FQXi Community

Essay Abstract

We know that some physical phenomena can be derived from a more basic substratum. Heat is a manifestation of the kinetic energy of atoms. Atoms are more fundamental than the laws of thermodynamics, but atomic physics in turn is derived from the interactions of more primitive components. Is fundamentality then a relative concept with no absolute bottom, or is there a fundament of physical law which is not derived from anything deeper? Does physics perhaps circle back on itself in recursive fashion? “Fundamental” is an adjective to describe a level of reality that is not derived from anything else. Fundamental laws are not in any way accidental or arbitrary. They must be as they are, because they could not be any other way. If such a level of reality exists, then how can it be explained? Do we just have to accept it as axiomatic? Does it emerge out of nothing? These questions seem unanswerable but we must not accept defeat so quickly. The universe exists, so there must be answers. Why would those answers be incomprehensible to us? I sketch some answers choosing information, events, symmetry, quantisation and stories as fundamental concepts.

Author Bio

Philip Gibbs is an independent physicist and mathematician.

Download Essay PDF File

This essay in its summary hits a very important nail on the head with this statement...

" If young researchers are all corralled into one pen it could turn out to be in the wrong place. The chances are they are going to be influenced only by the highest profile physicists."

Excellent insight!

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Dec. 21, 2017 @ 17:49 GMT

Scott, thank you for your comment. I think there is a genuine concern that some directions are not being explored because the young academics are made to follow the direction set by the older physicists. I am not saying that they have it all wrong but where they are stuck we need more diversity of ideas.

The FQXi essay contest is a rare opportunity for people to think for themselves. It should be flooded with essays from PhD students but we only get a few of those. Are they afraid to say what they think? There is a lot more diversity from us outsiders so I hope we have a tiny bit of influence this way.

Scott S Gordon replied on Dec. 22, 2017 @ 01:51 GMT

A lot of truth in regards to new ideas not coming from within physics academia...

report post as inappropriate

Philip,

Many thanks for yet another interesting read. You have succeeded in provoking my thoughts.

You briefly mention that the particles that we observe are simply a manifestation of a stable state of the vacuum. Does this suggest that the vacuum is more fundamental than the particles that reside within it? I believe that it does.

I am intrigued by your notion of summing up histories. But doesn't this produce some type of integral? Wouldn't the thing that is being integrated be more fundamental and the resulting integral be emergent? And a history is itself a kind of integral. So you are really proposing a double integration.

You seem to have belief that information is fundamental although I did not read that explicit statement.

I thought your use of recursive thinking was very clever. In some ways, that is precisely how the scientific method works ... The analogy of using the Newton-Raphson method to calculate a square root gave me a little chuckle. I can tell you that in some systems, it REALLY helps if you have a decent first guess. You don't want to be on the wrong side of an inflexion point.

You placed a lot of emphasis upon different types of algebra. This tends to reinforce some of my own thinking. I have not yet tried to study the Lie algebra and such but I see that I need to do so.

All in all, a very good essay.

Lastly, allow me to thank you again for the website viXra.org. I continue to use this resource to post works.

Best Regards and Good Luck,

Gary Simpson

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Dec. 21, 2017 @ 20:20 GMT

Garry, Thank you for reading my essay. You have understood its important points.

I do indeed regard information as fundamental. This is a common idea that I am sure will feature in quite a few essays. It was something I was writing about 20 years ago and I have been influenced by Wheeler, Fredkin, Duff and especially Weizsäcker.

In the hierarchy of fundamentalness the vacuum is one above particles, but if there are many possible alternative vacua and spacetime is also emergent, then it is still some way down from the most fundamental levels where information is the main entity.

I am beginning to see how Weizsäcker's idea of an iterative process related to quantisation addresses some of the problems that fundamental theories face in terms of where do you start, so I am glad that part stood out. The question is then how to turn that into a theory that works. It is a task of matching philosophical ideas with what we know about how physics works. Lie algebras are important and based on a symple idea of composing small transformations.

The free Lie algebra is a structure that physicists and even mathematicians have neglected. It properties as a hopf algebra are striking and clearly related to physics. If people worked on how to generalise its mapping properties I am sure there would be a breakthrough.

I will be reading your essay soon.

"It has always been my view that symmetry is not only fundamental, but there is a huge hidden symmetry in nature that unifies the symmetry of spacetime and gauge theory." My guess is that the huge hidden symmetry is the monster group.

Monster group, Wikipedia

If nature is finite and digital then my guess is that string vibrations are strictly confined to 3 copies of the Leech lattice. If nature is infinite, then my guess is that string vibrations are approximately confined to 9 copies (or more?) of the Leech lattice.

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Dec. 22, 2017 @ 15:46 GMT

David. I share your enthusiasm for the monster group. Its relation to physics via the Leech lattice is very intriguing. However, I am looking for a group with one dimension for every degree of freedom in physics. According to our current view of field theory there are several field variables at every point in spacetime, so I require an infinite dimensional Lie algebra with one dimension for each one. This itself is not so outlandish. In gauge theory there is an independent gauge group at each point in spacetime. These generate the gauge symmetry. However the gauge field has four of these at every point so there are not enough for my theory. If the final theory is something like string theory then it takes even more variables to describe the state space, so the symmetry has to be even larger. I don't know anyone who shares a belief in this idea but I bet that when they realise it is right they will say they knew it all along.

The monster group is the largest sporadic finite simple group. It has a huge number of elements, but it is tiny compared to the invariance group of any gauge symmetry. It is really answering a different sort of question to the one I am thinking of. However, the intricacy of its structure is remarkable. I would not be surprised if it has a part to play. In contrast, the groups that I consider most fundamental are a little boring. These are the free groups where you just multiply and invert group elements without imposing any structure apart from associativity

David Brown replied on Dec. 25, 2017 @ 14:22 GMT

"... a group with one dimension for every degree of freedom in physics ..." If nature is infinite, then it is plausible to assume that physics has infinitely many degrees of freedom. If nature is finite, then nature might have only 78 degrees of freedom. Consider 3 copies of a model of 26-dimenional bosonic string theory, yielding 78 dimensions of bosonic waves. There might be a boson/fermion duality theorem derivable from Wolfram's cosmological automation. There could be 6 "barks" or "big quarks" each carrying a barkload of 12-dimensions of information, yielding 72 dimensions controlled by Fredkin's 6-phase clock, thus 78 dimensions of fermionic information. Each 12-dimensional barkload might represent 4 dimensions of spacetime, 3 dimensions of linear-momentum density, 3 dimensions of angular-momentum density, 1 dimension of quantum-spin density for matter, and 1 dimension of quantum-spin density for antimatter. By redundant representation of information, it might be possible to derive an 11-dimensional model of M-theory and a 12-dimensional model of F-theory — the idea is that the interior of the multiverse would be 72-dimensional in terms of "barkload" data, and the measurable universes would all be 71-dimensional and located on the boundary of the multiverse.

report post as inappropriate

Is this issue of deforming or breaking the symmetry of the hexagon related to a paper I think you wrote about moving an object through a maze? I think it was titled the moving couch problem. It addressed the problem of the range of shapes that can be moved through a hallway with a 90 degree turn in the hall. I have been pondering something similar. We know you can't tessellate a plane with pentagons. However, if you shave off sides in various ways you might be able to approximate a tessellation. The question then is what is the minimum amount of deformation required to do this. Also, how is this related to the topology of a dodecahedron, topologically a sphere, and the R^2 plane.

Cheers LC

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Dec. 22, 2017 @ 16:05 GMT

Hi Lawrence. Yes the Lebesgue universal covering problem is in the same class as the moving sofa problem. They are both geometric optimisation problems like a minimax problem in game theory. The interest is in that simple questions lead to complex, but comprehensible answers. It seems to be the nature of the type of problem that this happens. The state of the physical vacuum is also an optimisation problem, but we don't know the question we have to answer yet. What we can say is that the complexity of the vacuum could emerge from a much simpler starting point.

I am sure you are aware that the problem of classifying pentagonal tessellations with a single (non-regular) pentagonal shape was solved this year Pentagonal Tilings but there are still lots of other problems to solve in this area.

Lawrence B. Crowell replied on Dec. 22, 2017 @ 22:52 GMT

I was aware of the Bagina results and Mann, McLoud, Von Derau, but not the complete set by Rao. I suppose I should have done more of a heads up on this, but I have this small stack of drawings with calculations that are almost high school level.

This seems in some ways a bit similar to the covering problem. If I want to tessellate a plane with pentagons I have to deform them. If I have a dodecahedron I can form a plane by sending a point to infinity and the pentagons are deformed and I have an icosian. This gives metric data near the origin, but far out there is little data. I might think of then piecing icosians together to create a regular pentagonal tessellation of the plane, What then are the deformations necessary? I have to perform transformations on the pentagons, and what are transformations or deformations are required?

The vacuum is I think a sort of quantum time crystal. Wilzcek worked this up, where there is a periodicity of a discrete system in not just space but time. I make mention of this in my paper that will be coming soon. It is a part of my question with respect to tessellation of space with pentagons.

Cheers LC

report post as inappropriate

If we are instructed by your essay we may stray from scientific methods. Why should governments and universities fund endeavors if nature is relative to the view of each observer? They can just say “tens of thousands of people have been trained in the sciences and you guys are more confused than you were a hundred years ago”. But you say some very important things. There is a structure to consciousness and it draws on information. The information it uses is not always relative. For example most believe that atoms and the quarks they contain are the same every time they are measured. Electronic structure may be probabilistic and complex but it is consistent. I believe you would say that some symmetry causes this. I couldn’t tell for sure but you might also believe that the structure of consciousness may cause this consistency. This is a very productive line of thought. I associate what MIT calls the unitary operator 1=exp(iet/H)*exp(-iet/H) with the structure of consciousness. My essay deals with the quark “quantum circles” that this operator describes. The quantum circles can be either information based or real time and energy based. The operator and its quarks are a symmetry. The consciousness that contains quarks, atoms and electronic structure has access to consistent information that it can shape into what it pleases including relative thoughts.

Thank you again for creating viXra (but I notice that you are able to use arxiv). My December 2017 paper vixra: Information and Reality, viXra:1602.0219v2 follows the line of thought above.

report post as inappropriate

Phillip, I posted the above with too much haste. I re-read it and want to clarify that I meant no disrespect to you or your fine, thought provoking essay. I was reacting to only one of your thoughts, not your essay in general. I am sorry if it came across wrong. I don't know if you saw Tyson's concern that we have some leaders who ignore science as "fake news". I was thinking about damage control if there is criticism that science doesn't appear to be converging.

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Dec. 23, 2017 @ 09:06 GMT

Hi Gene, thanks for your comments. I have not been following the latest from Tyson, but I did submit an essay to the Global Challenge New Shape essay contest about how we could deal with these kinds of problems. The last thing we need to tackle fake news is fact checking organisation or any brake on free speech on the internet. I think peer review needs to be more open, not less open, but that is another subject. Nothing I have written is meant to be anti-science. When I say that reality is relative to the observer I am not saying we should accept alt-facts. I am talking about observers in different universes.

You say that I have access to arXiv but actually my access is very limited. I can only post to a small number of categories and my papers have often been moved to different ones. All my submissions are held for moderation. It was better in the past but now I prefer to submit my work to only viXra and researchgate. I have not submitted to arXiv for nearly four years

I noted your comment to Gene Barbee's comment in Scott Gordon's essay.

Yes. We independents do it for our amusement. But, if one of us does get the beginning of a TOE a breakthrough, society and science will not know it. Or, will they?

A breakthrough means a new paradigm which the money people (the powers that be in science funding) wold consider it a challenge to their authority. So, society suffers because an advance means the society gains.

How does society become aware of the new paradigm? There are so many out there (just look at viXra) and most have almost no data or solved problems let alone predictions made and found.

I've been published in peer reviewed journal, on arXiv. But Now my model is just too radical (apparently). I no longer try.

But the model (STOE) has made predictions that were later found, explained problems standard models consider problems, the STOE suggested 2 experiments that were performed and it rejected wave models of light (a photon model produced diffraction and interference). Well, I still talk about it when I get a chance.

Hodge

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Dec. 24, 2017 @ 11:13 GMT

It is going to be very hard to get people to notice a new theory of fundamental physics from an outsider. Sometimes the sociology lines up and there is some short-lived media attention (think Garrett Lisi or Eric Weinstein) but the main problem is that a worthy theory needs to be very complete to be recognised. It may be that what I or you are saying is correct, but it is hard to see that now. It may become clear much later but even then we will get little credit because they will say that we did not have much influence and that is what counts. There is some truth to the "challenge to authority" claim, but a really clear breakthrough would get past that. Some of the essays here are mathematically sophisticated, but their correctness would need to be overwhelmingly obvious in some way to grab immediate attention.

I now prefer to work on mathematical problems because if you solve an interesting unsolved problem in mathematics it is much more likely to get noticed and appreciated. In physics I just do he FQXi essays because I find that the questions I get help push my ideas along a little each time

Hans van Leunen replied on Jan. 22, 2018 @ 15:43 GMT

Independent writers that worked in industry and that start researching after retirement have severe problems in publishing unorthodox and controversial documents otherwise than via vixra. It is an excellent service.I praise Philip Gibbs for providing that service. I have found another way to present my knowledge in a concise and flexible way that enables revision of the published text. I publish in a Wikiversity project. It is a perfect way to present a coherent piece of knowledge and it offers an excellent editor. The format is familiar for those that use Wikipedia. The project that I initiated is https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Hilbert_Book_Model_Project. Highlights of the project are collected at http://vixra.org/author/j_a_j_van_leunen. I use a ReseachGate project to discuss the Hilbert Book Model Project. https://www.researchgate.net/project/The-Hilbert-Book-Model-
Project This works fine.

report post as inappropriate

Phil,

"I expect to find this symmetry in a pregeometric meta-law that transcends spacetime."

That says it pretty well. Like the shape of a Lotus petal bespeaking the whole form of the opening blossom. In spite of the possibility that not even the universe always works perfectly. Merry Christmas and a Happier New Year. jrc

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Dec. 25, 2017 @ 21:30 GMT

Thank you and merry Xmas!

quote

The biggest difficulty faced by theoretical physicists of this generation is that positive experimental

input on physics beyond the standard models is very hard to come by. That situation could change or

it could continue for much longer. Without empirical data how is it possible to tell if the answer is

string theory, loop quantum gravity, non-commutative geometry or something else? The theorists

can still progress by working with the few clues they have, but success will depend on guessing

correctly the answer to questions like ‘what is “fundamental”?’ If they don’t know then they must be

prepared to consider different philosophical options, letting the mathematics guide the way until the

experimental outlook improves. If young researchers are all corralled into one pen it could turn out

to be in the wrong place. The chances are they are going to be influenced only by the highest profile

physicists. If those leaders say that symmetry is unimportant because it is emergent or that

geometry is more fundamental than algebra, other possibilities may be neglected. It appears to me

that there is a clear program that would combine the ideas of algebraic geometry with quantum field

theory. It just requires mathematicians and physicists to bring their knowledge together.

You nailed it !!!!

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Dec. 26, 2017 @ 09:11 GMT

Thank you Andrew

Donald G Palmer replied on Jan. 1, 2018 @ 12:05 GMT

Phillip & Andrew,

There is an implicit assumption when depending upon mathematics "to guide the way" for new directions in physics. That assumption is that our current mathematics is adequate to the tasks we attempt to use it for. If it is not, then we will find it very difficult to make much progress. Mathematics likely suffers from the same effect as you describe for physics - the pen and corral situation.

I will suggest that this is actually the problem physics, which tends to lead other scientific disciplines so all of science, is faced with: The mathematical tools we currently have are not adequate to the task science has put to it.

The limitations of our mathematical tools might actually be keeping us from seeing aspects of our universe, which would be even more reason to consider fundamental reviews of mathematics and its limitations (especially on how it is applied).

I believe we will find a guide to a new direction this way.

Don

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Jan. 21, 2018 @ 10:01 GMT

I agree that we need some new mathematics to understand physics. Maths is a hard subject and it is especially hard for mathematicians to get organised. Each one understands too little of the whole making it difficult to see the important connections. I predict that at some point deep learning will crack the problem. When AI surpasses humans at discovering mathematics as it has now done in games such as chess and go, then there will be a big leap forward.

show all replies (2 not shown)

Donald G Palmer replied on Jan. 22, 2018 @ 11:47 GMT

Phillip,

The difficulty comes in thinking that some new mathematics is just the 'discovery' of more of what we have, rather than considering a really different direction of mathematics.

What is needed is a boost, an expansion, of mathematics into areas not considered today, because we think we have already covered them. This direction could also prove very expansive for both...

view entire post

Phillip,

The difficulty comes in thinking that some new mathematics is just the 'discovery' of more of what we have, rather than considering a really different direction of mathematics.

What is needed is a boost, an expansion, of mathematics into areas not considered today, because we think we have already covered them. This direction could also prove very expansive for both mathematics and science - and might help us understand the entire onion, rather than individual layers.

Complex numbers are not proper values today. They are represented as two numeric parts added together with an unknown quantity (i = sqrt( -1)) that makes the full value un-usable as quantities for measurement (we toss out the 'imaginary' part and can only use the 'real' part as a measurement). This remains the case today even though complex numbers are used extensively in science.

Two things are needed to correct this situation: negative base numbers need to be properly defined and a numeric system devised (as in invented) that can represent a value for sqrt( -1) as well as represent any complex number as a single valued numeric value.

I understand this is a problem for current mathematics that has used complex numbers as 'plane numbers' for several centuries. However the simplification of many equations should be apparent, if complex numbers could be represented as single values.

Science has been built on the decimal numeric system (and its cousin positional numeric systems, eg. binary or hex 'numbers'). It has known no other system. The science of today could not operate using the Roman Numeral system. In an analogous way, I do not think science can properly go beyond its current knowledge stage without a more advanced numeric system.

I also think we will find that complex values can represent measurement values not currently allowable today (as these numbers will require additional functionality built into them than our current positional numeric systems have).

Take care,

Don

view post as summary

report post as inappropriate

Hans van Leunen replied on Jan. 22, 2018 @ 15:56 GMT

Most required mathematics exists, but it must be brought in proper coherence. Physical reality applies a coherent piece of mathematics.

In nearly all approaches, I miss the efforts of Garrett Birkhoff and John von Neumann to establish a fundament that emerges into a suitable modeling platform. In their 1936 paper, they introduced a relational structure that they called quantum logic and...

view entire post

Most required mathematics exists, but it must be brought in proper coherence. Physical reality applies a coherent piece of mathematics.

In nearly all approaches, I miss the efforts of Garrett Birkhoff and John von Neumann to establish a fundament that emerges into a suitable modeling platform. In their 1936 paper, they introduced a relational structure that they called quantum logic and that mathematicians call an orthomodular lattice. It automatically emerges into a separable Hilbert space, which also introduces a selected set of number systems into the modeling platform. Hilbert spaces can only cope with division rings and separable Hilbert spaces can store discrete values but no continuums. Each infinite dimensional separable Hilbert space owns a unique non-separable Hilbert space that embeds its separable partner. In this way, the structure and the functionality of the platform grow in a restricted way. After a few steps, a very powerful and flexible modeling platform evolves. This model acts as a repository for dynamic geometric data that fit in quaternionic eigenvalues of dedicated operators. The non-separable part of the model can archive continuums that are defined by quaternionic functions.

In other words, the foundation that was discovered by Birkhoff and von Neumann delivers a base model that can offer the basement of well-founded theories and that puts restrictions on the dimensions which universe can claim.

Multiple Hilbert spaces can share the same underlying vector space and form a set of platforms that float on a background platform. On those platforms can live objects that hop around in a stochastic hopping path. This adds dynamics to the model.

The orthomodular lattice acts like a seed from which a certain kind of plant grows. Here the seed turns into the physical reality that we perceive.

Stochastic processes generate the hop landing locations and characteristic functions control these processes. These characteristic functions are the Fourier transform of the location density distribution of the hop landing location swarm that represents the elementary particle.

This delivers the holographic control of these elementary modules. Also, higher level modules are controlled by stochastic processes that own a characteristic function.

See: “Stochastic control of the universe”; http://vixra.org/abs/1712.0243 Indirectly via the characteristic functions the universe is controlled in a holographic way.

The Wikiversity Hilbert Book Model Project investigates this approach.

https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Hilbert_Book_Model_
Project

http://vixra.org/author/j_a_j_van_leunen contains documents that treat some highlights of the project.

view post as summary

report post as inappropriate

hide replies

Dear Phillip,

I knew there's a reason I always prioritize reading your contributions to these contests. Excellent work, and you certainly succeeded in your aim of provoking the readers' minds.

I particularly like this sort of theory-independent view in terms of events: whatever the fundamental theory may turn out to be, it has to have events within it in some form, be those...

view entire post

Dear Phillip,

I knew there's a reason I always prioritize reading your contributions to these contests. Excellent work, and you certainly succeeded in your aim of provoking the readers' minds.

I particularly like this sort of theory-independent view in terms of events: whatever the fundamental theory may turn out to be, it has to have events within it in some form, be those worldlines crossing, particles of all conceivable kinds interacting, string splittings or whatever. So let's not worry about those details for the moment, but rather, think in terms of those events, and the stories that can be told with them.

One tiny bit of criticism I have is that there's many deep and possibly controversial ideas that aren't developed in the way they deserve (although that is likely owed to the length restrictions, and I'm also aware that this is a criticism you could probably lob straight back at my own essay if/when it gets posted). In particular on topics where I perceive some confluence with my own thinking---like the relative nature of reality, or the idea that in terms of information, 'nothing' and 'everything' are really the same---I would have liked more discussion, just to see how somebody like you develops these notions.

But these are the complaints of one having been hooked by your ideas, and now finding themselves jonesing for more. Which, as you said, is really all you intended with this essay.

All the algebraic stuff has re-awoken that curious sense that if you could just take one further step back, you'd just see the big picture pop out. There are so many tantalizing hints and connections, it's hard to believe that there isn't some fundamental story to be told in these terms.

But I think that's for someone smarter than me to discover. I may get back to meddling with this some day (although my love of the octonions means that I'm skeptical of requiring associativity---alternativity is really all you need!), but for now, I'll concentrate on other matters.

view post as summary

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Dec. 30, 2017 @ 15:49 GMT

I hope you do get round to submitting an essay this year. There is some overlap between our philosophies which helps me find ways to expand my own viewpoint.

There are two sides to my essay, the philosophical and the mathematical. On the philosophical side it is partly about finding the right words to express ideas in a way that makes them sound reasonable. I think in terms of a high degree...

view entire post

I hope you do get round to submitting an essay this year. There is some overlap between our philosophies which helps me find ways to expand my own viewpoint.

There are two sides to my essay, the philosophical and the mathematical. On the philosophical side it is partly about finding the right words to express ideas in a way that makes them sound reasonable. I think in terms of a high degree of emergence, so fundamentals must take us away from anything we know in conventional physics. This is bound to be ambitious and speculative to a high degree, but structures like space and time and particles have properties that are too specific to be fundamental in my opinion. Information, events are the relationships between them are much more generic. I think you have a similar view.

The mathematical side is more important of course. Without mathematics to interpret the philosophy there is no end point. I have some mathematical ability in problem solving and algorithms but the more abstract ideas needed to develop these ideas are outside my comfort zone. I feel like an art critic who can appreciate what is good and can talk about how things should be, but without actually having enough skills and creativity to do it myself.

I agree that non-associativity is likely to play a part. I see octonions as just one algebraic structure with some nice properties that plays some role in certain possible solutions with good properties. The starting point must be something much more general like free universal algebra or higher category theories. Simple categories are associative, but with higher categories it is more natural to relax and weaken the structure to allow more interesting properties. The identities that define associativity are replaced with isomorphisms. Symmetry always arises as a useful tool in any algebraic structure. For example, if you want to understand octonions you will certainly want to know its automorphism group, and then there are the exceptional Lie algebras up to E8 that are also related to octonions. I think symmetry has to be generalised to supersymmetry, quantum groups, n-groups etc, so there is a long way to go.

The free Lie-algebra that I discuss in the essay is just a starting point that is simple enough to illustrate my point. It provides the important mapping from algebra to geometric structures using iterated integrals along paths. I suspect that there are generalisations of this where iterated integrals map more general alegbras onto branching networks, like Feynman diagrams. I don't know if I will ever get my mind round it well enough to formulate something that works.

view post as summary

Jochen Szangolies replied on Jan. 10, 2018 @ 18:19 GMT

Right, now that my essay is up to illustrate where I'm coming from, some more comments.

I like how you characterized your approach over in my thread---as 'pushing back' the fundamentals. This somehow seems very intuitive: the more general the mathematical structure, the less assumptions have to be made, and the less attack surface for 'But why this?'-type questions exist.

But does this process have an end? In some sense, you can always generalize further---throw away some more axioms, to put it starkly. When are we general enough? Is there some endpoint that does not contain any assumptions that can be rationally doubted---and even if so, does this say something about the world, or about the boundaries of our reason?

Exceptional structures seem to be good candidates for endpoints, in particular because they lend themselves to chains that actually do seem to terminate. Octonions are the division algebra with the highest dimension, things stop there---but then, why division algebras? E8 is the largest exceptional simple Lie group, but why any of that?

That said, I can certainly relate to the intuition that there's got to be some mathematical object of maximal symmetry, something ideally self-justifying, which---one might hope---gives rise to observed phenomena through some process of iterated emergence, be that symmetry breaking or multiple quantization. So this is kind of a point where I have my doubts whether the whole thing works---but would love to be proven wrong.

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Jan. 10, 2018 @ 22:43 GMT

The "Why this?" question is an important driver in my thinking. I should perhaps have mentioned it more as you have. Of course it is nothing new. Wheeler asked what gave the equations wings to fly? Hawking asked what breathes fire into the equations?

I know some people see exceptional structures like E8 or the octonions as something that can answer this question. These things do seem to...

view entire post

The "Why this?" question is an important driver in my thinking. I should perhaps have mentioned it more as you have. Of course it is nothing new. Wheeler asked what gave the equations wings to fly? Hawking asked what breathes fire into the equations?

I know some people see exceptional structures like E8 or the octonions as something that can answer this question. These things do seem to turn up, but for me they don't answer the "Why this?" question. I feel a bit like the annoying who just keeps asking why? every time something is explained to them. If any information is needed at all to specify the way things are then there is still a question to answer.

One candidate for a solution is that you just keep pushing back through layers of emergence until you arrive at a system with no information, where everything is possible. This is like Tegmark's MUH. This has problems. Firstly you need to define some measure or weight on the space of all mathematical possibilities and that introduces an unsourced system of information. Again I would ask Why this? Secondly, it does not explain why there is order and symmetry in the universe. If anything can happen we should live in a world where anything is possible. We might as well be living in a Disney cartoon.

Emergence is usually something approximate. The Navier Stokes equations emerge from inter-molecular forces in a fluid, but if you look closely enough you can see the molecules. I think the emergence of space and time is like that too. If we look closely enough we can in principle see the underlying structures from which it emerges. However, I think there is a layer beyond which we can't see, even in principle. A system that emerges from a universality principle on the ensemble of all possibilities without any input of information. I know I keep saying this, but the important point that responds to your comment is why I think that it must be that way. It's because that provides the only possible answer I can think of to the "Why this?" question that fits with our experience of a rational structured universe without any external source of information.

view post as summary

show all replies (4 not shown)

Jochen Szangolies replied on Jan. 11, 2018 @ 18:15 GMT

I see your point regarding the approximate nature of emergence---although we often try to do so, one can't really stratify the world into neatly separated layers and expect them to stand on their own. Your notion of the 'layer beyond which we can't see', however, is somewhat opaque to me. What makes it so that we can't see beyond? Is is a limitation of human nature, or of the world as such? Could perhaps some alien scientist see beyond, only to be stumped at another layer, or perhaps, not at all?

I think that possibly the main difference between our approaches may be that you keep on asking the 'Why this?'-question, while I, on the other hand, think that it's ultimately not the right question to ask, and might only seem to make sense to us thanks to the way our own thinking is structured.

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Jan. 11, 2018 @ 20:14 GMT

These are the ideas I am struggling with so I don't have clear answers, but here is how my thinking goes. Imagine you were able to run some simulation of a small world on a very powerful computer, so that within that simulation there is an intelligent entity that can examine its world. The entity could observe the artificial laws of physics that you were simulating, but it could never see what programming language you used or the hardware details of the computer you were using. I think this last layer must be similar in a way. We can't see the details of the ensemble of mathematical possibilities from which the bottom layer is emergent. We don't get to see the mathematical symbols or the choice of axioms.

There are also examples of this from physics. Near a critical point in some system of statistical physics you can get scaling behavior. If you take the limit at the critical point and rescale than the details of the statistical physics system shrinks to zero and vanish. A quick google search brings up this talk on the subject.

Both these examples are based around types of universality. In the first case it is the universality of computer languages that gives a definition of computability that is language independent. In the second case it is universality in critical systems. I think that something like this is happening at the bottom layer of physics. It's a form of emergence but it is different from the approximate forms that we can unpack.

I think symmetry emerges at that bottom level and is then spontaneously broken or partly hidden as space and time emerge higher up.

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Jan. 11, 2018 @ 20:34 GMT

I do agree that there is a danger of being misled by the way our thinking is structured. I am quick to criticize when I see people thinking in terms of temporal causality. The same may apply to reductionism in the form that I am using. The "how" may be more important than the "why." However, there is also a danger of throwing out too much so that we find ourselves lost and unable to do anything. Perhaps it is necessary to keep some philosophical principles as scaffolding to build on. They can be removed later.

Jochen Szangolies replied on Jan. 12, 2018 @ 05:58 GMT

Ah, yes, I see what you mean. I think David Deutsch mentions such worries somewhere. On the other hand, I once had the idea that this means we're already at the end of our search for a fundamental theory, and it's electromagnetism (or any other theory capable of describing universal computers): because whatever the fundamental theory happens to be, if it is computational, you can write a program simulating it and run it on a computer. This computer can then be described via Maxwell's equations, thus showing that we need nothing else to describe the world. (I sometimes wonder if the dualities between various theories could not fruitfully be understood as a kind of reduction, in the sense the term is used in computer science, but that's another discussion.)

Of course, this really just means offloading all the work to the initial conditions---essentially, the configuration of electromagnetic fields describing the way the computer is programmed. But this highlights another facet of the 'Why this?'-problem: it seems that any fundamental theory, in order to describe a given universe, is going to need some initial conditions. But well, why those? Is there really a set of initial conditions such that they are self-justifying?

And then there's the question of why the simulation starts at some pretty deep down level. Why simulate nature at (say) the Planck scale? In principle, it should be possible to simulate higher-level physics just as well---the way Newtonian physics is simulated in modern computer games, for instance. I mean, one could probably mount a simplicity argument here, but again, if there still is some finite complexity, one could always go more simple, and if there isn't, well, it seems difficult to even think about what the 'program' would be like---in a sense, it would be (again) no program at all...

report post as inappropriate

hide replies

"The mind itself is not fundamental. Neither are the biological processes by which it works, but the principles of information by which it functions are"

The central principle of Shannon's Information Theory is that, in order to reduce the length of any transmitted message, to the least possible number of encoded bits, it is imperative that the transmitter never send anything that the receiver already knows. For example, I don't need to keep telling you your name. But everything that you can predict, is a subset of the things you know. It follows, that everything that you can predict, is not even considered to be information, in Shannon's theory. That fundamental reality is enough to make most physicists apoplectic. They are searching for the truth, but as the movie said "You want the truth, you can't handle the truth." Because the truth is, the information content of most physical processes lies almost entirely within the unknown initial conditions, required to solve the equations of mathematical physics, not the long-sought equations themselves. This is what "emergence", emerges from.

Rob McEachern

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Jan. 1, 2018 @ 11:33 GMT

Rob, you are right to highlight the principle of redundant information. Imagine you wanted to send some information into space to tell any aliens something about us. You might send a bitmap photo image for example. To keep the transmission short you could compress the data, but the aliens would not have the decompression algorithm. When data is maximally compressed it becomes a stream of random bits that is impossible to decode without the algorithm. You could send send the algorithm in some uncompressed from, but that is adding extra information. The point is that fully compressed data without redundancy is incomprehensible.

The information that described the state of the universe is holographic, so it can be represented on a surface. This is the compressed form of the data. What we observe in the bulk volume is an uncompressed form with lots of redundancy in the form of gauge symmetry. In this form it is comprehensible to us. we observe and understand the universe in its expanded version, not the compressed holographic form.

Donald G Palmer replied on Jan. 1, 2018 @ 12:38 GMT

Phillip & Robert,

There is an interesting assumption in information theory - that there is a limit to what can be compressed or represented by a 'unit' of information. There might be a limit, given today's mathematics, but will that always be the case?

How efficiently can I represent pi? Using decimal notation, it is an infinite non-repeating sequence. If I use pi as the base of the numeric system, then pi is 1 - possibly a tremendous compression of information, although not without its problems for other values. What if a new numeric system, that used different bases in the same representation of a number were found - might this supplant our current system?

If context and perspective can make such a difference in the presentation of information, can we be sure that the limitations of our current representational structures will not be radically altered in the future? Is a positional numeric system the optimal way to present the value of pi? Like optimization concerns in general, there might not always be an optimal solution. This could suggest there is no limit to what can be represented as (a unit of) information.

This also appears to be the implicit assumption of any final Unification Theory - that there is an optimal way (usually assumed to be mathematical) to characterize all phenomena in the universe. If mathematics cannot present an optimal solution then likely neither can physics.

Don

report post as inappropriate

Robert H McEachern replied on Jan. 1, 2018 @ 14:27 GMT

Phillip:

"The information that described the state of the universe is holographic, so it can be represented on a surface. This is the compressed form of the data. What we observe in the bulk volume is an uncompressed form with lots of redundancy in the form of gauge symmetry."

The information content of an emission, is not the same as the information content of the emitter that produced the emission. Every emission must travel through every spherical surface surrounding the emitter and with a radius less than the distance between the emitter and the receiver, if it is to ever be received in the first place. Thus, the entire information content of every long-range emission must be observable on those spherical surfaces. This is why the holographic principle exists, and why all long-range forces are inverse-square. It has nothing to do with the information content stored within the emitter or with data compression used to produce the emission. Assuming otherwise is a major misunderstanding of Shannon's Information Theory, within the physics community.

Rob McEachern

report post as inappropriate

show all replies (10 not shown)

Philip Gibbs

I thank you for this interesting article. I have been provoked in my thinking. We should, as you say, regard science as finding better, and better, approximations. You are also right when stating information as fundamental in the field of physics. It is dangerous to listen to only one guru, as you say.

Best regards ___________________ John-Erik Persson

Good luck.

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Jan. 3, 2018 @ 15:19 GMT

Yes, as we gather information our model of reality becomes a better approximation. Sometimes this can lead to a paradigm shift where the underling principles are suddenly very different even if the predicted measurements don't change by very much.

John-Erik Persson replied on Jan. 11, 2018 @ 19:00 GMT

I agree

John-Erik

report post as inappropriate

Hi Philip, your essay is a pleasure to read and once I had started I was compelled to read to the end. Your ideas about story telling resonate with my own thinking about how we relate to the world. Especially via our senses and by imposing singular perspectives. I wonder why then at the end you say"’ If they don’t know then they must be prepared to consider different philosophical options, letting the mathematics guide the way until the experimental outlook improves." Why do you say mathematics must guide the way? Why not biology first? (To elucidate the effects of building from a literal human centered perspective or to seek and eliminate its effects.) Or why not all of the sciences leading together in a multidisciplinary effort? Well done, kind regards Georgina

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Jan. 3, 2018 @ 15:14 GMT

Hi Georgina, thanks for your interesting question. I do think that the human side of experience and evolution is relevant to the philosophical side of how we should understand our place in the universe. This came up more in the previous essay. However, I stop short of thinking that biology is in any way fundamental. I think that mathematics is the right place to look for fundamentalism, and is the more powerful tool for developing the harder side of the theory. Perhaps that is where our thinking diverges.

Nevertheless, there are grey areas in my thinking and I do hope that we get a few essays that argue the case for biology being fundamental, or that there is more to be learnt about foundations from biology. It seems like a more radical idea but perhaps my view can be pushed a little in that direction. we will see.

John R. Cox replied on Jan. 8, 2018 @ 18:55 GMT

Philip and Georgina,

When it comes to "there is more to be learnt about foundations from biology.", I harken back to a day long ago when I was struck by the physical symmetry of the classic Platonic Solid, the Octahedron. It has a number of planar aspects we find replicated in chemical arrangements into molecules and interactions, and shares an internal angle with the narrow range of the Brewster Angle which polarizes light in a laser. And among the most primitive known viruses, are octahedral entities. I have ever since had a waking nightmare that science will someday discover 'the spark of life' in that symmetry, and a naturally occurring compounding of energy that animates even the simplest volume in seeking form. Not too far from many a primitive religious belief that all things are imbued with a 'spirit'. I doubt we as a species have the wisdom to know such things. We could become Borg! :-) jrc

report post as inappropriate

Thank you very much for the essay. Only real entities can act be acted upon. If various objects mentioned in your article (under different categories) are real, they would have objective reality and positive existence. These qualities can be provided only by their substance. Therefore, whichever entity provides substance to these real entities is more fundamental than any of them. You mentioned, “Our reality is what we experience”. Our senses and instruments also have limited capability. Entities, we do not sense or experience but have substance, are also real. Our inability to experience them would not make them unreal.

An entity, its parameters, its properties or its actions cannot be defined by its own products. Therefore, products of substance cannot define substance. Since we, ourself, are formed by fundamental substance, it is impossible for us to define substance, the most fundamental entity. Most logical candidate for substance of all real entities is ‘matter’.

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Jan. 11, 2018 @ 16:11 GMT

Nainan, What you say seems to make perfect sense.

I have your essay on my list to read.

Philip,

Most stories about fundamental aspects of nature start at a fairly high level. In other words, the considered aspects are not at all fundamental. Still, reality appears to exhibit structure and that structure will be based on one or more foundations. The search for such foundation has been undertaken several times and not with much success. The reason is that physics took another route. It works by interpreting and precisely describing observations. At the same time, it mistrusts deduced statements. This attitude inhibits the exploration of existing foundations.

Garrett Birkhoff and John von Neumann most probably discovered one of the foundations of physical reality. This entry point was never seriously explored. See: The Incredible Story About the Reality; http://vixra.org/abs/1801.0033

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Jan. 11, 2018 @ 11:42 GMT

Hans. I agree that theorists have always looked at too high a level for fundamentals. This even goes back to Plato when he named the elements as earth, water, air and fire. We now realize how wrong that was because we have penetrated several levels of structure further down, and yet many physicists still think that elementary particles will be fundamental. I am saying that if it requires information to specify how it works then a theory can't be fundamental. there is still some way to go before we reach that point.

I will read your essay to better understand your point of view.

What is the difference between a necklace and a mouse? The mouse, or maybe it was moose, is a chain of Lie algebras. The vector spaces in the representations of these algebras form a sort of quiver. It would seem to me that in some setting if the group is a quotient H = G/K, then This algebra corresponds to a Hermitian symmetric space. An elementary example are the Grassmannian manifolds. This is an interesting development, where the local charts on the manifold are made of vectors that locally are a Lie group, and the atlas construction is a moose or what appears to be a necklace.

My essay have finally showed up. I can now vote and gave your essay a boost.

https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2981

LC

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Jan. 11, 2018 @ 14:22 GMT

Lawrence, I have not heard this mouse/moose terminology before. Is there a reference?

I am looking at your essay, but may take a few days to comment.

Lawrence B. Crowell replied on Jan. 11, 2018 @ 23:18 GMT

There is this paper

Strings from Quivers, Membranes from Moose

Sunil Mukhi, Mukund Rangamani, Erik Verlinde

A moose sounds very similar to a necklace. Both are in effect chains of Lie algebras.

Cheers LC

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Jan. 13, 2018 @ 22:29 GMT

The "moose" seems to go back to Herman Georgi in 1986 as a tool for model building. I don't think its the same as necklace Lie algebras but can't rule out a connection.

show all replies (1 not shown)

Hi Philip,

It was a real pleasure to read your contribution to this contest.

The first half is like I could have written it myself, but each of us have a different way of explaining our perceptions.

The second half of your essay is a witness of your dedication to mathematics, but your end conclusion NOTHING IS EVERYTHING is the same as mine, only I add "INITIATIVE" as a property of Consciousness.

I hope you will also have some time to read and rate my essay : "Foundational Quantum Reality Loops.

Thank you for making me think again.

best regards

Wilhelmus

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Jan. 13, 2018 @ 20:23 GMT

I am glad to here we have some conclusions in common. I will put your essay on my list to read.

Dear Philip Gibbs,

You wrote: ““Fundamental” is an adjective to describe a level of reality that is not derived from anything else.” My research has concluded that reality does not have any levels. The real physical Universe consists only of one single unified VISIBLE infinite surface occurring eternally in one single dimension that am always illuminated mostly by finite non-surface light.

Joe Fisher, ORCID ID 0000-0003-3988-8687. Unaffiliated

post approved

Dear Philip Gibbs,

You wrote: ““Fundamental” is an adjective to describe a level of reality that is not derived from anything else.” My research has concluded that reality does not have any finite levels. The real physical Universe consists only of one single unified VISIBLE infinite surface occurring eternally in one single dimension that am always illuminated mostly by finite non-surface light.

Joe Fisher, ORCID ID 0000-0003-3988-8687. Unaffiliated

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Jan. 13, 2018 @ 20:18 GMT

Joe, thanks for your comment. These competitions would not be same without you.

Hello Philip...

With regard to "guessing correctly the answer to questions like ‘what is “fundamental?’", the "stories" are ancient... REF: TOPIC Indra's Net - Holomorphic Fundamentalness by Cristinel Stoica ... and although such "stories" are prolific, multi-epoch, and multi-cultural, requirement for a logic reduction is a common element.

However, cognitive abilities...

view entire post

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Jan. 13, 2018 @ 20:17 GMT

Thanks, I will read your essay. I have a lot to go through and want to give each one a good read but will get to it.

Dear Phyllip, you wrote:

" Is fundamentality then a relative concept with no absolute bottom, or is there a fundament of physical law which is not derived from anything deeper?

The universe exists, so there must be answers. Why would those answers be incomprehensible to us?

"

I think:

Micro Black hole Pairing and Splitting should be explained first before we gain the next reality level.

See:

https://bigbang-entanglement.blogspot.nl/2018/01/b
lack-hole-pairing-and-splitting-should.html

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Jan. 15, 2018 @ 20:15 GMT

thank you Leo, that is very interesting. I will read your essay.

sorry Philip,

better look at: https://bigbang-entanglement.blogspot.nl/

report post as inappropriate

Dear Dr. Gibbs,

I enjoyed reading your well-written essay on the nature and speculative future of physics.

However, in my own essay “Fundamental Waves and the Reunification of Physics”, I argue that the universe is telling a quite different story. Unity and simplicity are most fundamental, although the unity of physics was broken in the early decades of the 20th century. I...

view entire post

Dear Dr. Gibbs,

I enjoyed reading your well-written essay on the nature and speculative future of physics.

However, in my own essay “Fundamental Waves and the Reunification of Physics”, I argue that the universe is telling a quite different story. Unity and simplicity are most fundamental, although the unity of physics was broken in the early decades of the 20th century. I review the historical basis for this rupture, and go on to present the outlines of a neoclassical synthesis that should restore this unity.

Briefly, quantization of spin in real waves such as the electron (there are no point particles) provides the scale of discreteness in what is otherwise a universe of classical continuous fields. There is no need for Hilbert space, indeterminacy, or entanglement. The same waves provide a real embodiment of time, space, and relativity; there is no need for an abstract spacetime.

In other words, quantum mechanics is not a theory of nature; it is a mechanism for turning continuous fields into soliton-like wavepackets with particle-like behavior. This requires a nonlinear component in the field equations that is hidden whenever spin is quantized. I do not know the mathematical form of this nonlinear component, but I describe some of its properties in the essay. For the electron field, this component generates the exclusion principle directly, without the need for Pauli’s entangled mathematical construction. Planck’s constant is the only true universal constant, and defines the granularity of the universe.

Furthermore, the advent of quantum computing takes this beyond obscure philosophy into the technological realm. Without entanglement, quantum computing will not work. There are billions of dollars being invested in this, and I expect an answer within 5 years. But when I have tried to discuss this with active participants in the field, they react as if I am killing the goose that is laying the golden eggs. No one wants to hear such a negative story, including funding agents. My prediction is that the failure of quantum computing will lead to a reassessment of the entire foundations of quantum mechanics.

Best Wishes,

Alan Kadin

view post as summary

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Jan. 15, 2018 @ 20:18 GMT

I think it's always important to look at the opposing views too. Sometimes they turn out to be more compatible than you might expect.

It is an interesting essay.

If the foundation of the physics could be based on the path integral formulation, and because it is applicable to the some field of statistical mechanics, then I think that it could be write in each field of physics: for example in classical mechanics, if the possible transition is unique, using a Dirac delta function instead of probability amplitude, then the trajectory in the phase space could be unique (unification of the description).

Furthermore, there is a blog entry of John Baez on quantropy

https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2013/11/11/qua
ntropy-part-4/

that I consider interesting, because of the analogy between path integral and partition function.

Regards

Domenico

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Jan. 18, 2018 @ 21:22 GMT

I did my doctorate in lattice gauge theories where the analogy between quantum mechanics and statistical physics is exploited to do calculations. It is a powerful theoretical tool as well. Good luck with the contest.

Thanks Philip,

Without the stories, there is no universe? I like the poem and the thoughts. I will have to get back to it. You provide a lot to think about as well. Mine has not yet reached an appearance. I do mention that the storyteller (the sentient creature) must be there to reveal the fundamental, kind of an existential philosophy, just like your stories suggest. You must be an advocate of supersymmetry: a symmetry between fermions and bosons. Do you believe it provides a dark matter candidate. Plan to reread your interesting essay as I progress. YOurs is my first read.

Jim Hoover

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Jan. 18, 2018 @ 21:18 GMT

James, you are very kind. I will look out for your essay.

To answer your question, supersymmetry at the TeV scale looked like a good theory before the LHC and dark matter searches. Now it does not look so good. It could still be right but it would have to be a different model from the ones theorists thought likely. It's chances are therefore very much diminished.

It's a funny thing that every known particle has R-parity of +1. R-parity is a quantum number combining known quantum numbers like spin and baryon number which appear to be conserved, so R-parity should be nearly conserved too. This means that the lightest particle with R-parity -1 would be very stable if it exists, making it an ideal dark matter candidate. Supersymmetry predicts particles with negative R-parity, but would such particles be a clear signature of supersymmetry? That is not so clear.

James Lee Hoover replied on Jan. 19, 2018 @ 16:41 GMT

Philip,

How would you alter SUSY to make it more viable? Do you think the neutralino is not a good candidate for DM? I am looking at it in an essay I'm considering. You did mention that symmetry is fundamental and independent of specific dynamics? Is it then a guiding principle in search for unification theories?

You provide a lot of food for thought in your essay.

My essay appeared: https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3035.

Jim Hoover

report post as inappropriate

Anonymous replied on Jan. 22, 2018 @ 09:29 GMT

The phenomenologists have tried to look at a wide range of supersymmetry models but they have to make assumptions to simplify the parameter space. Without knowing how supersymmetry would be spontaneously broken it is impossible to know the right way to proceed. Some experimental observation would resolve it.

If a particle has spin half, but zero baryon and lepton number it will be stable, because there are no light particles for it to decay into without violating baryon or lepton number conservation. That is what is meant by R-partiy conservation. A neutralino is just an example of such a particle. Supersymmetry was promising because it had the potential to solve a few different problems in one go, but all those problems could be solved in different ways so it does not have to be right at LHC energies.

Some symmetries at least are fundamental. I think this is the case for the gauge symmetries and for particle interchange, and if I am right there must be other hidden symmetries that are fundamental. Using symmetry as a "guiding principle in the search for unification theories" was the central theme of 20th century physics, from relativity to the standard model. I think that will continue but first we would need to find how the unknown symmetries operate. A lot of theorists now think that symmetries are all emergent and cannot help us further. I can't see how that can be right.

report post as inappropriate

Good to see your essay is well-received so far Phil!..

This one looks very thought provoking so I've added it to my reading list. I just got mine in last night, and I wanted to get it right this time, so I've been making that effort my focus. It looks like an interesting field of authors and array of essay so far. But I know there are more than a few more entries that are waiting to post, besides my own. So I look forward to some great discussions.

All the Best,

Jonathan

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Jan. 21, 2018 @ 11:38 GMT

I cant believe we have already reached the submission deadline. It was a slow start but there is a good field now. Looking forward to seeing your essay.

Jonathan J. Dickau replied on Jan. 22, 2018 @ 04:51 GMT

Thanks Phil,

I just finished reading yours for the first time, and I comment below. I just now got a preview too, of an upcoming entry from Brian Josephson (whom I met at FFP15), and I commented to him that with your entry being on "A Universe Made of Stories" his should fit right in. So yes; I think it will be an interesting field once the remaining essays have all posted.

All the Best,

Jonathan

report post as inappropriate

Phillip,

Interesting and also slightly provocative approach. Just what we need! I think your level of 'speculation' is spot on for this format. Beautifully clear and intelligible too.

As for content, a few things raised questions, perhaps mainly this;

We know that certain polarizer interactions rotate and can even reverse polarisation (inc. phase shifts from half wave plates etc.) and that changing polarizer/modulator 'angles' changes the fermion ('free surface electron') polar spin angle/direction. Does that mean you suggest Huygens is incorrect in that 'requantization' a occurs at each such interaction - so complete 'invariance' would seem tricky?

(I'm thinking perhaps 'collapse' may also be 're-birth' of the new wavefunction?)

x,y,z assymmetries may then also be essential on orthogonal measurements!?

I'd be interested in your thoughts.

With your QM background I also hope you'll study mine carefully (read alongside Declan's who references my work) as I can't see how the ontological sequence doesn't now fully reproduce the predictions (& findings) of QM, including so called 'non-locality' and the (Born/Malus) squaring of Cos. It does need a fresh way of looking (as Bell suggested) as well as familiarity with the original, but I think you're capable of that. I look forward to any questions.

Well done for yours. I don't doubt we may end up nearby, and that we're both above downmarking neighbours (I've already had the odd 1!)

Very best

Peter

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Jan. 20, 2018 @ 14:28 GMT

Peter,

I admit a very simple and conventional interpretation of quantum mechanics, but I may be able to give a better answer to your questions after I have read your essay to put them in context.

On the subject of scoring, yes I had a 1 already but I am not concerned about it. What I like to see is lots of good comments and lots of ratings. This shows interest and understanding of what I have written. I don't expect everyone to like it. Sometimes people low score everyone without understanding, but those even out and are not worth worrying about. Winning is not so important to me that I would vote tactically or bother about other people doing so.

A very interesting essay, thank you for sharing.

"No information about the universe, to know nothing about its laws or its history? It would simply mean that all logically consistent possibilities are still options. With no information the universe is the sum of all possible histories, described by all possible laws of physics. In terms of information “Nothing” means “everything.”"

I couldn't agree more; my text as well touches similar arguments from a philosophical point of view. Sadly I've not the mathematical tools to fully comprehend the rest of your proposal.

Bests,

Francesco D'Isa

report post as inappropriate

Dear Philip,

Thanks for this original, thorough and well argued essay.

Thank you for pointing out some long overdue problems with the intuitive reductionist approach. I am glad that you point out, for instance, that “the hypothesis has been further bolstered by the observation that the laws of particles physics are unnaturally fine-tuned”. I follow a falsificationist approach, namely a deductivist methodology in science that allows (in your words) “mathematics [to] guide the way until the experimental outlook improves”.

So, I think that there are pretty interesting similarities between our essays, and I would be most grateful to have your opinion about my work.

Your idea that “Reality is relative to the observer” is indeed one of the most promising directions of investigation in the modern foundations of physics. I find a particular affinity with a recent proposal by Brukner that there are “no facts of the world per se, but only relative to an observer” (If you havent seen this yet, please see https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.05255).

I definitely rate you high.

I wish you the best of luck, and I hope to hear from you soon for a discussion.

Best wishes,

Flavio

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Feb. 11, 2018 @ 16:08 GMT

Flavio, thanks for your comment. I agree that we have some similarities, but in some ways this makes the differences more interesting.

Ultimately I reject reductionism, but not in the same way as you. I think that reductionism will continue to work until we arrive at a final level where everything is possible and the whole theory is described with zero information. We will realise that actually nothing can therefore be derived from the final theory of everything and we will be forced to look back through the levels of reduction and ask ourselves where the real information about the world and how it works entered into the equations. What we will realise is that at every stage there is some extra information added when we go back up. Physicists would consider this information irrelevant until they reach the end when they will finally understand that it was all there was left.

For example, space-time and the particle spectrum of the standard model emerge from some deeper theory. but it is likely that it will do so only with the arbitrary choice of one vacuum state out of many possibilities. That choice is then a source of information that has been disregarded. To give a better known example, biology reduces to chemistry but it also depends on the choice of environment and the accidental processes of evolution. These things add new information in addition to the theory of chemistry in order to give us biology. My view is that in the end we will realise that it is this added information that gives us everything, not the final theory that everything reduces to.

You also reject reductionism, but the question is to what extend is your view consistent with or conflicting with mine. I have been reading your essay which is very good, but I will post my critique in your forum when I am done.

I think this essay is very interesting...

I'll have to read it a couple of times Phil, because you give me a lot to think about. I am reminded of, or informed by, a paper of Steven K. Kauffmann on "Getting path integrals physically and technically right," which argued for the less known Hamiltonian formulation of the sum over histories method.

This approach favors events over objects, while the conventional Lagrangian form assumes the kinematic nature of particles or other entities. One might consider that to be more physically-realistic, but the Hamiltonian form automatically incorporates uncertainty.

More later,

Jonathan

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Jan. 24, 2018 @ 08:23 GMT

Good to see your essay is up, but I am away for next few days.

Hi Philip Gibbs

“Atoms are more fundamental than the laws of thermodynamics, but atomic physics in turn is derived from the interactions of more primitive components. Is fundamentality then a relative concept with no absolute bottom”…..….. very nice idea…. Dear Philip Gibbs… I highly appreciate your essay and hope for reciprocity.

I request you please spend some of the...

view entire post

report post as inappropriate

In the approaches in this contest, I miss the efforts of Garrett Birkhoff and John von Neumann to establish a fundament that emerges into a suitable modeling platform. In their 1936 paper, they introduced a relational structure that they called quantum logic and that mathematicians call an orthomodular lattice. It automatically emerges into a separable Hilbert space, which also introduces a...

view entire post

In the approaches in this contest, I miss the efforts of Garrett Birkhoff and John von Neumann to establish a fundament that emerges into a suitable modeling platform. In their 1936 paper, they introduced a relational structure that they called quantum logic and that mathematicians call an orthomodular lattice. It automatically emerges into a separable Hilbert space, which also introduces a selected set of number systems into the modeling platform. Hilbert spaces can only cope with division rings and separable Hilbert spaces can store discrete values but no continuums. Each infinite dimensional separable Hilbert space owns a unique non-separable Hilbert space that embeds its separable partner. In this way, the structure and the functionality of the platform grow in a restricted way. After a few steps a very powerful and flexible modeling platform evolves. This model acts as a repository for dynamic geometric data that fit in quaternionic eigenvalues of dedicated operators. The non-separable part of the model can archive continuums that are defined by quaternionic functions.

In other words, the foundation that was discovered by Birkhoff and von Neumann delivers a base model that can offer the basement of well-founded theories and that puts restrictions on the dimensions which universe can claim.

Multiple Hilbert spaces can share the same underlying vector space and form a set of platforms that float on a background platform. On those platforms can live objects that hop around in a stochastic hopping path. This adds dynamics to the model.

The orthomodular lattice acts like a seed from which a certain kind of plant grows. Here the seed turns into the physical reality that we perceive.

Stochastic processes generate the hop landing locations and characteristic functions control these processes. These characteristic functions are the Fourier transform of the location density distribution of the hop landing location swarm that represents the elementary particle.

This delivers the holographic control of these elementary modules. Also, higher level modules are controlled by stochastic processes that own a characteristic function.

See: “Stochastic control of the universe”; http://vixra.org/abs/1712.0243 Indirectly via the characteristic functions the universe is controlled in a holographic way.

The Wikiversity Hilbert Book Model Project investigates this approach.

https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Hilbert_Book_Model_
Project

http://vixra.org/author/j_a_j_van_leunen contains documents that treat some highlights of the project.

view post as summary

report post as inappropriate

Hello Philip,

Well written essay.

I really like the way you interpreted the question and your essay is a unique essay among here.

I find some similarities between our essay; we both have not focused only on one topic but tend to discuss other topics as well, and the conclusion is also inspiring. I liked that you focused on symmetry which is also a mathematical term. I have also interpreted symmetry on my essay which focuses on mathematics and pattern being fundamental.

Kind Regards

Ajay Pokharel

report post as inappropriate

Dear Fellow Essayists

This will be my final plea for fair treatment.,

Reliable evidence exists that proves that the surface of the earth was formed millions of years before man and his utterly complex finite informational systems ever appeared on that surface. It logically follows that Nature must have permanently devised the only single physical construct of earth allowable.

All objects, be they solid, liquid, or vaporous have always had a visible surface. This is because the real Universe consists only of one single unified VISIBLE infinite surface occurring eternally in one single infinite dimension that am always illuminated mostly by finite non-surface light.

Only the truth can set you free.

Joe Fisher, Realist

report post as inappropriate

Hello Gibbs,

A very well written essay. I enjoyed your essay a lot; though some parts were out of my qualification, I tend to understand your essay carefully.

Believe me or not, but both of our essays have the same way of literature. You choose one topic and defend whether it could be fundamental by providing facts and logic which is same as I do in my my essay.

In fact, some of our lines coincide; like this particular one:

"Philosophers of physics discuss the emergence of the universe from nothing, but what is nothing?" where you define nothing as everything, while I define it in terms of mathematics, as zero (0)

I liked this line which gives a sense of motivation "Particle physicists should not give up on the hierarchy problem in particle physics just because they think they have tried everything." I have also used a sense of inspiration at the end of my essay.

At last, you conclude that mathematics and physics are required to solve the problems and it is indeed true which is reflected in my essay as well.

Anyway, I enjoyed your essay and wish you a great luck in the competition.

Kind Regards

Ajay Pokharel

It just requires mathematicians and physicists to bring their knowledge together.

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Jan. 29, 2018 @ 13:06 GMT

Thank you for your comments.

I will read your essay later to see how how it may be related.

Dear Philip,

I've only just got round to reading your essay which Jonathan had recommended to me. We do have a similar philosophy, but you have gone into the maths a lot which I have not as yet. I have two comments. Firstly, when I was a post-doc at the Univ. of Illinois working with Kadanoff on critical phenomena, Kadanoff was just developing his recursive view of critical points,...

view entire post

Dear Philip,

I've only just got round to reading your essay which Jonathan had recommended to me. We do have a similar philosophy, but you have gone into the maths a lot which I have not as yet. I have two comments. Firstly, when I was a post-doc at the Univ. of Illinois working with Kadanoff on critical phenomena, Kadanoff was just developing his recursive view of critical points, according to which behaviour at one level generated behaviour at a higher level, which would come to a limit in the manner you describe. Kadanoff's ideas led in due course to the renormalisation group.

Secondly, as regards the mathematical side, in the discussion of my own essay earlier today I posted the idea that we need to get used to the fact that at the deeper levels nature is biological and very messy, with quantitative maths rarely seen. But has since occurred to me that we need to look further and train ourselves to see it in Ilexa Yardley's terms, which I talked about a bit in my FFP15 lecture, which can be viewed at https://youtu.be/-Bv5vsZzX6Q. She speaks of a highly complex structure involving entities, systems and processes, perhaps hierarchical though she says it is wrong to view any hierarchy as linear. But anyway she sees all this structure as aspects of circle, itself viewed in a complicated way, but we can perhaps pick up particular aspects such as (a) the cycle (temporal aspect) and (b) rotation about an axis getting us back to the start (spatial aspect). It is also in some aspect the source of regularity in nature, possibly related to the fact that repetition, when it can happen, develops skills. Ilexa would argue that circle is the most fundamental aspect of mathematics, citing in effect how our concepts get more and more complex through the way systems develop. I think when one fully learns to see things the way she does this will make sense. If these comments don't make sense, think about elementary maths, e.g. set theory with its Venn diagrams made up our of circles, and then understanding sets of numbers by seeing unit things as sets.

view post as summary

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Feb. 1, 2018 @ 11:21 GMT

Dear Brian, thank you for reading my essay and for the comment, thanks also to Jonathan for the recommendation.

I have watched your video and do see some convergence of ideas. The iterative cycles and normalization group are very important. Jonathan has this in his Mandlebrot theory too. These ideas come up in different places and different related forms because they are universal....

view entire post

Dear Brian, thank you for reading my essay and for the comment, thanks also to Jonathan for the recommendation.

I have watched your video and do see some convergence of ideas. The iterative cycles and normalization group are very important. Jonathan has this in his Mandlebrot theory too. These ideas come up in different places and different related forms because they are universal. Universality is a central idea for me. Most fundamentally it comes up for me in an underlying meta-law for physics where I suspect that the cycle of iterations could be an algebraic form of quantisation.

The relationship between biology and physics is newer to me. It came up more strongly in the previous essay contest. When people talk about the interface between physics and biology it is not always clear what form they think this takes. There is a range of options which fall roughly on a scale from strong to weak. The strongest would be something like an unknown physical force field that is responsible for consciousness. A more subtle connection would work through quantum mechanics and measurement. I can set up an apparatus to measure the spin of electrons. If I then swear to spend the rest of my life studying consciousness ( or something more dramatic ) if the experiment measures an up spin three times, could that bias the result? I don't have the answer.

Even weaker connections might take the form of the anthropic principle or even just analogies, but these things are still very profound. One thing that I do see is that the link involves information. Semiotics is new to me but it seems to be about information in biology. Information is absolutely fundamental and there is no distinction between the kind of information that influences biology and information in physics, so that must be at least one part of the answer.

I am looking at how information as fundamental can answer questions about the most fundamental laws of physics, but it is impossible to avoid talking about biological experience as part of that picture.

view post as summary

Hi, Philip.

You describe the particle zoo like it would be the result of an observer situated in an old universe.... the only thing surviving would then be the information, or guidings... it is a very cool view. Maybe we can link it to the black hole and its informational paradox, and a way to see on information?

"If so, then the physics probed in particle colliders is barely more fundamental in kind than the workings of biology that evolved from the initial chemical accidents of abiogenesis." Yes, it is how I started to Think, or was FORCED to Think, rather, when comparing to biology.

I also started to look at general relativity like this. https://www.amazon.com/Meaning-Relativity-Including-Relativi
stic-Non-Symmetric/dp/0691120277/ref=reader_auth_dp

A non-symmetric field? We are so used to look at the symmetry and see gravitation as 'the distorter' but can it be the other way? It is Worth pondering. Can then gravitation 'survive' from one epoch to Another, and carry the information with it?

Can a process be the fundamental thing, not particles? Processes are described by constants, couplings, interferences, liftings, in one Word - complexity, but that requires and open system, and asymmetry. See my essay.

It is an interesting journey to try to gain general relativity and quantum mechanics through analyzing BIOLOGY :) Sounds odd? Yes, it is strange, but well Worth the effort.

https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3093 my essay :)

Enjoying Reading this, thanks.

Ulla Mattfolk.

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Feb. 10, 2018 @ 13:57 GMT

If we could derive physics from biology that would be truly something. I don't think I am ready for that yet, but the connection between biology and physics via information is something I can work with.

Dear Philip,

Thanks for this original, thorough and well argued essay.

Thank you for pointing out some long overdue problems with the intuitive reductionist approach. I am glad that you point out, for instance, that “the hypothesis has been further bolstered by the observation that the laws of particles physics are unnaturally fine-tuned”. I follow a falsificationist approach, namely a deductivist methodology in science that allows (in your words) “mathematics [to] guide the way until the experimental outlook improves”.

So, I think that there are pretty interesting similarities between our essays, and I would be most grateful to have your opinion about my work.

Your idea that “Reality is relative to the observer” is indeed one of the most promising directions of investigation in the modern foundations of physics. I find a particular affinity with a recent proposal by Brukner that there are “no facts of the world per se, but only relative to an observer” (If you havent seen this yet, please see https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.05255).

I definitely rate you high.

I wish you the best of luck, and I hope to hear from you soon for a discussion.

Best wishes,

Flavio

report post as inappropriate

Dear Philip,

Thank you for reading and commenting my essay.

Your question “Symmetry of space and time means that the laws of physics are unchanging over space and time. If that were not the case it would be hard to do science. Does this mean that symmetry must be fundamental? ” is linked to the approach you have in your essay.

“symmetry is agebraic” you say, so it is part of a “language” that is an intermediate between thinking and reality (both emerging phenomena). In my approach fine-tuning is an essential result of the Reality Loop the agent is part of. (if its was not fine-tuned the agent would be a different agent in a different reality loop. One of the languages agents are using to explain this fine-tuned reality is emerging algebra (symmetry).

You argue “I expect to find this symmetry in a pre-geometric meta-law that transcends spacetime,taking a purely algebraic form, only beyond that point will it be emergent, rising from immutable relationships between systems of information.” Indeed in this approach symmetry transcends space-time because space and time are (dimensional) restrictions (emerging from total simultaneity), and algebra/symmetry/thinking are not limited by these restrictions because they are the “cause” through consciousness of reality. The what you are calling “immutable relationships between systems of information” is maybe too strictly bound to our emerging reality. My approach places the “rising” outside our reality, so even more foundational.

“If those leaders say that symmetry is unimportant because it is emergent or that geometry is more fundamental than algebra, other possibilities may be neglected.”

Fully agreed, every emerging phenomenon is essential in a specific reality. Geometry is a description methodology, to be compared to filling in data in a computer, it is the software (thinking) that is concluding.

Best regards Philip nd good luck in the contest.

Wilhelmus

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Feb. 5, 2018 @ 18:51 GMT

Thanks for the interesting answer and good luck in the contest.

Wilhelmus de Wilde de Wilde replied on Feb. 6, 2018 @ 10:19 GMT

Thank you Philip,

I am not a schooled mathematicien like you are.

So I wonder if the "model" I approached might be valuable.

It is of course only one of the many that exist, but the human intelligence

is at this joint of time just a like a baby, we are all struggling with finding the

foundational essence of our reality, we see the rattle above our craddle, we reach out but still cannot touch it....(this contest is an exellent example of this reaching out...)

I rated you already on january 13, and hope that you will find my approach also good enough for a valuation.

thank you

Wilhelmus

report post as inappropriate

Biology doesn't demand exact laws

Firstly, I agree that recursion is important in physics. But inexactness has a role to play in the natural world as well. To quote from my own essay (in note 4): "In the context of technology, high precision may sometimes be necessary to achieve particular aims, necessitating the use of special methodologies. Biological systems can survive without such high precision, but a degree of constraint is necessary nevertheless. While precision has its value in the biological context, high levels of precision may not be necessary for survival.". However, mathematical properties may emerge in the limit through recursion, and the ones that prevail are the ones that are significant from the viewpoint of 'good design', since favourable consequences make it more possible for nature to loop back (consider for example the way languages tend to use words only to the degree that they have a role to play in the activities of a community). Investigation of the reciprocality between maths and biology is the main aim of the IBIOSA project (see http://inbiosa.eu/).

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Feb. 9, 2018 @ 17:19 GMT

I can easily accept that inexact laws have some significance. This is fine when we are in the realm of complexity theory and emergence. I think I come in at the high end of the scale when it comes to emergence. My default for anything would be that it is emergent at some level, all the way down to nothing.

I am also well strapped into the bandwagon that says information is fundamental. Information is a robust concept and it is important in biology as it is in physics, so the inexactness of biological systems could connect to physics through information processes.

Brian D. Josephson replied on Feb. 9, 2018 @ 21:31 GMT

I think your 'principle of universality through recursion' provides a mechanism whereby exactness can emerge, as your

$\sqrt{2}$

example demonstrates.

report post as inappropriate

Dear Philip,

One again that time of year to bug you:) If you had seen my essay you can strike what I am about to say. Otherwise I am going to save you the trouble right here. based on the conversation you had with Dickau. I say

"The system can use both Real and Integer numbers, and in both systems you always get finite answer no matter how high your energy goes as when...

view entire post

Dear Philip,

One again that time of year to bug you:) If you had seen my essay you can strike what I am about to say. Otherwise I am going to save you the trouble right here. based on the conversation you had with Dickau. I say

"The system can use both Real and Integer numbers, and in both systems you always get finite answer no matter how high your energy goes as when using Real mainly because the energy represented by line length summed up according to weights dictated by the interaction makes the short segments naturally lose their effect in long range interactions and the energies never blow up, even in short range.

As can be seen in the simulation of the electron mass (actually mp/me ratio) simulation the system is scale invariant, that is multiply the D0/D1 by any number the linearity makes the system scale invariant and you basically you get the same curves i.e. if you zoom in(or out) you get exactly the same curves. That is, when you are doing the electromagnetic interaction i.e. line crossing you always get the proton/electron ratio. because of the two special location which could be some phase change "

second

"Now suppose I ask you to tell me what will happen to some "object", but I don't tell you anything about it (how fundamental can you get) !! like what mass it has or what it will do if another thing is present. Ok, I'll give it a try. First I will say I will "invent a coordinate and since I don't know where it exists I will restrict it to be in some range and eventually make that range variable. This lonely thing would have a meaningless existence. i.e. it needs a partner. If we add another one next to it with similar setup and at some distance that can also be varied. Now, we can calculate all relative information just like our original idea in the essay.

Kaboom! both situations reached the same conclusion with generalization leading to all of physics ( at least the important) QM, QFT, Gravity like shown. In one instance we acted like GOD and decided to design a dynamic universe, in the other we are ignorant humans but figured out how things should work, and both match and are the FUNDAMENTAL building block. "

Thank you in all cases. and just in case

https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3127

I

view post as summary

report post as inappropriate

adel sadeq replied on Feb. 5, 2018 @ 23:35 GMT

Sorry, FQXI's editor ate the formatting and some letters:(

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Feb. 8, 2018 @ 16:37 GMT

Thanks for your comment. i will have a look at your essay.

adel sadeq replied on Feb. 8, 2018 @ 20:39 GMT

Hi Philip,

Thank you very much for your comment. I agree with Tegmark that All mathematical structures (circles, triangles ....etc) exist in what is dubbed as PLATONIC. However I think we must find the *correct structure* that represents our reality with all of its details (like I have proposed) before dabbling in Multiverse types( his four levels) which are connected to premature...

view entire post

Hi Philip,

Thank you very much for your comment. I agree with Tegmark that All mathematical structures (circles, triangles ....etc) exist in what is dubbed as PLATONIC. However I think we must find the *correct structure* that represents our reality with all of its details (like I have proposed) before dabbling in Multiverse types( his four levels) which are connected to premature interpretation and cosmology (which should be based on the newly found theory). My idea leads to possible proof that reality is a mathematical structure and reality is a proof that mathematical structures are Platonic i.e. they exist(actually the only thing that exist).

As for the cellular automata, as you know many have been proposed but no direct results that connect to physics have been shown. Some of Wolfram's NKS rules seem to come close to some aspects in my idea but I have not investigated fully. Also 't Hooft idea for example does not use CA to derive any physics as such only to use it as general argument for the interpretation part.

My system is not strictly an automata only some resemblance because I started as a design of a simple mathematical structure which is based on relations between numbers (two of them interpreted as lines). As I added some relations which lead to the concept of interaction, only then the system seem to resemble a CA, however with one major difference, that is the cells could be faraway anywhere. And so the big result in my system is that QM arises precisely because of these non local relations, so that is why EPR in my idea is so trivial and automatic(see spin). That is Entanglement (in my theory the relations between all point in space which themselves were created imperatively by the structure) is the basis of QM and hence reality. Of course, all these nonlocal effects also lead to local effects( as in standard theory) which I have not shown explicitly, also particles cannot have higher speed than light. You could see modern theories (entanglement ideas) are like rats in a maze, they can smell the cheese and get close to it but haven't fount the right road. I think they will reach the same conclusions as mine however longer road they have chosen.

view post as summary

report post as inappropriate

show all replies (1 not shown)

Dear Philip Gibbs

Just letting you know that I am making a start on reading of your essay, and hope that you might also take a glance over mine please? I look forward to the sharing of thoughtful opinion. Congratulations on your essay rating as it stands, and best of luck for the contest conclusion.

My essay is titled

“Darwinian Universal Fundamental Origin”. It stands as a novel test for whether a natural organisational principle can serve a rationale, for emergence of complex systems of physics and cosmology. I will be interested to have my effort judged for prospect and for novely.

Thank you & kind regards

Steven Andresen

post approved

Philip,

Seems to be sparse reviewing and rating in this essay contest so far. I am revisiting those I have reviewed and see if I have scored them before the deadline approaches. I find that I did on 1/23.

Luck in the contest.

Jim Hoover

post approved

Dear Philipp,

very nice and thought-inspiring essay. I was wondering whether by arguing stories are fundamental you believe that information is fundamental. As I'm arguing in my essay information usually has some perspectival elements to it and - as far as we now - needs a medium or information carrier. My stance would be that this medium is more fundamental at least than the information dependent on perspective. You seem to argue that such a medium is equivalent to „nothing“ and actually I also consider this possibility. I would argue though that this would be only correct if „physically possible“ would be equivalent to „logically possible“. While this might be the case I believe we can`t take this for granted.

Anyway, a very nice read! Heinrich

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Feb. 8, 2018 @ 16:29 GMT

Numbers are always used to count things or measure them, yet in mathematics we can study the properties of numbers in their own right without reference to what is being counted or measured. This is abstraction.

Information also needs a carrier and it needs to be about something, but it has its own generic properties independently of these. The same information can be transmitted by radio waves or stored in a disk. We don't have to take that into account if we are computing the entropy of a bit stream.

I am not saying that you are wrong about the medium being more fundamental. I am just saying that because of abstraction it does not have to be.

Another interesting question is whether information can have meaning without some way of interpreting it. A compressed bitstream appears random and is impossible to extract meaning from, but uncompressed data may eb able to convey a message without an interpreter. Remember the film "Contact" where they picked up an alien communication that started with prime numbers and then moved on to other forms of information that could be understood. If the information was about pure mathematics that could even work across universes if there were some way of transferring bit streams between them. The key to making sense is to use redundancy and universal concepts like prime numbers that inevitably arise in the mind of any mathematician no matter what form of being they are.

quote

Every possibility is assigned a probability. These are derived from the squared norm of a component

in a wave function. Observables become operators, states become vectors, sets become functions,

objects become morphisms. In physics we call this process “quantisation.” It is closely related to the

mathematical notions of exponentiation, abstraction and categorification. Even probabilities

themselves may be uncertain, so they too are given a probability distribution. The process can be

repeated to give us iterated quantisation, higher abstractions and n-categories. To understand the

origins of physics we must define this recursion more precisely in algebraic terms and see how the

physics of space, time and particles can emerge from it with specific features of our universe

understood as processes of information collection. The fundamental laws of the universe are then

uniquely determined by invariance under quantisation [4]

end of quote

Very interesting point. What I tried to do was to find , using Klauders enhanced quantization, a way to bound the behavior of classical physics, via a quantum analogue, as to the emergence of of the cosmological constant.

My essay is of December 21st. As a favor to me, could you critique my essay as given in FQXI, in terms of your above mentioned procedure?

Thanks

Andrew

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Feb. 8, 2018 @ 16:05 GMT

Thanks for you comment. I already read your essay and made one comment, but hopefully I will find time to give it another read in the context of your comment and perhaps say more.

Dear Philip,

some water into the wine of positive comments. In the following quote: “I expect to find this symmetry in a pre-geometric meta-law that transcends spacetime,taking a purely algebraic form, only beyond that point will it be emergent, rising from immutable relationships between systems of information” there feature at least six to eight terms that either are entirely undefined (e.g. pre-geometric meta-law) or at least have multiple, varied and even opposing meanings. I have roughly ‘calculated’ the number of possible meanings of just this sentence to be of the order of millions. The number of possible meanings of your essay is of course magnitudes bigger.

So, your essay appears to me much like a box full up with words marketed as a novel.

Hence your conclusion: "From there [the above] our understanding returns full circle to the nature of our experience and our personal life stories" reads something like: believe me that no less than six angles can dance on the top of a pin.

Heinrich

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Feb. 8, 2018 @ 16:01 GMT

Many theorists agree that space-time geometry could be emerge from something else. That structure is often therefore described as "pregeometric." I.e. It is a common generic term in physics used to describe any hypothetical theory in which space and time is emergent. Wikipedia is always a good place to turn to when you don't understand a term and in this case it gives several good examples of...

view entire post

Many theorists agree that space-time geometry could be emerge from something else. That structure is often therefore described as "pregeometric." I.e. It is a common generic term in physics used to describe any hypothetical theory in which space and time is emergent. Wikipedia is always a good place to turn to when you don't understand a term and in this case it gives several good examples of mainstream pregeometric theories http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregeometry_(physics)

"The meta-laws" here just mean the theory of this pregeometry. They are meta-laws in the sense that the laws of physics we know are just one possibility of what could emerge from the meta-laws. They exist at a deeper level. I am talking here about theory whose exact form is unknown so in that sense it does have multiple meaning, but what I am saying applies generically to whatever those meta-laws are. Again the term "meta-laws" is in common use although it is less common than "pregeometry"

I think the meaning of my statement that it takes a purely algebraic form should be clear enough. If it is pregeometric is should not be a theory of geometry so it could be algebraic or combinatorial or something else. Quantum mechanics is very much algebraic so once the geometry has been transcended it seems reasonable to expect that what underlies the theory from which it emerges will be algebraic.

I don't think "relationships between systems of information" is very ambiguous even though I do not describe those systems in general. Also I think the words "symmetry" and "immutable" are unambiguous.

Possibly the problem here is not that this can mean different things, but rather that I am referring to generic concepts where the detailed implementation of the ideas is not yet worked out. I don't see how this can be avoided given the essay topic which forces us to consider questions of what fundamental means when we don't yet have a complete fundamental theory of physics to work from. I am pleased that others seem to have understood some of what I say in that context and sorry that you have not.

view post as summary

Heinrich Luediger replied on Feb. 9, 2018 @ 10:10 GMT

Dear Philip,

thanks for answering a not so positive comment! The fact that a term is accepted in, say, physics does not imply that it has meaning. The ‘multiverse’ is such an example, because it is not hypothetical but merely speculative. My point was to say that a compound of meaning-less or very vague notions is not well suited to argue anything.

In addition, by the very well defined meaning of the word ‘transcendence’ one points to a domain about the form and operations of which nothing can be known in principle. Your ‘transcendence’, however, mediates between two domains of which you claim to have or hope to gain knowledge. So, the use of ‘transcendence’ WITHIN physics is an oxymoron.

Heinrich

report post as inappropriate

Brian D. Josephson replied on Feb. 9, 2018 @ 10:25 GMT

Something being 'speculative' doesn't mean that is has no meaning: one may for example speculate that someone is late because he has been held up by traffic, and it is perfectly clear what the meaning is. In regard to terms such as emergent or multiverse one has to turn to the literature to discover what precise meanings have been assigned to the term concerned, it is not a matter of there being an absolute meaning as there is for example in the case of multiplication of integers.

report post as inappropriate

show all replies (1 not shown)

Dear Philip,

You give very deep ontological ideas in the spirit of Cartesian doubt. I believe that this is the right way to overcome the crisis of understanding in the foundations of knowledge. I invite you to see my ideas of ontological с, where the "logos" - "metalaw" creates from the matter another alternative model of Ideality.

All the best,

Vladimir

report post as inappropriate

Dear Philip,

I have written to you already several days ago, but you must have lost my comments among the many ones you received. I report the main points here again, because I would like to have a confrontation between our ideas, that seem to show some similarities (you find my essay here https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3017):

Thank you for pointing out some long overdue problems with the intuitive reductionist approach. I am glad that you point out, for instance, that “the hypothesis has been further bolstered by the observation that the laws of particles physics are unnaturally fine-tuned”. I follow a falsificationist approach, namely a deductivist methodology in science that allows (in your words) “mathematics [to] guide the way until the experimental outlook improves”.

Your idea that “Reality is relative to the observer” is indeed one of the most promising directions of investigation in the modern foundations of physics. I find a particular affinity with a recent proposal by Brukner that there are “no facts of the world per se, but only relative to an observer” (If you havent seen this yet, please see https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.05255).

Best ratings.

Best wishes,

Flavio

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Feb. 10, 2018 @ 10:54 GMT

Apologies for the delay. I am working my way through stuff.

Philip, here is a story about Witten and Wheeler

report post as inappropriate

Brian D. Josephson replied on Feb. 10, 2018 @ 09:09 GMT

The late (and great) Michael Conrad also brought up the idea of representing ideas in computer language (he favoured LISP on account of its simplicity). But I believe he may have also suggested that not everything can be put into such forms.

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Feb. 10, 2018 @ 10:19 GMT

Information does not always come in discrete bits. If I tell you that the last digit of an unbiased number is not a seven, how many bits of information have I given you? However, quantisation in physics does seem to have discretised the information spectrum.

It is interesting that Witten admits that he does not have much talent for philosophy. That may have been limiting for him, although it seems silly to speak of Witten's work as limited. I think he is typical of many physicists in that regard. Some physicists are able to do more with philosophy, e.g. Einstein, Wheeler and more recently Arkani-Hamed. I think they are the exceptions which is one reason why so few physicists enter this contest.

The interesting thing about computability is that it has universality. There is not an obvious best computer language for defining computability but any choices you try can be shown to be equivalent by writing a simulator of each language in the other. I learnt this from John H Conway at his Cambridge logic course in 1980. He went to great lengths to show that a Minsky Machine is equivalent to a Turing Machine in fine detail. Universality comes in other forms, some more closely related to physics, but it may be this lesson that makes me think so much about the philosophical side of its significance. It may also be interesting to think about how uncertainty and imprecision relate to universality.

Dear Philip Gibbs,

Thank you for an essay with a lot of ideas. While I was intrigued by the whole essay, I was wondering if you can elaborate on one point. You write "The assimilation of information is an algebraic process of factorisation and morphisms." What do you mean by that? I look forward to your response.

Thank you again for an interesting essay.

If you have a chance, please take a look at my essay.

All the best,

Noson Yanofsky

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Feb. 12, 2018 @ 16:41 GMT

Thank you for this question. Since you are a mathematician you will understand the basic idea here. I have said that I think the universe must have "complete symmetry", meaning that there should be one degree of symmetry corresponding to every physical degree of freedom. I believe this may be the only way to explain the holographic principle to resolve the information loss paradox for black holes....

view entire post

Thank you for this question. Since you are a mathematician you will understand the basic idea here. I have said that I think the universe must have "complete symmetry", meaning that there should be one degree of symmetry corresponding to every physical degree of freedom. I believe this may be the only way to explain the holographic principle to resolve the information loss paradox for black holes. If symmetry was equivalent to group invariance then another way of saying this would be that the state space of the universe must be represented by a group, or a Lie algebra. In fact I think the concept of symmetry here has to be generalised, e.g. to supersymmetry and probably beyond, but for the sake of argument let's consider the hypothesis that the algebraic structure for the universe is a group.

If you then started with no other information about the laws of physics you might say that the universe is described by a ensemble of all possible groups, a strange kind of algebraic multiverse. However, I want to go beyond that view which I think is too simplistic because it does not take into account relationships between universes. If you make some observation within the universe you get some information about it. In group theory information would take the form of some algebraic equivalence relations between group elements. Given those relations what can you then say about the group? I am sure you know the answer. To construct the largest group G satisfying any specific set of algebraic relations you start with the free group F generated by all possible group elements and then construct the normal subgroup N of elements that must be equivalent to the identity given the provided relations the group you have is then G = F/N.

If you are then given further information you can construct a normal subgroup M of G and reduce further to a group H = G/M. Each time there is a group homomorphism mapping F onto G or G onto H taking the normal subgroup onto the identity.

When we think of an ensemble of possible universes we would imagine that gaining information would simply select some subset from the ensemble. If we believe the universe is algebraic it is more natural to start with a free algebraic structure and form homomorphic images of it instead of selecting sub-algebras or sets of sub-algebras. That is basically my idea.

I will give another example of how this can work. In a theory like string theory, the world is described on top of a geometric structure called spacetime. It has too many dimensions but dimensions can be reduced by compactification. Suppose that a more general underlying theory is found which is algebraic. Spacetime would then be a feature of the algebraic structure. When we compactify the spacetime we are identifying points and reducing the algebraic structure modulo those identity relationships. I think when string theory is seen as algebraic compactification will be seen as part of a more general process of factoring out some normal subgroup or whatever the equivalent of that is in the right type of algebraic structure. Being given information about what vacuum state the universe has selected will be equivalent to factoring out the corresponding algebraic structure.

Now I must confess to how this idea fails. In quantum mechanics gaining information is equivalent to making a measurement. If you measure position and then momentum you do not get the same result as when you measure momentum and then position. The operations do not commute. The simple algebraic picture of factorisations cannot for this noncommutivity. However, I don't think all is lost. It may be possible to take a level of abstraction and replace homomorphisms with morphisms between objects having a more non-commutative structure. I've no idea how something like that can be made to work, or even whether it corresponds to something that mathematicians have already considered.

view post as summary

Hi Phil,

I enjoyed your essay immensely. At one point you suggest that "quantization as a sum over histories is more fundamental than particles or field or even time and space." What is history without time or path without space? You then ask if there is a fundamental law which is not derived from anything deeper? Yes, if we assume that a law governs something, there must exist...

view entire post

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Feb. 13, 2018 @ 17:27 GMT

Edwin,

Thank you for reading my essay and thinking about it in so much detail. Your participation in this contest through your essay and your engagement with other authors is exemplary.

The following is how I see things, if it differs from your view I may be wrong :-)

I agree that a lattice is not a good pregeometry. Matrix models are much more interesting, but I expect some...

view entire post

Edwin,

Thank you for reading my essay and thinking about it in so much detail. Your participation in this contest through your essay and your engagement with other authors is exemplary.

The following is how I see things, if it differs from your view I may be wrong :-)

I agree that a lattice is not a good pregeometry. Matrix models are much more interesting, but I expect some principle from algebraic geometry to provide the real answers.

You compare energy with information. Which is more fundamental? I think the answer is that these two things are of a different nature so it is hard to set one up against another. Energy is something you find in physics. You don't encounter energy in pure mathematics. Information on the other hand is ubiquitous. Everything requires information to describe it. It is important in physics but it is important beyond physics.

Energy is just one conserved quantity. If energy is important then it is in many ways still on a par with other conserved quantities such as momentum, charge and spin. Energy is linked to time, so if time is emergent then so is energy.

My point of view is that anything in physics is emergent rather than fundamental. there is no fundamental structure from which everything else emerges. If we find some principles which explain the universe then they must be natural principles of logic, information etc. I think it is important to avoid the statement that mathematical structures are the fundamental elements of nature. That implies a kind of platonic realm. That is the wrong philosophy. We need to talk in terms of logical possibilities and the relativity of reality to see it the right way.

You ask how a path integral can work without space an time. That is an interesting question. The path is the path integral is actually a path through the classical state space. For a single particle this is equivalent to a path through space, but for multiple particles or fields it is something higher dimensional. The path can easily be replaced by more abstract constructs in the absence of space. What about time? The path integral is a sum over all possible ways the universe could be. We often call these "histories" but it does not necessarily imply the existence of time. The terminology is a bit misleading in that respect. I have looked at path integrals which are sums over all configurations of random graphs or random matrices with no explicit time element. Time may emerge in such models if the parameters are just right. I don't consider time to be an essential fundamental feature of the universe. It seems much more natural to me that it would be emergent.

Thanks again for you extensive comment and good luck in the contest.

view post as summary

Edwin Eugene Klingman replied on Feb. 13, 2018 @ 21:41 GMT

Dear Phil,

Thanks for your response. We agree on so much. Not to beat a dead horse, but local energy is ubiquitous. Information requires structure and context/decoding. Description is secondary (in my opinion), not fundamental. It requires a 'model' or image of whatever is fundamental.

You find matrix models more interesting, but didn't the Heisenberg/Schrödinger equivalence show they are different perspectives on the same thing?

I agree that there is no fundamental structure from which everything else emerges. The continuum is not a 'structure' (I don't think.) I certainly agree that "it is important to avoid the statement that mathematical structures are the fundamental elements of nature." I formulated my comment as an attempt to address your specific requirements. The self-interaction equation does lead to momentum, spin, and charge (given the appropriate physical assumptions to interpret the math.) I don't think either energy or time emerges from the equation, but are inherent to the primordial field "described" by the equation. I think energy and time are dual and have no separate existence or meaning.

I'm glad you find the Platonic realm the wrong philosophy. I used to think you were a Platonist. I asked the "history without time?" question to see how you would answer. I expected your answer and I agree with it. We're getting closer in our old age.

Your comments and replies to people are a model for how this contest should operate. You have a very generous nature (probably accounts for viXra.)

Edwin Eugene Klingman

report post as inappropriate

Edwin Eugene Klingman replied on Feb. 25, 2018 @ 22:11 GMT

Dear Phil,

On another's page, you said, "I like simulation myself, and I'm always interested to learn what other people have tried."

Based on this I am providing the link to a Bell's theorem simulation (on viXra) that is fully non-local [ A and B never appear together locally, except at birth] and uses Bell's discrete variables +1 and -1 to show that his theorem is not violated. I then use continuous variables, representing the actual Stern-Gerlach data and show that Bell's "impossible to achieve" correlation is achieved.

Cristi Stoica and I discussed the physics of this on his page [also copied to my page.]

The non-local simulation model is shown on page 5 and the discrete and continuous variable results are shown on page 6. The figures represent 10,000 random spins and SG-orientations.

In another simulation, Modern Classical Spin Dynamics, based on the same model of spin, I generate ~10,000 spins passing through an inhomogeneous magnetic field, and show that this exactly overlays the actual SG data [fig 6 on page 20].

A lot can be learned from simulations. If you have any that you have done, I would be interested in a link.

Finally, you are busy with responding to others as this contest closes, so you need not bother responding to this comment. It is FYI.

My best regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

report post as inappropriate

Dear Philip:

Your statement - "Time comes into it. Say it. Say it. The universe is made of stories,not of atoms." is vindicated by my paper –“What is Fundamental – Is C the Speed of Light” that describes the fundamental physics of antigravity missing from the widely-accepted mainstream physics and cosmology theories resolving their current inconsistencies and paradoxes. The missing physics shows that Big Bang is just a story and depicts a new spontaneous relativistic mass creation/dilation photon model that explains the yet unknown dark energy, inner workings of quantum mechanics, and bridges the gaps among relativity and Maxwell’s theories. The model also provides field equations governing the spontaneous wave-particle complimentarity or mass-energy equivalence. The key significance or contribution of the proposed work is to enhance fundamental understanding of C, commonly known as the speed of light, and Cosmological Constant, commonly known as the dark energy.

The manuscript not only provides comparisons against existing empirical observations but also forwards testable predictions for future falsification of the proposed model.

I would like to invite you to read my paper and appreciate any feedback comments.

Best Regards

Avtar Singh

report post as inappropriate

Hi Philip,

I like your open and expansive compilation of ideas on what is fundamental. A Universe Made of Stories resonates with me.

I made an essay that explains "the speed of darkness". Take a look and let me know what you think. You may want to add it to your collection of "fundamentals".

Thanks for introducing me to Muriel Rukeyser,

Don Limuti

report post as inappropriate

Dear Philip Gibbs,

Admittedly I mistook you for a while. With stories you meant histories, not levels, and the thoughtless use of "made" doesn't necessarily imply a creation.

The universe (in the sense of everything) consists of histories. Well, this was Shannon's and is my most fundamental point too. Therefore I rate your essay high.

Nonetheless I would like you to respect arguments that fundamentally differ from what you correctly called your "speculative view":

Shannon didn't speak of "past, present and future". As did he, I too exclude the fuzzy middle "present" between past and future.

You wrote: "Reality is relative to the observer." Doesn't already this differ from Shannon's opinion that in the assumed reality, the past is unchangeable?

Isaac Newton was born in the year when Galileo Galilei's live got history, independent from chosen point of view.

While I respect your almost mandatory view concerning symmetries, I can also not hide my suspicions concerning this topic.

Eckard Blumschein

report post as inappropriate

Dear Philip,

Once again, you deliver a great essay. You start with one of my favorite quotes, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms”, so how could it be not great? ;)

Since we share very similar views on many things, I agree on a lot of what you said:

- Fundamental physics is barely more fundamental than the workings of biology, since our stable vacuum is only one...

view entire post

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Feb. 18, 2018 @ 12:22 GMT

I'm glad you like the Ruykeyser quote. I first used it 20 years ago to express some of these ideas and it seemed to fit for this contest.

It is not surprising that you like many of my ideas. I nicked a few of them from you!

I am with you on the rematch idea. As soon as the discussion starts and the questions come in I am reminded of all the things I should have included to make the ideas clearer. This is why the discussion is so important. As you know the winners are encouraged to expand their essay for the compendium publication but that is not seen by everyone.

The ideas in the more technical section are not as difficult as they appear. The problem is just my inability to explain them in few words.

As always the best solution would be to write a longer paper, and there is always the next contest.

Eckard Blumschein replied on Feb. 18, 2018 @ 14:28 GMT

"Ultimate fundamentality shouldn’t be in any way accidental or arbitrary."

In physics, the commonly agreed reference t=0 is an arbitrary choice.

report post as inappropriate

Dear Phil,

You have a gift for expressing your ideas in a thoroughly engaging way, so that even if I may not agree with some of them, it causes me to consider them again.

A few comments;

1. The metaphor of stories as the building block of the universe is striking. I genuinely wonder why no one seems to have thought of it before.

2. Beginning at the bottom of page 3, you...

view entire post

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Feb. 21, 2018 @ 11:35 GMT

Thanks for your feedback,#

If you like the "nothing = everything" idea you should read the essays of Marc Séguin. I was inspired by his contributions in a previous contest. Perhaps he also expresses it better than I do avoiding the misinterpretation you point out.

Hopefully I will have time to read your essay in the last few days.

Dear Phillip,

You have quite an inquiring mind and put forth an oblique argument for ".. tensor product .. mapping ?(?) ⊗ ?(?) → ?(?)" to replace SU(3)xU(2)xU(1) of the standard model. Of course such a group involves a set of particle which could (and certainly should!) be compared to those which we know to exist from collider experimental observation.

While you consider that step, you might also want to note that a subgroup of a cross product of two wreath products works well to replicate QC/ED particles and interactions. Perhaps you'd like to exercise your group theoretic skills and better describe the correctly symmetry-broken "subgroup"? I have a lot of notes on the subject ...

Anyway, your inquisitive essay seems to have wandered closest to a new insight as above. I am glad you wrote and hope your inquiries turn to more productive questions...!

Wayne

post approved

Dear Phillip,

You have quite an inquiring mind and put forth an oblique argument for ".. tensor product .. mapping T(V) ⊗ T(V) → T(V)" to replace SU(3)xU(2)xU(1) of the standard model. Of course such a group involves a set of particle which could (and certainly should!) be compared to those which we know to exist from collider experimental observation.

While you consider that step, you might also want to note that a subgroup of a cross product of two wreath products works well to replicate QC/ED particles and interactions. Perhaps you'd like to exercise your group theoretic skills and better describe the correctly symmetry-broken "subgroup"? I have a lot of notes on the subject ...

Anyway, your inquisitive essay seems to have wandered closest to a new insight as above. I am glad you wrote and hope your inquiries turn to more productive questions...!

Wayne

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Feb. 21, 2018 @ 11:29 GMT

Wayne, thanks for your comment.

I think the passage from the algebraic meta-laws I describe to the standard model at low energy will require some arbitrary choices from a landscape of possibilities. Because this happens at very high energy we will need some new experimental input to get the details. This could come from a new collider, proton decay, inflation, dark energy observation or something else. Unless experimenter's luck changes this will not happen tomorrow. Nevertheless I think there is a lot of exciting theoretical work that can be done in the near term, and of course I could turn out to be wrong about the landscape.

Wayne R Lundberg replied on Feb. 25, 2018 @ 15:33 GMT

Philip,

The well-founded approach I use, and the algebraic group, replicate QC/ED quite well... no need for exploring an unknown 'landscape'.

{I found the band-like solution at the conformal boundary of the string theory landscape! ;}

report post as inappropriate

Very nicely written, MR. Gibss!

Read and rate it.

Further comments are useless.

If you do have the time and pleasure for another essay, you can check this one

Respectfully,

Silviu

report post as inappropriate

Dear Philip

You are just a nice master-writer in first, and also truly thinking man! I felt it is my duty always support you. Be well!

Best Regards

George Kirakosyan

report post as inappropriate

Dear Philip,

I highly appreciate your beautifully written essay.

Your essay allowed to consider us like-minded people.

I agree with you. «We know that some physical phenomena can be derived from a more basic substratum». «Heat is a manifestation of the kinetic energy of atoms».

«Fundamental laws are not in any way accidental or arbitrary».

I hope that my modest achievements can be information for reflection for you.

Vladimir Fedorov

https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3080

report post as inappropriate

Stories and Mechanisms

In the comments section of my own essay I have made the point that it may be helpful to adjoin to your 'stories' concept the idea of mechanism, as stories are underpinned by mechanisms (e.g. the use of FM signals involves complicated mechanisms to make it work) while mechanisms also have explanations involving what might be called stories. This just makes everything a bit more explicit. From this perspective, in regard to symmetry one might argue that this has its own mechanisms, a nice example being the creation of spherical mirrors by a grinding process which translates spatial symmetry into the symmetry of the mirror. Then I guess symmetry has its utility in the grand scheme of things, e.g. wheels work better if they are round!

report post as inappropriate

Phil,

I am reminded of a poem I wrote for a close friend some time ago:

To Candy.

You are your own puppet,

A marionette

Whose moves

Have not been invented yet.

You are your own story,

A novelette

Whose words

Have not been written yet.

So I certainly agree that "Reality is relative to the observer."

Yet I also agree with Josephson that a mechanics must support reality, or all our work in mathematics is nothing but recreational, and our story is only that of a wasted life.

No doubt in my mind that your essay is the most meaningful in this "contest." You write: "Time then is not fundamental and if time is out then so is space." I agree. Time is fundamentally inseparable from spacetime.

All best,

Tom https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3124

report post as inappropriate

Dear Philip,

Thanks for taking me on a pleasing little ramble through a series of intriguing ideas. I was sorry you didn’t get back to your thought about stories, at the end… but I agree with you that there’s still a lot to be learned from the strange combination of broken and unbroken symmetries in the laws of physics.

One thing I found striking here, which well describes the...

view entire post

Dear Philip,

Thanks for taking me on a pleasing little ramble through a series of intriguing ideas. I was sorry you didn’t get back to your thought about stories, at the end… but I agree with you that there’s still a lot to be learned from the strange combination of broken and unbroken symmetries in the laws of physics.

One thing I found striking here, which well describes the point of departure for the second section of my current essay: “With no information the universe is the sum of all possible histories, described by all possible laws of physics. In terms of information “Nothing” means “everything.”

For me, the problem is that when everything is possible, there’s no constraining context in which anything in particular is even definable, let alone measurable. So the question is, what story leads from here to the situation of our current universe, where so many different kinds of information are all definable and measurable in terms of each other?

There are two sides to the meaning of “fundamental” – one of which you emphasize: “a level of reality that is not derived from anything else. Fundamental laws are not in any way accidental or arbitrary. They must be as they are, because they could not be any other way.” It’s not clear whether this actually applies to anything in the physical world. Bu the other side certainly does apply – that is, things are fundamental insofar as they provide a basis for other things.

I argue that the complex structure of atoms is the basis for all observable information in our universe. Since that structure clearly depends on many deeper layers, I tell one possible story, taking an “archaeological” approach, digging out features of our currently well-established physics that require the least complex contexts to define them, and ordering them in a sequence of “pre-historic strata.”

Though I haven’t developed this thought in my essays yet, I think the reason so many different kinds of symmetry appear in physics is that symmetries mark a boundary between two levels of definition – a point where one type of information can be defined, but no context yet exists to define a related kind of information. If that makes sense, then this gives us a powerful tool for sequencing the strata.

I hope you get a chance to look at my essay and let me know what you think – not necessarily before the deadline for ratings. The feedback is more important to me.

Thanks again -- Conrad

view post as summary

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Feb. 24, 2018 @ 10:26 GMT

Thanks for your comment, you asked

"what story leads from here to the situation of our current universe"

I think it is necessary to think in terms of each persons experience rather than just the whole universe. My experience is different from yours. We are connected but not the same. We have some common information about the world, but there are also things you know that I don't and...

view entire post

Thanks for your comment, you asked

"what story leads from here to the situation of our current universe"

I think it is necessary to think in terms of each persons experience rather than just the whole universe. My experience is different from yours. We are connected but not the same. We have some common information about the world, but there are also things you know that I don't and vice versa. We each have our own story, equally real.

In quantum mechanics the world is described by a huge Hilbert space of possibilities. Many parts of that space are totally alien to us, yet when we do calculations we must sum over everything. We must consider all paths, all stories. If we don't then the sum is incomplete and the total probability of all possible outcomes is less than one. Whether people like it to not, quantum mechanics says all possible worlds must be counted and added into the sum. No possible story can be ignored. no matter how remote from our experience it is.

I don't think anything we are familiar with in the universe is really fundamental. Everything is just a subplot in our story. It is information for us about our experience of reality, but not for all possible realities. Information is related to probabilities. All experiences are possibilities, reality is relative. There are even things that are real for you that are not real for me, but our lives are so strongly entangled that these things are barely perceptible. Other realities that are more remote from us can be very different. reality is a balance between the number of possible combinations that match are experience and the probability derived from the amount of information available to us.

This leads to complexity, and in complexity a principle of universality emerges. This defines the algebraic meta-laws around which all possible experiences self-organise. It is the origin of the symmetries that make the world comprehensible. It means that the laws of physics can be the same at all places and at all times. Without such symmetry nothing would be predictable and our experience of reality would be nonsensical. spacetime geometry is emergent along with the spectrum of elementary particles and the physical parameters that make evolution of life possible. These are chance events but all possibilities are out there, and we are connected to them. It is this that gives meaning to our experience.

view post as summary

Dear Philip,

I came to your essay just after unloading some thoughts on Bell's beables: me believing that they are (for Bell) the existents in any universe of discourse -- thus, for Bell, not always physically real -- though they are real for me in my favoured universe of discourse = spacetime, itself a real physical beable. Which is my excuse for thinking, before I'd left your first page:...

view entire post

report post as inappropriate

Hello Phil,

Can't open a dialog with you without expressing gratitude for the service you've given the community via vixra. Many heartfelt thanks.

First pass thru your essay was overwhelming in both breadth and depth. Can't hope to address it all, or even significant fraction. Where relevant and possibly helpful will outline connections between ideas in your essay and the geometric...

view entire post

report post as inappropriate

Anonymous replied on Feb. 26, 2018 @ 18:56 GMT

Thanks for your comment. You were hit by the anonymiser bug, but you left enough clues for me to identify you.

The questions and comments have clarified the situation for me since writing my essay, but I am less clear about the definition of fundamental. Perhaps what is really fundamental is the information that is added at different levels and the relations between them. the next step should be to formulate a mathematical model.

I will look again at your essay.

report post as inappropriate

peter cameron replied on Feb. 26, 2018 @ 19:13 GMT

unanonymising here.

Thanks for mentioning clarification you developed from questions and comments, have not yet followed your thread but your mention suggests to me it will be time well spent.

re "...information that is added at different levels and the relations between them", where does that information come from? Is it not emergent from wavefunction interactions, just as the infinite variety of snowflakes emerges from H20 wavefunctions?

can/will you be a little more specific re what a math model might look like?

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Feb. 26, 2018 @ 21:45 GMT

Pete, I see information as a key characteristic of emergence. I agree that it emerges from different possibilities that are realised, such as the different snowflakes or the different outcomes of a quantum measurement. Information is what distinguishes your reality from mine. This information is not just the knowledge in our brain it is also the information about the universe around us that is consistent with our experience. So actually the information that defines your experience of reality is mostly the same as mine.

No information can come from outside the universe. When the whole is considered there is no information, it is just a collection of all possible experiences with no information to distinguish one from another. Your experience of reality requires information to distinguish it from all the other possibilities. It's a random. selection constrained by the requirement that the information we have must be consistent and comprehensible. In summary then, information is just the result of a random selection from all possible experiences.

I am not sure I can be more specific about the mathematics here. That would require writing a long paper the details of which are not yet worked out.

Dear Phil,

It is a pleasure meeting you here in FQXi again.

Once again, you wrote an entertaining and inspiring essay. Thanks for sharing it with us. Your work deserves my highest estimation. Being a physicist of gravitation, I particularly appreciated your statement that "General relativity may be celebrated as the most aesthetically pleasing theory in physics, yet it must emerge from something deeper and possibly less appealing to our minds", despite I hope that such a something deeper will be equally appealing to our minds!

Maybe you could be interested in my Essay, where I discuss on fundamental issues with... Albert Einstein!

Good luck in the Contest.

Cheers, Ch.

report post as inappropriate

Author Philip Gibbs replied on Feb. 26, 2018 @ 21:24 GMT

Thank you Christian, I have read and commented on your essay.

On the subject of the quote you picked from my essay, I smile when I hear physicists talk about the beauty of Einstein's geometric theory of gravity. Some talk about "Angel of Geometry vs. the Demon of Algebra." they say that quantum mechanics needs to be geometrised to unify it with gravity. I think pure mathematicians have long-since realised that algebra is more fundamental, in fact geometry is just a nice example of algebra. The beauty of algebra is harder to appreciate because it does not provide us with such lovely pictures, but in my opinion its beauty is both superior and far more extensive and I am far from being expert enough to understand the work of some of the great algebraists. If general relativity is about geometry then quantum theory is about algebra, but the full beauty and power of algebra has not yet been incorporated into physics to the same extent as geometry has.

Hello Philip,

A belated read of your essay reveals confirmation of my own fundamental thoughts concerning 'What is "Fundamental"?' As you note, 'The universe exists, so there must be answers.'

Such was my own conclusion: the prerequisite for all that 'is' - is Existence.

'Everything is nothing in the absence of Existence'. Amen.

If you have a moment to read, comment and rank my essay at this, the eleventh hour, I would much appreciate it. I am aware that there is 'ice' on the slope today moving ranking scores downwards, in my case from 6.8 to 6.3!

Go well and good luck in the final assessment.

Gary.

report post as inappropriate

Thanks to everyone for the comments and comparisons with your own essays. This has helped me advance my ideas a little further. Sorry if I did not have time to comment on everyone's essay. I did read a lot and rated the ones I liked. I wish you all good luck for the judging but it is the exchange of ideas that really counts.

Dear Philip,

My experience in reading your essay was that it was really nice locally, though somewhat hard to navigate as a whole. I liked your discussion of the geometry problem best, though I suspect it does less for your case than you suggest. In the example, the symmetries were an epistemically helpful ladder to the solution, which can be kicked away in the end (though you can learn from how others climbed it). Yet, for physics, you suspect to find symmetry in a fundamental theory beyond those we have now. Isn't that in tension, or did I misinterpret this?

The batch of entries I selected to read includes the essay by Ilja Schmelzer: section IV addresses the loss of symmetry across symmetry change. I think it would be interesting if you two could discuss this directly.

Best wishes,

Sylvia - Seek Fundamentality, and Distrust It

report post as inappropriate