A Universe Programmed with Strings of Qubits by Philip Gibbs

Ray,

This is one reason we use E_8xE_8 ~ SO(32) which does have a complex representation.

Cheers LC

Hi Lawrence,

Yes, SO(32)~E8xE8*=496 could be an important isomorphism. This symmetry is slightly different from the SU(11)~SO(16)=120 isomorphism because it requires a couple of singlet sub-groups (to accomodate a 248-plet vs. a 240-plet). Perhaps these singlet groups are 8-plets each of tachyons and Higgs. IMHO, a proper SO(32) would be Spin(32) with 30-32 dimensions. Now we are approaching 1000 particle states - approx double that required for 10^123 combinatorial possibilities.

Have Fun!

ahahahah let me laugh still and always, just a pub for some frustrated who have a specific job apparently,I don't see an other logical reason !!!Here is an explaination of my opinion.

I ask me if You make really foundamental sciences, you just mix a little and make pubs.It's not possible ,for people who know maths like you,to imply these conclusions.It's an other road.It's sure that.

It's not possible Ray, I am frank, it's not possible for a rationalist and a faith people to imply these extrapolations.

If it's a technic of some systems, it's very bizare.I am not parano , just realist about my works and my perceptions of the global system.

Now I am going to say an important thing, perhaps the confusions are programmed for a difficulty of perception for the majority.But it's an other debate in fact after all.

Congratulations for your perseverances.Fascinating in all case.

It's the end, beautiful string the end lalalalalalalala and of course it is the end of lost of monney and stupidities, fortunally for our uniqueness.

STRINGS...HIGGS...EXTRADIMENSIONS..MICRO BH(THERE IT'S SERIOUS REALLY)..MULTIVERSES....TACHYONS....THIS IS THE END .........SEE THE LAST WORDS EVERYWHERE APPARENTLY THEY LISTEN ME THEM!!! HIHIHIHI .Laugh is good for health and I must agree that with you I laugh a lot.and in the same time I am sad.

Cheers

Steve

Ray,

Type II string theory with coupling g is S-dual to the same theory with the coupling 1/g .IIA and IIB are T-dual. An orientifold of type IIB string theory leads to type I string theory in SO(32). The M-theory does require SO(32) and E_8xE_8 .

I noticed you paper made it on the board today. I will give it a look. I generally score these a bit later on as it takes me a while to get to them all. I try to read about 3 or 4 of these a week.

Cheers LC

Dear Lawrence,

Yes - The reciprocal lattice argument is equivalent to T-duality, and the Large Numbers/Inverse Large Numbers argument is equivalent to S-Duality. I know that I've said that before in one of these blogs, but I never put it in a paper - What was I thinking? I was trying to find that balance between "enough" vs. "too much" detail in my essay...

My essay is very similar to the one I e-mailed you earlier. I had already read yours' and Philip's essays, so I've already scored you both.

Have Fun!

Dr. Cosmic Ray

ahahaha wawwwwwwwww impressing !!!

Details they say, details ahahahha

it's neither a generality and nor detail.

It's true you are skilling in strategy, really impressing.

A new in the team phil but where are the others, th, lisi, and friends ahahahah

THEY NEED HELP IN FACT AHAHAHA

Have fun and cheers they said ahahah

Scored ahahaha but what is the real score .....

Belgium 65 USA 0 LIKE HABIT and furthermore me I am alone.A team of several against a small belgian.You know this little country, weak and vulnerable.hihii but the real score is the real sore.9.6 it's well Ray it's well and quick , ten votes in 1 day , very interesting.

Steve

Dear Dr. Gibbs,

I find it very strange that the scientific world is obsessed with mathematics (admittedly, my essay did dabble with it when offering a version of E=mc2 to suit the digital world - but I kept it very simple ... so simple it might be regarded as wrong). Math seems to be regarded as infallible, even though it leads to mistakes. The mistake I have in mind is string theory. I don't deny that there certainly is value in the theory, and in maths, but logic reveals shortcomings. Let me explain, after first writing a short section describing an unconventional approach to unveiling unification and offering an alternative to the Higgs boson that relies on gravitational waves.

ALTERNATIVE TO HIGGS BOSON

An important step might be to think of "... the grand design of the universe, a single theory that explains everything" (words used by Stephen Hawking on the American version of Amazon, when promoting his latest book "The Grand Design" - coauthored with Leonard Mlodinow, Bantam Books, 2010) in a different way than physicists who are presently working on science's holy grail of unification. The universe's underlying electronic foundation* (which makes our cosmos into a partially-complete unification, similar to 2 objects which appear billions of years or billions of light-years apart on a huge computer screen actually being unified by the strings of ones and zeros making up the computer code which is all in one small place) would make our cosmos into physics' holy grail of a complete unification if it enabled not only elimination of all distances in space and time, but also elimination of distance between (and including) the different sides of objects and particles. This last point requires the universe to not merely be a vast collection of the countless photons, electrons and other quantum particles within it; but to be a unified whole that has "particles" and "waves" built into its union of digital 1's and 0's (or its union of qubits - quantum binary digits). If we use the example of CGH (computer generated holography, these "particles" and "waves" could be elements produced by the interaction of electromagnetic and presently undiscovered gravitational waves, producing what we know as mass and forming what we know as space-time. Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves, and measurements on the Hulse-Taylor binary-star system resulted in Russell Hulse and Joe Taylor being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1993 for their work, which was the first indirect evidence for gravitational waves. The feedback of the past and future universes into the unified cosmos's electronic foundation would ensure that both past and future could not be altered. Our brains and minds are part of this unification too - which must mean extrasensory perception and telekinetic independence from technology are possible, despite modern science's objections to these phenomena which appear to be based on non-unification.

* For more information on the universe's proposed electronic foundation, please see my article and postings at

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/814

STRINGS ARE ONLY PART OF MATTER'S BASIS

Space and time only exist in our experience. They are emergent properties, like wetness and mind. We experience wetness because it emerges from the building blocks of the hydrogen and oxygen atoms which make up water. We experience mind because it emerges from the building blocks of neurons composing the brain. And we experience space-time since it emerges from the building blocks making up the universe. These units are a combination of electromagnetic pulses (forming a cosmic computer which includes randomness and thus the potential to escape rigid preprogramming, and have a small degree of free will) as well as a cosmic hologram (this is produced by the interaction of electromagnetic plus gravitational waves and combination of the holographic aspect with the electronic aspect unifies general relativity with quantum physics). Every physical and nonphysical part of the universal hologram would be a receptor for the downloading of data from the cosmic computer which not only exists in the hyperspace of the large-scale universe but also in the hyperspace of each subatomic particle. (In other words, the holographic universe or spacetime we know is a screen for displaying data from the 5th-dimensional computer.)

It might be helpful to visualise time as the playing of a CD or video tape. The entire disc or tape obviously exists all the time. But our physical senses can only perceive a tiny part of the sound and the sights at any fraction of a second. I believe space and time are infinite, so it might be more accurate to visualise time as that HUGE number - in this case, of CDs or tapes - which some versions of string theory propose (10 exponent 500). My essay tells you exactly how to travel to the future, how to return home, and how to travel into our past. Neither future nor past can be altered (a blow to our belief that we have the free will to shape the future) and my explanation of travel to the past requires re-interpretation of the concepts of "multiverse" and "parallel universes". It also requires the ability to travel billions of light years INSTANTLY - no doubt many readers will instantly dismiss the essay because their preconceptions "know" this simply isn't possible. It indeed sounds like pure fantasy, but I outline an approach based on electrical engineering, General Relativity, and Miguel Alcubierre's 1994 proposal of "warp drive" that makes it logically possible.

My essay explains why the universe is a Mobius loop and how it is contained in, or unified with, each of its particles (relying on physical senses or 21st-century scientific instruments would make this statement ridiculous). Then each fermion and boson would also be composed of the 3 spatial dimensions, the 4th dimension of time, and the 5th dimension of hyperspace. Detectors like the Large Hadron Collider would be unable to "see" the time and hyperspace components of particles but could only see the small (maybe 5% of the whole) 3 spatial dimensions (the time and hyperspace components would be what we call dark matter), erroneously assuming particles are those small fractions of a Mobius loop that physics calls strings. "Dark matter" would exert a gravitational influence because both time and hyperspace, being parts of a curved Mobius loop (whether of quantum or cosmic scale), would push objects together in the same way Einstein's curved space-time pushes objects together. We can speak of the HST now - no, not the Hubble Space Telescope but Hyperspatial SpaceTime. We can visualise the Mobius loop as composed of a hyperspace computer which generates information on how things change from one presently undetectably tiny fraction of a second to the next (we call this time, and it's comparable to the frames in a movie) and transmits the data (transmits dark energy) to the insignificant portion of length, width and depth that makes up subatomic particles ... and the universe.

That's the end of my one-paragraph summary. Now for some extra thoughts -

Preceding the Big Bang (which created this local section of the infinite, eternal universe ... or if you prefer, this subuniverse of the megauniverse) there would have been no space, matter or time in this subuniverse. No transmissions of dark energy (creating time and space/matter) would have occurred - therefore the dark-energy content of the universe would have been zero, increasing to the present 72% as more and more matter was created. How is matter created? Perhaps as cosmologist Alan Guth once suggested -

"You might even be able to start a new universe using energy equivalent to just a few pounds of matter. Provided you could find some way to compress it to a density of about 10^75 (10 exponent 75) grams per cubic centimeter, and provided you could trigger the thing ..."

At the time the Cosmic Microwave Background was emitted (less than a million years after the big bang), results from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe say the dark-energy content of the universe was negligible. Space/matter has been increasing since the big bang so transmissions from hyperspace computer (dark energy) which create them are increasing while the volume of the Mobius loop occupied by time/hyperspace (dark matter) has been shrinking as a result - according to the WMAP satellite, from 63% when the CMB was emitted to 23% today. Why isn't dark energy increasing at the same rate dark matter is decreasing? It must be because, as stated earlier, both time and hyperspace exert a gravitational influence, thereby mimicking space and matter to a degree. This mimicry causes the dark matter between the start of the CMB and the present to decrease by only about 40% while dark energy increases in the same period by about 70%. If we were dealing with a simple and ordinary loop, this similarity would cause dark matter and dark energy to be more or less equal and if there was any difference in their amount of decrease/increase, it would be in the same direction. But we're talking about Mobius loops which are like strips of paper that have been twisted 180 degrees before the ends are joined. This causes their variation to go in different directions (one increases, the other decreases) and the amount of variation is quite significant (+72%, -40%). My guess is that the real-life twist occurs in the temporal segment of the loop, enabling a traveller in time to go in different directions i.e. into the future or into the past.

My essay tells you how to travel into the future, how to return home, and how to take a trip into our past. Regarding travel beyond our start and into the past ... it can't be denied that these paragraphs imply the possibility of humans from the distant future time-travelling to the distant past and using electronics to create this particular subuniverse's computer-generated Big Bang. An accomplishment such as this would be the supreme example of "backward causality" (effects influencing causes) promoted by Yakir Aharonov, John Cramer and others. However, realising that we live in a cosmic-quantum unification with zero-separation and recalling Isaac Newton's inverse-square law and what it says about the force between two particles being infinite (does infinite mean 10 ^ 500, the HUGE number of universes proposed by some versions of string theory?) if the distance of separation goes to zero means there's still room for God (another bit of scientifically objectionable science fiction?) because God would be a pantheistic union of the megauniverse's material and mental parts, forming a union with humans in a cosmic unification.

Best wishes,

Rodney

I know I can't submit another essay. I don't plan to - these are just some comments that came to mind after thinking about my essay. They don't seem very relevant to the topic "Is Reality Digital or Analog?" but writing them has given even more satisfaction than writing the essay, and I'm in the mood to share them with the whole world. So if you've got time to read them ...

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

I fully realise that my essay doesn't sound like science at all. I can appreciate that many readers think it belongs to science fiction and fantasy. It does have saving graces though. I'm amazed at how well it fits in with the discoveries of the Microwave Anisotropy Probe and with string theory, culminating in the LHC's experimentally verified strings and my prediction of antistrings. Having said that, I must say this - it's very strange that the scientific world is so obsessed with mathematics (admittedly, my essay did dabble with it when offering a version of E=mc2 to suit the digital world - but I kept it very simple ... so simple it might be regarded as wrong). Math seems to be regarded as infallible, even though it leads to mistakes. The (partial) mistake I have in mind is string theory. I don't deny that there certainly is value in the theory, and in maths, but logic reveals shortcomings. Let me explain, after first writing a short section describing an unconventional approach to unveiling unification and offering an alternative to the Higgs boson that relies on gravitational waves.

ALTERNATIVE TO HIGGS BOSON

An important step might be to think of "... the grand design of the universe, a single theory that explains everything" (words used by Stephen Hawking on the American version of Amazon, when promoting his latest book "The Grand Design" - coauthored with Leonard Mlodinow, Bantam Books, 2010) in a different way than physicists who are presently working on science's holy grail of unification. The universe's underlying electronic foundation* (which makes our cosmos into a partially-complete unification, similar to 2 objects which appear billions of years or billions of light-years apart on a huge computer screen actually being unified by the strings of ones and zeros making up the computer code which is all in one small place) would make our cosmos into physics' holy grail of a complete unification if it enabled not only elimination of all distances in space and time, but also elimination of distance between (and including) the different sides of objects and particles. This last point requires the universe to not merely be a vast collection of the countless photons, electrons and other quantum particles within it; but to be a unified whole that has "particles" and "waves" built into its union of digital 1's and 0's (or its union of qubits - quantum binary digits). If we use the example of CGH (computer generated holography, these "particles" and "waves" could be elements produced by the interaction of electromagnetic and presently undiscovered gravitational waves, producing what we know as mass and forming what we know as space-time. Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves, and measurements on the Hulse-Taylor binary-star system resulted in Russell Hulse and Joe Taylor being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1993 for their work, which was the first indirect evidence for gravitational waves. The feedback of the past and future universes into the unified cosmos's electronic foundation would ensure that both past and future could not be altered. Our brains and minds are part of this unification too - which must mean extrasensory perception and telekinetic independence from technology are possible, despite modern science's objections to these phenomena which appear to be based on non-unification.

* For more information on the universe's proposed electronic foundation, please see my article and postings at

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/814

STRINGS ARE ONLY PART OF MATTER'S BASIS

Space and time only exist in our experience. They are emergent properties, like wetness and mind. We experience wetness because it emerges from the building blocks of the hydrogen and oxygen atoms which make up water. We experience mind because it emerges from the building blocks of neurons composing the brain. And we experience space-time since it emerges from the building blocks making up the universe. These units are a combination of electromagnetic pulses (forming a cosmic computer which includes randomness and thus the potential to escape rigid preprogramming, and have a small degree of free will) as well as a cosmic hologram (this is produced by the interaction of electromagnetic plus gravitational waves and combination of the holographic aspect with the electronic aspect unifies general relativity with quantum physics). Every physical and nonphysical part of the universal hologram would be a receptor for the downloading of data from the cosmic computer which not only exists in the hyperspace of the large-scale universe but also in the hyperspace of each subatomic particle. (In other words, the holographic universe or spacetime we know is a screen for displaying data from the 5th-dimensional computer.)

It might be helpful to visualise time as the playing of a CD or video tape. The entire disc or tape obviously exists all the time. But our physical senses can only perceive a tiny part of the sound and the sights at any fraction of a second. I believe space and time are infinite, so it might be more accurate to visualise time as that HUGE number - in this case, of CDs or tapes - which some versions of string theory propose (10 exponent 500). My essay tells you exactly how to travel to the future, how to return home, and how to travel into our past. Neither future nor past can be altered (a blow to our belief that we have the free will to shape the future) and my explanation of travel to the past requires re-interpretation of the concepts of "multiverse" and "parallel universes". It also requires the ability to travel billions of light years INSTANTLY - no doubt many readers will instantly dismiss the essay because their preconceptions "know" this simply isn't possible. It indeed sounds like pure fantasy, but I outline an approach based on electrical engineering, General Relativity, and Miguel Alcubierre's 1994 proposal of "warp drive" that makes it logically possible.

My essay explains why the universe is a Mobius loop and how it is contained in, or unified with, each of its particles (relying on physical senses or 21st-century scientific instruments would make this statement ridiculous). Then each fermion and boson would also be composed of the 3 spatial dimensions, the 4th dimension of time, and the 5th dimension of hyperspace. Detectors like the Large Hadron Collider would be unable to "see" the time and hyperspace components of particles but could only see the small (maybe 5% of the whole) 3 spatial dimensions (the time component would be what we call dark matter), erroneously assuming particles are those small fractions of a Mobius loop that physics calls strings. "Dark matter" would exert a gravitational influence because time, being part of a curved Mobius loop (whether of quantum or cosmic scale), would push objects together in the same way Einstein's curved space-time pushes objects together. We can speak of the HST now - no, not the Hubble Space Telescope but Hyperspatial SpaceTime. We can visualise the Mobius loop as composed of a hyperspace computer which generates information on how things change from one presently undetectably tiny fraction of a second to the next (we call this time, and it's comparable to the frames in a movie) and transmits the data (transmits dark energy) to the insignificant portion of length, width and depth that makes up subatomic particles ... and the universe.

Preceding the Big Bang (which created this local section of the infinite, eternal universe ... or if you prefer, this subuniverse of the megauniverse) there would have been no space, matter or time in this subuniverse. No transmissions of dark energy (creating time and space/matter) would have occurred - therefore the dark-energy content of the universe would have been zero, increasing to the present 72% as more and more matter was created. How is matter created? Perhaps as cosmologist Alan Guth once suggested -

"You might even be able to start a new universe using energy equivalent to just a few pounds of matter. Provided you could find some way to compress it to a density of about 10^75 (10 exponent 75) grams per cubic centimeter, and provided you could trigger the thing ..."

At the time the Cosmic Microwave Background was emitted (less than a million years after the big bang), results from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe say the dark-energy content of the universe was negligible. Space/matter has been increasing since the big bang so transmissions from hyperspace computer (dark energy) which create them are increasing while the volume of the Mobius loop occupied by time/hyperspace (dark matter) has been shrinking as a result - according to the WMAP satellite, from 63% when the CMB was emitted to 23% today. Why isn't dark energy increasing at the same rate dark matter is decreasing? It must be because, as stated earlier, both time and hyperspace exert a gravitational influence, thereby mimicking space and matter to a degree. This mimicry causes the dark matter between the start of the CMB and the present to decrease by only about 40% while dark energy increases in the same period by about 70%. If we were dealing with a simple and ordinary loop, this similarity would cause dark matter and dark energy to be more or less equal and if there was any difference in their amount of decrease/increase, it would be in the same direction. But we're talking about Mobius loops which are like strips of paper that have been twisted 180 degrees before the ends are joined. This causes their variation to go in different directions (one increases, the other decreases) and the amount of variation is quite significant (+72%, -40%). My guess is that the real-life twist occurs in the temporal segment of the loop, enabling a traveller in time to go in different directions i.e. into the future or into the past. To replenish dark matter in billions of years, we merely have to extend Guth's proposal by using the knowledge of that time to create more matter.

A real-life Mobius is by no means a featureless loop, however. If, contrary to our impressions, the universe is unified with each particle it's composed of; the WMAP satellite's findings must apply to the quantum world. The figures 72%, 23% and 5% would not only describe the present universe's content of dark energy, dark matter and ordinary matter but also any particle's content of space or ordinary matter (5%), time or dark matter (23% - time is considered to be dark matter here because dark matter is regarded as ordinary matter invisible to us since it's present in another region of the dimension we call time, just as most of a sphere is in another dimension and consequently appears as a dot when first entering Edwin Abbott's 1884 exploration of other dimensions called "Flatland"), and hyperspace (72%: the transmissions from the hyperspace computer create space and matter, cause expansion of space on cosmic scales where there are no forces to overcome the expansion as there is in matter, and are known as dark energy - creating more matter causes that matter's repelling gravity to bring about accelerating expansion).

Look at a picture of a Mobius (thanks to the repeating scales of fractal geometry, the apparently empty interior and exterior of the Mobius universe would actually be the same as the visible loop). Imagine the space/ordinary matter to be situated immediately counterclockwise (perhaps on the bottom of the loop) to the hyperspace segment and the time/dark matter portion to be immediately counterclockwise to the space/ordinary matter (time/dark matter would, moving clockwise, be next to the hyperspace segment).

The hyperspace transmissions flow directly into space/matter (all motion - "flow" and "transmissions" - are actually comparable to individual frames in a movie but are spoken of in everyday terms of motion for convenience, like saying the sun rises and sets) and are responsible for the large and unimpeded 72% increase, since the CMB was emitted, of dark energy. This flow rate of 72% also enters the time/dark matter section adjacent to hyperspace ... but the loop's twist seems to be in the time section. If we were to cut the loop lengthwise with scissors, previously varying the number of half-twists results in things such as two rings linked together or a knotted ring. So we get barriers to motion and blockages. Returning to the normal loop and twist, matters are less drastic and motion is merely slowed, resulting in a 23% flow rate.

If we lived in a non-unified universe of materialism, this is how things would remain (dark matter would have increased so today's content would be a low 23%). On p. 179 of "The Grand Design" by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow (Bantam Press, 2010) it's stated "One requirement any law of nature must satisfy is that it dictates that the energy of an isolated body surrounded by empty space is positive ..."

The only problem with that sentence, in an "everything is everywhere and everywhen" universe, is the word isolated. There can be no such thing as isolated in our cosmic-quantum unification. Page 179 also says "... if the energy of an isolated body were negative ... there would be no reason that bodies could not appear anywhere and everywhere." Does this mean you and I (plus all things in time and space) are a union of both positive and negative energy, able to display both separateness/solidity (isolation) as well as the potential to appear anywhere and everywhere? Dark matter, not being entirely positive, would be anywhere and everywhere as well as having decreased so today's content would be a low 23% (which is what WMAP says is the case).

If everything is a union of positive and negative energy, every matter particle and force-carrying particle would be too. And the strings the Large Hadron Collider might detect (being the parts of particles' Mobius loops it could see since those parts would be space/ordinary matter) might come in both positive and negative varieties. In 1928 English physicist Paul Dirac (1902-84) proposed that all negative energy states are already occupied by (then hypothetical) antiparticles (particles of antimatter). Building on this results in proposal of strings and antistrings.

My essay tells you how to travel into the future, how to return home, and how to take a trip into our past. Regarding travel beyond our start and into the past ... it can't be denied that these paragraphs imply the possibility of humans from the distant future time-travelling to the distant past and using electronics to create this particular subuniverse's computer-generated Big Bang. An accomplishment such as this would be the supreme example of "backward causality" (effects influencing causes) promoted by Yakir Aharonov, John Cramer and others. However, realising that we live in a cosmic-quantum unification with zero-separation and recalling Isaac Newton's inverse-square law and what it says about the force between two particles being infinite (does infinite mean 10 ^ 500, the HUGE number of universes proposed by some versions of string theory?) if the distance of separation goes to zero means there's still room for God (another bit of scientifically objectionable science fiction?) because God would be a pantheistic union of the megauniverse's material and mental parts, forming a union with humans in a cosmic unification.

--------------------------------------------------------

According to the Community Ratings, my essay in the 2011 Essay Contest is sliding further down the ratings each day. But I'm having more luck with a science journal called General Science Journal - comments of mine inspired by the essay (which are nearly 20,000 words long and include comments about "The Nature of Time" as well as "Is Reality Digital or Analog?") were published in the Journal on Feb. 6 and may be viewed at http://gsjournal.net/ntham/bartlett.pdf

Dear Sir,

We were not addressing your persona, which is very private for you. We were addressing you intellectual acumen displayed in public, which needs to be respected.

Regards,

basudeba

Dear Steve,

You seem to voice the frustration that probably a lot of others feel. Some math solutions get pretty far from the thing trying to be solved. For example, this essay describes a 4th order polynomial with each coefficient being another 4th order polynomial to form a hypermatrix. It is interesting to try to model any physical system with a standard 4th order polynomial because solving for the coefficients leads to math that is only a tool to calculate coefficients rather than a fundamental description of the original system. For that matter does even the original polynomial describe a fundamental operation of the system as opposed to just fitting to a portion of it?

I'd like to invite you to read my essay about an exploratory model with a single potential propelling particle motion. I'm curious if you think it is logically presented and sticks close to the things (photons, electrons, and protons) being described.

Kind regards,

Russell

Hello Phil

I am grateful to you for creation viXra.org.

This inspired me to become active and take part in this contest.

You did good job.

All the best.

Yuri

Thanks and good luck for the contest

Phil

I view what you put up as a " This is the limits of string theory" monikor, with an outline as to the promises and perils of takign the string theory monikor literally.

What I would like to see would be a description as to what forms strings and brane, from emergent space time.

When that is done, then the digital versus analog nature of reality will reveal itself

quote:

What about space, time and matter, are they discrete or continuous? Again the answer is open to interpretation. Space and time could emerge from interactions between discrete entities, yet their symmetries are continuous and perfect.

end of quote

Please outline how you came to this conclusion.

What you put up is the heart of your essay and affects its adherance to the topic. thank you for your essay. I enjoyed it immensely

Andy

Andy, I agree that knowing where the strings and branes come from is crucial to making further progress in this theory.

I know that many people are not keen on string theory these days so I dont expect my essay to score high points, however I still see it as the correct appraoch to understanding the principles of nature. My reason is that there must be a description of nature when looked at perturbatively around nearly flat spacetime and weak fields. String theory is the only solution for that.

Continuous symmetries are very important in everything we know about physics. You cant approximate them well with discrete symmetries so I assume they are exact. The Fermi observations also seem to show that Lorentz invariance holds even beyond the Planck scale.

With qubits we can keep the exact symmetries even when the information content is discrete and finite, so there is no reason to abandon these symmetries.

I don't agree with people who say that symmetries are emergent from equations. I think they are fundamental. Without invariance principles such as the invaraince opf the laws of physics at different times and places we could not make sense of the universe.

Good luck with your essay too.

I second your assessment. Discrete structures play a role with quotient structures or Galois cohomologies and with conformal completion of hyperbolic symmetries. This plays a role with the conformal complete of the AdS. However, a pure discrete symmetry can only define a charge, but not a current. You can't have Noetherian conservation principles with only a discrete symmetry. The only exception is with E_8, where the root space structure (a discrete symmetry) is equivalent to the continuous group of E_8.

I have been a bit out of action this month, for I have been terribly ill. I think the light is at the end of the tunnel --- though it could be a freight train coming my way. So I have not been commenting much on FQXi.

Cheers LC

Dear Philip, Lawrence and Guest,

I also agree. In my essay, I concluded that nature is both continuous and discrete. That is the way that we observe nature because of wave-particle duality. The discrete properties are expressed by quantum charges, such as color, electric, and weak charges. But the continuous properties are expressed by fields (and waves or classical strings) such as electromagnetic and gravitational.

Qubits of Strings are the best of both worlds: "discrete" quantum charges and "continuous" strings.

I think that this contest had three legitimate answers, either:

1) Nature is fundamentally discrete, or

2) Nature is fundamentally continuous, or

3) Nature is fundamentally both discrete and continuous.

Perhaps Qubits of Strings and the third answer aren't popular because:

1) Strings aren't popular, and

2) "both" continuous and discrete sounds indecisive

But I honestly don't think that popular "democratic" science is the best science. I would prefer that we work out all of the details, and see which approach best fits all data and details.

Lawrence - I hope you get well quickly.

Have Fun!

Dr. Cosmic Ray