Dear Narendra,

Thank you! You said:

> "I am amazed that fundamental particles and their connection to Higg's Boson isproving to be an enigma. Can you throw some light on why we should worry about the mass of the fundamental particles to be explained using Higg's Boson as the source?"

I consider the masses of particles one of the greatest mysteries. Historically, to get rid of some problems of the weak interaction, such as it being not renormalizable, the electroweak unification was considered and a model was built. This was very nice mathematically, but it didn't explan why the electroweak symmetry was broken into electromagnetic and weak, and why the electron and the weak force bosons had masses. So the idea was of course to add some terms into the Lagrangian. And it turned out that including a scalar field which carries some weak force into the Lagrangian gives the desired symmetry breaking and couples with the particles to give them masses. The field itself has mass, and by coupling for example with the electron, it makes Dirac's equation have a mass term. Metaphorically, it is as if the electron doesn't have mass, but carries with it a part of the Higgs field having mass, to which is coupled by weak interaction. The idea works well, as proven by the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. But I believe there is a deeper explanation, which is geometric. If there was no Higgs boson, the Standard Model equations would have been invariant to conformal transformations, that is, changes the unit of length differently at each point. This amounts to multiplying the metric tensor in General Relativity with a function which varies from point to point. If we change the metric like this, the Maxwell equations, but also Dirac's and Yang-Mills, remain the same and their solutions remain the same. But if they have masses, this conformal symmetry doesn't work. So some physicists believe that the Higgs mechanism is in fact due to choosing a unit length at each point of spacetime, breaking thus the conformal symmetry, and there are some results showing that indeed this gives the same result as the Higgs symmetry breaking.

Best regards,

Cristi

Dear Narendra,

I borrowed the metaphor "Indra's net" to illustrate how the mathematical notion of holomorphic functions have this property that the whole is present in each of its points. Indra's net was mentioned in various Buddhist texts like the Avatamsaka Sutra, and was described in Cook(1977), chapter 1, page 2, in the following way (I mention this in my endnote 7, pages 11-12):

"We may begin with an image which has always been the favorite Hua-yen method of exemplifying the manner in which things exist. Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificier in such a manner that stretches out infinitely in all directions. Inaccordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificier has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring. The Hua-yen school has been fond of this image, mentioned many times in its literature, because it symbolizes a cosmos in which there is an infinitely repeated interrelationship among all the members of the cosmos. This relationship is said to be one of simultaneous mutual identity and mutual intercausality"

Best regards,

Cristi

What a beautiful explanation to my enquiry? Your ingenuity of detailed analysis is remarkable. Your essay has reached the top three and i wish you reach the top. Geometry and then algebra are the off shoots of Mathematics. You are using these tools efectively in your expositions!

Hi Cristinel

Like usual you always write good essays, relevant and direct to the issue. I have pleaded with you in the past to look very closely at mine, but it seems the time is always wrong somehow.

The reason that I like to look at mine is because it implements your program however it looks unconventional. In my idea every point in space which is as emergent as all other aspects of the fundamental structure caries all information about all other points (which represents the particles and their interaction), and that comes naturally. I have not plotted the points between the particles (not to overcrowd the results) but the information can be captured just like the point in the particles. Thank you.

https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3127

    Hi Cristi,

    The picture you draw with Indra's net is beautiful and a wonderful exercise for the imagination.

    My essay imagines in a way the contrary. As condition for successfully define or measure a physical property, I assume the system must be separated from the environment (in order to be unitary). I would glad, if you could find the time to read and comment on my essay.

    Best regards,

    Luca

      Hi Adel,

      Thank you very much for your kind comments. You wrote:

      > I have pleaded with you in the past to look very closely at mine, but it seems the time is always wrong somehow.

      But the first time we interacted was during the last contest, and I commented on your essay. I also read your current essay, and if I will think at something helpful I'll comment. Good luck with the contest!

      Best regards,

      Cristi

      Hi Luca,

      Thank you for your comments. Your essay is in my planned reading list.

      Best regards,

      Cristi

      Hello Indra

      Dare I say, 'Wow!' I think our work is strongly connected. The following detailed comments are provided to show the connection. My apologies if these are rather long. My question is, are the nodes in my Harmony Set the centres of your pearls?

      Thoughts as I read through:

      You say, 'Isomorphisms of mathematical structures will play a central role.' I agree. I agree because it follows directly from the general principle of equivalence (my essay, in which the GPE is 'the' fundamental) and argument by Kant, so it is philosophically acceptable to me. The issue then comes down to whether the mathematical structure with which one begins is fundamental and well-founded, or at least a trustworthy representation of reality.

      You say, 'Could the world be made out of a small number of fundamental building blocks, by putting them together like we do with bricks when building a house?' I think, 'Absolutely.' It is these bricks that are the bones of my Harmony Set, derived from my principle of equivalence. Reading further it is surprising how closely your bricks seem to align to my own, though yours are derived as empiricist, while mine as rationalist. This is good.

      You consider Euclid's and Hilbert's geometries. I have a significant problem with this (not your fault) because these geometries lead to a provably transfinite number of contradictions (let me know if you would like to see this). Riemann and Hilbert were also concerned about this. The problem must be embedded in the axioms, and no one has yet identified which and why, however the conclusion is that lines simply cannot be sets of points. For example, how many points cover the line? If you try this, the mathematics blows up. My work dissolves these problems and removes the need for axioms, but to do so is not part of this comment. I like your identification of automorphisms and find that my own work coincides with this.

      My other concern as I reach the part on 'holographic fundamentalness' is that the connection between mathematics and physics has never been properly established, as shown by Wigner in his paper "The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences," available online, and also considered by other greats of mathematics and physics such as Einstein and von Neumann. My work provides a link but the Harmony Set is still quite basic, and points and lines are of a different nature, though they do produce a vector space. However, that's my work. I don't think this is fundamental to your next steps (having now read ahead).

      You then identify that you are considering an ontological relativity, and I think, 'Yay! Someone who gets it! We are looking for mathematics that is fused to the underlying reality.' Then 'lo and behold' you identify equivalence as being somewhat at the centre of it all. Does it not then immediately occur to the writer that equivalence itself (symmetry, equivalence and all equivalent ideas) is the fundamental?

      You then move into some high level mathematical physics which is essentially a literature review. Correct me if there is something new in that section. I note that my Harmony Set, raised into a 3-space topology (for which I have a basis, but not the detail yet) seems to produce at least some, possibly all, of the prerequisites for a Clifford algebra, but this would require a deal of work for me to connect the two. However, I will investigate this aspect, so you essay is valuable to me in this respect.

      Indra's pearls do seem to be very similar to what I get if I rotate up my 1-space Harmony Set into a 3-space topology, at least as a skeleton (this is not in my essay). Rotating up the 1-space Harmony Set as mentioned does produce complex vectors as well, so I am getting a bit excited (though dreading the volume of extra maths that I will have to derive to show the holomorphism).

      Now to the crunch. My model also had the 'problem' relating to it all happening at once, but if you follow the nature of evolution of the Harmony Set, the encoding within each pearl is evolving, and each step in the evolution is ontologically dependent on the previous state, so, while your description is quite reasonable, I would add to this in. You will note that this also gets around Parmenides' denial of change. Otherwise your proposal, as I read it, would be flawed for you need an ontological propagator, not an epistemological propagator (a la Feynman). Please, this is not really a criticism, because I like the treatment. I am just trying to add the missing part, which is in the essay that is precursor (https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1904) to my present submission (https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3041).

      Finally, the entire universe being enfolded in a spaceless and timeless point is one solution to my Harmony Set. Some might call it the trivial solution, but that seems deflationary.

      Fabulous paper. I rate it highly. If there was a book on this, your chapter would either be the chapter prior to or immediately after mine. You might consider my paper in the light of yours, and also my essay previous to this, which was in the It from Bit contest, which I think strongly relates. My question is whether the nodes in my Harmony Set are the centres of your pearls.

        Hi Adel,

        I commented your intriguing essay, I hope my comments are useful to you. But I can't see the connection between my proposal and your essay, which you said it implements it. Good luck with the contest!

        Best regards,

        Cristi

        Dear Stephen,

        Thank you for the comments, and for the parallels you make with your own essay. This made me curious, but more after I read it, to fully understand the connections you've made here. Until then, good luck with your essay!

        Best regards,

        Cristi

        Hi Cristinel,

        I really appreciate you commenting on my idea, after all you are the only customer so far:) This is a general response. The implementation of your program is hard to see and depends how much you delve, so I will address that desperately with details in the future.

        Quick points. The reason that I say ill defined is because the point can go to infinity and hence it becomes uncalculable (the story is just a bit more involved but I wanted to keep it simple). As a matter of fact the first "l" that you see defined in my programs is the reminiscent of the size of the "universe" and it is just there because of the historic development, it is not needed. Because if I throw the numbers to size of it, it will make the particle to particle interaction inconsistent as I change the size of the universe. Meaning, all interaction in this setup lead to FINITE results (only particle to particle interaction). Also, I have tried all kinds of random other than uniform they do not lead to the consistent easy to interpret results that I get with uniform.

        Although I know it is hard for people who have more than hundred essays to read, to really delve in some detail in my system by running the programs. However, I think still some time "maybe 15 min" should be taken to appreciate the system. Of course since I have not explained everything clearly it is easy to misunderstand. BUT I was hoping that people concentrate on the big picture i.e. the RESULTS that I have obtained and concentrate on the finer details later, and a lot of them do exist. Also many other results I have not shown.

        Thank you for picking up on the bolded statement in my essay because this system represents it automatically without any fudging and it became apparent only after some development which was doing just what any generalization I was allowed to do.

        Thank you again, I could not have asked for more. Comments are worth a thousand points.

        Thanks again

        If you switch the browser after running the program and switch back you will see a blank, it is calculating it will come back after finishing. The approximate timing and the mentioned issue and others are in the first textbox.

        Your other points are well taken and I have already quickly mentioned them throughout the essays. As you know many mathematical systems are equivalent( Schrodinger, Heisenberg,path integral ..). Particularly, the system is linked to Geometric probability, Radon transforms ... etc, an ongoing program.

        http://mathworld.wolfram.com/GeometricProbability.html

        https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0608251.pdf

        Hi Cristi,

        I enjoyed your essay very much. Excellent writing, wonderful concepts and sound conclusions. Using a game was effective to explain isomorphism and it made the reading more fun. It also made your essay more memorable for me because I showed the game to my wife, who is an avid Sudoku player, and challenged her to figure out the numbers that would sum up to 15.

        Your discussion of holographic fundamentalness is spot-on. I wish I had learned geometric (Clifford) algebra in school. I tried to pick it up a few years ago after reading a paper by David Hestenes, which I recommend for your reading (if you haven't already - I noticed you referenced Hestenes and G Sobczyk.) "Oersted Medal Lecture 2002: Reforming the Mathematical Language of Physics." Am. J. Phys. 71.2 (2003): 104-121. I've forgotten too much to fully understand what you wrote in your essay, but I remember enough to say I think you are definitely onto something. Especially your suggestion that such a unification result in a single holomorphic field.

        My approach to unification is much simpler than yours, and I took a sort of inside-out (or upside-down?) approach to conclude that motion serves to separate this holomorphic field in our percepption as space (S) and time (T), both of which are forms of motion:

        In your words, "Our experience unfolds the germ, creating space and time, but the germ always remains enfolded, and we with our experiences, and spacetime itself, are always enfolded inside it."

        In mine, "Physical form is the manifestation or perception we observe when motion separates the field into two coherent waves, S and T, one moving outward as a quantum particle wave function and the other moving inward as the collapse of the same wave function modulated with information. The surface boundary then is the holographic interference pattern forming the apparent surface of the volume in space."

        I would appreciate it if you would read my essay at "A Simple Model For Integrating Quantum And Relativistic Physics with application to the evolution of consciousness by Theodore St. John" and tell me where I go wrong. I think that the concept you call the germ is what I refer to as simply an event (in the spirit of Alfred Whithead). You said in your notes "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..." I think that each germ is created in each moment, collapsed into events, so our actions are inherently part of the process of making the germ(s).

        What little constructive criticism I can offer seems to make your point, as you say in the last sentence of Quantum holism section, about how "mathematics can offer more adequate notions of composability and reducibility than our classical intuition does". So here it is: You threw me off a little when you talked about "shapes", e.g. "If a particle can have two possible shapes, it can also have any superposition or linear combination of these shapes." I have never heard anyone refer to the shape of objects being described by the wave function, except perhaps as it relates to particle (localized) or wave (non-localized - expanded out in all directions), both of which would be spherical, or as the peaks and valleys in the solution that refer to probability amplitudes. I know you were talking about the shape of the wave because the previous sentence was "A single particle is a wave of various possible shapes." But the word "shape" formed a mental image of the object itself. I also had trouble with the "property of the particle" in the sentence "A property of a particle," you said, "like position or momentum, is well defined only for some of the shapes. For example no shape can have well defined position and momentum simultaneously." Position and momentum are not properties of the particle; they are dynamic variables and measurement of one of them changes the state of the wavefunction to the corresponding eigenvector. The state of the particle only changes in the sense that 'measurement of its position at a given instant in time' effectively means that it is stopped in that position, so the function describing it must be one that fits its current state.

        Anyway, congratulations on an excellent essay!!

        Ted

          Dear Cristenel, Cristi,

          I was very impressed by your essay esp in that it makes use of the algebraic group underlying QCD. I have also constructed a well-founded geometric approach to this same problem, with an emphasis on preserving causality at is most fundamental level.

          I see that your approach generates one Std Model quark/lepton generation. This would seem to present a problem? I have also seen other similar approaches which produce four generations (or more?).

          Thus I encourage you to read my essay https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3092 which discusses only the most fundamental formulations, but with particle causality ensured by consistency with NBWF.

          The algebraic group used is a subgroup of a cross product of two wreath products, which explicitly passes Seiberg's causality criteria. The essential mass/energy metrics are attributed to intrinsic _spatial_ variables of the quantum-geometric basis. It also has exactly three generations of SM fundamental particles! (which I didn't mention in the essay, but its in my older publications, cited)

          I was most impressed by your expository writing skills, which would suggest that collaboration would be very productive.

          Thus I downloaded your 2017 paper to better review its rigorous details.

          best,

          Wayne Lundberg

            Hi Ted,

            Thank you for your comments, I'm glad that you liked some ideas from my essay. I'm happy you liked Hestenes, I like him very much, although for my paper I recommend some standard textbook like Chevalley or Crumeyrolle. And for the comparison with your much simpler approach. You said you "conclude that motion serves to separate this holomorphic field in our percepption as space (S) and time (T)". Do you also use holomorphic fields and germs?

            You said "You threw me off a little when you talked about 'shapes'", and "also had trouble with the 'property of the particle'".

            :)) Let me explain it differently for you. This is what I mean by shape: wavefunctions in Schrodinger's equation are fields defined on space and changing in time, and for each (x,y,z,t) they have an amplitude and a phase. So if you draw a picture of the amplitude of the wavefunction at each point, you will see a shape. What I call "properties" correspond to Hermitian operators, for example position to a Hermitian operator x with a hat, and momentum along a direction to another Hermitian operator, i times the partial derivative with respect to that direction. A wavefunction has a definite position only when it is a Dirac distribution, so its shape is concentrated in a point. It has a definite momentum only when it is a plane wave, that is the amplitude is constant, but the phase changes linearly in a certain direction. So when a particle has a definite position it can't have a definite momentum and conversely. In general, a property is represented by a Hermitian operator (or matrix, but in the infinite dimensional Hilbert space), and a particle has that property ony if it is an eigenvector (or eigenstate) of that Hermitian matrix. In this case, the value of the property is simply the eigenvalue corresponding to that eigenvector. This is the rigorous, technical, standard definition (see for example the first page of this paper). I prefered to avoid speaking about Hermitian operators and eigenvectors because the essays are supposed to not be too technical, so instead I said "properties" and "shapes" of the wavefunction. I think this captures the idea without requiring the reader to know advanced linear algebra in Hilbert spaces. And everyone who knows the technical definition understands what I mean. And I think the reader who doesn't know understands better than if I use the usual descriptions in pop-sci literature, that "the electron is sometimes a point particle, sometimes a wave", or it is both or neither. But my effort can't please everybody. Anyway, thank you for the comments!!

            Best regards,

            Cristi

            Dear Wayne Lundberg,

            Thank you for your comments. You asked "I see that your approach generates one Std Model quark/lepton generation. This would seem to present a problem?". I think it would be better to have exactly three generations, with the correct mixing matrices. To "fix" this I could just use three copies of the model, but I think it would be better to have them be there naturally.

            Thanks for mentioning me your essay, from what you wrote here seems appealing.

            > I downloaded your 2017 paper to better review its rigorous details.

            Thanks, and please let me know if you have questions!

            Best regards,

            Cristi