This is a compilation of emails with Eldon New and papers I have written. It began as an attempt to understand the multiverse view of quantum physics and focuses on Feyman's path integral approach.
First I will begin with a mythematical traipse of archetypal images to set the tone of the discussion.
Confessions of Rasputin 11
"All is wheels upon wheels, wheels within wheels...rasputin 11"
It takes a story to flesh the quantum wave.
Here is one true story.
I have a pseudo-memory of being carried age 1(?) in 1947 Florida across sand dunes in the arms of my mother. The sandy beach wind flapped her navy blue&white polkadot dress as she nursed me. She was singing "you are my sunshine my only sunshine..." as my father strode toward us.
My earlist unreconstructed recollection is as a 2 year old, boldly treading out into the hot ashes of the field by our old family homeplace the day after it burnt down. It had been a large, 2 story, white columned, plantation style house, set amidst the large oaks and hanging spanish moss of South Caroline circa 1948. As I stumbled across the ash laden furrows (high to a 2 yr old) , a hot coal slipped into the back of my baby shoe, and I was branded for life. This is my earliest memory and to this day I have a circular scar precisely located on the Achilles Tendon of my left foot. I am left-handed by the way. This fire brand has been a constant reminder of the pains that follow the arrogance of boastful pride. It has been my strength and my downfall throughout life. There have been many signature moments in my life that have shaped this brand.
My age three recollection came as a fish. Frozen in a winter pond, shining brightly in oranges, blues, and yellows against the translucent whiteness of snow and ice, the sunfish (my astrological sign by the way is the sun) lay half curled as if in motion, fixing to dart below into the depths, but it was frozen in space and time and so was I. I believe this was my first moment of self awareness fascinated and caught looking at itself in a mirror. It was a zen freeze-frame into the silence of being. If you doubt me, look at the 'I. I believe' beginning of the previous sentence. That particular recursion was completely synchronistic and unintended.
Age four brought the surgeon's scythe of eternity into my life. Screaming as the nurses took me from my father's arms, I felt abondoned to an unknown and horrible fate. My mother, collaborating with the enemy, held my hand as they gagged me with an evil foul smell-of-death mask to put me out ... for good. As I struggled for air and life, I heard the nurse say, "My, he's a strong boy. I'll have to use another bottle of ether." Well, at that point I knew I was a goner for sure. A horrible buzz in my ears brought on a horrific hallucination of wheels turning and connected like gears with wheels on top of wheels, wheels within wheels, large wheels and small wheels, colored wheels meshing and turning maddenly faster and faster and then .... I saw an infinite flat black wall of death come rushing toward me.
I awoke totally alone in a sterile white place with a pain in my gut. Looking down fearfully I saw with horror that I was being held together by massive shiny chrome pinchers. Every now and then monsters in masks would come by and press on the evil pinchers to make sure they were doing their job. Being tortured by these evil demons only made the feeling of being abandoned by my parents the more agonizing. After millions of age four years, my father came to save me, but he only left me a toy to play with after he left. It was one of those little metal toy thingies that had a colored WHEEL that SPINNED and threw out SPARKS when you pulled the trigger! For days, while recuperating, I spun the little wheel and watch the magical sparks fly. It was my mandala of the death wheels to hold onto as I was reborn.
The 'death wheels' image has been an abiding archetype in my life. Its mythic overtones range from buddhism to quantum physics. Cycles of change, blending chi into energetic fusion and dissipating out into disarray foam maddenly beneath the quieter seas of contemplation. Death is a very busy place indeed. Having crossed Dante's river at age 4, I experienced an unusually early and deep crystalization of my core. I awoke into 3 dimensional space as a separate being in my own right with a predilection for mathematical and graphic sensibility. The wheels of death came to be seen later as the wheels of life turning furiously to avoid the black wall of death. The wall itself has two sides though and is but part of a larger wheel turning.
Think process and cycle.
Quantum waves spreading out in glorious diffusion. Little spinning arrow clocks of quantum probability measure space and time into probilities of being. Infinite webs of precise causality waves interfere, cohere, and entangle into finite unpredictable movements of the here and now. Quantum Electrodynamics is a fancy word for P = Sum over infinity of P times e to the i theta.
ei*theta = cos(theta) + i sin(theta)
The complex wave equation that Euler discovered. At theta = p, e to the ip evaluates to -1. e to the ip + 1 = 0. This is the GOD equation. It is comprised by the five basic mathematical number types - the cosmic null positional notifier '0', the rational integer unity '1' , the irrational incommensurate imaginary direction 'i', the exponentiating non-linear natural logarithm growth base 'e', and the transcendental right-angled cross dimensional wrap-around parameter 'p'. It is also the simple complex number formula for drawing a circle. It has a real cosine wave component and an imaginary sine wave component. These little mathematical beastie waves are the core actors in Richard Feynman's Path Integral appraoch to Quantum Electrodynamics. Primordial process. Cycles of being. Time. Probability clocks. Birth, growth, death, decay, rebirth. Cycles in time - waves in space. Oroborous. The snake eating it's tail. The alpha and omega. The tree of life. Fourier transform. Cosmic code.
Chemical process compressive involute to genetic seed, expansive evolute to process reborn again and again over eons of cycle time and wave space.
DNA
-----------------
From: Swinton Roof <sroof@earthlink.net>
To: Eldon New (Earthlink) <eldonenew@earthlink.net>
Subject: Fabric of Reality
Date: Wednesday, August 16, 2000 11:06 PM
I started reading "The Fabric of Reality" by David Deutsch. The first chapter was interesting because Deutsch's logic promised to free me from the evils of my reductionist mind. I thought that perhaps I was finally encountering an explanation that would force me to accept the Many Worlds interpretation. I liked the word 'Multiverse' as a new term.
Upon closer examination, I began to have doubts however. There was something nagging at the back of my mind. Deutsch uses the opening of a second pair of double slits to conjecture that something real has entered and deflected a photon going through the first pair, hence producing an empty place where there should have been a bright line. This is the central critical piece of evidence behind his multiverse conjecture. What bothered me was that he did not use the double slits as his starting point but jumped to four slits to throw in the conjecture. Why couldn't he simply have opened and closed one of the two first slits to demonstrate his argument?
Well I found out that his conjecture has nothing to hang its hat on if done only with two slits - no black space appears in just the right spot with the second slit open - in fact there appear a lot of bright lines where before there was only one (sort of). His method just simply doesn't work for two slits. I thought this was quite strange a difference. Kind of like a shell game where he arranges his experiment just so so to prove his point. Thinking further I reasoned, if a shadow photon deflecting a tanglible photon is responsible for the black space, what causes the bright lines to repeatedly appear at the other locations right and left? Other shadow photons? No, that would be an arbitrary result - deflection causing no spot in one case and bright spots in another.
To make things worse, it becomes apparent that Deutsch glosses over how a shadow photon deflecting a tangible photon can actually cause a black spot. He calls it 'interference'. This is supposed to be an explanation remember, but he really gives no explanation other than to say that a deflection occurs. Well pardon me, but where does the delected photon ( two each including the shadow photon) go? The sensors detect no energy differences in the barriers etc. according to Deutsch. The deflected tangible photon would have to end up somewhere else on the screen, presumably causing a random smear, or somehow careen back in some other direction escaping detection, or even worse, simply disappear without being accounted for. When one appreciates this, I think Deutsch's entire argument collapses, before it ever even gets off the ground and into partitioning of the multiverse.
Another point I would like to make is that 'interference' usually refers to linear superposition of two wave trains. In fact, the double slit experiment is very easily explained if the photon is seen as a wave and the phenomenon itself simply falls quite naturally and mathematically out of the geometry of the situation. Superposition of quanta as particles, on the other hand, leads to a pile of particles deflecting each other in incredibly difficult to predict ways like balls on a pool table during a break! That is unless you carefully pick a particular scenario out of a whole bunch, that just happens to confirm your conjecture. I think that's exactly what Deutsch has contrived. At that point he immediately throws you into a complex chain of arguments involving infinites of situations and moves straight into partioning of universes. I don't know about others, but by this point in his argument my mind began to reel and I accepted his conclusions without really being able to consider all the possibilities.
What makes Deutsch's approach so inventive, is that he starts from the very beginning with a corpuscular view. This really threw me for a loop. The kicker is that when he gets to his crucial conjecture, it is one shadow photon out of an infinity of universes that somehow kicks the tangible photon out of its usual position, but how arbitrary of him to say that it happens just so in that position X with no reference to geometry or the other lines at all. The interaction in fact occurs supposedly only between universes identical in all respects except for those two particular photon trajectories. On the one hand, almost absolute sameness is required, but simultaneously an absolute unique difference between those two photon trajectories (shadow and tangible) is where the interaction occurs. I find this an incredibly arbitrary argument. What about the the infinity of other shadow universes differing by only one photon trajectory that conspire to deflect that tangible in a different way. Are they not allowed?
Let's be absolutely clear here - Deutsch is not talking about superposition of all possible universes - he is talking about an interaction between two specific almost identical universes albeit still an infinite number of them. Of course he also means this interaction occurs for an infinite number of photon positions throught the whole black X space in between the lines, each single interacting pair just interacting precisely with each other to produce that single effect. This means an arbitrary ordered pairing of infinitely many paired shadow-tanglible universes. I find this to be ludricous in the face of no geometric argument at all! His conjecture would work equally well (in terms of his logic) if a Mandelbrot set pattern was the experimental result! I should point out, that his conjecture has nothing to do whatsoever with Feynman's superposion of all possible paths.
I still have a problem also with the jump from Feynman's all possible paths to all possible universes. It's the same game of partitioning infinites and throwing out the ones that don't support your conjecture. Deutsch evades this problem by saying that the effects are there but too difficult to observe because the effects are so small due to the infinity of almost-the-same-but-more-than-one-photon difference type of interactions. Well, I think this is an appeal to sloppy reason or unjustified claims to get yourself out of this bind. If one accepts these interactions as significant, the partioning idea may not fly.
A little talk about infinities is in order also. The math I know deals with infinites by doing one-to-one comparisons for EVERY potential element. Deutsch in contrast selects out a singular subset of infinites and discards the rest. I repeat, he is decidedly not saying that this universe is the superpostion of all possible universes. He is saying instead that some of the specific phenomena of this universe is the result of interaction with a certain subset of a multiverse.
Well, once again I find myself a victim of my own reductionist logic, as I have no better explanations to offer for quantum weirdness. There is one avenue or direction I would like to see explored, however. It seems to me that a geometric interpretation is paramount to such phenomena. One must be able to explicate the geometry of the situation. I think a pre-geometric formulation is where the ultimate answer will lie. When fully fleshed out and evolved, it will provide a simple explanation of how an infinity of possible interactions combine to produce one observation in one universe. The conjectured entities will have a different level of ontological reality - not equivalent to the final result (in contrast to Deutsch's interaction of infinite numbers of ontologicaly equal universes ). Deutsch in fact starts off with an ontological difference to make the case for his conjecture and then with a quick sleight of hands does an about face and says there is no difference between tangible and shadow.
My view is that there must be some non-local way (transcends space-time) of deriving geometric effects that defy linear causality. This proposes a new way of thinking so radical that I don't have a real clue as to how it might be accomplished. In a way I think it is similar to the question of how does consciousness itself integrate discrete phenomena into unified wholes of preception. When we get a grip on that question, I think we will be halfway there. I agree with Deutsch that we may be closer than we think, but I disagree with his conjecture.
I support his approval of Karl Popper's view that theory is a result of explanation that evolves as iterated conjecture and refutal. I am merely performing the refutation phase of this cycle.
This situation is vexing to me and I would welcome any insights you might have that reveal the errors in my logic. I am quite unhappy to find myself in the Copenhagen camp, even if the majority of physicists share the same position.
Looking forward to a reply.
Swinton
--------------------------
From: Eldon New <eldonenew@earthlink.net>
To: Swinton Roof <sroof@earthlink.net>
Subject: Virtual Universes
Date: Friday, August 18, 2000 12:11 AM
I did not follow all of Deutch's arguments, but I was
impressed that some
of his ideas have been proved in experimental quantum computer
experiments.
I prefer the model of superposition of waves also. I was
influenced by a
conversation we had several weeks ago to re-phrase some of the
arguments.
I would say that the infinite variation of posibillities in the
wave
equations represent virtual universes, whereas the one we
experience is
one universe. The fuzzy edges of things might require a "multiverse"
concept,
with the perceptual viewpoint causing each viewer to see a
slightly
different "universe".
----------------------------------
From: Swinton Roof <sroof@earthlink.net>
To: Eldon New <eldonenew@earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: Virtual Universes
Date: Saturday, August 19, 2000 12:09 AM
I thought of another aspect of the double slit experiment that
Deutsch
doesn't deal with - the frequency of the light. Now, we know that
the line
shape and spacing falls into easy correspondence with the natural
geometry
i.e. the lines spread out and become larger as the screen is
moved further
away.
Given a certain area on the screen at certain distance, however,
what
determines the actual number of lines? Well, it is the frequency
of the
light of course - higher frequency photons produce a line spacing
closer
together, hence more lines per given area. Therefore ENERGY is
the
geometric hook into understanding the line pattern. The energy is
quantized
and so are the lines. I cannot concieve of any corpuscular
argument leading
to this pattern that doesn't somehow hinge on the energy level.
Sadly, I
find Deutsch's argument contrived and specious.
I have been thinking about the conundrum quite a bit lately
and have a
radical new approach which I will send you when I get it finally
written
down. It's not a solution but it highlights some issues, I
haven't seen
covered before.
--------------------------------
To: Eldon New (Earthlink) <eldonenew@earthlink.net>
Subject: Quantum Paradox
Date: Saturday, September 02, 2000 12:12 PM
After our recent discussions, I was disturbed enough by my resistance to the multiverse view that I began a radical paper on the quantum double slit paradox. I have written some stuff that to me dispells much of the mystery by considering the ultimate reality as a unity of the implicate and the explicate. When one views the photon as implicate and the electron as explicate the wave collapse resolves into an ontological difference of form. I stopped at a point where I was going to discuss quantum confinement and origins of quantization and let things set a while.
Then Dennis and Ernie came by last night. Dennis had been reading
Spinoza and asked me about Zeno's Paradox. With a flash of
insight I realized that the wave particle duality and Feynman's
implicate path integrals are very closely related to Zeno's
Paradox! It seemed to me that the explicate is where the wave
collapses (infinites sum to a finite value) as a turning point
and Zeno's hare catches the tortoise.
Surprised that I could have such a revelation I searched the
internet with Zeno's Paradox and Quantum theory as my key words.
I was amazed to find that this has been a continual point of
contention in theory and found reference to much work done in
this area. A particular paper seemed to resonate with my concept:
http://www.weburbia.com/press/html/g04.htm It is part of a web
book you might find interesting.
http://www.weburbia.com/press/html/gframe.htm
In fact I found so much material, I don't know if I can focus
my ideas enough to even continue the paper. I get blown away
everytime I have an idea and it is already explored in so much
detail.
--
To: Swinton Roof <sroof@earthlink.net>
Subject: RE: Quantum Paradox
Date: Saturday, September 02, 2000 7:52 PM
I will check into it.
I have also run into a similarity in Bertrand Russels early work,
before he
started set theory....
--------------
From: Swinton Roof <sroof@earthlink.net>
To: Eldon New (Earthlink) <eldonenew@earthlink.net>
Subject: Quantum Ontology
Date: Monday, September 11, 2000 8:06 PM
Attached are two papers I started a few weeks ago. Neither is finished but you might get a better idea about my use of implicate and explicate by reading them. The second paper departs a bit from the first.
Uroborus
http://home.earthlink.net/~sroof/
----------
Quantum Push Button Physics
This paper is an attempt to undermine a few common notions of physics in the hope of inspiring new ways of thinking about non-local effects such as demonstrated by the classic double slit experiment.
The double slit experiment, you recall, poses a conundrum. The pattern of light and dark bands produced on the screen is easily described as an interference effect produced by two wave trains being superimposed. The mathematical treatment is straightforward and based on the geometery of the situation plus the wave equation for the wave trains. Changes in path distance cause phase differences in the waves leading to alternate additions and cancelations in the wave front. No big deal. The big deal comes when we reduce the light source down to emission of only one photon at a time. Remarkably we still get the same interference pattern. A single photon must go through only one slit or the other so somehow it must interfere with itself to end up in only certain spots on the screen. How strange! Detectors can establish that the photons do in fact go through only one slit and do not separate into magic pieces which traverse both slits and recombine. Doing this demonstration, however, causes the interference effect to disappear. Blocking one slit also causes the pattern to disappear.
This experiment is a classic example of non-locality. A photon moving through one slit produces an interference pattern purely because of the existence of a second alternative path not at the same location. This empty path seemingly has no effect other than to magically trick the photon into thinking it is a wave interfering with a wave from another source. There seems to be no direct causal linkage. We can say that the untraveled path has a non-local effect on the traveled path. Non-local effects in quantum physics seem to transcend space and time and cannot be explained in normal terms of linear causality between interacting bodies and forces. This is the conundrum.
In his book, "The Fabric of Reality", David Deutsch conjectures a solution based on a multiverse or infinite collection of parallel universes partitioned off from each other but weakly interacting via non-local quantum effects. I have previously shown why I think his argument is specious. I believe he has taken the proverbial baby and thrown so many toys into the bath water that the baby itself can non longer be found. Thinking about his arguments, however, has inspired my thoughts to follow a completely different direction. I found his use of the terms 'tangible photons' and 'shadow photons' troubling. He himself admitted that they were an artifice used to calrify the idea, but I particularly was intrigued by the distinction and noticed that the artifice leads one down the path of imagining things unseen but real in the same way that real physical things are real. He complicates the experiment by adding a second pair of double slits which, when illuminated, REMOVE some of the lines produced by the first pair of slits. The core of his argument is that REAL 'shadow' photons from a parallel universe kick the photons out of their path and we just can't detect these extra photons except by the effect itself.
I describe his conjecture with the following metaphor. A physicist looks at a mud flat and notices some strange markings. Seeing no observable cause for the marks, he proposes that some animal walked across the flat and left a bunch of footprints. A very resonable conjecture. A second physicist probes a bit deeper and notices that some pieces of the pattern don't seem to fit. The pattern has lines which intersect in threes. The problem is, some of the intersections connect to other intersections and the sizes vary. The first physicist speculates that it was a three-toed bird that left the marks, and then that there were other smaller birds. In fact there were lots of birds, maybe an infinity of them, hopping around making the marks just so-so in the right places. The second physicist is not amused. He reasons that it is an error to assume that some physical object had to make the marks. Perhaps some kind of non-local effect conspired to produce this strange pattern. Looking closely he observes that the mud is drying out and small cracks are appearing. As the cracks grow, they intersect and produce lines coming together in threes. Mystery solved. The mud as it dries looses moisture and shrinks. The shrinkage is omnidirectional and produces a global tension across any area till it becomes dry enough to harden and crack.
The analogy above is of course contrived and the mechanisms have no bearing on the double-slit experiment. The point is that it is not necessary to assume that real physical patterns have to be produced by real physical impacts. The problem is that we are so geared up to interpret reality in terms of linear cause and effect linkages that we think non-local effects can be similarly treated. All such attemps in that direction will lead inevitably to the introduction of metaphysical entities and it will require an infinity of them conjoining in conspiracy to produce that non-local effect.
To me this is as obvious as the fact that it requires an infinity of points to make a mathematical line connecting two points. If Deutsch had proffered his conjecture as an alternative interpretation, I would not have delved so deeply into this topic, but Deutsch out and out says that the majority of physicists are wrong wrong wrong. I beg to differ. Failing to find finite causal linkages, the majority of physicists choose the instrumentalist view that accepts summation of infinites as a necessary mathematical tool only till something better comes along for interpreting non-locality.
There have been other attempts to solve this conundrum. Pilot waves, hidden variables, and waves traveling back and forth between the past and the future are some examples. The problem again is that infinites are involved in ways that don't satisfy my intuitions and craving for simplicity.
I am now going to attempt a radical departure from the usual way of thinking about things. I think Deutsch would be perfectly happy to accept the reality of an infinity of points connecting two points and claim that they have a reality equal to the points they are connecting, only they just can't be seen. I, however, want to try something different. My point of departure is inspired by the use of his term 'tangible photons'. It struck me that photons are most certainly NOT tangible. In fact, the only way I know that photons are ever detected is when an electron is disturbed by a photon and jumps to a different energy level. This energy change can propagate and be ultimately detected by a photomultiplier device or perhaps a visual cell in the retina of the eye. We never actually see light. The 'flash' we see is a biological sensation triggered by changes in electron potentials.
So long as one is bound to linear cause effect linkage, then something physical, namely a photon, had to produce that energy change in some particular electron enabling a photon event to be detected. My approach is going to be that since I have previously slain the many-headed hydra of Deutsch's imagination, why stop there. Why not remove all metaphysical entities from the discussion as we encounter them one by one, and then stand there looking at the facts. This will require the reader to put on his semiotic thinking cap and do some willful suspension of disbelief. Surely this is no more difficult than imaging an infinity of parallel universes. Not as sexy maybe, but possibly more thought provocative.
Ok, here goes. Photons are a convenient figment of our imaginations. They do convey a semiotic content however. Photons are eminently massless yet they possess energy quantized as Planck's constant multiplied by a frequency number. This frequency is actually an integer value but is almost always represented numerically by floating point numbers for convience and mathematical translation. This belies the fact that light is quantized. For every photon ever detected, there is an emitter and absorber electron. Their energy is quantized because the electrons are bound to atoms in quantized energy shells. One may argue for free electron emission and capture of photons, but those photons just really aren't going to be detected until a bound absorption occurs somewhere along the line.
Therefore let's throw out photons as metaphysical entities with no real pupose other than to mathematically convey information about electrons jumping up and down in quantized energy levels. Photons as a concept are holdovers from the era when people thought little copuscles left the eye, bounced off objects, and returned to produce sight. Later physicists learned about electron emission and absorption. Wave effects and particle effects became invested in this imaginary figment and all phenomena were explained so long as one kept to either the wave or the particle definiton. Then came the double slit experiment which demanded both interpretations be embodied in that poor vehicle the singular photon. That's when the paradox could no longer be tolerated by swapping definitons. Thow it out. The photon is dead. It is not real.
If the reader is foaming at the mouth now, I will allow him to chew on his photons for the moment if he will at least concede that photon as a concept has a certain ontological lack of primacy compared to electrons which have real mass and can be found to have a real detectable position in space and time (within the tolerance of the Uncertainty Principle). Try to pin down a photon and what do you have? The semiotic essence of photon is that it is a more abstract entity than an electron is. What I propose is a sort of Copernican revolution - throw out all those imaginary epicycles even if they do have predictive power. A simpler explanation is at hand. Forget about animals leaving tracks and let the mud cracks form naturally in your mind. Ah hmmm ...
Now picture two electrons bound to their respective atoms prior to the mythic exchange of a photon. One electron spontaneously drops to a discrete lower energy level and supposedly emits a photon carrying energy equal to the energy the electron lost. when the second electron absorbs the supposed photon, it jumps to a higher level with the extra energy it absorbs. Now forget the photon and think non-local. One electron drops down and then a certain distance and time later the other electron pops up. The energy change in each is exactly the same although it might involve a different pair of energy levels. One goes down, the other goes up. This is similar to the way the old radio push buttons for changing channels used to work. That's why I chose the rather silly title of this paper as push button physics.
Forget for the moment what mechanism allows this. The radio had strings, levers etc. to accomplish the exchange. We, however , are giving up the linear causality conjecture and temporarily assuming there is some other sort of connection. Notice carefully that this exchange is complete. No energy or information is lost. The books balance. One might argue that the photon might have carried polarization information, but I maintain that one would have to involve correlations with other electrons to establish this. One might argue that a photon could be intercepted in between the electrons and prove that it was there, but that would require it being intercepted by a different electron, hence the situation would still resolve back to electron-electron push-pop correlation.
Let's talk a bit about perception and measurement now. Our entire sensory experience is based on the fact that detector cells in our body transmit information to the brain along electrical pathways ( axons and dendrites ). The entire process involves electron-electron correlations. There are certain molecular changes going on also, but the signal itself is push-pop correlation. Transmission along a pathway consists of push-pop-push-pop-.... chains of correlation. The signals are frequency based. Higher frequency means stronger signal. This allows the neural conduits to have a stable on-off pumping mechanism mediated by molecular ion exchange etc. The brain itself, while hugely complicated, processes the incoming-outgoing signals in the same fashion.
It is important to realize that your ENTIRE world is thus derived from this push-pop correlation scenario. I do not wish to go into a discussion of qualia here. Anything in your experience not following this mechanism is on a different ontological level of existence. The philosopher Kierkegard (sp?) proposed that space and time were a framework produced by the mind and that they had no independent reality. One can argue either way I suppose, but again I point out that one is perhaps mixing ontological levels. The key factor to me is that whatever information the brain uses to sort things into space and time has to be embedded in the push-pop signal chains. There are only two information carriers - the signal timing and the signal frequency.
Signal frequency establishes magnitude or intensity, while signal timing correlates different signals. The whole thing is based on push-pop correlations. Following a cognitive metaphor, we can view the entire inner world as an ongoing computation based on on-off bits. The brain essentially is a huge bank of push-buttons popping up and down in pairs and dancing to the rhythm of push-buttons dancing in the outside world. The only question left is how the devil does this dancing button story correlate itself into real events? Why aren't the buttons dancing randomly? Surely some sort of geometry of space-time must be organizing things into correlating because of local proximity relations, but we conceded ealier that the real action is non-local. Let's have a look see.
Think again of a push-pop pair of electrons. Lets say that this our proto-event. The down-up correlation involves a certain space-time lag. The two electrons may be moving with respect to each other or fixed in space. Einstein established that photons have a fixed maximum velocity in free space - namely the speed of light c. Forgetting about illusory photons, we see that for two electrons not moving with respect to each other, their distance is defined by the time lag of the correlation. Space defines the time lag or time lag defines the space. Without any outside correlations, there is no way to tell difference.
Modern laser scopes can measure distances by correlating the time lag between emission (push) and absorption (pop) cycles between the laser and detector. A tiny led and photomultiplier connected to a clock can theoretically do this for one pair correlation at a time. Relativity tell us that this lag will be influenced by motion and gravity so for all intents and purposes it is space-time itself that is produced by this push-pop. How observers interpret this depends on relativity.The problem of making any measurent is that pair correlations themselves are needed to make the measurement and even to make the observation as sensory experience. So where is the hook that enables us to cross-correlate? Well, I maintain that the hook is locality. The space-time being measured is a non-local affair but the measuring equipment has to be local. In fact it is desirable to have the measuring equipment so locally close as to have their pair correlations occur simultaneously relative to the pair being measured. This is actually the definition of locale! The extreme case would be two electrons swapping spins in the same electron shell, but that is sort of a non-event. At any rate the Exclusion Principle places a lower limit on closeness or locality, but since it's all relative anyway, one must accept the situation as inherently limited but still workable. Therefor any measurement is a second order correlation between a local pair correlation and a non-local pair correlation.
Let's take a moment now to digest where we're at in terms of information. The fundamental quantity of ALL measurement is space-time. In reality this quantity has no dimensional units but one can tack on meters or seconds if needed. Dimensional units are only needed mathematically when one is correlating quantities on different ontological levels! The units are a book keeping method of translation, because at the macro scale measurements are differentiated into all sorts of mechanisms. It is important to realize, however, that fundamentally all measurement is based on pair correlations of electrons and the measurement value itself is INTERPRETED AS SPACE-TIME.
Time might be invisioned as really the more ontologically fundamental, but at the macroscopic level our predilection is to use space as the fundamental unit and time as a parameterization of that unit. Ok, that's it. That covers ALL physical measurements. The only other quantity we have touched on at this point has been energy. Remember that it is the energy difference between electron shells that constitutes the correlation. This energy difference results in a net flow of energy to the absorbing electron in a pair correlation. It is the height of the push-pop button exchange. One can argue that this quantity itself is a derivative space-time affair. Indeed from basic physics, we define velocity as a correlation btween a distance and a time. Force is defined as mass times velocity, and energy as a essentially a product of mass and velocity squared. The only new measurable quantity introduced is mass. We measure mass instrumentally by taking space measurements on springs etc or by taking time measurements on moving bodies. Therefore Energy is seen to be derivative. It is at the core of the pair correlations, however, and no one really measures the space-time involved in an quantum shell jump so it is more convenient to accept this quantized entity as fundamental in the sense that it seems to drive the whole push-pop scenario as a causal agent. This is a return to linear cause effect linkage thinking however. Perhaps we shouldn't go there. Maybe it is best to just sit and contemplate pair correlations push-popping all over, dancing out a pattern which consists of second-order pair-pair correlations moving and throbbing with energy.
The electron exchange is non-local. Get over it. Action at a distance is everywhere. Magnets attract and repel at a distance. Masses attract at a distance. Non-locality is EVERYWHERE. In fact EVERY interaction is interaction at a distance because the Pauli Exclusion Principle demands it. Every single event in the entire Universe is non-local! Get over it. All those fields and forces created to explain how 'this' affects 'that' were created by our finite minds which tend to think in terms of linear logic syllogisms. Get over it. They are like index marks on a grocery list. Get over it. The truth shall set you free. It wasn't until certain non-local effects caused conflicts or gaps in our logic that we were pushed to admit the truth. Ininities of explanation became necessary to keep the logic chains intact, until either the computations or our minds blew out. Get over it. Let go of the reductionist grip for just a minute and look at the view.
All that is left after one cuts loose from all the higher-level interpretations is a a sort of network algebra based on dimensionless numbers which can be computationally processed to produce a space-time metric. Once a somewhat arbitrary metric has emerged, derivative entities result as mediators of change. Your space-time frame is a sort of filter that is a sub-section of the whole hence somewhat arbitrary, but once given it sorts the rest out into a recognizable universe.
Dimensionality is higher order correlation of correlations. This is the essence of what I mean by ontological levels ranging from the concrete to the abstract. There are computational limits to the dimensionality but essentially it is of any degree. At this point I categorically state that locality emerges at the lower levels of correlation and non-locality emerges at the higher levels. The double-slit condrum tells us that the non-local high level correlations influence the lowest levels. The influence itself is a correlation. The whole is a bootstrap circular top-down affair. If one considers the total phase space or space-time totality he is looking at a topology of connectivity, probably similar to the topology of a brain.
At this point I leave it to the mathematicians and theoretical physicists to come up with the math to describe this nightmare of non-existent but real somethings correlating. Wave-particle phenomena are the result of frequency hashing. Hashing is product of network connectivity - i.e. one push-pop frequency chain correlating with another to produce a hash. My guess is that in the double-slit case it is the background experimental screen setting correlations that conspire at the non-local level to produce the interference from the second slit - a sort of union between figure and ground so to speak. The 'figure' is the electron correlations of the actual path taken. The ground is the geometry of the rest of the experiment including the second slit. The screen with the slits act as a filter function, stopping correlations not producing an apparent linear cause effect linkage. The interference lines reflect a computational solution of how to represent the logical possiblity of choice of path plus the logical necessity of conveying the frequency information or energy level associated with the pair correlations. The most cogent least path solution is periodic.
The conundrum is apparent only because the experimental geometry forces the situation down to its simplest elements - one correlation pair at a time. The only way for the frequency (energy) information inherent in the pair correlation to survive and not be lost is for it to be manifestly spread out on the final screen as periodic lines! The second slit seems to perform conspiratorially to achieve this feat, but it is really the entire screen itself that is separating out the non-correlating imaginary 'junk' photons. The single slit experiment exposes periodic lines also but the periodic correlations diminish with distance from the central spot because they convey only single path information with no choice involved. Alternative paths spread out the uncertainty at the final destination. The alternate paths being discrete and equal means that an egalitarian solution must appear, hence all lines must have basically the same intensity. The number of slits equates to the number of correlation pair frequency hashes involved in producing the final pattern. The final pattern is thus a sort of wave interference but the wave is imaginary i.e. it is really only a spatially periodic correlation that conserves the information inherent in the quantum shell jump, the paths available, and the global geometry. Change any one of these and the total information content of all the myriad push-pop button pairs will readjust to correctly display that information. How sweet!
But where is the causality? Do you mean the linear causality? Well, it never was there to begin with and never will be. Linear causality is merely the higher order correlations which one recalls involve subsets of the totality. They will always and forever only present part of the picture. A convient part for finite minds to comprehend, but illusory when contemplated to sufficient depth. The double slit is just a clever way to expose this fact.
A useful slogan in economics, law, and government is "follow the money". Classical physicists say, "folow the energy". Quantum physicists should say, "follow the information".
In closing I should point out that this model of investigation opens the door for the theories of complexity and chaos to merge with quantum physics.
--------------------------
Quantum Ontology
by Swinton Roof
Aug. 27, 2000
This paper hopes to highlight some of the paradoxes inherent in quantum physics and show that with the right frame of mind, things may not be as confusing as they seem. It is the author's position that much of the confusion associated with quantum physics results from the natural tendency to misidentify the tangible with the real. Along the way we will explore two worlds - the explicate and the implicate - and attempt to show why the wave-particle duality and non-locality are necessary features of deep theory.
What is real? This question has so many answers depending on context, philosophy, and intent that no one can give a truly objective definition. The physicist, however, most certainly has to seemingly work very close to reality if his theories or equations are to have any 'real' predictive or explanatory power. Quantum physics has been extraordinarily successful in the degree of precision of its predictive power, yet it remains mysterious and quizical to the very physicists who use it every day. How is this possible?
Physicists use exquisite equations which are incredibly abstract, yet these same equations yield results which enable us to produce tvs, radios, microwave ovens etc. How is it that abstractions affect reality in the most tangible of ways? Is reality itself an abstraction? Now I do not wish to delve deeply into semiotics, semantics, or epistemolgy. I merely am pointing out these issues to the reader in order to set the frame of mind for our discussion. What I am interested in is coming to grips with the ontological level of primacy that any particular abstraction refers to. Some digression is necessary to clarify some of the issues, but eventually we will get to quantum physics if the reader is patient.
Instead of tackling 'reality' head on, let's investigate the 'tangible' first. The 'tangible' is defined as 1. that which can be touched or felt 2. definite; objective 3. assets having real substance able to be appraised for value. This dictionary definition adequately describes the things that physicists measure when they do experiments. I will use this term to denote quantities or entities that have substance, can be sensed, or measured directly in the physical world. This in fact is primarily what we mean by the words 'physical world'. We can't see the wind with our eyes, yet still it is physically real to us becuse it is 'tangible' or felt physically by our bodies.
We might say that the wind is perhaps less concrete or more abstract than a brick, yet we still must accept that ontologically speaking they share a similar level of being or existence. The place and time of day when we 'tangibly' encounter a brick or gust of wind, however, most certainly refer to things on a different ontological level. We may measure space or time, but we cannot call them tangible. They have no substance. Measurements are made indirectly using tools of substance i.e measuring stick or clock. Ontologically speaking, space and time are a sort of pro-crustean bed in which tangible entities are embedded. There are no specific sensory receptors for space and time!
Space and time are decidely more abstact than the 'tangible' yet somehow they are deeply connected to any encounter with the tangible. This sort of abstraction is quite different from abstractions like 'love' or 'society'. How or why? Well, let's use the word 'tangible' as the anchor concept which all abstractions are relative to. A purist of phenomenology might argue that the above distinction between 'space-time' and 'love' is invalid and another philosopher might argue for an inverted view, but I maintain that the pragmatics of physics reveals space and time to be fundamental and ontologically prime relative to the 'tangible' and that other abstractions have in contrast, less primacy relative to the 'tangible'. The context and views expressed in this paper are concerned with the physics of physical reality. An economist with his abstract equations will use 'tangible' to refer to things like 'real' assets or hard currency. His view will have a structure similar to that of a physicist, but the context will occur at a higher ontological level.
It is very important to realize that every equation used in physics is symbolicly expressed in space-time coordinates or symbolicly derivative thereof. The predictive or explanatory thrust of the equations, however, is aimed at 'tangible' quantities. There are other symbolic entities that are fundamentally dimensionless which mediate the relations between 'space-time' and the 'tangible' but for the purposes of this paper, I want to divide everything into two categories - the virtual and the tangible - and propose that both are aspects of the 'real'. VR and TR could represent virtual reality and tangible reality if one likes to use acronyms.
One might argue that space and time are relative only to the tangible and do not have ontological primacy, but when discussing the symbolics, it is obvious that space and time are the primitives from which all cause-effect linkages are constructed. In classical physics, velocity is derivative from space and time, acceleration is derivative from velocity and time, force is derivative from acceleration, energy is derivative from force, entropy is derivative from energy etc. Mass is fundamental as the prime tangible quantity. It may be ultimately derivative from space-time but that is beyond our scope here.
Quantum physics at present has nothing to say about mass except to use it as a given (although there are relatavistic considerations). The laws of quantum physics in fact are theoretical tools used to describe how masses move and interact. It is the ontological primacy of space and time that give the equations the validity to do so. The entire body of atomic and sub-atomic physics evolved as an attempt to discover the fundamental particles of being. Unfortunately the attempt failed because Quantum Physics came along and revealed a deeper mechanism underlying the 'tangible'. A whole host of paradoxes emerged as physicists attempted to grapple with the 'virtual' while holding on to their outmoded view of the 'tangible' as ontologically prime and indivisible.
Continuing perhaps to beat a dead horse further, I wish to discuss the mechanisms behind the world of bodily sensation and subjectivity and give clues to wherein objectivity emerges. Imagine we are observing an apple and wish to learn what it is made of. We cut it open to look inside. The pieces look a bit different and have structure like seeds etc. but we are still left wondering what the pieces are made of. We can continue this dissection deeper and deeper until we arrive at atoms and eventually sub-atomic particles. The thing to notice, however, is that throughout the entire process we as observers always stand outside the object looking at its 'tangible' exterior.
We may gain much knowledge about the composite parts or structure of the apple, but to really know what makes the apple what it is, we have to gain an understanding that may involve an infinity of viewpoints and levels of abstraction. We will have to do any number of experiments in perception, bio-chemistry, chemistry, physics etc. to understand how the parts interact. The point again is that the tangible pieces of apple are only half the story. To know how the tangible pieces combine to create the total apple requires adventures into knowledge about virtual reality.
Our entire perceptual world is built from the ground up using 'tangible' pieces or sensory elements. All of our sensations ultimately resolve into electrical impulses along neuronal pathways. Intensity of a sensory signal is determined by the frequency of firing. The essential amplitude of the signal is an on/off affair. Our neurons use frequency modulated binary signals! The tangible pathways are discrete and semi-fixed. The possible paths, however, number greater than the number of atoms in the universe.
The point I am making is that within our body, the sense organs provide discrete tangible pieces which our brain assembles into an abstract sensorial world view. Occasional glitches, perceptual distortions, or illusions reveal that we can only mirror or image reality with our brains (mind?). Again the point is that on the one hand we have finite discrete tangible elements and on the other we have complex, abstract, and potentially infinite processing about how the tangible pieces fit together.
Now we are ready to begin approaching the issues inherent in Quantum Physics. The most significant feature of quantum physics is the idea of quantization. A long lineage of scientists and thinkers beginning with Democritus and ending with Planck and Einstein have sought the fundamental indivisible particle of tangible reality. In a sense they succeeded with the discovery of the proton and electron. These particles have natural lifespans which encompass the age of the universe, and their masses (excluding relativistic effects) are always the same indivisible quantities for all protons or electrons. Particle physicists have managed to bust up these particles into piecies though. While there are rules for the way they decompose, it is been found that the actual masses invovled show no simple counting rules of combination like the atoms of the periodic table do. The final picture is that tangible reality is quantized but not in the simple building block way we hoped it might be.
There is another area of physics that was going through a similar but inverse development before the advent of quantum physics. Motion and energy exchanges were assumed to be continuous. Tangible particles were thought to interact by way of forces produced by continuous yet changing electrical, magnetic, and gravitational fields. Maxwell tied together eletricity and magnetism with an accurate representation of these fields as electromagnetic waves. The photoelectric effect and the double-slit experiment, however, demonstrated that the energies exchanged between tangible particles is quantized. Therein began the conundrum. Discrete particles were sometimes found to act like waves, and supposedly continuous waves turned out to sometimes act like discrete particles. And the discontinuites always happened in multiples of a number named Plack's constant.
Quantum physics was developed as a theory to encompass this fact of quantization. The equations themselves though were expressed in terms of waves - probability waves! Strangely by doing an infinite summing of probabilities one could arrive at quantization rules. Getting actual answers turned out to be a witches brew of mathematical tricks but the answers turn out to be incredibly accurate pedictors of experiment result. All sorts of interpretations have since been proposed to smooth out the paradoxical nature of these equations. How does an infinite continuous virtual wave of probability turn into a discrete real actuality? It is traditional to think of the 'wave collapse' as a bridge between the microcosm and the macrocosm, but I believe it is more apt to say that the quantum wave equations form a bridge between the 'virtual' and the 'tangible'. A discussion of photon transfer between electrons will give a better picture of what I mean.
The traditional view is that light is quantized into photons. An electron in an atom can reside at only certain quantized energy levels. It can absorb or emit a photon but only if it jumps to an energy level such that the energy difference exactly equals the energy of the photon. Quantum theory according to the late Richard Feynman resolves physical reality into three basic actions - A photon has a probability to go from A to B, an electron (or other sub-atomic particle) has a probability to go from A to B, and an electron (or other sub-atomic particle) has a probability to absorb or emit a photon. This is the entire picture according to quantum physics.
There are variations on the theme but the process is the same. Amazing! Photons are the carriers of force in this view. Now I wish to make it clear that electrons or elementary particles with mass are the 'tangible' side of things. Photons are intangible. They are virtual. They have no mass and cannot have a position in space and time like electrons do. Every photon must originate and terminate with a mass particle energy exchange. It simply has no independent existence aside from a coupling between a pair of mass particles. An electron in contrast can be inserted into a Leyden jar or oil drop and carried around just like any other 'tangible' object. In fact one can with an extreme instrument, the tunneling electron microscope, create contour images of atoms by using a mechanical sense of touch. The microscope probe has a tip only one or two atoms wide and is able to sense atoms as it comes into near contact with a surface.
Now I wish the reader to give up the very idea of photons for a minute! From the point of view of tangible reality, photons are only implied. They can never be frozen and put on display because they are intangible. In fact their only claim on existence is that a pair of electrons in motion at different places in space and time somehow couple together in an exchange of energy. The photon is only implied. The coupling rules determine the behavior such that it always occurs as if some imaginary particle (photon) had moved through space and carried the energy from one electron to the other. We don't see light. We only see sensory impulses caused by the changes in energy levels of electrons in our visual receptors. The photon is a virtual entity with no tangible substance yet it does carry energy. Energy you will recall is a space-time derivative quantity. Energy transfers convey momentum also because energy and mass are convertible via Einstein's e =mc^2. Therefore photons while virtual have a profound impact on the behavior of electrons.
At this point the reader must concede that virtual reality is just as real as tangible reality. It is ontologically different though and we shall next explore what the virtual rules are. First though I wish to change my terminology because 'virtual' and 'tangible' have so many connotations. I shall begin using the words 'implicate' and 'explicate' because they are more embracing of the concept and also more free of extraneous associations from ordinary life. Ok, here are the rules - the explicate is quantized. The implicate is continuous. Quantum mechanics provides a bridge between the implicate and the explicate. The bridge is incomplete because mass and gravitational force have not been ontologically accounted for, but the implicate rules for explicate behavior are well defined. In fact the basic rule for evaluating probability is quite simple.
In a nutshell the probability of movement from position A to position B is a periodic function of the space-time distance from A to B. There are some dimensionless numbers such as charge and spin, which are properties of the explicate particle, that modify the basic equation, but the basic functionality is that of a periodic wave function over space-time. The actual period or frequency is quite simply related by the quantum energy of exchange. This is expressed quite simply by Planck's law E=hv. Where h is Planck's constant. Such constants are necessary in physics to translate between all the various sorts and ways we macroscopically measure things. Dimensional units are things like cm, yards, pounds, kilograms etc.
Well, there you have it, a simple probabilty of an implicate change of position that is just a wave with frequency equal to the energy being moved. The law of conservation of energy demands that this wave doesn't change frequency in mid course or do anything else supicious. But let's get real here. We're talking about the implicate (implied) side of things. How do you get that energy transferred on the explicate side of reality? This is where things can get a bit more confusing but there is still sense to be had in our way of looking at this. It just takes a bit of patience to see the ontological necessity of how things operate.
Recall that the explicate side of things is dicrete and quantized. Energies will be accepted or issued only in increments that satisfy the local quantization rules or energy levels allowed. All exchanges occur as couplings between explicate particles across some space-time interval or distance. It's a sort of radio push-button affair. One goes down in energy and another pops up. The up and down heights are equal so to speak to the energy exchanged. Energy is thus conserved and if one wishes to include an implicate view also then physical information is conserved also.
It is quite important to realize that all such couplings are non-localized couplings between localized entities. Non-locality is in fact an ontologically necessary consequence of the quantization of the explicate. No amount of distance across the universe or experimental confabulation can change this essential nature of non-local but coupled pairing of explicate particle interactions. This coupling is nothing but cause and effect. The coupling can actually occur forward and backwards in time to some degree of probability but the most frequent result is our normal linear cause-effect linkage. This in fact is the only true example of linear cause-effect because macroscopic levels of the explicate present such an enormous horde of possible couplings as to be uncountable except statistically.
But wait. I said things were a bit more complicated. The implicate probability of movement from A to B involved a simple periodic function. What is the explicate probabilty of movement or interaction? Well, that's where the fun starts. Imagine an electron waiting to couple. Another electron at a higher energy level that is quantum acceptable suddenly has the probability to emit a photon. The electron absorbs this photon some time and or distance later and the coupling is complete. By which path did the photon travel? A straight line? A curve? The photon is implicate (implied) but a straight line path is nowhere implied by the equation. The probability is dependant only on the frequency and path distance remember. No particular path is indicated. Therefore to arrive at an actual explicate probability for the coupling, we have to consider ALL possible paths. This is what I call an ontological necessity of the 'implicate'.
As long as we continue to use so-called imaginary entities, we have by necessity to imagine all possible ways these entities might behave. Now, probability has simple rules for dealing with alternative ways things can happen - you simply add the probability for each and every possible path. If things happen in a connected sequence you multiple the probabilities. So there you have it. To get the explicate probability you add up the all the implicate probabilities for all possible paths that a real photon could take if a photon were explicately real. You see, the photon is still only a convenient fiction but a useful one.
So long as one clings to visualizing the implicate side as if it were explicate, one is faced with a conundrum - the impossibility of finding which path was taken or the absurdity of somehow collapsing an imaginary entity into reality. When one broadens one's view of reality to include both the implicate and explicate as real but ontologically different then the totality is somewhat less disturbing.
There is still some confusion as to why nature should have this probalistic quality, but here also, there are some clues which give a bit of relief even if total satisfaction is still a long way off. We shall next talk about quantum confinement. Before we do, however, remember - the implicate is implied, infinite, continuous,non-local, and probalistic - the explicate is given, discrete, finite, local, and actualized. Non-locality is just the coupling between localized entities via the entire summary universe of space-time possibilities. Get it?
Ok on to quantum confinement.
......unfinished..............
----------------------------
From: Swinton Roof <sroof@earthlink.net>
To: Eldon New <eldonenew@earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: Quantum Ontology
Date: Thursday, September 14, 2000 9:47 PM
I would rather you didn't send those out as there are aspects
I don't
necessarily think are right. It was an exploratory attempt at
understanding.
I would like to rewrite everything and finish it with some ideas
on
quantization by confinement that I didn't get to. I also had
another insight
you might find interesting: It dawned on me that the mathematical
form of
the Fourier Transform and Feynman's Path Integral are almost
identical! In
fact, I think that may be a key to understanding how the
implicate encodes
non-locality. For example consider the function y = x^2 over some
interval.
We have a symbolic expression which implicitly encodes a
proceedure x*x for
every x in that interval. We can make it explicit (explicate) by
writing
down a series of x,y results of that proceedure or points on a
graph. Now
suppose we have just the set of explicate points and try to
figure out what
the algorhythm was that produced them. We may not know the
implicate formula
that succinctly expresses in simple totality that algorhythm but
we can
approximate it by doing a discrete Fourier Transform on those
points. For a
given frequency the contribution is the sum of all points
multiplied by
complex waveform. The waveform encodes both the frequency and the
'path'
difference for each and every point in the series. The path is
simply given
by the position in the sequence! Each and every point of the
whole
contributes to the result for each part of the whole. Thus we
have a local
result being determined by a sum of all the non-local factors of
the
totality. This is exactly what's going on with the quantum waves.
From
explicate results we deduce an approximation to the non-local
implicate
functionality. The math is not that hard to show on paper. It is
an encoding
of the part into the whole and the whole into the part. The
essence of
hologram!
---------------------
From: Swinton Roof <sroof@earthlink.net>
To: Eldon New (Earthlink) <eldonenew@earthlink.net>
Subject: observer
Date: Sunday, September 17, 2000 10:10 AM
excerpt from http://tph.tuwien.ac.at/~svozil/publ/complexi.htm#tth_sEc1
Let me point out that virtual physics is part of a program called endophysics [2,3,,5,6]. Endophysics, in short, considers observers who are embedded in the very system they observe. Such observers are naturally limited by the methods, devices and procedures which are operational therein. They cannot ``step outside'' [7] of this ``Cartesian prison'' [] and are therefore bounded to self-referential perception. Can one give concrete meaning to this ``boundedness by self-reference?'' Indeed, a research program is proposed here which is capable of the formal evaluation of bounds to self-reference. This program is based on a recursion theoretic re-formulation of physics. It may result in paradigm change concerning the perception of indeterminism in physics.
-----------------
From: Eldon New <eldonnew@shareone.com>
To: Swinton Roof <sroof@earthlink.net>
Subject: Matter, Energy, Mind
Date: Tuesday, September 19, 2000 10:01 AM
Matter, Energy, and Mind ... the Buddhist trinity
>You said no one seems to worry about if the electron
exists
>when it isn't being observed. I add that the corollary to
this is...
>does the observer cease to exist between observations?
We co-create the sensorium with the universe. (the technical
term
in Buddhism is co-dependent origination.)
<>Zen Buddhism is a religion. Its theology, expressed
vigorously by the
ancient teachers in this book, rests on the teaching that the
entire
universe is nothing other than one "mind," a mind
reborn in every
moment of consciousness. A friend once paraphrased a book passage
to me that said something like; "People have the silly idea
that
their mind is inside their head! Their mind is not inside their
head.
Their brain is inside their head, and it is just an antenna that
receives the field of their mind. The source of their mind is
actually outside of their head." <>http://www.wisdompubs.org/books/zens.html
>The metaphysical observer must be the glue that binds the
random
>observations into one complete unity
I agree.
>What I'm getting at I guess, is where does the randomness
come from?
>The physical source of the observation or the Observer?
I think it comes from other observers watching a first
observer, and
then trying to fit the experiment into a rectangular box.
The boundary conditions of the idealized parameters de-cohere
the original gestalt. ("Randomness is a funtion of
parameters")
>Coincidence strengthens the connections and binds
freguency
>information into a coherent whole. The implicate side of
reality
>finds itself mirrored in the metaphysical observer's side of
the
>explicate.
Vey Zen.....
-------------------------------
From: Swinton Roof <sroof@earthlink.net>
To: <eldonnew@shareone.com>
Subject: Re: Matter, Energy, Mind
Date: Thursday, September 21, 2000 9:08 PM
I had another insight about the randomness. The electrons in
the final
screen according to Feynman have a probability to absorb photons
via a
similar complex wave equation. Normally this aspect is never
discussed in
the double-slit interpretation because the focus has always been
on the
photons. Also a random factor doesn't leave a lot of room for
interpretation.
If one thinks about it, however, the final observation is
really the sum
over all possible photon paths (alternatives) TIMES the
individual
probability for some particular electron to absorb(sequences
multiply,
alternativers add). We can now visualize all those multitudinous
electrons
with their little probability clocks spinning in random phases
and waiting
for a photon to come by. The phases are random because entropy
and energyexchanges during the lifetime of the universe has
effectively randomized all the phases.
Presumably an electron would reset its frequency and phase
during any exchange so over time the clocks drift apart into
randomness.
Therefore the observation is part deterministic implicate
probability and
part indeterministic explicate circumstance. I believe this
explains the
physical side of randomness, but I maintain that the observer's
view has a
similar randomness built in too. Then there is your point also,
that a
second observer with a differing inertial frame must inherently
scramble the
space time ordering of events to some extent relative to the
first observer.
Whew! Now I have three sources of quantum randomness to deal with.
Thanks much for the email Eldon! (Deric I thought you might be
interested
too) It's nice to have positive feedback that my ideas aren't
totally wet. I
have speculated about formulating the observer as a summation
over
micro-inertial-frames ala relativity with Feynman complex-wave
probability
clocks at their origins. I was glad to see also that Wheeler
confirms my
view about continuous causality and discrete probalistic
perception. I would
like to add your email to my quantum diaries paper on my web site
if ok with
you.
----- Original Message -----
From: Eldon New <eldonnew@shareone.com>
To: Swinton Roof <sroof@earthlink.net>
Sent: Tuesday, October 24, 2000 4:27 PM
Subject: objective subjective
> In 1973 Everett describes an objective/subjective difference
between
> continuous and discreet models of phenomena similar to your
recent
> observation:
>
>
> This is what Everett says: "We shall be able to
introduce into
> [the relative-state theory] systems which represent
observers.
> Such systems can be conceived as automatically functioning
machines
> (servomechanisms) possessing recording devices (memory) and
which
> are capable of responding to their environment. The behavior
of
> these observers shall always be treated within the framework
of
> wave mechanics. Furthermore, we shall deduce the
probabilistic
> assertions of Process 1 [rule 4b] as subjective appearances
to
> such observers, thus placing the theory in correspondence
with
> experience. We are then led to the novel situation in which
the
> formal theory is objectively continuous and causal, while
> subjectively discontinuous and probabilistic. While this
point
> of view thus shall ultimately justify our use of the
statistical
> assertions of the orthodox view, it enables us to do so in a
> logically consistent manner, allowing for the existence of
other
> observers." (1973, 9)
>
> http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-everett/