| Subject:
quant-ph/0607169
v1 Date: Fri, 04 Aug 2006 19:19:36 +0300 From: Dimi Chakalov <dimi@chakalov.net> To: D.Miller@unsw.edu.au Dear David, I believe there are three approaches to a theory of time: the A-theory or dynamic view, the B-theory or block universe view, and the A&B-theory, http://www.god-does-not-play-dice.net/download.html Best regards, Dimi -- http://www.god-does-not-play-dice.net
Note: If you wish to work in quantum gravity, I believe your first off task should be sorting out the whole mess in QM from von Neumann's projection postulate or Process 1, as I tried to explain here. Professor David Miller has provided an excellent overview of this outstanding task [Ref. 1]. Every sentence from his papers contains an enormous amount of information. Just look closely at his operational definition of 'preferred basis': the physical basis determined by his "measurement-ready" (MR) concept (I call it 'potential point'). David Miller says: "the primitive concept is the physical basis determined by the MR concept in Sect. 3.1" [Ref. 1]. I don't think it is "primitive". It is beautiful and sophisticated. My concept of 'potential point' is indeed primitive, since I cannot cast it in math. Sorry. Reading David Miller is a must. Forty-three moths ago, on January 9, 2003, I bet $100 that the Higgs boson will not be discovered. Why? Because "the rumour-carrying clusters", as explained by David J. Miller, are an effect of the global mode of spacetime: see the 'relational reality' below, and follow the links. David J. Miller is right that "there could be a Higgs mechanism, and a Higgs field throughout our Universe, without there being a Higgs boson." You can't directly observe the effects of the global mode of spacetime -- the "hypothetical lattice which fills our Universe". Same holds for the GWs. At this point, the common reaction is along the following lines: But how could be a Higgs mechanism and a Higgs field throughout our Universe, without there being an observable Higgs boson? The reply is as follows: If the hypothetical lattice which fills our Universe is a holistic effect of the global mode of spacetime, you'll get a situation similar to that in brain neurophysiology, namely, the effect that makes chemical reactions "biological" and binds 100 billion neurons and some 60 trillion synapses is indeed physical, but there is no directly observable "particle" resembling the phonons in solid state physics, which would mediate this effect. If you have a bunch of quantum trees bootstrapped in a 'forest', there will be a new entity, the forest itself, which would affect the properties of the trees, and make them behave as 'biotrees' or 'elementary particles'. Now, if you're curious to learn where is the forest itself -- the "hypothetical lattice which fills our Universe" -- think of the "dynamic dark energy" (DDE) and its reference frame during the inflation. It's spanned everywhere, in no time. The theory of relativity prohibits any direct measurement of DDE. And that is what makes it "dark". Put it differently, the old dictum 'the whole is more than the sum of its parts' refers to a real physical phenomenon, yet it is not directly observable. It is completely "dark", since we can only observe its impact on physical interactions, but not the "particles" such as Higgs boson(s). The latter are artifact from the ill-posed standard model (if neuroscientists were following the "logic" of theoretical physicists, they would seek some "fundamental" particle that produces the holistic effects in the brain). Similar holistic effect can be demonstrated with the notion of 'context': read the scrambled text here, and ask yourself whether you can directly observe the "Higgs boson" that fixes the meaning of all words. Yes, the effect is physical, but -- no, the "Higgs boson" that fixes the "meaning of words" (watch Leon Lederman's talk here) cannot be directly observed. And yes, there could be a Higgs mechanism and a Higgs field throughout our Universe, without there being an observable Higgs boson. Thus, I predicted that the number of quarks will jump to 8 and more, in a Fibonacci sequence. The only positive outcome from LHC could be an extension of the standard model, which would include the electron, but it's a shame that nobody is willing to do it on the back of an old envelope. Billions of dollars and Euro are scheduled to be wasted for chasing these effects of the global mode of spacetime, GWs included. Nobody seems to care, however. I haven't received any support from any institution whatsoever, and am still writing this web page on my old PC which I assembled in 1999, based on Intel Celeron running at 800 Mhz. And nobody has accepted my $100 bet that the Higgs boson will not be discovered. Shall I elaborate? The story is very old. To begin with, read David J. Miller and David Miller [Ref. 1], and bear in mind that there is no explanation of the cause or source of the quantum waves, hence the quest for Higgs boson(s) is ill-posed from the outset. Now, look at the example with a timetable and the mechanism of 'relational reality' below, and try to imagine that all students behave like quantum particles: they will choose a unique constellation of their correlated states in particular classrooms in just one 'quantum jump', and each of their next states will be again negotiated in the global mode of spacetime, like an already-solved sudoku or Rubik cube. Hence the chain of such already-correlated states/students will inevitably display, in the local mode of spacetime, a wave-like behavior. No "quantum jumps" in the quantum realm 'out there', however. If quantum particles 'think globally and act locally', there will be no jerky movements or "jumps" whatsoever. All 'local states' are perfectly continuous, and you have the cause and the source of quantum waves, as well as a fundamental Higgs mechanism and a Higgs field throughout our Universe, without there being an observable Higgs boson. Got some old envelopes? "If all this damned quantum jumping (verdammte Quantenspringerei) were really to stay, I should be sorry I ever got involved with quantum theory", said Erwin Schrödinger in September 1926. Dead matter makes quantum jumps; the living-and-quantum matter is smarter. To sum up, let me again stress the nature of the phenomenon in question: it is not directly observable, in terms of some "God particle" or "dark energy", yet it acts on the physical world. If everything that can act on the physical world were directly observable, we would have a theory predicting the observable values of the Aristotelian First Cause. What a boring world! Thank God, the living-and-quantum matter is smarter.
[Ref. 1] D. J. Miller, Quantum
mechanics as a consistency condition on initial and final boundary conditions,
quant-ph/0607169 v1.
============ Subject: THEN "all is
foreseen and the choice is given" ===========
Subject: Counterfactual reasoning and relational reality
Dear Professor Miller, Let me thank you for your beautiful paper "Counterfactual reasoning in time-symmetric quantum mechanics", quant-ph/0410076 v1 [Ref. 1]. This is the first paper on counterfactual reasoning, which I found readable, and I believe it helped me grasp the sublime quantum ontology implied by Yakir Aharonov [Ref. 2]. May I comment on the last sentence of your paper [Ref. 1]: "The same qualifications to counterfactual reasoning are not necessary in the case of classical physics because a classical system is in a measurement-ready condition for any measurement at all times." It seems to me that gravitational physics does imply counterfactual reasoning. I will highly appreciate your critical comments, as well as those from your colleagues. The case to be examined is the ontology of the so-called relational reality. It follows inevitably from well-know considerations in Einstein's GR: there is no 'outside reference system', http://God-does-not-play-dice.net/Barbara.html#4 As explained by Carlo Rovelli in his latest book "Quantum
Gravity", "Reality is not made by particles and fields on a spacetime:
it is made
http://God-does-not-play-dice.net/energy.html#4 I believe there is a subtle issue here, which requires
counterfactual
Suppose you have to make a timetable for classes in a university, such that all students would begin their classes at some instant t_1 , and all rooms will be occupied by all students. You don't have some boson field to bootstrap all students, http://God-does-not-play-dice.net/Brodsky.html#note Yet you have to make the timetable in some "quantum" fashion. How? Relationally. Each and every item on your timetable should be correlated with respect to 'all the rest'. Hence in order to fix the timetable at t_1 , you
have to anticipate at
Now, in order to apply this Gedankenexperiment to the realm of gravitational physics, I believe we need to replace 'anticipation' by 'feedback from closed time-like curves (CTC's)' and introduce some sort of "virtual" time travel of the coupled matter-gravity system. The hints come from the path-integral approach to QFT, where the 'amplitude density' can "wiggle up and down in time if it wants to", as explained eloquently by Roger Penrose, http://God-does-not-play-dice.net/Barbara.html#note Of course, you may say that all this does not make sense, because Einstein's GR is believed to be part of classical physics. What I would like to suggest is that, even in Einstein's GR, we need some brand new ideas about time and space to explain the resulting 'relational reality': the bootstrapping of matter fields by their gravitational self-interaction does produce a perfect "timetable", only the gravitational field does not and cannot operate as some classical reality 'out there'. More at http://God-does-not-play-dice.net/energy.html#Sic Last but not least, I believe we need new ideas about time and space to understand how the human brain creates its "relational reality": a perfect "timetable" for nearly 100 billion neurons, which requires correlating of at least 10^14 events per second [Ref. 3], http://God-does-not-play-dice.net/Beauregard.html#note We need to consider the human brain, because the current "shut up and calculate" interpretation of QM does not make sense: If you measure a quantum system, the very first thing that will happen is that your brain and the quantum system will be entangled, and *nothing* would have any definite state whatsoever, 'the rest of the universe' included. Hence your brain will break its "relational reality", and could never recall that there is such thing as Process I or 'projection postulate', not to mention the Born rule, http://God-does-not-play-dice.net/Maximilian.html Thank you for reading this, and please be assured that your critical comments, as well as those from your colleagues, will be kept strictly private. Kindest regards, Dimi Chakalov
References [Ref. 1] D. J. Miller, Counterfactual
reasoning in time-symmetric
"Whether or not the differences between the ensembles
are significant has been the subject of discussion [6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11,
12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22]. For the purposes of the present
work, it will be assumed that the differences between the ensembles are
not significant.
"Placing the quantum system in a measurement-ready condition
involves a unitary time evolution.
"One of the characteristics which is unique to a "measurement-ready"
condition is that it could be ascertained, on some repetitions of the experiment,
that the quantum system was in any one of the states that could be the
outcome of the measurement by monitoring the *other* possible outcome states,
i.e. without in any way disturbing the state the quantum system was thereby
found to be in. Of course, that condition is met only on those repetitions
when the quantum system is *not* found in the other possible outcome states.
It is important to re-iterate that being put in a "measurement-ready" condition
is a reversible process and the quantum system is not coupled to a measuring
device in the process.
"A measurement of a quantum system involves the quantum
system being subjected to suitable physical interactions, after which a
measurement of a non-commuting observable cannot take place unless the
quantum system is subject to different physical interactions. This necessity
of subjecting the quantum system to suitable, mutually exclusive physical
interactions needs to be reflected in the counterfactual reasoning.
"The same qualifications to counterfactual reasoning are
not necessary in the case of classical physics because a classical system
is in a measurement-ready condition for any measurement at all times."
[Ref. 2] Yakir Aharonov, Lev Vaidman, The Two-State Vector Formalism of Quantum Mechanics, in "Time in Quantum Mechanics" (Lecture Notes in Physics, New Series, Vol 72), eds. J.G. Muga, R. Sala Mayato, I.L. Egusquiza and R. Sala Mayato (Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2002), p. 369; quant-ph/0105101 v1 "One of us (YA) is not ready to adopt the far reaching
consequences of the MWI. He proposes another solution. It takes the TSVF
even more seriously than it was presented in this paper. Even at present,
before the "future" measurements, the backward evolving quantum state (or
its complex conjugate evolving forward in time) exists! It exists in the
same way as the quantum state evolving from the past exists. This state
corresponds to particular outcomes of all measurements in the future."
[Ref. 3] Matthew J. Donald,
Neural Unpredictability, the Interpretation of Quantum Theory, and the
Mind-Body Problem,
quant-ph/0208033
v1
Note: Remember
the Rubik cube? See above, and compare it to the machine version of 'relational reality' below,
in 2-D. The task of timetable is to find the
unique rooms for all fifteen students --
simultaneously. They don't
jump around, as in the machine version below, but find their unique rooms
simultaneously, like a shoal of fish swinging
along a
coral reef.
See also a kaleidoscope metaphor here. Elaborating on this metaphor (I'm afraid you'll have to read it by following the link; sorry), there are "dark gaps" during which the kaleidoscope is being "shaken", and these dark gaps cannot be observed in the static state of the kaleidoscope, in which all colored pieces are "already" perfectly correlated and display what physicists call 'relational reality' (we call it Synchronicity, after Carl Jung, but that's a bit different story). I'm not going here into 'anthropic cosmology' [e.g., Max Tegmark and Martin J. Rees, Why Is the Cosmic Microwave Background Fluctuation Level 10-5? Astrophysical Journal, 499:526-532 (1 June 1998), and Stefano Bettini, Anthropic Reasoning in Cosmology: A Historical Perspective, physics/0410144 v1], because all these issues are covered from the outset, by suggesting that the universe can be modeled as a brain. More here and here. Now, look at the current story about the timetable above, and ponder on the following situation: all students are diff-invariant observables, so let's examine the case of one student, say, John. At the instant t_1 , John wants to enter the school, so at some prior instant, t_0 , he has to have his own state fixed relationally. John has read the paper by John Baez about Einstein's equation, gr-qc/0103044, and knows that [t_1 - t_0] is a very special entity, denoted by e . It's the infinitesimal timelike displacement along John's geodesic path, as all the students of Ted Jacobson already know. John has a wristwatch and knows from textbooks that his watch reads some sort of (local) time comprised of infinitely many e chained into a "continual" trajectory that has been called 'geodesic'. He is forced by the so-called linearized gravity to think of e as some "point", because otherwise he cannot possibly calculate a tangent vector at e , and if he cannot calculate a tangent vector, he'll be in deep trouble, because he will never learn how to do "calculus on manifolds", as explained by Bob Wald [R. M. Wald (1984), General Relativity, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, p. 14]. But all these prerequisites can't help John at all. He wants to know how the heck he will get his state fixed by this relational reality, since he is part of it, and wants to go to school at the instant t_1 . So he just has to make a Schnitt (cut) between him and 'the rest of relational reality'. Let's call the latter 'not-John'. And here comes the real tough part: at the instant t_0 , John needs a fixed state of not-John at t_1 for fixing his own state at t_1. However, "at the same time" t_0 , not-John needs a fixed state of John at t_1 to fix its own state at t_1. Who goes "first"? Nobody, Abby. Hence John and not-John engage in that famous bi-directional "talk" of John Wheeler, and none of them can move to t_1 , ever. They are frozen. They cannot display any dynamics whatsoever. These are the pitfalls of 'relational reality'. Unless, of course, John and not-John can jointly anticipate their potential state at t_1 , and move jointly into their fixed state at t_1, as a happy EPR-like correlated couple, as explained by John Polkinghorne. Again, this is the law of Synchronicity. But physicists just don't like it: "Synchronicity is something which physicists do not know about, nor would they wish to", as stated anonymously by a well-known physicist and student of Wolfgang Pauli. Perhaps Abby Ashtekar hasn't read Carl Jung either, because he has been trying for many years to outsmart Mother Nature with math. What a waste of time! You need a background to "time" the bi-directional talk, and this brand new background is the common potential future of 'John-and-not-John'. This is their common context. It fixes the state of John and not-John at t_1 , thanks to which John and not-John proceed simultaneously from t_0 to t_1 , thanks to which this elementary step is perfectly smooth, and hence we can instruct it to approach asymptotically zero, resulting in a perfectly smooth continuum of infinitely many steps e . Hence the "feedback from the potential future" at t_1 does NOT run against the time track of John's watch. These two trains never collide at t_0 , because one goes in the spacetime hypersurface made of infinitely many e , and the other is "outside it", like Kuchar's Perennials. They pertain to two different kinds of reality, physical (John's watch) and potential (the context of relational reality). The first is perfectly continual, thanks to which we can use differential calculus and calculate a tangent vector at e , while the second is "discrete" in the sense that it keeps the whole spectrum of different possible states of 'John-and-not-John' in some form resembling human memory. Its "location" is inside the gaps of spacetime needed for the phenomenon of transience. We cannot directly observe the "discrete" form of potential reality, because anything we can observe (with inanimate physical devices) is being already cast in our past light cone, and is already converted into a perfectly continual 4-D physical reality fixed on an asymptotically flat 4-D spacetime. Thus, the potential reality residing in the "gaps" is what enables 'John-and-not-John' to move, plain and simple. For if they can't move, their state will be undecidable, so they just have to move, running from one e to the "nearest" e . This is the origin of the peculiar "speed" of light in vacuum. Briefly, if 'John-and-not-John' cannot move to t_1 , they will be frozen into one state only, frozen into eternity, into some undecided state at t_0 . Panta rei conditio sine qua non est (old Bulgarian saying, as you have rightly guessed). The problem is known since the time of Zeno and Lucretius; see a modern version in Thompson's lamp paradox here. A. Ashtelkar is a very good mathematician, and I believe he should have invested his time and efforts in Synthetic Differential Geometry (SDG) or any other branch that deals with regions instead of "points", as tried by his colleague Chris Isham. Anyway. Also, the unresolved issue of 'relational reality' is causing severe difficulties in quantum gravity and quantum cosmology: the Hilbert space problem. We cannot fix the inner product in the Hilbert space of physical states by requiring that it is invariant under Diff(M), because the genuine temporal evolution of our 'relational reality' cannot be supplied by Einstein's GR and quantum theory. Why? Because the inner product that encodes the probability current cannot, even in principle, be conserved in the time variable from Einstein's GR. This time variable cannot "anticipate" anything and cannot fix the "timetable" of our relational reality, as I tried to argue above. See the problems encountered by M. Bojovald, J. Pullin, and recently by K. Davis [Ref. 4]. Many physicists are trying, one way or another, to bypass this crucial issue, but it shows up in all 4-D cases, for example, the problem of Quantum Inequalities in 4D, encountered by Tom Roman. Wolfgang Pauli was fully aware of this limitation of our current notion of causality, but didn't dare to publish his concerns. Read about them here, and wait for David Miller's Plan B [Ref. 5]. Or maybe we need something a bit more radical. Are you interested in some 'virtual geodesic path' formulation of Einstein's GR? The topology and dimensionality of spacetime are also dynamical variables, and their values should be fixed by the 'context' of spacetime, too. I suppose that in the local mode of physical reality we will have an asymptotically flat 4-D spacetime, while in the global mode of potential reality we will have both open and closed 4-D topologies, depending on the "direction" from which they approach the asymptotical limit e in the local mode of reality. Hence we might find the right track toward the puzzle of all dynamical "dark" components in the universe, which should be embedded in the asymptotically flat 4-D spacetime from the outset. Have you seen elephants in china shop recently? Perhaps you have to live on a null plane to "see" them properly. To improve your vision, read Steve Carlip on 4-D gravity here, and the proposal of Kevin Brown here: "Then each point in the six-dimensional space with coordinates [x,y,z,t,q,f ] is a terminus for a unique pair of spacetime rays, one forward and one backward in time." To sum up, there are two major differences between the quantum form of relational reality and the machine form of relational reality displayed above. First, in the machine presentation we have a number of successive steps, while in the quantum version the EPR-like correlation between all "students" enables them to proceed to their unique configuration in one step, like a shoal of fish swinging along a coral reef. Secondly, in the machine version the desired configuration is known and is fixed in advance as 'boundary conditions', while in the quantum version the "final" configuration is valid for one step only (=infinitesimal timelike displacement e ; see above), and is being build "online", like in the example with John Wheeler's 'cloud'. Since the target state (here we have examined one unique configuration only, "timetable") is a variable and changes in every step of the universal time arrow, e , the "students" will be bootstrapped by their common quantum wave, and will proceed to the target state in one go, with a quantum "jump": Dead matter makes quantum jumps; the living-and-quantum matter is smarter. In psychology, we call this quantum
dynamics
Synchronicity,
but that's a different thread.
D. Chakalov
[Ref. 4] Kelly Davis,
Holography and Quantum Gravity in 3+1 Dimensions,
hep-th/0410036
v2, Mon, 11 Oct 2004 11:31:51 GMT (0kb,I)
[Ref. 5] David Miller,
Quantum Mechanics: Time for Plan-B, Philosophy of Physics Conference, March
30, 2004, Darlington Centre Conference Room, University of Sydney, 9:30
AM-10:45 AM,
|
