Thanks for your detailed response. I agree with you about calculus but I disagree - for whatever it worth - with your statement that "Basically then, in the context of this discussion, motion is possible and exists because we observe it to exist." This is not the point of Zeno's paradoxes.

I will refer to a story that is reported by some ancient Greek philosophers. Zeno, most do not know, was an advisor to Pericles, the man who established Democracy. One day he was giving a speech in the central Agora of Athens, trying to convince people that motion is impossible. When he stated his arguments, the philosopher Antiphon - a real person by the way - got up from his marble sit and started walking up and down in front of Zeno in a silent protest. Everyone laughed. However, by the end of his talk, it was reported that Zeno had convinced everybody in the audience that motion is impossible.

The point is, we observe something we call motion but is this motion in 3-dimensional infinitely divisible space? This is the issue. Sure, we got motion; it is all over the place. But maybe it is not what people think it is. Maybe it is not motion in 3-D space but something like recreation of 3-D space from a higher dimensionality space, a sort of virtual reality.

This is the issue. I think it is a misunderstanding that Zeno said motion is impossible. He specifically limited his argument to infinitely divisible 3-D space with absolute time. In Relativity for example, motion is possible because everything is in eternal motion in a 4-D spacetime, as I attempt to describe in the paper.

Thanks again.

Efthimios

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    • Post #33

    Dear Efthimios Harokopos,

    Thank you for replying. I see now that I left my point unclear:

    Me: "I assume that you mean that uncertainty frees us from a digital universe."

    Your response: "As a matter of fact I state the opposite that uncertainty is a feature of the digital world and determinism of the analog."

    My point is this: A digital world lacks connection. Since it functions in a cooperative manner, there must be some form of continuity. I presumed that you considered uncertainty to fill in gaps and, in effect, smear a digital nature so that it might connect enough to mimic continuity.

    Your analysis of this would be greatly appreciated. Please be as direct as necessary to make your point. Directness helps me to understand. Thank you.

    James

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    • Post #34

    Efthimios,

    I appreciate enormously your clarification of Zeno's point, because I am reminded of sitting through a conference presentation a few years ago, in which the presenter claimed to have solved Zeno's paradoxes (specifically, tortoise and hare; and arrow paradox) through some assumptions about time and space he had manipulated.

    At the Q & A following, I asked (innocently, in fact), "Well, is motion possible?"

    The reaction was as if I had two heads. Hadn't I just heard the presentation? The presenter and others went through all the main points of discussion about time and space. I asked again, "Then if the paradox is resolved, what's the answer: Is motion possible?" The time-space explanation took off again, with the added suggestion that perhaps I wasn't asking a proper question.

    I replied, "It's the question that Zeno asked."

    And I think that had never even crossed the presenter's mind, as he presented a solution to a problem that had never actually been posed.

    Zeno's question is equivalent to the origin of inertia. We still don't know.

    Tom

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    • Post #35

    There is an interesting story in one of Richard Ferynmans popular lectures on science. A student oncer asked him if, when he was viewing an object, if he was really 'seeing' the object or the light that is reflected from the object.

    He just replied by telling the story of a philophers who slowly starved to death because every time he was presented with a meal, he spent all his time contemplating whether or not the food was really just reflections of light.

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    • Post #36

    Dear Efthimios

    I read the response to Lieu's paper you cited above. Again the assumption is that quantum foam is a reality. This idea is speculative and is based on Born's probability interpretation. In my Beautiful Universe paper on which my present fqxi paper is based I have suggested that on the contrary nature may be precisely local, causal and deterministic at the minutest scale - and still produce quantum effects including probability. I also suggested that the Planck scale itself may be a fiction or much too tiny: G is determined by macroscopic experiments. It may well be that at the granular, ether (or whatever you call it) scale, its value is quite different.

    Concerning your question "If spacetime is granular, then what is there between the grains?"I would say it may be impossible to determine the physical nature of the granularity or any other hidden large dimensions the granules may reside in. We are talking about the stuff that makes stuff so we cannot project (what is the inverse of 'project'?) or macroscopic notions onto the granules of the universe. It will be sufficient to presume they have certain qualities (i.e. in my theory the lattice nodes have angular momentum, density, polarity, etc}.

    You said " disproving the granularity of space is equivalent to preserving the autonomy of the world. In my opinion, it is now too late for that." Can you please explain that interesting statement? thanks.

    Dear Ray et al,

    Concerning Zeno's paradox of divisibility and motion - in an ordered universal lattice where motion occurs by momentum transfer from node to node (as in my theory) , such questions will have obvious answers and will no longer pose any logical difficulties. There may be a message spelled out with the ether granules: "reductionism stops here!".

    Dear Anonymous

    The story of Feynman telling the story of the philosopher (who contemplated the reality of food and the light from it) is typical of his cavalier attitude to foundational questions. Feynman seems - perhaps wisely as far as his great work was concerned - to have adopted a pragmatic stance to unanswered quantum puzzles, using ad-hoc solutions and mathematical formulations even if they were not derived from more basic concepts. By the way a simple phrase like "just reflections of light?" was the foundational question of the 10th century answered for all time by the father of the scientific method, Al-Hassan Ibn Al-Haytham (Hazen) by his meticulous experiments with the camera obscura and their logical analysis in his book Kitab Al-Manazir. Before him it was believed (after Aristotle, I think) that we see because the eye projects visual rays onto an object. Hazen's book, translated from Arabic into Latin influenced the Renaissance and modern science. Moral of the story: foundational questions have to be answered eventually and not swept under the carpet, Feynman-style!!

    Good luck to us all! Vladimir

    Dear Ioannis,

    In my paper, I framed no hypothesis about the specific structure of reality, whether analog or granular. As Newton said, "hypotheses that are not deduced from the phenomena, whether mechanical or occult, have no place in science, especially in experimental physics"

    My essay was not about the ontology of spacetime. It was an effort to find a way of falsifying or corroborating the virtual reality conjecture. A virtual reality is generated by definition by a higher reality. I am not interested at all in specific proposals about possible ontologies. I began thinking this way long ago and soon I realized that unless those ontologies generate unique falsifiable prediction they are nothing more than metaphysical hypotheses.

    I am not sure I agree with your comment about not being able to manufacture a machine better than our brain. I certain respects I believe this has been accomplished many years ago. The human brain is very limited in mathematical operations but very fact in pattern recognition. In my experiment I am looking at a nanocomputer running a complex math algorithm. Computers are orders of magnitude better in doing math than people, I hope we agree to that. If you do not agree, try asking the smartest people in the world to matrix multiplication of solve partial differential equations with split boundary conditions.

    I cannot also discount the results of any experiments before they are performed.

    Thank you for your comments.

    E. Harokopos

    Hello James,

    I apologize for the delay in responding.

    You are raising important points. In my paper, I framed no hypothesis about the specific structure of reality, whether analog or granular. As Newton said, "hypotheses that are not deduced from the phenomena, whether mechanical or occult, have no place in science, especially in experimental physics"

    My essay was not about the ontology of spacetime. It was an effort to find a way of falsifying or corroborating the virtual reality conjecture. A virtual reality is generated by definition by a higher reality. I am not interested at all in specific proposals about possible ontologies. I began thinking this way long ago and soon I realized that unless those ontologies generate unique falsifiable prediction they are nothing more than metaphysical hypotheses.

    The problem with these hypotheses, as I said before, is that they hardly produce any new predictions on top of relativity and QM. They remain in the realms of metaphysics, at least for now. Thus, I avoid them. I concentrated in providing a short - due to space limitations - account to justify the virtual reality hypothesis and a possible experiment. As a scientist, I cannot go that far. I cannot speak about things I do not understand, things that are not deduced from the phenomena. I hope you will understand.

    However, I do not want to appear as if I am not escaping here. There are many possibilities I have thought of about this in the past. I think one that is plausible in the case that our reality is indeed generated by a higher reality is that the granular structure is part of a supersolid medium. The continuity part arises from the supersolid medium which allows for faster than light speeds in coordinating local operations in the virtual reality, in which the maximum speed is the speed of light in vacuum. The uncertainty arises from specific operations that I describe in another paper I am working on - actually a book - and I hope you will allow me to refrain from giving details here.

    Thank you.

    E. Harokopos

    13 days later

    Yiassou Efthimie,

    To the question, "is reality analog or digital" you answer "reality is fundamentally digital". To the same question, I respond that "we cannot know 'what is' but can only know what our 'measurements' of 'what is' are". In my paper "The Interaction of Measurement" I present a mathematical argument that shows we cannot know a quantity E(t) (as a function of time) directly through our measurements of E(t) - if these measurements involve an absorption of E in making the measurement.

    Although I have not included a discussion of this result in my essay, I thought you may be interested in considering it - especially as you are interested in the philosophy of science. But what I do include in my essay you will find very significant.

    The key result in my essay is to mathematically derive Planck's Law of blackbody radiation without using 'energy quanta' or statistics. This result shows that Planck's Law is an exact mathematical tautology that describes the interaction of measurement. This clearly explains why the blackbody spectrum obtained experimentally is so indistinguishable from the theoretical curve.

    I hope you can support my efforts to put this iconoclastic result in front of the 'panel of experts' for 'peer review'.

    Yia hara,

    Constantinos

    Dear Efthimios,

    Following my suggestion to possibly use moire effects to design an experiment to discover the granularity of the Universe: I just read a recent Nature journal article Vol 469 pp. 39-41 and pp 72-75 has an article by M. O'Sullivan et al entitled "Vernier templating..." that might prove interesting. The Vernier effect relies on two scales one slightly smaller than the other to measure extremely small distances, using a geometry identical to the moire effect. The paper studies a spherical configuration, and may provide some food for thought.

    Best wishes, Vladimir

    11 days later

    Dear Efthimios,

    Congratulations on your dedication to the competition and your much deserved top 35 placing. I have a bugging question for you, which I've also posed to all the potential prize winners btw:

    Q: Coulomb's Law of electrostatics was modelled by Maxwell by mechanical means after his mathematical deductions as an added verification (thanks for that bit of info Edwin), which I highly admire. To me, this gives his equation some substance. I have a problem with the laws of gravity though, especially the mathematical representation that "every object attracts every other object equally in all directions." The 'fabric' of spacetime model of gravity doesn't lend itself to explain the law of electrostatics. Coulomb's law denotes two types of matter, one 'charged' positive and the opposite type 'charged' negative. An Archimedes screw model for the graviton can explain -both- the gravity law and the electrostatic law, whilst the 'fabric' of spacetime can't. Doesn't this by definition make the helical screw model better than than anything else that has been suggested for the mechanism of the gravity force?? Otherwise the unification of all the forces is an impossiblity imo. Do you have an opinion on my analysis at all?

    Best wishes,

    Alan

      Dear Alan,

      Thank you very much for your kind words.

      Newton's law of universal gravitation, to which you referred, is a mathematical expression that has no physical meaning, according to his inventor, Newton himself. This is the well-known "hypotheses non fingo" phrase of Newton:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotheses_non_fingo

      The expression "fabric of spacetime", if I am not mistaken, is used for the 4-dimensional geometry of the spacetime of general relativity. There, gravity is not a force but only motion that results from the geometry of spacetime.

      I'm not sure we can talk about the mechanism of gravity when we do not know what gravity is in the first place. Regardless, as far as I know, any mechanism that has been proposed using some kind of "material influence", like graviton flux, for example, should create some type of drag on celestial bodies that has not been observed. It can also create heat that has not been observed.

      Gravity is a mysterious force. I believe, for whatever it worth, that what we call gravity is an "outside force" that makes our reality "functional", the term I use in my paper. The best mathematical model we have of this phenomenon today of that of general relativity on a macroscale.

      I am not sure if I answered your question, probably not I guess, but I am inclined to think that we should not be looking for a mechanism of gravity in our world of phenomena because it does not belong there. If it did, we would have known it already.

      Regards.

      Dear Efthimios,

      thanks for the link btw, I didn't know that one. I don't quite understand the "drag" aspect you talk of, other than the force of attraction. Why would a graviton create "heat"? okay through mechanical friction...ummm...I don't think we can say that this "hasn't been observed" due to no-one having entertained the idea in the first place.

      I just thought last night that the original quandry w.r.t the orbit of Mercury can likely be explained by the 'inclination hypothesis' i.e. that gravity is stronger on the plane of rotation of a celestial body. It's too much to explain in one go but there's plenty of circumstancial evidence to support this claim. I'm working on it right now.

      Best wishes,

      Alan

      2 months later

      Alan,

      You mentioned an " 'inclination hypothesis' i.e. that gravity is stronger on the plane of rotation of a celestial body."

      This sounds reasonable if you think of the GR concept of "frame dragging": At the equator the frame is dragged at a maximum rate, and it is null at the poles. This is also in accord with how matter affects the gravitational field around it in my Beautiful Universe theory: Any local effect is transferred from lattice node to its neighbors, so the dragging would indeed spread as the gravitational wave GR predicts, and as you observe, it is strongest at the equatorial plane because motion is fastest there.

      Best wishes from Vladimir

      a year later

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      • Post #45

      Dear Mr. Efthimios,

      I cannot possibly expect you to check this thread after a year but let's give it a shot.

      I feel some unease with your approach, however I am not educated in physics, so please be patient.

      To make it as clear as possible, as I understand it, your proposed experiment is essentially that of checking something what I would call the 'local computational capacity' of the universe, that would more precisely be 'time scale resolution computational capacity', as the proposed experiment concerns accelerated computation in a local preocupied space. Is that correct?

      I have some doubts about the realizability of this experiment, or, its interpretational value. You predict the appearance of a noise of some kind in the output, if your hypothesis is correct. However, you do not propose any of its particular properties. When eventually found, it would feel temptating to ascribe it to the features of the suggested virtual functional reality.

      But what would really be its nature? Probably it would be something of a stochastic process. Could it not be in the same manner related to the anyway profound question of nature of chance?

      Relatedly, I have a problem with your use of the term 'true description of reality'. I do not believe any such property can be ascribed to any scientific theory. Anyway, they are just the models of the universe, which itself is as it is (in the spirit of scientific realism). In this sense, all of physical theories are just tools for making more or less accurate predictions of matters, of course. None can be favoured because of its metaphysical foundations.

      I have no problem with the possibility of existence of fundamental limitations on the local (space- or time-bound) computational power of universe. However, your proposed idea indeed seems to me metaphysical in essence. I fail to see the signs of its testability.

      Kind regards,

      Michal Krajnansky

        2 years later

        Michael,

        I do not expect you to read this after two years. I do not approach experiments from an emotional viewpoint, like you said that you "feel some unease". People also felt unease to fly a plane or break the sound barrier last century. The only way to see what experiments produce is to do them. You say "However, your proposed idea indeed seems to me metaphysical in essence." But how can an experiment be metaphysical?

        "When eventually found, it would feel temptating to ascribe it to the features of the suggested virtual functional reality."

        No, this is not what the paper says. The paper says that "The objective of this experiment will be to falsify or corroborate the functional virtual reality model"

        I am looking for falsification indication, of the particular idea. If I get constraints on local computation, that can only be a loose corroboration of the virtual reality hypothesis. More experiments will have to be made and on different grounds to get a full corroboration. I am looking at a first step. That is all.

        Thank you.

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