Essay Abstract

This essay proposes a variant of decoherence theory in which the classical universe is interpreted as a finite set of bits operating on top of a deterministically conservative quantum understructure. From this it is concluded that undecidability and uncomputability lack valid physical interpretations, while indeterminacy is fundamental.

Author Bio

Terry Bollinger is retired from the MITRE Corporation, where he once helped keep open source software alive. He is not a physicist, but he finds solid and insightful physics papers delightful.

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6 days later

Terry

I really enjoyed reading your essay! You have covered many points of interest. I will say that I did not expect to find such an interesting paper here on IMO such a negative set topic. I had not originally intended to submit an essay on this topic but very late on found that my paper-in-progress could be loosely fitted to the theme too. And the extension of the deadline gave me an unwelcome(?) or grudging(?) opportunity to complete my paper in a hurry.

Taking your topic of pair creation. The vacuum is not empty so there is not necessarily a strict requirement for particle pairs to add to null. They could add to whatever was in the vacuum which contributed maybe to their creation. This is a similar point to that described in Sabine H's recent blog thread where the search for beauty in postulating a missing yin for a yang or a symmetrical ancestry for potentially broken symmetries does not necessarily lead to the truth. On the other hand (watch what I do and not what I have just said) I am keen on doing exactly that as I have postulated in various papers: particles of negative mass causing DM and DE, and antiparticles travelling backwards in time and thereby solving Bell's Theorem (my current essay paper).

Congratulations on your essay.

Austin,

Thank you for your kind comments! I too very nearly passed on this theme entirely, for much the same reason: It's a bit of a downer, really. But at some point I realized that other work I've been doing -- the dark-image interpretation of wave functions, literally the negative image of MWI, replacing infinities of universes with voids subject to unavoidably finite decoherence superselection rules -- has consequences for the very concept of eternal, universally applicable formal proofs in general, let alone the case of Godel's theorem. Given that and the similar flip it does on quantum uncertainty (it becomes classical uncertainty!), it seemed worth a quick shot.

Also, my apologies to you and any other readers of my essay for what I'm sure are an abundance of typos and broken sentences. I hit the deadline wall before completing even one full end-to-end review. Now I'm literally afraid to look!

Austin, you also said "... there is not necessarily a strict requirement for particle pairs to add to null ..."

Yes! Simple action-reaction pairs are a beautiful example: Annihilating a recently created momentum pair (you may need a rope) does not annihilate total mass-energy. This is that multi-level pair idea, and without it you cannot for example get pair cosmogenesis. The entirety of spacetime emerges as sort of a break-the-glass emergency mechanism for ensuring some kind of final accounting of conserved quantities, invoked after too much nanoscale cross-cancellation makes a mess of everything. Our universe may be nothing more than horrendously broken quantum-units glass, but by golly-wumpus, at least it's highly structured broken glass.

The most delightful irony of broken-glass as the first and most critical driver of cosmogenesis is that it places the concepts of poor Boltzmann first, in the cross-scrambling (thermodynamics) step. The postulated pristine spacetime infinities of the arrogant Mach, who denied even the graininess of atoms and made it a personal hobby to drive Boltzmann to suicide, become nothing more than limit approximations of a Boltzmann first universe.

Your essay sounds interesting; I'll read right it after this. Since you track Sabine's Backreaction, I assume you are familiar with the recent discussion of John Cramer's Transactional Interpretation of quantum mechanics. His ideas, as I (sort of) understand them certainly sound as if they may be related to your idea of antiparticles traveling backwards. I'm mentioning it just in case you have not seen it.

Again, thanks. I had hoped to slip by without anyone actually reading my essay, since my real goal was to use the FQXi deadline to focus my thoughts. Deadlines are nice for that! But if I do get comments, it's nice to get ones like yours.

Cheers,

Terry

Terry

First, as you may read my essay I will add a brief comment post to help: on my site page where it would be more appropriate. I ditched a lot of words to fit my paper within the ten pages allowed. Then found that the references had to be on a page without other text. But on loading my paper to the website I found that 12 pages are allowed. But too late to use the extra space. Also I realise that the abstract does not have to be repeated in the paper, so that could have gained me more space!

I will need to find the paper by John Cramer to see how relevant it is to my essay. Maybe I saw it previously but the header Transactional Interpretation may have put me off reading further as some proper nouns often do? But I can't remember it at the moment.

Second, there is so much in your paper of interest that I want to post more later. A lot of it seems parallel to my thinking but with obvious mis-matches and places where I am ignorant. I will also need to check out your essay references where I can access them.

The Yin and Yang may not form 100% (or is that 0%?) as it needs glue to keep them together. I like the idea of shattering glass as it fits my preon model nicely. At the BB all the stuff of the universe was in one state - at a minimum of entropy. But all the stuff was present. Like a huge glass crystal. I prefer 'one state' rather than one point as it does not imply zero or infinity. This is like a newly formed particle or a particle measured at a point (or one state). This also agrees with the CCC model as the stuff in the universe is recycled at nodes in that model rather than requiring creation. In the 'particle = universe' idea it can be asked how did the universe come to a single state. I agree with CCC on its method but it is not the only method. I prefer the universe being created in a 'particle' interaction. For that to happen the universe cannot have a null beginning ie it cannot be a Yin Yang = 0. It would be hard to bring a field with zero properties to a point or single state. Just as interactions need the EM strong, weak or gravitational forces to make an interaction. Not sure about gravitation there. Can gravitational force bring a DM field to become a particle? So IMO your chase for nullity may be on a turtles-like path of unreachable layers?

But the breaking glass analogy is interesting in a CCC context. As the glass continually shatters the entropy continually increases as there are more and more pieces of glass present. And the presence of more and more pieces of glass is related to the structure of a space metric. In CCC the universe is originally all or mostly bosonic and bosons can form a condensate in a minimum number of states. And a breaking of glass represents formation of fermions, which need separate or individual states, so that increasing fermion content of the universe drives the entropy higher. Until the universe expands so much that the fermions can no longer interact with each other, despite photons moving at speed c. At this point in the CCC, the fermions evaporate (and become bosons) and loss of fermions acts to reduce entropy and also acts to undo the space metric which itself is dependent on the presence of fermions. At the end, the metric completely vanishes and the node is reached. But what is the location of the node? In my model that node is placed where the universe/particle is measured as a point particle. But surely its position is not calculable. Within the decaying universe/particle the loss of metric undermines the speed c of travel within that universe. So the node can find itself where the decayed space metric leaves it. It seems not to be calculable to log the decaying embers of the space. And in my model it is not merely the location of the embers within the universe/particle that is important but the location of that node/point in the outer laboratory of the particle/universe.

Best

Austin

Terry

I have been reading five of your references. I suspected correctly from the way you write that your references would be readable too! Thanks. But can you point me to where I can find more about dark image interpretations?

I have been thinking further about pair creation. Ideally a yin-yang antiparticle would be the complete inverse of a particle. Backwards in time and negative mass. But problems arise in picking a neutral observation post. For example, masses of both signs should measure as positive when measured within a positive matter dominated region. Maybe the same occurs for time signs and negative time measures as positive within a region dominated by matter with positive time signs?

Best

Austin

    Austin,

    Thanks, you have raised lots of interesting points. I've been short on time, but before midnight (in 5 minutes? oops) let me mention a couple of items quickly:

    -- Alas, I cannot provide any specific references for the dark function (or negative image) interpretation of quantum mechanics because... well... this essay is where I invented it.

    I'm not familiar with any papers or prior work that proposes quite this idea... or even remotely this idea? It's, um, a bit radical, I guess, though it surely does not feel that way to me, since it fits a lot of stuff together nicely once you go the dark route. No more infinite sums of infinitesimals, just large but always finite set of superselection rules.

    The closest thing to a resource available is decoherence theory, especially (and oddly) some of the earlier work there, when folks seem to be a bit more open to saying radical things about the wave function being "defined" by its environment. But taking it to the extreme I did -- the literal inverse of MWI, total darkness where once lived an infinity of other states and universes -- well, it at least seems to be a new interpretation. That said, there's always something related buried in the deep literature. I've just not found anything yet.

    I have brought up essentially the same idea over the past year on Backreaction, using different terminology such as a bit-first view. However, I've quickly become fond of "dark functions" because this phrase describes vividly exactly what the intent is: The absence of state within a region of space, constrained not by anything within it (there is nothing!), but by the full set of superselection rules in both spacetime and the immediate environment.

    So, bottom line: For good or bad, the first and so far only reference on dark function is in this essay.

    -- For the dual universe part, it's interesting that you mention yin-yang, because I so don't think of it that way that I didn't recognize what you meant the first time I read your sentence. The reason is, ironically, exactly the issue you mentioned: the absolutely critical importance of observer location.

    No matter which universe you are in, the other universe will be the negative one to you, and exactly so, not "sort of" as with antimatter. So it's not black vs white, but purely where you are located.

    This is something I didn't get into (um, I don't think? :) in the essay, but if both space and time are emergent forms of entanglement -- by which I mean a simpler, more direct, and coarser version than the complicated and insanely over-detailed Planck-scale holographic version of space as entanglement -- then this entanglement quite literally acts a net that drags you with it as you move along with the time of your universe. It drags you because you are a classical, information-defined entity -- that's what information is at a deeper level, part of this network. That's also why dark functions work so well for issues of context: With dark functions,all of physics is context, in particular all of classical physics.

    This spacetime dragging effect also provides another delightfully simple way to interpret quantum physics: It's physics for which time has not yet been defined, for which due to constraints or due to designed safeguards against it, the network of classical physics has not yet "snared" the event and forced it to become classical, informational, a part of history. Wave collapse becomes snagging those who've been dragging, so to speak. It's not easy to hide, either.

    Another bit that is fun with this view is that the original process of pair generation never ends. That is, other universe pairs are in effect trying to start all the time within ours, but cannot get very far before they too are captured by the entropic net of entangled information (the Boltzmann fabric as I like to call it) that is the evolving spacetime of our universe.

    Ongoing pair production even of space and time also provides another way of explaining why things get ratty and weird at the quantum level. Since even (actually, especially) the direction of time is determined by the entangled, number-conserving consensus of the Boltzmann fabric, then at small enough scales even that direction starts getting ratty around the edges, at least until time is forced back into order by an encounter with causal history in the form of the Boltzmann fabric, the information that is classicality.

    (Such virtual pair breakout attempts are not necessarily completely random, since they too are constrained. For example, want to know why protons and neutrons are small, and the color force is spatially constrained? Psst, a little secret: It involves multiple axes of time competing with each other to try (and fail) to get to be "real" times. One result is the 3-space of strong and electric charge displacements that we call the color force. But only one causal time can emerge into the broader universe from such any such competition, just as only the electric force can emerge from baryons into unlimited xyz space. The txyz fabric is a very unforgiving taskmaster, forcing the little temporal rebellions constantly taking place within nucleons to be both crystallized into a precise 3-space of color charge displacements, and severely limited in xyz size so that quantum uncertainty can wash out any attempts to create truly alternative causal timelines.)

    Argh, did I say quick?? It's almost 1am. Later!! Sometime this week...

    Cheers,

    Terry

    Yutaka,

    Thank you, I will take a look at your essay.

    While I didn't get into it in this essay, I have a very specific interpretation of black holes that is based on recent papers by 't Hooft. His view is that particles become momentum waves that travel to the antipodal side of the black hole, rather than into a singularity at the center or to some other universe.

    I just rephrase that idea a bit by saying that the particles enter momentum space. This is equivalent to saying that a black hole is equivalent to a spherical mirror, only one in which it's not just the electrons that are delocalized over the entire surface, but all particles. No information is lost. There is just a switch from mostly-in-xyz to mostly-in-momentum-space, which scrambles everything but does not destroy anything.

    Ironically, given my independent use of "dark functions" in this essay, I've more than once called this my "dark mirrors" interpretation of black holes. I need to work on finding some cheerier adjectives!

    Cheers,

    Terry

    4 days later

    Dear Prof Terry Bollinger

    your starting words are very good. You are proposing another model of Universe. For a change see someother model Dynamic Universe Model as described in my essay "A properly deciding, Computing and Predicting new theory's Philosophy"

    It is an N-body problem solution which solves many present day unsolved problems give many predictions that came true. I developed with the help of Maa Vak about 40 years back. You can see my blog

    " https://vaksdynamicuniversemodel.blogspot.com/ "

    Best wishes to your essay

    =snp

    Dear Terry,

    Thank you so much for answering my comment.

    I am not familiar with the t'Hooft recent paper. On the new definition of the black hole, what do you think about the Hawking and Ellis textbook? Should we rewrite this book on the conceptual issue of the black hole as the "dark mirror"?

    Best wishes,

    Yutaka

    Terry

    I have been idly thinking about some of your ideas over the last week.

    Multi-level structures interfering with a return to nullity ...

    I did have this thought years ago about my preon model. If a standard model elementary particle has to be brought to a point (or a single state) at a measurement then if there are preons within the particle, wouldn't all the individual preons need also to be brought to points at the same time?

    I then noted that Bose Einstein Condensates can exist as multiple structures (collections of bosons) in a single state. This is just Penrose's Cyclic Conformal Cosmology where a single state/point for the universe can be allowed if all content is in bosonic form. This alleviates any need for all hypothetical preons to likewise be brought simultaneously to point(s?) themselves.

    On the other hand in CCC the universe is not brought to nullity but merely to a single state at a node where it then recycles back to enormity.

    I have struggled over your dark voids .... but I do think that almost anything is better than many worlds. (Although to me every elementary particle is like a universe full of content, and that is enough worlds for me.) In my model, the dimensions of the universe are inbuilt into the elementary particles (and even more fundamentally into the preons). So a boson has dimensions inside it even when it has not been brought to a point. So for example the higgs fields contains dimensions and not just the higgs boson. This means that for me every time a new universe is made or recycled the dimensions are pre-existing, so they are the same dimensions in all structures. And like you, as you know from our discussions elsewhere, I think that there are colour dimensions over and above the normal four.

    If one thinks of a dimension without matter being a void then I can give an opinion about that. I have often in a previous pre-physics existence used dimensions, for instance see my paper at https://vixra.org/pdf/1609.0329v1.pdf . The final line of Table 3 in that paper shows a metric being unable to be formed in certain circumstances: when the data points are too far apart for communication to hold. This is IMO very like the metric of the universe falling apart in the final stage of a cycle in Penrose's CCC model when fermions are very few and far spaced compared to speed c communication. I think that for most people this is the least convincing part of the CCC model but for me it is very convincing. But does the dimension cease to exist when the metric fails. Is a metric more fundamental than the dimension (void) or vice versa?

    So at a node in the CCC where everything in the universe is bosons spread out to almost infinite range with no metric and suddenly there is a fermion and a new metric of a very small-in-spatial-range universe. But did the old far-extended dimension really vanish? Can that dimension/void continue without its metric. Did all the bosons re-locate (in field format) to the vicinity of the new metric? Or did bosons stay put in a metric-less extended dimension/void? Is the new metric expanding (due to the exclusion principle) within itself somehow in the usual picture of the expanding universe. Or are any bosons outside the expansion, or providing stuff to feed the expansion within it?

    There is no energy in the extended void at the end of a CCC cycle. But in my preon model the entire contents of the universe is there in an aggregation of a finite number of preons. So in that preon model that void is not truly empty. Here is where I differ significantly from standard idea. I think that energy is necessary but not sufficient for particle pair creation. It is of primary importance to have the preons available and secondary to have the energy necessary to force the interaction/measurement/event. So some of what I think you called failed (?) creations might have been formed on an unequal playing field.

    Also, in my preon model, the colour dimensions are part of the structure of the preons. So at the start of the universe/CCC node the dimensions/voids pre-exist within the preons contained within the BEC condensate of a big universe-worth of bosons in a single state. So I do not think new dimensions/ voids can be created which are not pre-existing within particles. Likewise any new dimensions within a big bang must be the same as those outside the BB. Although there is the idea that spatial dimensions can become temporal and vice versa wrt a BB which therefore IMO means that spatial and temporal are qualities associated with the metric and not of the void-like metric-less properties of a dimension/void.

    No time left. I never wrote about whether a field is in the void but a particle is in the metric. Where does a particle go when it is in the form of a field ....?

    Just ignore (or void it!) this if it is too much on a Monday morning.

      Dear snp,

      I enjoyed reading your essay, but I also have a self-imposed rule that when an essay makes non-trivial mention of a specific deity of any religious tradition, I thereafter avoid making specific comments on its contents. I believe it is an important duty to us as fellow humans to respect each other's religious traditions, so I do not feel comfortable critiquing an essay that includes such beliefs. I will note, however, that I found looking up वाच् fascinating. I gather she plays a somewhat similar role in Vedic traditions to the creative aspects of the Spirit of God in Judaic traditions. There are some fascinating and ancient histories there! I wish you well on your essay.

      Cheers,

      Terry

      Dear Yutaka,

      I found both your 2013 essay and this 2020 essay interesting, and also your remarks above about black holes. 't Hooft's papers can be found pretty easily by looking up his name on either Google Scholar or directly at arXiv. Your perspective had for me some unanticipated common themes with my essay, so I ended up leaving longer (maybe too long!) comments on your essay threads.

      Good luck on your essay!

      Cheers,

      Terry

      Hi Michael,

      Thank you for your kind comments. To be honest, I submitted it so late and with so little review (one of my old hats was senior technical magazine editor) that I've been afraid to read it myself!

      I had fun reading your essay, which was certainly broad ranging! In cases like this where I can tell my poor brain is just not following the thread, even after a couple of reads of some sections, I just enjoy the read and avoid making critical assessments of valuations. So thanks again for letting me know about your essay, and I wish you the best on the FQXi contest this year.

      Cheers,

      Terry

      Dear Prof Terry Bollinger,

      Thank you for reading my essay. Name of the Goddess is Vak, Pronounce "k" as in coffee or cow, but not "Ch" as in Chess. Maa Vak is Hindu God of Knowledge, and education.....

      People asked me "why are you entering Physic field, what degrees you got, what knowledge you got??? We are sufficient to study physics."

      I told about Maa Vak, I have to. That is true for many people for them accuracy and truthfulness not important. What results you show are not important. 40 years I faced lots of humiliation. No recognition, no back patting nothing No help was available, except Maa Vak, what shall I do? They dont give seat in PhD even. For them the power and position are important. I know many people in our community are believers or followers. One Example is Prof Stephan Hawking, when he met Pope , pope appreciated him.

      Its Ok . Maa gave me mental support, reduced my pain, answered my questions through my consciousness.......

      I am just nobody. This difference with you cant be solved by me..........

      Hope you will rate my essay ignoring the difference. i will reciprocate ....

      Best Regards

      =snp

      Dear snp,

      Since you are OK with me assessing your essay purely in terms of its scientific and theoretical content, I'll go ahead and make some comments on that part of it. Since I have been an editor for a technical magazine, I have ethical considerations about how folks should do FQXi mutual reviews. Here are some guidelines I posted three years ago for FQXi reviews.

      (1) Overall, I liked the various assertion you made about the scientific method in the first and larger part of your essay, though I was a bit baffled about why you do not like imaginary and complex numbers. Complex numbers are both very self-consistent and extraordinarily useful for applications such as expressing 2-dimensional angles and vectors.

      (2) Your second shorter section was on your Dynamic Universe Model that uses "21000 linear [tensor] equations ... in an Excel sheet". Computer modeling is of course a great way to explore phenomena that change too slowly for direct observation, and spreadsheets provide a more powerful programming language than I think a lot of folks realize. So there's nothing wrong with using such a model per se.

      However, you also mentions features of your model such as "Independent x,y,z coordinate axes and Time axis [exhibit] no interdependencies between axes". That is a problem, because it contradicts the extraordinary amount of not just evidence but application of special relativity, including for example in GPS systems. A computer model can only be predictive of the real universe if the initial assumptions built into it have been verified experimentally. Otherwise, you just has a model that may give interesting results, but those results will have no correlation to or predictive power about the real universe. Not having special relativity for example immediately isolates the model from making predictions that have much to do with the real universe.

      So, if I rated your essay, following my own ethical guidelines of not caring one whit whether or how you might rate mine -- the incentive to care is a very unfortunate feature of the FQXi community review model -- I would give you a 3. The credits would be for the good assertions about science, the debits for giving a model that I'm sure has lots of good work in it, but which does not adequately attempt to model actual, well-validated outcomes of real experiments. Making strong assertions about the real universe based on the computational results of such a model is a big debit.

      At the same time I would rate your efforts much higher than almost half a century of extremely costly work on superstring theory, which was quite recently (March 2020) experimentally shown to be flatly incorrect by a HAWC Consortium paper on high energy gamma implications. You, at least, have a working model of the universe! They have nothing executable after that half century and likely hundreds of millions of dollars total of direct and indirect costs, not to mention innumerable research careers wasted on papers that discuss experimentally disproven formalisms that cannot be run on a computer and cannot predict anything about the actual universe.

      I will not actually enter the 3, in part because I don't think it's fair to downgrade your significant efforts at creating a very real, predictive computer model, even if flawed, when so much money and time has been wasted for decades on the supposedly more "mainline physics" discipline of superstrings. At least you took the time and effort to create a real model capable of making real predictions! That never happened with superstrings, which from the start chose to explore only topic they (incorrectly, as it turns out) would be safe because they could never be disproven.

      -----

      You are free to grade me as you see fit, although I would again encourage you first to read my guidelines on FQXi review ethics. Don't hesitate to give a low grade if you truly feel that is what I deserve! I would much, much prefer to get an honest low grade than any kind of grade the felt like a "favor".

      The other factor you might want to consider regarding FQXi mutual ratings is that, at least three years ago, they seemed to matter very little in terms of actual selection of winners.

      I recall that I was quite disappointed when the essays that I and many others thought were the most innovative, insightful, well-written, and science-focused -- essays that scored well in reviews like this (I was not in this group) -- nonetheless ended up getting at best a few lower-level awards.

      Meanwhile, authors who other essayists had not noticed much during the internal reviews somehow ended up not just winning the big prizes, but getting heaps of praise for their dedicated repetition of themes that were far more traditional and predictable, and whom in at least some cases had been previously supported by the same groups that fund FQXi. An unfortunate appearance of conflict, that, although it was surely unintentional.

      Cheers,

      Terry

      Dear Terry,

      I never expected that you will reply because our differences. My work is a pure scientific work, not a devotional work as you correctly stated. I read your wonderful guidelines you posted in FQXi three years back, I am just following them.

      Thank you very much for your very long observation and well study on my essay. Since this is related my essay, I will post it there. Further reply to many technical points I will reply there. So that others will also read.

      That study is enough for me, I will give you 10, the best.After all you yours is a wonderful essay from your experience!!!

      After 40 years of long work without ANY recognition, now I lost interest what some one gives 3 or 1. For me no problems........

      I hope some one will recognize my good work after my death. If nobody does recognize also no problems, I will never be knowing it is it not??? :)

      Best Regards

      =snp