Flowing with a Frozen River by Cristinel Stoica

Dear Peter,

Thank you for your explanations.

You say: "Please don't possibly interpret my words as harsh. They are not intended to be."

I appreciate very much that you sustain your ideas, I think that this is what you should do, and I like this.

The initial conditions (for example instantaneous positions and momenta), together with the evolution laws, contains all the information needed for restoring all the fields and their evolutions. They contain both the states and the processes.

You say: "by now presumably suggesting that velocity and momenta mean succession, you seem to be negating your original position regarding block time and change".

I do not deny my original position; I deny your original understanding about what my position is.

Best wishes,

Cristi Stoica

Dear Kavita Rajanna,

Thank you for watching the consistency with the contest's rules, for reminding us these rules, and for clarifying the situation.

Best regards,

Cristi Stoica

Dear Cristi,

Thanks.

"The initial conditions (for example instantaneous positions and momenta), together with the evolution laws, contains all the information needed for restoring all the fields and their evolutions. They contain both the states and the processes."

Ok, but as you would agree, such a situation is static; it is incompatible with motion and change. Yet, you talk about evolutions. These are mutually exclusive and it can only be one or the other.

"There is no change, only that each instantaneous observer identifies himself as the flowing observer."

In relation to your original position, I see it as being encapsulated by the above. Again, though, given such an interpretation of block time, there can clearly be no succession from one instant to the next for the observer either, nor can one imply any evolution (as you seem to be trying to do).

Best wishes

Peter

Dear Kavita Rajanna,

I think that some people may misinterpret your message. They may misunderstand that you find an inconsistency with the contests rules. Please clarify the situation.

Best regards,

Cristi Stoica

Dear Cristi,

I have edited my above post to make clear that this message was intended for all essay contest voters, not just those voting for your essay.

At this point we have not looked into any possible voting inconsistencies; we will do so after voting finishes on December 15. Until then we encourage everyone to vote for their favorite essays if they haven't already done so. A refresher on the voting guidelines is available at http://www.fqxi.org/community/vote.

Best,

K Rajanna

Wonderful work. At the end, the experiment to test free will...right now the input data does cause us, the player to get ahead (if I understand you correctly). The input data from our senses is not random, it is specialized to be useful to us. The outside player is the self-organizing developmental process (again, evolution). Is this player outside the physical world? In a sense it is, as an organizing principal.

Dear S. Baron,

Thank you for reading and posting your nice comments. I think that you caught the idea, and this is indeed the free-will hypothesis which I propose for testing. It is partially based on the quantum phenomena that seem to suggest that the initial conditions are established with delay. I look forward to read your essay.

Best wishes,

Cristi Stoica

To Kavita Rajanna:

Just want to clarify: Is the contest ending date December 15 (as was stated in your comment above and as originally posted in the rules section), or Jan 1 (as stated now in the rules section)?

Thanks.

I found your paper pretty interesting. What is of considerable interest is the strong causality principle:

On the same spacelike hypersurface (corresponding to an instant of time t0), the value of the matter field at a point must not depend on its value in other point

Much of how quantum physics is formulated this does not obtain. It is the standard approach that one must select a spatial surface, with equal time commutators specified and a coordinate time vector which fixes the Hamiltonian. This is an infinite amount of data, needed to provide data for partial differential equations.

There a version of this however is possible. The simple fact is that with general relativity the only time which corresponds to a real measurement is proper time ds = sqrt{g_{ab}dx^adx^b}. Quantum wave equations on the other hand are written according to the coordinate time t, which in general relativity is just a metric bookkeeping device. As such the strong causality principle might be looked upon as:

On the same spacelike hypersurface the value of a field at a point under all conformal transformation must not depend on its value in other point.

So for a metric g_{ab} ---> Omega^2g_{ab}, the field data specified by coordinate variables can be deformed by a set of conformal transformations into a reduced set. This would then define the a causality condition of the form which you write conformally. For the Anti-deSitter spacetime and its fields this would hold on the AdS ~ CFT equivalency or duality, similar to Maldacena's theory.

I wrote the paper #370 which illustrates some elements of what I am working on with respect to a similar vein. My paper here discusses how in this setting time is a scaling principle for quantum fields within a universal phase or quantum critical point.

Cheers,

Lawrence B. Crowell

a word of warning to anyone who does not know better: in addition to someone voting for this essay around 80 times in 3 days, it has received now 7 restricted votes. some more information: cristie has gone around most of the essays giving highly complimentary but content free comments to each single one of them. this includes essays that can be classed mystical or are one page long....read into this what you wish

I also found it a bit suspicious that Cristinel Stoica's essay is getting so many votes, considering that his essay is only full of technical jargon but with little real scientific content. Even though I don't agree with Rovelli's thesis, his work is definitely of a much higher quality than Stoica's.

Since I can't imagine so many informed voters voting for this essay, the votes may be explained by one or more of the following:

1. The voters are mostly uninformed and cannot distinguish good science works from bad ones.

2. Stoica has done a good PR job of convincing people to vote for him.

3. There may be multiple bogus essays submitted by the same person in order to gain more votes...

0. Maybe some contestants really liked my essay, at least as their third option.

Dear Dr. Crowell,

Thank you for the interesting and insightful comments you made about the Strong Causality Principle, I confess that I did not expected such implications. I haven't read yet your essay, but I look forward. Thank you very much for reading and appreciating my essay.

I wish you all the best,

Cristi Stoica

I thought of a number of ways in which the SCP could be formulatated. The possibility of a conformal version of this struck me first. I have not given this any deep analysis of course, but assume you have a base metric h_{ab} where the field theoretic content satisfies the SCP. This base metric defines other metrics g_{ab} = O^2h_{ab} by conformal transformations. Then on a metric where field content is dependent point to point, that dependency is due to the conformal choice one has imposed on the metric.

This might feed into the discussion on the prepration of quantum states in an experiment. Such perparations are a matter of the experimenter's choice, which can include the Wheeler Delayed Choice (WDC). So with the {0, 1, (0, 1)} topology space this would indicate that the SCP holds for quantum bits "transmitted" on the interval on a spatial surface.

This might connect to specifications of fields that determine the I^{oo} of the AdS. If CFT data in the AdS, and particularly CFT on the horizon of a BTZ black hole in the spacetime. If field theoretic content on the black hole is holographically projected into the spacetime from a base which obeys the SCP to the conformal boundary of AdS where it is again recovered then the deformations away from a SCP in the intevening spacetime are due to a set of all possible conformal transformations which exist there.

I will need more time to think about this to be sure I have this idea right.

As for some criticisms of this essay, I will say that it suffers in part from a problem mine does. I thought the deadline was Jan 1, and then discovered in the last week of November it was Dec 1. So I wrote mine in three days, and there are some gaps and what I admit are disconnects. In some ways the reasoning from SCP to the issues of quantum states and WDC is a bit disconnected.

However, over all this essay was intersting to read and raised some interesting points.

Lawrence B. Crowell

Dear Christi

You say: After presenting the arrows of time as emergent phenomena, I discuss the mind and its perception of time as flowing, in the context of the block spacetime.

I would say: I the universe we perceive only motion in space that is atemporal. Time is a mind model into which we experience motion into atemporal space

motion--perception--mind midel of time--experience

yours amritAttachment #1: 4_Relation_Between_Time_Mind_and_Consciousness.pdf

Dear Dr. Crowell,

I think that the conformal version of the SCP, and the connections you made with the AdS/CFT duality, are very interesting. I also had in mind a relation between SCP and the holographic principle, on a slightly different nature, which I did not develop it in the present essay. Like you, I need some time to think at the subjects you raised. Thank you for your interest, and the insightful and constructive observations.

Best wishes,

Cristi Stoica

Christa,

You say "The only hope for humans to have free-will is that the real "player", the real "I" is outside the physical world. You also say that you limit your study to relations between things. In light of this I assume you mean by "physical world" anything which can be studied by physics (natural science). I assume that you view a relationship between the non-physical and physical as off-limits to your study.

You talk about your desire to have an alternative to the standard discontinuity of the wavefunction in QM. In my FQXi paper I argue that this discontinuity, which occurs with a measurement, is a first cause in newly created causal chains. Anyone thinking about causality must also consider first cause(s), which by definition doesn't itself have a deterministic physical cause. This seems to mean that first causes, if they exist, must come either by chance or from the non-physical world. Clearly the study of "first causes" and the possibility of free-will are one and the same.

An interesting paper here to read is by Wiltshire. He makes an argument I compltely agree with that general relativity may not apply for cosmology appropriately. He argues for a cosmological equivalence principle based on conformal theory.

A metric is often modified by some scale factor Q so that g_{ab} ---> Q^2g_{ab}. There there is the issue of what is conformally invariant, which in GR is the Weyl curvature. So for the metric line element

ds^2 = g_{ab}dx^adx^b

for a diagonal system we have that the conformal transformed element is

ds^2 = -Q^2(u)(du^2 - dr^2 - r^2dOmega^2).

Now I write the time part as u, because suppose that Q^{-2) = du/dt, then we can write this as

ds^2 = -dt^2 Q^2(dr^2 r^2dOmega^2),

where for this conformal factor Q^2 = exp(sqrt{L/3}t), (L = CC) this gives the deSitter spacetime. So this time dependent conformal transformation can in a special setting define the deSitter cosmology. So this means that in the cosmology the equivalence principle is extended to frames which are conformal. So the comoving frame, which "surfs" on the expansion (Q-dot/Q)^2 = L/3 = H^2(Omega)/c^2, is in effect on a local inertial frame with the expansionary factor. We might call this a cosmological equivalence principle, which generalizes the notion of how we define frames globally.

There are some subtleties with this, for the Minkowski spacetime has four Killing vectors defined globally (K_i = partial_i) while for cosmologies this is an approximation. Cosmologies as type O Petrov-Pirani solutions have no Killing vectors. This is because different regions have different "time vector fields," for lack of a better term, and how a local inertial frame is defined is now generalized.

If we think in a reciprocal scale, think as a solid state physicist with Briollioun zones etc, then in this inverse space something similar may obtain. In string theory the structure of gravity assumes higher order terms, which suggests that something similar in an inverse setting is taking place. These higher order terms are I think similar to stimulated emission in laser physics, or its classical analogue of a microphone-amplifier feedback.

Now suppose that there is a parameter p associated with the deviation from standard general relativity in cosmology. Similarly suppose there is an order parameter q for deviations from GR in string theory. We might postulate that pq = constant. If I were so bold I might go so far as to say that constant is hbar.

Lawrence B. Crowell

Dear Prof. Wharton,

Thank you for your comment. I understand that you associate the discontinuities with the "first causes". The first causes work as well with the delayed initial conditions in Smooth QM. Eliminating the need for discontinuities does not eliminate the possibility of first causes, nor of the free-will. The difference is that they no longer start to apply at the moment of choice, but from the very beginning of time. On the other hand, in standard QM, the first causes also start to apply before the choice is made, as we can see from the delayed choice experiments. I see no incompatibility between the smooth QM and free-will, and first causes, which can be allowed by the delayed initial conditions. The smooth QM is based on deterministic equations, but it is not deterministic in the standard way, because the initial conditions are determined more with each new choice.

Best wishes,

Cristi Stoica