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Dear Flavio Del Santo and Chiara Cardelli,

In qualifying the aim of the 'What is Fundamental?' essay contest, Dr. Brendan Foster, the FQXi.org Science Projects Consultant wrote: "We invite interesting and compelling explorations, from detailed worked examples through thoughtful rumination, of the different levels at which nature can be described, and the relations between them.

Real Nature has never had any abstract finite levels.

I have concluded from my deep research that Nature must have devised the only permanent real structure of the Universe obtainable for the real Universe existed for millions of years before man and his finite complex informational systems ever appeared on earth. The real physical Universe consists 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.

Joe Fisher, ORCID ID 0000-0003-3988-8687. Unaffiliated

Dear Flavio Del Santo and Chiara Cardelli,

In qualifying the aim of the 'What is Fundamental?' essay contest, Dr. Brendan Foster, the FQXi.org Science Projects Consultant wrote: "We invite interesting and compelling explorations, from detailed worked examples through thoughtful rumination, of the different levels at which nature can be described, and the relations between them.

Real Nature has never had any abstract finite levels.

I have concluded from my deep research that Nature must have devised the only permanent real structure of the Universe obtainable for the real Universe existed for millions of years before man and his finite complex informational systems ever appeared on earth. The real physical Universe consists 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.

Joe Fisher, ORCID ID 0000-0003-3988-8687. Unaffiliated

Dear Flavio Del Santo and Chiara Cardelli,

In qualifying the aim of the 'What is Fundamental?' essay contest, Dr. Brendan Foster, the FQXi.org Science Projects Consultant wrote: "We invite interesting and compelling explorations, from detailed worked examples through thoughtful rumination, of the different levels at which nature can be described, and the relations between them.

Real Nature has never had any abstract finite levels.

I have concluded from my deep research that Nature must have devised the only permanent real structure of the Universe obtainable for the real Universe existed for millions of years before man and his finite complex informational systems ever appeared on earth. The real physical Universe consists 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.

Joe Fisher, ORCID ID 0000-0003-3988-8687. Unaffiliated

Dear Flavio Del Santo and Chiara Cardelli,

In qualifying the aim of the 'What is Fundamental?' essay contest, Dr. Brendan Foster, the FQXi.org Science Projects Consultant wrote: "We invite interesting and compelling explorations, from detailed worked examples through thoughtful rumination, of the different levels at which nature can be described, and the relations between them.

Real Nature has never had any abstract finite levels.

I have concluded from my deep research that Nature must have devised the only permanent real structure of the Universe obtainable for the real Universe existed for millions of years before man and his finite complex informational systems ever appeared on earth. The real physical Universe consists 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.

Joe Fisher, ORCID ID 0000-0003-3988-8687. Unaffiliated

Dear Flavio Del Santo and Chiara Cardelli,

In qualifying the aim of the 'What is Fundamental?' essay contest, Dr. Brendan Foster, the FQXi.org Science Projects Consultant wrote: "We invite interesting and compelling explorations, from detailed worked examples through thoughtful rumination, of the different levels at which nature can be described, and the relations between them.

Real Nature has never had any abstract finite levels.

I have concluded from my deep research that Nature must have devised the only permanent real structure of the Universe obtainable for the real Universe existed for millions of years before man and his finite complex informational systems ever appeared on earth. The real physical Universe consists 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.

Joe Fisher, ORCID ID 0000-0003-3988-8687. Unaffiliated

Dear Flavio Del Santo and Chiara Cardelli,

You wrote in the Abstract: "Commonly accepted views on foundations of science, either based on bottom-up construction or top-down reduction of fundamental entities are here rejected." Unfortunately, this poor English language translation am incoherent. Real science could only have one single real foundation. It follows that real scientists ought to know what the real fundamental foundation of real science am. The mysterious anonymous folk you mention that seem to have formed some sort of common viewpoints apparently know next to nothing about reality. Please try to get a better translator.

Joe Fisher, Realist

Dear Mr. Tansa,

thank you very much for your appreciation and comments.

Indeed you are right; surely scientific progress has benefited by reductionism in many instances, and you recalled a few of them. In our essay we do take for granted an euristic power of reductionism. However, ehat we wanted to point out is that reductionism (and even more its stronger form of physicalism) is not necessarily the best research program to be pursued, because it can prevent us from approaching theories more holistically. And we provide some evidences from the literature of anti-reductionist approaches. It is just a way to think less narrow, that it is in my opinion the way to get towards an understanding of the foundations, istead of merely separate systems in smaller and smaller or more and more (theoretically) elementary components.

Thank you again, and all the best,

Flavio and Chiara

I liked your essay showing the interesting facet of the foundations problem - progress by overcoming older beliefs such as local realism (LR), simultaneity, and one could add belief in left-right parity P (violated for weak interactions) leaving the product CPT as a likely goal of "fundamental constraint" (FC). Perhaps one could also add a prejudice of the "unreality" of wave-function represented by complex and hypercomplex variables separately from (or prior to) Born Rule actualization (psi-star-psi). Protein folding is also interesting--such as left handed amino-acids making right handed alpha-helices misfolding to beta sheets. Proteins have so much complexity that it seems hard to avoid a landscape having many possible energy minima for foldings.

I think FQXi.org might be trying to find out if there could be a Natural fundamental. I am surprised that so many of the contest's entrants do not appear to know what am fundamental to science, or mathematics, or quantum histrionics.

Joe Fisher, Realist

Dear Flavio Del Santo and Chiara Cardelli,

I read with great interest your extremely deep essay on the problem of fundamentality in natural scientific knowledge and your conclusions on a new methodology for finding a reliable support for knowledge, a higher form of a philosophical approach to the fundamental problems of natural science with the aim of overcoming the crisis of interpretation and representation, the crisis of methodology , the crisis of understanding. Great essay. My highest score. Yes, indeed, it's time to "demolishing prejudices to get to the foundations".

Successes in the contest!

Yours faithfully,

Vladimir

    Dear Vladimir,

    thank you som much for your very kind words. I really appreciate them!

    I posted my commments to your thread already.

    I really wish you the best of luck for the contest.

    With my best regards,

    Flavio

    Dear Flavio and Chiara

    Your essay is a very high quality work, mainly as a critique of the physical sciences for determining what is fundamental.

    A very in depth discussion of the Popperian falsificationism, as applied and adapted by physicists in different frontiers of physics.

    It is a very good methodological application of epistemology for "demolishing the prejudices" implicit in the construction and falsification of scientific theories in physics.

    But it ends abruptly without constructing or proposing an epistemological methodology for establishing what is and what is not fundamental in science, avoiding the biases of reductionism and implicitly accepted traditional conceptions. This would have made a superb closing for this essay.

      Dear Del Santo and Cardelli,

      Your paper is very well written. Your focus on no-go theorems with respect to quantum mechanics is a good overview of that area. It is as you indicate the case that modern physics does lean on such ideas. In relativity there is something similar with the invariance of the interval that gives a "no-go" theorem result that information and matter must move at the speed of light or slower.

      These bounds on quantum mechanics and no-go theorems such as no-signaling and no-cloning have interesting analogues with spacetime. For instance we have the no-cloning theorem that a quantum state |П€> can't be cloned in a unitary transformation |П€> в†' |П€>|П€>. This can be seen if we write this quantum state as |П€> = a|1> + b|2> so this cloning is

      |П€>|П€> = a^2|1>|1> + b^2|2>|2> + ab(|1>|2> + |2>|1>),

      but cloning on the basis {|1>, |2>}gives

      |П€>|П€> = a^2|1>|1> + b^2|2>|2>.

      This means cloning is basis dependent, which violates unitarity. This connects with spacetime physics if we assume we have a spacetime has a wormhole. A wormhole where one opening is transformed under a succession of Lorentz boosts or a send and return motion will exhibit closed timelike curves. It would then be possible to clone a quantum state. An observer with the quantum state |П€> will have a copy appear so that |П€> в†' |П€>|П€> if that observer later throws one |П€> into the wormhole.

      The types of spacetime solutions that may exist could then be constrained by quantum no-go theorems and restrictions on quantum measurements. I wrote a paper last year on a correspondence between the Tsirelson bound and the invariant interval of spacetime and how spacetime is built from entanglements. In general we then have that spacetime physics and quantum mechanics are mirrors of each other. The limits in both of these areas are then specific manifestations of the same constraints. It could be that the ultimate foundations of physics is just plain vanilla quantum mechanics.

      I wrote an essay that attempts to look at this correlation between quantum mechanics and general relativity. In part I attempt to look at empirical ways of supporting or falsifying this. At any rate I enjoyed your essay

      Cheers LC

        Dear Mr. Aybar,

        thank you for your comments.

        You are indeed write that we do not propose a new methodology that can open up frontiers even more.

        What we showed is that (1) we should not rely on very intutive thought, that incorporate prejudices, a reductionist approach, and naive empiricism as a methodology. Falsificationism surely brought new ways of testing a new variety of phenomena.

        We will anyway take your suggestion to further develop our ideas.

        Best wishes,

        Flavio

        Dear Mr. Crowell,

        thank you for your appreciation.

        As I state in the essay I strongly believe that results such as no-signaling theorem and its relativistic analogous no-fast-than-light-movement are the most fundamental that we have so far. They might change and be surpassed, possibly in different methodological framework (but who knows?). The fact that such constrains arise from different theories, are surely a fuerther evidence of fundamentality, in my opinion.

        I was not aware of the connectionof no-cloning with relativity that you point out. I will have a look at it.

        I look forward to read your essay. Very many thanks once again for your kind remarks.

        I wish you success,

        Flavio

        Chiara and Flavio

        Your idea that we should look for very basic assumptions and prejudices is in good agreement to my article. I regard the confusion in physics to be started before Einstein and even before Lorentz and in reality due to Stokes.

        I therefore think that it would be very interesting to here your opinions about my article. So, I hope that you will take a look at Fundamental Errors in Physics.

        Regards from ______________ John-Erik Persson

        Dear Del Santo and Cardelli,

        I found your essay very interesting, systematic and well written, and voted it very high, congratulations. Sadly I was lost in the §3.1 due the lack of mathematical tools - my formation is in philosophy.

        Anyway, you wrote that "the search for foundations is a dynamical process that aims at removing "philosophical prejudices" by means of empirical falsification.". I was wondering, could we consider also "empirical falsification" like a possible philosophical prejudice?

          Deat Mr. D'Isa,

          thank you for your very kind comments.

          It could well be the case that falsification is not the definitive methodology (and indeed, as you know even better than I do, most of modern philosophers of science do not adhere to falsificationism). What our essay tries to show is that within falsificationism we can strive for a systematic demolition of prejudices in our theories. And also with our examples we support the idea that falsificationism is what scientists are doing every day (or at least what they are convinced to do). But surely, a different methodology can lead to possibly surpass this.

          However, if is the empirical part that you would like to remove, than I cannot agree, because otherwise we are not doing natural science: we can do mathematics, art, or any kind of beautiful and imaginative activities, but that have nothing to do with the "world".

          I will read soon also your essay, that is in my list of the ones worth reading.

          Thank you again, and I wish you the best of luck!

          Flavio

          Dear Flavio,

          thank you for your reply. I understand your point, and as I said I find your theory useful and well argument. I agree that within falsificationism we can strive for a systematic demolition of prejudices in our theories.

          I have to partially disagree in what you said in the last part of your comment: it's true that empirical facts are necessary to natural science, but it's not true in my opinion that mathematics, art or other disciplines have nothing to do or to say (and I mean something true) about the world, even if within different languages. But maybe I misunderstood your statement.

          Thank you again, I wish you luck! In bocca al lupo (by your names it looks like you are Italian) ;)

          Francesco

          Dear Francesco,

          thanks for your further reply.

          Surely I didn't mean that maths is useless or meaningless in natural science. Far from me this! I only meant that is somethnig different, but I think we pretty much agree.

          I am reading your essay and will comment in the dedicated page.

          Crepi il lupo! And in bocca al lupo anche a te!

          Flavio

          p.s.

          Sono nato e cresciuto a Firenze, dove vedo che tu hai studiato