vol VII: Notes
2017
Notes
Sunday 20 August 2017 - Saturday 26 August 2017
[Notebook: DB 81: Scientific theology]
[page 98]
Sunday 20 August 2017
The complexity of quantum field theory might be a source of despair insofar as we have to write such complex description of very simple particles like photons and electrons which have only a very limited set of features like spin, energy, momentum and so on. Why is this so?
[page 99]
From the classical point of view the most powerful symmetry or abstraction is Hamilton's principle based on the Lagrangian expression for action which selects points of stationary ation as the representation of reality. The question may be how do we relate stationary action and the execution of computers, and what is the relation between stationary action and quantum algorithms.
What is the spin of the universe? The angular momentum of God? [cannot be answered because there is no outside reference point to compare it to?]
Dick Gregory: 'The most difficult thing to get people to accept is the obvious.' AZ Quotes: Dick Gregory
Roland Omnès xi: 'Beyond the shadow of a doubt, the origin [of the current crisis in epistemology] is to be found in an event that no one has fully recognised in all its significance: the irresistible irruption of the formal approach in some fundamental sciences such as logic, mathematics and physics. As a consequence these disciplines have become practically impenetrable . . ..' ie concentration on the stationary points in the universe since there are the only things that can be represented in stationary text, as Parmenides noted. Omnes: Quantum Philosophy: Understanding and Interpreting Contemporary Science, Parmenides - Wikipedia
We might all agree that one of the most ancient, perennial and difficult problems in philosophy is the relationship between stillness and motion. Heraclitus and Parmenides, time and eternity, dynamics and fixed points. Heraclitus - Wikipedia
Logical continuity does not require an ether or a vacuum, it exists independently of any continuous substrate and its whole reality can be expressed in the truth tables for the logical connectives. This is a very hard idea to absorb because it looks like action at a distance, but there is no distance in logic, no metric, just the logical operation of a deterministic computing machine.
[page 100]
Monday 21 August 2017
Omnès 35: 'Instantaneous action as a distance: such is the original flaw, as it were, of Newton's theory of gravitation. It was rapidly forgotten by most labourers of science. As a matter of fact without yet realizing it, they were unconsciously shifting from an intuitive science where everything can be visualized and is in agreement with common sense toward a science involving formal elements that were essentially unintelligible.' (?)
Writing is both formal and (usually) intelligible. It lies in the logical [psychological] realm. Nevertheless we do need some sort of underlying physical structure to keep the words in place, in this case paper. So we look for the fundamental logical connections of the universe in the gravitational era which lies at the origin of spacetime, or should we say the quantum or divine era of pure action.
Action: 'The action is the integral over time involving the difference between potential and kinetic energies. We can surely make sense of their sum—it is the total energy—but their difference? What's more, action means nothing by itself, it is only an intermediary: actual motion has a kind of magical property which is to minize the action (Ithe priciple of least action). Why a minimum, or even a maximum? We can only wonder, without expecting to understand, without "seeing" anything because we do not know what "action" is or where it comes from.'
Did he ever read Aristotle? Maybe the total energy is really the difference between kinetic and potential energy because potential energy is the algebraical negative of kinetic energy, so PE = - KE, so KE - PE = KE - (-PE) = KE + PE = 0 (in the whole universe and so locally [see Feynman]). Feynman: Feynman Lectures on Gravitation
It is a bit hard to understand, but if we follow the logical of formalism we get the observed results, so it is telling us something.
[page 101]
Omnès page 35: 'More efficient calculations do not entail higher conceptual content.' ? What about Copernicus. And given that the world computes its way along, we would expect it to have found the most efficient algorithms (hence Hamilton's principle) which makes all the gigantic computational superstructure of field theory look a bit suspect when we are talking about the simplest systems in the world.
page 36: Einstein & Michaelson and Morley did away with the ether and replaced it with autonomous particles travelling from a to <>b. When it came to gravitation [Einstein] gave a kinematic description, but like Newton did not know the underlying dynamic mechanism. Since then many have tried to apply quantum mechanics to general relativity, which suggests that the field theory approach has the same problem as the ether approach. What is waving? The ether? No. The wave function? the graviton? How is the logical process represented by the formalism physically represented? Or is it not represeted at all because there is no information there, as in the ancient omnino simplex god? Weinberg and Auyang say the field is everything and the particles are epiphenomena. Maybe they are exactly wrong, and in the case of gravitation there is no field and no particles because it is so primordial, governed only by local consistency. Steven Weinberg: The Search for Unity: Notes for a History of Quantum Field Theory, Auyang: How is Quantum Field Theory Possible?, On the (non-) quantization of gravitation
page 45: Maxwell's equations: The application of the law of large numbers (via fields) to particulate behaviour.
Jerry Lewis: 'I'm not going to get greatness unless I have to go at it with fear and uncertainty.' David Kehr: Jerry Lewis, a Jester Both Silly and Stormy, Dies at 91
How do particles propagate through space? Space is the 'ether' that they use to propagate themselves, ie it is the hardware (firmware) that serves as the layer of software processing that makes [local] motion possible. As Einstein saw, space is not passive, it is the fundamental agent of communication and an essential constituent of all process. it is not absolutely invisible as the old ether was, but part of our experience. We see photons
[page 102]
as massless particles whose propagation is the simplest manifestation of the physical processes that make the world go. The fact that photons have no mass we interpret to mean that they have no 'closed' internal process. Their only process is to travel along at the velocity of light, 'walking' at a frequency determined by their energy, taking steps whose length is determined by [inversely proportional to] their momentum.
Omnes page 57: In mathematics what matters is not the nature of things but the relationships that exist among them [which in the network model are obviously determined by their nature as the sources of communication that determine their relationships].' All put in place by mathematicians' fiat, ie hypothesis, and then the consequences are explored formally. As Wigner saw, given the right hypotheses we often find ourselves with structures that can be mapped onto the observed world and predict some of its behaviour, giving us faith in the mathematics and formal insight into the nature of the world. The symbols interact as required by the mathematician. How do the phenomena corresponding to these symbols interact? That is the question The answer proposed here is that quantum mechanics is isomorphic to a computer network. Eugene Wigner: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences
Symbols (particles) communicate with one another through exchange of messages as in a computer network, using code corresponding to the four forces, gravitation, electromagnetism, weak, strong, all constrained by the basic Lorentz software (group) of special relativity.
What we are looking for in any situation is the relationship between the quantum of action and the energy which is measured by frequency and the basic task is to search for harmonics between processes (just in time) that enable them to assist one another.
page 66: natura naturans / nature naturata Natura naturans - Wikipedia
Omnès page 81: '. . . in fact [the laws originating from each particular science]
[page 103]
are, when seen through the eyes of the average intelligence or classical philosophy, absolutely incomprehensible. In a nutshell, the more we know the less we seem to understand.' This is your idea anyway. The Fracture.
page 82: '. . . we are losing the spontaneous representation of the world that used to be the origin of every thought; common sense is defeated together with the philosophical principles it generated.'
page 91: 'In the universe of symbols the only meaningful facts are the relationship between them,' correspondences represented physically by bonding, logically by binding.
page 99: Peano's axioms tell us everything about the natural numbers' ?
Tuesday 22 August 2017
Analysis is an interesting and possibly consistent branch of mathematics but there is no evidence that it applies to the real world. In fact, to the contrary, we can see from physics that its epsilons and deltas are always greater than or equal to the quantum of action.Omnès page 115: '. . . no serious discussion of mathematical realism can be carried out independently of the laws of the physical world, that is the nature of mathematics is inseparable from the nature of these laws. . . . It would be a mistake to build a philosophy of mathematics independently of a philosophy of the physical sciences.' See paragraph above.
The success of formal mathematics in the physical sciences suggests formal processes in the physical world, that is the embodiment of computation.
In the creative evolutionary process new systems build on the old to move into new territory. Human scientific and technological creativity is an example of this so there is no reason why mathematicians may not explore new
[page 104]
processes and structures that have never existed before.
Omnès page 122; 'The laws of physics that translate the existence of objects can only be expressed by the most refined methods of analysis immeasurably removed from the a,b, c of set theory.' Yet these refined methods of analysis are all built on set theory whose strength lies in the establishment of correspondences between identifiable discrete objects, sets and elements of sets.
Minkowski space: we measure distance by time, the conversion factor being a velocity, light or tectonic plates, the formalism is the same, a Lorentz group.
page 127: Ether: Materialization of the absolute space postulated by Newton. An early version of the space-time layer that now carries the wave function. What waves when light waves? What waves when the wave function waves?
page 129: My rest frame is my absolute space-time and I use the Lorentz group to transform your rest frame (absolute for you) to mine.
Network layers and the [re]normalization group. Renormalization group - Wikipedia
Page 135: Perpetual of atoms.
Each layer is the application of the layer beneath it.
page 163: '. . . the arrival of formalism propels the world toward a future of unlimited possibilities.' First documented by the formalism of Vantor's set theory.
page 164: 'There can be no doubt that the principles of quantum mechanics clash with common sense. We had better accept it up front rather than seek at all costs some artificial compromise.' Cannot agree. Quantum mechanics describes the nature and frequency of messages in
[page 105]
the universal network. We are natural inhabitants of all sorts of social and economic networks, so our common sense is acutely tuned to net work matters and it is but a short step from the eigenvalue equation and the Born rule to the behaviour of an ordinary communication networks like the internet or a family.
Omnès page 164 continued: Bur such a recognition should not be a pretext for ruling out common sense as worthless because we cannot do without it.
'But the logic of common sense cannot handle events taking place on the atomic scale. These events are governed by altogether different physics, a universal physics, more general and extensive than the one ruling the world that we can "see". Classical physics, the one familiar to our intuition, is only an extreme form that quantum mechanics adopts when applied at our scale.' No again. The mathematical theory of communication is both classical and common sensical and it applies to quantum sources, so we do not see "altogether different physics".
So Omnès wants 'to deduce common sense from quantum premises, including its limits—that is to demonstrate also under which conditions common sense is valid and what is its margin of error.' [We should not forget that our common sense evolved in the quantum world which we all inhabit]
page 165: 'After all, isn't logic the best beam there is for those who have lost their way>' Of course not, logic is useless without data, like a position fix.
Wednesday 23 August 2017
So Omnès page 168: Classical dynamics is deterministic, proven by the determinism of real arithmetic proven in turn by real analysis which sees arithmetic operations on the reals as arithmetic operations of infinite decimals which are assumed to be computable. What about incompleteness and incomputability?
[page 106]
So Omnès page 171: 'We must first explain to [an angel] what matter is. . . . the fundamental laws of nature, in particular those of quantum physics.' Is the wave function material or formal?
Velocity → momentum operator. Momentum operator - Wikipedia
page 172: 'The notion of "concrete" does not belong to pure theory." ? So what is concrete? Fully determined, all symmetries broken or instantiated, every detail fixed, a consistent existent that we can represent by a (possibly) transfinite ordinal, which can belong to pure theory.
'The statement of a property uniquely determines a certain mathematical object that completely characterizes it.' Quantum mechanics says that all the available information is encoded in the wave function, a superposition of frequencies that we understand to define s particular function through a superposition (Fourier integral?) Chaitin would say, however, that there can be no more information in a superposition than in the symbolic differential equation that defines it, suggesting that there is no information to be lost when the wave function 'collapses'. Fourier analysis - Wikipedia, Gregory J. Chaitin
Property - projector Measurement in quantum mechanics - Wikipedia
page 173: '. . . A is an operator, roughly equivalent to a computer program which transforms any given wave function &psi into another function Aψ.'
page 176: Non commutative operators introduce uncertainty.
page 178: 'Probabilities . . . lie at the very heat of the theory and their role goes beyond the mere description of chance.' True for all message sources.
page 179: Probabilities apply to observations, not wave function which are
[page 107]
indeterminate like spinning coins. Feynman, Leighton & Sands FLP III: Lecture 1: Quantum behaviour
Omnès page 186: '. . . begin by defining an object as a collection of wave function.' Wrong. It is a collection of observation. The wave functions are invisible until observed.
page 209: 'A rigorous theory must begin by specifying the attributes that make a given experimental device into a measuring instrument.' All that it has to do is confront the system to be measured with a concrete observable. The presence of physicists and philosophers is irrelevant. A measurement is a communication between two sources in the universal network. Everything can measure everything that speaks the same language. I sit here on the verandah enjoying the view and the sunshine, measuring aspects of the scene, the warmth, the gentle breeze, the bird sonf. My presence has some effect on all of this. It is measuring me, receiving messages from me [eg the birds keep away from me].
Zurek: Decoherence Wojciech H Zurek: Decoherence, Einselection, And The Existential Interpretation (The Rough Guide)
page 211: Modus ponens Modus ponens - Wikipedia
page 211: 'Every measuring experiment results in a single datum, in a tangible, unquestionable fact.' An element [which we interpret as the halting of a computation] of the fixed past yielded by an event [computation].
page 213: 'Every characteristic of [reality has] reappeared in its reconstruction by our theoretical model; every feature except one: the uniqueness of facts. Theory and reality agree on every aspect but for that single hiatus. . . . We seem to have reached a limit, some fundamental barrier that cannot be crossed. . . . During more than half a century, countless philosophers have reproached quantum physics for not explaining the existence of a unique set of events.
page 214: '. . . science's inability to account for the uniqueness of facts is not a flaw of some provisional theory; it is on the contrary, the glaring mark of an unprecedented triumph.' Trumplike rubbish.
[page 108]
By denying the collapse of the wave function, Omnès has painted himself into a corner where he has to explain a failure to describe the concrete world as a win. We can make sense of the collapse when we consider an event as the output of a source in the quantum network. I am also a source, with a vocabulary of some 100 000 words which are 'superposed' in my neural network. As I write I select words from this superposition to express my meaning but to a source blind to the meaning these selections look like random events and a communication engineer might count them, treating them as letters in a source alphabet and computing a source entropy. An atom behaves in a similar way. It is a source with a alphabet of transitions between different energy and momentum states of its electronic configuration and it listens and talks to its environment using these states. We examine their frequencies and categorize them as spectral lines, and we examine their frequencies of emission and list the weights of each line, enabling us to compute a source entropy for each species of atom.
So a big question for realism: why p = |ψ|2 [=ψψ*]? [maybe because a complete act of communication requires a message and a reply, represented by ψ and ψ*].
Omnès page 222: 'Both [momentum and position] are logically legitimate descriptions but they exclude each other. Thus one cannot speak of a real property.' ? Both tall and blonde are legitimate descriptions which exclude one another (they are orthogonal) but we use them all the time to describe people. At a maximum the difference between non-commuting operators is of the order of Planck's constant.
page 223: 'although the basic laws are quantum mechanical the properties and phenomena occurring in the macroscopic world can be stated classically.' ie in a source (like myself) the processing is quantum but the messages are classical, easily observed body language ranging from speech to scent.
page2 24: '. . . a significant difference between reality and truth is that the former is existential and wordless, whereas the concept of truth is perfectly controlled by logic.' No, everything talks. Logic is realized in real events.
[page 109]
Omnès page 238: '. . . the unbridgeable gap between theory and the real world, between thought and existence, or, to use our previous terms, between Logos and Realty.' This is rubbish, of course. Our theory is exceedigly effective, as we can see in the things engineers of all sorts can do, from sewage works to iphones to brain surgery to politics. The divine world is logical mind not continuous matter.
page 240: 'Science developed in opposition to metaphysics . . . ' More rubbish. Aristotle worked his way from physics through psychology to metaphysics, and that has been the path ever since.
Then '. . . I claim that science is presently mature enough to permit the revival of metaphysics.' Which never went away.
page 249: Principle - axioms. Laws are derived from principles. So parliament makes laws in the context of the principle of human symmetry.
Thursday 24 August 2017
Omnès seems to be a thorough Platonist and Christian: '. . . mathematics exists by itself, as the consistency and fecundity of the fragments already discovered by the human mind suggests.' Christians are obliged to downgrade the phenomena by the dogmatic requirement to believe the doctrine of the Eucharist which says that the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus is realy present in the bread and wine , although the consecration in no way changes their appearance, In the divine universe, god is present in everything. The modern version of god, the initial singularity is the fundamental physical layer of the universe and so every message passes through it. Is this more or less credible than the Omnès picture? Joseph Pohle (Catholic Encyclopedia): The Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist
Omnès page 274: 'Another difficulty, and an eventual source of considerable puzzlement has to do with the very notion of existence and how to grasp it.' To exist is to communicate. If it does not speak, we do not know it is there.
[page 110]
Omnès page 275: Like the human brain, the internet holds a lot of 'dirty' thoughts, the things the nuns and priests were trying to eradicate from our childish minds by drawing attention to them: "Bless me father, for I had bad thoughts," the unavoidable sins targeted by the thought police.
page 279: '. . . Everything becomes clear if Logos is a consistent element independent of Reality.' Back to God. But god is not independent of reality, it is reality. John got it: 'In the beginning was the word . . . and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.' (John 1) John 1: 1-14
'The separation of Logos and Reality thus appears both as the most appealing hypothesis and the one promising to be the most fruitful. Back to Aquinas, 5 ways to prove that god is not the world. Thomas Aquinas: The existence of God can be proved in five ways
We can measure distance in a network through time (travel time) and correlation. Events far away take longer to reach me and have much less influence on me that messages from my nearest and dearest.
Here I am in my Thoreauesque cabin in the country doing the minimum of labour necessary to maintain normal life while spending the rest of the time working on my theological fantasies and beginning to enjoy them as I slowly work through all the errors that were indoctrinated into me. To live is to have an answer to every [possible] error in the system [until the fatal one comes along].
Zurek - Decoherence . . . 2: 'My aim here is to sketch the "big picture", to relate recent progress on specific issues to the overall goals of the program. I shall therefore attempt to capture "the whole' (or at least part of it), but in broad brush strokes. Special attention will be paid to such issues as the implications of decoherence for the origin of quantum probabilities and the role of information processing in the emergence of 'objective existence'.
[page 111]
which significantly reduces or perhaps even eliminates the roles of the "collapse" of the state vector. Quantum decoherence - Wikipedia
Wc can mention two open issues right away. Both the formulation of the measurement problem and its resolution through appeal to decoherence require a Universe split into systems. Yet it is far from clear how one can define systems given an overall Hilbert space "of everything" and the total Hamiltonian. Moreover, while the paramount role of information has been recognised, I do not believe it has been, as yet, sufficiently thoroughly understood. Thus while what follows is perhaps the most complete discussion of the interpretation implied by decoherence, it is still only a report of partial progress.' Maybe the quantum network will sort this out.
Zurek page 4: '. . . the apparatus plays the role of a communication channel (memory) (i) through its ability to retain correlations with the measured system, but also (ii) by "broadasting" of these correlations into the environment which is the source of decoherence. Such broadcasting of quantum correlations makes them—and the observables involved in broadcasting—effectively classical.' Ie a message is a particle which has a lifetime, like me, a message from my birth to my death.
page 5: 'A defining characteristic of reality of a state is the possibility of finding out what it is and yet leaving it unperturbed. This criterion of "objective existence" is of course satisfied in classical physics.' I change you when I talk to you and I cannot find out what you are without talking to you. Same for fundamental particles [a communication is an entanglement which destroys [erases] the individuality [orthogonality] of the communicants].
What we are trying to do here is digitize physical communication. What this means is that we replace the infinite dimensional superposition represented in a complete complex Hilbert space with something simply binary. The clock on a computer emits something akin to a square wave with sharp leading and trailing edges and the clock signal is propagated through the machine to keep all the processes exactly in phase to within the margin of error which yields one loss of synchronization [coherence] event in something like 1018 events. In a primordial quantum system there is no fundamental measure of clock rate or energy, but we do know that conservation of energy is equivalent to conservation of frequency, and we imagine this conservation to be a local phenomenon occurring in its own inertial frame. Coupling between different frames is described approximately by Lorentz transformations and more generally by the diffeomorphic transformation of general relativity. Diffeomorphism - Wikipedia
A network is a model of the equations (processes) of physics that are networked to make the Universe go. We begin with the simplest situation, where the network is simply a power network with no modulation.
Diffeomorphism — gravitation, a closed network of flows — the hydrodynamics of field theory. We take this from continuous to digital by installing a pipe system to approximate the behaviour of the continuous hydrodynamics [the pipes follow the streamlines].
Friday 25 August 2017
Saturday 26 August 2017
The whole Universe and every part of it is divine body language, some embodying the reality that one must kill (directly or by proxy) to live, even if one is a vegetarian.
The big problem with quantum mechanics since the beginning has been the measurement problem. In a nutshell, how can a continuum break down to a discretum. Maybe the answer is that it not a continuum [in the first place]. To understand this we have to understand the Universe in terms of information processing rather than real numbers, in other words we turn digital. The observable world is a discretum, a population of discrete objects to which we can give names, coordinates and properties [behaviours]. Following that clue, we propose that the Universe is
[page 113]
digital to the core. In his book Omnès makes sharp distinction between Logos (which old timers call substance) and Reality, which is just the phenomena. This view is expresses by the idea in quantum field theory that the continuous invisible fields are the realty and the particles we observe are epiphenomena.
Things interact. The wind blows the trees, the birds talk to one another and so on. The holy grail of physics is to find out how this interaction works and pass the knowledge on to engineers to dream up ow ways to use the fixed propeties of the Universe to design things. We have followed this trail to an energy level of about 10TeV per particle and made mathematical models that work pretty well, but raise a lot of problems when the arithmetic [and algebra] of our models directs that we shall divide by zero or something very close to it.
All that we know about continuous and differentiable objects has been developed by mathematicians for perhaps 5000 years. From a physical point of view, the apogee of this work are the manifolds used by physics. A manifold is essentially a set of points addressed by real numbers. Descartes formalized this idea to 'rigid' Euclidean space and the idea has moved on to modelling the Universe as a system of diffeomorphisms that seem to work pretty well. But there are two huge stumbling blocks to this physical picture the cosmological constant problem an the collapse of the wave function. Stephen Weinberg
To deal with this problem, let us model the world as a computer network. . . . Fundamentally we are replacing the continuous wave function with a square wave which is simply on-off and not an infinite superposition of sine [complex] waves necessary to get a square wave in the Fourier representation of functions.
The basis of the energy wave function is a set of frequencies that
[page 114]
solve the energy equation ∂φ/∂t = Hφ.
Physics is normalized by Planck's constant and local energy, ie its alphabet of states is limited to ℵ0, and [because they have the same cardinal] we can establish a correspondence between this set of states and the set of Turing machines which has the cardinal of the set of finite strings of symbols. We have a hierarchy strictly finite, countably infinite, uncountably infinite (transfinite).
Topological deformations require a flow, as a doughnut flows into a cup. Topology - Wikipedia
Eigenvalues have plenty of spare entropy to be able to correspond to Turing machines since at first glance there are ℵ1 of them available [in an infinite dimension Hilbert space] to correspond to ℵ0 computers. What about the effect of the eigenvalue equation? We are looking for operators which do not change the direction of their eigenvectors, and since the information content of a state vector is coded in its direction, the information is not changed by the operation of the observable: it picks out stationary states. How many of them are there? [If we guess that stationary corresponds to computable, ℵ0].
By their fruits you shall know them. An operator, coded as a matrix, does something to the state vectors and we learn about the operator by what it does, which picks out as a basis in the observed system corresponding to its own basis.
Here we get to the pieces falling into place stage of the jigsaw. First came the easy edges, then the long slog to work out the middle and how we have only a limited number of different pieces and places to deal with.
We map state vectors to Turing machines and only those that remain fixed and produce a result are selected by the observable.
[page 115]
since the basis of the code used by the observable must match a basis possible in the observed system, so only those computations yield eigenvalues in a proportion decided by ?We cannot see dynamics [that is faster than our measuring device, eg at the movies]. Nothing can see dynamics because it is so simple it is not conscious. Only when two dynamic systems come into contact do they need to define themselves into a set of stationary states to give them time to communicate [the 'handshake'].
The problem we face is theological. Since the era of the most ancient scientific literature we have, god (everything the creator, etc) has had two incompatible features: first it is absolutely simple; and second it knows and controls everything. Knowing and controlling everything means communicating with everything, and how can a system with no structure at all control the immensely intricate structure of everything [it does not have the "requisite variety"]? In addtional theology this accepted as one of the mysteries of theology, a no go zone or region of [invincible] uncertainty in the theological model. This problem has not gone away in the light of modern science. Now we are faced with the problem of constructing the immensely complex Universe we inhabit with its initial state, the initial singularity which has all the properties of the classical god: eternity (no time); simplicity (no spatial structure); the creator, ie the source of the world; and so on. Ashby: An Introduction to Cybernetics
Keep gravitation revisited simple. Ie stick to short algorithms, leaving the actual concrete structure of the Universe, a giant look-up table, in the background, ie concentrating on the symmetries that form the layers of the universal onion whose invisible centre is the initial singularity [symmetry].
We keep the harmonic paradigm and digitize it by establishing stationary states like the lines of the atomic spectrum and so on. The transitions between lines are described by quantum field
[page 116]
theory but it is quantized by the distance between distinct states which is measured by the quantum of action, At its most abstract the transition between two states is a quantum of action and we model what actually happens with a network computation that serves to average all possible behaviour of the system via the law of large numbers to give us something like quantum field theory as we know it with all the need for renormalization digitized out of it (whatever this may mean).
Boundary conditions digitize the solutions to the wave functions which is why we put the Universe in a box to get tractable digital computation and allow thins to go to infinity. In the digital approach, the box is the set of computable functions each represented by a certain turing machine, ie a universal turing machine programmed (instantiated) in a particular way. String vibration - Wikipedia
Hunting for ideas is a waiting game. Did Archimedes spend a lot of time in the bath? Archimedes - Wikipedia
Zurek page 8: 'information transfers have no effect on classical states.' We can look without touching. In realty (not classical) every look is a touch, so inertial frames cannot truly observe one another and remain inertial except on the information free gravitational layer where geodesic deviation [although it is measured as an acceleration] leaves the relevant inertial frames inertial.
page 13: 'The subjective nature of quantum states is at the heart of the interpretational dilemmas of quantum theory.' ie it takes two to make a state: a state is in effect duples, φ and φ* which give a probability when multiplied |φ|2. Is there something here?
'it seems difficult to comprehend how quantum fuzziness could lead to the hard classical reality of our everyday experience.' ? Quantum mechanics
[page 117]
is very hard as the one second per 108 years clock shows What [are] not uncertain [are] the actual eigenvalue[s], but the actual outcome of an event, like the roll of a die: the outcome is a number from 1 to 6 but when it will come (in a fair game) is anybody's guess. Atomic clock - Wikipedia
Zurek page 13: 'In a closed quantum system it is impossible to "find out" what the state is. Asking question (choosing the to-be-measured observable) guarantees the answer (its eigenstate) will be consistent with the question posed' [ie the observed answers the question posed by the observer].
page 16: 'The interpretation based on the ideas of decoherence and einselection has not really been spelled out to date in any detail. I have made a few half-hearted attempts in this direction but, frankly, I was hoping to postpone this task, since the ultimate questions involve such "anthropic" attributes of the "observership" as "perception", "awareness", or "consciousness", which at present cannot be modelled with a desirable degree of rigor.' The existence of this problem for you seems to suggest that you are thinking of observers as scientists when it is clear that every one of the 10100 events per second in the visible Universe is identically a quantum act, observation or measurement. Einselection - Wikipedia
page 17: '. . . real neurons are coupled very strongly to their environment and certainly cannot exist in superposition." But we can have real superposition in a network in the sense that different states are stored at different locations in the network. All the words I know are effectively superposed in my mind.
'licentia physica theoretica' [theoretical physicist licence, cf poetic licence]
A measurement is a meeting or relation where two things are in contact Δτ = 0 [and become one as a superposition in the product of their individual spaces].
page 20: 'in a quantum universe information is physical — there is simply no information without representation.' Also true in classical universe
[page 118]
in that all information is classical, carried by durable messengers, particles are the angels of physics.
Zurek page 20: 'The very physical state of the observer, and thus his identity is a reflection of the information he has acquired [Aristotle knew this]. Hence the acquisition of information is not some abstract, physically insignificant act, but a cause of reshaping of the state of the observer,' For 'he' read 'it'.
page 22: '. . . one issue that has often been taken for granted is looming big as a foundation for the whole decoherence program. It is the question of what are the "systems" which play such a crucial role in all the discussions of the emergent classicality. . . . — we have at least tangible evidence of the objectivity of the existence of systems.' Let the network model of quantum mechanic loose on this. Tomorrow.
