Alan,

I think one of the primary conceptual fallacies afflicting physics predates the discipline. It is the basic assumption of time as the present moving from past events to future ones. While this is our evident experience, so is it evident that the sun moves across the sky from east to west. The problem was trying to construct of physical theory to explain it, prior to understanding the elementary fact that it is the earth which rotates west to east.

Same for time. It is the changing configuration of what exists which turns future potential into past circumstance. We don't travel the fourth dimension from yesterday to tomorrow. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates. Time is an effect of motion, not the basis for it.

Reality doesn't split into multiworlds at every quantum superposition. It's the collapse of those possibilities which is the future becoming the past.

There can be no dimensionless point in time because that would freeze the very motion creating it. Much like trying to take a picture with the shutter speed set at zero. This lack of an absolute instant means an object cannot be distinguished from its activity, whether its a particle from its wave, or a car from its context.

We can't have free will if the present is dimensionless point between past and future, since we can't change the past or affect the future, but if it's the motion of the present turning potential into effect, our actions are part of the whole.

I think there are various other conceptual issues causing trouble for physics. For one thing, it's based on a western, object oriented view of reality, rather than an eastern context oriented view. So we keep isolating objects/particles/waves/strings/etc. from their situation and then find it's all kind of fuzzy and not as absolutely precise as we assume it must be. Just think how different modern physics would be, if it had evolved in the east. It probably wouldn't even be physics, but called something like "contextuality." We wouldn't be looking for supersymmetric particles, because we would understand opposites are not something which annihilate each other, but balance each other and give context and deeper dimension to reality. The yin and yang, up and down, positive and negative of everything.

It's sort of a simplistic view, but complexity only covers errors in logic, it doesn't cure them.

I like the simplicity of your thinking, yet don't quite agree on the points you're making. A lot of science did emerge from the east, when the Muslim empire was at it's zenith. I've done a lot of eastern book reading and although I think different worldviews help individuals in different communities the basic underlying dynamics of nature are the same. The results would be pretty much the same. Their interpretation of how we should live our lives may be very different, but the picture of reality if it emerged as a t.o.e from the eastern empire would be near identical.

I think I have found the stumbling block of modern physics btw. It is the simple idea of using an Archimedes Screw analogy to explain gravity. Newton missed a trick. Look at the dynamic diagram and see how this can represent a graviton. The red ball indicates the direction of force. Now imagine the whole screw moving to the bottom right of the screen. This is how a force carrying particle/wave can be visualised. When it interacts with another particle/wave a force of attraction is induced. Now imagine that this Archimedes screw travels around a wraparound universe, or hypersphere. It would emerge on the other side as a force of repulsion i.e. dark energy. Think about it and you'll be amazed.

Alan,

It does provide an interesting concept to explore the possibilities implicit in spin. Though with many ideas, it is possible to carry the analogy too far and lose the meaning, as you get wrapped up in the details. Sort of like the momentum of a pendulum swings past its point of attraction. I only say this because I'm not getting all the connections you are seeing, but have seen the propensity to over project too many times.

I guess my point about eastern ways of thinking is that I suspect we do focus a bit to much on what is actually physical and then the closer we examine it, the more blurry it gets. This leads to a point I don't have time to get into at the moment, which is that I think space, in having no physical properties, is both equilibrium state and infinite. Which makes it that invisible void, the missing piece of the puzzle, we keep trying to patch over with something physical, but keep getting lost.

John: okay, I was talking about the object reality, as defined in Georgina's essay, as being EXACTLY like a helical screw and not just an analogy. It's the image of a GRAVITON imo and can be nothing else. Do you accept the graviton idea or do you reject it for a spacetime continuum image of reality?

Alan,

I'm somewhat cautious as to the nature of anything. I can understand how the idea of a screw might solve the contradiction of an attraction particle, but I don't know that the particle is the best conceptual solution for every effect. Gravity may well be a composite of attraction and vacuum effects. All that can really be said is that it's a property of mass/structure to consolidate, as opposed to the nature of radiation to expand.

But when one considers the work of quantum mechanics and the six building blocks of nature being six quarks, with spin properties, then this FITS the particle model. It's only Newton's inability to postulate a mechanism for the force of gravity that has left it in it's mathematical form. His equation denotes a lack of ORIENTATION for a particle mechanismfor gravity! He has left the solution lacking in detail. He has left the solution in mathematical form which dictates a non-particle solution. The graviton has no place in his famous equation. He has skewed science from the outset and Einstein never changed it for a graviton model. This is the reason for the current problems imo. The answer is easy. Just wait until the penny drops..

John,

We have always fundamentally disagreed, so there's no point rehashing the physics of spacetime.

However, I do appreciate that mathematics agrees with you on the difference between counting and measuring, and that it does lie at the heart of "why" digital and analog coexist. We measure probabilities (a continuous interval between zero and one) for a particle to exist; we count the discrete particles. There's a delightful story about the great Polish mathematician Sierpinski, who was waiting on a train platform with his wife, in a high state of agitation. "What's wrong?" she asked. "We're missing a bag," he replied. "No," she said, "all six bags are here." "They are not!" he shot back -- "I've counted them several times now: zero, one, two, three, four, five!"

How one starts counting determines the outcome, and certainly quantized spacetime depends on that "smallest measurable quantitity." Zero isn't measurable, however -- it's a number, but not a quantity. That's what Einstein was up against, the appearance of singularities.

Tom

    Thanks Tom.

    While I haven't followed the thread of logic to really make this point before, I've wondered whether math doesn't treat fractions as a form of infinite regression, a la Zeno's paradox and effectively avoid dealing with some of the complications of nothing/zero. Using zero as a marker is necessary, but that really makes it a one. Geometry treats the center point of the coordinate system as zero, but if it is a one, doesn't that mean the blank sheet of paper, without any marks, is the real zero?

    Alan,

    It's not like I'm really arguing it from a conventional perspective, but I think there is another side to it. Consider nodes and networks. In reality they create and define each other. Form follows function. By looking at the particles and trying to understand their interactions is like trying to understand the network only as connections of the nodes. You don't get the larger emergent effects. Physics doesn't seem to see these larger effects as they are. Their results just spin off into blurry multiworlds.

    So are quarks actually some little particle, or is that simply a convenient designation for what is going on that we are not seeing?Maybe the three quarks are qualities of the proton, which we measure, but don't really separate. Maybe gravity is part of the larger emergent structure of mass. I don't know, but physics doesn't really know either.

    That's the thing, John. A blank sheet of paper, analogous to spacetime without matter, is a "real" zero insofar as the continuous functions of classical physics are concerned. The warping caused by matter makes it possible for us to differentiate that nothing from the curvature that is something. What's fascinating is that we know by observation that the overall curvature is very nearly 1.0 -- like a sheet of paper with a single symbol on it. Very suitable for a T-shirt, no? :-)

    Geometry, OTOH, is abstract. The point is dimensionless, just the case of a line of measure zero.

    Tom

    Tom,

    Does the symbol create the sheet of paper, as would be premised by Big Bang theory, or does the paper permit the symbol? An expending metric, that of redshift, would suggest the first, but a stable metric, the speed of light, would suggest the second.

    As an abstraction, we should treat geometry as a useful model and nothing more. Otherwise we must account for that other mathematical principle that multiplying anything by zero equals zero. So a dimensionless point doesn't exist. The problem so often with math is that people treat the principles they like as absolutes and ignore the ones they don't like and that defeats the purpose. The Planck unit is where divisibility meets its limit, but this is inherently fuzzy because defining it further would require a level of definition beyond the planck scale. Math is modeling.

    John,

    I enjoyed reading your essay. Most was familiar to me from previous discussions we had in these blogs. But the style of writing was easy, smooth and clear. I liked it. Since we agree in many fundamental views (especially as it concerns cosmology) I hope your essay makes it to the 'finals' -- along with Peter's and Georgina's and Eckard's and many others that now seem to converge on the same 'view' of physical reality. Who knows. If a sizable number of essays in the final round play on the same central theme then our call for greater 'physical realism' may begin to be taken more seriously by the judges. I will definitely give you a good rating and hope you make it to the final round!

    Recalling our discussions on cosmology. I have a curiosity and concern I like to share with you.

    In my essay I show that Thermodynamics (The Fundamental Thermodynamic Relation as well as The Second Law) requires that physical time be 'duration', t-s, rather than 'instantiation', t=s. Thermodynamics as I argue asserts that 'every physical process (event) takes some duration of time to occur'. This, of course, fits well with my claim that 'there is accumulation before manifestation' of energy. My curiosity -- and physicist's concern -- is that Thermodynamics thus would seem to invalidate GR where 'events' in the Universe are given (x,y,z,t) coordinates in a spacetime continuum. Clearly, time so used in GR is 'instantiation' t=s, and not 'duration' t-s as I argue is required by Thermodynamics. And if GR violates Thermodynamics, wont then the Cosmology based on GR and deeply Thermodynamical, also be false?

    This goes well with your notion of 'counting clicks' (instantiation) rather than 'counting the time between clicks' (duration).

    Wishing you well,

    Constantinos

      Constantinos,

      I think spacetime geometry is equivalent to epicycles, in that it is trying to give a physical explanation for how time goes from past to future, since that is the bedrock of rational thought. As opposed to the simple fact that we have the relationship inverted, much like it is actually the earth which is rotating and not that the sun actually moves. Remember that for their time, epicycles were extremely advanced math and laid the foundations for much of the cosmology and physics that came after, once the correct pivot was established and all the parts came together in a much more simplified whole.

      Safe to say, for those who have spent their lives loading the old program, this just "does not compute."

      Having been following the news out of the LHC, they have pushed many of the boundaries for super symmetry quite far and haven't found any of what they are looking for. Combine this with the likelihood that evidence for a galaxy to be discovered, further away than the universe is presumed to be old, within the next few years, considering the current oldest discovered one is 13.2 billion lightyears away and I suspect the physics world is going to have some major earth guakes rattling in in the coming decade. Who knows, by the time this contest is finished in June, some discoveries, or lack thereof, might be rattling the china.

      Chris,

      Thanks. Good to hear from you again. I haven't been reading too many of the entries, but am meaning to get to yours. I burn mental fuses reading too much of this sort of stuff.

      John,

      Great title, catchy and somewhat profound.

      "The main reason why particles won out over waves is because there is no suitable

      medium in which such quantum waves might propagate and this is a very valid concern."

      I contend that models can only simulate reality.

      Jim Hoover