Does God play dice with time itself? by Del Rajan

Dear Del,

Congratulations for your interesting and very well written essay.

I completely relate with your argument that an esthetic principle, as the one of Dirac's, is not enough. And your ''principle of mathematical randomness'', i.e. taking randomness as fundamental, seems (to me) to be one of the best tracks to move forward. I also enjoyed your proposition to focus on compression rather than information, and your proposal on typical and atypical time is really interesting. Working on quantum causality on quantum indefinite causal orders, I would have liked to have an analysis of these compared to your ideas.

"The emergence of time in this intrinsic random manner suggests that God not only plays dice but plays dice all the time and with time itself." My essay aims at arguing for the fact that quantum "paradoxes" might emerge from self-referential issues (i.e. God does play dice, and this fundamental randomness in quantum theory as a source which might be analog to the undecidable propositions in mathematical logic). As an epilogue, I propose a (not very developped) intuition that time itself might emerge from self-referential structures. If you have the time to read it, I would be very interested to have your feedbacks on it.

All the best,

Hippolyte

PS : Correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to me that you identify the Copenhagen interpretation with "shut up and calculate". However, there are rather Copenhagen interpretationS (nuances between Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli... views) and they do not defend the "shut up and calculate" view, but rather refined forms of realisms, that could be said to be carefully based on structures and relations (cf. the section "The Heirs of Copenhagen" in my essay).

Dear Dr. Rajan,

Your essay is beautifully written and a pleasure to read. You ask all the good questions about quantum mechanics - whether randomness is fundamental, the origin of the Born probability rule, the possibility of there being randomness in time, and the deep foundational issues that plague quantum gravity research.

I wanted to mention here that there has been much progress on these questions, in a manner which moved away from `shut up and calculate'. It started with the Ghirardi-Weber-Rimini-Pearle theory of spontaneous localisation in 1986. They provided a falsifiable and dynamical explanation of the quantum measurement problem, and of the absence of macroscopic superpositions. The theory is currently being tested in a few labs in Europe.

Subsequently, Stephen Adler sought to derive quantum theory from a deeper underlying formalism - his theory of trace dynamics. The deeper theory is a deterministic matrix dynamics from where quantum theory, Born rule, randomness, and spontaneous localisation are emergent phenomena.

Recently, I have shown how to include gravity in Adler's framework, using the mathematics of non-commutative geometry. This has lead to the new theory of Spontaneous Quantum Gravity, where indeed God plays dice with time, but only in an emergent sense. Underlying quantum indeterminism is determinism at the Planck scale.

I discuss these developments in my essay in this contest: The pollen and the electron. Since many of the deep questions you raise are addessed and answered in my work, I hope you will find it interesting.

My best wishes to you in this contest,

Tejinder.

My apologies. The anonymous in the previous post is me...I forgot to log in. Sorry!

Tejinder

I forgot to log in, sorry for this !

Best,

Hippolyte Dourdent

Dear Del,

A most interesting, dense and deep essay which I enjoyed reading.

I was particularly interested in your conclusion re typical and atypical time intervals. In my theory of time (not covered in my essay) I also have typical intervals (relates to relative time, and flow rate of time) and atypical intervals (relates to expansion of aether, cosmological time - thus working at boyh the smallest and largest scales.

In my essay I discuss the 3 Un's as they have affected me, and I cover another aspect of time from a new point of view - philosophical presentism.

Good luck with the ratings - you deserve high scores!

Regards

lockie Cresswell

Hi Rajan. very important points you raise there on quantum spookiness in a very simple and elegant manner. very well done, you certainly earn my votes.Forgive me, but to be sincere this year's contest raised within me Questions which to date make me more than just suspicious about us as Quantum observers.When quantum event occurs in nature,Do quantum effects of an opposite Nature happen in our brains to counter observation ridding us access to Reality ?maybe you may please see my take on Anthropic bias here -https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3525.all the best to you thanks.

Dear Del,

this was a very exciting essay for me to read---thank you for submitting it to this contest! You provide a highly original perspective, and argue it well. I like the starting point: Einstein and Hilbert, each poised in there respective quest for certainty, set up to be foiled by incompleteness and quantum unpredictability. It's perhaps no accident their names are, together, enshrined in the centerpiece or general relativity, the Einstein-Hilbert action---with general relativity itself, the 'marble of geometry', reflecting their shared convictions.

I was also taken by your observation that "mathematically modelling the physical world without deep understanding can be compared to machine translation without comprehension." I think this is a highly insightful comparison. An algorithm that produces words merely based on some probability distribution as abstracted from massive volumes of text is not much different from a human being predicting measurement outcomes from a probability distribution abstracted from massive numbers of experiments---successful, perhaps spectacularly so, but ultimately without even any real appreciation as to the reason of this success.

I wonder---what would a Turing test for such understanding look like?

The path you plot is a daring one---well, beautiful mathematics, with austerely certain foundations, hasn't fulfilled its promise, so let's look to (ugly) randomness, to propositions 'true for no reason', as Chaitin put it elsewhere. This is close to my own view---I, likewise, try to find a comprehensible foundation for quantum mechanics, analogous to Einstein's explanation of the Lorentz transformation, and likewise, I've been steered towards the notions of incompleteness and randomness, including Chaitin's specific take (which is to say, here's the obligatory advertisement for my own essay; you might also be interested in the paper I first worked on these ideas).

You suggest an intriguing concept regarding Lorentz dilation as a compression of time. I will have to mull this over a litte; at the outset, the intuition instilled by special relativity bristles a little at the singling-out of time (from spacetime) this seems to imply. But it also makes me think of two possibly related notions. One is the recent proposal by Dragan and Ekert that quantum mechanics could derive from the usually discarded 'superluminal' solutions to the defining equations for the Lorentz transformations---perhaps this is a way your 'unordered time' could enter into the picture, leading to indefinite causal orders.

The other is Seth Lloyd's discussion regarding the ultimate physical limits of computation. (Well, I thought it was in that article, but it might have been another one---I can't quickly find it there.) Anyway, the idea is for there to be an analogue to the Bekenstein bound in time---related not to the entropy, but rather, to the action, giving the number of state transitions that can be implemented in a given time frame. Perhaps this could yield a universal time scale---sort of the 'blocks' of your unordered time, which come either in the 'usual' direction or in the direction deriving from the 'superluminal' Lorentz sector.

Anyway, as you can see, your essay lots of---perhaps overly speculative and rash---ideas for me. I'm sure I will come back to it many times. I'm glad to have discovered it before the end of the voting period.

Thanks, again, and good luck in the contest!

Cheers

Jochen

Del:

A new era dawns.聽 Old questions become quaint and historical.聽 Is the whole community ready?聽 Or is physical reality too dangerous for the collective understanding at this time?聽

I have a comment and a question. The Born rule is tacked onto quantum mechanics and accepted without question. I have often wondered how well it has been tested experimentally. Would we know if there were departures from the Born rule at very high energies (say, cosmic rays), for example?

My question refers to your statement: 'Far more profound are atypical time intervals. These are ones that exhibit Lorentz violations as they cannot be compressed. They do occur but very rarely.' Can you apply your analysis to the famous ambiguity in defining tunnelling time?

Dear Del,

I have wished that all the essays concentrated on the problems that you have addressed about QM. Namely, superposition and Born's rule , because these are really the sticking point.

My system, while not entirely clear, however it point to that the probability density is in fact the density of energy contained in the particle, because as I calculate the associated "lines" and interpret them as energy they very much agree with the standard results of QM and QFT. Moreover also gravity appears and EPR is automatic since the system is inherently nonlocal. All from a system which is so simple and I discovered it by chance and was not after "mathematical beauty".

while I use probability in my programs but that is only for convenience. The system is similar to geometric probability as in line-line and line-circle picking where the results are obtained by probability but it is not the only way.

We seem to disagree on time, however maybe as the theory becomes more mature a different perspective might be in order. Thank you.

Reality is a simple mathematical structure literally, hence computable

BTW, my system seem to agree with this interpretation, but not exactly in some details.

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/the-thermal-interpretation-of-quantum-physics.967116/