Notes
[Sunday 25 October 2009 - Saturday 31 October 2009]
[Notebook: DB 68 Salalah]
[page 14]
Sunday 25 October 2009
At every observable moment the Universe is fully determined, since such moments are parts of history, that is stationary points in the Universe. So every string of English letters is a definite string from the point of view of communication technology, even though it may be meaningless to some readers (but nevertheless is in some way meaningful to the writer because the writer serves as the explanation of what is written, the explanation sought by the readers peer to the writer.)
There is nothing to be gained scientifically be representing the world in its fuly concrete form, a set of data with one data point per event in the Universe. In fact what we do is sample the data (ie observing the positions of the planets ar certain times) and then seek to reduce it by finding common elements in different concrete situations. The symetric Universe provides a explanation for this situation since the set of all permutations of a given set of elements contains many strings with substrings in common. Since each string of discete actions (letters of the alphabet) describes a process we expect to find this
[page 15]
process as a sub-process of many larger processes, like the electron process in the Universe.
The unity of the Universe arises from the fact that there are continuous strings of action within it stretching to the initial singularity and forming an expanding web of interaction ever since that moment.
Ian T Durham: Unification and Emergence in Physics: The Problem of Articulation. Ian T Durham
page 1: Fortun & Bernstein Fortun & Bernstein
'We're simply modelling the world of our sensory perceptions as best we can.' But, it seems, with the deep underlying assumption that we are the only intelligent entities in the world. We reject this with the suggestion that the human act of insight is isomorphic (up to a scale of complexity) with the collapse of the wave function in physics.
page 2: Fortun & Bernstein: 'Language matters, Language is essential to reason, and it can't be gotten rid of so easily with a few new machines. Somewhere along the line - no matter how long that line is - every experiment, every mathematical equation, ever pure numerical value will have to find its way into words [page 43].
'In fact it is often through the interactions that we come
[page 16]
to understand the "stuff", since on the fundamental level these interactions transfer information in various forms including momentum and energy.'
'[String theory] does very little to further our understanding of how the macroscopic emerges from the microscopic world, nor does it do much to further elucidate the nebulous boundary between the quantum and the classical which may or may not be the same things as the boundary between the 'micro' and the 'macro' as we shall see.'
We say all classical is quantized because it is all communication.
Durham page 3: 'In addition to . . . the fundamental interactions, "building" an atom requires invocation of the Pauli Exclusion Principle (PEP).'
'. . . constructing the macroscopic [spatially extended] world of our senses requires the interaction picture along with a healthy dose of PEP.'
Force = rate of momentum transfer = rate of data transfer.
Zee page 27: 'that the exchange of a particle can produce a force was one of the most profound conceptual advances in modern physics (QFT in a Nutshell, page 27 Zee)
Durham page 3: '. . . PEP does not represent an interaction. In theory, nothing should be transferred between objects associated through the PEP, meaning we should not be able to associate forces with PEP. . . . Interactions are causal processes. Since
[page 17]
particles associated through some process via PEP can't be interacting with one another, they must be space-like separated. One of the axioms of relativistic quantum field theory is that any pair of space-like separated observables must commute.'
Essay on the Divinity of Money = essay on the divinity of cardinality. An essay on the divinity of money.
White dwarf: PEP vs gravitation.
'. . . how can we draw a free body diagram of a stable chunk of a white dwarf star if forces are only associated with interactions? In fact, given our definition of forces, [momentum transfer] a stable chunk of white dwarf star violates all three of Newton's laws but not for any relativistic reason. We seem to have run into a problem in our articulation of certain phenomena while in the process of building up the macroworld from the microworld.'
Here the fact that all information is represented physically becomes manifest. The information is that PEP is a formal requirement for a Universe with space, that is independent addressable memory locations and the PEP is the physical expression of this fact, without which we would have no structure of distinct, differentiated but dynamically connected parts.
'We know there is a deep link between the notion of causality (and thus locality) and reversibility, yet we also know that at the microscopic level there are processes that are fully reversible (ie entropy conserving).
[page 18]
The term 'locality' is relative to the local velocity of light, which limits the cone of events which may affect a particular event. The world of formalism, however, works on the basis of instantaneous communication, so, for instance, each operation of a formal Turing machine is completed in an infinitesimal instant. With instantaneous communication, the whole Universe is local, as may be the case with whatever underlies gravitation.
Durham page 4: 'The status of the second law of thermodynamics and the emergence of macroscopic irreversibility from time-symmetric dynamics has been widely debated since Boltzmann's groundbreaking work relating thermodynamic behaviour to microscopic dynamics late in the nineteenth century. . . . There is . . . a slowly growing consensus that the asymmetry observed in macroscopic phenomena originates in the 'initial conditions' of our cosmic neighbourhood, and ultimately that of the whole Universe.' M Hossein Partovi Partovi
Using models of dilute gases [Partovi] constructed a class of macroscopically entangled systems in which heat can flow from the colder to the hotter system. His results actually bolster Boltzmann's argument that the second law is an 'emergent phenomenon' that requires a low-entropy cosmological environment, one that can effectively function as an ideal information sink.'
The initial condition of the Universe is that there in no initial condition except consistency of determinate objects.
Durham page 4: What makes Partovi's result so interesting is that it provides additional evidence of macroscopic entanglement while
[page 19]
simultaneously suggesting a link between entanglement and the second law of thermodynamics. Macroscopic entanglement has already been demonstrated in the bulk properties of magnetic materials, while a link between entanglement and the second law has been suggested, but Partovi has managed to unite all these concepts under a single umbrella.'
Quantum applies to microscopic and macroscopic, wherever there is a need for error-free communication.
Durham page 5: laws of coexistence and laws of succession = (in quantum mechanics) selection and super-selection rules.
Durham page 6: 'Moore claims [that] it is the conceptual layer that is missing in quantum physics - we have mathematics that match experimental results but no consistent way to conceptually explain the phenomena.
Comment posted 26/10:
Comment on Ian T Durham /578 Unification and Emergence in Physics: The Problem of articulation. Dear Ian, I found your paper contained many very interesting and helpful questions and observations. I am not a physicist but venture a few comments. First, I feel that the radical answer to the current crop of problems in physics is to recognize that physicists and physics are just as much part of the universal process as any other process. In particular, I would see the ‘collapse of the wave function’ and the human act of insight as isomorphic up to a scale factor. In other words the Universe is intelligent in the same way as we are intelligent. From a communication point of view, both insight and collapse are acts of coding, whose outputs and inputs are messages. These words are the message output of some of my own insights into physics derived from the inspection of thousands of pages of data and modelling. A particle of some sort is usually the output of a physical observation. Human talk and universal talk are abstractly the same. By seeing the world as a communication network (the ‘interaction picture’) we get an explanation for quantization. As Shannon showed, the strategy for defeating error in communication is to encode messages into long strings or packets whose letters are equiprobable so that we can place packets as far apart as possible in message space, so minimizing the chances of confusion. This is quantization. Messages with no overlap are orthogonal, like quantum mechanical basis states. This picture may resolve the macro micro quantum classical question. Wherever there is error free communication there is quantization, whatever the scale. We are led by the apparent continuity of motion to attribute continuity to the foundations of the Universe. In fact nothing is continuous, and continua carry no information. At the most fundamental level, quantum field theory sees motion as a series of discontinuous creations and annihilations, and at the macroscopic level everything is broken up into pieces like letters, sentences, people, stars and so on. From the communication point of view, we may see quantum mechanics as a method for computing the traffic in various channels in the universal network. The transition to quantum field theory introduces space and special relativity. One might see special relativity as a consequence of the delay induced by error defeating coding, since the channel must wait for the source to emit enough letters to form a packet before it transmits a signal. Finally, the quantum network picture may also enable us to understand emergence in the Universe. It seems reasonable to start with an initial singularity with no internal structure which, communicating with itself slowly builds up the Universe as we know it. Like practical engineered communication networks, we see this network as layered, each layer charcterized by a certain set of software. We may see quantum mechanics as the lowest layer. As Zee notes (Nutshell page 16) (0 + 1)-dimensional quantum field theory is just quantum mechanics, ie quantum mechanics antedates space. It seems clear that the origin of space has something to do with the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Following the computer network analogy, we might see space as memory and the exclusion principle as maintaining the orthogonality between independent memory locations. The selective advantage of remembering algorithms which enable error free communication thus somehow bootstraps the exclusion that makes independent memory possible. I can not see much further than this, but do suspect that space has become fixed at three dimensions because (as chipmakers, wirers and pipelayers know) three dimensions is the minimum space in which one can join many pairs of points without crossed wires. The network picture may provide the ‘missing conceptual layer in quantum physics'. The Universe is inherently dynamic, but, since it maps onto itself, is constrained by fixed point theorems. It is the fixed points in the dynamics which physicists seek, since, as Parmenides noted 2500 years ago, we cannot write a permanently true text about something that is changing. Mathematics turns out to be a good language for the expression of these fixed points. All the best, Jeffrey
Monday 26 October 2009
G S Paraoanu: On the (im)possibility of quantum computing. Gheorghe Sorin Paraoanu
Paraoanu page 2: 'quantum computing is a theorists dream and an experimentalist's nightmare'
Scenario 1: '. . . all attempts to assemble a processor with a larger number of qubits and run a quantum algorithm fail. In this case we would have discovered an experimental situation which quantum mechanics
[page 20]
fails to describe. Needless to say the implications would be revolutionary: it would mean that there is fresh experimentally-accessible physics beyond quantum mechanics to explore out there, and I cannot think of a single physicists who wouldn't want to unveil the mysteries of the new science.
Paraoanu page 5: '. . . summing over Feynman diagrams would probably look to a physics student of the future as conceptually awkward and cumbersome to us as counting epicycles to get the trajectories of the planets in the solar system.'
page 1: 'The clever trick of quantum computing is to bypass all these objections [randomness, uncertainty etc] by avoiding to encode the classical bit of information directly into a corresponding observable. Typically, the data of the problem are embedded in the initial conditions of the system, which are amenable to fully classical description. Then the system evolves quantum mechanically under the application of a sequence of quantum gates and the final state is measured. The result, which encodes the solution to the problem, is as such cast irreversibly - alea jacta est - into the clasical world. In other words, to perform a computation, there does not have to be a one-to-one correspondence between the bit ant the "it" at every step of the program: all that matters is how the "output" results correlate with the "input".
fxqi Prati /552 Enrico Prati
[page 21]
Fellman, Post and Carmichael fqxi . . . /550 Philip Vos Fellman, Jonathan Vos Post ad Christine Carmichael
Julian Barbour 'The Nature of time' Julian Barbour
Barbour page 2: '. . . the quantum Universe is static. Nothing happens: there is being but no becoming. The flow of time ans motion are illusions.' Very Parmenides. Fellman et al page 3: 'The subject of physics is physical systems, not the language of description of physical systems. To believe otherwise is to imagine that the equations of state have a determinate role in the experimental process.'
. . .
Florin Moldoveanu fqxi . . . /473 Florin Moldoveanu
Hilbert's sixth problem: Axiomatization of Physics. Hilbert's sixth problem - Wikipedia
Heuristic rule: 'Identify all mathematical properties of the physical world that are universally valid in the real world and are not universally valid in the abstract world of mathematics.'
'. . . in mathematics truth means that something is derived from axioms, while in the physical world truth is usually defined as something corresponding to reality, and has a ubiquitous non-trivial universal property.'
Having observed the dynamics of the essay competition for a while, it seems that on balance a little self-promotion
[page 22]
may improve my chances of putting my hands on some much needed dollars. I therefore draw your attention to a prediction consequent upon the model presented in my essay (Jeffrey Nicholls). The prediction is that gravity is not quantized. Quantization seems to me to indicate a realm where the Universe has evolved error resistant communication. We map the layered computer network model onto the real world by assuming that one quantum of action corresponds to the completion of one computation. The rate of computation then corresponds to energy. Gravity sees only energy and is indifferent to all the different forms energy may take. We further observe that a particle is equivalent to a message, a signal created by physically encoding a string of symbols, like this writing or myself. Gravity cannot therefore be in error, and so it does not need the error resistance that quantization provides.
The transfinite numbers have a space invariance expressed by the arithmetic formula:
2aleph(n) = aleph(n)aleph(n) = aleph(n+1)
Which is true for all values of aleph(n), 2 . . aleph(n).Punctuality in a distant place requires a careful estimate of the time needed to get there, some feed forward?
Tuesday 27 October 2009
Le Carre Wanted Le Carre
[page 23]
BANK == SECURE PAPERWORK (COMMUNICATION)
Communication must be secured if it is of local value.
SECURITY - FAITH - BELIEF
To shake one's faith is to shake their personal security and therefore to threaten them. In order to change faith without pain, one must have a more secure system ready to demonstrate so that they can make the migration without fear. Even with Macintosh, installing a new operating system can be fraught with danger.
It is interesting to see the theological edge in the fqxi submissions.
The task of missionaries is to convince the natives that they are better off with the new system, by force if necessary. In this case the new system is not necessariy better but the warmongers will certainly make sticking to the old feel worse.
The use of atrocity is to appear convincing. The twin towers episode opened our eyes to what the US has been doing for the last hundred years, bombing people into the stone age. Curtis LeMay - Wikipedia
. . .
The world has no initial conditions whether it started from nothing or everything, both of which are tantamount to the ancient God of physicists and mystics. It is only intermediate, constrained worlds that need explanation, those who are on the way from nothing to everything,
[page 24]
. . .
We presume that you are looking for a real paradigm change in physics, a break from the past at least as great as the classical / quantum rift. I and a few others are offering that break, in the form that I call the transition from geometric to logical continuity. This is equivalent to saying human intelligence is nothing special. It is just a local manifestation of the overall intelligence of the Universe. We can see this by considering the nature of communication. The essay above describes this paradigm change as completely as I can manage in ten pages.
Ordinary human discourse, insofar as it is meaningful, is not conducted in space-time except incidentally by way of the actual physical symbols used as signals to carry information., like photons, and phonons and odouriferous molecules. It is conducted in logical space. Given that the whole Universe is a logical space of vast complexity, we see in physics the study of a degenerate subset of that space, the space in which all symbols are treated simply as units that can be integrated. Rather like studying the Bible by counting the letters in it rather than decoding it as a meaningful text in a certain language. *
By putting physics in this theological perspective, we can see the unity of ourselves and our world more clearly and work out more securely what we should do about it.
* This degenerate view fits nicely into the network model, which is layered, beginning with the simplest software possible, logical calculus, and building
[page 25]
up from there as Turing showed us how to do building up the structure of his Machine from something like a typewriter to something powerful enough to execute any deterministic process, so showing us that beyond the determined is the undetermined. We see that the transition from future to past can be modelled by this dichotomy, the undetermined future slowly becoming the determined past. Our future lies in empirical theology.
Le Carre page 169: 'Now at last he was able to understand himself. He had mistaken his need. He had invested himself in the wrong market. It was not copulation he was looking for, it was this . . .
I was saved from the Roman Catholic Church by lust, somewhat missshapen but nevertheless effective.
At present we often compromise our humanity (ie constrain) to fit our organizations, whereas all organizations should be designed to accept the full flowering of humanity without error. So this theory has a lot to say bout the formal human discourse we call bureaucracy.
Physics describes the degenerate world where particles are indistinguishable.
Le Carre: 'Clinic was worse than prison to him."
The logical domain of human discourse is made obvious by telecommunications which render planetary distances essentially irrelevant to that any two people may converse as though they are in the same local space.
[page 26]
Continua are degenerate enough to be integrated.
Any theory of everything must explain physicists as well as physics.
Eugene Fredrick Mische 'The Imitation of Christ: The Universal Security State, Freedom and Responsibiity. Eugene Fredrick Mische
Cantor showed us how to exploit the ordinal numbers to make ever larger cardinal numbers, a construction that 'feeds of itself' by working at constant foundatinal entropy (the cardinal of the set of natural numbers). . . .
It is a symbolic system made by dividing a simple system into more and more details with less and less energy each. Detail == state.
If the Universe is divine then scientists are on a mission from God.
Wednesday 28 October 2009
Alfred Tang page 3: 'Physics as a supposedly objective discipline should not take sides between atheism and theism. ... It is conceivable that theoretical breakthroughs can be made when new ideas in physics are shaped by old ideas in theology. . . . A leap of faith from physicalism into extra-physicalism can very well usher in a new era in physics. Alfred Tang[page 27]
Tang page 6: 'Both physics and theology are interested in the concept of unification.'
Goldfarb page 3: 'I am suggesting that we are poised to shift from the ubiquitous numerical representation and the associated measurement process to the structural representation and the associated structural measurement process.' Lev Goldfarb
'. . . we need a formalism in which objects are viewed and represented as (structured) processes).
Thursday 29 October 2009
SYMMETRY = MEANINGLESSNESS = DEGENERACY
Back to 'Is gravitation quantized?' It seems better to explain the transfinite symmetric network by applying it to a specific question, the relationship between infinity and finitude, ie betwee ncontinuous and discrete, symmetry and broken symmetry, the creation of structure out of not-structure. Shannon's theorems tell us structure bootstraps itself. We cannot have stable structure without secure (error free) communication, and we cannot have secure communication without quantization.
A numerical example: We have a binary source (ie with an alphabet of 2) and we adjust the frequency of the symbols so that the source entropy is 1/2. We know that if the two letters are equiprobable, the entropy of the source would be 1. If a1 were emitted with a probability of 1 (always) and anot-i with a probability of 0 (never), then the source entropy
[page 28]
would be zero, computed by Shannon's well known formula H = SUMi pi log2pi.
Gravitation describes a fully degenerate world where the source (Universe) emits the same symbol always so that it has zero entropy per symbol and can never make a mistake, and so has no need of quantization.
Assumption 1: the world is a communication network (Feynman QED Feynman) in which all observables are quantized meaning that each element of the Universe is perceived as a unit with a certain structure. Physical data is basically obtained by classifying particle structures into bins and counting how many there are in each bin. Quantum field theory enables us to predict some of these numbers when the bins represent very simple events.
Assumption 2: A simple measure of the structure of a network is its number of independent degrees of freedom (memory locations, that is its entropy [= mass?].
Assumption 3: A network may increase its entropy by copying itself.
Assumption 4: The world begins with state of entropy 0, ie no degrees of freedom. This state complexifies by observing itself according to the laws of quantum mechanics, which apply to the initial singularity because it is a structureless continuum described by a 0 dimensional Schrödinger equation, ie nothing happens, so omnino simplex and eternal like the 'base' (pre-living [Parmenidean]) model of God.
[page 29]
Assumption 5: Early thinkers were no more stupid that the current crop, although we are inclined to believe that we are so much smarter than [they were].Perhaps they had a better view because their lives were simpler (?). Either way, the general questions about the nature and origin of our experience of life have been around a long time and the general run of answers are the same: we're here and that is that, no matter how you might explain it.
<>p> Assumption 6: Structure and error free communication are two sides of the same coin, the structure guiding the communication along secure paths by coding and the error free messages maintaining the structure by faithfully copying it from point to point in spacetime.Assumption 7: Spacetime may be represented by dynamic memory. We define a network as a set of interacting memory locations, able to change on another by communication.
Assumption 8: The basic parameters of a relationship are the frequencies of interaction along various dimensions, such as the rate of sex, nappy changing, cleaning, exchange of photons etc. These rates ultimately decide if the relaitonship will maintain itself or die, and can be expressed as the coefficients of vectors in Hilbert space. [in fact the product of two complex amplitudes corresponding to the corresponding observing and observed vectors].
Assumption 9: On the role of complex numbers in the quantum mechanical formalism. Manipulating quantum ssystems is very like pushing a swing, a matter of period (rate of change) and phase (position) that is neatly encoded in the complex numbers. This explains
[page 30]
the strange algorithms needed to compute quantum probabilities.
Assumption 10: We measure symmetry with probability, so the symmetry of a binary source may vary from 0 to 1. The probability (frequency) of my various activities is a function of myself and my environment. The number of times Indeed to do the washing depends on the rate at which I dirty clothes and the size [capacity] of the washing machine. Dishes the same.
Faith Bleasdale Peep Show page 524: 'As they left the television studio, they felt tired of all the publicity; as they thought of the money, they realized that they had sold out. As Leigh said, it didn't matter that they had sold out because it was their past that people would see, and one thing her stupid overdose has taught Leigh was that you had to look to the future. Bleasdale
Friday 30 October 2009
Emile Grgin fqxi . . /529 Emile Grgin
page 2: 'Do [the dimensionless constants of the Standard Model] stem from the initial conditions at the Big Bang or are they theorems (like the value of pi in mathematics)? Opinions differ on this point.'
page 3: 'No medium is "absolutely transparent" to fields. Two constants, denoted by epsilon and mu specify its opacity to electronic and magnetic fields
[page 31]
respectively.
Grgin page 4: 'The conceptual simplicity of general relativity stands in contrast to its technical difficulty.'
The 'technical difficulty' is not inherent in general relativity but induced by its application to 4-space / time. The natural habitat of GR is 1D time [inverse energy]
'Find a mathematical structure that incorporates the principle of special relativity (c = const) and the principle of equivalence.'
'. . . since the apparent curvature of the world line of a mass point in a gravitational field does not depend on its mass [if it is small], it must be a property of the space.'
Mathematics: quantitative = cardinal / structural = ordinal
page 5: '[In quantum mechanics] Equations of motion operate on an unobservable Universe of concepts based on complex numbers, while observations, to be useful, take place in a Universe of real numbers.'
The complex numbers are part of the structural (ordinal) side of mathematics and complex vectors, since they contain phase (ordering) and frequency (identity of letters) are equivalent to ordered strings of letters, ie sentence or packets of information.
page 6: 'Two theories cannot be unified until they have been finalized and characterized by principles. . . . Are
[page 32]
[quantum mechanics and relativity] characterized by principles? Special and general relativity are, but quantum mechanics is defined only by technical axioms. It is therefore not ready for unification. Postponing unification, we must first search for the "principle of quantum mechanics" which implies the axioms of the latter.'
Saturday 31 October 2009
Never in human intellectual history has there been so much denial as in modern physics. Two examples will suffice. First, the cosmological constant problem. Weinberg Here we have a discrepancy between theory and measurement of the order of 10100, and yet people trumpet the Standard Model as the epitome of good science. Second, although the Universe is manifestly discontinuous, being host to births and deaths at every scale, we insist on using continuous mathematics to describe it. Even religious fundamentalists at the worst are hardly so stubbornly wrong as physicists and the reason is clear. As in religion, there is big money to be made and endless sinecures to be won of only people will fall in with the dominant delusion and refrain from rocking the boat.
The special feature of quantum mechanics is its method of computing possibilities [probabilities - impossible probability = 0]
The principal absurdity of modern physics is the belief that one can encode information in a continuum. This proposition is simply meaningless.
[page 33]
Logic and time. Physicists have proposed a few concepts and stuck to them like glue, leading to complete absurdity elsewhere.
Starting from quantum mechanics, all the numbers yielded by physics are relative rates of traffic flow along various channels, ie coupling constants.
The heart of the task before us is to explain quantum mechanics in network terms. What we are asking for is the rate at which events are virtually unconditioned (Lonergan Lonergan) that is the rate at which everything is ready for an event to happen, ie the rate at which a photon coming through two slits hits detectors at certain points in space. The rate at which people fall in love because all inhibitions are removed. Knowing this should also show is the link between continuous and discrete mathematics as used in physics. In quantum mechanics the dimensions in Hilbert space are discrete (orthogonal), the coefficients on these dimensions continuous complex numbers constructed by Born's rule and normalization.
What we want to see is how the network explains the mathematics of quantum mechanics in the same way as Archimedes principle axplains how deep something will sink (if it floats).
Rate of communication is governed by community of language and 'need'. Community of language is related to symmetry.
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