Ridiculous Simplicity by Peter Jackson

Peter,

Finally getting to your essay, going item by item and numbering

1. reductionism - final paragraph caught my eye, agree both with qualities you suggest 'most fundamental' should possess, and with your emphasis upon relative motion. I think here we find perhaps the deepest connection between our models, as that which Michaele and I present is based upon an epistemologically rigorous analysis of the two-body problem and Mach's principle, which is all about relative motion. How does your understanding of relative motion relate to the concept of background independence?

2. 'Of What' - relative motion of what? agree re nominal bottom of event horizon at Planck length, tho the mind can go where the body cannot. Beyond that not clear to me what the what is that you refer to with your 'Of What'. Would not agree that 'states of motion' form 'matter'. There is more to it than that, as i think you would agree, tho the way you close this section leaves me confused.

3. 'Most Profound' - here i question including SR at the level of most profound. SR is a three-body effect, Lorentz transform is just Pythagoreus. At foundational level it is better to confine the logic to two-body interactions imo. Background independence is lost in three body problem, the mix between spin and orbital angular momentum is resolved with introduction of third body,... also one can advance topological arguments against introduction of another singularity, at the least has to properly account for the effects in terms of nonlocality...

Love explaining physics to barmaids. Agree that one should be able to coherently present one's worldview over a single pitcher of good beer shared at a moderate pace, preferably in company with traditional 'garbage pizza'.

4. Motion - the notion that a particle requires 'spin' to exist is new to me. According to wiki, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meson, spin zero mesons form a nonet, with pizero/eta/etaprime being the non-strange members. Branching ratio calculations for those mesons are shown in an impedance analysis of the chiral anomaly, posted on my vixra author page. Model used there is geometric interpretation of Clifford algebra, which defines 'geometric wavefunction'. In principle one should be able to use that model to confirm or refute your suggestion that particles require spin to exist. However more than just impedance analysis is required to sort out which components of geometric wavefunction comprise spin zero mesons, so it could be that mode structure of these mesons have two spin modes that cancel. Whether these would correspond to your two counter-rotating vortices is more complicated.

5. OAM - finding it very difficult to follow this. I look at things from two-body perspective, the simplest possible imo. The Riemann sphere (?) construction you present may well be correct and appropriate, but my mind has a very hard time following what you're doing and why. Background independence appears to me to be lost by doing this. Agree that to formulate a testable experimental prediction one must establish the sort of structure you develop, but to incorporate that into one's conceptual foundations rather than using it as a reality check has my head spinning a little. As i understand it background independence is an essential property of any viable quantum gravity model. This is major obstacle for the mathematician's Riemannian 'curved space' interpretation of Einstein's thinking. In any case what you're doing with this may be completely valid, appears to me to be pointing in interesting directions so must be at least partially valid.

6. Transition Zone - here you hit the nail on the head, tho with a hammer that makes me laugh at least a little. Agree it is in the near field that things get interesting. What is little recognized in physics community is that near field impedance of photon differs from far field. Particle folks just set impedance to dimensionless unity along with light speed, Planck's constant,... Was the fashionable thing to do in the day. But what governs amplitude and phase of the flow of energy at the foundation of QED (our basic QFT template), what governs energy flow in the photon-electron interaction, the near field impedances, fell thru the cracks. This is why we have to renormalize. Renormalization coefficients are just impedance mismatches in a geometric wavefunction model. Mainstream folks have forgotten about your transition zone.

7. QM - here again i get lost in your formalism, in the structure you're imposing on the two-body problem, on the interaction of two geometric wavefunctions. To my mind this is still very subtle. For me to comment sensibly here would require much more study. Like that you introduce three body three filter problem, tho not yet getting if/how it is connected to the work you and Declan are collaborating on. The nested Mach-Zender we briefly touched on earlier in my thread appears to me a potentially much more symmetric tool for evaluating the work you and Declan are doing. Please, take a look at the work Vaidman (Aharonov's former student and inventor of 'weak measurement' theory/technique) and company are doing. It seems to confirm the Wheeler-Feynman papers on time symmetry of quantum phase, is related to phase symmetry/polarity reversal you mention, phase clock of QM running CCW for particles and CW for antiparticles, and back to oppositely spinning vortices, that old film of 'galloping gertie', resonant vortex shedding oscillating a suspension bridge torsional mode into destruction out west back in the 30s,... Curious how that maps into your formalism,...

so enough already. like what you're doing, agree re importance of properly understanding relative motion. It was foundation of my lifelong work. Came from working with my brother back in the mid 70s, designing, building, and operating vibratory piledrivers. Two synchronized spinning eccentric weights. Two body problem and Mach's principle at gut level. Mechanical impedances. And dad was electronics guy, we built the electromagnetic analog on his test bench during the design process. Eventually this evolved into what we are now calling quantized impedance networks of geometric wavefunction interactions.

Don't understand your decomposition into orbital and helical, why you do that, but still have some confusion about helicity/chirality and its origins in geometric Clifford algebra. So perhaps there is something i can learn from you there.

Peter,

darn. just got another of those anonymous 1 ratings, drove Michaele and I from 7.1 to 6.7. Agree moderators need to take those behaviors into consideration. Reading their rating guidelines to contributors, my guess is they already do in their final selections of which essays go to the referees, adjust their perceptions regarding justified ratings accompanied by comments and penalize the backstabbers as well. Simple software to catch the outliers, tag the perps. Tho it doesn't compensate for the fact that higher rated essays get more attention.

Would help to have a more sophisticated fqxi search interface imo.

Hello again Peter,

Thanks for your generous ranking.

In tune with the comments above by Peter Cameron, the last day for the acceptance of Posts is full of mischief; a bit of a 'downer' you might say.

Perhaps after all, relatively speaking, 'reductionism' is the name of the end game!

I presume that this is not a rude awakening for the FQXi sponsors and that Peter C's 'guess' is correct. I am taking this to be so and rewarding him with my top ranking, not that he didn't earn it in his own 'write' anyway.

You carry my best wishes, Peter. Just remember that it is the process rather than the goal that 'counts'. I still expect to see your name on the final list.

Cheers,

Gary

Dear Peter,

Thanks a lot for assessing my Essay The Mysterious "Fundamental" https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2998. I feel honoured. I have gone through your essay twice and given it the best rating. I am amazed by the in-depth knowledge contained in it. However, I found it quite concentrated- this may have something to do with my academic background and the word limit. I have flagged it and would read it once again at leisure after making use of references.

Best wishes for outstanding performance in this contest.

Hi Peter...

If the essay, as a finalist, would come across Gregory Chaitin's view, it might provide momentum for qualified reductionism.

Gregory Chaitin was one of the other 4 panelist of the World Science Festival "Limits of Understanding", and if I read his body language correctly, he was dismayed at Mario Livio's pronouncement that "... we can not know what is fundamental.".

In any case, may this contest clearly differentiate qualified reductionism from Don Palmer's, and others' expressed view of "pure reductionism".

sl

Peter,

Sorry, but I only gave you a 9. It was a couple of days ago and I'd just scored Ed a 10, since he really is focusing on the issue of time, which has been my pet peeve. Space might be foundational, but that's like a flatline is more fundamental than a heart rhythm. If you want to know who I'm riffing off, give Tom Ray a good score. He deserves it. I really only entered to join the discussion and I think the most interesting one I had was with Christinel Stoica, where he was willing to present a fairly establishment position and still listen to my point of view. As it went on for 22 posts, it did get into detail. If you want to read it, it's on his thread, starting Feb 19.

Good luck and good to see the outsiders doing so well.

Regards,

John

Peter,

Rating your now. Certainly the star of the show fir fundamental advancement of understanding and I'm surprised how a number of the Academics have reacted (or not reactred!) Dogma rules it seems, here as much as anywhere. Also interesting how few seem to really understand QM. Shocking really.

Very well done. I'll keep an eye on Classic QM.

Rich

Dear Peter,

Thank you for the interesting comments you gave my essay some time ago and I hope the comments I gave you will help. I would like to remind you that you said "I have yours down for a high score". I was 1-bombed kind of seriously in the last 24 hours by some people who didn't trust their arguments enough to present them, and this happened to others too. I think that to make the impact of the 1-bombs for those who want to climb in the last minute irrelevant, it is important to read as many essays as possible, and not forget to rate according to the fairest evaluation we can offer.

Best regards,

Cristi

Dear Peter

Thank you for your asking about CMB.... My Paper on CMB is available at

http://viXra.org/abs/1606.0226

CMB is nothing BUT star light, Galaxy-light and Light from Other inter stellar & Inter Galaxieal Objects in the Microwave region. CMB anisotropies and variations were were calculated and and discussed in the in the above paper given by the above link

I request you please have a look at this paper and calculations..........

Best Regards

=snp

Peter,

If the reference was to my debate over dimensionlessness, that was more logic, than physics, as in whether describing something as dimensionless is a useful abstraction, but overlooks the aspect of eliminating spatial dimensionality, then insisting space arises from the resulting geometry. Is geometry a mapping of space, or the platonic foundation of it? The old map versus territory debate.

As for Dark Energy, I do go into that in my own essay. Since BBT uses spacetime to explain why space itself is expanding, yet overlooks that this means the speed of light is no longer Constant to the ruler of the cosmic frame, then possibly an optical explanation for redshift might be considered, given we are at the center of our point of view. Then if this effect was compounding on itself, that would explain the parabolic increase in the rate of redshift, out from our point of view, rather than the assumed sudden drop off and leveling out, from the edge of the universe position, that requires Dark Energy for explanation.

My instinct suggests there is a cosmic convection cycle, with one side being expanding radiation and the other being coalescing wave lengths, aka gravity and mass as part of that spectrum. So Dark matter is more a function of mass being part of the gravitational spectrum, than gravity being a property of mass.

Think that Einstein originally proposed the Cosmological Constant as a way to balance gravity collapsing space to a point. What if what Hubble found, with redshift, was actually evidence of that original CC?

Consider it in terms of the rubber sheet and ball analogy for gravity. Logically, from Einstein's point of view, there would be no flat sheet, where there is no ball, as that would be assuming the absolute space he dismissed. So put the sheet over water, so that when the ball is placed on it, the sheet rises in the unweighted areas, equal to what it sinks in the weighted areas. That rise would be the analogy for the CC. Now consider that we measure this effect by light crossing it and redshifting, because the light is constantly expanding and we are only sampling the front of this expanding wave, not a particular photon traveling billions of years.

Which does to the two papers I linked, Rieter's entry on the loading theory of light and Christov's paper on the redshifting of multi spectrum "packets," due to distance alone.

So what you have, is an overall balance between light out and gravity in.

Then compare this possibility to current theory, where every gap between theoretical prediction and measured evidence gets filled with some enormous new force of nature and no one mentions Popper, that possibly this should be considered a falsification of the theory, not evidence of invisible forces.

It will be interesting to see how the judging goes, as assigning credence to entries like yours, or Edwin's, would raise foundational questions and I'm a bit too cynical to see that happening anytime soon. String theory and multiverses are much safer topics for the tribe.

Regards,

John

Peter,

Given the extent to which humanity seems to be spiraling into a vortex, objectivity seems a lost dream, but then vortices are physical processes and they have a reputation for tearing apart finely constructed structures. So it seems to be a case of sitting back and at least enjoying the ride.

Underneath it all, my sense of spirituality is that there is only that one elemental being, so its fracturing itself into innumerable reflections, all bouncing against each other, creating company and entertainment. The price we pay to feel in the first place, is a lot of it is pain.

Cheers,

John