Reductionism Is Not Fundamental by William C. McHarris

William McHarris

Thank you very much for telling us that we often have too much trust in reductionism, and also in mathematics.

A question: Should we also change our view about Occam's Razor from Simplest is 'most true' to 'easiest to understand'?

I think my essay would interest you:

Fundamental Errors in Physics

Best regards from John-Erik Persson

Dear Bill,

Thank you for doing me the honor of multiple readings of my essay. I know I put in too much info for one reading, and I hoped there would be a few who found it worth a second look.

I probably erred in putting too much detail about gravito-magnetism [the non-linear field that I find so important] because it has little to do with most of the other ideas in the essay. [Actually, it does have to do with the energy of moving systems, but I do not explain how in this essay, as that is another essay in itself.]

If I understand your question about "E generating B generating E..." as a self-induced "ether", then a comment I made on my page Feb 18, @21:02 is relevant. I'll copy the relevant part here:

"Even as an assistant professor of physics, I once taught that the E and B fields of electromagnetic waves were 'out-of-phase' and their sum, ~(sin^2 cos^2) preserved energy across the vast reaches of space. When I noted the "in-phase" diagrams in my textbooks, I thought them mistaken, but quickly convinced myself that the Maxwell solutions do yield E and B in-phase with each other.

This means that (E^2 B^2) energy is max at one point in the waveform and zero at another. Thus as the waveform passes through a point, the energy of the point pulses from max to zero, and this repeats every cycle.

The equations(1) in my essay provide exactly the mass-energy density compensation needed for conservation of energy at every point the photon passes through. This only works when the non-linearity of the field is taken into account, and is "non-intuitive". I hope to solve and graph the solution, but it ain't gonna happen in this comment."

Bill, I hope this is what you meant by "E generating B generating E..." . If so, then the answer is no, they're both generated in phase with each other. I used to think that God missed a good bet, but now I believe the answer lies in the full use of equations(1), making use of the non-linearity. If you meant that they interact 'in-phase' to self-generate, it's difficult to see what starts and stops the process, then repeats.

I too find search for inconsistencies healthy, and I agree that some of the hastily drawn conclusions about orthodox QM might not withstand such bright light. I left a comment on Cristi Stoica's essay and copied it to my own page [Feb. 20, 2018 @ 00:56 GMT] pointing out certain aspects of this issue.

Thank you again for rereading my essay and putting serious thought into it.

Very best regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Dear William

If you are looking for another essay to read and rate in the final days of the contest, will you consider mine please? I read all essays from those who comment on my page, and if I cant rate an essay highly, then I don't rate them at all. Infact I haven't issued a rating lower that ten. So you have nothing to lose by having me read your essay, and everything to gain.

Beyond my essay's introduction, I place a microscope on the subjects of universal complexity and natural forces. I do so within context that clock operation is driven by Quantum Mechanical forces (atomic and photonic), while clocks also serve measure of General Relativity's effects (spacetime, time dilation). In this respect clocks can be said to possess a split personality, giving them the distinction that they are simultaneously a study in QM, while GR is a study of clocks. The situation stands whereby we have two fundamental theories of the world, but just one world. And we have a singular device which serves study of both those fundamental theories. Two fundamental theories, but one device? Please join me and my essay in questioning this circumstance?

My essay goes on to identify natural forces in their universal roles, how they motivate the building of and maintaining complex universal structures and processes. When we look at how star fusion processes sit within a "narrow range of sensitivity" that stars are neither led to explode nor collapse under gravity. We think how lucky we are that the universe is just so. We can also count our lucky stars that the fusion process that marks the birth of a star, also leads to an eruption of photons from its surface. And again, how lucky we are! for if they didn't then gas accumulation wouldn't be halted and the star would again be led to collapse.

Could a natural organisation principle have been responsible for fine tuning universal systems? Faced with how lucky we appear to have been, shouldn't we consider this possibility?

For our luck surely didnt run out there, for these photons stream down on earth, liquifying oceans which drive geochemical processes that we "life" are reliant upon. The Earth is made up of elements that possess the chemical potentials that life is entirely dependent upon. Those chemical potentials are not expressed in the absence of water solvency. So again, how amazingly fortunate we are that these chemical potentials exist in the first instance, and additionally within an environment of abundant water solvency such as Earth, able to express these potentials.

My essay is attempt of something audacious. It questions the fundamental nature of the interaction between space and matter Guv = Tuv, and hypothesizes the equality between space curvature and atomic forces is due to common process. Space gives up a potential in exchange for atomic forces in a conversion process, which drives atomic activity. And furthermore, that Baryons only exist because this energy potential of space exists and is available for exploitation. Baryon characteristics and behaviours, complexity of structure and process might then be explained in terms of being evolved and optimised for this purpose and existence. Removing need for so many layers of extraordinary luck to eventuate our own existence. It attempts an interpretation of the above mentioned stellar processes within these terms, but also extends much further. It shines a light on molecular structure that binds matter together, as potentially being an evolved agency that enhances rigidity and therefor persistence of universal system. We then turn a questioning mind towards Earths unlikely geochemical processes, (for which we living things owe so much) and look at its central theme and propensity for molecular rock forming processes. The existence of chemical potentials and their diverse range of molecular bond formation activities? The abundance of water solvent on Earth, for which many geochemical rock forming processes could not be expressed without? The question of a watery Earth? is then implicated as being part of an evolved system that arose for purpose and reason, alongside the same reason and purpose that molecular bonds and chemistry processes arose.

By identifying atomic forces as having their origin in space, we have identified how they perpetually act, and deliver work products. Forces drive clocks and clock activity is shown by GR to dilate. My essay details the principle of force dilation and applies it to a universal mystery. My essay raises the possibility, that nature in possession of a natural energy potential, will spontaneously generate a circumstance of Darwinian emergence. It did so on Earth, and perhaps it did so within a wider scope. We learnt how biology generates intricate structure and complexity, and now we learn how it might explain for intricate structure and complexity within universal physical systems.

To steal a phrase from my essay "A world product of evolved optimization".

Best of luck for the conclusion of the contest

Kind regards

Steven Andresen

Darwinian Universal Fundamental Origin

William McHarris

Thank for these ideas regarding Occam. I agree to all that you say in this blog post. Occam is not in much help regarding truth, but perhaps of some help regarding the order of testing theories.

I hope that you will keep your promise and write comments on my essay. I try to be provocative and is hoping for some kind of resistance. However, until now nobody has given any negative feedback, and that is what I am hoping for. So, please, tell me something that you find inconsistent, so we get something to discuss. It is the negative feedback that is most important.

Waiting for your response, and with best regards __________ John-Erik Persson

William

Perhaps you are interested in my blog at:

blog

John-Erik

William

I have read your essay. Its wonderful and understandable even by an electrical engineer, with no previous knowledge of nuclear chemistry. Thanks for that interesting reading. I hope for comments on my own essay.

Thanks again ___________ John-Erik

Hello William,

Your beginning quote set the tone for an exceptional essay.'Science progresses one funeral at a time.' The future depends on some graduate student who is deeply suspicious of everything I have said.

Geoff Hinton, grandfather of deep learning September 15, 2017

I have this suspicion that what is fundamental is not only non-linear, but discontinuous. For something different take a look at my essay "The Thing That Is Space-Time".

Thanks for your essay,

Don Limuti

Bill,

Thanks. I often feel I'm punching a citadel wall so appreciate you, Chandra and others support. I'd like you to understand the orthogonal vectors in OAM and have just discovered, though unfamiliar to all, they've been in Poincare's Sphere for 100 years! See the Figs in my last years essay; http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2755. Simply ROTATION at poles opposite but is zero at 90o, LINEAR at equator is zero at poles and also opposite at 180o

So start point is NOT 'singlet' but 2 inverse state pairs! Then I show both momenta values physically change non-linearly over 90o by the Cosine of the latitude of the interaction tan point. A bit more careful thought, 2nd photo-multiplier (orthogonal channel) interactions and the WHOLE of QM resolves into classical mechanics with no weirdness. I've just put a quick sequence checklist on my posts to help reconstruct a mental picture. Do also see Declan Traill's short confirmation code & plot, & Gordon Watsons similar analysis.

A 100 sec video here gives a quick glimpse of the dynamics. A full version is also available but needs an update.

THIS may be the weapons we need to open the citadel gates. But I need help to refine and wield it. Let me know how you get on. Top score going on yours now.

Very best

Peter

Dear William,

I highly appreciate your well-written essay in an effort to understand.

I hope that my modest achievements can be information for reflection for you.

Vladimir Fedorov

https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3080

Bill,

Great essay. Also liked your comments on Peter J's. No time now to chat! Boost coming.

Rich

Thanks again Bill,

For the reference to Susskind; I thank you. It appears it may be a direct outgrowth of some of the work I cite in my essay, but it is definitely worth following up the complexity limit notion in the context of my present research.

Best of Luck!

Warm Regards,

Jonathan

Dear Bill,

Thank you for your perceptive comments on my essay page.

As you may know, on this, the final day for the receipt of comments, there are some shenanigans going on whereby rankings are being forced down, presumably by parties that believe that, in doing so, they can elevate their own status.

For me the process is 'fundamentally' more precious than the goal; however, if you have not ranked my essay, any assistance in the direction of my prior, higher standing would be much appreciated.

I would like to believe that we shall 'meet' again, somewhere, some time.

Until then cheers, and thank you again.

Gary

Dear Bill,

Thanks for your comment on my essay. So far you are the only one commenting on my paragraph on free will. I really like that part of my essay, although it is very speculative. What I tried to do is to find a conceptual framework that makes it possible to think about free will. I don't think this is possible within a reductionistic realistic framework. No wonder that in that framework free will is not even definable and hence might appear as emergent or an illusion.

Yes, I take a orthodox view on quantum mechanics. But contrary to the orthodox view, I tread the measurement apparatus as quantum object. However by asking the object - measurement system to be separable from its environment (contrary to decoherence), the evolution on this system can be described as unitary and on the reduced states even as deterministic. Also conservation laws hold on the subsystem. Many words is not necessary, because the information transfer is objective. I think these are nice features of the presented model.

Of course, that the reality of the properties depend on the measurement system is the pill that one has to swallow. But I think this might be true in some extend for classical physics. Newtonian physics is only valid within an inertial reference frame. The reference frame itself remains undefined. Except one takes Poincare's view, where Newtons first law serves to define the linear momentum (and what a reference frame is). The second law then becomes an empirical law.

In my model (a bit different than the usual treatment of quantum reference frames) the measurement system is a field and has a double role. It serves as reference frame for the properties of the measured object and as a measurement systems, that gets information of the properties of the system.

Last but not least: I am really serious with my statement "whether a system is a classical system or a quantum system depends only on the symmetries of the system." The statement is true in a very trivial sense: If the evolution is invariant under phase changing (local gauche) transformations on the object subsystem (hence this transformation is a symmetry), then the phases are not observable and the properties are classical.

I belief that the statement is true also in more ambitious sense, that I cannot prove at the moment and might simply be wrong: every observable/measurable property is defined by a physical symmetry - where I call symmetry physical if there exists an evolution (depending only on the state of the environment), such that the changing of the properties of the object correspond to that symmetry. To show something like this would be nice. It could follow, that classical physics is not observationally complete. But there is much work to do here.

Thanks again for your comments. If you want to reply on the above please let me know on my blog.

Luca

SOME OBSERVATIONS AFTER COMMUNITY RATINGS HAVE BEEN CLOSED

The topic of this year's contest seem to have elicited an even wider range of subjects than usual -- and the variation in quality is enormous. Many are well-written and inventive, others more orthodox. Many are well-organized and ingenious, others -- let's face it -- crackpot. But this is all to the good. Contests like this encourage imagination and invention, something that is scarce in contemporary science, especially in Big Science. Perhaps this is the norm rather than the exception -- for in science, just as in music and the arts, one can enumerate the creative few in a rather short period of time.

Scientists, after all, are not all that different from other people. They are also susceptible to peer pressure and convention -- to the forces of "Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy," as so aptly argued by Roger Penrose in his recent book [5]. Even when we earnestly try to maintain a disinterested, objective viewpoint, we can easily fail to reach that goal.

Years ago, when I was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, the best way to measure alpha-particle spectra from radioactive decay was with a magnetic spectrometer. A strong magnetic field bent the alpha particles in a semi-circle onto a photographic plate, where one could determine their energies from the positions of their tracks on the plate. Even the best-prepared sources were not ideally thin (effectively monolayers), so the outgoing alphas would often drag bits of the source with them. Thus, the spectrometer quickly became contaminated, with alphas being emitted from places other than the original source. This meant that one had to determine (with a microscope) not only the position, but also the intensity, length, and angle of a track to determine whether or not it was a valid event. Interestingly enough, we the scientists were poor, almost unacceptable scanners -- the trouble was, we knew where the tracks "should be"! Try as we might, we couldn't completely eradicate our bias of "too much knowledge." The very best scanners turned out to be undergraduate students who knew nothing about alpha-particle spectra and nuclear structure!

A more humorous example of how unexpected factors can affect the progress of science. The Bevatron was going strong in those days, producing copious amounts of new particles in high-energy proton collisions. Most often these reactions were analyzed in a bubble chamber, where the pressure on supercooled hydrogen was released in sync with the beam pulse, leaving the particle tracks observable as a series of microscopic bubbles in the liquid hydrogen. Thousands upon thousands of photographs of these tracks were analyzed every week, with the initial sorting usually done by hired students. Surprisingly, it was found that the night shift did a better job, analyzing more photos and with higher accuracy, than the day shift. Upon closer analysis, it was discovered that, while the day shift was bored out of their minds with the tedious job, the night shift -- with a little pot on the side -- was treating it as a light show!

Thus, the progress of science is not necessarily a straightforward -- dare I say reductionist?! -- path. One must not eliminate all seemingly oddball ideas at the outset. This illustrates the value of contests such as this one. Finally, in the next post I would like to show the dangers, both experimental and theoretical, that can be encountered when we humans engage in a stampede related to a popular topic. I'll call it "The Rise and Fall of Anomalons."