Hi Armin,

I really appreciate your response! My girlfriend described it as “kind and heartwarming” which I totally agree with. Thanks for signing up for the movie’s email list as well. It has been difficult to drum up support for “Digital Physics”, given its uniqueness, so your enthusiasm and interest in the movie is really appreciated.

So you want to know why an...

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Hi Armin,

I really appreciate your response! My girlfriend described it as “kind and heartwarming” which I totally agree with. Thanks for signing up for the movie’s email list as well. It has been difficult to drum up support for “Digital Physics”, given its uniqueness, so your enthusiasm and interest in the movie is really appreciated.

So you want to know why an actuary, someone who should know something about (difficult) odds, embarked on the daunting project of making a feature film? It’s actually a simple answer: I went into it with an unrealistic model of expectations… a naïve model… a model that underestimated the work involved… a model based on one scenario where everything goes according to plan and you don’t give yourself a heart attack;) But seriously, filmmaking is a lot more accessible these days and so is the education around it, so if you’re interested in getting into the art form, don’t over think it… just dive into the learning and creating process… make something, critique it, get feedback, and then do it again. You already have the music side covered, and audio is more than half of the film experience. I recommend playing around with Adobe After Effects. I bet you could make some great pieces of visual art to compliment your piano playing. If you can do that, you’re a filmmaker. End of story. QED. Worry about financing, locations, actors, scripts, etc. at a later date.

Now on to the science…

I checked out your youtube presentation on a novel approach for making sense of the Copenhagen Interpretation. (I also enjoyed your “sunset landscape” piano piece. I pictured George Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon…” but with slightly warmer sunset tones.) Your talk about how the surface to volume ratios of smaller objects of the same shape are greater and therefore more 2-D reminded me of how properties of a substance can change when they are in small quantities due to the fact that the substance has a higher proportion of its molecules on its surface, and therefore a higher proportion are interacting with the substance’s surrounding environment, not just with the molecules/atoms on the “interior” of the substance… whatever that word means to a Flantlander. (Actually, you talked about objects of the same “shape” in your discussion when discussing surface to volume ratios, but I think that term is a little vague if we’re dealing with a discrete atomic model. I think trying to derive a more precise notion of “shape” in your discrete atomic model might even be insightful and help build out your theory a little more.) So some of the properties of the substance do not seem to be self-contained within the molecules themselves, but are properties that should be attributed to the interactive relationship between the substance and its environment. Could this stripping away of properties attributed to “things” be extended? Could more properties thought to be the properties of particles/matter really be looked at as properties that arise from interactive relationships? Could a non-physical, informational reality give rise to all the properties that we attribute to a physical world of particles? Maybe this viewpoint makes the “shut up and compute” reality of QM more intuitive. Maybe the world is purely mathematical/informational/formulaic/non-physical at its core. Information has no purpose/meaning/existence unless it is describing relationships… which I think is consistent with the viewpoint we extract from QM experiments. I think this also relates to the conversation I was having with Luca on the subjective nature of experiencing color.

I also liked your distinction between “potential” and “actual” in your quantum theory. It reminds me of my Aristotelian preference for potential infinite instead of actual infinite, but I will not go into anything on that matter here due to time constraints; I have to get to your actual FQXi essay at some point:)

Thanks again for your interest and support of “Digital Physics”. Spread the word!

Jon

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Dear Jon,

Thank you for your response, as a matter of fact, I had been playing around a little with After Effects to see if I could create music videos consisting entirely of animated images appropriate to the music. My initial attempts proved to consume more time than I had available, so I had to set it on the back-burner.(I suspect the problem was fundamentally that my vision was too far...

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Dear Jon,

Thank you for your response, as a matter of fact, I had been playing around a little with After Effects to see if I could create music videos consisting entirely of animated images appropriate to the music. My initial attempts proved to consume more time than I had available, so I had to set it on the back-burner.(I suspect the problem was fundamentally that my vision was too far beyond my ability). After this semester is over, I might just try again.

Concerning the Vaxjo talk, One of the few things I would change if I gave the talk today would be to cut out the part about the surface to volume ratio. Of course it is correct that smaller things have in general more surface to volume, and in that sense can be considered "more" two-dimensional, but that argument does not get me to the limit of infinite surface area to volume. In fact, I understood only later how to approach the limit, and it is not in terms of size but speed. Specifically, the limit at which v=c, is, in my view, also the limit in which spacetime itself vanishes. I believe that, at bottom, this is the reason why spacetime observers cannot transform to lightlike frames. If you are more interested in this aspect, there is a paper I have written but have not promoted much because in the absence of the context of my ideas in quantum mechanics it might seem too crazy, but here it is:

http://vixra.org/abs/1306.0076

A major problem with this view is that it requires that lightcones be topological objects whereas at present, most researchers, to the extent that they think about the topology of spacetime at all, consider it to be Euclidean (in which light cones have no topological significance). I believe that this current view is in error, and that the topology of spacetime is such that lightcones are in fact topological submanifolds. Proving this is a whole other ball-game, and, given how much I already have on my plate, probably not something I will get to attempt in the near future. But this is one of the theoretical implications of my idea.

As for the distinction between potentiality and actuality, yes, during the earlier stages I was in fact considering using Aristotle's distinctions. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, his distinctions do not have the right relationship to each other to be used in standard modal logic. Of course, one could just build up a different modal logic based on those distinctions, but the standard one has the advantage that all the model theory and semantics has already been worked out. I would rather not try to re-invent the wheel, if at all possible.

Finally, concerning the actual and potential infinities, while I am not constructing this framework for that purpose, I can imagine that an ultrafinitist might find ZFCD attractive because they can then put omega and all sets larger than it in the outer domain.

Best wishes,

Armin

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Hi Jon,

Sorry I took so long to answer. I tried to relate my question to your questions in the sense, that I tried to make a connection between the language of a statement and the meta language that describes the meaning of the statement. But did not succeed.

So finally it might just be related to the color question. Sorry that I use your forum for that!

Let the set A contain...

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Hi Jon,

Sorry I took so long to answer. I tried to relate my question to your questions in the sense, that I tried to make a connection between the language of a statement and the meta language that describes the meaning of the statement. But did not succeed.

So finally it might just be related to the color question. Sorry that I use your forum for that!

Let the set A contain two sheep. From the point of view of A A cannot distinguish the two sheep. It is symmetric. But we can. Maybe one sheep is black, the other white. Or one is bigger, the other smaller. In a way the two sheep must have other properties, that can distinguish them, that are not defined in A or by A. If the sheep are completely identical, they have at least to different space locations, by which we can differentiate between them.

What is with space itself? What additional properties can distinguish between 2 space points?

What with a qbit? The qbit has the full SU(2) symmetry. What distinguishes two different states?

Logically speaking the set can be seen as the predicate of a proposition. Its elements are the possible subjects: "A sheep is an animal." The predicate could also be called a term. In the greek philosophy eidos. To specify what this term mean, contains, we need other term (eidos), that are not defined by the term itself. The relation between different terms (eidos) is what we call mathematics. Formally it is possible creating terms, that contain themselves, leading to the well known paradox. In the philosophy of Aristoteles the paradox do not arise, because he finally end up with the substance. He defined substance as something, that can only be the subject and not the predicate of statement. The substance is what I would call reality, or factuality.

On the way down from the eidos to the factual we face the problem how the general becomes a singular. And how we could even speak about the singular (factual), since it is singular.

In the other direction, we have Humes problem of how eidos could be derived from singular facts.

Hope this makes some sense.

Luca

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