Fundamental? by Emily Christine Adlam

Thank you Emily,

Your acknowledgement that ' "fundamental" is a shifting goal-post in physics' prompts the question whether we should identify and target the subject for which we seek a fundamental concept before attempting to define what constitutes "fundamental".

In accepting this premise the notion 'getting to grips with the fundamental is the promised land, the endgame of science' is no longer so since every structure has its own discrete foundation - its own fundamental existence.

Hi Emily Christine Adlam

Your discussion of arrow of time other concepts in a simple and thoughtful way of discussion about Fundamental are really excellent.....dear Emily ..... By the way have a look at my essay also and post your esteemed observations there....

Dynamic Universe Model says that the energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation passing grazingly near any gravitating mass changes its in frequency and finally will convert into neutrinos (mass). We all know that there is no experiment or quest in this direction. Energy conversion happens from mass to energy with the famous E=mC2, the other side of this conversion was not thought off. This is a new fundamental prediction by Dynamic Universe Model, a foundational quest in the area of Astrophysics and Cosmology.

In accordance with Dynamic Universe Model frequency shift happens on both the sides of spectrum when any electromagnetic radiation passes grazingly near gravitating mass. With this new verification, we will open a new frontier that will unlock a way for formation of the basis for continual Nucleosynthesis (continuous formation of elements) in our Universe. Amount of frequency shift will depend on relative velocity difference. All the papers of author can be downloaded from "http://vaksdynamicuniversemodel.blogspot.in/ "

By the way.....................

Main foundational points of Dynamic Universe Model :

-No Isotropy

-No Homogeneity

-No Space-time continuum

-Non-uniform density of matter, universe is lumpy

-No singularities

-No collisions between bodies

-No blackholes

-No warm holes

-No Bigbang

-No repulsion between distant Galaxies

-Non-empty Universe

-No imaginary or negative time axis

-No imaginary X, Y, Z axes

-No differential and Integral Equations mathematically

-No General Relativity and Model does not reduce to GR on any condition

-No Creation of matter like Bigbang or steady-state models

-No many mini Bigbangs

-No Missing Mass / Dark matter

-No Dark energy

-No Bigbang generated CMB detected

-No Multi-verses

Here:

-Accelerating Expanding universe with 33% Blue shifted Galaxies

-Newton's Gravitation law works everywhere in the same way

-All bodies dynamically moving

-All bodies move in dynamic Equilibrium

-Closed universe model no light or bodies will go away from universe

-Single Universe no baby universes

-Time is linear as observed on earth, moving forward only

-Independent x,y,z coordinate axes and Time axis no interdependencies between axes..

-UGF (Universal Gravitational Force) calculated on every point-mass

-Tensors (Linear) used for giving UNIQUE solutions for each time step

-Uses everyday physics as achievable by engineering

-21000 linear equations are used in an Excel sheet

-Computerized calculations uses 16 decimal digit accuracy

-Data mining and data warehousing techniques are used for data extraction from large amounts of data.

Have a look at

http://vaksdynamicuniversemodel.blogspot.in/p/blog-page_15.h

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Best Regards

=snp

Dear Fellow Essayists

This will be my final plea for fair treatment.,

FQXI is clearly seeking to find out if there is a fundamental REALITY.

Reliable evidence exists that proves that the surface of the earth was formed millions of years before man and his utterly complex finite informational systems ever appeared on that surface. It logically follows that Nature must have permanently devised the only single physical construct of earth allowable.

All objects, be they solid, liquid, or vaporous have always had a visible surface. This is because the real Universe must consist only of one single unified VISIBLE infinite surface occurring eternally in one single infinite dimension that am always illuminated mostly by finite non-surface light.

Only the truth can set you free.

Joe Fisher, Realist

Emily,

Quite brilliant, beautifully conceived, considered & written, and correct. Thank you. Top marks. I certainly agree; "We are in dire need of another paradigm shift". and your alternate view.;

"quantum mechanics came along, and try as we might, we could not find satisfactory explanations for the quantum probabilities. So we stopped trying, and began applying the term 'fundamental' to cover our lack of understanding.

Now a shock - I didn't stop trying. I'd hope you might study & try to falsify the ontological mechanism in my essay (no maths) which appears to reproduce QM classically - in just the way John Bell predicted. Yes it DOES seem a bit complex initially, but you should understand it (better than most seems able to!)

The matching computer code and Cos2 plots are in Declan Trail's essay.

Note this came out of trying to falsify and apparent logical solution for SR (see my prev finalist essays inc peer rated 1st & 2nd). So I think and hope, finally, you're right that;

"another such paradigm shift may be upon us - but this time, we may have to change not only our ideas about what sorts of things need explaining, but also our attitudes about what counts as an explanation."

Well done, and thank you again, for yours.

Very best

Peter

Hi Emily,

Definitely one of the best essays here - clear, insightful and fun to read. I especially appreciate that it's historically informed... and I think you do get to the key issue. The question of what's fundamental is closely tied to the question of what counts as an explanation, and also, of what it is that really needs to be explained about our world. As you suggest, the questions that really should be most pressing may not even be approachable within the current reductive paradigm.

There are several points you raise that I take up in my current essay. For one, you suggest it's important to explain why there are the kinds of regularities in the world that allow us to make predications. I would add... that allow us to observe and measure things, which would hardly be possible in a less well-organized environment. Ideally we could ground our explanation of the complex forms these regularities take in some sensible notion of why they exist in the first place.

I particularly liked your thought that maybe "most of the time there simply is no fact of the matter about how things are on a microscopic level, because the universe is efficient, and doesn't bother answering questions when it doesn't need to." I would say, it only answers in situations where the question is actually asked, and where the answer can make a meaningful difference to something, by setting up other such situations.

And finally, your whimsical tag-line that maybe after all it's atoms that are fundamental, happens to be the main point of my argument. Not fundamental in the sense of indivisible, or independently self-sustaining, of course... but in that the possibility of measuring anything or meaningfully defining any kind of information, in our universe, depends on the remarkable combination of things that atoms can do.

Many thanks for your excellent contribution. If you're looking for recommends, Karen Crowther, Ines Samengo and Marc Seguin are my other front-runners.

Conrad

Hi Emily -- Wow; that was a really great essay! A much bigger scope (and much better answer) than what I tried to do in mine, although we touched on a few of the same themes. As you probably know, I'm in essential agreement about just about everything here -- and indeed I'm still trying to sort out just how 'under-determined' the micro-reality might be.

Right at the very end, though, I couldn't quite tell if you were describing how I think about things or rather something a bit different. You wrote:

" If this is correct, it is no wonder that when we do quantum physics we find it difficult to say anything definite about how things are on a microscopic level: most of the time there simply is no fact of the matter about how things are on a microscopic level, because the universe is efficient, and doesn't bother answering questions when it doesn't need to. To ensure the satisfaction of the macroscopic constraints, there's usually no need to decide how things are on a microscopic level - except of course when human experimentalists start wiggling smaller and smaller things and demanding answers."

I figured you weren't being anti-realist here, which was confirmed by your answer to Matt's question, but I'm still not quite sure what you have in mind. To Matt, you wrote:

" we just have a constraint problem whose solution requires more detail in some places than in others."

That sounds fine to me, but still leaves open the question of what happens when we *don't* look closely, what happens when we don't impose detailed boundary constraints on a microscopic system.

So here's an example: an atom passes through a Stern-Gerlach device, but instead of measuring which path it takes, the two paths are recombined so one can't tell which way it went through the device, even later. I assume this is what you mean by *not* demanding answers -- but what do you mean by saying there's "no fact of the matter about how things are"? Is that just shorthand for saying that there might be some non-particle-like history, some realistic thing (say, a field) that takes *both* paths in this instance? Or are you leaning towards something even more dramatic -- say, that there's nothing corresponding to the atom at all, or that the spacetime locations of the paths aren't even well-defined? I'd be curious to know what you thought about this example.

Thanks again for a great read!

-Ken

Dear Emily Christine Adlam

Just letting you know that I am making a start on reading of your essay, and hope that you might also take a glance over mine please? I look forward to the sharing of thoughtful opinion. Congratulations on your essay rating as it stands, and best of luck for the contest conclusion.

My essay is titled

"Darwinian Universal Fundamental Origin". It stands as a novel test for whether a natural organisational principle can serve a rationale, for emergence of complex systems of physics and cosmology. I will be interested to have my effort judged on both the basis of prospect and of novelty.

Thank you & kind regards

Steven Andresen

Dear Emily,

many thanks for one of the best essay I have read (and I have read many indeed). It is clearly writte, well argued, and it provides a number of insights that go directly to the point of what fundamental means. It was a real pleasure to ascertain that our views are very close about most of the things you state in your essay. I particularly appreciated the sentence in which you rightly notice that "something that was once regarded as fundamental became explainable in the context of a new theory".

Moreover, your critique of the naive reductionist program is very agreeable, and it is based on the same arguments I have used in my essay, namely that " It seems likely that part of the problem is the reductionism that still dominates the thinking of most of those who consider themselves realists about science.

Congratulations again for this beautiful essay, I top rate it!

Best of luck,

Flavio

Dear Emily,

congratulations for your essay, it's one of the best I've read, very clear, well written and full of intriguing ideas. Moreover your idea has some points in common with mine, since I propose the relativity of fundamentality.

> So seems that we are in dire need of another paradigm shift. And this time, instead of simply changing our attitudes about what sorts of things require explanation, we may have to change our attitudes about what counts as an explanation in the first place.

I very agree, the answers change with the questions. This is a statement that you make stronger with:

> the notion of the Fundamental, writ large, is not supposed to be about our practical interests

Finally, just a curiosity:

> The present explains the future, and not vice versa

I propose a logical model where it could be also vice versa, redefining "explains".

All the best!

Francesco D'Isa

Emily,

The quandary about what is fundamental can be solved by cherry-picking your definition: mine is "that which is fundamental is necessary for existence," and pointing out that fundamental evolves with discovery. Physics starts with that which we know and build theories on that and as discoveries come smack our foreheads and say "this is the new truth." To determine fundamental we must have sentient beings to observe and set the theories and nature as the source of our queries. We now have LIGO which scientists theorize can be fine-tuned to recording the BB. We have LHC ramping up to the first seconds of the BB, that is if it is the BB and not the inverted BB or whatever. As you say, we must start with big pieces maybe the atom which our best microscopes can detect, and not define fundamental as the smallest and most basic. Certainly "changes in our understanding of the fundamental have often been associated with important scientific advances -- the concept does evolve.

Enjoyed your monologue. Hope you get a chance to look at mine.

Jim Hoover

Dear Emily,

Thank you for a wonderful essay.

While others have questioned if there are fundamentals, you have questioned if fundamentals are a positive thing. Interesting!

Your analysis of probability is brilliant. Thank you.

I hope you have a chance to look at my essay.

All the best,

Noson

Hi Emily:

I agree with your statement- "The moment for another such paradigm shift may be upon us - but this time, we may have to change not only our ideas about what sorts of things need explaining, but also our attitudes about what counts as an explanation in the first place."

I would like to draw your attention to the paradigm shift of the missing fundamental physics governing - "What causes a photon to accelerate to the speed of light?" I would like to invite you to look into 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

Emily,

As time grows short, I recheck those that I have commented on to see if I've rated them. I find that I have not rated yours and am correcting that now.

Hope you can get a chance to look at mine.

Jim Hoover

Emily,

A logical explanation for the "arrow of time."

We experience reality as flashes of cognition and so think this arrow, or "flow," from past to future, is a fundamental fact of nature, but have difficulty explaining it. Physics has determined it must be a dimension, experienced as duration and so distills it down to measures of duration, which are correlated to measures of distance, resulting in Spacetime. Though cannot explain why it only seems to go past to future, other than the effect of entropy.

A simpler explanation is that it is change turning future to past, as in tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is simply the state of the present, as events coalesce and dissolve.

Energy is 'conserved," because it is always and only present. Past and future are other configurations of the same medium. Given this, causality is redundant. It is the dynamic of this energy which creates these configurations.

As such, energy and the forms it manifests go opposite directions of time. Energy going past to future, as events go future to past. Think of the frames of a movie, versus the projector light shining through them.

Consider a factory, as an example of this relationship between entity and process. As the product goes start to finish, being in the future to in the past, the process points the other direction, consuming material and expelling product. Onto the new, shedding the old.

Life is the same, as individuals go birth to death, while the species moves onto the next generation, shedding the old. As consciousness goes from one thought to the next, these mental forms go future to past.

So time is like temperature, an effect of action. One is the individual frequency, while the other is masses of frequency and amplitude.

Simultaneity was dismissed by observing that different events are observed in different order, from different locations, but this is no more consequential that seeing the moon, simultaneous with seeing stars as they were years ago. It is the energy which is conserved, not the information it carries.

So the reason time is asymmetric is because it is a measure of action and action is inertial. The earth turns one direction, not both.

Regards,

John B. Merryman

Emily - I think you're leaning in the right direction here. I don't think it's "anti-realist" to assume there's no absolute fact in situations where the facts make no difference to anything.

But as to "when the universe is required to make up its mind" - in other words, when there's a physical context in which something about a quantum system becomes measurable - I don't think there's really any mystery about this. In these dual-path experiments, we have no problem understanding when "which path" information is available and when it isn't. We know what kinds of contexts are needed to measure any particular information. The problem is that measurement contexts are hard to conceptualize, since different kinds of information need different contexts, and every measurement relies on other kinds of measurements. So it's not clear how to fit them into any fundamental theory... which is the question addressed in my essay.

Thanks again - Conrad

Dear Emily,

What a wonderful essay! I liked it on multiple levels, the ideas, the explanations, the style.

In particular I fully agree with your statement "Fundamental means we have lost. Fundamental is an admission of defeat" when saying that "we stopped trying, and began applying the term 'fundamental' to cover our lack of understanding". While maybe we can't assign quantum probabilities in the usual way as in statistical mechanics, this doesn't mean there are no other ways.

Also this was really a good one "Even Leibniz ultimately needed a God to complete his vision - 'God,' of course, being the same sort of sticking-plaster concept as 'fundamental.'" Yes, you're right, and you're right also that there is more beyond the place where we proclaim the final stop. Maybe the most interesting things are beyond.

Best wishes,

Cristi Stoica

Dear Emily,

Yours is one of the most elegant essays in this contest, and it broaches a number of interesting points in an engaging manner.

A few comments:

1. It seems to me that the consequence to draw from the realization that "our ancestors who came up with concept of objective chance cannot ever had anz actual experience of what we now understand to be objective chance" is not that this was "nothing short of miracle", but rather that sometimes the wrong idea can nevertheless lead to the right conclusion. Is that miraculous?

2. I really liked the contrast in conceptualizations of fundamentality as something desirable because it gets rid of unnecessary or superfluous conceptual baggage, but then by the same token as something undesirable because what is being thrown out could actually be precisely that for which there is a value in finding deeper explanations. To me, this reinforces the notion that fundamentality is a purely epistemic notion.

3. On page 5 you ask "Why is it that objective chances seem to be the only thing we have in our arsenal when it comes to explaining regularities without explaining their specific form?" I would like to suggest an answer which you are unlikely to hear anywhere else: I believe that our understanding of the fundamental workings of nature has advanced so much that we cannot go further without integrating some physics-based understanding of being into it.

Questions of existence suffuse the background of any of the contemporary approaches to trying to understand this and related questions, but because existence is currently considered a purely philosophical concept, this aspect is generally simply overlooked by physicists. For instance, the reductionist answer you mention first, which "tells us that global regularities like quantum statistics must be explained in terms of fundamental properties of individual properties" glosses over the fact that our intuitive notions of existence always presuppose having definite properties, but this is already violated (under the textbook interpretations) in quantum mechanics. Sometimes (as in Heisenberg's "Physics and Philosophy") this is vaguely acknowledged, but, as far as I can tell, only within the context of some philosophical verbiage the meaning of which seems hard to apply mathematically to the equations.

4. I agree with you that as we go to ever smaller scales "most of the time there simply is no fact of the matter about how things are on a microscopic level", but I draw from that a completely different lesson than you seem to, namely, that this is an indication that our current conceptual, and to the extent that novel concepts drive the definition of novel mathematical objects, mathematical framework is simply inadequate to represent what is going on at those scales. I really wished I had already completed the second part of the 2-part series of which the first part is my contest entry, because it gives concrete examples of this claim, but regrettably this will still have to wait. Even the antireductionist conclusion of your essay involves considerations of existence in the background: I find it hard to conceive of atoms as more fundamental than quarks unless this was supported by some argument which elevates the ontic status of the latter relative to the former.

5. In my view we do not have to build ever bigger particle accelerators to gain a more fundamental understanding. Rather, I believe there is still ample space to reinterpret some of our current concepts in a different way which reveals connections or insights which were simply not obvious under the prior interpretations. In my entry I attempt to show this with the concrete example of length contraction.

That was my post.

Armin