A theory of the impossible: A new paper from Marletto, Deutsch and Vedral

Zeeya Merali

Inventors have been trying to build a perpetual motion machine for around a thousand years. Around 1150 the Indian astronomer Bhāskara II described a wheel with hollow spokes part-filled with mercury that he was sure would turn forever. It didn’t. And after him came a long parade of weighted wheels, self-filling flasks and closed-loop water mills, none of which worked. Energy is never created or destroyed, only moved around and converted from one form to another. A machine that kept doing useful work without drawing on a source would have to make energy from nothing, and so it cannot run.

Find out more on qspace.fqxi.org/news

Robert McEachern

Zeeya Merali
The "Constructor Theory", at the heart of their paper, is founded upon a deeply flawed conception of Information:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-mystery-at-the-heart-of-physics-that-only-math-can-solve-20210610/#comment-5430724168

Lorraine Ford

The idea seems to be that the universe is an agentic entity that automatically generates probabilities. This is a problematic idea.

And these probabilities are themselves agentic entities that hang around in the ether directing traffic flow in the universe. This is another problematic idea.

So, I think that this whole idea is a load of far-fetched nonsense, wrapped up in high-falutin mathematical/ algorithmic language.

Lorraine Ford

Robert McEachern
Rob,
Binary digits don't actually exist. Binary digits are a manmade concept.

Lorraine Ford

Lorraine Ford
Binary digits DON’T EXIST.

What DOES exist is consciousness

of what mathematical situations (represented in terms of a set of mathematical categories, relationships and associated numbers)

are point-of-view TRUE,

where consciousness of what is point-of-view TRUE or FALSE

can be symbolically represented (by high-level human beings) as ones or zeroes.

Lorraine Ford

It seems that the authors of this paper implicitly assume that mathematics is a thing that has consciousness (of its own mathematical situations) and agency (it is self-moving, e.g. it initiates movement in its own numbers).

They are no different to a lot of people out there who also implicitly assume that mathematics has consciousness and agency.

They seem to prefer this version of the world to the version of the world that would say that it is matter that has the consciousness and agency, NOT the mathematics.

I.e. it is matter that has consciousness (of its own mathematical situations); and it is matter that has agency (matter is self-moving, e.g. matter initiates its own number jumps, which has a flow-on effect due to the law-of-nature mathematical relationships).

Robert McEachern

AI Mode:
According to physicist and information theorist Robert H. McEachern, all deterministic, repeatable behavior in the universe is an emergent property of a fundamentally fault-tolerant reality built on white noise.
Writing extensively on platforms like the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) Forums and Disqus, McEachern applies Claude Shannon’s Information Theory to reinterpret quantum mechanics. He argues that nature achieves its structural permanence not by executing flawless code, but through a deeply error-immune physical reality.

His argument rests on several core pillars:

Natural Immunity: McEachern states that signaling via symbols with the statistical properties of white noise is inherently fault-tolerant.
No Correction Needed: Such a system does not actually need to detect or actively correct random errors.
Mathematical Averaging: When a long sequence of random noise encounters an uncorrelated error sequence, their cross-correlation averages out to zero. The auto-correlation peak of the original sequence is preserved, making the signal immune to degradation.
Scale Resistance: The longer the underlying sequence of noise, the higher its immunity to random mutations and errors becomes.
DNA Architecture: McEachern points to biology to illustrate his claim, noting that double-helix DNA is famously much more resistant to genetic mutations than single-stranded DNA or RNA because it leverages this exact mathematical fault tolerance.
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: He argues that this same principle applies all the way down to quantum particles. He asserts that the Uncertainty Principle is not a "mysterious fuzziness" of nature, but a fundamental information limit. It is simply what happens when you set Shannon’s information capacity to one single bit of information—the shortest possible sequence capable of embodying this fault-tolerant property.
The Mathematical Delusion: McEachern believes that mainstream physicists mistake math for physical reality. He argues that quantum mechanics is not a strange, paradox-filled depiction of moving waves and particles, but merely an incomplete mathematical representation of energy-detection statistics.
The Illusion of Indeterminism: In his view, by failing to use information theory to account for baseline "bit-errors" (the failure to distinguish between intended and unintended detections during experiments like Bell tests), scientists mistakenly conclude that reality is fundamentally non-local or non-deterministic.

In short, McEachern’s view of a "fault-tolerant reality" is that order, determinism, and physical laws emerge directly out of the mathematical resilience of noise. Reality does not collapse under random errors because its baseline architecture is mathematically built to ignore them.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/thermodynamic-computers-go-with-the-energy-flow-20260715/#comment-6902110021

Lorraine Ford

Robert McEachern
Rob, the delta symbols in your last viXra paper are like a burqa that hides quite a lot of goings-on.

You rightfully assume the basic mathematical elements of categories, numbers that apply to the categories, and mathematical relationships between the categories.

But it is wrong to assume the complex algorithmic steps that are hidden by/ symbolized by the delta symbols.

E.g., it is wrong to assume that bandwidth (∆f) is a type of basic Platonic knowledge that is automatically held by the real-world mathematical system; and it is wrong to assume that duration (∆t) is a type of basic Platonic knowledge that is automatically held by the real-world mathematical system.

Because quite a bit of algorithmic complexity is in fact hidden beneath the superficial simplicity of the delta symbols.

Can you explain how the real-world mathematical system, or small parts of the system, has knowledge of this “bandwidth” and this “duration”?