Is Reality Digital or Analog? by John S Minkowski

Vladimir, I wish I had this name. Thanks for getting the point! But to be slightly more precise, as seems typical for these essays, "viewed with myopic under-correction would appear to us ..."

'Myopically' has a slightly pejorative context in the U.S.A because it is usually reserved for the political class.

Dear VT,

Jan M. was my father and faculty at Johns Hopkins in Elec. Eng. - specialty in quantum optics - for which there is now a named lecture. Hermann Minkowski's grandfather is a common relative to all of us. Hermann's brother was Oscar Minkowski who with Von Mering discovered that the pancreas was the source of insulin, but the Noble prize went to Banting and Best who identified the Islets of Langerhans in the pancreas (based on the previous discovery).

I was most pleased to be able to corroborate "It's not even wrong" from my father's memoirs and to learn that he was there when Pauli and Peierls had their oft-quoted verbal skirmish.

As a young person, I was most distressed to learn from my father that the speed of light in a vacuum was a constant, and to this day I believe that this notion will be modified, even if not falsifiable. Falsifiability was a major construct in our household. It would be a massive understatement to say that Pauli influenced our family, then and still now. The quote regarding education and our ideas of 'veritas' follow directly from the Pauli point of view. (By the way, I was making another little joke when I tried to make your point more precisely.)

Now on to myopia and pinholes - subjects closer to my own area of 'advanced' education. First, myopia (nearsightedness) is not bad, unless of the degenerative form. Teleologically, it makes perfect sense to have a broad range of nearsighted and farsighted individuals for a species dependent on social structure to survive in the early tool-forming ages. War machines, cars, road signs, and TV's arrived much later.

The explanation for the pinhole test of acuity function is that only those "rays" closest to parallel are allowed to pass through the aperture, thereby obviating the need for refraction, but at the same time reducing illumination. This is exactly like the aperture/illumination problem in cameras. So to be mathematical, a point size aperture would have infinite depth of focus but unfortunately - zero illumination (and likely infinite diffraction)-(perhaps a singularity of some sort). Practically, however, the dual (or more) nature of light starts to interfere when the pinhole size approaches one millimeter (diffraction), and so the pinhole test device often has multiple one millimeter apertures. The latter improves the illumination problem because even if the optics of the entrance aperture (pupil) are non-homogeneous overall, they are often locally more so. And so the pinhole test is used to bypass first, second, and third order aberrations in refraction so as to determine whether the sensory aspect of the eye has the potential to resolve finer detail under more ideal or homogeneous circumstances. If so, sometimes glasses alone are sufficient to achieve such potential.

Now it is possible to create an aerial (or virtual) aperture of much smaller size without the illumination or diffraction problem:

J.S. Minkowski, M. Palese, and D.L. Guyton, Potential Acuity Meter using a Minute Aerial Pinhole Aperture, Ophthalmology 90 (1983), pp. 1360-1368.

This method was independently described and forgotten in 1973:

C.R. Cavonius and R. Hilz, A Technique for Testing Visual Function in the Presence of Opacities, Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science, (December 1973), 12:933-936.

As for gravitational 'refraction', I will defer to your expertise and hope for you that your theory is falsifiable but not falsified.

Finally, I would offer the following non-falsifiable cosmology: Our UNIVERSE is like the ocean SURFACE over a riptide or a BRIDGE in a harmonious cross wind: each with an observer invisible nearly perpendicular force amplifying the reciprocations - the latter occasionally out of control. You can call it dark energy coming from within, or you can admit that is not detectable and coming from without. And I am in no way suggesting devine intervention.

And_so keeping the DOUBLE-SPACE to a minimum (I think my best pun_so far).

And alliterating: pun_so, puns are, porno, Ponzi - And_so Back to Reality.

Thanks for the set-up and signing off.

John S. Minkowski, M.D.

PS. My original post only had seven Double-Spaces instead of the 14 that you see. Maybe the riptide crosswind dark energy is responsible for the expansion. (Pun czar intended)

Dear VT,

I have visited your web site, and all the fonts displayed are fantastic. (I encourage others to do the same.) It made me wonder whether the projected 3D representations we are toying with in film just now will facilitate more progress in understanding our universe. Till today, the vast majority of symbols and diagrams in math and physics have been in two dimensions due to the obvious limitations of printing on a plane or display. Soon 3D will supercede these constraints, and visual intuitives will be able to compete with the high IQ symbolists. And finally - Spacial IQ will at last be testable outside of packing the car for vacation. (Could be a few punzo's in there:))

Best regards, John M.

I would like to add one final post to this very interesting and fun contest. I have met very interesting and thoughtful persons, such as Tamari, Blumschein, Wagner, and others who have shared their speculations. I know from experience that my father, Jan M. Minkowski, as mentioned above and referenced in my essay, was terrified of a sign error or trivial mistake which might make the whole thing wrong, and so he never finished his own work of decades - one in which he claimed one could derive one of the four fundamental constants from the other three based on information theory. Ultimately, he became interested in quantum optics, and today there is a lecture in his name at Johns Hopkins, at which most of the luminaries have addressed the paradox of split photon pairs. Even as a lay person, I can tell that H. Uncertainty is a rather trivial observation in these experiments, but more interesting to me is that Einstein's Simultaneity is inconsistent with the results, at least so far as I know this minute. If simultaneity is wrong, then c is wrong, space is a point, or split photon pairs are not discrete, or something else smart people can discern.

Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of my father's death. I wish for all of the real scientists and mathematicians participating that you will not be afraid to be "not even wrong".