Physics and the Integers by David Tong

LOL. I must be getting essay fatigue. Scanning replies, I noticed that I had already made a remark early on, where I commented on the commentary, rather than on the piece itself -- which surely deserves a careful reading, which I am happy to say that I accomplished, along with awarding a deservedly high score.

Tom

Hey David, good to "see" you here. Just dropping by to say hi and let you know that enjoyed your essay. Hope to run into you soon...

Cheers,

Moshe

Dear David,

I hope you will be ready to read and understand my essay. You wrote: "The maths that underlies this is simply the Fourier transform. Your cosine transform is just the real part of the Fourier transform." Do you consider me stupid? Why do you believe that cosine transform is not sufficient?

Regards,

Eckard

Excellent essay, a breath of fresh air. Hope you will win a prize.

Hello dear David, dear Eckard,

It's relevant indeed dear Eckard, the complexs ah these complexs....after all they dance inside the sphere....conclusion viva el Reals fortunally.....

ps good luck dear finalists.....

Steve

Dear David,

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

David,

I enjoyed reading your essay very much. I quite agree with you about the emergence of the integers as something special. A discreteness emerges from continuous semigroups. Take spheric to toric as an example of where the path integral proves useful. We are able to constrain divergence in order to commute a system in a computer simulation, and this indeed is the correct approach. I believe that the integers themselves are the culprit of breaking symmetry. Your essay was very clear, and next year I will endeavor to make my essay more like yours, You hit the soul of philosophical thinking that I like very much. Emergence allows us to do all sorts of things that we have in math that physics may have to wait a long time to realize.

Dear Alan

This is my guess:

There are Base Fermion and Base Boson of the Universe.

Both have radius size 10^-13sm

Base Fermion is proton(neutron) Mpr=10^-24 g

Base Boson is Hawking black hole Mhbl=10^16 g

Mplank; Mpl=10^-4g

Mpl=sqrt(Mpr x Mhbl)=10^-4g

10^16g/10^-24g=10^40

Fgr/Fem =1/10^40

Rounding values.

Regards

Yuri

Hi Yuri,

Thanks for the reply. I only understand pictures at the moment, my mind has become exclusive to numerical arguments I'm affraid! You may well be onto something though.

P.S I feel guilty about not reading David's essay and giving him a critique. The replies he got give me a good idea that he's 'on our side'.

Cheers,

Alan

David,

I can only re-iterate Edwin's remarks:

[quote]You have truly written a masterful essay. Simple enough to be read and enjoyed by all visitors to fqxi and yet insightful enough to teach experts a few things. Thank you for your excellent contribution.[end quote]

I wish I'd have read this during the early stages of the competition. I would have scored this a 10 with ease. The best essay here by far. I really hope that you win something.

Alan

Right from the start arithmetic was connected to music, so this is the most obvious place to look for integers. Standing waves are the paradigm: anything non integer interferes with itself and gets destroyed. So, they provide their own scale and select only multiples. Most of discrete physics boils down to this. (And if you need some extra integers, take the values of Euler's gamma function.)

Dear David,

A nice read in which one feels you know whereof you speak because of the elegance and ease in the flow of ideas! You single out the fact that no one can can write a discrete version of the Standard Model because of the need to express its chirality. Since fqxi is devoted to asking fundamental questions that remain unsolved in physics, can't we simply say that the Standard Model is far from being the last word - a simpler and more powerful theory may entirely supplant it one day.

Something similar may have already happened to the the "no-go" Nielsen and Ninomiya theorem proving that chirality cannot be represented on a lattice. I refer to this admitting the technical aspects are beyond my understanding, but the author claims he has done so: Weyl Neutrinos on a Lattice: An Explicit Construction.

I would be honored if you look at my qualitative and incomplete suggestions for a lattice theory of everything in which chirality is built in at the most fundamental 'building block' level: a universal lattice of identical dielectric nodes spinning mostly in one direction transferring angular momentum in units of (h). These ideas are in my present fqxi contest contribution, and also in the earlier 2005 Beautiful Universe paper on which it is based.

With best wishes for your success, Vladimir

Congratulations, David, to the silver prize. I would endorse every letter but couldn't write it in your masterful English. Your essay is clearly the best one in this contest, with all due respect to Moshe.

David,

Congratulations upon your place in the fqxi essay contest.

I repeat my earlier remark:

You have truly written a masterful essay. Simple enough to be read and enjoyed by all visitors to fqxi and yet insightful enough to teach experts a few things. Thank you for your excellent contribution.

I am happy that the judges saw it the same way!

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Dear David,

Congratulations on your prize. I had not read your essay until now but decided to read it today, as the judges placed it so highly. It is just as Edwin describes above. I found it very interesting indeed and enjoyable to read.

Very well done. Regards Georgina.

I wanted to say that this essay should have won first prize. The fact that it didn't clearly represents a bias in the judges. I stumbled on the same logic recently and find it fantastic that others see the same evidence. It seems that our notion of discreteness is strongly associated with our sense of oppositeness. Its this nonuniformity that gives us a sense of time, among other things. Bravo on a fabulous piece of thought!

Thanks to all you for your kind words and support!

David

Pulling up what I can on this subject, it seems that practical reality shows that you have one of two choices, either accept continuity in 3+1 dimensions or accept extra dimensions.

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen-Ninomiya-Theorem&ei=wlvvTeesFcm3twfotMmhCQ&sa=X&oi=translate&ct=result&resnum=9&ved=0CG0Q7gEwCA&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dnielsen%2Bninomiya%2Btheorem%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den%26prmd%3Divns

http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=en&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dnielsen%2Bninomiya%2Btheorem%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den%26prmd%3Divns&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=de&u=http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-Wall-Fermion&usg=ALkJrhgLwUg8PtxZIK4j6WuASB7n1a-5pw

http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/28271

This essay is definitely very cool. It is a bridge which gives thought for philsophy too. See David Tong's excellent PDF slide show on this subject http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/talks/integers.pdf

An example this brings to mind is that of the problem of determining Avogadro's number as an integer (which would be related to something physically significant). Unfortunately they have been trying to determine this integer as a cube so that it fits neatly within the cubic space. I do not think that it can be done and that it would be trivial and un natural. See: http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/an-exact-value-for-avogadros-number

The problem of relating Avogadro's number as an integer (related to something physically or naturally significant) is going to probably be related to black hole physics. ;)