Does God play dice with time itself? by Del Rajan

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/

Hi Del Rajan, I read your essay with great interest. Compression is very interesting as a fundamental concept. I did not understand if the atypical time and the typical time consider them fundamental or emerging. : "time is intrinsic to chance" I hope for your clarifications

Best wishes for your wise

Hi sorry if I repeat my comment but I noticed errors in my English therefore I tried to write better I read your essay. I found your essay really interesting. Very interesting that the compression of information is taken as a fundamental concept. I have not been able to understand, however, how you consider the atypical and typical time intervals: are they fundamental or emerging? The atypical time interval I think I understand that it is rare and fundamental?Your sentence: "This alludes to the notion that time itself is intrinsically random"Therefore, if randomness is fundamental, time should also be fundamental?

I hope for your clarifications. Thank you in advance and best wishes for your essay!