Fundamental as Fewer Bits by Terry Bollinger

Terry,

Like your practice of numbering responses by paragraphs. and a useful analytic. Had not thought of approaching my reading in that manner. Like that free acrobat permits highlighting and commenting.

Many interesting thoughts in your responses. Skipping beyond a few of them to

(4) Euler's identity - yes, apparent deepness of connection between math and matter befuddles. re inversion, i did try to work with conductance early in exploration of impedance quantization. Shoulda been trivial. Seemed more sensible to work in terms of what goes easy rather than what resists. Simple thing in mathcad (left a link for you to pdf of an early mathcad file in our thread on my essay) to work either way. Was very puzzling. Gave it a lot of attention, as somehow it seemed a philosophical item of importance, to opt for conductance rather than resistance. Could not make any sense of it, still don't understand why. Couldn't get the numbers to work. One has to calculate to figure anything out. Couldn't calculate. Had to give up, switch back to impedances. Can't believe there is anything fundamental in the modeling that would cause this. Wish i had a student to chase it.

(5) renormalization - you are calling conductance 'the primary fraction'? Like that, but of itself it is not enough to result in finiteness if i understand correctly. Impedance has both capacitive and inductive components with pi/2 phase shift between them in 'free space', a consequence of how wave function of interest excites the eight-component 3D Pauli vacuum wavefunction. Capacitive impedance is zero at the singularity, inductive is infinite. Going from ohms to mhos doesn't get rid of the singularity, just shifts its phase. However either extreme results in an infinite mismatch.

(5a) Regarding applications of quantum impedance matching in amo/condensed matter, agree there are possibilites as yet unimagined. Been humping on that for years. Only way to understand the inertia of mainstream is to experience it. Would seem obvious. The computer holding me a willing captive at this very moment is chock full of impedance matches. How could a quantum computer be any different? So far in our investigation of impedance quantization it seems the concept is firmly grounded in reality. Computers require impedance matching. Quantum computers require quantum impedance matching. Have a Buddhist friend that likes the phrase 'not no mind'. Me, i go with compassion for ignorance, otherwise would hate my not no self and go lusting for the not no gold mines' kitty kats. What a funny world we live in. Mortgages and back taxes.

(6) dude! We got got gravity. That was our black hole info paradox paper/poster for the 2013 Rochester Conference on Quantum optics, information, and measurement. Vetted by Optical Society of American, world guardian of quantum information theory/experiment. Poster is perhaps quickest click. http://vixra.org/pdf/1306.0102v1.pdf

(7a) excellent. You know math better, perhaps i have found a teacher please. The uniqueness of 3D space is an area pretty new to me, and i've never seriously looked at quaternions. When trying to model particle physics one picks and chooses what to learn very carefully, as there is infinity of beauty and complexity in every direction. For the purposes of tying together loose ends it seldom suffices to simply chase down the ends and knot them, unless one agrees to be satisfied with the tangle that connect them. Lacking that the universal PhD path dives in and start untangling. The village idiot just tracks down the ends and ties the knot. and poof fairy tale tangle vanishes and he steps in a cow pie. So it goes. Michaele and i are more modelers than typical theorists, and def not math types. Calculators.

(7b) thanks for link to Traill, Peter Jackson also recommended him and I took a look but was not able to wrap the mind around it, will try again.

re intuition, i think much of it has to do with what one experiences in life, what the Buddhist might call dependent arising. For me it was working with my brother, designing/building/operating vibratory piledrivers, synchronized spinning eccentric weights. Standing next to them, feeling the energy transfer,... Made one want to laugh, to dance and sing. That and dad was an electronics guy, we build the electronic analog and ran it on the bench. Mechanical and electrical impedances. Quantization comes easy once one gets that.

took a look at the Rochester poster. Had forgotten superheavies (top/higgs/Z/W) line is in the wrong place by a power of alpha in figure 4. Better reference for that figure is the big bang/bounce paper http://vixra.org/abs/1501.0208

Terry,

Not sure what you mean:

a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak,

My comments above did not apply to you, basically the contest in general.

Jim

Terry,

Perhaps because I think like a complex systems scientist, I agree with your gold mining metaphor -- applied to information. Information without waste and redundancy is efficient and useful. On the other hand, waste and redundancy are assets to creativity. The meaning that one assigns to information is a subjective judgement; it does not necessarily contain the requisite information to "be fruitful and multiply."

A priori meaning is that which precedes information, and continues without the user's knowledge. For example, Leslie Lamport said, "A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable." Unusable, not meaningless. For in the context of the system, rejected information is useful somewhere else in the system.

Thanks for bringing the dialogue to a higher level. It is most welcome.

Best,

Tom

Hi Terry,

I saw the amazing brainstorm in your 2/17 "quick addendum" comment on Karen Crowther's essay, but thought it was more appropriate to respond here. (Unfortunately since your comment is hidden in that thread, I can't link to it directly.)

The basic idea is that perturbative theory is more fundamental than non-perturbative theory, even where the latter is actually available -- which isn't the case, so far, with the Standard Model. I'd never thought of it like that, but it does make sense to me. It has always seemed to me significant that a beautifully simple formula like Newton's gravitation law has to be computed perturbatively as soon as you have more than two interacting bodies. I think what this points to is just that the actual physics of our world is being done in the vast numbers of one-on-one relationships between things (and parts of things)... while the seemingly simple "formal solutions" represent the summary result of this, not its underlying cause.

What's really daring is your insistence that not only physics but sacrosanct Math itself - at least to the extent it's computable - also works this way. I was indeed shocked, not so much by the anti-Platonic idea as by the intellectual energy behind it. But as I've come across your responses to many another essay in this contest, I've come to realize you're one of those who can "think five impossible things before breakfast." I'm in awe.

Now for another of your dicta, which I also agree with: not only entropy but also meaning increases with time. Referring here to your reply to Noson Yanofsky above, and to your comment on Josephson's essay: "Meaning itself appears to be inherent and pre-programmed into the very fabric of our cosmos, both at the level of the Standard Model and deeper. I do not think we are remotely close to understanding how that works, or even how to frame the question properly."

Framing this question is a central concern of mine. My my last FQXi essay proposed a recursive definition of meaning, expanding on Bateson's "difference that makes a difference." As argued also in my current essay, for any kind of information to be meaningfully definable, there has to be an appropriate context of other minds of information, that have meaning in other contexts. In relation to your quantifying the "impact on reality per bit," the point is that "impact" depends on the "pre-programming" of some part of reality to receive this particular kind of information and translate it into some other kind, that has an impact somewhere else. In the earlier essay I tried to outline the three great recursive technologies that accomplish this in the physical, biological and human worlds, each working by a form of natural selection. In a still earlier essay I pointed out the "semantic" dimension in the mathematical language of physics - another way of getting at the issue of how different types of physical information help define each other.

My sense is that Josephson's "semiotics" doesn't get to this key issue. If we think of "meaning" in terms of signifying, we have a relation between sign and signified where the context goes unnoticed. This is also the problem with much discussion of measurement in quantum theory, where the many-faceted complexity of any actual measurement arrangement gets abstracted into a relation between object and observer.

It's quite understandable that even though measurement-contexts clearly play a key role in quantum physics, it only seems possible to describe them theoretically in a highly abstract form. But I think this is why I'm so impressed your notion that "perturbative" theory has to be fundamental - it shows a willingness to get involved in the many-leveled nuanced "lumpiness" of the world. So more power to you! (But do stop for breakfast once in a while.)

Conrad

Terry,

I like your definition (quote?) of QM. The thing about history is that nobody can see it as history at the time.

There's history being written in my essay you've so far missed due to normal embedded assumptions. To make it more visible I've posted the below check list which the ontology builds on; Hope you can find the l time to look with a fresh mind.

AS MOST STRUGGLE WITH THE CLASSICAL SEQUENCE (TO MUCH TO HOLD IN MIND ALL AT ONCE) A QUICK OUTLINE INTRO IS HERE;

1. Start with Poincare sphere OAM; with 2 orthogonal momenta pairs NOT 'singlets'.

2. Pairs have antiparalell axis (random shared y,z). (photon wavefront sim.)

3. Interact with identical (polariser electron) spheres rotatable by A,B.

4. Momentum exchange as actually proved, by Cos latitude at tan intersection.

5. Result 'SAME' or 'OPP' dir. Re-emit polarised with amplitude phase dependent.

6. Photomultiplier electrons give 2nd Cos distribution & 90o phase values.

7. The non detects are all below a threshold amplitude at either channel angle.

8. Statisticians then analyse using CORRECT assumptions about what's 'measured!

The numbers match CHSH>2 and steering inequality >1 As the matching computer code & plot in Declan Traill's short essay. All is Bell compliant as he didn't falsify the trick with reversible green/red socks (the TWO pairs of states).

After deriving it in last years figs I only discovered the Poincare sphere already existed thanks to Ulla M during this contest. I hope that helps introduce the ontology.

Very best. Peter

Terry,

If #7 were true, physics would have no foundational theories. Complex, non-trivial properties are often the result of dynamics with specified boundary conditions.

Dear Terry,

An original and daring idea, to define a numerical measure to answer the question 'what is fundamental'. It is really interesting to literally view scientific theories as a concise way to represent measurement data.

I have a few comments. Your example of decimals of pi nicely illustrates that an unambiguous measure of Kolmogorov complexity is not possible. The example doesn't suffice, however, because the string of decimals is too short. I'm quite sure that in the space of 20 decimals, you cannot write a program that enumerates the decimals of pi. So probably the shortest way to represent your example string is the string itself (or a zipped variant). But of course, if you would take a string of decimals of pi that is much longer, the example does work.

A more serious objection on your view on physics as information theory is that I would want to see arguments why it makes sense to view a physical theory as a concise way of reproducing data. This view misses the semantical part, the meaning of the theory. In practice, the question on how to check measurement data against the predictions of a theory, is not a straightforward one. A lot of theory interpretation is needed to calculate what outcome the theory predicts for a certain measurement. This aspect is absent from your view.

Let me put it in a different way: if I understand you right, I can rephrase your claim that the most fundamental physical theory is somewhat like the best compression algorithm. Both are the shortest possible way to represent a set of data. But there is an important difference, because any scientific theory is a finite description of an infinite set of data, whereas the size of a compressed set of data still scales with the size of the original data. This indicates that there is an important difference between the two.

In the end, I tend to think that how fundamental a theory is, is not a concept that can be given a numerical measure. But I admit that the idea is really interesting.

Let me read up on the Spekkens principle, because I don't think I understand it. And I really like the three challenges you conclude with. I must confess, as a physicist, that I never appreciated the mysteries around spin and the difference between fermions and bosons. My bad, because indeed this must be profound.

All the best,

Paul Bastiaansen

Terry, some quick short notes as I work my way to your essay:

1. FQXi Essay Contestant Pledge = Suggested FQXi Voting Pledge

Your Pledge is so refreshing that I've hot-linked it above. LHS wording of the title is yours; to me, it reads "official" and is thus too hopeful (for now). RHS is my suggested edit as we work with FQXi to improve things!

2. Under current circumstances, my own position is clear:

(i) As an independent researcher, I'm here to discuss, learn, teach, debate, respond to every question, critique others, etc. Result = Fail; eg, next-to-no questions, few responses.

(ii) I'm not here for the votes: Result = Just-as-well; eg, given a 0 without explanation: how can I learn, respond, correct, defend, revise, acknowledge, etc?

3. While we await (with many others) for FQXi improvements, why don't we develop an OPEN voting system? Add to your Pledge a (say, for argument's sake) 5-category [each numbered; #1-5] scoring sheet [maximum vote per category = 2??] with space for explanations, plus identifier (say, for you, hot-linked Terry Bollinger [or with hot-linked email-addresses also allowed] so that we ALWAYS get an alert -- with easy-return access. [You get the idea.]

Recipient can respond to Terry Bollinger#2, for all to see: thus promoting open learning, debate, progress, support for one view or the other, or a middle view, etc. Given the teaching/learning, who then here, as a serious researcher, would focus on "fake-scores"?

The advantage of this OPEN proposal is that you, with your background, could lead us to something truly useful, actionable, within the current rules, a worthwhile experiment, ready for the next "contest" (surely the wrong word here) -- which FQXi can monitor before refining (if need be), and accepting as the new gold-standard in OPEN teaching/learning/essay-exchange; etc: ready for the next 1 "contest"!

4. To your (for me) excellent essay:

(i) I counted 8 important fundamental symbols in Challenge #1.

(ii) Re Challenge #2: in my [hurried] essay, see hot-linked Reference [12], p.639! It's part of my theory.

(iii) NB: Your editorial red-pen will be very welcome there at any time; hopefully after you've read [in the first thread], the Background to my theory (which dates from 1989).

(iv) Maybe, with hard work and insight, you might just become the person who finds a hidden gemstone of simplicity by unravelling the threads of misunderstanding that for decades have kept it hidden.

PS: Terry, if/when you reply to my post (at any time), please copy it to my essay-thread so that I'm alerted to it. I will do likewise.

Enough (for now): With many thanks and much appreciation for your lovely work;

Gordon Watson More realistic fundamentals: quantum theory from one premiss.