Blondes, Brunettes & the Flaw of the Excluded Middle by Peter Jackson

Dear Peter,

Thanks ever so much for your comments on my essay. I searched out the missing link by looking you up on arxiv and found "Resolution of Kantor and Babcock-Bergman Emission Theory Anomalies". Wow, had I known about your work I would have surely referenced you, as I should also do with Israel Perez's Aether work.

It seems as though we are on the same page, but I defer to your much deeper probings. And I feel more confident now that the matter will be decided in the hopefully near future.

I am currently reading your iqbit essay from a few years ago. I admire your ground breaking work!

I am not sure I am qualified enough to comment sensibly on your latest offering, except to say LEM has been on the nose for some time, and maybe some ternary bit computing will drive that home.

Best wishes,

Marts Liena

Dear Peter Jackson!

Your essay made us very happy. We agree with many of your theses. We also believe that understanding the objective world depends on our subjective logic. Logic is a theoretical device. This device can be improved. Therefore, we propose introducing some new principles for understanding time, which will allow us to understand in a new way both classical logic and set theory.The following definitions are given: 1) there is a set that we call "Time"; 2) this set consists of an infinite number of individual elements, which we call "Moments"; 3) all elements of a given set have a peculiarity: if one element is REAL, all other elements of the set are UNREAL; 4) we will call sets of this type - "AREAL SETS". It was found that the elementary areal relation is a logical law of contradiction: statements A and NOT-A together form an areal set of two elements. Formulating the law of contradiction, Aristotle and all the logicians after him constantly emphasized: there cannot be A and NOT-A in the same respect at the same TIME. We propose to rearrange the emphasis: in our formulation, AREALITY is a special logical relation that can simulate natural Time. The new model defines the time order in the form of definite characters' sequence.

The proposed ontology is related to the definition and introduction of the digital physics paradigm.

We hope that our approach will be useful to you.

Truly yours,

Pavel Poluian and Dmitry Lichargin,

Siberian Federal University.

Peter,

Thank you for alerting me to your essay. I got in at the last minute and have had the time to look at only a few essays up to now.

Yours was so unusual and refreshing! Free-thinking, physical physics! What a concept, what concepts!

I love your compilation:

"H.A. Lorentz said in 1906 "we can make no progress without some hypothesis that looks somewhat startling at first sight," Feynman echoed that in 1981 saying new solutions first "look wrong" before 'turning out simpler.' Similarly John Bell predicted QM's classical solution will need "radical conceptual renewal".iv [p172] and an imaginative leap that will astonish us [p27]. Solutions often exists, hidden well, in plain sight! We point to one in3 and below. But what IS certain is dismissal and default to embedded beliefs will STOP new solutions emerging. Good science has no place for beliefs, but we can hypothesize."

And ""(Ψ)..would prove to be a provisional or incomplete description.. It is this possibility, of a homogeneous account of the world, which is for me the chief motivation of the study of the so-called "hidden variable" possibility." J S Bell 1987iv Ch.4

also believing; "the founding fathers were in fact wrong" iv p171. "

And your simple attribution of gravity waves: "Motions of matter cause density fluctuations to propagate through the medium."

Dirac's view that solutions can't be found in "mathematical terms" but need "physical entities."

Mathematics. "There are, at present, fundamental problems in theoretical physics...(which)...will require a more drastic revision of our fundamental concepts than any that have gone before. ...these changes will be...beyond the power of human intelligence to get... by...mathematical terms. (and we must try to find and) ...interpret...in terms of physical entities." Paul Dirac. (PRS 1931 A133,60);

And your simple attribution of gravity waves: "Motions of matter cause density fluctuations to propagate through the medium." What? No need to squirrel gravitation-as-geometry into quantum physics???

Thank you for thinking about physics.

Jim

Peter,

I promised a reply to your thoughtful paper. You alread read my essay.

You mentioned a deep problem: does nature follow our logic? In the last century we learned that there are more logic systems, among them intuitistic logic with an excluding middle. We (my co-author Jerzy and I) found also interesting relations between this kind of logic and QM (but also 4-manifold topology).

You also wrote about matter (as a kind of vortex). Maybe you will find my paper about the relation between braids and particles interesting

paper

Finally I vote for your nice essay

Best wishes

Torsten

Dear Peter,

Glad to read your work again.

Thank you for evaluating my work: "I found your essay well written and informative, adding to my perception and understanding of how De Broglie Pilot waves can work".

I greatly appreciated your work and discussion. I am very glad that you are not thinking in abstract patterns.

While the discussion lasted, I wrote an article: "Practical guidance on calculating resonant frequencies at four levels of diagnosis and inactivation of COVID-19 coronavirus", due to the high relevance of this topic. The work is based on the practical solution of problems in quantum mechanics, presented in the essay FQXi 2019-2020 "Universal quantum laws of the universe to solve the problems of unsolvability, computability and unpredictability".

I hope that my modest results of work will provide you with information for thought.

Warm Regards, `

Vladimir

Dear Peter,

Thank you for your valuable comments on my essay. I read your essay and I am greatly impressed by the depth and width of your knowledge and thoughts. The title of your essay is most attractive and eye catching of all. Questioning binary logic is very promising, there is stuff called quantum logic. Noticing that laws of ancient Greeks are valid for metaphysical but not for nature is brilliant. You correctly see that applying fuzzy logic is the way and that should be standard for the future. I wish you very fruitful research along these lines.

Best regards,

Irek

Dear Peter,

Your essay presents an interesting way of looking at things, but I can't really evaluate if there are any "holes" in it. You seem to be saying that if we first assume that a 3D Higgs condensate/ ether underlies everything, then a lot of physics including gravity could be explained via the vortices and pressure densities etc caused by movements in the ether, if something first moves to start the system moving. Does this movement in the ether dampen and dissipate, continually requiring new movements, e.g. new flappings of butterfly wings, to "top-up" the system?

Re "The critical first step is to rigorously distinguish strictly PHYSICAL entities from the META-PHYSIAL; concepts, abstractions, attributes & thoughts, which INCLUDES symbols and numbers":

What about law of nature relationships? They are not exactly physical (measurable) entities; they represent the behaviour of the physical entities, and they can only be represented via symbols and numbers. For that matter, people can never avoid using symbols if they want to communicate with other people: written and spoken words are symbols; also you need to use symbols and numbers to represent vortices and pressure densities.

Re "The law of the excluded middle":

"Hair", as opposed to "a flower", is true or false; "blonde" or "brunette" is not so much true or false; but if you somehow measure the colour and assign a number to it, then the colour equating to that number is true or false.

Regards,

Lorraine

Howdy Peter,

I've come to pay my respects. I enjoyed the essay and I may come back for a longer review later. First off; I agree with your opening statements about logic, and some of the same items have peeved me. I think the middle is often falsely excluded, when it should be fleshed out in shades of gray. Or a false dilemma is invoked because of an incorrect and improper use of the excluded middle law. My Physics mentor chided me for not recognizing and properly treating either/or questions, but I think he missed the point sometimes, though he was both smarter and wiser than I.

My Logic professor in College was a Harvard PhD who recruited me for that school, but I failed to complete the application process on a technicality (unpaid library fine). Later he became an outcast or victim of conscience. Search the term "Les Sachs American in exile" to learn more. But it was an honors level course and I learned a few things. The Higgs condensate idea sounds interesting. I downloaded the paper. I'm familiar with Chapline and Laughlin's emergent Relativity and also bosonic condensation. A 0-mode massive graviton can be Higgs-like and form a condensate, in some theories.

More reading now, more comments later.

Jonathan

Dear Peter,

Thank you for the very interesting essay.

I have given it a single read, but it will take more because it rapidly ramps-up with ideas coming at the reader at a fast and furious pace.

I have some concerns that have me thinking (always a good thing, so thank you!).

The three laws you look at are laws that apply to logical propositions, not objects. And I would worry about anyone seriously trying to apply them to objects. One should not expect them to apply to objects, as you deftly point out.

Incidentally, this is an issue in quantum mechanics where we implicitly (and wrongly) expect our logic of propositions to apply to experimental setups. In quantum mechanics, we quantify experimental setups (which is the terminology that Ariel Caticha has used), or measurement sequences (favored by my past co-author Philip Goyal), with two numbers. One can derive that the mathematics of this pair is equivalent to that of complex numbers, which we refer to as quantum amplitudes.

We assign amplitudes to experimental setups, and we use the relationships among experimental setups to calculate the amplitudes for more complex experiments via the Feynman rules. With the Born rule in hand, one can then calculate the probability associated with that setup (or measurement sequence).

In short, we use two types of measures in quantum mechanics, each operating in a separate space. In the space of experimental setups, or equivalently measurement sequences, we use complex amplitudes. These amplitudes quantify the relationships among experimental setups via the Feynman rules. The Born rule maps the resulting complex amplitude to a probability, which lives in the space of logical propositions about these experiments. Two different measures (quantifications), each with its own algebra and calculus, applied to two different, but coupled, spaces.

It is the lack of recognition that these two quantifications (complex amplitudes and probabilities) live in and quantify elements in two different spaces that have led people to claim that quantum mechanics does not obey Boolean algebra.

Well, what do you mean by quantum mechanics when you say that? Because quantum mechanics is a theory that works in two different, but coupled, spaces. Of course the theory is not Boolean! Only the space of propositions is Boolean! There is NO SINGLE ALGEBRA of QM. The whole thing results from confusion about what we are really doing.

And the way I am thinking about your three laws is that they do not apply to objects. I don't really see a need to rework things. But I do see a need to take more care!

I hope these comments make some sense. I would be happy to engage in a dialogue if you have any questions.

Thank you again for a thought-provoking essay!

Cheers

Kevin

Peter,

Thanks for your last post on my page. I would like to share my particle theory with you sometime, if and when you have recovered from all the essay readings. I think we have a lot of ideas in common, and mine haven't been put to the test of any real review (except once 15 years ago). Where can I find your email address? Mine is lcress#rfprobes.com.au

On another topic I have noticed a lot of troll voting (1's, 2's, and 3's) after the supposed deadline. I took a snapshot at midnight (GMT) on the 18th, and then again now. Lots of changes! I think it's only proper to offer support or criticism via the posts, not by voting 1 without explaining why. I think the voting is counterproductive in many ways.

This is my first foray into FQXI and it has taught me a lot. What a fabulous resource to have available to the world, whith so many excellent ideas. I'm certain future breakthroughs in physics will have been discussed at some level in these essays. I am excited because my other special topic is time, and there is a whole comp of essays to read!!

Best wishes

Lockie Cresswell