Reductionism Is Not Fundamental by William C. McHarris

William

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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

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."

"The Rise and Fall of Anomalons -- a Cautionary Tale"

by Wm. C. McHarris

Anomalons were all the rage in nuclear science for about a decade in the 1980's to 1990's. First observed in cosmic rays, they were heavy ions -- fragments of atomic nuclei -- that exhibited anomalously short interaction paths; hence, the name, "anomalons."

There is much we don't know about nuclei, but one thing we do think we know pretty well is how charged heavy ions lose energy when interacting with matter. If we know their charge, mass, and energy, then we can predict rather precisely the lengths of their paths as they pass through a particular medium. This is because they lose energy primarily through a multitude of "small" collisions with the electrons of the atoms and molecules in the medium. There are enough collisions to make good statistical predictions of the lengths of their paths.

However, in some cosmic-ray experiments, secondary fragments were observed to have much shorter paths than predicted. These "anomalons" were never the primary cosmic rays but only occasional secondary fragments produced after the primary heavy ions had collided with nuclei in the photographic emulsions. The difficulty with cosmic-ray experiments, however, is reproducibility -- one has to be content with whatever events have occurred, and these tend to be few and far-between.

When the Berkeley Bevelac came on line in the early1980's, it replaced cosmic rays as a reliable source of high-energy heavy ions. Heavy ions were accelerated to moderate energies by the HILAC -- Heavy Ion Linear ACcelerator -- at the top of the hill, transported by an "umbilical cord" beamline halfway down the hill to the Bevatron, and there reaccelerated to GeV energies. This rather Rube Goldberg arrangement was originally proposed to extend the lives of two aging accelerators, but it served well for almost twenty years. And one of its first successes was the production of anomalons "in abundance." "In abundance" must be used advisedly, however, for the primary beams never acted anomalously, and a fair amount of statistics had to be applied to separate the relatively few anomalous secondary fragments from all the other debris.

Two "World Conferences on Anomalons" were held at Berkeley in the 1980's, and I was present at both. Explanations for the phenomenon were numerous -- and at times highly imaginative. The most lauded explanations had to do with "color seepage." Just as the short-range, saturated chemical bond can be thought of a result of the "remnants" of the long-range electromagnetic (QED) force, so might the short-range, saturated strong nuclear force be thought of a a result of the "remnants" of the long-range color (QCD) force between quarks. And just as polar chemical bonds can result in dipoles that interact with outside matter, so might "color seepage" cause anomalons to interact more strongly with the material they were passing through, resulting in an anomalously short path. The concept of color-seepage became rather fashionable.

I was working with a group at the Bevalac involved with the mechanisms of pion production in relativistic collisions between nuclei, so I had pions on my mind. While listening to some of these explanations, I suddenly had the idea of a much more mundane explanation: These could instead be the result of negative pions (produced copiously in such collisions) loosely bound (with a velocity dependent force) to neutrons -- "pi-neuts," a term we coined. One of the group leaders and I decided to follow up on this, and over the next month or so we gave ourselves a cram course about the region where pion physics meets nuclear physics. We kept pretty quiet about what we were doing, for the subject was bound to be both exciting and controversial, releasing a preprint only after our resulting paper had been accepted for publication. ["Anomalons as Pineuts Bound to Nuclear Fragments: A Possible Explanation," Wm. C. McHarris and J. O. Rasmussen, Phys. Lett. B 126, 49 (1983)]. In this we were proven wise, for one senior researcher accused us of stealing his ideas, another told me that he, too, had come up with the same idea but discarded it as impossibly mundane, and a senior faculty member approached me asking how much I would charge for him to be included on the next publication!

Anomalons remained in vogue for a few years longer, and many more experiments were performed. But alas, eventually they were shown to be artifacts of the very involved statistics involved in analyzing the experiments. I emphasize that there was no fudging of data involved in any of these experiments-- no hanky-panky whatsoever. It was simply that the (large) groups of experimentalists wanted and believed so earnestly that anomalons be real that they inadvertently blinded themselves to the uncertainties involved with the statistics. Our paper in "Scientific American" ["High-Energy Collisions between Atomic Nuclei," WCM and JOR, Sci. Am. 250, No. 1, p.58 (Jan. 1984)] gives an overall view of the situation, and I hope that the measured skepticism in it might have contributed to the downfall of anomalons.

So anomalons disappeared, but pineuts remained. Several subsequent studies have indicated that they are indeed produced in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. They are actually a sort of "penta-quark," and pentaquarks have more recently been seen in elementary particle experiments. I must confess, however, that even though anomalons are currently considered beneath contempt -- I confess that I still have a soft spot for those old cosmic-ray experiments, which are more difficult to explain away.Attachment #1: Rise_and_Fall_of_Anomalons.pages

William McHarris

Thanks for discussions.

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Best regards from John-Erik Persson