FQXi FORUM
CATEGORY: Essay Contest
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TOPIC: The Epiontic Principle, Time and the Laws of Physics by Luigi Acerbi
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The voting deadline has been extended to January 1, 2009.
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Essay Abstract
In this short essay we postulate the "Epiontic Principle" (EP), a concept which underlies more or less explicitly many physical theories, and we study its implications, in particular for the nature of time. After a brief discussion about the distinction between temporal dimension and time evolution, we adopt the EP as a guideline in Gedankenexperiments in order to understand the inde finite and shifting essence of what it is commonly called "the past". Real experimental results -- analyzed here in accordance with the epiontic paradigm -- confirm our qualitative predictions. In a subsequent speculative section, the EP is applied to the understanding of temporal evolution and thus to the laws of physics. The essay terminates with some thoughts of a cosmological nature and on desirable future quantitative developments allowing to study the EP with the aid of toy-models: the epiontic foils.
Author Bio
Luigi Acerbi received a B.Sc. in physics (2005), a B.Sc. in computer science (2006), and he is currently finishing his Master's degree in theoretical physics at the University of Milan, Italy (Università di Milano-Bicocca). As a computer scientist, he has done research on the field of topological dynamics, studying cellular automata as discrete-time dynamical systems (to be published in Theoretical Computer Science). As a physicist, he is working towards his degree with a thesis on a computational model of reheating which adopts interacting scalar fields on a inflationary background.
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I wonder if the EP has something in common with 'refextivity'
described here
http://www.geocities.com/ecocorner/intelarea/gs1.html
as
I call the passive relationship the “cognitive function” and the active relationship the “participating function,” and the interaction between the two functions I call “reflexivity.” Reflexivity is, in effect, a two-way feedback mechanism in which reality helps shape the participants’ ....
Petr Frish
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Well, I think that the two concepts stem from a similar root.
In fact, John A. Wheeler pointed out that we may live in a "participatory universe" and that physics-observer-information are entangled in a strange loop (John Wheeler, Information, Physics, Quantum. The Search for Links).
The passage following the one you quoted states the same thing with almost the same words:
"... reality helps shape the participants’ thinking and the participants’ thinking helps shape reality in an unending process in which thinking and reality may come to approach each other but can never become identical..."
It seems to me that "reflexivity" can be described generally as a property of self-determining epistemic systems -- which is an epiontic feature indeed.
This is good news... maybe epiontic models could have applications beyond (meta)physics and deserve attention in any case.
Thanks for the interesting link!
L. Acerbi
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Dear Luigi,
Nice essay, interesting the idea of epiontic principle.
Best wishes,
Cristi Stoica
Flowing with a Frozen River
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