Continuation Causes Superior but Unrealistic Ambiguity by Eckard Blumschein

Dear Tom Wagner,

Please do not take it amiss that I added Wagner. Tom alone is perhaps a too frequent name. You need not telling me acoustics. While my dissertation, forty years ago, was a comparative study of power electronics for arc welding, the superiority of welding by ear challenged me. Maybe you know the English professor and self declared pop star Chris Plack. It was he who told me that there is a Steven Greenberg of ICSI Berkely who uttered similar ideas on the mechanism of hearing as I suggested. The latter argued correctly that a frequency analysis alone could not explain the astonishing performance of hearing. For instance, onset is utterly important. Steven Greenberg organized together with Malcolm Slaney of Stanford an Advanced Study Institute on Computational Hearing in 1998 in Il Ciocco, Tuscany, and invited me to take part. Here I met virtually all important experts on hearing. Since then I thoroughly dealt with auditory function.

Certainly you know the huge list that was initiated by Al Bregman and is maintained by Dan Ellis. Al Bergman asked for altruists as to get his list rid of too controversial discussions. Jont Allen and I each provided a forum.

I intended to find out how the extraction of temporal features from sound might work and how to explain why the spectrogram has so many shortcomings. In the end I got increasingly aware of a cardinal mistake in theory of signal processing:

Complex analysis and inclusion of void future data is a detour.

Meanwhile I also got familiar with many details of the physiology of the auditory pathway up to A1. In Magdeburg we have a Leibniz Institute of Neurobiology. Moreover I regularly attended the annual meetings of DAGA (German Acoustics Society) and read JASA as well as ARLO papers. Currently I am just participating in a list on Cochlear Amplifier by Matt Flax.

What about my statement that standing waves are strictly speaking an approximation, I should add that I was teaching fundamentals of electrical engineering for decades. So you may consider me a professional in this field.

You wrote: "A standing wave is a very definable and precise physical phenomenon." What I meant refers to the fact that every signal in reality has a beginning and an end. We may describe it as a superposition of a transient and a stationary component. Neglect of the former is an approximation.

If I did not sufficiently answer your question, please do not hesitate asking again. Questions by laymen are often valuable. We need not be able to follow for instance Lawrence Crowell as to find out why the theory of "relativity" and non-relativistic quantum mechanics do not fit together, why quantum computing does not work, and why so far neither the Higgs boson nor SUSY were experimentally confirmed.

Regards,

Eckard

Regards,

Eckard

Dear Eckard,

I wish I had a greater knowledge of the things you discuss in your essay. I think you are doing an important job of looking at the mathematics that is used to describe reality and what it really means to be continuous or discreet , analogue or digital. For models to be -realistic- these considerations need to be made. It is a very different approach to the other essays I have read here and a valuable direction of investigation. Because of my non mathematical background it is an essay that I will have to reread a number of times and digest slowly.

I will admit that the thought "what do we -really- mean by continuous or discreet, analogue or digital?" did pop into my mind but having a huge body of content discussing reality there we was not room to also thoroughly consider that in my essay. I think you are doing that. I touched on it with the film photography. Which may be talked about as an analogue process but the film does have a chemical structure and therefore it is individual grains that change color or not.

I did notice that Eugene Klingman in this thread mentioned the usefulness of having i orthogonal to a surface. IMO There is unseen spatial change over time, which is not visible from the perspective of the observer, at the same scale as the observed object. The direction of that change can not be a direction that exists within the 3 dimensional spatial structure of the observer's individual reference frame. It is an other direction. So therefore it can not be represented as a real direction or measurement because it is not seen and so is not measurable like a "real" distance.

Your support has not gone unnoticed and is very much appreciated.I do hope your ideas get the attention consideration they deserve.

Georgina.

Dear Eckard,

I enjoyed your essay which built a solid case for the superiority of digital signal processing and discrete representations. I thought that the historical references to Euclid, Leibniz, Gauss, Cantor and others were fascinating.

Best regards,

Paul

Dear Eckard

I was hoping to see a response to my post above. The more rigorous logical analysis is in a post I've just made to Tom in support of Georgina in the blogs (Time travel) but repeated in my string. I hope you'll look, as it identified conceptually and logically where our understanding and application of maths and SR was incorrect.

I note I haven't scored yours yet and will do so now with the far higher one it deserves, as time is running out. I do hope you will agree mine deserves the same, if you haven't done so yet.

Very best wishes.

Peter

Dear Paul,

In my understanding, foundational questions should not just include FOM (fundamentals of mathematics) but demand some clarification in FOM even if corrections might be painful to those mathematicians to whom aleph is a gospel and set theory the alpha and omega alias infinity of mathematics. I agree not just with David Joice in that the good old Euclidean notion number was abandoned in the 19th century. So far I seem to be the first one who makes this an issue. Cantor's "counterintuitive" infinities beyond infinity provoked distrust, and they got even used as to enforce purely formal thinking. I do not intend being considered one more crank who tries to disprove Cantor or Einstein. Having dealt with the foundations of the foundations, I see the necessity for tiny but very basic resurrections.

When I tried to explain why discrete and in particular digital models are superior, I did not hide that any belonging abstraction and in particular linearizing implies a loss of realism. I do not yet see any possibility to decide whether or not the world is anyhow discrete at the lowest level. However, most likely such lower end of our scales for temporal and spatial distance would be as useless as an upper end. I never dealt with or believed in the big bang.

Already when I was a child, I did not understand those who spoke of blowing up a point. To me numbers and continua are likewise abstract notions that do not have exact correlates in nature unless we define for instance how to count a pregnant cow. My Fig. 1 might illustrate how to imagine discrete values to be seen in a continuous function and how a non-linear transformation changes the scales. When I heard for the first time the expression negative signal to noise ratio, I was confused. How can it be negative? The answer is simple: SNR is usually given in dB.

Best regards,

Eckard

Dear Eckard,

I enjoyed the ideas in this essay. We are very much on the same line. Quantities are related to objects, negative and complex numbers are useful because they represent orientations of real objects. They represent common sense reality, nothing magical about them. We could do without complex numbers and replace them with their 3D analogs, the more powerful quaternions.

I remember you also used examples of auditory perception in last year's essay to make your point.

I especially liked the sentences:

"Strictly speaking there are neither absolutely continuous nor absolutely discrete signals, because any tangible thing is finite."

"Even begin and end of an animal's life are continuous while irreversible processes."

"Peas are preferably treated as if they were uncountable. Uncountable liquids are measured in terms of countable gallons."

"Both the foundations of mathematics and, to a larger extent, basic interpretations of implication for physics are not yet as mature as possible."

"...unfortunately common identification of a number with just one point instead of the distance between zero and a virtual limit point..."

"Foundational pragmatism outperforms pseudo-foundational formalism"

Best wishes for this contest,

Arjen

Dear Arjen,

Even John Baez confirmed in principle that quantum physics can equivalently be expressed in terms of real or complex numbers, and quaternions and octonions.

However, so far he did not even mention the - as I maintain - reasonable tailor-made description in terms or only positive real numbers (R).

My argument is simple: Any finite interval in R can be completely shifted into R, and this shift merely reverses the original physical relationship. For instance, any analysis of measured data has nothing to do with what will possibly happen after the measurement.

Some consequences imply a lot. For instance, there is presumably no a priori given block of spacetime, no Higgs boson and no SUSY. MP3 works well with cosine transformation. This does however not mean that negative and complex numbers are unnecessary. On the contrary, they are utterly advantageous if correctly used and interpreted.

Regards,

Eckard

Dear Peter,

I did not yet read what you just wrote in your string. Time travel is impossible to me. What about the somewhat simplistic explanation you gave by means the metaphor of a river, it did not yet immediately convince me. With acoustic waves in a single medium one can also not exceed the velocity of sound by means of superposition.

You might read what Tom Van Flandern wrote: "Is faster-than-ligth propagation allowed by the laws of physics?" and "Lorentz Contraction" in http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/gravity/LR.asp .

Does it agree with your ideas? I see it agreeable with logic and all pertaining experiments I am aware of. It also seems to agree with the many convincing arguments collected by Ekkehard Friebe.

Yan Flandern recognizes a universal time, a universal instant of now. Lorentz transformation works just one way and therefore without paradoxes. Minkowski metric seems to loose its basis. Physics becomes less mystic, and my touch stone seems to work: We do perhaps no longer need ict.

Regards,

Eckard

Dear Eckard,

I am very pleased with your new found popularity. Hope your essay makes it to the panel, as it appears it will. I am equally (if not even more) pleased, but not with my rating position (38) of my essay. But rather, by a very significant result I just posted yesterday. I consider you a friend and a supporter. So I just had to tell you of this directly.

Two very key assumptions in physics (dating back to Einstein) are

1)The constant speed of light (CSL)

2)The Photon Hypothesis (PH)

The first lead to Relativity, while the second lead eventually to Quantum Physics.

In my very short paper "If the speed of light is constant, then light is a wave" I give a simple mathematical proof that CSL contradicts PH.

I look forward to your always insightful comments.

Best Wishes,

Constantinos

Thanks for that historical clarification, Eckard. I am always impressed by your vast knowledge and your deep insights. And that is the reason I seek your comments on the result I linked in my last post.

I am aware that Maxwell's equations (considering light as a wave) determine that the speed of light is a constant. My just posted result does the opposite. With the assumption that the speed of light is constant, I mathematically demonstrate that light must be a wave. Thus, under all circumstances, light is a wave. In my view, this contradicts the Photon Hypothesis and the 'physical view' it lead to. It makes a strong case for a continuous universe.

Good luck,

Constantinos

Eckard,

I had forgotten to rate your essay. I have now done so. If you have forgotten me, I ask you to remember.

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Dear Eckard,

on the contrary Mc Taggart's very clear and unambiguous definition of the elements neccessary for time as we know it are very useful. The everyday notion of past, present and future is not adequate.

As I have tried to explain in my essay for the distant observer events that have already occurred and are to the near man already the past, are yet to be experienced and are in that distant observer's future. Though beyond what has already occurred everywhere (even though it has not been experienced) the future is un-written. So you see from this that some parts of the future, not yet experienced, are preordained, as they have already happened, and others are not.So there is partial determinism allowing causality and free will.

The everyday notion of a present experienced by all simultaneously is not sufficient to explain observations, where there is observed to be non simultaneity of events. (See the dog on the hill example in the essay.) However simultaneity is necessary at the foundational level to permit causality.The differentiation of (Foundational)object and (Reconstruction from received data)image reality allow both to co-exist without contradiction or paradox.

The experienced present is formed from the data that is -received-, not the objects or events that exist or the data immediately it is formed. So objective or uni-temporal Now (Where foundational objects exist and interaction occurs) is different from the experienced space-time present. There is transmission delay according to distance from object or event which causes temporal distortion of the image reality experienced.

Best regards, Georgina.

Yes Eckard,

you are correct that most people do understand there is an information delay. However it does seem that there has been a general difficulty reconciling this knowledge with the notion of the present. Most are not conscious that the present experience is not a singular simultaneously occurring collection of events, or objective slice of reality happening right Now - but a composite image formed from received data with incorporated time delay, that is unique for each observer.The amount of delay being variable according to the distance from the origin and the nature of the stimulus.Smells taking longer than sound taking longer than light.

I suspect experiments are designed without the subjective, relative nature of the present being taken fully into account. The two ends of the laboratory are not seen at precisely the same time by the experimenter standing at different ends of the room.It takes time for the light reflected to reach the experimenters eyes and be processed.

Such considerations are important for example when quantum physicists start to talk about time travel. On a minute scale due to the high speed of light and tiny scale of particles under consideration, the far end of the room is seen in the past compared to what is actually happening at the far end of the room. The yet unobserved event might be said to be occurring in the future as it has not yet been observed, but so it is with all distant observations.It becomes the experienced present when the observation is made ie the data is received and processed so that there is an awareness of it.

This gets really messed up for astronomical observations because it takes a vast amount of time for the data to arrive so it is obviously not something happening right now but yet it only now a part of present experience.Until it is observed it is something that has happened but is not yet observed, like the event at the end of the room. Still in the future until it is seen even though the event has happened. After the event is seen it becomes the past consigned to memory or other records.

Those events that have happened but are not yet observed are only a part of the future, the determined part. Beyond what exists at the uni-temporal objective Now (That is right now in objective reality) there is nothing so the future is open and unwritten. Allowing non determinism and free will.I think confusion over this is what lead to the writing of the Andromeda paradox. It can be understood either as I have explained here or by using the Lorentz transformation to calculate what would be observed. The event becomes a part of the present when the data is received by the observer not when the data is formed.

I do not know if you have actually talked to many people about their concept of the present. I seem to have had great difficulty getting others to accept the composite nature of an experienced present moment which is an image of reality formed from received data, rather than an objective reality made from objects and events as they are in space. If you are now saying this is the common everyday perception of the present then I am surprised at that.

I too have only recently become aware of Mc Taggart. I have found his A, B, C series helpful because I have myself been trying to describe how a spatial change can become a sequence in time, which is necessary for passage of time and how this is different from experienced and geometric space-time. As his A, B C series are very clear and unambiguous so I am using his series to explanation what I mean.

That should have said "As his A,B,C series are very clear and unambiguous, I am using them to explain what I mean.