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

Dear Ray Munroe,

Do you really wonder why I got almost only a one-rating?

My arguments are too uncommon. I challenged too many established tenets at a time. I should be cautious in order to get a ten-rating from you which would hopefully contribute to make Tianying Ren who is right at least as known as v. Békésy who was wrong.

The main contribution of mine to physics is to suggest an overlooked distinction between measurable and abstract time. Neither v. Weizsaecker nor Einstein understood that past and future time must not be considered always exchangeable.

Likewise I argue that it would be logically consequent to consider the rational number 1.000 and the real number 1.000... within a Peirce-continuum equivalent while also essentially different from each other. Physicists tend to regard such attitude tortuous, mathematicians tend to defend Cantor's paradise. Look at Wolfram who claims that the quadrature of the circle has got possible. Well, he is correct from a pragmatic point of view. However, Buridan's ass and EPR indicate a persisting lack of understanding in physics.

Let me reply to what you wrote in one more post.

Regards,

Eckard

Dear Ray Munroe,

Thank you for explaining to me lattice matters. I just quoted v. Neumann.

Descarte's hesitation got obvious to me from a Russian booklet by Cornelius Lanszos (Loevy) who quoted Einstein.

What about the number of dimensions, my argumentation is stolen from a book on physics of plasma the author of which listed many mutually excluding explanation of retrograde motion of cathode spots and argued like B. Russell on religions: At best one out of them can be correct. Hopefully, you do not feel hurt. Ren needs a high rating.

I do not know any reason to consider in theory the natural reference point for elapsed time hopping instead of sliding relative to the conventional scale. In practice, signal processing of auditory signals differs from the natural smooth one. It is restricted to a limited sample rate.

Concerning Heisenberg's uncertainty and what you called non-quantum ear, I would like to tell you that the smallest audible motion of membrane is in the order of a picometer, smaller than the diameter of the hydrogen atom, according to Schulman within the micro-world.

Replace E by omega and h by 1. The uncertainty relation would hold in signal processing too. Nonetheless cochlea and my spectrogram perform better, and I tried to explain why.

Do not worry about spin of point-like models. Recall bishop Berkeley. Models can be very useful even if they fail to model all aspects at a time. Look at the word trivial: three ways. No street is a line, no ramification of streets is a point. A point is still something ideal that does not have parts. Nonetheless I favor sinc(r) instead of 1/r.

To me there is no reason to separate between good physics, appropriate mathematics and good philosophy. The most common criterion is to avoid arbitrariness.

I dislike the word timetravel because it is often meant as an allegedly possible shift of time in reality. Here is again my distinction between past time as a measurable quantity that exclusively belongs to unchangeable reality and what has been abstracted from it and extrapolated: ordinary time. Of course we can shift, flip, stretch or otherwise manipulate any record or theoretical process.

Go in a cinema and travel back into the past. You cannot manage getting younger. I dislike technologies of fraud.

Future buildings do not yet exist. In so far they are not yet to be seen and not yet real. How stupid is a physics that ignores this peculiarity? The notion direction of time is better than direction in time but not sufficient. We have to accept causality, i.e. the fact that no influence comes from future.

Regards,

Eckard

I will have to read your essay again more carefully. There are a couple of things which came to mind.

The cochlea is a wedge shaped membrane with a length dependency on the impedance of certain frequencies, or resonance conditions on frequencies with ω = ω(l). This has a nonlinear content to it, which to my suspicion is that wave on the cochlea is similar to a soliton, where a soliton will exist on a region of the cochlea appropriate for the detection of certain frequencies. I might be totally off base here, so you can inform me if I am wrong.

The nonexistence of negative frequencies and in quantum mechanics why energy is bounded below is why there is no well defined notion of a time operator in quantum mechanics. Similarly for the Dirac equation the upper positive portion of the momentum-light cone is physical, while the negative is the "filled up" Dirac sea. Extending things to negative frequencies and energies in mathematical modeling, such as integrating on the complex plane, may or may not have some subtle bearing on deriving some consistent form of time operator. Though to be honest I doubt it.

Cheers LC

Dear Eckard,

You have taken my answers out of context. Remember JCN Smith's blog site? I said "The present is real, the past is a faded memory, and the future has not yet been written." The context was in regards to the impossibility of time travel.

I have played with 8-, 10-, 12- and 14-dimensional TOE models, and K12' is my favorite candidate. Although the particles are represented by points, these points contain the quantum numbers of a 12-dimensional lattice. Twelve dimensions may decompose into a 4-dimensional H4 Quaternion Spacetime and an 8-dimensional Octonion Hyperspace. H4 and E8 have similar component symmetries. These 12 dimensions have many similarities with 11-D M-Theory - the biggest difference may be an imaginary time dimension (I'm not sure...).

Intrinsic spin is a sum of these quantum numbers, and thus, a property of multiple (not zero) dimensions. A classical analogy to intrinsic spin is something like a gyroscope. A gyroscope works via conservation of angular momentum. In the simplest case, we could define angular momentum as L=mvr, where m=mass, v=velocity and r=radial arm. This concept is non-sense in zero dimensions. My "points" contain color, electric charge, flavor, spin, mass, etc. They are not zero-dimensional points with zero structure.

Dear Lawrence,

Your interpretation of negative frequencies as compared to the negative energies of the Dirac Sea is interesting. Of course, Eckard considers these negative frequencies non-physical.

Have Fun!

Ray Munroe

I too consider negative frequencies to be unphysical. I could not say whether or not as pure mathematical terms, something used to perform an integration, but which contribute no negative energy, would have implications for a time operator. To be honest I would strongly doubt that.

Whether the future exists is a bit of an odd question. We might say tomorrow will happen, and in a block model it exists. Curiously in Russian the language has no grammatical sense of a completed action in the moment. The present does not exist! It is too fleating in a way. There are a host of ways of thinking about this, and it comes down to interpretations of time in general relativity. I have wondered whether these interpretations have some sort of mirror to quantum interpretations. This touches on the many worlds interpretation. Yet interpretations of a theory are different from a theory itself.

Cheers LC

Dear Georg Schoenfelder,

You listed 12 "criteria of a scientific field that is complete" and asked: "Did I miss anything?"

Please consider the following remarks of mine an attempt to translate your ideas in more common terminology:

You denied Euclid when you wrote; "A 'point' must have a discrete size because it is not nothing." This idea is not new. It reminds me of Zenon, Hegel and Mathis as well as of epsilontics.

The zero-dimensional point, the one-dimensional line, and the 2D area are very old and still useful ideal mathematical notions. I prefer to distinguish these abstractions if necessary from reality and from more realistic models. Often it is reasonable to consider a road a line. Sometimes one has to consider a 2D picture or even a 3D one.

Be cautious. Those who are denying infinity risk to be called a crank. Infinite means endless. For instance, motion along a loop is endlessly possible. Engineers like me used to operate with infinity as if it was a number. Of course, in reality nothing is infinitely large because 'large' is a relative measure, and cannot be attributed to the ideal property of having no limit.

You should perhaps focus on the advantages of your field.

Regards,

Eckard

Dear Ray and dear Lawrence,

I got the impression I failed to explain why the fathers of quantum mechanics made a decisive mistake when they shared the common opinion that negative frequencies are to be avoided because they are unphysical.

Let me say it quite pronounced: If a measured or at least measurable basic physical quantity is a real and necessarily terminated at the very moment of measurement, then its Fourier transform must be unphysical in that: It must be a complex function, and it must be a symmetrical function of positive as well as negative frequencies. Neglect of the negative frequencies causes an error. In particular, inverse transform does not return the original real and one-sided f(t) but a complex and symmetrical one that includes a mirror picture of the original one.

In other even more bold words: With Fourier transform, the flaw of being unphysical is a must either in the time or in the frequency domain.

I do not know how familiar you are with Fourier transform. Maybe, the attached files will help.

I would like all those who consider the present real how long they imagine the duration of the present. Doesn't it have zero duration? Those who are only interested in prediction of future try to compact all reality in the sense of influence from the past into initial conditions. This does not correspond to the reasonable view that past events are not merely fading memories but something that really continues to influence the actual state. A memory denotes merely information. Processes in reality cannot be observed in advance.

Regards,

EckardAttachment #1: How_do_negative_and_imaginary.docAttachment #2: How_do_part_2.doc

I got the idea that with Fourier transforms there are integrations from -∞ to ∞, and to get "symmetry" the same should hold for frequency. However, usually the negative frequencies are treated as positive and the integral doubled --- if one is going to worry about this.

As for memories from the past continually influencing the present, that really occurs if the system is subMarkovian. For many Markovian systems fluctuations at one time do not influence the future, and the correlation of two observables at different times have a delta function.

Negative frequencies are just something which corresponds to the mathematical set up IMO. There are not really negative frequencies, but in the Fourier analysis these correspond to a sign. We might take the Fourier integral

Ψ(t) = (1/sqrt{2π})∫-∞∞dω φ(ω)exp(iωt)

and convert this to

Ψ(t) = (1/sqrt{2π})∫0∞dω φ(ω)(exp(iωt) exp(-iωt))

or

Ψ(t) = (1/sqrt{2π})∫0∞dω φ(ω)(exp(iωt) - exp(-iωt))

depending on whether φ(ω) is even or odd with the sign on ω. So the negative frequencies can be transformed into something which has no physical implication of an actual negative frequency.

I will try to read you essay again. I will have to admit that I read it rather hurriedly.

Cheers LC

PS, my sub and sup did not work on the integrals, but you might get the idea.

LC

Dear Eckard,

I'm sorry. I may have misunderstood you. You are saying that negative frequencies are OK. Within the interpretation of the Dirac Sea analogy, that is comparable to saying that positrons are OK. In Particle Physics, negative energies are positrons. In Solid State Physics, negative masses are holes. What are negative frequencies? Is it the absence of a frequency? It is better to have an absent frequency than a negative time. By the way, haven't we beat this time issue to death?

Although I don't use Fourier transforms on a regular basis, I am familiar with them. In my model, I talk about Direct and Reciprocal lattices. They are Fourier transforms of each other.

Good luck in the contest!

Ray Munroe

Dear Ray,

I can imagine lattices that are infinite to both sides in Cartesian coordinates. Are there spherical lattices too? If so, they could only exist between r=0 and oo, as does any measured function of time. I will look into your essay because I guess your direct lattices are in an original domain of distances while reciprocal lattices are in a domain of wave numbers. Is this domain a complex one?

I did not say negative frequencies are OK. Hermitian symmetry in complex domain means functions of positive as well as negative arguments with mirror-symmetry of their real part and anti-symmetry of their imaginary part.

So we have a twice redundant, twice unphysical representation in complex domain.

One must always interpret all four components together. By means of a correctly performed inverse transform they will altogether collapse into the real original function. Accordingly, negative energies as well as negative frequencies must not be taken seriously as something with physical meaning but as artifact of Fourier transform. I used to speak of apparent symmetry.

If one calls for instance debts negative money, holes in a solid negative mass, or a negative electric charge in a semiconductor a hole, then this is not an artifact of Fourier transform but the split of something positive in two components, a large positive and a small negative one.

Apparent symmetry as an artifact of Fourier transform is necessarily balanced between positive and negative.

Ray, you wrote: "What are negative frequencies? Is it the absence of a frequency? It is better to have an absent frequency than a negative time. By the way, haven't we beat this time issue to death?"

No, the matter was obviously too difficult for believing physicists like Einstein and v. Weizsaecker. I do not say this as a blasphemy but because they stuck in the traditional belief in an to both sides infinite rigid block of an 'a priori' given time. There are not yet many like me who feel free to only trust in theory that is exclusively founded on repeatable observations, measurable data, and compelling reasoning.

Regards,

Eckard

Dear Lawrence,

You nicely demonstrated how the Fourier transform relates to cosine transform and sine transform: exp(iwt)+exp(-iwt) = 2 cos(wt).

I am sure you understand that I meant omega when writing w. Indeed, the complex Fourier transform would only be required in case of arbitrary phase shift respective to an arbitrarily chosen point of reference.

You are quite right. If a function of time is assumed to extend from -oo to +oo, then the corresponding function of frequency fills the same range.

In reality, influencing action as well as possibility for observation of a process are limited to the last now under consideration. Consequently, time extends just (backward) in one direction, and the same is true for frequency.

In contrast to Fourier transform, with cosine transform there is no change into an unphysical domain.

I appreciate your intention to read my essay again. You will find further information via http://home.arcor.de/eckard.blumschein/M283.html, M290, M291, and http://www.fqxi.org/commumity/forum/369 . In case of trouble do not hesitate please dropping a line to eckard d ot blumschein a t arcor do t de.

Regards,

Eclard

Dear Lawrence, dear Ray,

Undoubtedly you are well trained in application of Fourier transform. Nonetheless I would like to invite you to better understand some often omitted very trivial basics. Just look into the files I attached this evening at 19:48.

Regards,

Eckard

Dear Eckard,

I was a little sloppy earlier. You are well-versed in Time-Energy (omega) Fourier transforms. A reciprocal lattice is a Fourier transform of a direct lattice in Space-Momentum (wave number). The same concept with different variable pairs...

I've been thinking about the "zero-dimensional point problem". Technically, we could build these simplices and Face-Centered Cubic (FCC) lattices by stacking fruit at the grocery store (the lattice "points" are now the centers of each piece of fruit). In this respect, my model starts to look a lot like Steve Dufourny's spheres.

Have Fun!

Ray Munroe

It is getting a bit late right now so I will have to make this short. With negative time and frequencies the phase exp(isωt), s = sign, has only one sign value for both the frequency and time. So in interpreting where the sign is attached to physically it is usual to assign it to time. So we can fold the negative frequency part of the Fourier integral into a positive part in a sine or cosine transformation.

Cheers LC

Dear Ray, dear Georg Schoenfelder,

I do not see a zero-dimensional point problem. Nobody demands that the middle point of earth or a spheric football has to have a non-zero size. It is merely a fiction belonging to the more tangible surface of the sphere.

What about Steve Dufourny's spheres, I have to admit, I did not at all get what he suggests.

I will give Peter Jackson a high ranked vote because I got aware that my epiphenomenal cochlear traveling wave almost ideally illustrates his idea concerning the propagation of this time genuine electromagnetic waves.

Although it is far from my field of competence, I naively guess that elementary, i.e. spherical electric monopols, are the most basic elements of physics. Dirac conjectured magnetic monopoles too. Were they found? I guess, this would violate causality.

Regards,

Eckard

Dear Eckard,

I follow Neumann nor Russel; I haven't read their texts and don't know in what context these quotes were made. I have just been asking myself some quite simple questions and they leave only two possibilities. Since any causal reasoning refers to some primordeal cause which by definition not can be understood as it isn't reducible to a preceding cause, causality is unavoidably founded on the quicksands of religion. Either we live in a causal universe, caused, created by some outside intervention, 'god' for short, or we live in a noncausal universe which creates itself. This noncausality doesn't prevent a local, limited causality: though you may dip your finger in the sea, if its physical effect on the sea at the other side of our planet is nil, then your act, however real to you, is a ficitious an event to someone there as future events are to you.

So people who think that there can be a causal universe without a creator are kidding themselves. I'm wondering whether if they try to save causality to exorcize their own subconcious doubts about causality, or whether, despite proclaiming and believing to be atheists, in defending causality try to save their piousness ?

What I'm trying to do in my essay is dream up a mechanism of how a universe can create itself without any outside interference, without violating any conservation law or any other law, which leads to fundamentally different view on nature than what we're used to.

Regards, Anton.

Hello to all ,

Dear Eckard ,

Thanks a lot .

I think what 0,- and infinity are math tools ,the physicality and its numbers is an other story .Thus I agree about the time and its absolute value,like physical numbers .It is an irreversible system in the physicality and in the whole point of vue of course .The locality seems dancing under the same logic even .Why thus to complicate our simple universal dynamic .

Best Regards

Steve

Dirac magnetic monopoles have been found! These have cropped up in surprising forms. I attach a file on the discovery of Dirac magnetic monopoles in ice-like condensed matter systems. The tetrahedral system of spins can set up a discrete version of the Dirac monopole.

Cheers LCAttachment #1: 1_375.pdf