physics, either quantum gravity or its offshoot of string theory, mostly because Planck level physics postulates energy levels that likely do not exist anywhere in the real universe, which in turn means they are not subject even in principle to validation or falsification.
Also, there is this problem that at the Planck limit everything sort of falls apart in ways that make almost anything possible, just as in logic you can prove anything from a false premise. For example, if in string theory you accept the pathetically procedurally incorrect (ask any mathematician) assertion that 1+2+3+...=-1/12, well, pretty much anything can follow mathematically from that point on. Even worse is what happened in 1974, when Scherk and Schwartz [2] took the Deep Dive from real, genuinely interesting, highly constrained hadron-sized string-like vibrations (see Regge trajectories) down to Planck level of gravitons, based solely as best I can tell on the observation that these hadron vibrations were spin 2, just like the hypothetical graviton.
That had to be one of the least justified and most unscientific leaps of theoretical faith of all time, but quantum gravity was "in" at the time, so the Deep Leap was accepted almost without question. And the result? Well, the string-like vibrations at the hadron level were incredibly constrained and likely (research was mostly abandoned) led to no more than a handful of solutions. By removing all such silly experimental-reality-based constraints and upping everything else -- energies and dimensions for example -- to the max, the placid low-energy strings of the hadron scale became little unleashed monster capable of absolutely anything, including the 10500 minimum estimate of the number of vacuum states possible in string theory. S&S's deep leap of faith ended up distracting generations of good minds away from real, experimentally attached physics, and plunged them instead into the utterly unverifiable and magically malleable mind-muck of the Planck limit.
Other than all of that, I like quantum gravity and string theory just fine... :)
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[2] Scherk, J. & Schwarz, J. H. Dual Models for Non-Hadrons Nuclear Physics B, Elsevier, 1974, 81, 118-144.
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[3] I still think you have a really interesting idea going on there. You may just that you may need more time developing it. I noticed that you did mention the holographic principle in your very last sentence, while carefully avoiding the word "strings". Since I do not personally think that string theory per se is even relevant to the mostly geometric holographic principle, perhaps your future directions in this area could end up defining a version of the holographic principle that is not needlessly tied to the perplexing paradoxes of Planck level physics. That would be nice, since I strongly believe that the link between string theory and the general concept of a holographic universe is not much more than an accident of people and timing.
Dear Terry,
Thank you very much for the comments. I loved your pledge!
You mention the Plank length. I am not convinced of this, because I see no evidence for such special distance. I think the Plank units arise because there are some equations which can be solved to get them, but why would they be relevant? If Plank length is the minimum length, then why isn't the Plank mass the minimum or maximum mass? So I agree with you. It may be possible to mean something, but I think it is too early, and people choose the Plank scale as some place where we will find new physics, especially quantum gravity. This reminds me of the hopes people in my country had before joining NATO or the EU, but nothing special happened :) It is true that the Plank constant itself is very relevant, and maybe the length would somehow be relevant regarding to the Bekenstein bound, but even there it is not exactly the Plank length, and there is nothing to suggest that the BH entropy is due to minimal length, because the entropy is derived simply from combining GR with QFT, neither of them having such length. As for the holographic principle, I didn't mention strings because I don't think the idea is necessarily about this, and there may be other explanations as I suggested.
The main plan of my essay was to propose two ideas, the relativity of fundamentalness, and the holomorphic type of fundamentalness, which I believe are new ideas relevant to the topic of the contest. It would have been easier to me if I took already existing data or philosophical concepts about theories in physics and discuss it from a new perspective. But I think that the problem with introducing the holomorphic fundamentalness was that required more background than other views on fundamentalness, both background in mathematics and physics, but also in my own work. Both this background and the discussion of holomorphic fundamentalness are too wide to properly cover them in a limited length essay (see for example my paper which is quite long and require much background). I hope to write someday an extended version of the essay, with additional data which I had to omit and better explanations.
I look forward to read your essay, and I wish you success in the contest!
Best regards,
Cristi
Dear Cristi:
I fully agree with your conclusion - "And there is no need for a mechanism to unfold the state of the universe out of the germ, since the germ already contains everything that happens in the universe, including the observer experiencing separation in space and the flow of time. .....No additional mechanism is needed to unfold the germ, unfolding itself is part of the enfolded."
The fundamental wholesome reality of the universe can be represented without an explicit notion of separated space-time. The same conclusion is unfolded in my paper - "What is Fundamental - Is C the Speed of Light". that describes the fundamental physics of antigravity missing from the widely-accepted mainstream physics and cosmology theories resolving their current inconsistencies and paradoxes. The missing physics depicts a spontaneous relativistic mass creation/dilation photon model that explains the yet unknown dark energy, inner workings of quantum mechanics, and bridges the gaps among relativity and Maxwell's theories. The model also provides field equations governing the spontaneous wave-particle complimentarity or mass-energy equivalence. The key significance or contribution of the proposed work is to enhance fundamental understanding of C, commonly known as the speed of light, and Cosmological Constant, commonly known as the dark energy.
The manuscript not only provides comparisons against existing empirical observations but also forwards testable predictions for future falsification of the proposed model.
I would like to invite you to read my paper and appreciate any feedback comments.
Best Regards
Avtar Singh
Thanks Cristi, here's the skinny version...
Are you familiar with Steven Carlip's ideas on spontaneous dimensional reduction? He claims it is a generic feature of a broad class of theories. Seeing this same behavior; I assert that the Misiurewicz points in M teach us about dimensional reduction, with the specific point of focus in my recent work being the one location that appears to model pure gravity (and which turns out to have exact analytical solutions).
Accordingly; this point displays an analogy with Schwarzschild horizons, but also with BEC formation. At various times when studying that spot, varying the algorithm to reveal hidden details; I saw a clear resemblance to one or the other but was reluctant to make a linkage. Since discovering the recent paper by Dvali and Gomez, and follow ups; I've found a lot of work presses that BH event horizon/quantum critical point analogy. So I am now running with that.
Thanks for your curiosity, JJD
Hello again Cristi,
I hope you notice the hidden remark above answering your question 'how does this work?' in relation to the continuation of solutions through the horizon. I briefly explained the Misiurewicz point analogy. I have just learned too, from Bill McHarris, of a recent paper by Susskind treating gravity as a phenomenon of quantum chaos, which appears to have a strong analogy to the work I am presenting in my essay. This paper builds on other work by Shanker, Maldacena, and others on a quantum chaotic limit. It obviously ties in with the progression to chaos in the logistic map as I reference relating to M.
All the Best,
Jonathan
Hi Jonathan,
Yes, I did some research in dimensional reduction, and I know Carlip's papers. In many approaches to quantum gravity it appears to be one kind of another of dimensional reduction. Such approaches start with some assumptions which are intended to lead to something like this, to make gravity quantized by perturbative methods. I usually find these assumptions to be ad-hoc, in order to get the right result. My approach to singularities leads to dimensional reduction without other assumptions, and several of the other approaches follow from this automatically. One of the results that follow directly was previously obtained in the fractal universe by Calcagni (see refs in the linked paper). Maybe his approach, and other fractal approaches, can be of interest to you.
Best regards,
Cristi
Hi Jonathan,
Thank you for the details, this is interesting, although I don't know much about it. You previously mentioned dimensional reduction, this is something I researched, I replied to your comment above.
Best regards,
Cristi
Dear Avtar,
Thank you for the comments and for sharing your views, all these seem intriguing. Good luck with the contest!
Best regards,
Cristi
Nice essay. Great to see Bohm's implicate order mentioned.
Just a little point, on the attribution to Sontag of Time is nature's way of stopping everything happening at once. From John Wheeler's wikipedia page: "Time is nature's way to keep everything from happening all at once. Wheeler quoted this saying in Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information (1990), p. 10, with a footnote attributing it to "graffiti in the men's room of the Pecan Street Cafe, Austin, Texas". Later publications, such as Paul Davies' 1995 book About Time (p. 236), credited Wheeler with variations of this saying, but the quip is actually much older. The earliest known source is Ray Cummings' 1922 science fiction novel The Girl in the Golden Atom, Ch. V: " 'Time,' he said, 'is what keeps everything from happening at once.' " It also appears in his 1929 novel The Man Who Mastered Time. The earliest known occurrence other than Cummings is from 1962 in Film Facts: Volume 5, p. 48".
Dear Dean Rickles,
Thank you very much for the comment! And for the information about the quotation about time, I didn't know about this, it's very interesting to see that it goes back to 1922! I'm happy to see that both Cummings' books are freely available online The Girl in the Golden Atom, The Man Who Mastered Time.
Best regards,
Cristi
Hi Cristi,
Fascinating general essay.I liked your questions about how to unify this gravitation with the geometry and Clifford algebras, like Hestnes you make a beautiful work.The indra net also corrélations are interesting, good luck.Best regards
Hi Cristi:
Congratulations. Excellent paper, well-written, concise, and thoughtful. Really enjoyed reading and agree with most of it. I have given you the highest grade it deserves. Below are some of my thoughts on and beyond what you have presented.
I agree with your statement: "The relativity of fundamentalness implied by different axiomatizations and formulations is just epistemological fundamentalness. ......... Or maybe it is possible that something more fundamental than these exists?" Hence, the fundamental ontological reality must be beyond the selected frame of reference (axiomatizations and formulations) that biases the relative reality or ontology.
What is fundamental is not a theory but the end state or physical reality it is supposed to depict or predict. A theory should be considered "fundamental" if the end state predicted by it is fundamental. Hence, we must define the most fundamental reality first, which in my view is the absolute Zero Point State (ZPS) that is invariant in space-time i.e. fully dilated with zero space-time. Since, a finite mass has a finite non-zero space-time, mass should also be zero in the ZPS. Such a fundamental state or reality would be immeasurable since it is absolute and not relative. A theory that predicts and bridges this absolute ZPS state with the relative (non-zero mass-energy-space-time) states of the comprehensible universe should be defined as the "Fundamental" theory. Remember, "Fundamental" refers to the predicted end state and not to the theory itself. You rightly state that quantum theories (QFT, EFT) predict arbitrarily large vacuum energy and hence are not fundamental.
In my paper- "What is Fundamental - Is C the Speed of Light", I propose the missing physics of spontaneous mass-energy conversion (as observed in wave-particle behavior) that bridges the observed relative mass-energy-space-time states to the ZPS while resolving the paradox of the missing dark energy that is revealed as the relativistic kinetic energy, the paradox of the collapse of the wave function that is explained via transition to the classical space-time from the fully dilated space-time when a measurement is made, the black hole singularity of GR eliminated via mass dilation at small R, and solution to other current inconsistencies as well as weirdness of mainstream theories as described in my book.
It is intriguing that in harmony with your described Indra's net, my model also depicts the universal reality as an ensemble of coexisting, complimentary (to the absolute, fundamental ZPS), parallel relativistic states corresponding to varying germs of mass-energy-space-time states of One Universe.
I would greatly appreciate your time and feedback on my paper as to which of your criteria it satisfies?
Thanking you in advance,
Best Regards
Avtar Singh
Thank you Cristi...
For your gracious attention and detailed thoughtful replies, you have my appreciation. I hope this excellent essay is among those awarded a prize. At this point; it appears certain you will be in the finals. You are more rigorous or thorough than I can be, your points make good sense, and they are well explicated. That would be three thumbs up, if I had an extra thumb.
All the Best,
Jonathan
Hi Avtar,
Thank you for the comments!
You said "Hence, the fundamental ontological reality must be beyond the selected frame of reference (axiomatizations and formulations) that biases the relative reality or ontology.". Well said!
Your other comments contain very interesting ideas as well, which I want to understand more, by reading your essay. Good luck with the contest!
Best regards,
Cristi
Dear Cristinel Stoica, fundamental is what has Foundation. Physical space, which according to Descartes matter is the Foundation for fundamental physical theories. I'm here to urge researchers to develop theory everything of Descartes in the light of modern science. Look at my essay, FQXi Fundamental in New Cartesian Physics by Dizhechko Boris Semyonovich Where I showed how radically the physics can change if it follows the principle of identity of space and matter of Descartes. Evaluate and leave your comment there. Do not allow New Cartesian Physics go away into nothingness, which wants to be the theory of everything OO.
Sincerely, Dizhechko Boris Semyonovich.
Dear Cristi,
Wow! (or maybe, as Neo would say in "The Matrix", Whoa!) What a densely packed, ambitious essay!
As always, your present a lot of fascinating topics in interesting and insightful ways. I like how you state right away that it is hard to define "fundamental", and that, anyway, "reality tends to ignore our definitions"...
Your analysis of the relevance of isomorphism to fundamentality is thought-provoking. By the way, nice illustration of isomorphism with the Sum 15/Tic-Tac-Toe example.
I like how you frame the astounding weirdness of wavefunction "collapse": "the wavefunction spreads and interferes, but if you catch it, you catch the entire particle, not only that part of its wavefunction you thought was there."
Nice discussion also of the relativity of fundamentalness, with the example of points vs lines.
And now, for the main idea: the germ/seed that can unfold into an entire universe, or even a whole set of multiverses... Intriguing! In the same way that a holomorphic function car be recovered just by knowing the derivatives of all orders at a single point, the entire universe could be recovered from knowing everything there is to know at a given point... That's non-locality with a vengeance! :)
I have to confess that, from the bottom of page 5 to the bottom of page 8, the density, complexity, and unfamiliarity (for me) of many concepts made it hard to follow your argument. I have downloaded your 2017 paper, "The Standard Model Algebra", and will certainly study it to get a better idea... I am fascinated by potential deeper-level explanations of the Standard Model, so I am looking forward to it.
In your ambitious footnote 8 (on free will), you write:
"If we want to turn the picture upside-down and consider that our choices also determine the germ, then would it be possible that our local actions determine the germ here, and by this the state of the universe everywhere?"
I find this intriguing, since it resonates somehow with my ideas about "co-emergence" that I presented in my essay in the last FQXi contest. You also write:
"Or maybe each agent is free, but if their choices conflict with each other, then the germs of the two agents turn out to unfold in distinct universes, so again their choices don't conflict with each other."
I also find this interesting, as it reminds me of the Q-Bism like idea that the Universe only makes sense one observer at a time (the theme of Amanda Gefter's fascinating book, "Tresspassing on Einstein's Lawn").
In closing this already quite long comment(!), I have two questions concerning the last part of your article, "Indra's net" (lovely analogy, by the way!).
1) You say that the information about the whole universe could be encoded at each point, in higher derivatives of the field at that point. By information, do you mean the laws, or the initial conditions as well? Or is it that the initial conditions are irrelevant because you are thinking of the whole universe as infinite, so every possible initial "local" condition happens infinitely often, so everything averages out to zero information overall in initial conditions?
2) You say there is no need for a mechanism to unfold the state of the universe out of the germ, since the germ already contains everything that happens in the universe... Is it a similar claim than when someone who believes that the universe is a simulation says that there is no need for an actual computer to run the simulation, since the "consequences" of the simulation exist whether or not it is run?
Congratulations once again for a strong entry. I am glad your essay is doing so well in the community vote, and I wish you good luck in the "finals"!
Marc
Hi Steve,
Thank you very much! yes, Clifford algebras deserve more attention! Maybe next time you will join us with an essay.
Best regards,
Cristi
Dear Dizhechko Boris Semyonovich,
Thank you for the comments, this is very interesting.
Best regards,
Cristi
Cristi,
Three generations are ensured by topological combinatorics. {I was glad when the 4th-gen theorists were excluded years ago.} I tried to illustrate this with a trecoil band in three 'flavor' states. Of course it is massive (knew that back in 1992 when I first published the idea) and oscillates, too! A massive oscillating neutrino is VERY fundamental in the model constructed.
Wayne