The Possibility of Unification via a Global Adynamical Organizing Principle by Michael David Silberstein and W. M. Stuckey

This was a pretty good essay I thought.

Lawrence B. Crowell

Mr. Silberstein,

Thank you for this well written, thought provoking essay addressing divergent views on what must be one of the most fundamental and interesting questions currently being debated in physics, i.e., the dynamical vs. adynamical nature of our ultimate reality.

Your essay has caused me to step back mentally and try to put the whole enterprise of science writ large into a broader perspective. In doing so, I find myself wondering whether sometimes we humans might not be too clever by half for our own good. As we Homo sapiens evolved, we kindled and nurtured our increasingly sophisticated embodiments of science as a tool to help us understand the world in which we find ourselves.

One of our most primitive, fundamental, and persistent observations as sentient beings is that of being part of an evolving universe. So when the tool upon which we rely to understand our observations in essence tells us that we are not observing what we believe we are observing it should be, at a minimum, cause for concern and reassessment. Certainly we can be, and have been, misled by our senses and by our interpretations of our observations (a la geocentric vs. heliocentric worlds), but when the disconnect is of this magnitude (dynamical vs. adynamical) it must be run to ground and resolved.

In 'The Trouble With Physics,' Lee Smolin wrote, "More and more, I have the feeling that quantum theory and general relativity are both deeply wrong about the nature of time. It is not enough to combine them. There is a deeper problem, perhaps going back to the origin of physics." (p. 256) I am convinced that Smolin is exactly correct in this assertion. Collectively, we very gradually and inadvertently got ourselves off track in our thinking about time as a result of our inventions of the calendar and, especially, the clock. The problem arose through our careless use of terminology (specifically our less than rigorous use of the word "time") while making use of our calendars and clocks. I have spelled out some of the background of this problem, the ripple effects of which we are still obviously living with, in an essay which may be found here.

I believe that many problems of the sort which you address in your essay will become less intractable once we have returned to the scene of the crime, as it were, discovered where and how we went astray in our thinking about time, and taken remedial steps to get our thinking back on track.

Cheers

Michael & Mark,

I found your essay very interesting, at least from a philosophical standpoint.

Can I ask you though,

a) Do you view the "time" element of your amalgam as *real* or only as an operational convenience, transported from GR & QM?

b) Could your "SCC" be formulated with a foundation, one element of which is a 4th dimensional, *spatially* relational, orthogonal vector, rather than "time"?

Could you also explain why you said that Smolin's solution is..."just a multiverse in time rather than space" and..."the first-order laws and other fundamental facts change over time"? I don't see how in this sense (evolution laws) Smolin's dynamical finite space of evolving states would necessarily differ from a "Block World" view. I assume you are saying that your "BBP" can describe or at least constrain, let alone *explain*, a final boundary condition simultaneously as per the Tralfamadorians? I admittedly had trouble with the mathematics & would appreciate clarification of how the SCC either guarantees invariance of the physical laws at all points in the BW, or can "self-explain" variation of those laws without dynamical causation?

It seems to me that if you want a BW, to stay adynamical and retain time, you are necessarily describing an external "God-like" view. If you want BW, stay adynamical and remove time, you are still "God-like" but describing a Wheeler-DeWitt type quantum cosmology, basically the same as Julian Barbour's *static* "Platonia". I have trouble with that type of model for Darwinian reasons among others.

Thanks for the essay and good luck.

Cheers

Michael & Mark

Well argued but I am unconvinced. An initial comment:

You write " relativity theory by itself suggests a BW (per the relativity of simultaneity and lack of a preferred foliation)(11):"

SR & GR can suggest lots of models. It is Minkowski's (extremely effective) maths and rhetoric which convinced Einstein and every physicist thereafter that the 4D continuum model was the only acceptable one. So much so that Einstein, it is said, became convinced that the Present is an illusion. Oh the folly of clever men. Please don't go down that road. As philosophers i assume you are above such prejudice.

All that SR & GR mandate is that measurements of Space and Time are observer relative but compatible and any observers reference frame is as good as any other. There is nothing in SR & GR to prevent valid 3 space & 1 time models - just that measurements vary with the observer. Every observer that has ever lived observes a 3 & 1 universe, naturally but relatively "foliated" by an instantaneous - not extended - Time. That there is no preferred foliation does not imply that a foliation free model is compulsory.

Dirac among others was attracted to a many times formalism - one per observer. That no one, yet has been able to construct one does not invalidate the concept. Tying yourselves to the 4D formalism bandwagon negates the power of your arguments for me. As philosophers I expect you to be more open.

in my essay I present a case for deficiencies in all available formalisms and hope for a major revision in the foundations of maths to enable more effective formalisms. A many times formalism may be the / one answer.

MIchael

Thanks for a comprehensive and REASONED reply - especially the first sentence which should be inscribed in bold largest font over the portals of every science & philosophy faculty - and every book or paper on Relativity. How Minkowski got away with it I don't know. He could sell investments to Madoff.

I do not say you are too conservative. Au contraire, you are too extreme. By adopting BW you take the most radical step I can imagine - as i tried to emphasise - you eliminate "NOW" the one thing we all share. Whereas the BH is unobservable. How can that be physics ? How radical can you get ? If there are any Logical Positivists left you should avoid them. They would have your guts for garters.

You may not be afraid of weirdness, but I am. I favour the unification of Reason and Rationality. Is that what you would call "weird" ? Or do you think Naive Realism is ?

Terry,

Do you actually think physics has anything to say about the subjective, e.g., "NOW?" That's where I, as a physicist, disagree. Physics is about the objective, not the subjective. As Wheeler once said, "Suppose you write an equation to describe the universe on a tile of the floor, then you write another that you think is a better description and so on until you get to the door standing outside the room. If you take up a wand, wave it over the floor and command the equations to fly, not one will get up and fly. The universe flies, there's a life to it that no equation has." Taken from "The Creation of the Universe," Northstar Productions, 1985.

Thanks for your comments,

Mark

Mark

You erect a Straw Man and, surprise, knock him over with a heavyweight. Unless you want to include all our thoughts as being Subjective (which presumably they are), there is a difference between "Subjective" and "Relative" that science has noticed and has a lot to say about. Our "Nows" are Relative, not Subjective. They are Positions in/of Time. They are indispensable to science. The Relativity of Simultaneity is all about relative Nows. The problem is they are transient and we don't know how to express transient time.

That so far science has little to contribute to our understanding of "Now" is my point. Perhaps in the future it will. I don't think Wheeler or anyone would want to be invoked as defending the perpetuation of ignorance. See my quote from Wheeler. Anyway one half of my essay is about making the point Wheeler makes. The other half is complementary. He & I are in concert.

I am glad you appreciated my comments.

PS Perhaps one day I will write an equation.

Terry,

Write your equation and wave your wand. Good luck!

Mark

Your quotation from Wheeler

"Suppose you write an equation to describe the universe on a tile of the floor, then you write another that you think is a better description and so on until you get to the door standing outside the room. If you take up a wand, wave it over the floor and command the equations to fly, not one will get up and fly. The universe flies, there's a life to it that no equation has." Taken from "The Creation of the Universe," Northstar Productions, 1985.

struck a chord. I had read something similar recently, but my faculties work very slowly these days. i have just recollected what it was. Someone recently wrote the same thing as Wheeler (without knowing your quote) in different words as follows:

"We should note here "the complete irrelevancy of Proof". According to Wikipedia there are 365 proofs of Pythagoras. Even if they are all found to be flawed and the Theorem discredited as irrational, the builders could, and today still do, construct walls that are reasonably perpendicular to each other just by using their empirical knowledge of triples. The proof of the pudding is in the reasonable empiricism of the eating and the cooking, not the rational theory of the recipe."

This is in the 2nd para. of section D from "Ultimately, in Physics the Rational shall become Reasonable !" an essay by Terry Padden in the FQXI competition.

Michael

Let me back up a bit before addressing your post. Originally I made 2 comments on your essay.

1. That it was very well argued - but I was unconvinced. A compliment and a simple personal opinion.

2. I pointed out a technical error - which I accept is not particularly germane to your theme - but which is almost universal. It needs correcting. I corrected it in detail so their would be no misunderstanding, and showed that 3 & 1 alternatives were acceptable and do not contradict Relativity. I have had to correct several other authors here on the same point. What this says about the level of understanding of basic physics and the quality of physics education is evident.

I did not assert the 3 & 1 were better than yours. I never said you were too conservative. I merely mentioned Dirac's many times formalism. A many times concept is a natural derivation from Relativity. I never used the word NOW, but did disagree with Einstein's supposed view that the present is an illusion - a very silly view in my opinion.

You accepted my correction. Thank you. I would have presumed that accepting the correction implied that you accepted that alternative formalisms were legitimate but you preferred 4D BW; which is tautologous given your essay.

And somehow we get to here, where i am being asked to justify MY opinions, and having Wheeler-ian thunderbolts aimed at me (but they were actually boomerangs that missed). Just because in response to you I expressed a belief in "NOW" and that it is empirically indispensable to science. It is your essay and it is your opinions we should be discussing here; not mine. I said all I wanted to say about your essay in my first post. The rest is self-defence.

Anyway in response to your post, here goes:

There are 2 aspects to the science of NOW: the Reasonable and the Rational (see my essay):

1. Reasonably, NOW is not a problem for me or anyone I know, nor any scientist who ever makes a scientific measurement. Every measurement of dynamic data is identified with a Time co-ordinate, a NOW. So all scientific data is built upon a collection of discrete and different NOWs. As the Weinberg quote in my essay confirms, and as I assume we all agree, the purpose of science is explanation - to explain in his words "why the world is the way we find it" The scientific data with all those NOWs is "The way we find it" - the thing that needs explaining.

I don't care what formalism you use to explain whatever concepts you prefer to use - as long as you end up explaining (not necessarily in this essay) why the world is the way it is. Why it has an apparently moving NOW. I know of no formalism that does that. That is one of the major issues for my essay.

2. Rationally, nearly all the formalism people choose aggregate the discrete NOWs into a Set - assign a linear sequential structure to the Set and then ASSERT it is really (?) a Continuum. This enables them to apply the standard differential calculus tools of maths to the physics problem. By ignoring the NOWs they are saying the Set exists but the elements don't. Actually this is irrational. A Set is defined by its elements !. But I don't care (actually I do). It is only at this stage a formalism. The real problem is once you have used all your maths and logic to get whatever rational conclusions you want, how do you get back to those reasonable discrete data points - the different NOWs - that is our starting and end point of physics ?

3. You wrote

"But the bottomline is this, as per many other facts about experience, there is no reason to think that our experience of time and change corresponds to any FUNDAMENTAL PHYSICAL FACTS about the nature of time. And while physics must be consistent with experience at the end of the day, there is no reason to think that it must underwrite or agree with all of our folk-beliefs and the manifest image."

The comment about "Folk-belief" in relaton to NOW is unacceptable, scientifically (see Weinberg quote). The implied allegation that what i am writing is Folk-belief is unacceptable, personally. The sentence is self-contradictory and Subjective (see Wheeler quote). Who decides which physical facts of scientific observation are acceptable or mere Folk-belief ? What does the phrase "manifest image " mean here, anything ?

The only FUNDAMENTAL PHYSICAL FACTS are the empirical data resulting from scientific experiments - just ask Uncle Al - all of which are designated with a HERE & NOW.

I don't understand why a belief in HERE and NOW as being scientific causes so much anger & resentment among physicists (actually I do).

Terry,

You can't write an equation (or, in general, an explanation) that conveys to me the knowledge of my seeing red. No matter what you write, if I haven't perceived the color red, I will gain knowledge when I actually see red that I didn't have by reading your equation/explanation alone. Likewise, any equation you write attempting to convey NOW will fail to change the NOW I perceive. No matter what I do with your equation, it will not allow me to perceive other NOW's.

That's what I meant by "write your equation and wave your wand." Nothing will happen, no matter what formalism you use.

Mark

Mark

I assume you are not just talking about "my hypotheiical " equation but any equation that refers to one or more NOWs, directly or indirectly. I think there are lots of such equations. In fact every equation that refers to Time in some way.

As I stated in my last message, my view is that any such equation - even those derived from 4D continua, e.g your BW - IMPLICITLY refer to lots of NOWs because they are the source elements of the Set which constitutes the Time variable.

Taken at face value your statement applies to all such equations. Are you saying that all such equations are vacuous ? What happens to physics then ?

I accept the philosophic issues surrounding "qualia" but physics is not philosophy. I have stated that the NOWs are different for every observer - which is why I mentioned the many times formalism; but in physics an acceptance that we can and do share the same universe and can communicate about the same things (using suitable formalisms like Lorentz transformations to specify equivalences for things like NOW) is a pre-condition for doing physics.

Otherwise your comment applies and we squat in the dust contemplating our navels not knowing if your red is the same as my red. That is not physics as I understand it.

I don't know if you are familiar with Lakoff's work. I think that his findings do more to explain how we can share our Reds than the philosophic view you express. We can share our views of Red, or NOW, because we share the same world, in a Naive Realistic way.

PS Maybe, just maybe, new foundations for our formalisms will enable a scientific treatment, as opposed to philosophic, of qualia. After all we don't really have a proper theory of colour yet, do we. See my quote from Weyl.

Terry,

Correct, I don't see any equation capturing NOW. If that's what you mean by "vacuous," then they're vacuous. [Not how I would use the term, but it's semantics.] The situation is exactly as you say, the equations refer to many NOW's, none of which captures its qualia (that NOW is now, no I mean now, no I mean now, ...).

Perhaps it comes down to this simple disagreement: You believe it possible to capture this qualia in an equation and I don't. In my opinion, physics is the a lossy product of consciousness that cannot account for all aspects of consciousness, e.g., qualia. As a physicist, I can live with that. To complete my worldview I'll have to go beyond physics (specifically, I'll need a theory of consciousness). Yes, that's blasphemy in some circles :-)

Mark

Dear M&M

Super essay, and very sound thinking. I've just added a more deserved scoring.

I hope I may have helped prove you right already, look under the (what have ben termed;) 'layers' of my own essay 'Perfect Symmetry' (and the link article) and you'll find a new organizational principle that works. It's a bit veiled at present as it's not for general consumption yet, but working on that now in collaboration.

The thought process is different, I'd be interested in your thoughts.

Best wishes

Peter

Mark

I like the way you pose the problem of "now". I have not posed a solution, but do hope scientists, especially physicists, will not just shy away from the problem; and I urge them to take up the challenge.

I believe all productive arguments (will) eventually reduce to semantics or syntax - especially syntax.

By addressing the issue through the abstract formalism one does not have to go beyond physics. Merely outside for a while. On return one may have a generally applicable formalism not restricted to the physics of Time. After all isn't that the point of our formalisms (Logic & Maths) ?