The Distinct Nature of Physics and Cosmos by Thomas J. McFarlane

Thomas,

You make a good argument for why reality can only be understood in terms of its discrete relationships, but it's wrong. With your last paragraph, it's clear you understand your point has its limits, but relegate the wholistic view to mystery. It isn't mysterious at all. It's overlooked because it's so basic. Math says that if you add two things together, they equal two. Well, if that's the case, you haven't actually added them together. Necessarily actually adding things together means you have one of something larger. In basic terms, it's like adding two piles of sand together and having one larger pile, but in reality it's more like components combining to create a larger whole. Whether physics, or biology, we like to take things apart to see how they work, but the fact is that they work together. Much like all the parts of your body add up to a larger whole, or all the components of an atom add up to an atom, not to mention all the various levels between, above and below the atom and the person.

This dichotomy is basic to the difference between eastern and western philosophy. In that we in the west tend to focus on objects and view their actions as emergent. While in the east, there is the contextual view and the particulars within the context are as much a part of the larger whole as your nose is part of you.

One aspect of this that I raise quite frequently and was the subject of my entry in the Nature of Time contest, is that we are looking at time backward. The basis of our rationality and from that, language, culture, history, etc, is the concept of time as the present moving from past to future. So it is natural to include this into our physical theories of how reality functions, but the fact is that it is the changing configuration of what is, the present, which turns the future into the past. We don't travel the fourth dimension from yesterday to tomorrow. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates. It is not that we move from a decided past into a probabilistic future, but that the continuous collapse of probabilities which turns the future into the past. Time is an effect of motion, not the basis for it.

In fact, in eastern cultures, the past is considered to be in front of the observer and the future behind, because both the past and what is seen are known, while what is behind one and the future cannot be seen. Physically we do understand what is in front of us and can be seen is of past events, be they across the room, or across the universe, but we consider ourselves to be moving through our environment, rather than part of it, so we think of ourselves moving from past situations to future ones, as a function of our own spatial action. The irony is that this creates a deterministic view of time, since we only exist at the moment of the present and cannot change the past, or affect the future. On the other hand, when we understand ourselves as fully integrated into our own context, then our actions are part of the process creating these situations and we affect our context, as it affects us.

You do conclude your essay with a nod toward Complexity Theory, with its dichotomy of order and chaos, but I think this relationship can better be described as a dichotomy of information and energy. Energy manifests information, while information defines energy. The information is the top down view of the details, while the energy is bottom up process. They are like two sides of the same coin, such that there cannot be one without the other. They are still opposites though, as energy is fundamentally dynamic, while information is necessarily static.

Think in terms of how you perceive the distinctions you use to define your view of reality: Necessarily you must move from one to the next, otherwise it is that frozen featureless void. So there are the distinctions and there is your movement from one to the next. That is time. Remember the clock has two features; the hands and the face. We think of the hands as moving clockwise, but from the context of the hands, it is the face which moves counterclockwise. The hands represent the present, as it moves from one unit of time to the next.

As I pointed out though, it is the energy of the present which forms and dissolves these units of time. The future becoming the past.

So it is the wholistic present which is creating these discrete units which come into being, grow as long as they absorb more energy then they lose, eventually to lose all energy and fade into the past.

One way to think of this is as a factory: The products go from initiation to completion, but the production line faces the other direction, consuming raw material and expelling finished product.

The mind functions in a similar fashion, as it consumes masses of information, turns it into discrete thoughts, which are then replaced by the next. The brain is physically real, thus it exists in the present. Thoughts coalesce out of the future and fade into the past.

I could go on, but this makes the basic point.

Regards, John

Dear Thomas J. McFarlane,

Your historical background of the essay is excellent;but it is partial because you have concentrated only in explaining digital aspect of reality but not its analog nature.Yet in the ending you are not sure whether reality is digital or analog although you side with the former.You have not mentioned in your essay GR which is purely classical (analog) theory.

Inorder to have a balanced view,please, read my essay and make your comments.

Thanks for your thoroughly enjoyable essay.

Best regards and good luck.

Sreenath B N.

Dear Thomas,

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

oops sorry for the confusion about your name.

Steve

Thomas,

Congratulation for your essay! It reads well and is very interesting. But..

What one sees depends on the lens he chooses. At the focus of all these different lenses is one and the same subject; the substance. And, built into it, the cause.

You could have made your point without attacking the substance. Sure, physics is not about the substance. The original question was about what substance makes the universe and what cause accounts for it spontaneous evolution.

Physics cannot (and will not) answer these questions. They are nevertheless the ultimate question before which we cannot quit in the face of easier answers.

The questions remain and you cannot wave them away. Ignorance can't be a wish. Never.

Thanks,

Marcel,

Dear Thomas,

Physics at best is relative explanation and hence can never describe singularity or absolute truth in words or expressions or symbols. Truth can only be experienced in silence in one self that is the ultimate reality and true nature of universe.

Love,

Sridattadev.

Dear Thomas,

your essay interested me very much because I had similar ideas recently, some of them inspired by a notion of entropic gravity presented in Erik Verlinde's paper. Below I share my thoughts. I hope that despite many similarities you will find something interesting.

Firstly - what is the reason for the existence of material objects as opposed to abstract ideas? This question is not necessary if we assume that the material world does not exist, or, equivalently, it is not different from abstract ideas. And there seems to be no necessity to explain why abstract ideas (like 'empty set') exist or whether they exist or not. The fact that we actually experience material world may be just our own representation of what is accessible to us.

Second thing is the nature of laws of physics. The entropic explanation of gravity is an example of the phenomena that a law of physics that we experience may be just a consequence of lack of laws or chaos. The entropic force of gravity is described by Verlinde as a consequence of some set of information (bits) changing randomly over time to less organized state. So what if we assume that there are no laws? This assumption is appealing for some reasons:

- laws operate on something. If there is no objective existence only abstracts, everything is allowed

- physics seeks for the ultimate theory which has a minimal set of assumptions which explain everything. Theory without assumptions would be truly ultimate. It would not be possible to explain it in terms of a simpler theory.

So if there were no laws, why should we experience the laws? After all, in real life most things are predictable and if I am sitting in my room, I will not find myself on the moon the next second. Again I tried to avoid this question - we do not experience chaos not because there is no chaos but because of what we are. We may be that part of 'universe' that is based on aspects of order (on the other hand it is interesting to note that not everything is predictable and ordered; although I will not be on moon the next second, I do not know many things that will happen the next second to me, like what I will see on my TV. This degree of randomness seems to be conncted with the concept of time).

I was also thinking about our inability to understand infinity 'natively'. In science we think by operating on finite information. For example we cannot operate on infinite sequences of natural numbers. We can only use finite descriptions of such sequences. This implies that there are sequences we are not able to describe accurately at all (set of all infinite sequences is uncountable and set of finite descriptions of countable set of letters is countable). Such and other limitations may be the reason why we cannot experience 'everything' that 'exists' in the 'universe', only things which contain some order. Perhaps even our consciousness as we know it (do we?) is based on (or is some aspect of) order, in which case to experience chaos fully would be less possible to us than it is possible for 2-dimensional creature to fit 3rd dimension somewhere in its world. We are only exposed to aspects that exhibit some laws.

It seems far fetched to try to explain the universe using the assumption that the universe does not exist and there are no laws in it. Perhaps one day we will derive Einstein's equations from these assumptions. My feeling is that to do that we need to understand some more fundamental things - like what we are and how it is related to our experience of time and space.

Thanks for the essay,

Artur