A Universe Programmed with Strings of Qubits by Philip Gibbs

Hi Philip

Very good essay offering quite convincing arguments for a speculative look at reality.

I am wondering if there might be a possible compatibility between this idea of fundamental quantum information as you have described it and the proposal of David Bohm dating back to 1952 of "active information" which might exist as a sub-quantum field which would "inform" the QM wave function via what he calls the "quantum potential? It is an extension of DeBroglie's "pilot wave" theory and is starting to receive a bit more attention lately, mainly because it has the capacity to treat quantum theory in a physically real way, very naturally explaining what conventional quantum theory can't, EPR, wave function collapse etc. It also has the advantage of very simply removing notions like "superposition of states" (and therefore "collapse") via the non-local field.

Do you see your fundamental qubits as generating only a geometry, ie spacetime/Calabi-Yau M, or as you seem to indicate in your section on the Holographic Principle, can it also apply to matter? If so, it could I think connect with Bohm in that the wave functions of elementary particles could be "formed" and "guided" by the information contained in the sub-quantum field of Qubit interactions.

Just some ill-defined initial thoughts but I thought it might be interesting to relate the two concepts?

Congatulations on your essay and good luck!

Roy,

Thanks for asking these questions. I'm also interested in the answers. FYI, my essay addresses some of these questions, and I would appreciate your thoughts.

Also, I'd like to point out that Brian Whitworth's essay follows the logical implications farther than perhaps anyone else has done. I think both you and Phil would find his essay very interesting.

Edwin Eugene Klingman

I like the idea that Bohm anticipated the holographic principle a couple of decades ahead of the quantum gravity version. His motivation for it was very different but since 't Hooft is interested in alternative quantum theories I am sure it must have had some influence on his thinking.

I agree that other erssays such as Whitworth's and Klingman are interesting in regard to Bohm's work

Hello dear Sir,

You are welcome.

Sorry to say dear Basudeba.Here all people says the name as Peter, John,...

You can say Steve you know I am 35 years old.

Regards

Steve

It is my understanding the difficulty with getting QFT to work with Bohm's interpretation of QM remains. Relativistic QFT of interacting fields describes the creation of particles with some mass gap, which Bohm's approach is not able to work with.

Goldstein, I believe at Rutgers, has been trying to push this. I am not aware of his progress. However, at the end of it all Bohm's QM is still nonlocal, and the quantum potential has nonlocal properties. Bohm's QM has not managed to reduce nonlocal hidden variables to something which is local.

Cheers LC

Lawrence,

You state: "Relativistic QFT of interacting fields describes the creation of particles with some mass gap, which Bohm's approach is not able to work with."

A somewhat related question: A dozen years ago it was realized that the vacuum energy was off by 120 orders of magnitude. Do you believe that all relevant QED calculations (since 1947, or so) have been recomputed to take this into account? Have all 'virtual particle' assumptions been re-questioned? Only a year or so ago physicists were expecting a 'sea of strange particles' in the proton. It's not there. And 3 years ago the expectation of QCD was for a 'gas' when nuclei collide. They found a 'perfect fluid' as I predicted.

Second, for about six months we've known that QED only comes within 4% of the proton radius in muonic hydrogen. Do you have an opinion as to the cause of this?

Third, if, as I believe, the gravito-magnetic field is 10**31 orders of magnitude greater than Maxwell et al believed, then the relative changes between QED and GEM involve 151 orders of magnitude, in favor of GEM as a physically reasonable factor in the universe. Should this be ignored? At what point does one decide to look in new directions?

Finally, my 'pilot wave' is not the same as Bohm's approach. He was not basing it on a very specific 'real' field, like gravito-magnetism, but on a more general 'quantum' field. So the fact that "Bohm's QM has not managed to reduce nonlocal hidden variables to something which is local" may not be entirely relevant to my approach.

Thanks for your consideration.

Edwin Eugene Klingman

We solve comparatively simple NP problems all the time. A sodoku or crossword or jigsaw puzzle are NP problems. Assisted by unquantifiable intuition, induction, creative insight you iterate your way to a solution which, when achieved, can be recognized almost instantly. Negotiating your way through a traffic jam is an NP problem. Sherlock Holmes was pretty adept at solving NP problems. But each case required him to start from scratch. These problems and their solutions are one-offs. You can't compress them algorithmically. You can come up with certain basic strategies which may work for subsequent problems, but strategies aren't solutions and sometimes they don't apply anyway.

The basic genome isn't where it's entirely at nowadays, Craig Venter notwithstanding. The frontier is epigenomics, how specific genes interact in aggregate, often extremely complexly. In some senses the process appears to resemble multiple entanglement where the information is distributed among the quanta. What's junk DNA for, if anything? And so on. And where do these processes devolve from in the first place if they don't emerge from the fundamental physics of the universe? Wouldn't a valid fundamental theory need to comprehend them?

Concerns like that.

A sodoku or crossword or jigsaw puzzle "is an NP problem" not "are NP problems" of course, sorry.

I think the level of complexity in the world is some sort of extremal condition on paths in a Feynman path integral. Each path here corresponds to a particular "universe" or nucleation bubble. The vacuum configuration of each of these universes is determined by the compactification on a Calabi Yau space. Strings which wrap on these spaces have a duality with their mode index --- T duality. We are all of course familiar with path integrals and how very high frequency stuff or wild phases tend to cancel themselves out, so that you tend to get WKB behaviour or classical systems. My conjecture is that the huge degree or measure on the NP-completeness of the landscape (the extent of its space or need for qubits) is reflected in the complexity of the classical world. If so then of the 10^{500} or so landscape "realities" that exist there is a far smaller number of them which are classical. The "worlds" are those which satisfy an extermal condition on their complexity. This complexity is determined by the n-form flux through Dp-brane coincident with these wrappings.

Cheers LC

I accidently pasted my response to this in the bottom text box.

LC

I can't comment upon the muonic atom result which got the radius of the proton adjusted. I will offer my suggestion that the large muon has a small orbit and these results reflect the interaction of the muon with the proton. So the perturbation may be reflected by this result. To ferret out the problem requires some very complicated QED calculations with a quark or parton model of the proton.

The fluid properties of the quark-gluon plasma is interpreted as an AdS_4 ~ QCD result. In effect the quark gluon has properties of a BTZ black hole in the anti de Sitter spacetime. There is then some parameter that depends on energy, so that at low energy the quark gluon plasma has properties of a black hole with very weak gravity, but as the energy is scaled up the QCD plasma becomes a real black hole with strong gravity. Nastase and others have written on this.

The value of the cosmological constant means there is some field flux across the Dp-brane of the cosmology that counters the vacuum energy. The AdS has negative Gaussian curvature, which counters the Ricci curvature on the S^5. In the AdS_5xS^5 the boundary of AdS_5 = ∂AdS_5 ~ CFT_4. The AdS_5 has negative Gaussian curvature, which is from a 5-form which has a positive curvature on the S^5. On the boundary the gravitational curvature is zero. So problem involves the incidence of these curvature fluxes on the Dp-branes in the presence of these spaces.

My understanding is that since Bohm QM does not involve Hilbert space, the whole thing lives in configuration space, it is difficult to model the production of particles. One can well enough derive a Bohm version of the Klein-Gordon equation, or the Dirac equation, and even the Maxwell equations. The problem comes when you couple them together. It is difficult to describe the generation of photons, which are massless, and from what I know up to now it is not possible to describe the pair production of particles with some mass --- such as e-e^ pairs.

Cheers LC

Lawrence,

I interpreted your earlier comment following my question as the answer to my question. Thanks for the more direct answer. I generally understand your answer. You and I have a different focus. Believing in 10**500 universes must make it easy not to sweat the details. I believe in only one universe, generally described in my essays, and the real details, especially anomalies, are where I think effort should be expended, but that's what makes horse races. You pays yer money, and you takes yer choice.

I am curious as whether the failure of the Higgs, SUSY particles, or any other conjectured particles to show up will give you pause, or whether the 10**500 vacua remove all such cares.

Finally, I don't know about Bohm's problems, but my theory seems to handle both photons and particle pair creation. I also suggest that if an alternate means of explaining the weak force mechanism and the strong force interactions between quarks, based on the Yang-Mills GEM fields, were to be true, then all justification for more than 4 dimensions would vanish, and a Calabi-Yau manifold would reduce to a torus. I base this on the 151 orders of magnitude change in the QED-GEM energies as well as the existence of physically reasonable, if not mathematically fully developed mechanisms that seem to provide all known particles with no need for Higgs, SUSY, or more than 4 dimensions, while also explaining physically many, if not most, of today's anomalies and mysteries. Of course I would like to have full mathematical backup for these arguments, but it is difficult, in five years, to compete with over a century of math developed by many thousands of bright guys. Yet the 4% accuracy of QED and QCD on 'simple' problems should worry anyone.

Thanks for your response. Probably neither of us will be moving into the others camp.

Edwin Eugene Klingman

The LHC is still in its teething phase. There are some signatures of SUSY already. The Higgs will prove to be difficult to detect. Its signature is comparable to other fields. It is not expected to be observed until 2013, though some results from the Tevatron are favouring a SUSY Higgs sector. Some evidence of the 2-doublet Higgs sector in MSSM has been found.

The issue with the 10^{500} vacua does involve the Calabi-Yau space, which in the trivial case is a T^6 = T^2xT^2xT^2. There are entangled states associated with groups of the T^2's which correspond to the presence of a Dp-brane. The problem is that the T^6 is sort of the ground state of Calabi Yau spaces. The introduction of singular points which transform between each other in conifold extends this to a more general set of CY manifolds. This leads to this landscape issue of 10^{500} vacua.

The question about one universe vs many comes down to the classical measure for each of these cosmologies. A large cosmological constant would correspond to a nucleation bubble that inflates rapidly and correspond to paths in the grand path integral with wildly oscillating phases. These contribute little to a classical amplitude, or any decoherent set of paths which have some WKB or classical-like content. A low cosmological constant is a small vacuum energy leve and is more likely to define some coherent set of "histories." The idea of there being some extremal condition on complexity is what I would call a condition for a decoherent history that has a classical-like content. Whether there is ultimately one of these or not is unknown. As such this would mean the grand path integral in the superspace consists of a much smaller number of cosmologies which are classical or are proximal to what we call "reality." The rest of these cosmologies are then quantum corrections.

Cheers LC

Lawrence,

Thanks for your explanation. I note the Higgs is now expected in 2013. Just two years ago it was expected (by Peter Higgs) in 2009, and about 2 decades before that by Leon Lederman in the 1980's. It's always "real soon now". Because my theory works so well in explaining known anomalies of experimental physics, and because the Higgs would put my theory out to pasture, I do not believe the Higgs is going to show. We'll have to wait and see. SUSY is another story. I'm not sure that SUSY would wipe me out, but it wouldn't make me happy. I've heard so many rumors in the last year, not just SUSY but dark matter, etc, that seem to blow over, I will again just have to wait and see. You must admit, it's been a really long dry spell in particle physics, which is consistent with my theory -- not sure what it means for other theories. It could be just the obvious problem of not yet reaching the right energy.

If I am correct, then, as I said, Calabi-Yau reduces to a torus in 4-space, which fits my ideas. If I'm wrong, I'll probably just get out of the game. It's too much effort working out details of new theories from particles to cosmology, and I'm already too old to be doing so, according to standard physics mythology.

By the way, just because I believe you are wrong does not mean that I do not very much admire your level of skill, math knowledge, and erudition. You are quite impressive.

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Dear Philip,

In your essay, you mention a 4 qubit model. Would an 8 qubit model contain all of Lisi's ideas? I think that Lisi's specific model is wrong (because he included fermions and bosons in the same lattice, rather than in reciprocal lattices), but the idea of a quantum crystal (Gosset lattice in Lisi's E8 model) of information yielding the various particle states is an interesting, and potentially fruitful, approach. As always, the Genius is in the Generalities, but the Devil is in the Details...

Dear Ed (aka Dr. Gene-man),

I expect a TOE to be much grander than all of these "minimal TOE's". As such, your ideas on a classical magnetic-like gravitational field could be one component of the ultimate TOE. As I understand your ideas, your "C" field is a classical field that produces a triality (using Lisi's terminology). Is this a triality of Generations (that the Standard Model desperately needs to explain the CKM and PMNS matrices, IMHO), or a triality of Color, or are the two related via an AdS/QCD correspondence (I think that Lawrence has some ideas along this direction)? Whereas you are focusing on the classical continuous field side of this "C" field, I'm wondering about the quantum discrete particle side of the problem - i.e. the gravitational version of the "magnetic monopole".

You aren't too old to play this game. You and Tom Ray are about the same age, and Lawrence and I are about 10-15 years younger.

Have Fun!

Dr. Cosmic Ray

Ray, the E8 group can be represented by a quadripartite entanglement of 8 qubits. The model presented here is based on bosonic string theory which cannot be used to build a physical theory due to tachyon instabilities, so it is necessary to generalise the idea to superstring theories such as the heterotic string with its E8xE8 gauge group. A more complicated qubit arrangement might be needed to make that work.

However, none of the uses of E8 in string theory and M-theory really match up to the unification idea that Lisi is pursuing as far as I know. I am not aware of any scheme for making the gravitational groups from string theory embed in the E8 group in the way Lisi does it. So in order to make some connection with the Lisi theory the E8 group would have to arise in a different way. In my opinion the use of E8 is too different for the theories to be able to match up. I think Lisi has always seen his theory as an alternative to string theory so I don't imagine he will be disappointed!

Of course your suggested variations may bring them closer.

Dear Philip,

Lisi thinks he is working against String Theory - I think it is all related (as I will present in my upcoming Continuous vs. Discrete Essay). I agree that any E8 model (if it really is E8 and not a crystalized perversion of SU(11)) must minimally be a SUSY E8xE8* because fermions and bosons cannot exist in identical lattices (they must reside in dual and/or reciprocal lattices of one another). IMHO, Lisi should not have had bosons in the E8 that he presented - those extra states should have been tachyons.

What if Hyperspace is a quadripartite entanglement of 8 qubits, and Spacetime is an entangled 4 qubit?

Have Fun!

Dr. Cosmic Ray

Edwin,

The Higgs field is really an application of the Landau-Ginsburg potential to particle physics. As such an array of physics follows this type of thing, from the Curie point for ferromagnetism to superconductivity. The breaking of the standard model is then similar to the breaking of the QED field at low temperature in superconductivity. I tend to think that nature has a general repeating pattern whereby a generic law can manifest itself in an array of circumstances. AdS~CFT is showing up in solid state physics, so it too appears to have some universality to it. So my bet is with the Higgs field.

Cheers LC

Phil & Ray,

The major problem with Lisi's irreducible representation theory is that he frames things in funny ways. In particular he frame the SO(3,1) for gravity with the rest of the gauge fields. A global transformation in the unification group means that internal and external symmetries transform between each other in ways which lead to unphysical results. For instance a black hole could be transformed away into gauge fields so that its internal configuration could be specified. In more generality this violates the Coleman-Mandula theorem. He also frames bosons and fermions by multiplication by Clifford basis elements. This runs into trouble IMO, for these really need to be Grassmannian elements in a SUSY which correspond to SUSY generators with some Clifford content. The E_8 is 8 dimensional with 248 (or 240 depending on how you count) elements, and this does have a correspondence with CL_8 with 2^8 = 256 elements in 11 dimensions.

The SO(8) corresponds to the 4 qubit entanglement situation. E_8 decomposes into O(16) or SO(16), which is half of the Clifford --- given abuse of terms here, which in turn decomposes into two SO(8)'s. The 4 Q-bit has G_{SLOCC} flows or orbits of the state ψ_{ABCD} SO(4;R) ~ SL(2;C), and we can convert the SL(2,C)^4 into SO(4)^4 and use SO(4;C) = SO(4)^2. The orbits of the G_{SLOCC} are the an SO(8) conjugacy class. The set of nilpotent orbits is a classification of SO(8;C). The complexification of SO((8,C) means it occupies the same space as SO(16) ---- 4 qubit entanglements have 16 complex elements. For the 8 qubit entanglement situation we "double down" our bet here. The 4-bit system is the quaternionic structure, Cayley number 2^2 = 4. The 3 qubit system is related to the complex field, but instead of pertaining to 2 bits (2^1) for an 8 charged black hole it there are 4 D3-branes where charges may combine into 5 dimensions (NS5-brane) with the Clifford basis in 5-dim corresponding to 2 3 = Cayley plus 3 => Cl_2. Going up the Cayley ladder involves states ψ_{ABCDEFGH} and we are talking about products of 8 SL(2,C)'s for the octonions or E_8.

The other approach, which is what I have been primarily pursuing is the E_8 -> E_7 -> E_6 decomposition. This has a triality condition on the G_2 automorphism of E_8 and leads more naturally to the Jordan matrix algebra and Freudenthal theory of general determinants. The cubic structure of G_2 also gives the elliptic curve structure to the theory. I would in some part be interested in knowing if this connects up with the orthogonal group decomposition I outlined above.

My paper got hosted finally, where this is an overview of this work. I am working out more of the maths and crafting a more detailed paper. When it is done I will attach it to my paper site.

Cheers LC