Causality is Fundamental, not Math Ontology by Roger Schlafly

Dear Roger Schlafly,

I very much enjoyed your essay on causality. Those who deny it seem to have some abstraction in mind. Your essay is so impressive because it's based on simple common sense, applied to a variety of special cases in physics.

Why is common sense required, for example, to counter the symmetry of time? You probably somewhat up best when you point out:

"But this is only a formal mathematical symmetry of the equations."

I have, for several essays, focused on the fact that physicists project mathematical structures onto physical reality, and then often come to 'believe in' the projected structure as real. Your treatment of this is excellent.

In addition to 'time-symmetry', physicists have projected 'space-time symmetry' on to reality. I analyze this in my current essay, which I hope you will read, comment on, and score.

Best regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Dear Roger Schlafly,

I too consider causality most fundamental, and I appreciate your essay defending causality and offering many compelling reasons for that view. I even see causality indispensable because it is the only alternative to mysticism.

You distinguished between causality and the direction of time. I am not sure whether or not this is necessary. Maybe, this split reflects the intention of causality deniers to justify some putatively contradicting claims. If I recall correctly, in his essay Dos Santos "purifies" Brukner's quantum science from what he calls "philosophical prejudice".

My point of view arose from awareness of logical contraditions with application of generally accepted and meanwhile mandatory tenets. Because you have a PhD in mathematics, you will be able to carefully check what I found out.

Best regards,

Eckard

Roger,

Great essay, I think you put a lot of silly and distracting ideas to bed very conclusively. I have you down for top marks for that valuable achievement, interesting and easy to read.

You also well identify and characterise the great remaining 'carbunkle' on logic and causality at the most fundamental scale; Quantum Mechanics, which you'll recall I've been addressing.

Well shockingly this year I think I've completed the task. I do hope you'll study and help test the ontology of the classical mechanistic sequence, starting with Maxwell's orthogonal state paired momenta on each particle rather than 'no assumption' so silly 'superposition' in QM. You'll like the way that the finding also identifies the error in the apparent 'backwards causality' /quantum eraser analysis. (Do also check out Declan Trail's mathematical proof & plot.)

Very well done for yours. Like your previous essays it was a pleasure to read, right on topic and also a relief after some others! maybe there's hope for us yet.

Very Best of luck.

Peter

Dear Dr. Schlafly,

Your essay is clear, simple, and well argued. I agree that causality is fundamental.

I would argue that quantum entanglement is not consistent with causality. This is now important technologically, because quantum computing has become a fashionable field for R&D by governments and corporations. But the predicted power of quantum computing comes directly from entanglement. I predict that the entire quantum computing enterprise will fail within about 5 years. Only then will the mainstream start to question the foundations of quantum mechanics.

In my own essay, "Fundamental Waves and the Reunification of Physics", I argue that both GR and QM have been fundamentally misunderstood, and that something close to classical physics should be restored, reunifying physics that was split in the early 20th century. QM should not be a general theory of nature, but rather a mechanism for creating discrete soliton-like wavepackets from otherwise classical continuous fields. These same quantum wavepackets have a characteristic frequency and wavelength that define local time and space, enabling GR without invoking an abstract curved spacetime.

Alan Kadin

Dear Dr Roger Schlafly,

FQXi.org is clearly seeking to confirm whether Nature is fundamental.

Reliable evidence exists that proves that the surface of the earth was formed millions of years before man and his utterly complex finite informational systems ever appeared on that surface. It logically follows that Nature must have permanently devised the only single physical construct of earth allowable.

All objects, be they solid, liquid, or vaporous have always had a visible surface. This is because the real Universe must consist 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.

Only the truth can set you free.

Joe Fisher, Realist

Roger,

I agree with the importance of causality. An entirely dynamic universe must be made of a causal process. A spontaneously evolving universe has causality written all over. At the fundamental level, this causality is logical (basis of maths). This general spontaneous evolution of the universe is what we perceive as time.

My essay calls for substance and cause to be fundamental...

Best of luck,

Marcel,

Dear Roger Schlafly, you said: "Causality is Fundamental" And who doubts?

As soon as the memory of the past was born in the living organism, he began to search for the cause of the present. The source of the cause is the physical space, which according to Descartes is matter. Space is the foundation for fundamental ideas about the world. Figuratively one can say that space is the body of God, which moves in the future from the past. The moment of his creation is the moment of our life. Look at my essay, FQXi Fundamental in New Cartesian Physics by Dizhechko Boris Semyonovich Where I showed how radically the physics can change if it follows the principle of identity of space and matter of Descartes. Evaluate and leave your comment there. I highly value your essay, however, I'll give you a rating as the bearer of Descartes' idea. Do not allow New Cartesian Physics go away into nothingness, which is end of some questions.

Sincerely, Dizhechko Boris Semyonovich.

Roger,

I would say that causality has been mugged by the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics.

And, would add that to the extent that a phenomena is mathematically perfect, it is not physics.

Do take a look at my essay on the causation of space-time. I think it is refreshingly cause based. So, therefore it is not as fundamental as your essay, but interesting nonetheless.

Thanks for your well presented essay in defense of causality.

Don Limuti

Dear Roger Schlafay

I enjoyed reading your defence of causality. You might be interested in causal set theory that extracts the causal structure of GR and attempts to build a physical theory on top of this. I'd also say that the measurement problem in QM signifies cause and makes time real in a way that the classical theories don't. See Smolins book, Time Reborn, where he moves away from a timeless conception of he universe to one where time is essential.

Best Regards

Mozibur Ullah

Dear Roger Schlafly,

Thank you for a very stimulating essay. You have two parts. One says that causality is important and the other says that mathematical objects/equations are less important. What about mathematical objects/equations that describe causality? Is it not true that such mathematical entities are as important as causality. Newton's laws can be thought of as describing causality.

Thank you for such an interesting essay.

Please take a look at my essay.

All the best,

Noson Yanofsky

Dear Dr. Schlafly,

thanks for this short, but interesting essay. Although I don't agree overal with your starting point, namely that "the search for fundamental physics usually focuses on mathematical objects". I think that this is a mere collateral effect. The search for fundamental physics search for the fundamental "things" (being them laws, or entities, or principles, etc.). Mathematics is the most successful way we found to describe those things, but it is used as a tool to model our ideas in such a way that we can perform experiments to test these ideas.

Having said this, I am also convinced that, exactly because of this, causality is fundamental. In my essay (https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3017) I called it a "fundamental bound", beyond which it is no more meaningful to perform experiments to test our theories.

I hope to discuss this further, also if you have a look at my essay.

I wish you the best of luck for the contest,

Flavio

Dr Schafly,

The title intrigued me as I am quite sure that causality is a fundamental property, and that current particle theory is remiss in its acausal formulation. But sure such a discussion should have, at a minimum, referenced the literature on the subject?

See J.B. Hartle, S.W. Hawking and T. Hertog, "The Classical Universes of the No-Boundary Quantum State" hep-th/0803.1663v1 March 2008. and especially

N. Seiberg, L. Susskind and N. Toumbas, "Space/Time Non-Commutivity and Causality", hep-th/0005015v3, May 2000. in which they establish a causality criteria.

The NBWF fits the requirement but lacks a quantum algebra. {I supply that in many of my earlier works}

regards, Wayne

Thank you for the explaination. Please take a look at my essay.

All the best,

Noson

Yes, those arguments against causality of those "Philosophers and others" are "just wrong on every level".

Those standard wavefuction solutions used to describe phenomena are time irreversible, but contrary to a common confusion in the literature, those solutions do not correspond to time-symmetric equations. It is trivial to show that the weavefunctions used in quantum scattering are not solution to the Schrödinger equation, but solution to the modified (time-irreversible) equation

[math]i\hbar \frac{\partial\Psi}{\partial t} = H \Psi + \eta ( \Psi - \Phi )[/math]

with Phi the unperturbed wavefunction and eta the infinitesimal that regularizes the power series expansion of the perturbed state Psi.

In fact, a generalization to mixed states of the above time-irreversible equation is used as base for a formulation of irreversible quantum statistical mechanics. I mean the Zubarev equation.

Those decays of unstable particles you allude are often described by a time-irreversible extension of the Schrödinger equation obtained by replacing the Hamiltonian as H --> H - iR. The associated quantum states of the instable particle no longer are defined in a Hilbert space and give one of the known formulations of irreversible quantum mechanics.

Entropy is not fundamental. The irreversible equations mentioned above continue to work in situations where the concept of entropy does not apply or is ill-defined. The second law "Entropy increases with time" is only an approximation. It can be demonstrated that the monotonic production of entropy is only valid in the Markovian regime. The classical second law is not a fundamental law, but only an approximated way to characterize irreversible processes.

Yes, it is very funny how some people dismiss the second law as "empirical". The most ridiculous argument against the second Law I know is found in the textbook by Robert Zwanzig. He argues that all that we know about the classical second law is derived from experiments made in a Human timescale "the ice cube always melts and never reappears", and so we cannot really trust thermodynamics about what will happen in thousands of million years, instead he claims we must trust dynamics and its time-reversibility, and that the ice cube will reappear, even if we will not see it, because dynamics says it will happen. It is ridiculous because dynamics has been also formulated over the base of experiments made on a Human time scale. He seem to believe that dynamics was formulated by God whereas thermodynamics was only formulated by scientists. LOL

Effectively, causality does not require an arrow of time. Classical Hamiltonian mechanics is time-reversible (there is no arrow of time) and however it is fully causal. And, of course, causality does not require determinism.

Whereas agreeing with most, I don't think I have to take causality as a fundamental property of the Universe.