In Search of Continuity: Thoughts of an Epistemic Empiricist by Ian Durham

Dr. Durham,

Yes I have an entry. Its down on the second or third floor. Actually I have enterred all three of the contests so far. I think my first one was perhaps the most important one. I don't do well; but, I think that that is understandable. Almost everything I write is at odds with accepted theory. I don't remember if I have said to you that I believe that theory went wrong right from the start when it choose to make mass an indefinable property. My own work begins by not making either force or mass indefinable. I define them both in terms of distance and time the properties of their empirical evidence. After that act there is no way for the rest of theory to remain the same. Anyway, I write what I think and do not expect easy acceptance or high ratings. This contest was the harder of the three for me. I felt that answering the question from the view of theoretical physics required one to be well versed in quantum theory. That is still a weak area for me. I am working on it. For that reason I chose to mix a little bit of new theory with some prose and general thoughts. I think we have some good leading essays. It is another educational year because of this contest.

James

Ian - Outstanding Essay!

As an educator - I always look for how understandable an essay can be to nonprofessionals and you hit this out of the park! I think being inclusive is very important as many outside the field often have valuable contributions. You do an excellent job of showing that the act of measuring will always be a weaker accuracy link that what is actually measured. This of course applies to the passage of time as well in our pursuit to determine if it is discrete or continuous.

By the way, if gravity is like a painting, then the problem is that we can't see the individual brush strokes since none have been detected. We assume (well, some of us, but not me) that it must be made of individual strokes despite Einstein's original theory telling us that it is the warping of the canvas itself that gives us the painting. I once had a crazy theory that gravity will ultimately be determined to be a "London Force" of EM. If that ever turns out to be true - at least we will have brush strokes, just not the kind we were looking for.

I will be sure to keep a copy of your essay with me so that the next time I get pulled over for speeding, I can point out the inaccuracies of the radar detection device!

Great job!

Chris

Ian,

Your argument is objective and logical. As you seem to say, our view of reality has distortions. I like to compare it to our view of space through earth's atmosphere.

Great essay.

Jim Hoover

Hello Ian,

I've been seeking a dialog with you since my post under your forum on math and physics last spring. This contest provides me another opportunity. We agree generally on the notion that we can only know our measurements (and observations) of 'what is', but not 'what is' the Universe. That much I remember from our brief exchange.

Picking up on this general theme I ask that you consider the following result to be found in my essay. One among many, but what I consider the key finding. The Rosetta Stone, as it leads to many other 'translations'.

Planck's Law of blackbody radiation I prove in my essay is an exact mathematical tautology that describes the interaction of measurement. The mathematical derivation is simple and mathematically irrifutable. It uses continuous methods and does not use 'energy quanta' and statistical mechanics.

I further argue that this tautology explains why the blackbody spectrum obtained experimentally is indistinguishable from the theoretic curve obtained from Planck's Law. Certainly, a mathematical tautology that describes measurement will be indistinguishable from the measurements it describes.

Please read my essay and comment on this result. I also ask your support in getting this result 'peer reviewed' by the 'panel of judges'.

All the best,

Constantinos Ragazas

Dear Ian,

Firstly please accept my condolences for the loss of your father-in-law. I lost mine many years ago but still think of him with great affection and respect.

Your interesting discussion of Doppler effects in connection with the speed of light and relativity reminded me of the fascinating insights and simulations of these topics by my friend Gabriel LaFreniere though he does not deal with the question of granularity of space as such. I would also greatly appreciate it you can read my fqxi essay and the 2005 Beautiful Universe paper on which it is based. I know this means you have to wade through my obviously speculative or half-baked ideas, but it all makes a lot of sense - at least to me! :)

With best wishes, Vladimir

Hello,

Several mistakes right from your abstract

"In this essay I argue that both classical and quantum physics include limits that prevent us from definitively answering that question. "

Limits are established experimentally in physics, not through argumentation.

"That classical physics does so is rather unexpected. In fact, I argue that classical physics is itself really nothing more than a convenient approximation."

What is new about this that requires arguing about? Every physics graduate student knows classical physics is an approximation.

"Either way, it turns out that our knowledge of the universe is discrete and so it is extraordinarily difficult, perhaps even impossible, to determine the underlying continuity of the universe itself."

What is discrete about this knowledge about the universe?

X^2+y^2 = 1

Don't math equations constitute knowledge or you exclude them from that set?

I was really disappointed by this essay.

Dear Ian,

Thank you for replying to my questions earlier w.r.t a helical model for the creation of structure which we observe today. I have been pursuing this line of enquiry and have hit upon something quite extraordinary. I've just talked about it on Edwin Klingman's essay page, so I'll copy and paste it over:

On day-by-day thinking about the novel idea of a mechanical Archimedes screw in empty space representing the force of gravity by gravitons, I have deduced an explanation for the galaxy rotation curve anomaly.

The helical screw model gives matter a new fundamental shape and dynamics which the standard model lacks imo. This non-spherical emission of gravitons is in stark contrast to the Newtonian/Einsteinian acceptance that "all things exert a gravitatinal field equally in all directions". This asymmetry of the gravitational field allows for the stars to experience a greater pull towards the galactic plane, due to their rotation giving more order to the inner fluid matter of the stellar core. Both the structure of the emitter and the absorber of the gravity particles is important. It also has implications for hidden matter at the centre of the galaxies..

I've given the idea some more thought and come to the conclusion that the stars furthest from the galactic centre must have a more 'bipolar nature' than the matter of stars of the inner halo presumably. This is the reason they have wandered towards the galactic plane whilst the halo stars have not. The outer stars' configuration means they experience a greater interaction with the flux pattern of the graviton field. Are the stars of the outer arms simply spinning faster?? We are on the outer edge of a spiral arm and so this would fit with this hypothesis. Our sun could have spin which is higher that that of the average halo star. This relationship between spin and distance from the galactic centre is a fundamental feature which ties in with the suggested mechanism of their creation.

All that is needed is an additional factor of stellar spin speed as well as it's mass and distance from the galactic centre. The relationship should then give calculated values which match those of the observed.

Best wishes,

Alan Lowey

Thank You for advance for comment my essay

http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/946

Dear Ian,

I wanted to be sure to say hello before the commenting period is over. I really appreciated your essay and how you discuss that the universe is such that our theories and observations will always be subject to interpretation. Your essay demonstrates a great interest in the science of physics as well as the philosophy of physics. I hope you will have a chance to read my comment on Dean Rickle's essay about the philosophy of how we look at our observations.

Thank you for a thought provoking essay!

Kind regards, Russell Jurgensen

Mr Durham

A very good essay, thank you. But you say of the subject, which is of physics ~ 'we will likely never know unless we can nd a clever way around the problem of determining the continuity of something through a discontinuous lens.'

You should have found this you have read the essay of 2020 vision. I did, but in thought not in reading. Do see my post. You lead this and I expect read each others? I was interested in your view but saw none from you there. I commend it and more, and hope you support science not yourselves. I wish you and your family well.

Petra

Dear Ian Durham,

I found some errors in this essay:

You write: ''Any interaction necessarily requires an exchange of information''.

It is an erroneous statement; I can show you an example of interaction without any exchange of information. The Black Hole's event horizon is a boundary in spacetime through which matter and light can only pass inward towards the mass of the black hole. Nothing, not even light, can escape from inside the event horizon. Therefore, if a body cross the event horizon, the exchange of information between the Black Hole and falling body is not possible because information can flow in one direction only. Thus, this statement is wrong.

You write: ''This idea simply formalizes the somewhat intuitive notion that causality is somehow related to continuity. If spacetime is discontinuous, how do we know that this information couldn't jump around' from point to point? Continuity guarantees that the information follows a nice, orderly 'path' between A and B. This should make it easy to see the conceptual attraction of a continuous reality''.

1) In quantum mechanics particles don't follow a nice, orderly 'path' between A and B, and the position of a free particle is uncertain - so we can consider space as discontinuous. In spite of fact that particles don't follow a nice, orderly 'path' between A and B and all macroscopic bodies are made of quantum particles, we do not observe any violation of causality in our everyday life or macroscopic experiments. Thus, your statement is wrong: even if the space and behavior of the particles is discontinuous, the causality holds in our everyday life.

You write: ''Now, any attempt to measure velocity (or just about any other physical quantity, for that matter) requires an interaction between the observer and the system under observation (sorry folks, there's just no way around that)''.

It is an erroneous statement; we can know the velocity of a particle (or even a macroscopic body) without measurement/interaction. Imagine the radioactive decay of an atomic nucleus when two its clusters/parts fly in opposite directions. If we measure the energy (mass and velocity) of one cluster/part, we'll know the mass and velocity of another cluster without measurement (interaction) with this object.

Another example - we can know the velocity of distant star without interacting with one by observing its motion concerning other stars. in fact, we do not interact with this star but we know its velocity.

You write: ''Though the universe itself has cleverly prevented us from determining whether or not it is continuous, I'd like to believe that it is''

It is an erroneous statement; we can determine whether or not the Universe is continuous by observing the expansion of the Universe: If the distance between galaxy clusters is increasing today, everything must have been closer together in the past. It means that in the first microseconds of expansion the Universe was very small and therefore finite in volume. Since the Universe has a finite age, the Universe will have the finite volume always, in spite of expansion. Since the Universe has a finite volume, it must have the edges (holes), because all objects with finite volumes have borders. And the space with holes is discontinuous because a hole is the absence of spacetime. Thus, since the Universe is expanding, therefore it must be finite and discontinuous. Do you see any flaws in this reasoning? Hence, the Universe is discontinuous but not continuous.

Sincerely,

Constantin

Ian,

"Thus it seems that while it is clearly mathematically possible for an instantaneous velocity to exist, we are physically prevented from ever measuring one!"

Would it be possible for "an instantaneous velocity" to physically exist? It begs the question of whether time is an underlaying basis of motion, on which those mathematically dimensionless points of instantaneous velocity can exist, or is it an effect of motion, such that a dimensionless point of time would freeze the very motion creating the events located on that sequence? Sort of like trying to take a picture with the shutter speed set at zero.

Does the present move along this dimension from past to future, or does the changing configuration of what is present turn the future into the past?

Do we travel the fourth dimension from yesterday to tomorrow, or does tomorrow become yesterday because the earth rotates?

Dear Ian Durham,

My dictionary explains ruse as follows: "an action which is intended to deceive someone". As I indicated in my essay, I consider both Euclid's numbers and a Peirce's continuum ideals that may approximate features but cannot exactly be found in nature. Who deceives whom?

Sincerely,

Eckard

Hi there, I enjoyed this essay enormously. To point out one connection to my essay - you correctly identify a connection between causality (and the Lorentzian structure of spacetime) and continuity. I believe this relation can be strengthened by using some ideas from effective field theories, which are elaborated on in my essay, which I offer for your perusal

http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/856

I also point out that continuity of spacetime in short distances, as seems to be required by this argument, is not necessarily in conflict with fundamental sort of discreteness, albeit of a different type.

Cheers,

Moshe