Galilei, Gold, Ren - votes for ultimate realism by Eckard Blumschein

Apology:

While I already quoted my M290, I did not yet manage getting access to and putting it on my homepage.

So far I can only offer sending it by email on request.

EB

Look at the universe where the atmosphere is opaque to get nothing. Shine light through a slit with fuzzy edges to get apodization. Optical illusions exploit processing peculiarities in the eye and brain. Source, intervening medium, receiver, processing (e.g, filling zeros in a fast Fourier transform), interpretation. Where is the Virgin Mary these days? Where were UFOs in the Middle Ages? Nobody can exercise any supernatural or magical power. The Pope is no more than any other man, as are the sincerely insane. No mindset will free you from gravitation, including Podkletnov. We trust what works.

What is interesting is what fails. Make Godel happy, find propositions that resist answer within a robust (no economics or psychology) model by whatever mechanism. Does reality get grainy at Planck scales, does theory fail for being an approximation, does observation become meaningless whatever the answer? Hard to say. Mathematics is not empirical.

Physics is empirical. Much of the fun is finding and exercising disquieting footnotes. It is cowardice, incompetence, and corruption to impose authority to squelch heterodox inquiry that is consistent with prior observation. JD Roberts hand built an early NMR. When he made Gignard reagents in the tube some of the signals were inverted - emission rather than absorption. His group wrote it off as an equipment anomaly, cleanly missing the discovery of CIDNP (Chemically Induced Dynamic Nuclear Polarization).

Theory can propose but theory cannot dispose. By whatever route, propose a heterodox experiment - and exclude none of its three possibilities: Their answer, your answer, and reality's answer.

Dear Eckard-

Some comments on your essay. I must admit being a bit rough on Fourier transformations, since it has been quite a while ago I've used them.

Are you suggesting that it is better to use a cosine than a fourier transform because of causality issues? I recall having discussions about causality issues and also about negative frequencies during my studies, and that neg. and pos. frequency should be considered together.

The fact that the transformation is augmented with a complex part was just for mathematical reason. After multiplication with a transfer function, the complex part at the output could be removed. I think you are suggesting to use a cosine transform (CT). Can you keep the Fourier transfer function or does it need to be modified?

You say: "no explanation was available to the strange phenomenon of an audible missing fundamental". Could you explain this a bit more?

What is represented in Fig 1? Is that a similation of a sound traveling in a cochlea?

On page 3, you refer to Heisenberg's uncertainty relation which, in my view, is a mathematical artifact and therefore it is not necessarily physical. In fact, based on QFM, there is no uncertainty in discrete time dt or discrete displacement dx of a particle. This then results in Edt >=h , pdx >=0 (because dx can be arbitrary small), and p x lamda = h (for p>0, lambda is de Broglie's wavelength).

On page 9, I did not understand the statement: Circular frequency omega = 2 pi f parallels momentum p.

About the local/global issue that you raised earlier: this is in space (one domain). In the frequency-time analysis, two different domains are compared: small pulse gives wide frequency spectrum and v.v.

Dear Eckard-

Thanks for the reply.

This is an important statement: Heaviside introduced a trick how to integrate from minus infinity to plus infinity even though future data are definitely not available in advance. Accordingly I see the reason not in the mathematics but in the religious anchored notion of time and god from eternity to eternity. Did you read M290?

I get an error message when I try to retrieve M290. Could you mail the document to me? My email address is at the top of my essay. I tried to email you by using the email address on your home page, but received an error message.

So, you are saying that CT is more efficient (because of the imaginary part of the FT is left out) and causal? The last part, I need to think about (too long ago that I used it).

Let's assume that one performs a CT on a set of data up to the current moment. After that on data sample is added because time progresses. I guess the CT needs to be recalculated for the entire data set. Maybe an odd question: is it possible to faster calculate the CT for the new data set in terms of the previous known CT?

Yes, I meant imaginary part.

I was confused by the piece of text .... parallels momentum p.

Regards,

Ben

Dear Ben,

I will email M290 soon. In the meantime let me briefly reply:

You wrote:

So, you are saying that CT is more efficient (because of the imaginary part of the FT is left out) and causal?

-- Calculation of CT is indeed more efficient. The point is: FT has an arbitrarily chosen point of reference. So phase depends on this redundant choice. The result is ambiguous (positive and negative frequency) and non-causal.

Let's assume that one performs a CT on a set of data up to the current moment. After that on data sample is added because time progresses. I guess the CT needs to be recalculated for the entire data set. Maybe an odd question: is it possible to faster calculate the CT for the new data set in terms of the previous known CT?

-- Your question is not odd at all. One can simplify calculation if one admits a lossy transform. This is valid for CT as well as for FT and for the inner ear. Be not misled by the elegant shift option in complex domain. It cannot be exploited in this case. Heaviside's trick also demands to strictly speaking permanently relocate the window and recalculate the FT when one more sample has lapsed.

I was confused...

-- I apologize for my shaky command of English.

Regards,

Eckard

Eckard!

Sorry I didn't write an essay for this competition I would have voted for your essay, but that would be seen as nepotism or sycophancy on my part. I have given your paper a read through. I will have to go through it line by line and ask you a lot of questions too before I understand the weight of it.

You definitely came out swinging with the right hook it is a knockout:

'Science is subject to some general fundamentals that deserve absolute priority. At first, theory has to obey reality, not the other way round. While G. Cantor claimed the essence of mathematics is just its freedom, physics does not let room for mysticism or mere speculation. Accordingly, the traditional concept of causality is indispensable. Science must be a puzzle whose elements do or at least will fit together with no contradictions and no arbitrariness. Let's consider reality an open system and distrust any final condition. Unfortunately, such attitude is at odds with prominent doctrines including conjectured general symmetry'

We have LaTeX now too which will make things easier. I also learned that it is pronounced la tech and that a pompous accent is optional, but encouraged.

Eckard,

You said,

"-- Peirce defined a continuum as something every part of which has parts."

This would certainly correlate with how we consciously percieve the world.

"The point I was making is simply that our conscious sujective perception of physical processes and of "time passing" is continuous,

-- I disagree."

Could you explain further the nature of your disagreement with this statement?

"which is in contrast to experimental observations of the objective world being discontinuous,

-- I consider continuity and discreteness mutually complementing ideals."

This may depend on your interpretation of the words "continuity" and "complimenting". My use of the word "contrast" may be a bit misleading too. I am talking about the way that, despite our brain processes being necessarily quantum in nature, our sensory input is not processed in a way that is *consciously* discrete. It may even still turn out that our brains do function like quantum computers, eg Penrose & Hameroff's "Quantum Consciousness" microtubule/quantum state idea, but we are not able to "sense" this, as the state vector evolution is "swamped" (decohered?) by classical processes, as per our observation of the classical world.

Cheers

Roy

Dear Roy,

This is me, Eckard. I did not login because my connection to fqxi was very slow. Let me tell you my intention and my background: As as an electronics engineer who was a teacher of fundamentals for decades I am used to apply mathematics as a tool. I share with my colleagues the conviction that there is a real world that can be explored rather independently from individual consciousness. We agreed that the theory of electromagnetism has been mature for more than a hundred years. By the way Maxwell's equations go back to Heaviside, the enfant terrible of mathematics.

When I looked for the reason why theory of hearing is still far away from adequately describing physiology and very poor as compared with hearing, I got aware of what I consider a fundamental flaw in the mathematical models of processes: Physics is tense-less.

Does the brain work analog or digital? Be cautious. It has no hardware and no software just so called wetware. Mathematics is abstract. A circle is a continuous line. Even if one choses 9^9^9^9^9 equidistant points as to represent it, the diameter deviates from a multiple of the chosen distance. It is irrational alias alogos.

Even if something can be resolved into indivisibles, it might be more reasonable to treat it as continuous. On the other hand, perception is subject to numerical restrictions. I already object to what most people imagine as the "passing of time". I dislike discussions that do not intend to deal with serious consequences. Given the LHC will confirm SUSY and quantum computers will work as promised and my cospectrogram will be proven wrong then I will perhaps give up.

I am not an expert in quantum computing, and I am familiar with coherence length but I found out that those who introduced entanglement of distant particles made serious mistakes. So it is my guess that quantum computing will never fulfill the very high expectations. How long will I have to live as to judge an outcome of LHC's search for SUSY?

Eckard

Apology to all:

I managed to fix the problem of access to my file Ritz09.pdf via

the attached link.

I have to beg your pardon also for my incorrect Ref. 21.

In order to correct the address replace the dot between blumschein and M283 by a slash or simple use the second attached link.Attachment #1: M290.htmlAttachment #2: M283.html

Dear Echard,

I promised that I will comment on your essay, but, unfortunately, I am not in position to do so, except to mention that I'm in agreement with you regarding the inadequacy of the numerical models in general and those of cochlea (and auditory perception) in particular. I can refer you to the very preliminary joint work of Dr. Alex Gutkin and our group on applying an earlier version of our (non-numeric) ETS formalism to the modeling of auditory perception. See, for example, Section 6 of Gutkin's doctoral thesis and the references therein:

http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/downloads/publications/2005/gutkin_phd_full.pdf

Best wishes,

--Lev

To be more precise, I should have mentioned Section 6.4 of Gutkin's thesis.

Dear Lev,

Thank you for pointing me to Gutkin. His thesis starts quoting Steven Greenberg who invited me to a NATO Advanced Study Institute where I got excellent insights.

Speech recognition was and is not my field of interest. If I understood Gutkin correctly, he included refractory time when he applied your ETS on HSR fibers.

While my spectrograms in cochleagram style are similar to his Fig. 6.17, they differ from all usual responses of a filterbank with a limited number of channels in that they are continuous in frequency. What you called structural history changes with each incoming sample.

In all, a comparison with Gutkin seems to confirm that my method is actually very uncommon and also quite simple. I did not yet manage finding out how Gutkin implemented the frequency analysis. I am claiming that complex calculus is a detour in this case.

Let me remind of the title of my essay: I consider it always necessary to ultimately return to realism after mathematical ambiguities, and I refer to Galilei's allegedly outdated notion of infinity, Gold's objection to v. Békésy's TW, and Ren's measurements, one of which has been quoted by Gutkin. They are altogether at least as unwelcome as the still valid argument by Ritz and uncle Al's obstinate question. Hermann Weyl was perhaps correct when he admitted: "We are less certain than ever about the ultimate foundations".

Regards,

Eckard

Dear Lev,

Admittedly, I did not yet understand your ETS. Do you distinguish between symmetry in the sense of conservation and stationary cyclic or reversible processes on one hand and irreversible transitional components on the other hand? I am an old and somewhat tired engineer who is not familiar with your expressions like struct and primitive.

In your essay you wrote natural number ... starting from 0. As a bloody layman in mathematics I love the ancient first natural number 2, the first step after agreeing on a unity. Peano changed his choice. Was he influenced by the Nullmenge?

You ascribed a key role to events. Isn't an event just a reasonably idealized but rather imprecise description that includes an ensemble being distributed in space and in a time that is not clearly separated in past and future? An animal can be alive or dead. The event of dying is not point-like. Events are processes.

Did you consider strict causality?

Regards,

Eckard

Eckard Blumschein wrote on Oct. 14, 2009 @ 22:45 GMT

"Admittedly, I did not yet understand your ETS. Do you distinguish between symmetry in the sense of conservation and stationary cyclic or reversible processes on one hand and irreversible transitional components on the other hand?"

Eckard,

We postulate that there is no reversible processes: events just get "attached" to the previous ones, and this constitutes the 'flow of time'.

"In your essay you wrote natural number ... starting from 0. As a bloody layman in mathematics I love the ancient first natural number 2, the first step after agreeing on a unity. Peano changed his choice. Was he influenced by the Nullmenge?"

Whether you start from zero or one is immaterial: you just need a starting point.

"You ascribed a key role to events. Isn't an event just a reasonably idealized but rather imprecise description that includes an ensemble being distributed in space and in a time that is not clearly separated in past and future? An animal can be alive or dead. The event of dying is not point-like. Events are processes."

Processes are constituted by events: events compose processes.

Events are the most basic (structured) units, and should be considered as 'mathematical/informational entities which designate an atomic interaction between several basic/primary processes (the structure of the latter is not accessible to us).

So, to begin with, we have primary processes and primitive events, out of which the processes, whose structure is accessible to us, are composed. What this formal language is supposed to offer--in contrast to *all other* formal or common languages--is the congruence of its syntax and semantics: the formal events are supposed to look exactly like the natural ones.

Lev, you wrote -- I reply:

We postulate that there is no reversible processes: events just get "attached" to the previous ones, and this constitutes the 'flow of time'.

-- I learned that there are no really closed systems and no absolutely reversible processes while nonetheless models like the harmonic oscillator are reasonable to some extent.

Whether you start from zero or one is immaterial: you just need a starting point.

-- Do we really need a starting point like the story of Adam and Eve or an apocalyptic end point? May I suggest focusing instead at the only definitely common point "NOW". I know, this suggestion of mine is too simple as to be acceptable to believing physicists.

Processes are constituted by events: events compose processes.

-- Chicken or egg? Aren't events the result of processes?

Events are the most basic (structured) units, and should be considered as 'mathematical/informational entities which designate an atomic interaction between several basic/primary processes (the structure of the latter is not accessible to us).

-- Yes, events are entities. However, I consider the atomistic point of view just one option, which is complementary to the genuinely continuous one.

Please find illustrations in the figures of my M290. If a wave reaches a climax, this is an observable event.

No woman can be a little bit pregnant. However, it is almost impossible and perhaps not necessary to exactly determine the very moment of the event of getting pregnant. Mathematics so far demands to exclude the very point t=0 from |sign(t)|=1. I am voting for more realism.

So, to begin with, we have primary processes and primitive events, out of which the processes, whose structure is accessible to us, are composed. What this formal language is supposed to offer--in contrast to *all other* formal or common languages--is the congruence of its syntax and semantics: the formal events are supposed to look exactly like the natural ones.

-- Comparison with language reminds me of a deficit affecting physics. As e.g. Weizsaecker complains in his book Aufbau der Physik, Munic: Hanser 1985, physics ignores tenses.

In the Oostdijk thread, Terry Padden wrote:

TO Eckard

Who somewhere up there said I (and some others) was one of those who questioned the use of / correctness of / interpretation of / modern mathematics and its use in physics.

I DO NOT ! ! Eckard misunderstands my essay. I endorse and applaud the use of advanced maths. We need more of it, not less. I accept that in principle it is all correct.

My point is not that it is no good; it is very good - but not good enough. To get even more advanced maths we need to extend the foundations of maths to enable its scope to be extended. Extending foundations will of course mean we have to demolish part of the superstructure that has worked very well in the past, and REBUILD it with a better version.

I will post this on Eckard's site also.

-- So far I did not got aware of it.

Dear Terry,

Could you please reveal what you meant with "part of the superstructure" to be demolished and in what it is wrong?

I do not at all object to the use of complex calculus and more sophisticated mathematics. I just got aware of belief-based unnecessary generalization.

To virtually all: Do not confuse theory with reality.

The mistake seem to be so deeply rooted that virtually everybody ignores any alternative. I collected mounting indications for serious misinterpretations. While the topic of this contest lets room for even more science fiction, I prefer seeing the issue the other way round. I vote for ultimate realism.

Regards,

Eckard