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Essay Abstract

The main mystery of quantum mechanics is contained in Wheeler's delayed choice experiment, which shows that the past is determined by our choice of what quantum property to observe. This gives the observer a participatory role in deciding the past history of the universe. Wheeler extended this participatory role to the emergence of the physical laws (law without law). Since what we know about the universe comes in yes/no answers to our interrogations, this led him to the idea of it from bit (which includes the participatory role of the observer as a key component). The yes/no answers to our observations (bit) should always be compatible with the existence of at least a possible reality – a global solution (it) of the Schrodinger equation. I argue that there is in fact an interplay between it and bit. The requirement of global consistency leads to apparently acausal and nonlocal behavior, explaining the weirdness of quantum phenomena. As an interpretation of Wheeler's it from bit and law without law, I discuss the possibility that the universe is mathematical, and that there is a "mother of all possible worlds" - named the Zero Axiom.

Author Bio

Cristi Stoica is a PhD student, specialized in differential geometry and mathematical physics. A draft of his PhD thesis, which is about singularities in general relativity, can be downloaded at http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.2231

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Cristi,

What a truly excellent essay! I will be very surprised and disappointed if you are not a winner. I may later argue a point or two but I simply want to congratulate you on a job well done.

With respect to Smolin's treatment of laws versus Wheeler's treatment, I think Smolin says it best that "If everything that is real is real in a moment, then the distinction between laws and states must be a relative one."

You've stated, "If one believes that there are things that are not included in the mathematical model of the universe, one should describe these things." That is sort of a 'trick question'. If something can be described in words, one can make a mathematical model of some sort. I agree with Smolin that "There are aspects of the real universe that will never be representable in mathematics."

Your Yin-Yang diagram is probably the best way the it/bit question can be answered!

A job well done.

Best,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on May. 15, 2013 @ 11:02 GMT

Dear Edwin,

Thank you for the warm welcome! I hope you will delight us again with an essay, as you did in the past. Interesting your remarks and the references to Smolin. It would be really something if there will ever be a proof either for your point about this, or for mine. Until then, I am happy there are different opinions.

Best wishes,

Cristi

Cristi,

What if you have axiom zero and axiom infinity? Wouldn't the tension "require" all "possible," ie. consistent, intermediate stages and this is where "laws" emerge?

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John Merryman replied on May. 15, 2013 @ 02:38 GMT

The "mother" and the "father" of all possibles.

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John Merryman replied on May. 15, 2013 @ 03:12 GMT

So energy tries radiating out to infinity, before flatlining to black, while structure tries collapsing to a point, but reaching a parabolic boil that shoots it out across the cosmos.

Is zero the point, or the flatline? Or both?

Is it the void?

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John Merryman replied on May. 15, 2013 @ 11:05 GMT

Cristi,

One further observation of relations;

Absolute, extant, infinite.

Order, complexity, chaos.

Past, present, future.

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Cristi,

Well done! This is a beautifully written piece, with whose premises and conclusions I mostly agree.*

There are only two points with which I would take issue:

1. "If we think that the physical solutions have reality, it becomes natural to admit that they have to behave well at infinity (otherwise they can't have physical reality)."

I can't see that this follows...

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Cristi,

Well done! This is a beautifully written piece, with whose premises and conclusions I mostly agree.*

There are only two points with which I would take issue:

1. "If we think that the physical solutions have reality, it becomes natural to admit that they have to behave well at infinity (otherwise they can't have physical reality)."

I can't see that this follows "naturally." What it means for physically real phenomena that have an effect, is that they are not in turn affected by physical conditions. If infinity is a physical condition, then well behaved solutions -- representing physical conditions -- drive the phenomena, and not the other way around; infinity can't be physically fundamental. This is what forced the conclusion in my previous essay that "the source of all information is a point at infinity." That is, only a topological model C* satisfies the bound of a physically real spacetime, by compactifying the complex plane into a sphere with one simple pole at infinity. Hawking back in the '80s explained imaginary time in terms of this 1-point, 2-dimension compactification by noting that one cannot go "north of the North Pole." In this same context, Wheeler reminds us that "the boundary of a boundary is zero." In other words, a walk of time over the unbounded manifold of C* (the simplest Riemann sphere) makes all information locally available as a finite set of infinite things. It's the finite set that's physically well behaved, not the mathematical solution at infinity.

2. "Zero is an axiom."

What does that mean? You seem to say that the Liar's paradox (Russell) is an "axiom." You call that logically consistent -- it isn't. We couldn't even do arithmetic unless zero is a number (with the accompanying axioms of succession and induction). If zero is an axiom, it isn't a number. For a set of axioms to be logically consistent, we cannot simply assume that everything follows from a single axiom. If it did, all numbers would be zero. The binary predicate ("is a member of") fundamentally implies a second set.

Tom

*(My previous essay "The Perfect First Question" was also based on Wheeler's 20 questions variation, and my upcoming essay expanding on that theme has a lot in common with yours.)

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on May. 15, 2013 @ 13:25 GMT

Dear Tom,

Thanks for reading my essay, and for the kind comments. You raise two points. I don't think that your comment to the first point contradicts what I said. You say "If infinity is a physical condition, then well behaved solutions -- representing physical conditions -- drive the phenomena, and not the other way around", I agree, and "the other way around" is not my position, although you make it sound like it is. My position is the "global consistency principle". As for the second point, you write between quotes "Zero is an axiom.", which is supposed to be quoted from my essay, but it is not. Also, you say that I call liar's paradox logically consistent, which I don't.

Best regards,

Cristi

Author Cristinel Stoica replied on May. 15, 2013 @ 13:39 GMT

I hope my reply to John Merryman's comment above yours may clarify what I meant by the Zero Axiom, and its relation with logical consistency: "Axiom Zero gives birth to each possible universe (because of the principle of explosion [...]), but it is not part of any of these universes, because this would contradict logical consistency."

Thomas Howard Ray replied on May. 15, 2013 @ 13:46 GMT

Hi Cristi,

Sure, I understand that your " ... position is the 'global consistency principle'." My own sentiments (and proofs) are with Einstein: "All physics is local." By making global consistency primary, you de facto subscribe to the physical reality of nonphysical measurement qualities as a boundary condition. Bell's theorem does the same, in fact. Global consistency, like...

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Thomas Howard Ray replied on May. 15, 2013 @ 13:52 GMT

Our posts crossed. I do understand that your possibility space is the space of all possible universes. However, to propose an "axiom zero" as a possibility and then to show that it is an impossibility makes axiom zero a member of the set of all possible universes. Thus, the liar's paradox. If you really mean to say that all universes are equally likely, then I agree.

Tom

(duplicated to place in correct thread. Will try to get duplicate post deleted.)

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Thomas Howard Ray replied on May. 15, 2013 @ 13:56 GMT

And you know what? -- it furthers occurs to me that each of those equally likely universes, by your reasoning, allows axiomatically that "zero is a number, and the successor of zero is a number." Very interesting!

Tom

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on May. 15, 2013 @ 13:58 GMT

Tom,

I am with Einstein more than you think or are. Physics is local and global, and there is no contradiction between these, at least not in the way I see it. Not all local solutions are realized, but only those which admit global extensions. So, global consistency indeed is primary, because it constrains local solutions, but both global and local consistency have to be true.

Best,

Cristi

Thomas Howard Ray replied on May. 15, 2013 @ 14:03 GMT

Cristi,

"So, global consistency indeed is primary, because it constrains local solutions, but both global and local consistency have to be true."

Okay, then, we agree in principle! (Now let's talk the additional degrees of freedom needed to make that work.)

Best,

Tom

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It is not about belief, dear Edwin Eugene. The information is real in the sense that there is outside the observer, even if not Perform observation.Information is, for example, number of particles. The universe is in itself, full of information, for the simple reason, that everything can be measured, counted, etc. are numbers, and the numbers are pure information.Therefore,So, for example, the Bekenstein bound is an upper limit on the entropy S, or information I, That can be contained Within a Given finite region of space Which has a finite amount of energy.

$I\leq\frac{2\pi RE}{\hbar c\ln2}$

The vacuum energy density is a pure numerical value, and independent, its value, the observation process, since the expansion of the universe itself, is conditioned to this numerical value.

I do not believe, observe, make theories to explain the observed phenomena, using an informational process of creating algorithms (equations) that give some outputs, and it then taste numerical information outputs of these equations, or algorithms, with the reality of the phenomenon observed physical, measured.All this is information, not subjective beliefs.If I make a theory, with which using an algorithm or routine (equations, etc.), get the measured value of pure number density of vacuum (0.6931 ...), that is objective and real, and it is information. Everything else is to juggle metalinguistic, which are fine for philologists, but does not help the physicists.

regards

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Edwin Eugene Klingman replied on May. 15, 2013 @ 19:53 GMT

Dear Angel,

I do not dispute the utility of the concept of information, but we do disagree upon the level of reality to attach to this concept.

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Angel Garces Doz replied on May. 15, 2013 @ 20:23 GMT

Ok;now I understand to exact their views.

"but we do disagree upon the level of reality to attach to this concept"

Yes, I totally agree that, that part of reality, or what we call reality as mental model, corresponding to algorithmic processes.As you well know, there are numbers, not algorithmically constructibles. You aims high: There is some physical phenomenon (unknown for now) that can not be computed algorithmically?, And therefore we can not speak of it in terms of what is known by orthodox science, and information. That's a great question. Maybe if there are physical "facts" that are not computable. And therefore speak of these "realities" in terms of information does not make sense, to be unplayable for any algorithm. This is another question, very different

regards

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I agree that "It from Bit" can't be determined by a quantum binary, or n-ary, algorithmic or axiomatic system. Wheeler talked in these regard to the "choice" we have in determining the configuration of physics or physical law as a participatory universe. He then said that one is unable to frame the laws of physics in a complete axiomatic framework because the acto of observation is self-reference.

My essay hits on this part, where I think "It from Bit" is not formally decidable. I think this is a good thing, for it means there is a new layer of physical principles waiting to be discovered --- or to think in the Wheeler sense maybe "chosen."

Cheers LC

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on May. 16, 2013 @ 06:25 GMT

Hi Lawrence,

Thank you for the visit! You made an interesting point regarding undecidability of it from bit. I partially finished the first reading of your essay, I will have to reread many parts of it carefully, because it is very dense!

Best regards,

Cristi

Lawrence B Crowell replied on May. 16, 2013 @ 15:09 GMT

I wrote something on my blog http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1625#post_74642 that goes into greater detail. Both of our essays touch on the Wheeler participatory universe conjecture.

Cheers LC

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Good essay! I didn't understand it all, but the last part about Axiom Zero and the creation of any possible universe via the principals of explosion and logical consistency resonated with me. Starting with a single state (Axiom Zero), one can create an infinite space of other states (other possible universes). If each individual state could be considered to be a location in a larger set of states, then an expanding space has been created. Kind of sounds like the Big Bang! I'm going to be writing something along this line in my essay, too.

Anyways, nice essay!

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on May. 16, 2013 @ 06:27 GMT

Hi Roger,

Thank you for the kind comments. You present a nice interpretation, and I look forward to see your essay!

Best regards,

Cristi

Cristi

The issue is very simple. Observation can have no effect on the physical circumstance, as that has already occurred. Furthermore, the physical interaction of observation which is the receipt of physical input (what happens subsequently being irrelevant because it is not physics) involves a physically existent representation of what occurred anyway. It is commonly known as light.

Once that is understood, then all the 'wierdness' can be seen for what it is, ie attempts to rationalise an incorrect base premise as to how physical existence occurs.

Paul

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on May. 16, 2013 @ 06:35 GMT

Paul,

Thank you for the explanations. I am glad you got over the 'weirdness', with this very simple classical picture. For me quantum mechanics is still full of mysteries, and the only way they could make more sense to me was to think them in terms of delayed initial conditions and global consistency.

Best regards,

Cristi

Anton Lorenz Vrba replied on May. 16, 2013 @ 12:04 GMT

Cristi, A well presented and logically thought out essay, unfortunately your figure 8 does not display properly in chrome or firefox (I have not tried IE) but once downloaded Adobe renders Fig 8 correctly. Maybe you should try and fix that and ask FQXi organizers to replace the file.

I concur fully with you, especially the paragraph "The Big Book of the Universe" and your statement that the universe is isomorphic to a mathematical structure. I takes quite some abstract and brave thinking to accept that conclusion; especially the implications that one thoughts , dreams, acquired knowledge, etc are just mathematics at work.

Next, I will read your PH.D. thesis and hoping to find equally brave statements.

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on May. 16, 2013 @ 13:10 GMT

Dear Anton,

Thank you for the nice comments, and for pointing out the problem with figure 8. I will try to fix it. I see you have an essay, and I look forward to reading it. I wish you success!

Best regards,

Cristi Stoica

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Christi, this is an exceptionally clear essay with some very interesting things to say.

You suggest that to be able to choose from different laws the universe needs to evolve. Why can't they just be chosen from the set of logical possibilities? Why the need to connect them in s temporal progression?

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on May. 16, 2013 @ 14:00 GMT

Dear Philip,

You are right in asking "You suggest that to be able to choose from different laws the universe needs to evolve. Why can't they just be chosen from the set of logical possibilities? Why the need to connect them in s temporal progression?"

My essay is centered on Wheeler, but I wanted also to bring something new. Wheeler advocated this kind of evolution of laws. Smolin, with his Cosmological natural selection, offered a solution, but to go to baby universes, you have to go through singularities (or at least to "bounce" them, as in LQC). So, this was an opportunity to offer another application of my approach to singularities. This was in the section "Evolving Laws", but later, in "From Chaos to Law", I say "any possible world appears, due to the principle of logical consistency". Hence, I don't actually think this needs evolving laws.

Now, back to your question "Why can't they just be chosen from the set of logical possibilities?".

I agree with you, they are just chosen from the set of logical possibilities, but this doesn't mean the choice can't evolve.

Thank you for the kind comment, and I can't wait to read your essay.

Best regards,

Cristi

Philip Gibbs replied on May. 16, 2013 @ 16:25 GMT

Thank you for that. I think you are wisely keeping your options open. Of course Smolin argues the case that evolution of physics is a necessity to get where we are. With evolution of life we can see roughly how a progression can start from very simple chemical life forms to the more complex animals and plants we are familiar with. If cosmic evolution requires baby universes from the beginning then the starting point is already very complex and selective. Simple universes would not have babies so how did things get going? This would be more a question for Wheeler or Smolin I suppose.

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on May. 16, 2013 @ 17:54 GMT

I fully agree. In fact, looking at what we know so far in fundamental physics, I don't see too much room for evolution of the laws. At most some constants that are reset at the next big bang, but how many constants really are obtained from symmetry breaking, and can be expected to be actually variable? Of course, if we want to save the idea of evolving laws, we can appeal to the string landscape, and imagine that, when passing in the baby universe, the Calabi-Yau manifold can change. But I don't know if this can go anywhere.

Hi Cristi,

Nice essay, easy enough to read that even I can understand it (I am not a physicist).

I agree with your global consistency principle, I have an example of how it could be implemented.

In my essay (Definetely It from Bit !) the Universe is a succession of 2D layers of information (like rings around an onion). We (and our surrounding world) are just information moving up the layers at the speed of light. In relation to each layer, the inner layers represent the past and the outer layers represent the future. Each layer can evolve separately but they must always form a "coherent" storyline. (there are as many "presents" as there are layers).

If I am correct, then the consecutive layers (ie: the complete information sphere) could be what you call "the solution (it) which combines consistently all the pieces of the puzzle (the yes/no bits at different points and moments of time)"

Cheers,

Patrick

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on May. 17, 2013 @ 15:42 GMT

Hi Patrick,

Interesting the onion layers idea. I look forward into reading your essay.

Thank you for the feedback. I made extra effort to reach a broader audience.

Best regards,

Cristi

Cristi,

I must take exception to your statement that "The main mystery of quantum mechanics is contained in Wheeler's delayed choice experiment."

Last September, in the discussion of my essay for the previous FQXI essay contest, I pointed out that the delayed choice experiment, was not merely badly designed, but badly conceived. The telescopes block the path from a slit just as surely as if the slit had been closed. It thereby precludes any possibility for this apparatus to produce an "interference pattern".

It is not the case that "the past is determined by our choice", rather it is "the path is determined by our choice".

Consequently, Wheeler threw the baby out with the bath water.

Rob McEachern

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Thomas Howard Ray replied on May. 17, 2013 @ 15:50 GMT

Robert,

The path decribes a history, does it not?

Tom

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on May. 17, 2013 @ 16:07 GMT

Dear Robert,

I think you have a keen eye for telescopes and optics. Delayed choice experiments, not at galactic scale, but at lab scale, were performed, and the delay was ensured. The experiment confirmed the theoretical prediction.

Wheeler proposes the delayed choice experiment with the Mach-Zehnder interferometer, and also the one with a telescope and galaxy. I think that the one with telescope and galaxy is an exaggeration, done for explanatory reason. Something like Brian Greene's Quantum Cafe, or Gamow's books with Mr. Tompkins, where quantum or relativistic phenomena are "zoomed" at a level which makes them relevant to our daily experience. Or like Bohr's quantum devices, with exaggerated mechanical parts.

I am not sure that Wheeler really tried to design a workable experiment involving telescope and light from other galaxies. One big issue I think it is the lack of control of the source of light. By looking at Wheeler's drawing of the experimental setup, in Quantum Theory and Measurement, p. 139, we see that the device is more like Bohr's drawings of devices. But even so, I don't see in that picture how the telescope would block the path from a slit. Perhaps you analyzed a different picture than the one I found.

Thanks for the comment, and keep questioning everything! When we stop questioning, science stops.

Cristi

Robert H McEachern replied on May. 18, 2013 @ 01:30 GMT

Christi,

The statement "The experiment confirmed the theoretical prediction." is incorrect.

The experiment confirmed that the interference pattern vanishes. But it failed to confirm that the cause for the vanishing is due to the cause that was predicted. It was not.

The situation is analogous to preventing two cars from interfering (colliding) with each other at an intersection. Delaying one car will prevent the collision, but so will completely eliminating one car.

In effect, the experiment simply eliminates one travel path, via a spatial filter. The delayed choice is irrelevant - if there is no path, there can never be any interference, regardless of any delayed choice.

The telescope I was referring to is not an astronomical one. It is part of the laboratory interferometer, and used to "choose" the slit.

Rob McEachern

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Cristi,

I hope this link will work: Demystifying the Delayed Choice Experiments by B Gaasbeek (2010), arXiv:1007.3977v1 [quant-ph] 22 Jul 2010. I am curious.

Eckard

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on May. 17, 2013 @ 17:11 GMT

It works perfectly, thanks!

Stefan Weckbach replied on May. 18, 2013 @ 11:02 GMT

Hi Eckhard,

thanks for the link, the paper is interesting for me too.

I read it and i think it is yet too technical for the average reader to understand. At least i didn't understand what is the "true" reason for the interference pattern to disappear in the case the screen is moved out of the experimental setup (Appendix A: Wheeler's thoughts).

Can anybody explain it to me in more intuitive words, with destructive and constructive interference instead of conditional probabilities and all that stuff. Means, that stuff is highly abstract but i want to know how one can put it in terms of physical processes (be it with or without time ordering).

Thanks in advance,

Stefan

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Eckard Blumschein replied on May. 26, 2013 @ 07:52 GMT

Stefan,

I am sorry, I didn't deal with the matter. My intention was to hopefully clarify whether Wheelers mysterious claims can be explained at all without the rather disappointing result that they are based on mistakes or at best on beliefs.

I was tempted to blame Wheeler for phantasmagoria unless he was not well known for his earlier contributions to nuclear fission and atomic bombs. Of course, the strange theories he got then famous for go back to earlier speculative work e.g. by Parmenides, Einstein, Schwarzschild, Bohr, Rosen, and others.

Eckard

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Dear Christi,

your essay was an interesting read. I think your realization that ultimately, all we know of the world are relations is very deep, and is in a certain sense at the foundation of my own thinking, as well. However, I am less certain about the 'book containing every truth': this seems to me to run into trouble with the Kochen-Specker theorem (and related ones). In particular, if such a book existed, it would imply the existence of a global probability distribution such that its marginals give the outcomes for every possible set of observations; but this is known to be at variance with quantum mechanics. Put differently, while classically we can identify every object with a list of properties, of propositions true about this object, in quantum mechanics, no such list can exist. Any theory for which such a list exists necessarily obeys Bell's inequalities (and Kochen-Specker and Leggett-Garg inequalities, which are from this point of view just variations on a theme). (I think this connection was probably first worked out by Fine.)

Nevertheless, your big book seems to be very much a 'hot idea' in philosophy at the moment, after having been somewhat maligned after the 'noble failure' of Carnap's "Der Logische Aufbau der Welt"; three books have appeared in the past year dealing in various ways with the possibility of deriving all truths about the universe from some 'compact class' of basic truths: David Chalmers' "Constructing the World" (which is the only one I've read... well, I should say 'almost read'), Theodore Siders' "Writing the Book of the World", and John Heil's "The Universe as we Find It", so you're certainly at the bleeding edge in that respect! (Just in case you're interested.)

In any case, as a fellow PhD student in physics, I wanted to emphasize one point you made, though only somewhat implicitly, and only tangentially related to the main thrust of your essay: that of the necessity for courage in the scientific endeavour. Building on the Kuhnian model of scientific revolution, one might say that the ordinary, stick-to-the-mainstream method of science fails to produce the most important new ideas: it only clusters around local maxima, so to speak. For true innovation, one must sometimes leap beyond what seems reasonable, or even sensible within the current paradigm. Of course, many, if not most, such leaps will lead to nothing, which is why one needs courage to make them---a courage which John Wheeler certainly possessed, as you have shown in your essay.

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on May. 18, 2013 @ 21:38 GMT

Dear Jochen,

It's a pleasure to read such deep and well thought comments. Thank you for the attention given to my essay. I look forward to reading yours asap.

You said "I am less certain about the 'book containing every truth': this seems to me to run into trouble with the Kochen-Specker theorem (and related ones)." Any theorem has a domain of applicability. The Kochen-Specker and co. theorems are a great toolbox, with which I fully agree, and which rule out a certain class of attempts to describe reality. It would rule out the book containing every truth, if you would want it for instance to contain information about what the spin is along each direction, which will give definite results no matter how we will choose three orthogonal directions along which we measure the squared components of the spin. But I make no such claim. If one of the truths is what the squared components are, this should be accompanied by the three directions along which we measure. "Put differently, while classically we can identify every object with a list of properties, of propositions true about this object, in quantum mechanics, no such list can exist." I agree, but it makes no sense to have such a list in the book. I don't claim that the book will contain both position and momentum of a particle. This makes sense only classically. If you want it to contain both, you will run into the trouble you mention, but there is no need to do this. Why asking the state vector to be simultaneously eigenstate of incompatible observables? It is like asking the insect to be both a fly and a dragonfly, at the same time. To refer to the delayed choice experiment of Wheeler, if you want the book to contain information whether which-way or both-ways, it also has to contain information about whether the second beam splitter will be in place or not. The book should contain proposition about elements of reality, only together with the context. I tried to capture and explain this using the concepts of "delayed initial conditions" and "global consistency principle". Conditions at various points in spacetime should be mutually consistent, even if they are one in the future of the other, even if they are separated and can't exchange information without violating the speed of light.

Thank you for the references you gave, I am interested in principle. With "the book", I just wanted to make the point of how mathematical our universe can be. I am not sure I want to develop more this idea, but no matter if I will or not, I am sure the references you gave me will be very useful.

Best regards,

Cristi

Paul Reed replied on May. 19, 2013 @ 05:06 GMT

Jochen

"while classically we can identify every object with a list of properties"

But we cannot. There is no object, physically. That is a conception at a much higher level than how reality occurs, based on certain superficial physical attributes. Which is why the classical/intuitive view has been denigrated, because it has not been followed through to its proper logical...

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Jochen Szangolies replied on May. 19, 2013 @ 10:24 GMT

Christi, yes, I think I missed the importance of your 'global consistency principle'. Indeed, if you intend for the big book to contain truths that include their proper (measurement) context, then you avoid the difficulties with Kochen-Specker etc.

I think I see two ways how this might work: one is a kind of 'superdeterminism', where what measurements are performed is fixed for any given instance; the other amounts to the book containing truths that are conditional on the performed measurements. It seems to me that you advocate the former strategy: the world is, in a sense, given by an action principle; it is like the famous catenary problem, wholly determined by initial and final conditions. The latter strategy is essentially what I've argued for: the book only contains relative facts, of the form 'if such-and-such a measurement is performed, the outcome is this-and-that', which then sort of co-exist peacefully. So maybe our perspectives are not that far from one another!

Also, somewhat amusingly, both solutions have a distinctly Leibnizian character: yours pertaining to his notion of the 'best of all possible worlds', while mine relates to his overall relational philosophy.

Paul, in a classical world, you can certainly always draw up a list of properties, and then clarify by that what you mean when you talk about 'an object'. What happens at the foundational level doesn't really have a bearing on this.

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Paul Reed replied on May. 19, 2013 @ 11:45 GMT

Jochen

"Paul, in a classical world, you can certainly always draw up a list of properties, and then clarify by that what you mean when you talk about 'an object'. What happens at the foundational level doesn't really have a bearing on this"

Well, apart from the fact that I said the opposite is true, ie there is no 'object', why is it that the 'classical' view does not deal, or could...

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Lawrence B Crowell replied on May. 21, 2013 @ 00:06 GMT

This "book" can be thought of in a number of ways. The book might be a set of tables, where these tables contain the states under some set of projector operators. This particular book though is incomplete, for there exist other books of the same form, but the books are not consistent with each other because the probabilities violate Bell inequalities.

We may look at these books as propositions that are connected by a disjoint "OR" operation. In that setting the books become elements in systems of relationships. Within that sense these relationships describe a set of geodesics that have a measure over Hilbert space.

Cheers LC

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Hi Cristi,

In your essay you have touched the roots of science. Excellent and interesting. I have read it twice and I would like to comment barely every sentence but I don’t want to torment you so much. So let me please to leave only a few comments of my choice.

1. You find compelling the idea that our universe is mathematical in the sense of relations. This is widely accepted...

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Hi Cristi,

In your essay you have touched the roots of science. Excellent and interesting. I have read it twice and I would like to comment barely every sentence but I don’t want to torment you so much. So let me please to leave only a few comments of my choice.

1. You find compelling the idea that our universe is mathematical in the sense of relations. This is widely accepted that only waves or rather wavepackets give an information about the universe, the information which is accessible to observers (e.g. gamma rays, sound waves etc.). Then let us assume that Axiom Zero sounds like that: primordial conformally flat spacetime is the ‘fabric’ of everything. Everything could be derived from the spacetime and everything could vanish in it. Assuming then that a wave is only a spacetime dynamic deformation (also Clifford’s and Wheeler’s concepts) then the mother of all possible worlds could be our conformally flat spacetime (details in references to my essay concerning relations between it, bit and reality). Consequently the observer is also a wavepacket (deformed spacetime) so its participatory role is his own wavepacket’s interference with another wavepackets. If we assumed that any spacetime deformation is unlimited (to some extent it deforms the entire spacetime e.g. in Gaussian distribution mode, due to its elastic and homeomorphism properties) than we could say that this is our participation without a need for many worlds interpretation!

The geometry is a part of mathematics and is completely about relations. But does the spacetime need a mathematics to exist? Or only we (observers) need a communication tool? This tool helps us to replicate our genes successfully (Darwin’s survival of the fittest). I have touched the spacetime / geometry issue truly because my memes (information) try to replicate.

I know that this is only your essay’s intro and not the point where you have noticed that Wheeler and his students wanted to obtain the mass and the electromagnetic field as effects of the topology of spacetime. They failed. But I have to comment shortly. Their problem was they were chasing geon solutions to the vacuum Einstein field equation (partially made by Brill and Hartle in 60’s). A major issue regarding geon was whether it was stable and it was not a quantum-mechanical entity. This wrong approach has buried the very idea that the mass and fields can be effects of the topology of spacetime. In order to combine statistical nature of QM with geometrodynamics (any kind) we need the general law of survival of the stable. Quanta are just that stable wavepackets so we are able to perceive them.

2. Regarding your version of the delayed choice experiment the most interesting from my point of view is what is going on at the mirror A. I have proposed a simple spin experiment to find out and at the same time to make my concept falsifiable (details in references to my essay).

3. ‘…it seems very plausible that there may be a (possibly infinite) collection of propositions which contains all the truths about the universe. In this case, we have a theory (of everything). To the theory we can associate a model, in the sense of model theory.’

Such a model would contain propositions that are computable and deterministic. But if the universe is SOC system? The universe evolution (naturally evolving self-organized critical system) is non-computable and non-deterministic.

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on May. 19, 2013 @ 12:54 GMT

Dear Jacek,

Thank you for the careful reading and the comments. I find interesting the way you see the first axiom of the universe. Later, you ask "The geometry is a part of mathematics and is completely about relations. But does the spacetime need a mathematics to exist?" I am not sure how they can be separated, so that spacetime can exist without math. I don't understand what you mean. Say math was never discovered, and somehow all humans would have evolved, as people who know to survive, develop various crafts, and maybe arts, but no math at all. I find very possible, and if there is such a civilization in the universe, I think one should not consider them inferior, just because of that. But, I don't think they can do without math, in the sense that math is implicit anywhere. A spacetime without math, I can't picture. Our spacetime doesn't seem to be without math. Perhaps the subsequent comment you make, about the failure of geometrodynamics, explains what you meant. Maybe the final word is not yet said. Some things they tried worked, but not all, who knows what will be. About the book of true propositions, it will contain every true, including the ones you refer to as not computable or not deterministic. I don't claim that the book is a finite set of axioms, and the consequences that can be proven by finite length proofs. It contains everything. I hope figure 8 in my essay clarifies this. Good observation, it gave me the opportunity to explain better!

Best regards,

Cristi

Jacek Safuta replied on May. 19, 2013 @ 13:55 GMT

Dear Cristi,

You refer to "...does the spacetime need a mathematics to exist?" I am not sure how they can be separated, so that spacetime can exist without math…

I will try to explain: the spacetime can be defined only as a mathematical entity created by observers (Platonic) but it is not necessary. It can be defined as a purely physical entity (real) that does not need observers. As you see the approach to spacetime can be dual: one mathematical and one physical (Einstein also attributed an elasticity property to the spacetime regarding it as physically existing entity but not the ether). I don’t know if my view is clear. It is a lot of language intricacies and philosophy involved in the issue. It is very hard and maybe impossible to stay independent from our language and culture notions.

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John Merryman replied on May. 19, 2013 @ 18:26 GMT

Jacek,

If I may offer up a point about time, ask yourself the question of whether it makes more sense to say the earth exists along a fourth dimension, from yesterday to tomorrow, or that tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates?

As I see it, the problem is that we experience time as a sequence of events, much as we still see the sun moving across the sky, from east to west, yet like the underlaying reality of the earth spinning west to east, it is the events moving through the physical actuality of what is present, as it is constantly changing, not the present moving along some extra-dimensional vector.

Because physics treats time as only a measure of duration, it re-enforces this sequential perception, rather than revealing its cause. Duration is not an external vector to the point of the present, but is the state of the present between events.

As effect of action, time would be similar to temperature, much as frequency and amplitude are features of waves.

So spacetime as causal, is no more real than giant cosmic gearwheels spinning in the heavens, as explanation for the mathematical effectiveness of epicycles.

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Paul Reed replied on May. 20, 2013 @ 03:39 GMT

John

The present becomes the next present due to alteration, and ceases (because it has altered)in doing so. There is only ever a present. There is no existent tomorrow or yesterday, or more precisely preceding or succeeding physically existent state. The 'fourth dimension' is not a spatial dimension, it an aspect of sequence, ie the rate at which the turnover of presents in the sequence occurs. We calibrate it (aka timing) by comparing rates of change and identifying difference. Physcal existence is a purely spatial phenomenon, though it has more than 3 spatial dimensions.

Paul

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John Merryman replied on May. 20, 2013 @ 15:15 GMT

Paul,

We agree on that. The disagreement is on how it comes about. You seem to see it as fundamentally discrete events and I see it as how we discretely perceive a dynamically continuous process.

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Paul Reed replied on May. 21, 2013 @ 04:53 GMT

John

No, we do not agree, because you immediately dispute the concept of discreteness in your next sentence. To which the reaction is:

-how can physical existence be continuous, since it obviously involves difference?

-how can our perception of what is occurring affect it, physically, since it has already occurred in order for us to then perceive it?

Paul

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john Merryman replied on May. 21, 2013 @ 10:00 GMT

Paul,

We do agree there is no physical existent blocktime, which given the extent this is foundational to a causal geometry of spacetime, is a big step. Where we disagree is the nature of the process. You seem to see it as a series of distinct presents, while I see it as what is present is energetic and thus constantly changing. Since it is what exists that is the constant, not the forms it takes, then it is not really the present moving along some vector, be it physically real, as in blocktime, or a sequence of distinct events, as you propose, but that since this state is constantly changing, it is these forms that come and go, ie. the events going future to past. My favorite example being that it is not the earth traveling some fourth dimension from yesterday to tomorrow, but tomorrow becoming yesterday because the earth rotates.

Now since our actions are every bit as real as the insensate activity occurring around us, they are part of what forms these events, that are constantly receding into the past. On the other hand, yes, if we think of time as a sequence of events and we exist at one point on this line, we cannot go back and change the past, nor reach out and affect the future. It is only when time is an emergent effect of action, do our actions have effect.

Now this is Cristi's thread, so if you wish to continue, go to yours, or mine, otherwise I will reply any further at mine.

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Dear Cristinel

I enjoyed going through your engaging essay - every topic you chose was interesting, pertinent, beautifully explained and illustrated and thought-provoking. As a mathematician you should know how fertile and precocious the field is - so many different ways to express the same situation. Combine that with the cleverness and imagination of a Feynman or a Wheeler and you get truly mind-boggling choices in how to represent the Universe. Unfortunately It=It and one feels that the simpler a model is the more probably it is right - a single universe vs. many - one history instead of multiple ones etc, local causality vs. probability.

The delayed-choice beam-splitter experiment is brilliant. Sadly it has been now made meaningless after Eric Reiter's experiments, backed by solid theoretical and historical analysis of the issues involved, with beam-splitters showing that light-quanta do not 'choose' one path or another, but as waves (not point photons) are detected by both detectors simultaneously. Reiter reported about this in his 2012 fqxi essay and on his website unquantum.net . How such an important experimental challenge demolishing the inherent probability in Nature (the Born Rule) can be so neglected by the physics community is beyond me.

With best wishes, Vladimir

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on May. 22, 2013 @ 07:28 GMT

Dear Vladimir,

Thank you for your kind comments. There are some points which I probably should have made clearer. For instance, when I speak about delayed initial conditions and global consistency, I don't need to advocate MWI, although I don't reject it either. About Wheeler's delayed-choice beam-splitter experiment, I happen to know that it was confirmed by experiments. I agree that photons are waves: in QM they are, in the first place, solutions to Schrodinger's equation. When you measure positions, they become for an instant very localized, but still they are waves. I hope this eliminates some confusions. I didn't have the chance to read your essay yet.

Best wishes,

Cristi

Dear Cristi

If I along with many debunkers of QM weirdness are right, Wheeler's delayed choice test being confirmed by experiment does not mean much. Here is a quick-and dirty explanation of how I see the scenario:

Forget point photons, wave collapse and all that. Einstein's 'photon' concept is the font of all the QM weirdness he himself railed against! Compton himself gave a wave explanation for his effect as Reiter explained on unquantum.net - all proving Planck's loading theory in which an atom releases light suddenly but absorbs it slowly until a threshold is reached and the (hv) quantum released.

In other words the light wave passes simultaneously through both slits and creates the wave interference pattern beyond them. In the famous faint-light case when the pattern emerges dot by dot on the long-exposed film the timing of the dot flashes in the film is an artifact of the sensing atoms individually and randomly reaching their energy threshold and has nothing to do with how the light went through the slits!

When the film is removed and two telescopes watch the slits no simultaneous sensing is recorded because of the energies involved. Reiter has shown how a single gamma ray is simultaneously recorded in two detectors.

I have touched on these issues in my 'Fix Physics' paper, and the scenario above plays out nicely in the universal node lattice of my Beautiful Universe theory.

These papers can be read on my website . I am now trying to simulate my theory to show how things like matter formation, gravity, quantum probability etc. all emerge locally linearly and causally. Big job small capability!

Best wishes

Vladimir

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Paul Reed replied on May. 23, 2013 @ 05:12 GMT

Vladimir

This explanation might be correct, but the danger is that there is then an argument over alternatives.

Whereas in fact:

-QM is an invalid theory because its base presumptions are contrary to the way in which physical existence must occur

-there is no way in which any form of experimentation can identify the 'bottom line', the degree of alteration and duration involved is too vanishingly small of itself, let alone that, in terms of observation, we receive a representation of it. So the effect known as light would have to be capable of capturing and transmitting accurately and comprehensively exactly what occurred. We are kidding ourselves. Not that there is any problem with experimenting, but we must understand what is possible and then interpret the results accordingly.

Paul

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on May. 23, 2013 @ 05:18 GMT

Dear Vladimir,

Good luck then with this. One should never stop challenging the accepted science. I expect that at this time it is early for this simpler theory you develop to make predictions like EPR. But, there are simpler and more direct tests. For example, if atoms don't absorb photons in quantized units, then we expect that they will also emit photons in a continuous spectrum. But as we know, the atomic spectra are not continuous.

Best wishes,

Cristi

Vladimir F. Tamari replied on May. 23, 2013 @ 11:39 GMT

Cristi

Your point about emission in quanta need not cotradict the loading theory. After all it was Planck himself who proposed it and fought Einstein's point photon concept all the way!

Obviously I am not an expert on this but I really think it is worth studying the material Reiter has collected because it will clear a lot of questions and open new lines of thought.

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Cristi: your argument that from the Zero Axiom and the principle of logical consistency is puzzling in puzzling. The Zero Axiom is just the axiom that there. Is at least one contradictory proposition, namely itself. But of course there isn't one such proposition, there are infinitely many. There are round squares is another self-contradictory proposition. There is a tortoise that is not a tortoise is another. I could go on. So the Zero Axiom is really a triviality. All you need to say is that there exist contradictions.

This brings me to a more fundamental problem: which is how you try to use the Zero Axiom and principle of logical consistency to argue for a mother of all possible worlds. Although you *say* that any proposition can be derived from a contradiction, and thus that the *existence* of an entire mother of all worlds can be derived from it, this peculiar feature of the law of logical consistence is only an implication of classical logic: one that has long struck many logicians as absolutely unjustifiable -- which is why there is such a thing as Intuitionistic logic which does *not* permit the derivation of any proposition from a contradiction. Thus, if Intuitionistic logic is correct, your argument fails. It's fine if you want to say, "Well, I'm only interested in classical logic", but unfortunately that's not an argument. It just assumes that classical logic is correct, despite its having a bizarre implication that Intuitionists reasonably deny. Unless you can give an argument for classical over Intuitionistic logic, it's not clear why anyone should accept your argument.

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Cristi: your argument that from the Zero Axiom and the principle of logical consistency is puzzling in puzzling. The Zero Axiom is just the axiom that there. Is at least one contradictory proposition, namely itself. But of course there isn't one such proposition, there are infinitely many. There are round squares is another self-contradictory proposition. There is a tortoise that is not a tortoise is another. I could go on. So the Zero Axiom is really a triviality. All you need to say is that there exist contradictions.

This brings me to a more fundamental problem: which is how you try to use the Zero Axiom and principle of logical consistency to argue for a mother of all possible worlds. Although you *say* that any proposition can be derived from a contradiction, and thus that the *existence* of an entire mother of all worlds can be derived from it, this peculiar feature of the law of logical consistence is only an implication of classical logic: one that has long struck many logicians as absolutely unjustifiable -- which is why there is such a thing as Intuitionistic logic which does *not* permit the derivation of any proposition from a contradiction (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuitionistic_logic). If Intuitionistic logic is more defensible than classical logic (as I and many other people think it is), your argument fails. It's fine if you want to say, "Well, I'm only interested in classical logic", but unfortunately that's not an argument. It just assumes that classical logic is correct, despite its having a bizarre implication that Intuitionists reasonably deny. Unless you can give an argument for classical over Intuitionistic logic, it's not clear why anyone should accept your argument.

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on May. 24, 2013 @ 03:40 GMT

Marcus,

What I said about Zero Axiom is not part of classical logic, because classical logic doesn't admit contradiction. The principle of logical consistency may be part of classical logic, but contradiction can't. Why the only alternatives considered should be the ones known at that time? In fact, paraconsistent logics are more suited to admit contradiction and avoid the principle of explosion, so why referring to intuitionistic logic and not to paraconsistent logics?

"If intuitionistic logic is more defensible than classical logic (as I and many other people think it is), your argument fails." Even if classical logic is less defensible than intuitionistic one, for an argument to fail, it has to be proven false, it is not enough to be less defensible. For example, it is more defensible, from many known examples, that the Goldbach conjecture is true, but this doesn't count as a proof, and doesn't exclude the possibility to be false.

Best regards,

Cristi

Author Cristinel Stoica replied on May. 24, 2013 @ 04:05 GMT

Marcus,

While from Axiom Zero we can obtain the possible worlds by using the principle of logic consistency, Axiom Zero itself stays outside of these universes. So, the internal logic of the universe may very well be intuitionistic. There are two different levels, which should not be confounded, that of the chaos caused by Axiom Zero, and that of the internal logic of each universe.

Best regards,

Cristi

Paul Reed replied on May. 24, 2013 @ 05:07 GMT

Cristi

The underlying point here is about context. We can only consider existence as manifest to us. Nothing more, because we cannot know more. There is always the possibility of alternatives, if A there is always the possibility of not-A, but these are irrelevant for science. Always watch for an argument which presumes these alternatives.

Paul

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Hi Cristinel,

Looking at Wheeler's delayed choice experiment, do you get the sense that there are real wave-functions that are being created (by opening the slit) and collapsed (by closing the slit), such that the waves-functions appear/vanish faster than the speed of light? In other words, wave-functions are the mathematical "bit", but they also exist as the "it", and are not restricted by the speed of light.

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Has anyone thought of toggling between particle and wave (particle-wave duality) using the Wheeler delayed choice experiment for use in FTL signalling? In other words, opening/closing the second slit creates/destroys the second wave-function. The second wave-function is what is interfering with the first wave-function and causing the interference pattern.

Creating/destroying wave-functions can be done to transmit, not information, but patterns, faster than light. On the receivng end, you need a way to determine (a) is it a particle pattern = 1 or (b) is it a wave-pattern = 0.

There is no reason why you can't place the photon detector a distance of several light hours away. Then, you open and close the second slit to transmit a digital code: 1010 0110...

If delayed choice is true, then the wave-particle-wave-particle pattern should be transmitted instantaneously (faster than light).

Anyone?

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Jason Wolfe replied on May. 24, 2013 @ 03:11 GMT

Cristinel or anyone! Doesn't Wheeler's Delyed Choice suggest that you can toggle on/off an interfering wave (like a light switch); only you're turning of/off/toggling a wave-function that can produce an wave/particle pattern as an observable, even after the photons have passed the slits. That's why it's called "delayed choice". It implies that you can produce an observable faster than the speed of light.

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on May. 24, 2013 @ 03:52 GMT

Hi Jason,

If we think that the waves were there, and then our last moment choice affected them, it seems like they change instantaneously. But one can't prove that they were there, and they changed as a result of our last minute choice of what to observe. If we try to measure them to see where they are, and we find them there, the interference is destroyed, no matter what we do later. In other words, once we find them in a place, we can't make them rearrange by choosing to observe interference in the last moment. So we can't use this to transmit FTL signals. Like in the case of entanglement (they are faces of the same phenomenon), it is not known a way to send faster than light signals using this.

Best regards,

Ovidiu

Jason Wolfe replied on May. 24, 2013 @ 05:16 GMT

Hi Cristinel,

I'm trying to follow you. I could take a laser and shine it on two slits, and the light waves emerging from the slits will produce interference patters. But if I cover one slit, then the interference pattern disappears. I can do this experiment one photon at a time. In principle, I could open and close the second slit in some binary code fashion such that someone at the back of the wall could look at the pattern of (interference pattern),(particle pattern) and know that I'm trying to send a message SOS (for example).

Now I'm trying to understand how the Wheeler delayed choice experiment works. I still think there is a wave-function involved in the geometry somehow. Sorry, I gotta go. I'm just trying to understand how this works.

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Paul Reed replied on May. 24, 2013 @ 16:33 GMT

Cristi

"and then our last moment choice affected them"

Leaving aside what was there, just assume something for the sake of this point. How does observation/measurement/whatever affect that physical circumstance? It must have already occurred, otherwise you cannot observe, etc, it. Apart from the fact that you do not observe the something anyway, you receive a photon based representation of it, eg light (which is not affected either), and the process of subsequent processing of what is received is not a physical process , as it involves the conversion of physical input to a perception of that, not a physical output.

Paul

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on May. 24, 2013 @ 19:22 GMT

Hi Jason,

Sorry for being too brief, I am attending a conference which gives me no time for other activities. I hope I will be able to give a more detailed answer in a few days. Earlier in this thread, Eckard gave the link to a more pedagogical explanation of the delayed choice experiment, maybe it can help you. The only way I could make sense of quantum experiments of this kind, is by considering that the wavefunction is real indeed, but in a way which depends on the experimental setup. Delayed choice experiments delay the experimental setup as much as possible in the future, and this makes the wavefunction to behave as if it anticipates the future. There is an experiment, you can read about it in Proposal for a quantum delayed-choice experiment, in which the choice is delayed an arbitrary time after the results of the experiments were already collected. This makes even less sense if we ignore QM, but it is predicted by QM. It has been tested by 5 independent teams, in different implementations.

Best regards,

Cristi

Jason Mark Wolfe replied on May. 25, 2013 @ 02:04 GMT

Hi Crist,

While reading the article, the particle-wave duality reminded me of something I learned in biology. Predators (unlike prey) have two eyes facing forward to give a sense of depth perception. As it pertains to quantum waves, the idea is that one "eye" looks at the real part, the other "eye" looks at the imaginary part, and as we all know, the phase = arctan (real/imaginary). I'm not sure if that analogy is accurate or not. I guess the "brain" would be the observer, the scientist trying to figure out what the two eyes (real & imaginary) are saying.

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on May. 25, 2013 @ 17:45 GMT

Hi Jason,

I found some links that may help 1, 2.

Best regards,

Cristi

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Hello Cristinel,

Enjoyable essay. I have two questions for you.

1. Using this weekend to catch up on backlog of essays I have marked to read. Yours shows a keen interest in the topic and more importantly sticks to the scope of the subject under discourse. I also visited your blog on same topic.

If as you say, "...the universe comes in yes/no answers to

our...

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jun. 1, 2013 @ 12:25 GMT

Hi Akinbo,

Thanks for reading and commenting.

1. "what question would you like to ask the universe if you are given just a single question to ask?"

Nice question, but you realize that if one would really be in that position, one would better spend very long time to choose the question. And life is too short to spend it preparing a question which we may never be in position to...

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Hi Akinbo,

Thanks for reading and commenting.

1. "what question would you like to ask the universe if you are given just a single question to ask?"

Nice question, but you realize that if one would really be in that position, one would better spend very long time to choose the question. And life is too short to spend it preparing a question which we may never be in position to answer. At this time I don't think I know which question is optimal to ask. Some may think that it worth wasting the single shot with a question like "Is there God?". But I don't think this will have much impact, because people can very easily adjust the new data to their prior beliefs. And, let's face it, a single bit, no matter what question would you ask, would not suffice, since additional information may turn the situation unexpectedly. Especially since our concepts may differ from the fundamental concepts of the universe. Think for example of a question whether light is 'classical wave' or 'point particle'.

"2. You are obviously a fan of Wheeler ..."

Why do you think I would agree with all Wheeler said? Why such strong words like "fan" and "disciple"? You are right that Wheeler initially, in geometrodynamics, wanted to explain everything from geometry and topology, and later from bit. I will try to explain what I think he thought about this, but this doesn't mean that I think the same.

In "John Wheeler - Information, Physics, Quantum The Search for Links (1989)", he mentioned "four no's", and the third was "no continuum", which apparently is at odds with his original geometrodynamics views. But he also mentioned "five clues", and the first one was "the boundary of a boundary is zero" (which he used for example in "charge without charge"). So, he believed that the world is not a continuum, but it obeys a principle originated from topology. There is no big contradiction between these, given that the "no boundary proposal" appears in simplicial homology, which is discrete. Of course, it appears also in homology, cohomology, Stokes' theorem, etc., but maybe all these can be reduced somehow to simplicial homology (you may know even of a research program of simplicial quantum gravity).

About the "fan" thing, let me tell you a secret. During my attempts to understand the universe, I had several ideas, and I found that some of them are very closed to Wheeler's. One was the idea to find some conditions the curvature has to satisfy, to be able to obtain from it the electromagnetic tensor, and hopefully other fields which compose the "wood" part of Einstein's equations. After many months of researching the subject, I found that this was first done by Rainich, and later rediscovered by Misner and Wheeler. For this, see Geometry of gravitation and electromagnetism, by L. Witten, and chapter 9 from Gravitation: An Introduction to Current Research, ed. L. Witten, and section 5.3 from Spinors and Space-time: Spinor and twistor methods in space-time geometry, R Penrose, W Rindler - 1986. Another one was a way to understand QM, which consists in the fact that initial conditions are selected at measurement, but apply to the past, and I found that this was very close to Wheeler's delayed choice experiment. Maybe the difference is that he sticks to the "bit", empty of the need of an "it", while I stick with the "it" too, and this is how I think the relation between geometry and "bit" is, as opposed to Wheeler's, which I described earlier. So, if I studied Wheeler, was because I found many relations between his views and mine. But there are important differences in our views, and I hoped my essay showed this. Being conscious of this, I believe that anyone who apparently has similar views to another person of whom I've heard, may in fact have unique and very distinct views from that person. On the other hand, it seems to be very common to judge other people by yes/no questions (like the one you asked me if I would ask Schrodinger's cat), or to use dichotomous classifications. So, to both of your questions, the answer is that what you can learn from a bit, is just a bit.

Best,

Cristi Stoica

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Akinbo Ojo replied on Jun. 2, 2013 @ 15:19 GMT

Hello Christi,

Thanks for reply. No offence meant by 'fan' or 'disciple'...

Yes, life is short but a question that must be answered Yes/No and must come before , "does God exist?" is "does the universe exist?". It is when this is answered Yes, that you then follow up with whether God exists.

Similarly, with Schrodinger's cat, before asking whether it is dead/alive, the question as Wheeler says that will be at the "very bottom" before asking this is, "Does Schrodinger's cat exist?", then if answered Yes (1), you can then ask whether it is dead (0) or alive (1).

To Leibniz, he attributed 1 to God and 0 to 'nothing', but essentially as Barbour says in his FQXi essay, bits 1 and 0 MUST stand for something very concrete and fundamental.

I am grateful for those references. I will surely look them up.

Happy to be your acquaintance (or is it your disciple) online... :)

Best regards,

Akinbo

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jun. 2, 2013 @ 17:07 GMT

Hi Akinbo,

I'm pleased to meet you, too.

Best regards,

Cristi Stoica

Christi,

Beautifully written essay. You take the counter case to my own, which is refreshing, and argue it very well, I certainly hope and expect you'll be in the top few this year.

I hope you'll read mine and comment on the counter arguments about mathematics, and also the delayed choice statistical findings. I propose the experimental evidence, found in two different ways, of the quantum eraser case can de explained without delayed choice by using a different starting assumption to Wheeler.

I won't repeat it here, but I propose that using and correlating 'individual' entangled particles with time separation in the EPR case will give access to the additional information that exists to prove Von Neumann's thesis for a more consistent QM. i hope we can discuss this if you manage to read the essay.

Very well done for yours. I wish my arguments was as clearly presented.

Best of luck

Peter

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jun. 3, 2013 @ 18:48 GMT

Hi Peter,

Thank you for your kind comments. It seems we look at the same phenomena, and try to make sense of them by opposite approaches, which is good. I look forward to reading your essay.

Best regards,

Cristi

Hi Christi,

It was refreshing to read your very well written essay. And I think the construct with Axiom Zero was very elegant, but we still need to find the logically consistent subset that matches our observations don't we? Which luckily further narrows down the subset.

Could I ask you the favor to read and question the logic in my essay, where I try to explore possible subsets? I wrote it to get constructive feedback but many comments seems to trail of with themes that are not really a part of it. (And I already apologize for it to be substantially lesser well written than yours - and for advertising it here.)

Thanks and best regards

Kjetil

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jun. 5, 2013 @ 03:52 GMT

Hi Kjetil,

Thank you for the comments. You say "but we still need to find the logically consistent subset that matches our observations don't we?". Of course, this is true. I look forward to read your essay.

Best regards,

Cristi

Hi Cristinel,

I like the illustration of the spiderweb for catching particles and spiderweb for catching waves. Rings very true. Also the use of the delayed choice experiment is always welcome. I was going to go down that route myself (no pun intended)!

Well done!

Antony

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jun. 5, 2013 @ 03:56 GMT

Hi Antony,

Yes, I hoped that the spiderweb metaphor captures the measurement problem in very simple terms. I am glad you liked it, and thank you for the comment.

Best regards,

Cristi

Antony Ryan replied on Jun. 23, 2013 @ 23:44 GMT

Forgot to mention that I liked axiom zero and also that you suggest the Universe is mathematical in nature, which sits well with my essay. I'd be delighted if you could find the time to look at my essay, which also relies on observation and attempts to link the Fibonacci sequence with reality around Black Holes by utilising information exchange.

Kind regards,

Antony

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Dear Cristi,

a very good essay with a great overview about Wheeler's ideas. I agree completely. Your global consistency principle reminds me on my topological condistions. So, our approaches should be related, see my essay.

Your whole ideas have a strong touch of mathematical logic, like topos theory. In particular Axiom Zero looks like the usual contradictions used in the proof of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

More later after rereading your essay.

Torsten

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jun. 5, 2013 @ 08:21 GMT

Dear Torsten,

Thank you reading and commenting. I just finished your excellent essay, on your program of obtaining physics from the exotic smooth structures and topology, which I find very much in the spirit of "it from bit". Congratulations!

Cristi Stoica

Dear Cristi, yet to study your essay in depth, I was impressed by Axiom Zero and your creativity.

It reminded me of an axiom that I've played with for many years (copy attached).

With best regards,

Gordon

attachments: Axiom_.pdf

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jun. 11, 2013 @ 05:45 GMT

Dear Gordon,

Thank you for sharing with me your writing about your axiom, and for the kind comments.

Best wishes,

Cristi Stoica

Dear Cristi,

This is a very well written essay and I had to go back to Wheeler 'law without law' writings to fully appreciate it. I also found 'We have clues, clues most of all in the writings of Bohr, but no answer'. At least I am confident in this view and I think that quantum contextuality is a concept close to Wheeler's view but may be not as radical as the 'law without law' dogma.

What is your opinion? You may be interested in my own essay on this topic

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1789

Michel

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jun. 16, 2013 @ 11:09 GMT

Dear Michel,

Sorry for the delay in answering, I am on vacation and I am able to check the messages and answer very rarely. I look forward to reading your essay, and I will return with a more detailed answer.

Best regards,

Cristi

Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jun. 25, 2013 @ 08:16 GMT

Dear Michel,

You said "At least I am confident in this view and I think that quantum contextuality is a concept close to Wheeler's view but may be not as radical as the 'law without law' dogma. What is your opinion?"

I think my position is close to yours. I think that what the delayed choice experiment exhibits is contextuality, and one cannot directly infer "it from bit" and "law without law", which indeed are too radical. That's why I emphasize the interplay between information and ontology. I express this by the ideas of delayed choice initial conditions and global consistency.

I read your essay and I like it very much.

Best regards,

Cristi

Dear Cristi

Unfortunately, your essay is too large for self-service capabilities of my computer, but I agree with "axiom Zero ".

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1802

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jun. 18, 2013 @ 11:18 GMT

Hi,

Thank you for letting me know about the size of my file. Next week, when I'll be back home, I will try to upload a smaller file for you.

Best regards,

Cristi

Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jun. 25, 2013 @ 04:22 GMT

Hi,

I attach the smaller sized version of my pdf file.

Best regards,

Cristi

attachments: taoofitandbitsmallersize.pdf

Dear Cristi,

You offer another excellent essay food for inspiration. Because I am convinced that we follow - more or less - the same way seeing into Nature allow me to pose few suggestions as interpretation between our views.

You propose the law of no law and the zero axiom. They are both right although could go a long way forward if they are combined.

The low of no law is related to two independent factors. First the position and state of observer (e.g. variety of "constants" in relation to the Universe's age) and second the real or virtual reality the law is applied into. According to the latter differentiation, the law acts in exactly the opposite manner and not just alterably (e.g. impulsive or repulsive gravity). This is related to zero axiom in the sense that going to elementary level examination, the difference is expressed by opposition (+ or -) in Nature. This differs from the notion of existence or not, that implies to 0 or 1 for a bit. No existence is the existence of two or more (2n) opposite existents, n of them in certain state and the rest n in the opposite one. This leads also to the unlimited division (of no existence...).

Good luck,

ioannis h., narsep

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jun. 24, 2013 @ 12:52 GMT

Dear Ioannis,

Thank you for reading and commenting. Sorry for answering with a delay, I am travelling, with no computer and Internet. You make interesting observations.

Best regards,

Cristi

Hi Christi,

I really enjoyed reading your essay, it is one I printed out.

"The Big Book of the Universe" remids me of "The library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges. You mention that this book contains "every" truth, but what with the not true ? There is a lot in our universe that we see as true but it may be untrue. That is why I created so called "Total Simultaneity", where every probable, unprobable, possible , impossible (for us) universe "IS", however I agree that I cannot describe this "environment" with words or formula's (because they are causal and TS is non-causal).

In my essay : "THE QUEST FOR THE PRIMAL SEQUENCE" I try to go deeper in the ocean of "reality", but I feel like a grain of salt so I melt before I can reach any depth.(http://belurmath.org/gospel/chapter03.htm thank you Don Limuti). I hope dear Christi that you can spare some time to read and rate it.

Congrats with the high score.

Wilhelmus

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jun. 25, 2013 @ 04:26 GMT

Dear Wilhelmus ,

Interesting comparison with Borges's "The library of Babel", and also the link you gave. Good luck with exploring the ocean of reality, and I am looking forward to hear more about your TS!

Best regards,

Cristi

Hello, Christinel,

I was interested, as many others, in your approach to Wheeler. I am on the other side, as you will see if you read my essay, but would like to question you on a couple of things, if I may: what is the basis for saying that the universe asks us only questions with yes-no answers? Many of the questions I get asked in life have much more complex answers. Also, regarding the Tao as a model of It-Bit: the discussion of the Tao often refers not only to yang and yin, but to their conjunction (or join). How do you take this into account?

Best regards,

Joseph Brenner

P.S. My logic derives from that of Stéphane Lupasco. If this name means something to you, we have a further basis for discussion. JEB

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jun. 25, 2013 @ 04:30 GMT

Dear Joseph Brenner,

Thank you for the comments. You consider that you are on the other side, but I can't see what this side is, given that I don't think I am on one side or another. Probably I will figure out your side from your essay. Anyway, I often take a neutral position and find myself interpreted as being "on the other side". When asked questions like "it from bit, or bit from it", I try to find a viewpoint that keeps the best from both. My habit of taking the position of going beyond dichotomies attracted me some years ago to read Stefan Lupascu's "Logique et contradiction" and "L'expérience microphysique et la pensée humaine".

You ask "what is the basis for saying that the universe asks us only questions with yes-no answers?"

What I actually said is that we ask questions to the universe, and the answers are yes/no:

"what we know about the universe comes in yes/no answers to our interrogations"

By interrogating the universe I meant perform observations and experiments. While the questions we have are more complex than those requiring yes/no answer, to get an answer from the universe, one has to frame them as yes/no questions. Of course, one can measure a position, and we will get a value of say x plus/minus an error, but this answer is just a more complex combination of yes/no answers: we never get the precise value of a continuous parameter, just an interval obtained by dividing the set of possible values.

"regarding the Tao as a model of It-Bit: the discussion of the Tao often refers not only to yang and yin, but to their conjunction (or join). How do you take this into account?"

This is precisely what I did in my essay, in which I argue that there is in fact an interplay between 'it' and 'bit'.

Best regards,

Cristi

Dear Cristinel,

I have down loaded your essay and soon post my comments on it. Mean while, please, go through my essay and post your comments.

Regards and good luck in the contest.

Sreenath BN.

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1827

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jun. 25, 2013 @ 04:23 GMT

Dear Sreenath BN,

I am looking forward.

Best regards,

Cristi Stoica

Sreenath B N replied on Jun. 29, 2013 @ 01:00 GMT

Cristinel,

Thanks for your kind comments. I will shortly post my comments on your essay.

Best wishes,

Sreenath

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Sreenath B N replied on Jun. 29, 2013 @ 07:20 GMT

Dear Cristinel,

I congratulate you on your well written essay in which you have clearly pointed out the defects prevailing in Wheeler’s views stemming from his delayed choice experiment.

But, your interpretation of Zero Axiom, I feel, is not right. Because you have said that according to Zero Axiom, the proposition p ‘and’ its negation –p is always true; that is in symbols...

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Dear Ioannis, Wilhelmus, Joseph Brenner, Sreenath,

Thank you for reading and commenting. Sorry for answering with a delay, I am travelling, with no computer and Internet. You make interesting observations.I will reply soon.

Best regards,

Cristi

Send to all of you

THE ADDITIONAL ARTICLES AND A SMALL TEST FOR MUTUAL BENEFIT

To change the atmosphere "abstract" of the competition and to demonstrate for the real preeminent possibility of the Absolute theory as well as to clarify the issues I mentioned in the essay and to avoid duplicate questions after receiving the opinion of you , I will add a reply to you :

1 . THE...

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Dear

Thank you for presenting your nice essay. I saw the abstract and will post my comments soon.

So you can produce material from your thinking. . . .

I am requesting you to go through my essay also. And I take this opportunity to say, to come to reality and base your arguments on experimental results.

I failed mainly because I worked against the main stream. The...

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jun. 28, 2013 @ 04:24 GMT

Dear snp

Thank you for visiting, and for sharing with me your thoughts.

You wrote

"So you can produce material from your thinking. . . ."

If by "material" you mean this essay, then you are right. If by "material" you refer to matter, then this is far from what I said, as I hope you will see if you will read my essay.

Best regards,

Cristi

Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta replied on Jun. 28, 2013 @ 17:34 GMT

You are Correct Cristi,

Thank you for such a nice discussion. I also mean to say one can not produce matter from thinking.

That's what I also said...

Best wishes for contest..

Best

=snp

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Hello Cristi,

Reading your essay was greatly enjoyed. When my essay posts; you will see there is broad agreement on the major points. However; my offering is philosophical and non-technical, while yours says some of the same things with precision. An excellent offering overall. I'll probably have more to say later.

All the Best,

Jonathan

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Jonathan J. Dickau replied on Jun. 30, 2013 @ 01:26 GMT

Hello again,

I wanted to thank you for emphasizing in your essay that It from Bit comes out of the Participatory Universe idea, as a kind of outgrowth of the measurement process. This is something I emphasize the importance of in my own essay, but I did not fully grasp that some of the perspective I recommend was part of Wheeler's original conception of It from Bit Physics.

I think too many assume incorrectly that Wheeler was merely re-stating the digital or computing universe concept, when what he had in mind was probably a little different. I thank you for pointing out the historical relevance of Wheeler's work, and the caliber of his more successful students. Invariably; breaking new ground requires bold thinking, and JAW was certainly a champion of that.

Have Fun,

Jonathan

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jun. 30, 2013 @ 04:43 GMT

Dear Jonathan,

I want to thank you for reading and commenting my essay. Indeed, too often some ideas propagate in a distorted or misunderstood form, and few have time to go to the source and check with careful consideration. I guess the problem is that there are so many interesting things to do and read in life. This competition is a good opportunity to go back and (re)read some of Wheeler's works. I am glad if I could shed a little more light on the subject. I am looking forward for your essay.

Best regards,

Cristi Stoica

Hi Cristi,

If particles, particle properties (its) are both cause and effect of their interactions, of the exchange of information, of bits, then you cannot have one without the other. If particles, particle properties (its) only exist, are expressed and preserved in their interactions, in the exchange of bits, then the bits are no more fundamental than the 'its' so you cannot have one...

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Hi Cristi,

If particles, particle properties (its) are both cause and effect of their interactions, of the exchange of information, of bits, then you cannot have one without the other. If particles, particle properties (its) only exist, are expressed and preserved in their interactions, in the exchange of bits, then the bits are no more fundamental than the 'its' so you cannot have one without the other.

The validity of the delayed choice experiment, whether or not you affect ''the'' past with an experiment depends on whether causality is a scientific proposition -which in my essay I argue it is not. If we understand something only if we can explain it as the effect of some cause and understand this cause only if we can explain it as the effect of a preceding cause and the chain of cause-and-effect either goes on ad infinitum or ends/starts with some primordial cause or event which, as it cannot be explained as the result from a preceding event, cannot be understood by definition, then causality ultimately cannot explain anything. If particles create, cause each other, then they explain each other in a circular way: here we can take any element of an explanation, start from any link of the chain of cause and effect to explain the next link and so on, to follow the circle back to the assumption we started with –which this time is explained by the foregoing reasoning. If we have to discard causality as it one way or the other implies that the universe has a primordial cause, that is, that it has been created by some outside intervention, then this has consequences for the interpretation of c, the 'speed' of light, and hence for what we mean with ''the'' past.

If there would be only a single charged particle in the entire universe, then it wouldn't be able to express its charge in interactions. Since it in that case it cannot be charged itself, charge, or any property, for that matter, must be something which is shared by particles, something which only exists, is expressed and preserved within their interactions. Similarly, in the seemingly innocuous assumption of Big Bang Cosmology (BBC) that we can regard the universe as an ordinary object which has particular properties as a whole, an object which changes in its entirety in time, we assume that there's something outside of it the universe interacts with, to which it owes its properties: that it has been created by some outside interference. The idea of causality, that cause precedes effect, only would make sense if we could determine where it is earlier and later, what precedes what in an absolute sense, if we could look from outside the universe in, which BBC, in the concept of cosmic time, wants to make us believe is justified even though we cannot actually step outside of it. To regard it as an object we may imagine to observe from without only would be justified if particles only would be the source, and not also the product of their interactions. The problem of the concept of cosmic time is that states that the universe lives in a time realm not of its own making: as in a Big Bang Universe (BBU) it is the same cosmic time everywhere (ignoring the effects of gravitational fields on the pace of clocks), here it takes light time to move, so here the speed of light indeed must be conceived of as the (finite) velocity of light.

In contrast, if a universe which creates itself out of nothing, without any outside intervention has to obey the conservation law according to which what comes out of nothing has to add to nothing, so as everything inside of it, including space and time has to cancel, it has no physical reality as a whole, doesn't exist as 'seen' from without, so to say, so unlike a BBU, a Self-Creating Universe (SCU) does not live in a time realm not of its own making. It doesn't make any sense to make statements about the content or state of a SCU from an imaginary observation post outside of it. Since a SCU contains and produces all time within, here an (inside) observer sees clocks running slower as they are more distant even when at rest relative to the observer, so here it is not the same time everywhere: the concept of cosmic time has no significance in a SCU whatsoever. As a result, here a photon bridges any spacetime distance (emphasis on 'time') in no time at all. As in a SCU every observer, no matter when he lives or where he looks from sees clocks run slower as they are more distant, here it doesn't even make sense to ask what precedes what, where it is earlier and where it is later in an absolute sense: in a SCU everything is relative. As a result, the observer doesn't see a distant galaxy as it was in a distant past, in ''the'' past, but as it is at present, to him, never mind that the galaxy looks different to a near observer. The problem of the concept of ''the'' past is that it presupposes the existence of an objectively observable reality at the origin of our observations, that is, that it is scientifically legitimate to imagine to look at the universe from without, which, as said, only would be justified if particles only would be the source of forces, interactions, and not also their product.

To be continued in the next post.

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So the delayed experiment doesn't change the past, nor can it be seen as ''switching in the last moment the web with another kind, while the insect is still heading toward the web'': if with ''insect'' we mean a photon, then it arrives at the web the moment the web is 'switched' on.

If atom A emits a photon which is absorbed by B, a transmission which changes the state of both atoms (and hence affects all particles within their interaction horizons), then A 'sees' B change at the time it emits the photon, as soon as A changes itself so sees a slightly changed world, whereas B 'sees' A change at the time it absorbs the photon, as it changes itself and hence the world it observes. That is, unless we believe that B, after absorbing the photon sends back a message to confirm the receipt of the photon, a thank-you-note informing A that it can, as of this moment, the receipt of the note, start to see B in its new state. While BBC assumes that the emission of the photon by A precedes its absorption by B in cosmic time, in a SCU both A and B are equally right about the time of the transmission, in which case its transmission must be instantaneous. The fact that we cannot experimentally determine whether c must be conceived of as a (finite) velocity of light or as a property of spacetime (a number which says how many kilometer pace distance correspond to one second time distance), combined with the fact that an instantaneous action-at-a-distance would solve most if not all riddles of quantum mechanics like entanglement, the EPR paradox and the double-slit experiment should at least give pause for thought.

Regards, Anton

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jun. 30, 2013 @ 05:23 GMT

Dear Anton,

I appreciate you posted here such interesting comments, which present a critical view on causality. I think causality has its roots more in our daily experience, and in classical mechanics. This is so rooted in our minds. Theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, were so difficult to understand, hence were initially resisted, mostly because of our preconceptions about causality. Wheeler's delayed choice experiment was intended to show that causality is not what it used to be, so to speak. This doesn't mean that delayed choice experiment shows or claims to show that we can change the past, this occurs only because we assume that the past was in a state, which was then modified, as in the grandfather paradox. "No phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon."

Evolution equations are local, and the solutions exhibit local causality, which seems to be violated by quantum mechanics. I proposed that the "global consistency principle" explains this, by constraining local causality so that, globally, there is no conflict. So, global consistency comes first, and local causality later. Local causality is just an illusion of an observer who perceives time as flowing. In the block universe, in which time is just the fourth dimension, as in relativity, global consistency is natural, and local causality emerges only when you go to a dynamical description, in terms of a flowing time. When you tell a 4d story, things look natural, but when you tell it as a 3d story evolving in time, causality becomes manifest, and then appears to be broken by quantum nonlocality and delayed chocie experiments, and we conclude that there are paradoxes. But this is an illusion.

Best regards,

Cristi

I'll summarize here.

There are several points of strong agreement between your essay and my own (yet to be posted), which figure into my current line of research. To enumerate...

There is an interplay between 'it from bit' and 'bit from it' roles at work.

There is a realistic middle ground which global consistency assures.

The deep structure of Math is unavoidably influential on natural law in Physics.

Of course; the second point may be true largely because regularities in Math existing outside our spacetime conceptions rule when there is nobody looking, nor any form to influence. What seems not to be grasped is that rather than imposing a strait jacket which dictates a single outcome deterministically, the deep structure of Mathematics assures that there will be sufficient degrees of freedom for realistic outcomes to emerge.

Recent forays have examined projective geometry as the determiner of object/observer relations, and of course this ultimately leads to an explicit connection with the octonions. Does Math like that predate our discovery thereof? I think it's reasonable to assert that; in some way, all realistic possibilities arise from the deep inner structure of Math.

Regards,

Jonathan

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Jonathan J. Dickau replied on Jun. 30, 2013 @ 17:16 GMT

Already something more..

Not feeling like I said enough, I'll mention that part of what disagrees with me - about the common conception of 'It from Bit' - is the sense that either/or choices are enough to determine anything. Wheeler was pretty crafty, with his variation on the 20 questions theme, and it's interesting to see how this introduces a kind of telescoping element that later gets reduced down, but allows a flexibility of interim definitions. This allows the process of determination to be playful. I really like that aspect of the story.

But this description allowing ranges rather than values is fundamentally different from what's normally employed, and is instead more constructivist, heuristic, or lateral thinking oriented. The idea of considering all possible trajectories from A to B requires a non-verbal approach and encourages one to suspend beliefs, in favor of ideas. Something to ponder.

Have Fun,

Jonathan

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jul. 1, 2013 @ 04:18 GMT

Dear Jonathan,

I enjoyed reading your latest comments too, and it seems to agree at many points indeed. You made some deep remarks, and emphasize correctly the role of Math and lateral thinking. I look forward to reading your forthcoming essay.

Best regards,

Cristi

Dear Cristinel Stoica

You did a great job, I found your essay very enlightening and well structured. I agree in many points with you. What I could notice is that you open several topics and I'm afraid they cannot be addressed in a small essay. In particular, what drew my attention was your discussion of the mathematical universe due to Tegmark since I have also discussed a bit about it in my essay. I do agree that maths are logical relations and that finding the right mathematical structures that describe the observed data is relevant to quantify and model nature, however, what "worries" me is that from mathematical structures one cannot extract intuitive and tangible explanations of the phenomenology. This is the problem that we have, for instance, with quantum mechanics. The theory has been written in a mathematical language such that most people are uncertain about whether the theory is telling something about reality or it's just a prediction machine.

From my view, the formulation of physical theories in terms of pure math (without baggage as Tegmark put it) can only give mathematical (or logical) "explanations" of the world but not descriptions of physical phenomena in the intuitive language that we all humans understand. This is in part what I discuss in my essay. I hope you have the opportunity to read it and leave some comments, I'd appreciate it.

Best regards

Israel

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jul. 1, 2013 @ 05:32 GMT

Dear Israel,

I appreciate you reading and commenting my essay. I am happy about our points of agreements.

"what "worries" me is that from mathematical structures one cannot extract intuitive and tangible explanations of the phenomenology. This is the problem that we have, for instance, with quantum mechanics."

I agree with you that quantum mechanics should be supplemented with something. Its formalism ignores anything except outcomes of quantum measurements. But the world in which we live is also general relativistic, there is also gravity. Having a deeper understand of QM (and GR for that matter) would be helpful in trying to unify them. But ignoring anything but outcomes, by applying "shut up and calculate", would not allow us to go beyond these problems. Those saying that we should "shut up and calculate", claim indeed that QM is complete, because mathematics works and makes the predictions. But if we want to supplement this description, it doesn't mean that what we add cannot be mathematical. In fact, all attempts to extend quantum mechanics or to add content to it are based on mathematics (think at GRW, de Broglie-Bohm, TSV, trace dynamics, etc). The fact that the mathematical description of a phenomenon at a moment of time is not enough, it is not necessarily due to the limitations of mathematics, but of our understanding.

"the formulation of physical theories in terms of pure math (without baggage as Tegmark put it) can only give mathematical (or logical) "explanations" of the world but not descriptions of physical phenomena in the intuitive language that we all humans understand."

I am not sure I understand why would be like this. For instance, 1/2 spin, which is elementary and simple, as compared to other things in physics, is well described mathematically, but how to explain it to the "lay man"? One way is to explain the math, this will take time and patience from both sides, but it has chances to succeed. The way without math, no matter how many years will take, will not lead to any progress at all in explaining such a simple thing as spin.

To put it as a joke, I am not sure why God would have choosen physical laws with the purpose that they can be explained in plain language to the lay men.

On the other hand, I think that human brained is a tool for understanding mathematics. Maybe the need for survival made our ancestors search for patterns, make abstractions, make deductions. Anyway, no matter what the reason is, people can learn math. I dare to say that most of us can do this, although for some takes longer, mostly because of our resistance to abstract logical thinking which seems to be disconnected from reality. There is also another reason: after WW2, either math became too much and had to be made more concentrated, or the mathematicians became snobs, anyway, they banished the good old geometric interpretations from mathematics, by calling such approaches "too elementary". Vladimir Arnold, in The antiscientifical revolution and mathematics, attributes this to the Bourbaki school, and he may be right. I think that in learning math, one should keep anything that can help, but after that, get over it in our thinking. For example, humans use fingers when they first learn to count and make simple arithmetic operations, but later they no longer refer to fingers in doing this. Such references would slow down thinking.

So I agree that one should supplement math with something, when we are trying to explain to the laymen. Many scientists try to make their work more accessible by doing this in popular writings, but since science is very active and new things happen all the time, it is difficult to do this with any new idea.

Thank you for your insightful and stimulating observations. I look forward to read your essay.

Best regards,

Cristi

Israel Perez replied on Jul. 1, 2013 @ 22:41 GMT

Dear Cristinel

I'm also glad that we have some opinions in common. I'd like make some comments on your previous reply.

You: Having a deeper understand of QM (and GR for that matter) would be helpful in trying to unify them. But ignoring anything but outcomes, by applying "shut up and calculate", would not allow us to go beyond these problems. Those saying that we should "shut up and...

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jul. 2, 2013 @ 10:36 GMT

Dear Israel,

It seems we agree at all points you discussed. Yet, at one of them, I feel the need to reply. I said "I think that human brained is a tool for understanding mathematics", and you replied with "Yeah, but according to some studies, there is one hemisphere dedicated to logical operations and another for intuitive ones.". I don't see any disagreement here, since I did not say that the brain is exclusively for doing math (anyway, the brain lateralization is also between math: right hemisphere is not only dealing with intuition, but also geometry). I just meant that and it is not obligatory to translate math into another language for people, since their brain is capable of understanding it. I think geometry is the intuitive part of mathematics, so left-right brain means, from math viewpoint, algebra-geometry. I don't recall of any study showing that mathematicians have only one hemisphere :). On the other hand, as I already said, I am all for using whatever additional means we can to improve understanding, both in research, and in teaching.

Best regards,

Cristi

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Dear Cristi,

I very much enjoyed reading your well-written and lucid essay, which provided me with food for thought. If I understand you right, you appeal to Wheeler’s delayed choice experiment and observer participance to start with a case for it from bit, and law without law. Along the line though, you make a case for objective realism and a global consistency principle, and end by concluding for the necessity of an underlying it, so that the bits do not contradict. To quite some degree we are in agreement about the final conclusion.

However, I have always been puzzled by the significance and interpretation attached to the delayed choice experiment. Does it tell us something new about the conventional view of quantum theory, which we already did not know without this experiment? For instance, if we could strictly conclude observer participance from here, would it not rule out `observer independent’ reformulations/modifications such as Bohmian mechanics and GRW? But we know that these latter two theories are still in the reckoning. [You might enjoy looking up the proceedings of the recent Bielefeld conference `Quantum theory without observers’ available at http://www.mathematik.uni-muenchen.de/~bohmmech/bielefeld/vi
deos.html ]

In any case the above is a point for discussion. I admire the courage and passion with which you have written your essay and wish you all the best.

Tejinder

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jul. 3, 2013 @ 13:55 GMT

Dear Prof. Singh,

Thank you very much for reading and commenting.

You said "I have always been puzzled by the significance and interpretation attached to the delayed choice experiment. Does it tell us something new about the conventional view of quantum theory, which we already did not know without this experiment?"

I think that Wheeler's delayed choice experiment doesn't say something that is not implicit in the known experiments. Its great merit is, I think, pedagogical: it emphasizes a feature which, otherwise, is ignored and rolled from one corner of the mind to another, to avoid confronting it. The essence is that what happened in the past depends on how we prepare the measurement device now. Wheeler liked the spectacular conclusion of the observer participance, probably because he liked his conclusion of 'it from bit'. I think we can limit this to the experimental setup, rather than extending it to the observer (although the observer chooses what to observe). He wanted to conclude that this proves there's no 'it', and 'it' is inferred from the 'bit', while I prefer to restore reality, the 'it'. My claim is that 'it' is something that prevents 'bits' from contradicting one another, a 'reality check'. But, the price to restore realism is to make it dependent on the context, and by this I mean future measurements. I like to look at this as a 4D universe, in which events at various positions and moments in time constrain one another (global consistency). In quantum phenomena, when we develop the events in time, the 4D constrains manifests as if the present depends on what we measure in the future (delayed initial conditions).

Does this dependence of the past on the future measurements persist in realistic approaches like GRW and deBroglie-Bohm? I think it does, and I would refer here to Bell's and Kochen-Specker's theorems. Some claim realistic approaches like dBB are ruled out by such theorems. I don't think so, but the price is the same: to admit that the experimental setup constrains the past. Otherwise, the dynamics of GRW and dBB is not contradicted. In fact, I think that even the unitary evolution, as in the Schrodinger's equation, can be maintained without discontinuous collapse, if we accept that the initial conditions are delayed, or that they have to include the future experimental setup (superdeterminism). No reference here to observers, but only to measurement device. Restoring unitary evolution in the theory (without tricks like "unitary evolution is preserved, if we include all the branches corresponding to the different outcomes") is much more difficult than in modified dynamics or hidden variables, because unitary evolution is much more rigid. But even if there is no proof that unitary evolution is preserved, at least we know that it is not obligatory to be violated - the collapse is not necessarily discontinuous.

Thank you for the link to he conference Quantum theory without observers III. Currently I am watching The Quantum Landscape 2013.

Best regards,

Cristi

Chidi Idika replied on Jul. 4, 2013 @ 14:59 GMT

Hi Cristi,

Talking about the observer and Quantum mechanics, I have secured a unique definition of the term "observer" here What a Wavefunction is.

Pls read through.

Meanwhile am getting back to you on your essay in a while. I have a download.

Chidi Idika

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jul. 4, 2013 @ 15:33 GMT

Dear Chidi Idika,

Thank you for the link. I look forward.

Best regards,

Cristi

Christinel,

If given the time and the wits to evaluate over 120 more entries, I have a month to try. My seemingly whimsical title, “It’s good to be the king,” is serious about our subject.

Jim

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Dear Christnel

Thanks for the essay. I think what you have written, "I argue that there is in fact an interplay between it and bit. The requirement of global consistency leads to apparently acausal and nonlocal behavior, explaining the weirdness of quantum phenomena" might have a solution in my posted essay but in some how differently.

The "world" or I say as "digital nature" i.e. "It" can be defined as is a product of two inverse sets of ultimately "bits". Therefore some new fundamental constants may emerge to explain that "world" or "digital nature" simply as an interplaying of "It" and "Bits" in cycles.

Thanking once again.

Regards

Dipak

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jul. 5, 2013 @ 13:45 GMT

Dear Dipak,

You observed well that I propose as a solution to the apparent acausality and nonlocality encountered in quantum mechanics, the global consistency principle. Thank you for directing me toward your essay, in which, I understand that you also proposed a solution.

Best regards,

Cristi

Dear Cristi,

Your essay has captivated my attention.

You agree with me that such a "zero axiom" should exist. This is what I suggest in my essay. I called it the principle of duality, which handles the contraries. What do you think about ?

A question : what do you think if we rename « quantum mechanics » by « quantum and wave mechanics » ?

best regards

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jul. 9, 2013 @ 03:28 GMT

Dear Amazigh,

I am glad you liked the axiom zero. About renaming « quantum mechanics » by « quantum and wave mechanics », this sounds a good idea. For some reason, one tends to forget about the waves. Looking forward to read your essay.

Best regards,

Cristi

Hi Cristi,

Yesterday evening I returned from holidays. I have just finished to read your beautiful Essay which enjoyed me very much. Congrats. I appreciated that you emphasized the important contribution by Zel’dovich and Starobinski to black hole radiation. Although Hawking cited them in his original famous paper, they are often neglected by researchers who study black hole thermodynamics. Another fundamental contribution on quantum fluctuation is due to Parker, who preceded both Hawking and Zel’dovich's group on this important issue.

In any case, I am going to give you an high score.

Cheers,

Ch.

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jul. 10, 2013 @ 04:01 GMT

Dear Christian,

Welcome back from vacation. I am very happy you enjoyed reading my essay. I read yours few days ago, and I liked it very much. Good luck with the contest.

Best regards,

Cristi

Dear Cristi,

It happens that your essay is a special one for me so please you will permit me to say some things in good detail.

Now, in response to your position that “… the complete picture is not it from bit, but rather it from bit & bit from it.” and “that at any moment there is at least ONE [emphasis mine] possible reality, which ensure the consistency and the...

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jul. 11, 2013 @ 17:03 GMT

Dear Chidi,

Thank you for considering my essay special for you, and for the detailed comments. You mention standing waves, I happen to consider them a paradigmatic example of global consistency. On a space or spacetime, there is a deep relation between wave functions and the topology. I appreciate you explained the connections between my essay and yours. I may be able to comment more about this after reading it.

Best regards,

Cristi

Dear Cristi,

You have written a very intriguing essay. Yours is the second (beside Philip Gibbs') essay that I have read which emphasized the role of consistency in arriving at more . It seems to me that if you consider the action for the Universe as a whole from the big bang to the present in a path integral context it already implies the global consistency principle (could there be any inconsistent, as opposed to incompatible, paths contributing to the action?).

I have to wrap my mind around the proposition that the universe might at the most fundamental level be based on a contradiction. Years ago, I had considered it as mechanism for creating time: Say, you find the statement to have a truth value of T. Then immediately, it is F, thus, the next instant is created because the determination of the new truth value occurred in sequence, and of course it doesn't stop there but goes on.

I did not develop this idea further because I was not sure that it was the right track, but perhaps there is something to it. One concern that comes to my mind is that the zero axiom undermines the global consistency condition. Why should the universe be globally self-consistent if it is at its very roots based on a contradiction?

Anyway, I thought this was a thought-provoking essay. I wish you all the best especially because I recall that last year it does not appear you were treated fairly.

Armin

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jul. 12, 2013 @ 12:05 GMT

Dear Armin,

You read carefully my essay, and saw the importance I gave to global consistency. And the question how can this be consistent with the axiom zero is justified. The two are mutually compatible, because axiom zero indeed introduces contradiction, but never within the same universe. The logical consistency principle forbids a proposition and its negation to be true within the same universe, they can only be true in distinct universes. As I wrote in the essay, "Axiom Zero gives birth to each possible universe (because of the principle of explosion [...]), but it is not part of any of these universes, because this would contradict logical consistency."

Best regards,

Cristi

Dear Cristi, Excellent work. We have similar concepts with big caveats: First, yours is Axiom Zero and mine is the Original zero(00,1,-1), our Ancestor FAPAMA Qbit as Planck's matrix of all matter and as the Maxwell infinite being with unlimited storage to store all accumulated qbits, so that no qbi/bit will ever be deleted and our Multiverse thus does not generate even a single bit of entropy or...

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Dear Cristi, Excellent work. We have similar concepts with big caveats: First, yours is Axiom Zero and mine is the Original zero(00,1,-1), our Ancestor FAPAMA Qbit as Planck's matrix of all matter and as the Maxwell infinite being with unlimited storage to store all accumulated qbits, so that no qbi/bit will ever be deleted and our Multiverse thus does not generate even a single bit of entropy or ΔS = 0. This Qbit is Pythagorean in steriod: All things are one Qbit. This Qbit is the one and only singularity Qbit Multiverse that projects its computations in the form of Einstein complex coordinates onto our event horizon Multiverse which is Minkowski Null geometrics in the zero dimension of Lm. Second, your Axiom Zero lives outside of our universe whereas the Qbit is our Multiverse/Existence as the empty set that contains itself. You wrote: "The two are mutually compatible, because axiom zero indeed introduces contradiction, but never within the same universe. The logical consistency principle forbids a proposition and its negation to be true within the same universe, they can only be true in distinct universes. As I wrote in the essay, "Axiom Zero gives birth to each possible universe (because of the principle of explosion [...]), but it is not part of any of these universes, because this would contradict logical consistency." Third, we agree that our Existence must be onsistent. Mine derived from the fact that Existence must obey Gelmann's principle of conservation laws. Fourth, KQID has another secret mechanism under our nose but it is too obvious to be noticed that the Qbit is synchronized, refreshed, renewed every absolute digital time T ≤ 10^-1000seconds. Every T-moment, the Qbit is reborn, reemerged as new perfect baby without bugs. That is why our Multiverse has never crashed like normal computers do. This explains why all existence from a bit to an atom to our universe and Multiverse are quantum entangled from the very beginning as Hooft's precondition. Fifth, I agree with the delayed choice exoeriment with one caveat that it happens in the NOW. you wrote quoting Wheeler: "Since we make our decision whether to measure the interference from the two paths or to determine which path was followed a billion or so years after the photon started its journey, we must conclude that our very act of measurement not only revealed the nature of the photon’s history on its way to us, but in some sense determined that history. The past history of the universe has no more validity than is assigned by the measurements we make–now!" KQID prescribes that yes within our block Multiverse happens all-at-once per T-moment, the Qbit is free to move backward and forward and collapse the time-past-present-future into the NOW T-moment. Yes, we observed the light from billions light years ago in the NOW and this effect the time-billion years past in the NOW upon observation. It collapses the event in the NOW to make the whole Existence CONSISTENT in the NOW, not billion of years ago event. The collapse of any bits- wave function is always in the T-NOW moment ≤ 10^-1000s. If you are interested we can continue our dialogue. Finally, you cited the Tao and I cited Fu Xi who is the founder of the Tao/Dao as the founder of our digital world concept. Again, I rated your essay superb. Please give me your comment and rate my essay accordingly. Best wishes, Leo KoGuan

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jul. 14, 2013 @ 17:29 GMT

Dear Leo KoGuan,

I appreciate very much your comments. As you explained, it seems that our viewpoints have much in common, and our approaches intersect often. Thank you for pointing out these connections. I look forward to reading your essay, and after that I will probably understand better the connections you made.

Best regards,

Cristi

Dear Cristi, thanks for commenting on my essay I understand that due to space limitation my essay is hard to digest. However, harder still is to escape from our own preconceived reality as is is IS for our own frame of mind. Having said that it is good that we do have many different opinions to create an harmonious symphony in diversity. If I may explain below that KQID is not only about an...

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Dear Cristi, thanks for commenting on my essay I understand that due to space limitation my essay is hard to digest. However, harder still is to escape from our own preconceived reality as is is IS for our own frame of mind. Having said that it is good that we do have many different opinions to create an harmonious symphony in diversity. If I may explain below that KQID is not only about an operating system of Existence but also about predictions, verifications and falsifications. The KQID Ouroboros Equation of Existence: Ξ00☷ = ψτ(iLx,y,z, Lm) = KbΘln2 = hf = pc + mc^2 = p^2/2m + U(iLx,y,z) = 4πGρ- Kqid(ΑΘ-ΘS)gμν = (8πG/c^4)Tμν - Kqid(ΑΘ-ΘS)gμν = Τμν = E = A + S ⊆ T that contains QM, KQID relativity, Landauer's bound, Planck, Einstein, Newton, Maxwell, Poisson, Einstein GR with KQID dark energy equation and KQID Third Law of Multiverse as the equation of everything from physics to chemistry, law, monetary and full employment. In physics as shown in my essay, this equation explains the Bit Bang, not Big Bang, plus its partner the Bit Crush and we can estimate the temperature about 7.8 x10^126K in the first burst at 1.43478x10^-147 seconds with the wavelength λ = 4.3x10^-139 meter, moreover when A = S our universe will inevitably start its contraction and acceleration to a Bit Crush sometime hundreds of trillions years later thatI also calculated in two different ways. As you can see I made specific predictions with specific numbers that can easily be falsified later by experiments. We are the seekers of the truth and paraphrasing the great Carl Sagan, we are the Qbit's way to know itself and to evolve as a renewed Qbit every absolute digital time T≤10^-1000seconds. We are brothers and sisters literally in our human senses but actually we are one in our Ancestor Qbit reality. I really enjoyed reading your superb essay and we must continue our discussions and I do have several KoGuan Institutes at Tsing Hua, Peking University as well as KoGuan Law School at Shanghai Jiaotong University that I can invite you as a post PhD fellow. Best regards, Leo KoGuan

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jul. 15, 2013 @ 07:01 GMT

Dear Leo KoGuan,

I replied on your page.

Best regards,

Cristi

Dear Cristi

I apologies if this does not apply to you. I have read and rated your essay and about 50 others. If you have not yet read or rated my essay The Cloud of Unknowing please consider doing so. With best wishes,

Vladimir

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Dear Cristinel,

Thanks for writing a very well knit essay in which you have nicely elucidated the relationship between It and Bit.

Best regards,

Sreenath

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Dear Cristi,

I read with interest your very profound essay. The idea is very original. It is good that you use pictures. As Alexander said Zenkin in his article "The scientific counter-revolution in mathematics»: «the truth should be drawn with the help of the cognitive computer visualization technology and should be presented to" an unlimited circle "of spectators in the form of color-musical cognitive images of its immanent essence ». But for some reason many mathematicians do not agree with this conclusion A.Zenkin. I think you and I are close in spirit to the study.

Best regards,

Vladimir

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jul. 19, 2013 @ 06:16 GMT

Dear Vladimir,

I am happy you read and like my essay. Thanks for the reference to Alexander Zenkin. I find myself in complete agreement with the fragment you quote from his interview. I presume that at this time people are in a big rush, since the information increases exponentially. In math for instance, replacing geometric with algebraic formalism, and further with the category theory one, makes compact many calculations, but there is a trade off in grasping the problems. For those who want to take their time and visualize, there are plenty of videos which can help. I'll just give some examples, this, this, and especially this. I expect in time more advanced interactive methods to be developed, and more and more of our knowledge to be visualized like this. This will also help with the problem of the time needed to learn. Of course, the researchers will not have much time to make videos like these with their most recent work, but hopefully the gap will become smaller in time.

Best regards,

Cristi

Hi Cristi,

Great essay! A lot of excellent hard work clearly went into it. I should have followed your lead and actually explained Wheeler's motivation and position on these questions; you did a superb job on that front, and I especially liked that you played up the retrocausal implications that Wheeler tried to resist.

And most of the rest was great as well. As you noted over on...

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Hi Cristi,

Great essay! A lot of excellent hard work clearly went into it. I should have followed your lead and actually explained Wheeler's motivation and position on these questions; you did a superb job on that front, and I especially liked that you played up the retrocausal implications that Wheeler tried to resist.

And most of the rest was great as well. As you noted over on my thread, we're both coming from almost the exact same direction on these problems. In fact, with the exception of page 5 (which I'll nitpick on below) and the Zero Axiom (which I simply don't get), I'm in near-agreement with everything here.

I'll point out that your "global consistency condition", along with your whole point of having many "laws" to choose from, all smack strongly of the spirit behind the sum-over-all-histories/path-integral approach. Something to consider as you pursue this.

Okay, page 5. I think the main issue here is that you're conflating the standard quantum story with the story of a (potentially classical) underlying reality. If there *is* an underlying reality of which we have partial knowledge, and the Schrodinger equation is merely evolving that state of knowledge, then there may be many possible *underlying* realities, but there is still only one solution to the Schrodinger equation itself. (It's just that this solution doesn't correspond to reality; merely our state of limited knowledge.) So your phrase "possible solutions of the Schrodinger equation" is assigning a path-integral like uncertainty to standard QM that simply isn't correct. The Schrodinger equation is just as pre-deterministic as Newtonian physics, the uncertainty principle notwithstanding.

Of course, as you probably saw from my essay, I'm perfectly happy with a system of underconstrained dynamics for which there *are* many allowed solutions, but this necessarily has to be at a deeper, underlying level than standard QM, not at the level of the wavefunction itself.

And this is exactly where the rest of your essay might best inform your quantum story: it all is pointing to a scenario where the laws themselves (at the underlying level, not the epistemic quantum level) are different for different choices of measurement. (Or at least that's how I'm reading it, maybe because I also advocate such a scenario... :-) To make it all work (given Bell's thm, etc.) one will need retrocausality in a block universe, but you seem mostly on board with at least the latter.

Again , great job!

Best,

Ken

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jul. 19, 2013 @ 15:18 GMT

Dear Ken,

Thank you for reading and commenting my essay. I am glad you too see the strong relations between our views. I am happy that you discussed openly the point you felt we disagree on, contained in page 5. I think that the disagreement will vanish after I will add some completions to what I wrote in page 5. There is a big difference between what I said and the usual formulation of...

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Dear Ken,

Thank you for reading and commenting my essay. I am glad you too see the strong relations between our views. I am happy that you discussed openly the point you felt we disagree on, contained in page 5. I think that the disagreement will vanish after I will add some completions to what I wrote in page 5. There is a big difference between what I said and the usual formulation of initial value problems. In an initial value problem, the complete initial state is given. By unitary evolution, the unique initial conditions lead to a unique solution to the Schrodinger equation. What I claim is that, by quantum measurement, we don't have access to the complete description of the initial conditions. For example, we may say that the measurement gives an eigenvalue, and we know the precise eigenstate of the observed system. This is true, but by the measurement, we only learn the present state of the observed system, which is a subsystem of the larger system which is the universe. When thinking about the universe, we only learn partial initial conditions, and each one of them refers to a different time, when the particular observation was made. The complete system belongs to a tensor product of Hilbert spaces, and each measurement only gives a factor of the total state. The rest remains undetermined, but at least we know that from all possible solutions, we keep a subspace. This is what I mean by having more possible solutions, and reducing them by successive measurements. Now, we may think that if we are concerned with measuring a subsystem, say a particle, we obtain a unique solution. This is true, so long as the particle did not and will not interact with other systems, which are undetermined. But I referred to larger systems. If we consider the observation of a small system like a single particle, if we measure it twice, we may impose to it two inconsistent initial conditions (if the observables don't commute). But, by making two measurements, we can no longer say that the second measurement measures only the particle, since it interacted with the previous measurement device. So, what we observe now is a composite system, and our observation refers to only one of the Hilbert spaces composing it. The complete solutions will depend on unknown states of the previous measurement device, which cannot be known completely, since the device has macroscopic parts. I hope I was able to address your concerns with page 5, which was to small to contain the entire discussion, but if you still have questions or comments, I will be happy to hear them.

Thanks again for your comments, and for the suggestions!

Cristi

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jul. 20, 2013 @ 12:40 GMT

Dear Ken,

Thinking at Wheeler's "law without law", and at Tegmark's "mathematical universe", and various landscape scenarios, how could all these possible universes be generated? One way is to think that, since in sum over histories we sum over all permitted histories, maybe we should consider that all possible universe exist. Another proposal is that of Tegmark, that there is an algorithm which can list all of them, so they are implicit in that simple program. An alternative is to consider a pool containing all possible features of a universe, and to select from this pool logically consistent combinations, and obtain any possible universe. At first sight, it seems too much to consider a pool containing all possible possible statements. Of course, in the pool, they can contradict each other, but when a consistent set of features is selected, obviously they are not allowed to conflict. A problem is, why starting with such a huge information, like all possible statements, including their negations? Isn't this against Occam's razor? Indeed. But all possible statements can be obtained from a self-contradictory statement, by the principle of explosion. And this is axiom zero: just a cheap way to generate all possible propositions. Then, the universes are generated by selecting logically consistent subsets of propositions.

Best regards,

Cristi

Dear Cristi,

Source and Observation, is the Cause and Effect; that is in analogue with Tao. Source of information is the action in space-time continuum, in that information is the transfer of energy in particle scenario where as it is the transfer of matter with Hamiltonian in string-matter continuum scenario. Thus in particle scenario the nature information at the source is continuum whereas it is discrete at the observer as the observation is probabilistic rather than realistic. To resolve this paradox on information continuum, we ascribe a generic wave mechanics with string-matter segments in that the Delayed choice experiment is also elucidatory and thereby the string-segment nature of matter may be validated.

With best wishes

Jayakar

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jul. 20, 2013 @ 11:14 GMT

Dear Jayakar,

Thank you for reading and commenting. You made very instructive observations and analogies. I agree that "in particle scenario the nature information at the source is continuum whereas it is discrete at the observer as the observation is probabilistic rather than realistic." I look forward to read your essay, and see how you approached this.

Best regards,

Cristi

Thank you

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Dear all,

Until 29th I will be away, so I may not be able to answer.

Best regards,

Cristi

Dear Cristi -

It is very interesting to see Wheeler's ideas covered in such depth; I loved your coverage of the subject. You speak of Wheeler's exhortation to be bold and to question everything, and this makes me think about how all discoveries were 'pre-discovered' - by artists, writers, and people living off the land. They didn't worry about looking ridiculous; they had to survive, and...

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jul. 30, 2013 @ 10:48 GMT

Dear John,

Thank you for your deep comments. I find useful your comparison between our views, it will be helpful for me when I will read your essay. I am not competent in discussing the relations with biology, but I am interested in learning more. At any rate, I suspect that there have to be strong relations.

Best regards,

Cristi

Dear Cristi,

I have come back here to say (in hard score) that I totally buy your argument. It only needs a working model like I think I have per chance attempted to raise in What a Wavefunction is . While my arguments may not be YET elegant am sure there will be physicists who can read and rate with required open mind. I have found one or two!!

When you are back please do tell a peer or two to compare and contrast with yours. And then rate, deadline permitting. But we are here at last to push boundaries, ain't we?

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jul. 30, 2013 @ 10:49 GMT

Dear Chidi,

Thank you for coming back with more interesting comments. You said "while my arguments may not be YET elegant am sure there will be physicists who can read and rate with required open mind." Elegance of arguments may ease communications, but maybe is not mandatory. I hope the peers reading your comment did or will follow your link to your paper to read and rate with the open mind as you mentioned. Good luck with the contest and with your research!

Best regards,

Cristi

Cristi,

Thank you for a very lucid and enjoyable essay. I am very much in agreement with your global consistency principle.

It is also possible to express this principle using bounded Lagrangians. The yin/yang is the reciprocity between the observable consequences and unobservable consequences (erased entanglement information). (See my essay "A Complex Conjugate Bit and It".)

In this way, quantum information theory complements your arguments.

Best wishes,

Richard

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jul. 30, 2013 @ 10:50 GMT

Dear Richard,

I am happy for your nice and interesting comments. What you said about bounded Lagrangians and quantum information theory sounds very intriguing, and I look forward to read your essay.

Best regards,

Cristi

Hi Cristi

Richard Feynman in his Nobel Acceptance Speech (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/19
65/feynman-lecture.html)

said: “It always seems odd to me that the fundamental laws of physics, when discovered, can appear in so many different forms that are not apparently identical at first, but with a little mathematical fiddling you can show the relationship. And example of this is the Schrodinger equation and the Heisenberg formulation of quantum mechanics. I don’t know why that is – it remains a mystery, but it was something I learned from experience. There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.”

I too believe in the simplicity of nature, and I am glad that Richard Feynman, a Nobel-winning famous physicist, also believe in the same thing I do, but I had come to my belief long before I knew about that particular statement.

The belief that “Nature is simple” is however being expressed differently in my essay “Analogical Engine” linked to http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1865 .

Specifically though, I said “Planck constant is the Mother of All Dualities” and I put it schematically as: wave-particle ~ quantum-classical ~ gene-protein ~ analogy- reasoning ~ linear-nonlinear ~ connected-notconnected ~ computable-notcomputable ~ mind-body ~ Bit-It ~ variation-selection ~ freedom-determinism … and so on.

Taken two at a time, it can be read as “what quantum is to classical” is similar to (~) “what wave is to particle.” You can choose any two from among the multitudes that can be found in our discourses.

I could have put Schrodinger wave ontology-Heisenberg particle ontology duality in the list had it comes to my mind!

Since “Nature is Analogical”, we are free to probe nature in so many different ways. And you have touched some corners of it.

Best

Than Tin

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jul. 30, 2013 @ 10:59 GMT

Dear Than Tin,

Very interesting comments about the simplicity of nature. Intriguing ideas about Plank's constant as the mother of all dualities, indeed, it can be viewed this way.

Best regards,

Cristi

Dear Cristinel,

You have provided a rich account of Wheeler’s academics.

Wishing you luck,

___Ram

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jul. 30, 2013 @ 11:00 GMT

Dear ___Ram,

Thank you for the nice comment and the wishes. I wish you good luck with the contest and your research!

Best regards,

Cristi

Dear Christi,

very well written, well illustrated and highly informative essay. I really loved the spider webs analogy and iceberg illustration. Axiom zero was a bit puzzling to me but the illustration was nice. An enjoyable read, you deserve to do well. Good luck, Georgina

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Georgina Woodward replied on Jul. 27, 2013 @ 07:39 GMT

Oops sorry Cristinel, I meant to write Cristi.

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jul. 30, 2013 @ 11:40 GMT

Dear Georgina,

Thank you for commenting. I am happy you read and like some points of my essay. I look forward to reading yours.

Best regards,

Cristi

Hi Cristi,

I enjoyed your essay again. We have been in a few contests together.

Wheeler has what I call a genetic disease. He insists that quantum mechanical objects must move continuously with no gaps in space or time. And yes if this is true then he can have present events changing the past. This is reflected in your diagram of the delayed choice experiment.

Wheeler delays the removal of the second beamsplitter to insure that the photon is past the first beamsplitter. My objection to this is that Wheeler does not measure that the photon is beyond the first beamsplitter, he assumes it, given the way that photons move "continuously".

I believe there is good reason to believe that photons move discontinuously. A photon moves by appearing and disappearing. When the photon arrives at the first beamsplitter it disappears from space-time. It will reappear after a delay and at a distance that is its wavelength.

The conclusion that the present can change the past is then incorrect because the photon is not beyond the first beam splitter after the delay, it is actually non existent and waiting to enter existence again. When it does come into existence again, it is beyond the first beamsplitter.

Yes, this a different kind of QM. There is a logic behind it and experiments can be made. Please take a look at my essay. I would be interested in what you think of my attempt to destroy the uncertainty principle.

Thanks,

Don L.

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Jul. 31, 2013 @ 15:32 GMT

Dear Don,

Thank you for the comments, and for questioning the delayed choice and describe an alternative explanation. I understand you propose that photons jump in spacetime according to their wavelength ("lambda-hopping"). This seems to me to make, in some situations, very different predictions than QM, so the two can be distinguished by experiments. I will read your essay for more details.

Best regards,

Cristi

Hello Cristi,

We had a couple of interesting exchanges about June 1. Very much valued. I can now say I am now a "disciple" or "fan" of Wheeler. Following additional insights gained from interacting with FQXi community members, including you, I wrote on my blog the judgement in the case of Atomistic Enterprises Inc. vs. Plato & Ors delivered on Jul. 28, 2013 @ 11:39 GMT. I don't think you have read my essay yet but you can view the judgement.

Thanks,

Akinbo

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Aug. 2, 2013 @ 06:12 GMT

Dear Akinbo,

Thank you for pointing me to the comment on your blog, which will surely complement your essay. I'll take a look.

Best regards,

Cristi

Dear Cristinel,

I used taijitu sign in my work. I calculated the some value with bits. Yet I did not have the courage, to the symbol, draw anything. Is it in black point, bit in white, arbitrarily or has some meaning. Which? What is in the rest of symbol at the end of your article?

regards,

Branko

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Aug. 2, 2013 @ 06:18 GMT

Dear Branko,

Thanks for the comment. The picture you mention is the only one without description, because it is open to interpretation.

Best regards,

Cristi

Dear Cristinel Stoica :

I am an old physician and I don’t know nothing of mathematics and almost nothing of physics,

But maybe you would be interested in my essay over a subject which after the common people, physic discipline is the one that uses more than any...

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Dear Cristinel Stoica :

I am an old physician and I don’t know nothing of mathematics and almost nothing of physics,

But maybe you would be interested in my essay over a subject which after the common people, physic discipline is the one that uses more than any other, the so called “time”. No one that I know ever said what I say over it and I am convince that I prove that with our clocks we measure “motion” and no “time.

Maybe you would be interested in my essay over this subject which after the common people, physic discipline is the one that uses more than any other.

I am sending you a practical summary, so you can easy decide if you read or not my essay “The deep nature of reality”.

I am convince you would be interested in reading it. ( most people don’t understand it, and is not just because of my bad English).

Hawking in “A brief history of time” where he said , “Which is the nature of time?” yes he don’t know what time is, and also continue saying…………Some day this answer could seem to us “obvious”, as much than that the earth rotate around the sun…..” In fact the answer is “obvious”, but how he could say that, if he didn’t know what’s time? In fact he is predicting that is going to be an answer, and that this one will be “obvious”, I think that with this adjective, he is implying: simple and easy to understand. Maybe he felt it and couldn’t explain it with words. We have anthropologic proves that man measure “time” since more than 30.000 years ago, much, much later came science, mathematics and physics that learn to measure “time” from primitive men, adopted the idea and the systems of measurement, but also acquired the incognita of the experimental “time” meaning. Out of common use physics is the science that needs and use more the measurement of what everybody calls “time” and the discipline came to believe it as their own. I always said that to understand the “time” experimental meaning there is not need to know mathematics or physics, as the “time” creators and users didn’t. Instead of my opinion I would give Einstein’s “Ideas and Opinions” pg. 354 “Space, time, and event, are free creations of human intelligence, tools of thought” he use to call them pre-scientific concepts from which mankind forgot its meanings, he never wrote a whole page about “time” he also use to evade the use of the word, in general relativity when he refer how gravitational force and speed affect “time”, he does not use the word “time” instead he would say, speed and gravitational force slows clock movement or “motion”, instead of saying that slows “time”. FQXi member Andreas Albrecht said that. When asked the question, "What is time?", Einstein gave a pragmatic response: "Time," he said, "is what clocks measure and nothing more." He knew that “time” was a man creation, but he didn’t know what man is measuring with the clock.

I insist, that for “measuring motion” we should always and only use a unique: “constant” or “uniform” “motion” to measure “no constant motions” “which integrates and form part of every change and transformation in every physical thing. Why? because is the only kind of “motion” whose characteristics allow it, to be divided in equal parts as Egyptians and Sumerians did it, giving born to “motion fractions”, which I call “motion units” as hours, minutes and seconds. “Motion” which is the real thing, was always hide behind time, and covert by its shadow, it was hide in front everybody eyes, during at least two millenniums at hand of almost everybody. Which is the difference in physics between using the so-called time or using “motion”?, time just has been used to measure the “duration” of different phenomena, why only for that? Because it was impossible for physicists to relate a mysterious time with the rest of the physical elements of known characteristics, without knowing what time is and which its physical characteristics were. On the other hand “motion” is not something mysterious, it is a quality or physical property of all things, and can be related with all of them, this is a huge difference especially for theoretical physics I believe. I as a physician with this find I was able to do quite a few things. I imagine a physicist with this can make marvelous things.

With my best whishes

Héctor

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Aug. 2, 2013 @ 06:28 GMT

Dear Héctor,

Thanks for the interesting comment about time. I agree that time is among the least understood concepts, and I salute your efforts to clarify it. I hope to look soon at your essay.

Best regards,

Cristi

Dear Cristinel Stoica :

I am an old physician and I don’t know nothing of mathematics and almost nothing of physics,

But maybe you would be interested in my essay over a subject which after the common people, physic discipline is the one that uses more than any...

view entire post

Dear Cristinel Stoica :

I am an old physician and I don’t know nothing of mathematics and almost nothing of physics,

But maybe you would be interested in my essay over a subject which after the common people, physic discipline is the one that uses more than any other, the so called “time”. No one that I know ever said what I say over it and I am convince that I prove that with our clocks we measure “motion” and no “time.

Maybe you would be interested in my essay over this subject which after the common people, physic discipline is the one that uses more than any other.

I am sending you a practical summary, so you can easy decide if you read or not my essay “The deep nature of reality”.

I am convince you would be interested in reading it. ( most people don’t understand it, and is not just because of my bad English).

Hawking in “A brief history of time” where he said , “Which is the nature of time?” yes he don’t know what time is, and also continue saying…………Some day this answer could seem to us “obvious”, as much than that the earth rotate around the sun…..” In fact the answer is “obvious”, but how he could say that, if he didn’t know what’s time? In fact he is predicting that is going to be an answer, and that this one will be “obvious”, I think that with this adjective, he is implying: simple and easy to understand. Maybe he felt it and couldn’t explain it with words. We have anthropologic proves that man measure “time” since more than 30.000 years ago, much, much later came science, mathematics and physics that learn to measure “time” from primitive men, adopted the idea and the systems of measurement, but also acquired the incognita of the experimental “time” meaning. Out of common use physics is the science that needs and use more the measurement of what everybody calls “time” and the discipline came to believe it as their own. I always said that to understand the “time” experimental meaning there is not need to know mathematics or physics, as the “time” creators and users didn’t. Instead of my opinion I would give Einstein’s “Ideas and Opinions” pg. 354 “Space, time, and event, are free creations of human intelligence, tools of thought” he use to call them pre-scientific concepts from which mankind forgot its meanings, he never wrote a whole page about “time” he also use to evade the use of the word, in general relativity when he refer how gravitational force and speed affect “time”, he does not use the word “time” instead he would say, speed and gravitational force slows clock movement or “motion”, instead of saying that slows “time”. FQXi member Andreas Albrecht said that. When asked the question, "What is time?", Einstein gave a pragmatic response: "Time," he said, "is what clocks measure and nothing more." He knew that “time” was a man creation, but he didn’t know what man is measuring with the clock.

I insist, that for “measuring motion” we should always and only use a unique: “constant” or “uniform” “motion” to measure “no constant motions” “which integrates and form part of every change and transformation in every physical thing. Why? because is the only kind of “motion” whose characteristics allow it, to be divided in equal parts as Egyptians and Sumerians did it, giving born to “motion fractions”, which I call “motion units” as hours, minutes and seconds. “Motion” which is the real thing, was always hide behind time, and covert by its shadow, it was hide in front everybody eyes, during at least two millenniums at hand of almost everybody. Which is the difference in physics between using the so-called time or using “motion”?, time just has been used to measure the “duration” of different phenomena, why only for that? Because it was impossible for physicists to relate a mysterious time with the rest of the physical elements of known characteristics, without knowing what time is and which its physical characteristics were. On the other hand “motion” is not something mysterious, it is a quality or physical property of all things, and can be related with all of them, this is a huge difference especially for theoretical physics I believe. I as a physician with this find I was able to do quite a few things. I imagine a physicist with this can make marvelous things.

With my best whishes

Héctor

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Aug. 3, 2013 @ 06:32 GMT

Dear Héctor,

I hope the comment I wrote here, and lost during changing the server, will be restored. If not, I will try to make another one.

Best regards,

Cristi

Hi Cristi,

Thank you for a delightful description of quantum contextuality.

> Information may not be just what we learn about the world. It may be what makes the world.

In my essay Software Cosmos I construct a picture based on the simulation paradigm. This discrete computational model can answer many cosmological puzzles and has much in common with your "mathematical universe".

> This is why I think that the complete picture is not it from bit, but rather it from bit & bit from it.

My conclusion, "It from Bit, and Bit from Us" also takes in the important role of participating observer.

I hope you get a chance to read my essay, as I suspect you might find it to be a specific realization of your ideas about the cosmos; however, one that is not only mathematical, but computable.

Hugh

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Aug. 4, 2013 @ 14:56 GMT

Hi Hugh,

Thank you for the comments, and for pointing me toward your essay, which I look forward to read.

Best regards,

Cristi

Dear Cristi:

Very nice essay! The idea that our world is fundamentally mathematical is very interesting but I always had one question: What is the role of time? Mathematical objects are timeless and it is not obvious to me how time would arise.

Also: Your axiom zero seems a bit too smart for me. Basically what it says is that the world is something. The fact that you use the language of logic then suggests that you are interested in logically consistent worlds. It would be nice to constrain the world a bit more, wouldn't it.

All the best.

Olaf

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Anonymous replied on Aug. 4, 2013 @ 15:24 GMT

Dear Olaf,

Thank you for reading and commenting my essay. I remember reading and liking yours too.

About your question "What is the role of time? Mathematical objects are timeless and it is not obvious to me how time would arise."

Perhaps all physical theories we found so far can be described as dynamical systems. Knowing the state (and maybe a number of partial derivatives),...

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Dear Olaf,

Thank you for reading and commenting my essay. I remember reading and liking yours too.

About your question "What is the role of time? Mathematical objects are timeless and it is not obvious to me how time would arise."

Perhaps all physical theories we found so far can be described as dynamical systems. Knowing the state (and maybe a number of partial derivatives), the evolution equations give any future state, or the probabilities. Anyway, the evolution of a system is a path in the phase/state space. Our best theories so far admit such a mathematical description. The question is, should we add something to this, which is not mathematical, and would explain time? The state at this time contains you, and engraved in the cells of your brain, the memory that you asked me this question. Later, it will contain you, and in your brain, the idea that I replied. Both snapshots are timeless, yet both contain the memory and the anticipation of other snapshots. What else should be contained in these states, about time? A bookmark indicating the present moment, somehow similar to the needle of a pickup playing the disk on which is recorded the path in the phase space? I am not sure how this would help, since there has to be a bookmark at any moment, and they will become timeless too. Anyway, if there is a problem here, probably is the hard problem of consciousness. I am not prepared to discuss it.

About the axiom zero, I agree with you. The world is something, one of the possible logically consistent worlds. But I disagree with Tegmark's idea that a kind of anthropic reasoning can reveal that all possible worlds exist and ours is one of them. I think that our world is more than just one of them, and more constraints are needed. Doing physics means to explore these constrains, and if we will ever have the "final theory", it will be very constrained indeed. Perhaps we will ask, like Einstein, what choice had God when creating the universe? Yet, at this point, I feel that we know very little, and the things will take many unexpected turns until then, so I would like to be open to as many possibilities as I can.

Best regards,

Cristi

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Dear Cristi,

What a lovely essay! It's as good a rendition of the delayed-choice experiment as I've ever seen.

My biggest worry is about the experimental verification of the violations of Bell-type inequalities. I worry that they are actually comparing correlated vs non-correlated probabilities rather than quantum vs classical mechanics. (See my rather lengthy answer to Mauro D'Ariano's comments under my essay.) For nonlinear classical systems can and do exhibit correlations that change their predictions for these inequalities so as to overlap with quantum correlations. (They, so to speak, are obeying Bayesian probabilities.) It this is really true, then I worry about the interpretations of the delayed-choice experiments.

Also, I'd be interested in your speculations about what Wheeler might have done had he been interested in nonlinear dynamics and/or chaos theory.

Again, congratulations on a wonderful essay.

Bill McHarris

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Aug. 6, 2013 @ 06:30 GMT

Dear Bill McHarris,

Thank you for the comments, and for liking my essay. You surely noticed how I interpret the correlations, both between entangled particles, and between past and future, by appealing to global consistency of fields on the 4-dimensional block universe. This reduces a bit the gap between quantum and classical. Unitary evolution implies that the measurement device and the...

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Dear Bill McHarris,

Thank you for the comments, and for liking my essay. You surely noticed how I interpret the correlations, both between entangled particles, and between past and future, by appealing to global consistency of fields on the 4-dimensional block universe. This reduces a bit the gap between quantum and classical. Unitary evolution implies that the measurement device and the observed system are correlated prior to measurement. But if this is true, we can consider in the EPR that particles are classical, so long as we admit the correlations. And this not even require nonlinearity. So yes, I agree with you that results like Bell's theorem, are not as much about classical vs quantum, but about uncorrelated vs correlated. The reason why is usually considered that they are about classical vs quantum is that, in general, classical systems, when coming in interaction, are separated, uncorrelated. But to make them violate Bell's inequality, we have to assume them correlated prior to the measurement. And the delayed choice experiment shows that, depending on what we will be measuring, the (preexisting) correlations have to be different. In other words, the initial conditions depend on what we measure. Now, this can't be escaped, no matter what. Chaos-based or not, to exhibit the quantum correlations, any realistic interpretation has to contain the correlations already in the initial conditions. So I think we see where we agree: classical is not ruled out per se, but classical correlations, in which the initial conditions are not constrained, are ruled out. Of course people make this about quantum vs hidden variables, but, as you said, it is about correlated vs uncorrelated. To have a truly classical interpretation, the problem, in my opinion, is to obtain from uncorrelated initial conditions, correlations that depend on the future choice of the measurement settings.

You said "Also, I'd be interested in your speculations about what Wheeler might have done had he been interested in nonlinear dynamics and/or chaos theory."

That's a good question. I can only answer what I think he might have done. First, I think that if Wheeler had had a student willing to pursue this direction, he would had gladly and openly supported her, no matter if he would not agree (except, of course, if he could prove the idea wrong). If asked about the possibility to explain quantum correlations by chaos, Wheeler would ask for evidence about violations of Bell's inequality by chaotic phenomena. If he would have such evidence, of course, he would not ignore it.

Thanks again for visiting, and congratulations for your essay!

Cristi Stoica

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Dear Cristinel,

We are at the end of this essay contest.

In conclusion, at the question to know if Information is more fundamental than Matter, there is a good reason to answer that Matter is made of an amazing mixture of eInfo and eEnergy, at the same time.

Matter is thus eInfo made with eEnergy rather than answer it is made with eEnergy and eInfo ; because eInfo is eEnergy, and the one does not go without the other one.

eEnergy and eInfo are the two basic Principles of the eUniverse. Nothing can exist if it is not eEnergy, and any object is eInfo, and therefore eEnergy.

And consequently our eReality is eInfo made with eEnergy. And the final verdict is : eReality is virtual, and virtuality is our fundamental eReality.

Good luck to the winners,

And see you soon, with good news on this topic, and the Theory of Everything.

Amazigh H.

I rated your essay.

Please visit My essay.

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Aug. 6, 2013 @ 06:45 GMT

Dear Amazigh,

Thank you for the brief description of your ideas, and for reminding me of your essay.

Good luck!

Cristi

Late-in-the-Day Thoughts about the Essays I’ve Read

I am sending to you the following thoughts because I found your essay particularly well stated, insightful, and helpful, even though in certain respects we may significantly diverge in our viewpoints. Thank you! Lumping and sorting is a dangerous adventure; let me apologize in advance if I have significantly misread or misrepresented...

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Late-in-the-Day Thoughts about the Essays I’ve Read

I am sending to you the following thoughts because I found your essay particularly well stated, insightful, and helpful, even though in certain respects we may significantly diverge in our viewpoints. Thank you! Lumping and sorting is a dangerous adventure; let me apologize in advance if I have significantly misread or misrepresented your essay in what follows.

Of the nearly two hundred essays submitted to the competition, there seems to be a preponderance of sentiment for the ‘Bit-from-It” standpoint, though many excellent essays argue against this stance or advocate for a wider perspective on the whole issue. Joseph Brenner provided an excellent analysis of the various positions that might be taken with the topic, which he subsumes under the categories of ‘It-from-Bit’, ‘Bit-from-It’, and ‘It-and-Bit’.

Brenner himself supports the ‘Bit-from-It’ position of Julian Barbour as stated in his 2011 essay that gave impetus to the present competition. Others such as James Beichler, Sundance Bilson-Thompson, Agung Budiyono, and Olaf Dreyer have presented well-stated arguments that generally align with a ‘Bit-from-It’ position.

Various renderings of the contrary position, ‘It-from-Bit’, have received well-reasoned support from Stephen Anastasi, Paul Borrill, Luigi Foschini, Akinbo Ojo, and Jochen Szangolies. An allied category that was not included in Brenner’s analysis is ‘It-from-Qubit’, and valuable explorations of this general position were undertaken by Giacomo D’Ariano, Philip Gibbs, Michel Planat and Armin Shirazi.

The category of ‘It-and-Bit’ displays a great diversity of approaches which can be seen in the works of Mikalai Birukou, Kevin Knuth, Willard Mittelman, Georgina Parry, and Cristinel Stoica,.

It seems useful to discriminate among the various approaches to ‘It-and-Bit’ a subcategory that perhaps could be identified as ‘meaning circuits’, in a sense loosely associated with the phrase by J.A. Wheeler. Essays that reveal aspects of ‘meaning circuits’ are those of Howard Barnum, Hugh Matlock, Georgina Parry, Armin Shirazi, and in especially that of Alexei Grinbaum.

Proceeding from a phenomenological stance as developed by Husserl, Grinbaum asserts that the choice to be made of either ‘It from Bit’ or ‘Bit from It’ can be supplemented by considering ‘It from Bit’ and ‘Bit from It’. To do this, he presents an ‘epistemic loop’ by which physics and information are cyclically connected, essentially the same ‘loop’ as that which Wheeler represented with his ‘meaning circuit’. Depending on where one ‘cuts’ the loop, antecedent and precedent conditions are obtained which support an ‘It from Bit’ interpretation, or a ‘Bit from It’ interpretation, or, though not mentioned by Grinbaum, even an ‘It from Qubit’ interpretation. I’ll also point out that depending on where the cut is made, it can be seen as a ‘Cartesian cut’ between res extensa and res cogitans or as a ‘Heisenberg cut’ between the quantum system and the observer. The implications of this perspective are enormous for the present It/Bit debate! To quote Grinbaum: “The key to understanding the opposition between IT and BIT is in choosing a vantage point from which OR looks as good as AND. Then this opposition becomes unnecessary: the loop view simply dissolves it.” Grinbaum then goes on to point out that this epistemologically circular structure “…is not a logical disaster, rather it is a well-documented property of all foundational studies.”

However, Grinbaum maintains that it is mandatory to cut the loop; he claims that it is “…a logical necessity: it is logically impossible to describe the loop as a whole within one theory.” I will argue that in fact it is vital to preserve the loop as a whole and to revise our expectations of what we wish to accomplish by making the cut. In fact, the ongoing It/Bit debate has been sustained for decades by our inability to recognize the consequences that result from making such a cut. As a result, we have been unable to take up the task of studying the properties inherent in the circularity of the loop. Helpful in this regard would be an examination of the role of relations between various elements and aspects of the loop. To a certain extent the importance of the role of relations has already been well stated in the essays of Kevin Knuth, Carlo Rovelli, Cristinel Stoica, and Jochen Szangolies although without application to aspects that clearly arise from ‘circularity’. Gary Miller’s discussion of the role of patterns, drawn from various historical precedents in mathematics, philosophy, and psychology, provides the clearest hints of all competition submissions on how the holistic analysis of this essential circular structure might be able to proceed.

In my paper, I outlined Susan Carey’s assertion that a ‘conceptual leap’ is often required in the construction of a new scientific theory. Perhaps moving from a ‘linearized’ perspective of the structure of a scientific theory to one that is ‘circularized’ is just one further example of this kind of conceptual change.

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Aug. 6, 2013 @ 06:42 GMT

Dear Charles,

Thank you for the comments to my essay. I find very useful and interesting the summary/review you made to most of the essays in the contest.

Best regards,

Cristi

Christi - One of the best descriptions I’ve seen yet for Wheeler’s delayed choice. Although I imagine our views may diverge substantially (for example on the global consistency principle), I still gave you top marks for an Outstanding essay. Well done.

I would imagine that the concept of subtime would provide an intriguing explanation of the delayed choice paradox.

I will look forward to following up on your other publications, and reading your PhD Thesis.

Kind regards, Paul

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Cristi - One of the best descriptions I’ve seen yet for Wheeler’s delayed choice. Although I imagine our views may diverge substantially (for example on the Global Consistency Principle), I still gave you top marks for an Outstanding essay. Well done.

I would imagine that the concept of subtime might provide an intriguing explanation of the delayed choice paradox.

Excellent job. I will look forward to following up on your other publications, and reading your PhD Thesis.

Kind regards, Paul

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Aug. 6, 2013 @ 19:45 GMT

Dear Paul,

Thank you for reading my essay, and finding in it things you liked. I read yours too, and see that you put at use a sort of retrocausality. Probably you noticed that I used the idea of "delayed initial conditions", which can be viewed as retrocausality. When understood in terms of 4-dimensional block universe, this takes the form of the "global consistency principle". Solutions have to be global, I don't think there's a way to avoid this. And if this rather tautological truth can explain quantum correlations, even better. Good luck with the contest!

Best regards,

Cristi

Paul Borrill replied on Aug. 7, 2013 @ 05:50 GMT

Cristi - thank you for the review of my essay and insightful remarks.

Actually, I would like to make a distinction between retrocausality, and true reversibility, where the state that is returned to is fundamentally indiscernable from having never left that state.

As you have seen from my essay (and my warning of diverse opinions ;-) I have dispensed entirely with the block universe: Minkowski space leads us to the false illusion that time can proceed independently of change along the spatial dimensions. Instead, I consider time/space as extending only down the 1-dimensional path of the traversal of a photon from one atom to another, and reversed, in all ontological respects, when the photon reflects back to the original source. Thus, there is no net change in time/space at the microscopic level.

By the way, your PhD thesis is awesome.

Kind regards, Paul

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Aug. 7, 2013 @ 05:57 GMT

Paul,

Thank you for the clarifications, and for liking my PhD thesis. The version that is online is a bit older, and I hope to upload soon the final version.

Best regards,

Cristi

Cristi - thank you for the review of my essay and insightful remarks.

Actually, I would like to make a distinction between retrocausality, and true reversibility, where the state that is returned to is fundamentally indeterminable from having never left that state.

As you have seen from my essay (and my warning of diverse opinions ;-) I have dispensed entirely with the block universe: Minkowski space leads us to the false illusion that time can proceed independently of motion along the spatial dimensions. Instead, I consider time/space as extending only down the 1-dimensional path of the traversal of a photon from one atom to another, and reversed, in all ontological respects, when the photon reflects back to the original source. Thus, there is no net change in time/space at the microscopic level.

By the way, your PhD thesis is awesome.

Kind regards, Paul

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TAO and eDuality are like brother and sister.

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eAmazigh M. HANNOU replied on Aug. 7, 2013 @ 10:08 GMT

Excuse me again.

your « Hi, votes are vanishing again. »

For a long time I had noticed that the dice were loaded.

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Aug. 7, 2013 @ 15:32 GMT

Dear Amazigh,

Nice comment "TAO and eDuality are like brother and sister." :)

Thank you for the visit!

Best regards,

Cristi

Antony Ryan replied on Aug. 7, 2013 @ 18:16 GMT

Hi Cristinel,

Does anybody know where the votes are going?

I plummeted many positions from last night when I had 68 ratings to this morning's 66.

Think it has happened a few times?

I've sent FQXi a message.

Best wishes,

Antony

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Dear Cristi,

I'm glad to see another fine submission from you after the unfortunate confusion at the end of the previous contest. I didn't have time to participate in this one myself, but I enjoyed reading your contribution. Take care,

Ben

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Aug. 7, 2013 @ 15:39 GMT

Dear Ben,

Thank you for taking time to read my essay, although you did not have time to participate this year. Your previous edition essay was great, so I look forward to see you here next time!

Best regards,

Cristi

Cristi,

Very nice work! I just rated it.

I found your essay while searching for something about Wheeler on Google. It led me to find FQXi website for the first time. Thank you!

Brian

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Aug. 7, 2013 @ 20:21 GMT

Dear Brian,

Thank you for the visit, and for the attention given to my essay. I am glad my essay helped you find FQXi, since I just read your essay and I like it!

Best regards,

Cristi

Cristi

thank you for your kind comments on my essay! I read yours back in June and again, now. You have a wonderful, easy to read, informative and thought provoking essay, which I very much enjoyed.

It's funny that we both make entomological analogies describing quantum experiments. Even though I have a little issue with yours. I think it should have been more fitting to have not...

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Cristi

thank you for your kind comments on my essay! I read yours back in June and again, now. You have a wonderful, easy to read, informative and thought provoking essay, which I very much enjoyed.

It's funny that we both make entomological analogies describing quantum experiments. Even though I have a little issue with yours. I think it should have been more fitting to have not either flies or dragonflies for quantum spiders to catch but an unusual for the macro world hybrid: depending on the type of the web the spider sets up to catch this weird thing, it may turn out either as a fly or a dragonfly, exhibiting an unnerving duality -- but it still is the same insect!

Also, it was refreshing to read such a positive review of Wheeler's ideas. I saw various takes on his legacy, including the ones coming from the other end of the spectrum, where, far from a visionary, he was made to appear more like the 20th century physics troll. But I agree with you that we should be thankful for Wheeler's courage in presenting his provocative ideas, on which "the new generation of Einsteins grew up to change the face of modern physics".

I see you pose a provocative question yourself:

"If Wheeler was right that we decide the physical laws, by our very choices as observers of the universe, then, due to their important contributions to physics, he and his students are responsible for many preposterous features of our universe."

Somehow, intuitively, perhaps and on a completely different level, there may be truth to it. I believe that it is not so much our thoughts but our deep-most feelings to which the universe responds. But, at the moment, this lies outside of physics studies.

I do not quite share your idea that our universe is mathematical. Here I side with Leibniz who pointed out that only because one can always find a mathematical formula describing any random distribution, like in an ink blot, it does not prove that this distribution is governed by a 'mathematical law': "This means that there exists a law simpler than just listing all the facts, from which nevertheless all the facts can be derived." [I copied this Leibniz quote from one of the essays without keeping the reference, sorry] But this idea is very much in line with Wheeller's beautiful thought that a very simple principle may lie at the heart of reality, waiting to be discovered.

I very much liked that in the end you brought up the ancient TaiJi symbol (those ancients knew and understood more about the world than many modern people care to admit, don't you think?) In TaiJi two opposites, 0 and 1, meet, interact and combine to generate the myriad of things.

Well done :)

-Marina

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Aug. 8, 2013 @ 07:07 GMT

Dear Marina,

Thank you very much for the nice and detailed comments to my essay. If you liked mine half as much as I liked yours, that's fine! About the analogy with fly/dragonfly, I wanted to make it by using some shape-shifting entity, like larva/butterfly, but larvae couldn't fly! And most important, I didn't want it to be interpreted as if the shape-shift took place in contact with the spiderweb. Regarding the quote you mention, about Wheeler and his students being responsible for many preposterous features of our universe, I am not sure in what proportion it was a joke, or a serious statement, or something between: a metaphor describing the paradigm shifts initiated by them.

You said "I do not quite share your idea that our universe is mathematical." That's fine, since, for example, I don't know if it matters whether a line is a line, or just a collection of points which happen to form a line! Important to me is that I expect an element of the collection to be on that line.

Thanks again for re-reading my essay, and for delighting us with your beautiful one (which I hope it will go into the finals).

Best regards,

Cristi

M. V. Vasilyeva replied on Aug. 12, 2013 @ 04:08 GMT

Thank you Cristi for your sweet reply!

And congrats on making the list. For my part, I'm there not on the merit of my entry but because the 'thumbs' were bombing their competition and so pushed many of the best essays bellow the cutoff point, while mine innocuous entry remained under their radar. I already asked for permission to swap my place with one of those unfairly slighted essays.

I returned here to further discuss your fly/dragonfly analogy. It is very clear to me now that we do not understand light. Neither do we interpret it right => hence paradoxes. Regarding my slight change of your analogy, won't you agree that with a single even if weird insect -- rather than 2 types of insects -- there is no paradoxes in either a plain double-slit nor a delayed choice experiment. I.e. we are observing the same phenomenon through different means and so we see its different aspects. But this means that nothing changes retroactively. Do you agree?

Again, congratulations for making the list. Your essay is a good read for SA. Let's hope it gets there,

-Marina

PS Oh! and regarding your take on Wheeler's PAP -- every joke has some truth to it. I've seen people taking his PAP very seriously. I also see PhD's taking Copenhagen interpretations very seriously (as in 'this is IT' rather than just 'Bit' based on lack of better info). So, on the last day of the contest, having read so much that day, I could not longer be sure how you meant it. I thought you were joking when I read it the first time but must have lost my sense of humor by the time I read it again :)

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Aug. 12, 2013 @ 06:08 GMT

Dear Marina,

Thank you for visiting my page even after the competition is ended, this is very kind. But of course nothing can be kinder than your proposal to swap your place with a less fortunate. Let me tell you that had you withdraw your essay after the votes ended, but before deciding the finalists, the finalists would have been the same (except yours). Because the tie at 4.3, the number...

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Dear Marina,

Thank you for visiting my page even after the competition is ended, this is very kind. But of course nothing can be kinder than your proposal to swap your place with a less fortunate. Let me tell you that had you withdraw your essay after the votes ended, but before deciding the finalists, the finalists would have been the same (except yours). Because the tie at 4.3, the number of finalists exceeds 40. So I don't think that if you withdraw now, the position will be filled by the next essay, but you can try. Personally, I don't want to check now what is the next essay, but I would like yours to stay in the competition. And I think you deserved the good rates. See that only one FQXi member had to be added in the finalist's list, this shows that the community appreciated good essays, despite some attempts to self-promote by "the representants of the next revolution in physics", by downvoting "the defenders of the evil establishment".

About complementarity. If you allow the particle to morph just before being detected, according to the property you measure, this doesn't quite resolve the weirdness. In the delayed choice experiment with the mirrors, one possibility is that the photon traveled both ways, and the other that it traveled along one of the paths. If we allow it to morph, then this means that it can teleport from one path to the other. So then, we have to admit teleportation of this sort (which is not the same as what goes by the name of "quantum teleportation"). For the sake of the argument, say we admit this too. Then, another problem appear. Let's think at the first mirror, the one doing the splitting. If the photon passes through, the mirror is not kicked. If it is reflected 100%, the mirror is kicked. If it is reflected 50%, the mirror is half-kicked. The delayed choice of whether to keep or remove the second beam splitter affects the existence of the kick in the first mirror. But the kick/not kick already hapened. So here is the mystery, that can't be removed just by allowing instant morphing. Also, how would the instant morphing explain EPR, without assumning the "spooky action at a distance"? All these are predicted by Schrodinger's equation, the mystery appears when we try to tell the story in a local manner.

Best regards,

Cristi

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Hi Cristi,

I waited until tonight to rate your essay, and raised your score a bit.

Good Luck in the finals!

Jonathan

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Aug. 8, 2013 @ 06:46 GMT

Dear Jonathan,

Thank you for visiting my essay again. I read your beautiful essay some time ago and I liked it. Good luck in the finals too!

Best regards,

Cristi

Jonathan J. Dickau replied on Aug. 8, 2013 @ 23:54 GMT

My congratulations Cristi.

I'm glad you made the finals, and I think your essay will get high grades from the expert reviewers (after all, they are experts). I wish you luck but I don't think you'll need it, as you did an excellent job on your essay this year.

All the Best,

Jonathan

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Author Cristinel Stoica replied on Aug. 9, 2013 @ 04:38 GMT

Dear Jonathan,

Thank you, and I am happy for you too! There are probably almost fifty finalists, (and many others interesting essays which are not in the finals), but I hope the expert reviewers will find the time to give them all the deserved attention. I wish you success with your essay!

Best regards,

Cristi

I develop in more detail the ideas of global consistency principle and delayed initial conditions in a recently published paper,

C. Stoica, Global and local aspects of causality in quantum mechanics.

This is a proceedings paper, for the Conference The Time Machine Factory [unspeakable, speakable] on Time Travel in Turin.

Here are the slides of the talk.

Hi Cristi,

Congrats for the Prize.

You Jennifer Nielsen and Douglas Singleton, Elias Vagenas, & Tao Zhu are the only positive news on the ridiculous and shameful "results" of this Essay Contest.

Cheers,

Ch.

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Anonymous replied on Oct. 31, 2013 @ 17:53 GMT

Dear Christian,

Thank you for the congratulations. It was a pleasure to meet you here. I liked your essay and the discussions we had on this forum.

Best regards,

Cristi

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