[ Sunday 14 August 1983 - Saturday 20 August 1983 ]
[notebook Creation - The Metaphysics of Peace = CMP I: DB20]
[page 110]
It is not uncommon to feel that a task must be begun all over again. Einstein had this feeling when he approached quantum mechanics. He was a man of principle. He derived his special and general theories of relativity and many of his other advances in physics from deep reflection on apparently simple notions such as that of simultaneity and the equivalence of gravitation and acceleration. So deep was his attachment to the notion of principle that although he acknowledge and admired the enormous practical success of quantum mechanics, he absented himself from the apparent mainstream for the last few decades of his life in an attempt to start all over again with quantum mechanics. He was not happy with it. Although he agreed that it was logically consistent, he insisted that it was incomplete. One can reasonably say that it was his deep aesthetic convictions about the nature of physical theory that moved him to this position.
The present work is also an attempt to start all over again, motivated not so much by the aesthetics of physical theory but by a deep felt personal need. It will be necessary to give a brief resume of my personal intellectual history in order to explain this need
[page 111]
and put the thoughts that have stemmed from this need [in context]. I have been fortunate, I feel, that in many ways the theoretical conceptions that have come to me have fulfilled my need for a theory of the world and have enabled me to construct a satisfying context for and understanding of my own life. It is this satisfaction (which relates not to the completeness but to the promise of my ideas) which motivates me to write this book, first to share my ideas with others, but more importantly, to attract their criticism.
I have tried for a long time to extract subsets of these ideas for publication as articles rather than as a book, but have found it difficult. It seems best to appear in print first with the overall picture and subsequently to clarify and extend my work in response to criticism and my own further insights.
It has been necessary to maintain both informal and formal exposition of these ideas side by side. For this purpose I have chosen the two track approach so common in textbooks and others (Including Pais's admirable biography of Einstein etc etc). Pais
[page 112]
Any theory of the world must explain why the pen is mightier than the sword, why the man of thought has greater influence than the man of action and the businessman, why the Universe persists in evolving toward life and culture despite the fact that the laws of physics would like to see it go otherwise (although the evolution of life does not contradict the laws of physics).
It must explain knowledge and intelligence.
The basic insight of all this is coding . . . [computation]
It must explain why reading books and thinking is as enjoyable as fucking, even though the latter is intimately connected to biological survival.
A place for music, for love, for quarks, UFO's, other intelligences and above all instantaneous communication through the Universe and life after death. These are the desiderata.
It must explain why mathematics fits reality, why it is so hard to distinguish between ideas and reality, why ideas fit reality, why reality is intelligible.
[page 113]
As well as all these things it must make measurable physical predictions.
Some indications of digitisation: uncertainty / discreteness of quantum states {evolution / intelligence / creation }.
It is axiomatic that if humans are intelligent then the Universe must be intelligent (or God must exist) Given the possibility that God does not exist, we are left with the residue that the Universe is intelligent and, using Occam's Razor, we must accept the view that the mechanisms of human and universal intelligence are the same. We are therefore faced with a new and exceedingly powerful principle of equivalence. Our current theories of universal evolution and the function of mind must therefore be seen as attempts to solve the same general problem, . . .
The theory must be able to explain the paradoxical gain / loss of freedom / capability resulting from the formation of relationships eg between people, molecules, atoms etc.
[notebook Creation - The Metaphysics of Peace II = CMP II: DB31]
[page 39]
Gravitation, Misner, Thorne and Wheeler
Misner page 4: Physics is simple only when analysed locally.
page 5: Einstein: 'Why were another seven years required for the construction of the general theory of relativity? The main reason lies in the fact that it is not easy to free oneself from the idea that coordinates must have an immediate metrical meaning.'
page 10: Points and events are primary - coordinates are for bookkeeping only. Space is a continuous four dimensional manifold.
. . . [pages 40-102 reading Misner, Thorne and Wheeler]
[page 31]
For uncertainty relation ΔaΔb ≈ h the restriction on a and b being that their dimensions must be in Joule.sec, ie ML2T-1. How does this apply, for instance, to electric charge. We want information per second, which is a frequency T-1 to be in unity of mass-energy E = mc2. Dimensions of E are ML2T-2. Do dimensions help in all this? Conjugates are energy / time, momentum / distance.
Pais page 454: Influence of Einstein letter to Roosevelt marginal.
'Had I known that the germans would not succeed in producing a atomic bomb, I would not have lifted a finger.
page 456: Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, 1935. Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen
Einstein wanted to describe phenomena independent of experimental conditions. Paper caused a stir among physicists and has played a large role in philosophical discussion.
'If without in any way disturbing a system we can predict with certainty (ie with probability = 1) the value of a physical quantity, then there exists an element of physical reality corresponding to that quantity.'
'This article concludes that objective reality is incompatible with the assumption that quantum mechanics is complete.'
[page 32]
Pais page 460: Einstein's vision: 'Enormous practical success of Newton may have blinded people the fictitious (ie imagination created) nature of his theory. Einstein got the same result from an entirely different standpoint.'
Einstein: 'I still believe in the possibility of giving a model of reality which shall represent events themselves, and not merely the probability of their occurrence.'
page 461: 1. Quantum mechanics is a major advance. 2. One should not start with quantum mechanics and try to reinterpret it. 3. Rather start all over and get quantum mechanics as a generalisation of general relativity.
1950 to Born: I am convinced of [objective reality] although, up to now, success is against it.
page 462: ' Monetary success carries much more power of conviction for most people than reflections on principle.
'The essence of being a man of my type lies in what he thinks and how he thinks, not in what he does or suffers.
Energy and momentum are most intimately related; therefore a theory can be justified only if it has been shown that according to [the theory] the momentum transferred by radiation leads to motions as
[page 33]
required by thermodynamics.
Pais page 463: 'To [Einstein], relativity was to such an extent the revealed truth that in his view the phenomenological and provisional quantum theory was not yet ripe enough, perhaps not yet worthy enough, to be brought into contract with relativity arguments'
'Relativistic quantum field theory was repugnant to him'.Special special relativistic vision. He was after "that program which may suitably called Maxwell's: the description of Physical Reality by fields which satisfy without singularity a set of partial differential equations.
'It seems to me that making great discoveries can be accomplished by trauma, and that the purity of Einsteins relativity theories had a blinding effect on him.'
page 464: Einstein: 'To the discover, . . . the constructions of his imagination seem to necessary and so natural that he is apt to treat them not as creatures of his thoughts, but as given realities.'
. . .
[page 34]
Pais page 465: Einstein's vision: 'He was looking for a unified field theory ... . He demanded that the theory shall be strictly causal, and that it shall unify gravitation and electromagnetism and that the particle of physics shall emerge as special solutions of the general field equations, and that the quantum postulates shall be a consequence of the general field equations.' (Pais emphasis)
1954 Einstein: 'I must seem like an ostrich who forever buries its head in the relativistic sand in order not to face the evil quanta.'
page 466-67 Einstein: 'In my opinion, there is the correct path and . . . it is in our power to find it. Our experience up to date justifies us in feeling sure that in nature is actualised the idea of mathematical simplicity.' [but his mathematics was not fundamental enough?]
page 467: Einstein (1940): 'The theory of relativity and quantum theory seem little adapted to fusion into one unified theory.'
If Einstein is right, the new unified theory must be a new beginning from relativity and from quantum mechanics. One is included to be swayed by the extraordinary mathematical precision of both. The rub must come at very small distances and/or very large masses, where there are possible instances of collision.
[page 35]
'As Einstein's life drew to a close, doubts about his vision arose in his mind:'
Einstein to Besso, 1954: "I consider it quite possible that physics cannot be based on the field concept, ie on continuous structures. In that case nothing remains of my entire castle in the air, gravitation included, and the rest of modern physics. Kevin Brown
page 468: Lessing: the aspiration to truth is more precious than its assured possession.
Pais page 473: Journey's End - The Final Decade
. . .
[notebook Creation - The Metaphysics of Peace = CMP I: DB20]
[page 114]
The spacetime manifold obviously formed early in the life of the Universe as a sort of basic operating system, It provides the first context (coding and context must go together) for subsequent physical interactions. This structure of spacetime acts as a subsequent constraint on universal process. However, insofar as computers can run stand-alone programs which do not depend upon the operating system, one might be able to construct a structure (at high energy or somewhere else) which bypasses the constraints of gravitation. Here we may find superluminal communication, eg by large space-borne accelerators which appear on the target planets as cosmic rays etc. . . .
Ultimate building blocks - leptons and quarks. This statement is only vaguely meaningful. In a communication system all structures are temporary and subject to evolution, like a language, without losing their meaning. However the general tendency is high energy ( = high redundancy) = stability = simplicity to low energy = low redundance = complexity = temporariness.
Light is outside time [outside space-time, living in a null world].
[page 115]
The laws of physics may be thought of as programs, the initial conditions as data and the results of the computation as the consequences of a certain program acting on data. We, by observing inputs and outputs, try to work out what the overall program is. Our experimental approach amounts to breaking into the universal supercomputer at various points, giving it some data and getting some output a little further along the road. What we are looking for is a characterisation of the overall computer, which has no data input or output, and of which we are part.
It is a characteristic of this computer that it has built itself through an evolutionary process of creative intelligence which is based on the digital and limited bandwidth of the machinery. Precision at early stages is high, corresponding to high energy. The appropriate mathematical theory for dealing with such a machine would be that of a computer in which all the hardware is software, but of different degrees of stability.
Functioning of human intelligence is based on finite time resolution of neurons which function as coincidence detectors.
[page 116]
Bohr, July 1913 On the Constitution of Atoms and Molecules.
1: 'The dynamical equilibrium of the systems in the stationary states can be described by the help of ordinary mechanics, while the passing of the system between different stationary states cannot be treated on that basis.
2: "That the latter process is followed by the emission of a homogeneous radiation, for which the relation between the frequency and the amount of energy emitted is the one given by the Planck theory.'
A physicist may claim to study what is simply by looking at what is to be fund in reality and hypothesising the structures that lie behind the observed facts. Thus hydrogen atoms are taken as given and the details of their behaviour attributed to certain theoretical structures, QED, QCD, which are nevertheless fitted (through measured values) to the facts.
However, the general principle of equivalence implies that genesis is all important, and that the mechanisms of original formation have undoubtedly left their tracks in what we see now, just as any almost infinite set of historical events has gone into the exact determination of the human animal, so we can expect the same degree of ad hocery to be found in quarks etc. We study human nature as we find it (or
[page 117]
at least are learning to) using both observations of humanity and of human ecology within the framework of a general theory of genesis (Darwinism). It is proposed that this general approach be broadened and generalised by the use of the general equivalence between intelligence and evolution and that this heuristic principle be used to search for a generalised explanation of the existence and structure of the Universe as we find it. This approach should eventually eliminate the arbitrary constants from the whole setup.
[notebook Creation - The Metaphysics of Peace II = CMP II: DB31]
[page 45]
. . .
Presumably, at a very early age of the Universe when there were, for instance, only isolated particles, gravitation
[page 46]
existed, and so therefore we must expect the quantities that give space and energy the interactions described by geometrodynamics must inhere in the smallest (simplest) particles of spacetime. Can we view even gravitation as the first level of sophistication following the initial period of zero entropy meaninglessness.
Einstein's field equations (or their analogues) therefore represent the simplest available non-contradictory structure given the principle of equivalence. Does the principle of intelligent equivalence predate the principle of gravitational equivalence, and if so how does it work and if it does work, does it lay the foundations for a Universe in which Einstein's gravitation holds, or do we find another equivalent approach to gravitation, yielding an almost identical result (perhaps with the odd different result). Just as Newton and Einstein agree in the weak field limit, etc). So a new theory should look for justification in superdense matter, maybe the big bang or somewhere energetic like that, (eg Quasi Stellar Objects)
[page 47]
Once something is discovered, the word can be passed around by some sort of communication, eg learned journal, photons etc etc. So once the atom was invented it became very popular, or perhaps we are dealing with simultaneous discovery, (morphogenetic fields)?
. . .
Misner page 71: 'All the laws and theories of physics . . . have this deep and subtle character, that they both define the concepts that they use and make statements about these concepts.'
[page 48]
A physical law both simplifies a mass of data and gives meaning to the data. All meaning comes from context. To give program A data meant for program B will result in a garbage output, even though within certain limits the program will function, eg add up the old pounds shillings and pence using a decimal adder instead of the 12 pence one shilling, 20 shillings one pound rule. So a group of phenomena are organised by some putative law connecting them. It is unlikely that the law will work unless the phenomena are in some way related, eg F = ma makes sense, x = ma does not, no correlation (F= force, x = position, m = mass, a = acceleration). A correlation points to the absence of information = order.
In other words, all depends upon relationship.
[page 49]
. . .
Misner page 80: Principle of covariance: laws of physics are the same in every Lorentz reference system.
Tensor carries information about field - 'machine' or program.
page 130: Spacetime carries a flowing river of 4-momentum, quantified by the stress-energy tensor T.
page 132: Conservation of energy-momentum expressed by the fundamental geometric law ∇ . T = 0.
. . .
[page 50]
. . .
Misner page 163: 'The objective world simply is; it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the world line does a section of the world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continually changes is time.'
'. . . special relativity was developed precisely to predict the physics of accelerated objects.'
Neutron experiences 1028 g.
Accelerated motion my be understood through momentarily co-moving inertial systems.
. . .
[page 54]
. . .
The operation of intelligence which gave rise to gravitation must have happened very soon after the initial singularity, and so must be described by the general theory under extreme conditions.
Why do black holes shrink and Universes expand?
Misner page 177: Newtonian gravitational fields propagate with infinite velocity.
page 178: Tensor theory in flat spacetime is internally inconsistent and admits no exact solutions. When repaired, it becomes general relativity.
page 187: There is no ideal reference system. We are in it, not out of it. Argument for redshift implies consistency and conservation of energy (within the specification). Energy / momentum conservation are part of gravitational consistency.
Special relativity cannot be valid in a gravitational field.
page 189: Equivalence: uniform gravitational field is indistinguishable from uniform acceleration of a reference frame.
Proved by gravitational redshift
[page 55]
The conceptual basis of general relativity. The difficulty comes in fitting a mathematical model to it. The pleasure comes when the model, once fitted, produces results hitherto unknown or unexplained (experimental results may appear before or after the relevant theory, cf Mercury's precession vs bending of light by the sun), which indicate that it is a good fit. Such results maybe nowhere as conceptually simple as the original idea. (Why does the principle of equivalence imply that planetary orbits precess?)
Proper time of the Universe at the time of the big bang was a very long period. What is the proper age of the Universe?
re Misner page 170 above: Intelligence: it must predate gravitation, since gravitation itself is intelligible.
Misner page 191: Local Lorentz frames do not mesh. The problem is analogous to map frames.
page 195: Nothing in the Universe is inherently necessary. It is sufficient that it does not involve contradiction that a sufficiently long lapse of time and large number of events will bring it to be.
[page 56]
Derek F Lawden: Tensor Calculus and Relativity. Lawden
General covariance means in effect that the Universe is not partitioned into subsets and that ur arbitrary partitionings are irrelevant. General relativity can treat the whole Universe as one.
Lawden page 5: 'all physical laws are covariant with respect to transformation between inertial frames.'
[back to Misner, Thorne and Wheeler]
[page 58]
Misner page 225: Chapter 9 Differential topology: Curve spacetime without metrics or geodesics or parallel transport.
['In analytic geometry, many relations which are independent of any frame must be expressed with respect to some particular frame. It is therefore preferable to devise new methods - methods which lead directly to intrinsic properties without any mention of coordinates. The development of the topology of general spaces and the objects which occur in them, as well as the development of the geometry or general metric spaces, are steps in this direction.' Karl Menger in Schilp.] Schilpp: page 467
page 240: differentiable manifold = a set of points tied together continuously and differentiably in n dimensions.
Added layers of structure give metric etc to differentiable manifold. Differentiability itself is added structure, and implies infinite information. What is the most primitive space with no mathematical properties at all. That is where we must start. [set?]
page 242: Differentiable manifold + geodesic, parallel transport and curvature = affine geometry. Affine geometry + metric = Riemannian geometry.
page 244: Chapter 10 Affine Geometry.
'Galilei's Principle of Inertia is sufficient in itself to prove conclusively that the world is affine in character.' Hermann Weyl
.. . .
[page 59]
A knowledge of all geodesics is completely equivalent to knowledge of the covariant derivative.
Misner page 265: 'Spacetime curvature manifests itself as gravitation by means of the deviation of one geodesic from a nearby geodesic (relative acceleration of test particles).'
This is the mathematical model for gravitation. The telephone book is devoted to making it look good, comprehensive and simple. Most of the inventions it adds to Einstein are mathematical, not physical. Einstein's was the basic physical insight.
. . .
page 302: Principle of general covariance useless for separating good theories from bad. So try 'Nature likes theories that are simple when stated in coordinate free language'.
Simplicity is a matter of viewpoint.
We say: parallel evolution or causality. If gravitation identically pervades the Universe, it does so from a very early age., hence the simplicity of the most general laws of physics. QED.
[page 60]
Misner page 304: 'It is not possible to give frame independent meaning to separation in time.' [might be counted in operations, ie ticks, a positive integer]
What is rate of communication?
Let us define the COMMUNICATIONS (analogous to hamiltonian or Jacobian as
Metric as foundation of all (spacetime metric)
page 311: -1, 1, 1, 1
Geodesic is world like of extremal proper time [minimal local energy?]
[notebook Creation the Metaphysics of Peace CMP 1: DB20]
[page 117]
So Wheeler's pregeometry incorporates the fact that the world is intelligent and can evolve - therefore intelligence precedes all things and must be the fundamental reality of the universe. We must therefore arrive at a theory of intelligence which can function on zero structure.