Time and the Multiverse

hahaha and with E8 and the team, they are going to have the nobel prize ahahah

oh my god this sad business.......

they want the prizes.....team job monney, fear of loosing.....logic to continue in these stupidities.....

With my theory it doesn't exist winners and loosers, only searchers of truth

SPHERIZATION BY SPHERES IN A SPHERE.....

Steve

These algebras do not explain the reality.....we understand thus why it exists stupidities about the constant of time and the utilization of sets and series, bizares, infinites , irrationals where complexs dance in irrationality.

That implies a mathematical and false extrapolation of our pure and real objectivity....all these things are falses physically speaking.

Furthermore in an universal and spiritual and global point of vue, it's our uniquity of all things implying the harmony which is taken on a bizare road of analyzes......

Any sense these multivers and others time reversibilies.......a real mathematician understands how act the series and their limits ...iof not it's a pure creation of the mind without a generality of our universe.

A balance is neceszsary between the hemispheroids of analyzes.

Sincerely

Steve

To Lawrence, Ray and Tom - the FQXi-MTP Group

Thanks for the invitation to join your discussion from the Free Radical blog here. Keeping up with this conversation is like seeking to understand a movie 'one frame at a time'. A little like understanding the Universe using particles!

Tom you write: "You want to have your cake and eat it too".

I don't even like cake. Such magic can only occur in modern theoretical physics, along with time travel. My 'trivial and naive view' (thanks for the complement Tom, really!) calls for 'physical realism'. No backward causality, no miraculous appearances, no parallel multiverses, no wave-particle dual nature.

If we start with the time-integral of energy, what I designate as eta in my papers, we are able to define energy, momentum, force, temperature and entropy in simple mathematical terms. We can mathematically derive such basic laws of physics as Conservation of Energy and Momentum, Newton's Second Law of Motion, Planck's Law for Blackbody Radiation, The Quantum Hypothesis, the average energy of a system per degree of freedom, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Furthermore, we are able to show that Planck's Formula is an exact mathematical identity using continuous processes, explain the photoelectric effect without using photons, derive an equation for the photocurrent, explain the double-slit experiment, provide an existence argument for Planck's constant, and give an interpretation of Schroedinger's Equation, with the associated wavefunction as being no other than our 'accumulation of energy' quantity eta. (link to papers)

Ray you write,

" ... you assumed Bose-Einstein statistics, and then showed self-consistency".

I have done no such think! This is forcing thoughts in my reasoning. Let's see if I can describe my derivation of Planck's Formula differently. Assume you have a physical quantity E(t) at any time t. Consider that you can measure the delta_E of this and the E{av} of this for any interval delta_t, but you cannot directly and absolutely measure the quantity E(t) at an instantaneous time t.

Question: How can you calculate E(t) at some instantaneous value of t?

Answer: Planck's Formula!!!!

If E(t) is exponential, the Formula will give you the exact value. If E(t) is any other integrable function, the Formula will give you the best possible approximation that can be experimentally obtained. This is a mathematical result! Nothing to do with Physics. No boson, no fermions, no quantum statistics involved.

I admire all great human achievements. Certainly painting the world with ideas is just as beautiful (more beautiful imho) as painting it with colors. But I don't mistake an abstract Jackson Pollock painting as being a true picture of the Universe. Likewise, I don't mistake abstract theoretical physics as being that Universe either. In both cases I see these as being a view (an interpretation) of the Universe, but not the Universe itself which is and will always be unknowable to us. (see The Interaction of Measurement). Theories are human creations. They are not 'real'. If physicists acknowledge that than I wont have any disputes. Just as I have no disputes with all areas of Mathematics no matter how abstract and incomprehensible. But I continue to believe that we can 'know' the Universe in simple (even naïve) terms that 'make sense'.

I value your comments and respect your points of view.

Constantinos

Constantinos,

It is trivial that events happen in time, and it is naive to take time as infinitely divisible. As I said -- terms of art. We all think this way, because that is the way we experience events. There's nothing personal in the characterization.

Particle physics, and the statistical and quantum mechanics that describe it, exist because Planck's constant is not zero. We know this not by mathematical models, but by observations of the behavior of particle and energy quanta. The mathematics explains why we _apparently_ experience the world as a classical continuum.

When you go the other way, describing a world without particles that doesn't exist physically, philosophers call it naive realism.

There are many ways to mathematically model worlds that don't and can't possibly exist (consider the Penrose triangle, e.g.) Physics takes the world as it is.

Tom

One obvious technical error. In your "temperature of radiation" paper, you say that "'degrees of freedom' seems to be equivalent to 'locally at a point.'" Not true. A point has zero degrees of freedom, except on C* where it has infinite degrees of freedom -- but then you've lost your advantages of real analysis, and the physical influences are nonlocal. Just as quantum mechanics has it.

Tom

Dear Constantinos,

You said "Perhaps bosons are conceptual representations of energy propagation while fermions are conceptual representations of energy interactions. It seems the basic difference of 'all values' vs. '0 or 1' suggests the same idea of continuity vs discreteness. Just a thought, for whatever it is worth."

I like the concept of continuity (bosons with occupations of zero to infinity) vs. discreteness (fermions with occupations of zero or one). Some months ago, I was asking Tom Ray if the Universe is fundamentally discrete or continuous. His answer (and he converted me to a believer) was that the Multiverse obeys scale invariance, and thus, both discrete and nearly continuous (I say "nearly" because I don't think that "infinity" exists within our Universe, but it does exist within the self-similar Multiverse) natures coexist.

You also said "For me, what is most significant about the question of time, is simply that there must be some positive lapse of time for something to exist. Nothing can exist instantaneously, without some time has lapsed. That this lapse of time that makes an entity exist is the time when the 'observer and the observed' (the source and the sensor) are in equilibrium. It's then that 'things exist'. Simply, 'time is what makes things exist'! How is that for a definition of time!"

In grad school, I saw a "semiclassical" treatment of action. The speaker was considering equations of the form Delta(S)=Delta(L)*Delta(t) (similar to your "accumulation of energy", but he was using the Lagrangian, and I suspect that you may be using the Hamiltonian), and then imposing an ad hoc quantization condition comparable to the single slit result to the principle of least action. If you only allow action to vary in increments of h-bar, then you do obtain parts of quantum mechanics.

Perhaps this concept also ties into the continuous vs. discrete dual nature of reality.

I think we must emphasize the fact that time is not reversible. Certainly, some simple problems and Feynmann diagrams "seem reversible", but thermodynamics does not allow them to be truly reversible. We cannot use all of our available energy, and thus the term "entropy" was chosen with a similar sound to the "energy" to which it originally applied. As a theoretical physicist who once studied the experimental side of things, I am tempted to say that time is as real as space because rulers measure ellapsed space and clocks measure ellapsed time. But then there are these philosophical implications that time is only as "real" as our ability to sense "change" (or entropy). If I stared at this computer screen (and ignored the ticking noise of the clock behind me), I might be tempted to say that time did not ellapse. If I wasn't measuring time, I wouldn't know for sure if that was 30 seconds or 10 minutes, and would it really matter anyway?

But I'm not the time guru - I'm still trying to figure out spacetime and hyperspace...

Have Fun!

Dear Tom and Constantinos,

How should scale invariance affect our interpretation of reality? Perhaps time, like space and mass, is hollow but not empty. What does this imply of the present? Is the PRESENT an instantaneous NOW Dirac delta function on a spacetime surface? Or is the PRESENT the local collection of Cantor set spacetime points? I think that scale invariance implies the latter. If so, then this has bizarre implications for the definition of the PRESENT.

Have Fun!

Ray, I think the major implication of scale invariance is infinite self similarity, which frees us from having to explain the properties of the "first tortoise" in a cosmological theory. A relativistic model then allows a multitude of quantum subsystems to cohere and decohere at different rates, breaking the barrier between quantum and classical domains.

It also leads to my physical description of the state we call the "present" as "the least of all possible moments."

Tom

Tom, responding to your July 24 posts to me ...

I really took it as a complement when you described my ideas as 'simple and naïve'. But then you went on in your last posts to me to apologize " ... nothing personal in the characterization." Now I'm thinking that perhaps there was something personal in your characterization. It's true! I am not a physicist. I don't pretend to be a physicist. I don't want to be a physicist like you. In my humble opinion, Physics does not need more physicists, but a naïve attitude that allows for uncorrupted fresh ideas.

My greatest challenge is making simple ideas clear to complex minds! You write, "A point has zero degrees of freedom". In the context that I am using 'locally at a point' (derived from mathematics and not physics) 'degrees of freedom' do not apply. My definition of temperature does not depend on 'degrees of freedom'. I was only seeking to guide the reader in making connections to ideas in Thermodynamics. Average energy 'per degree of freedom' in Physics is given by kT, while an exact similar formula, using my formulation of temperature, is for 'locally at a point'. This I felt may help physicists like you make connections I can't make -- helping to reduce the 'complex' to the 'simple and naïve'.

You write, "Physics takes the world as it is." Yes, and then goes on to create a theoretical monstrosity, like Ptolemaic epicycles and God particles!

Do you have no doubts? That should worry you!

Constantinos

"naïve attitude that allows for uncorrupted fresh ideas...."very beautiful dear Constantinos.

The complexity returns to simplicity,naturally and fortunally,....the evolution still and always....

Steve

Constantinos,

It wasn't an apology. This is a public forum, however, and I try not to be misunderstood by others who are also reading.

Anyway, mathematical theories have to be consistent with physical facts. One can't simply treat Planck's constant as zero when it isn't, or discard the kinetic theory of matter because it's inconvenient.

Temperature, in fact, does describe "average energy at a point;" however, the point is dimensionless, an instantaneous measure of state. Among statisticians, it's an old joke that if one stands with one foot in the fire and another in a bucket of ice, on the average one will be comfortable.

The dynamic measure of the energy state (Hamiltonian or Lagrangian) includes coordinates and momenta that imply degrees of freedom.

Nevertheless, you might find that contemporary theoretical physics is not in such bad shape as you imagine. The quest is ultimately to explain the behavior of this low energy world in terms of symmetry breaking and phase transitions from a point of high energy unification. Things actually do get simpler in that direction. Like the paradigm shift from Ptolemaic epicycles to Copernican orbits, we get complex physics from simpler mathematical models, without sacrificing knowledge that we've already won.

Tom

It is good that I checked up in here. After all I think Laura Houghton makes a nicer picture to enter the page with than Burbidge :-) I will have to read some of this exchange. Yet as I recall the issue was whether the time associated with the increase in entropy was t ~ vol(Ω) for Ω the phase space volume occupied by a system. The equation between Et/ħ for a quantum fluctuation and E/kT the generator of a Boltzmann distribution lead to the result that S = k log(t) ~ k log(Ω).

Cheers LC

The maths are only consistents when the mind and the hands of the thinker are rationals ,if not it's a pure joke without foundamentals.

It's thus 1 a business or 2 an error

cqfd in french "ce qu'il fallait démontrer" .

The theoretical contempory physics shall be always rationals if and only if the ultim referential is respected by these hands.

You can invent a mathematical equation even false, but never you shall cange the equations of our system.Universal, this sphere in optiùization.

If some people think it's possible to return at the Jurassic to cultivate Baobab and that to have in the future a CO2 equilmibrium, thus I think they must rethink about their irreversibilities due to a specific and coded evolution.

The differerent degrees of freedom are not a dance inside a coordonate system without sense.The energy and the momenta explain a specific rotating system with a real sense.

We can't pass the simple for the complex and vice versa, the real complexity is in 3D and its understandings.And it exists still a lot of xork, we are youngs indeed at the universal scale.

The reality is the reality, objective and not subjective ...our datas proof that and all our datas are in 3D ...it's liker that.The 3D WAS IS AND WILL BE.

Regards

Steve

Dear Ray,

In an earlier post you asked if we could do without Bose-Einstein or Fermi-Dirac Statistics. I agree with your comment that these are connected to a view of the Universe as being either continuous or discrete. My inner voice tells me, however, that whenever we choose between one or another of two complementary ideas we go wrong whichever idea we choose. My simple formulation of some basic laws of physics uses neither Bose-Einstein nor Fermi-Dirac Statistics. It's likely that neither is needed! This calms my inner voice!

We are generally forced to 'make a choice' only if we take the 'naïve view' (sorry Tom!) that the Universe is 'out there' and we are discovering how it works. I am not as bold or as certain to presume we can know 'what's out there'. Just as I am not sure I can know God or what's in someone's heart and mind. And it really doesn't matter much, since what is truly important and really knowable is what's in my own heart and mind.

So, instead of embarking on conquering the world through our knowledge of it, I rather do some soul-searching and embark on 'self-knowledge'. The ancient Greeks were so wise to this when they placed 'self-knowledge' at the center of life's aspiration. They also ascribed to the belief that 'man is the measure of all things', and 'balance' is the way of attaining true wisdom. These basic principles have guided me throughout my life. They are the backdrop of all my thinking on physics as well. So how does this work for physics? It's an evolving story.

We can only know our measurements of Nature, not Nature itself. The essence of science is measurement. That's why all physical quantities have units associated with them (unlike math, which makes no claims about Truth but only Logical Certainty). Measurement involves an interaction between the 'source' and the 'sensor'. And measurement occurs when the 'source' and the 'sensor' are in equilibrium. In the case of energy, this interaction of measurement is given by Planck's Formula, which is a mathematical identity independent of physics.

In this simple view, we do not need to choose whether the Universe is continuous or discrete. Yet we are able to explain why we 'see' energy quanta when we 'say' energy is continuous. This I describe more fully in my papers.

Multiverses and 'backward causality', etc. do not make sense for a physical Universe. I agree with Eckard. But they do make perfect sense if we are talking about Mind. In our Mind we can and do let the 'future' influence the 'present' or even change the 'past'. I have no problems with any of that. But if you ascribe such characteristics to an 'objective Universe out there' independent from all of us (even ET) then I have irreconcilable differences.

Time is not reversible because it takes time for anything to occur. So anything that happens requires time moving forward (the Second Law, as I show in my paper on [link:knol.google.com/k/knol/Search?q=ragazas Entropy and The Arrow of Time[/link]). But why does this require that time be discontinuous, Tom? I find the setting of time to 1 in QM very puzzling and contrived. What's the sensible explanation to that? To make a theory not well understood work? Physicists generally avoid time in their formulations. Not me! In my papers I show that the time it takes for an 'accumulation of energy' equal to h at temperature T is equal to h/kT. If anything qualifies as a 'quantum of time' it's this, not 1.

More as the occasion permits ...

Constantinos

Constantinos,

I already explained why time drops out of the equations of quantum mechanics. Planck's Constant is not zero. Therefore, action happens in zero time, i.e., time is unity. One cannot have a classical continuum of spacetime unless Planck's Constant is zero. It isn't.

Tom

Dear Constantinos and Tom,

Constantinos said "In an earlier post you asked if we could do without Bose-Einstein or Fermi-Dirac Statistics. I agree with your comment that these are connected to a view of the Universe as being either continuous or discrete. My inner voice tells me, however, that whenever we choose between one or another of two complementary ideas we go wrong whichever idea we choose. My simple formulation of some basic laws of physics uses neither Bose-Einstein nor Fermi-Dirac Statistics. It's likely that neither is needed! This calms my inner voice!"

And I know that Tom is also interested in scale invariance.

Do the above concepts require scale invariance and supersymmetry to be related? They are related in my models. Or better yet - Can we develop a type of "scale statistics" that incorporates all of the continuous (Maxwell & Bose?) and discrete (Fermi) statistics? Of course, it is easy enough to say

f=[exp(bE)+Theta]^(-1),

where Theta = (-1 Bose, 0 Maxwell, +1 Fermi) is our degree of continuity (Bose) vs. discreteness (Fermi).

Am I overlooking something obvious, or is it just that simple?

Have Fun!

Dear Tom, ...responding to your July 25 post to me:

Your non-apology accepted. But why you keep misrepresenting my ideas in this public forum?

For my thoughts on what Planck's constant means and why it exists, please read my paper, 'Let there be h': An Existence Argument for Planck's Constant.. But don't assume you know what I think!

Constantinos

Well what are you doing dear Friends??????

Ps That begins to be interesting viva el thermodynamics....

Dont FORGET.........56.697 nW/m²deg^4.....You kinow Tyndal, Stefan, Boltzmann......you know the heat tranfered by radfiation between two body with 2 temperatures...

Well now about the Fermi Dirac statistics....the closed packed .....and Pauli principle......thus Ni=gi/e^(ei-ef)/kT+1.....WE CAN KNOW THUS THE ENERGY u AND THE ENTIRE SYSTEM OF nPARTICLES....but I agree the evaluation of this integral is difficult...the séries thjus are relevants if and only if the real and correct nuber is inserted with the biggest rationality.

Deazr Ray,

you say...where Theta = (-1 Bose, 0 Maxwell, +1 Fermi) is our degree of continuity (Bose) vs. discreteness (Fermi).

I Think you insert a good idea indeed but the gauge is false for the different distributions and correlations between Maxwell,Fermi, Dirac, Bose......Indeed the constants are our constants and we can't invent series which imply difficult relations.

Impossible Ray your line of reasoning because you do not respect nor Bose-Einstein nor Fermi-Dirac Statistics and their invariances .The continuity and the disctreteness are linked Ray in a pure physical logic.

Steve

I don't wish to misrepresent your ideas, Constantinos. I only wish to compare what you claim, with what we already know of the physics. In fact, I thought I made it clear that I agree with you that the world should be describable in classical terms, which implies determinism.

We have to live with the way the world presents itself to us, though. I did read (and had read) your papers on Planck's Constant. Your treatment of temperature as a function of time does not seem to me the way that either time or temperature behave. You describe temperature as a quantity as if it has dimension, inversely proportional to a point of time for which you also assume dimension. The "accumulation of energy" you speak of, then, _has to_ come from the zero point of the vacuum, because that is the _only_ point of zero time and zero temperature. I don't have an issue with that, and I don't think any physicist would, because we already know -- as I have said repeatedly -- that if Planck's Constant were zero, the world would behave classically.

So given your units of measurement, you describe a dimensionless world. That's not the world we live in. Indeed, we do think the world we live in originated in quantum fluctuations of the vacuum; however, that doesn't mean that one can say, as you do, that the "accumulation of energy" can take any non-zero value -- presumably, you mean in the measurement space of 3 1 dimensions -- because you are using dimensionless units to measure with. That will only get you measure zero anywhere you look. Okay -- so you've discovered that the average energy content of the vacuum is zero. But that's something we also knew -- or at least, we strongly hypothesized -- already. What about the rest of spacetime and matter, that stuff we actually experience and which physics seeks to account for?

I sympathize more deeply with your philosophy than you think. I agree with you that all we can objectively know is what we measure. The very idea that the action of microstates differs from classical action led me into years of theoretical wrestling with how or why quantum time differs from classical time. Finally, I concluded -- it doesn't. Because classical time is one dimensional and the quantum domain is two dimensional, however, I eventually realized that a time continuum independent of space has to transcend the 3 1 dimension barrier in order that quantum degrees of freedom correspond to real points of spacetime in the classical domain. I fashioned a purely physical definition of "time" consistent with physical information theory: "(*) n-dimension infinitely orientable metric on random self-avoiding walk." This led to the following conclusion, excerpted from my preprint "On breaking the time barrier:"

"2.4 Given that entropy increase is the common physical reason for the apparent direction of time ("time's arrow"), we find that applying this principle in the context of information [Shannon, 1948], every recurrence of order in Sigma_d = 2,3 is at the expense of increasing disorder in Sigma_d > = 4 , i.e., hyperspace. We know this only when we can fix length 1 in Sigma_d , because d < 4 is a subset of the n-dimensional trajectory. Our definition of time (*) is fundamental to measure theory; unit measure is a subset of every notion of size, geometrically to be sure, but also metrically as a point in a closed interval [0,1] or a singular magnitude {N}. That n-dimensional measure accommodates length 1 in every dimension cardinal set Sigma_d > 0 , we understand by the generalized central limit theorem when we apply the definition (*) as a density function over dimensions Sigma_d > = 4 because n random distributions on [0,1] translate in Sigma_d = < 3 as a distance function. In other words, the randomly oriented complex metric obeys an analytically real bound (Lebesgue measure)."

Tom