What’s An Equation? And Why Are Equations Crucial in Physics?

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum mechanics (CIQ) is incomplete, because it uses the Quantum Collapse (QC) unavoidably, but has no description of it. Whatever. 

On the face of it, that shouldn’t be a problem, that’s how science always advances: newly proposed explanations are often incomplete.

A description of the collapse will be full when there is an equation for it. So what is an equation? It is a mathematical description using algebra and the logic (and semiotics) of algebraic geometry and its extension, mathematical analysis and infinitesimal calculus.

Now a typical equation is formalized by: V = W, where W and V are some expressions… each of them a logic of its own.

The equal sign (“=”) was invented by Robert Recorde, a Welsh mathematician, in 1557. He introduced the symbol in his book titled “The Whetstone of Witte,” where he explained its usage for the concept of equality in mathematical equations.

Before the equal sign, mathematicians used phrases like “is equal to” or “equals” to indicate equality. Recorde sought a more efficient and concise way to represent this concept, so he devised the two parallel lines (=) to signify equality between two expressions… As he put it:

“… to avoide the tediouse repetition of these woordes: ‘is equalle to’, I will sette as I doe often in worke use, a paire of paralleles, or Gemowe [twin] lines of one lengthe, thus: =, bicause noe .2. thynges, can be moare equalle.”

Going back to Euclid, or even earlier, Pythagoras, where are the equations? Well, I grabbed Pythagoras theorem, while testing my 13 year old daughter’s understanding of (some of the most famous of ) its proofs. It turns out that the proof equalizes logics.

It turns out that the proofs involve computing the same thing, an area, in two different ways, and equating the results.

Two logics lead to the same result, in two different ways, and equating the results forces out a hidden axiom (a so-called theorem [1]) 

The proof where one completes the hypothenuse is logically similar: one computes the area of the big square in two different ways, and then one equates the result, getting the relationship between the sides and the hypothenuse.

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In physics the situation is different. The two different logic are forcefully equated; that’s the equation. That forces some results (actually they are theorems, same as in pure math). Then those results are checked against experiments, say the advance of the perihelion of Mercury [1], or the deviation of light by the sun (twice more in Einstein theory than Newton’s).

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The force-acceleration law of motion (F = ma) and Poincaré-Einstein’s mass-energy equation (E=mc^2) are iconic equations which are the basis vectors of some dimensions of science (yes, equations as basis vectors in knowledge space…).

F is obtained, and can be measured, in a certain way, whereas the acceleration a is purely dynamic, it’s measured in a completely different way. So it’s not just two logics which are equated, but two completely different physical experimental processes [2]. Physical processes are themselves a particular type of logic,and each process is its own logic.

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E = mc^2 was first demonstrated by Poincaré in a reduced setting (a bit as Buridan had a reduced setting for F = ma). Poincaré demonstrated that light of energy E had inertial mass m = E/c^2. That was rigorous. Later generalizations evolved: EE – ppcc = (mc^2)^2… that too is rigorous, but confusion arose about E = mc^2 standing alone (true if in the strict Poincaré context, speculative otherwise, covering up unknown physics…).

So equations in physics start always speculative, lead to new theories in physics, and then join two different experimental approaches (logics)… The same happens in mathematics (where also explicit examples are often generalized to more general contexts… which are then checked, quite a bit as in physics)

People like to talk about the “Multiverse”… In the context of Quantum Theory, it’s completely idiotic idea… BUT, in the case of information space, the Multiverse is the rule, and equations is what binds it together. Equations ultimately are the foundational ideas expressed to their barest form.

It took around seven centuries to get the equation of gravity in its present form (SQPR says it needs to be modified further, to include the “splitting aka fatigue” of gravitons…)

In the case of Quantum Collapse, we don’t have an equation yet; according to SQPR, we should get one, as the Quantum Interaction (that QI exists is another axiom) is a field (it propagates topologically and at finite speed). But we have an experimental, and theoretical fact: QC is much faster than the speed of light.

I equate, therefore I think…

Patrice Ayme

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[1] The metalogic of the whole thing is crucial: Newton’s gravitation predicted not as much advance of the perihelion of Mercury as observed: a planet was searched to explain the dragging of Mercury’s ellipse… and not found… Einstein knew this. It turns out that Local Time slows down closer to the Sun, and that explains the effect…

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 [2]. The first to point the equivalence of these two logics, at least in a reduced setting, was Buridan circa 1350 CE. Anglo-Saxons idolaters call it Newton’s first law

LOGIC IS MATERIAL

Logic doesn’t just matter, it is matter.

FUNDAMENTAL PROCESSES, INCLUDING COMPUTATIONS, LOGIC, ARE MATERIAL OBJECTS:

Is there something besides matter? No. What is matter? Ah, two types of things, corresponding to wave-particle duality… Or, as I put it often, process-quanta duality.

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We should have come a long way in 24 centuries, yet some keep repeating ideas of Plato, an Athenian plutocrat. Plato (and his teacher Socrates and student Aristotle) had an extreme right wing agenda, much of it pursued later as the “Hellenistic” regimes (dictatorships), imperial fascist Roman Principate, and the rage against innovation. Plato’s metaphysics has much in common, if not everything, with Christianism (this explains its survival…)

And now for a word from this essay’s sponsor, the gentleman contradicting me. Robin Herbert replied to me: …”many don’t seem to grasp that the classical logics are not tied to any physical assumptions… the classical logics are not tied to any physical assumptions. I think the problem is that we have this term “classical physics” and another term “classical logic” and people think they are related. They aren’t.”

Are we that stupid? I guess, our enemies wish we were…

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Only those who have never heard of Platonism would not be familiar with the notion that logic is not “material”: it is at the core of Plato’s view of the universe. And also at the core of Christianism, so help me not god!

I beg to oppose the dematerialization of logic. Differently from Plato, I have a careful observation of nature, Quantum theory, the mechanics of atomic theory, to back me up. Frankly, relative to what we know now, Plato is an ignorant twerp. So why the reverence for his antique antics? My unforgiving mood is driven in part by the observation that the Ancient Greeks had plenty of holes in their axiomatics… Especially in mathematics (where they made several ludicrous mistakes, such as forgetting non-Euclidean geometry, generations after discovering it).

If logic is not tied to “physics”, or what’s material, we want to know what that is. But, as I am going to show, all we do is go back to the Gospel of John as the ultimate authority (itself straight out of Plato!)

Twentieth Century physics has revealed that physics is made of “Fundamental Processes” (see the very nice, pre-QCD book by that title from Feynman)… And Quanta. The former, the processes, are described by waves, the second, those lumps of energy, by particles.

Thus, saying that “logic is not physics” is tantamount to saying that logic is neither a fundamental process (or set thereof), nor quanta (or set thereof).

Orbitals to an electron around a proton (the Hydrogen atom), visualized in 2013 (Phys. Review). What you are looking at is one electron, when it is delocalized. The electron is the cloud. The cloud is a process. The process is what an atom of hydrogen is, 99.9999999% of the time… At least…

There are several problems with such a claim: far from being immaterial, any logic shows up as quanta (aka “symbols”), and is itself a process (classical logic rests on implication, the simplest process:”if A then B”, and chains therefrom). Logic shows up as nothing else, so that’s what it is: a bunch of fundamental processes and quanta. This is the modern philosophy of physics, in action! (It originated with Newton and Laplace, and was then amplified by Jules Henri Poincaré)

There was a famous exchange between Heisenberg and Einstein; the latter, at the peak of his glory, accused the young Quantum physicist to have only put observables in his matrix quantum theory. Heisenberg coolly smirked back that it was Einstein who taught him to do so! (Constructively infuriated, ten years later Einstein rolled out the EPR thought experiment, alleging a contradiction between Quantum Mechanics and LOCAL “elements of reality“. The effect was relabeled “entanglement” by Schrödinger, now the central notion in Quantum theory… Einstein should have realized that it was this very delocalization which made atoms wholes…)    

So what’s “material”? What’s observable! And what is observable? (Delocalized) fundamental processes and (localized, yet ephemeral) quanta. Claiming that the logos is neither is (implicitly) done in the first sentence of the Gospel of John, and John adds that its name is god. We of the natural school shall excommunicate those evoking god. Those who claim “logic”, the logos, escapes nature (= physis) are just followers of whom John followed, namely Plato. They are Platocrats, a particular prototype of plutocrats…

Fundamental processes are described by equations, but that doesn’t mean the equations are “real”, beyond symbols (“quanta”) of a medium. First of all, equations are approximations: a classical computer can only make a finite number of operations (differently from a full Quantum computer, which works with a continuum, the circle S1). Instead what is really real is the fundamental process(es) the equations approximate.

Indeed, consider atoms: they are real, “indivisible” (sort of)… and yet mostly made of delocalized processes known as electronic orbitals.  It is the delocalization which creates the substance: see the picture above… 

So is a classical computation a real object, in the aforementioned sense? Yes, because it is a FINITE set of fundamental processes (moving electrons and photons around). However, if the proposed computation, or logical deduction, takes an infinite amount of time, it becomes something that never comes to exist. (That’s an allusion to a classical computer trying to duplicate Quantum computers; in the case of the chlorophyll molecule, no classical computer could do what the molecule, viewed as a Quantum computer, does!)

In this view, call it material logic, time, whether we want it or not, whether logicians realize it, or not, is an essential part of logic: the time-energy principle de facto granulates time (we need infinite energy for infinitely small time intervals, hence for would be infinite logical computations). To say time is not part of logic is another of these oversights (as Archimedes did, implicitly using what non-standard analysts, Robinson and Al. called “Archimedes Axiom”, which excludes infinitely small (or large) integral numbers). Any piece of logic comes with its own duration, namely how many steps it needs in its simplest form.   

Quantum computing uses one (hypothesized) infinity: the assumed instantaneity of what I call the Quantum Interaction (aka Quantum Collapse). That enables to delocalize Quantum logic (no distributive law of propositional logic!), as delocalized Quantum processes, and this is why it can’t be classically duplicated (aka “Quantum supremacy”).

Happy processes!

Patrice Aymé

Mentality Trumps Logic

Mental States Trump, Prime and Build (Local Linear) Logic

How do people think? When thinking about thinking, intellectuals tend to go back to Plato describing the mythical Socrates ponderously going from a) to c) because a) implied b) and b) implied c). Well, this is NOT how the brain works. The brain has basically two systems: Local Linear Logic, and Topological Logic (TL = emotion, so we will call it ES, the Emotional System). LLL and ES are entangled. For example, ES, the Emotion System, shuts off, and opens, various sub-systems in the brain. Moreover the ES directs consciousness into these subsystems. Each of these systems comes with its own logic. So there is no such a thing as “logic” per se. 

Actually modern axiomatics in logic considers that any Logic L comes with its own Universe U (in which it sits, so to speak). Varying U varies L. Thus a Logic L in the brain, sitting in subsystem S1 will be different from one sitting in subsystem S2, because they constitute different universes U. (An aspect of that was long known, as thinkers argued that various drugs, from alcohol to THC enabled them to reach various stages of consciousness…)

Thus what Plato talked about is basically irrelevant to foster wisdom. What is relevant is mental subsystems selection, how, and why. And even subsystem management. Instead, Plato explores logic, LLL. And recent events have been enlightening: LLL is mostly secondary for directing people’s behavior. 

I Think, Therefore I Sting. At Least, Sometimes, I Feel That Way.

By “Trump Madness” I do not mean Trump is mad, far from it: after all, he is the next president, and already causing more change than Obama did in 8 years (see Europe dumping “austerity” within 30 hours of Trump’s election). Clearly, there was a very smart method to Trump’s madness, and it was highly successful for him, as he obtained the loftiest job in the world (at least as far as conventional wisdom has it; in truth the loftiest job is mine, but never mind…). Thus “Trump madness” was anything except madness, on the part of Trump… Or his supporters (who also got what they wanted).

The real madness has been the flow of insults and indiscriminate violence on the part of “Clinton” supporters. Innocent thinkers were called “unscholarly, uncouth, anti-semitic, racist, xenophobic, judged to have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder,  and compulsive liars”. This was just a sampler of the most polite insults directed at me… by “friends”… and I am NOT a Trump supporter. Just thought to be so, because I rolled out all sorts of graphs depicting demoncracy (from inequality, to incarceration, rate, to life expectancy, to government investment, etc.).

Never mind that this was all for positions I held sometimes for decades, they are all extremely progressive, and I am just culprit of having Trump embracing them.

Insults directed at Trump were often obviously more insane than grievous. Trump was called “xenophobic” (the evidence is, the exact opposite, that is, Trump is an extreme xenoPHILE). Trump was called “anti-semitic” (his beloved and trusted son-in-law is an observant Jew). Trump was called a business failure (he grew his “organization”, now in 60 countries, from 17 million dollar to somewhere around ten billion…)

How come Clinton supporters became so abusive? OK, they were surprised. Not just because people were scared to reveal in the polls that they would vote for Trump, skewing polls (pollster Nate Silver discovered this a week or two before the vote, so he “unskewed” the polls, and revealed the chances of Trump were significant; I knew for months, just talking to people, that people were hiding their Trump preferences).

Clinton supporters did not turn abusive and insulting just because what they worry about turns out not to be what most of the country worries about. But, mostly, they hated, because it turned out that they had become strangers to themselves, and the world. Part of them rose in fury, and took over their persona, because they wanted to lash out, so great was the pain that uncomprehension caused..

The Clinton supporters had no idea how neurohormonally entangled with (their idea of) their candidate. Precisely because they were deliberately ignored the (left, leftist, liberal, progressive) case I have made for more than eight years (with all those graphs), they had turned into fanatics, Jihadists, because they had rejected (the unsavory) reality.

The mental order in the brains of these self-described progressives, supposed to address politics, had become hopelessly disconnected from reality. For example, in judging Obama, they judged his brown skin, but not the fact Obama was led by the nose by Lawrence Summers, the Harvard-Goldman Sachs surrogate who had dismantled, under Bill Clinton, the Banking Act of 1933 (“G-S”). And this, seven months before Obama reigned. And they ignored hundreds of other indicators which were flashing way more right, and corporate fascism, than any other president before.

Thus the mental subsystems Clinton supporters activated over the years made them not just unreal, but incapable of activating anything else. One of my prefered game these days is to question Clinton-Obama fanatics about Quantitative Easing. I generally draw a blank. The self-perceived) most clever ones tell me it was a good thing. So here you have so-called progressives saying that giving more than ten trillion dollars to the world richest, most corrupt people and institutions was… a good thing.

Guess what, you dummies? It was a good thing only for plutocracy, also known as demoncracy. The only person who could understand what I was talking about, and agreed with me, before meeting me, is Senior VP in a major bank.

People think first with their neurohormones. Tell me their neurohormones most active, and I can tell you where their Local Linear Logic delves. Obsessions leads and localizes reflection.

Is there experimental evidence for the preceding? Yes, there is, from… insects. The theory of consciousness is starting to rise. It involves making flies play videogames, or seeing if, like American students, they can get scared. Flies can be put in a state of “scariness” and wanting to get to a “safe space”.

Insects have a rudimentary ego, though very different from Narcissus or classical literature would have it. Insect ego appears as the ability to act and mentally concentrate on certain environmental cues thus ignoring others. “They don’t pay attention to all sensory input equally,” cognitive scientist Andrew Barron of Australia’s Macquarie University declared.

When you and I are hungry, we don’t just move towards food, as bacteria do. Our hunger creates a particular feeling (an emotion) which, in turn rearrange which subsystems are activated in our brain. Such a state is called a “subjective experience” in traditional philosophy. Do insects have the same? Obviously they do (I can say from anecdotes, and thus as a philosopher; scientists will verify and make sure).

Insects can be led into mental states which do not fit reality. So can humans (humans even do this deliberately, when they play or make jokes). Once in such a state, a particular logic, the universe of which is that precise mental state, flows. That Local Linear Logic is particular, yet it leaves (neural) connections behind. If suddenly precipitated, for real, in a situation calling for that mental state, the LLL is ready to kick in. That’s why humans play, and make jokes.

This election was a joke. So were the mental states most citizens put themselves, or let themselves been put, in the last few decades. Time to wake up.

And time to wake up to the reality that it is moods which create logic, even more than it is logic which creates moods.

Some will rise their hands in surrender, reading this. They will see logic as defeated. But, well, not at all. Quite the opposite. That mentality trumps logic means logic has to go meta, meta on mentality. One can’t just be logical, to defeat enemy logic. Enemy logic, like ours, is grounded in mentality, and emotion. The fight has to be carried there, it’s not just logical, it’s metalogical.

Patrice Ayme’

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And example of emotion underlying logic has been TDS. TRUMP Derangement Syndrome (TDS) Is MENTALLY ENLIGHTENING, so thank you, all of you, clueless pseudo-progressives, for providing us with not just entertainment, but insights on how insects and other animals think. They think, because they sting. Most people with TDS are at a loss to inform us what progress should be made of, because they lose emotional power, contemplating progress. All the emotions they have tend to underlay their dislike of Trump. I personally disliked Trump 30 years ago, and find him rather improved, nowadays… And, on the progress side, I get more emotional than in my dislike of just one individual… 

Humans: Naturally Born Scientists

Philosophers, through the ages, have tried to distinguish man from beast. The soul was suggested as a possible distinction (that was an old Middle Age theory, later adopted by Descartes). Tool usage was proposed (Bergson). And then language was offered as characteristic of humans. But animals were found to have theories of mind, tools, and language. How is man going to feel proud and different?

What about science? Does the inbred ability to produce it characterize us? I think so.

What Is Science? It Is Not To Be Confused With Scientific Theories:

Science is the body of certain facts. Science is the body of facts which have been proven experimentally to be true.

Curiously, many people do not get this simple statement. Is it because primary school is not taught adequately?

We Have Been Scientists, All Along, Ever More

Science is the body of certain facts. Science is the body of facts which have been proven experimentally to be true. How hard is it to understand this?

Newtonian Mechanics for example is science because, within its domain of application, all its predictions are, and have been proven to be, indeed, what is observed.

Same thing for classical thermodynamics: facts are predicted, and observed to be true, time and time again. Same thing for continental drift: it predicts that continents are moving, and they are observed to move, indeed. At the exact rate predicted.

Biological evolution, too, is science. It says species have evolved. This is indeed what is observed. Thus, evolution is science. It’s not just a theory. Biological science says even more: that species are still evolving, as observed.

And so on:

Science is the body of facts which have been proven time and time again, to be indeed, occurring.

Then there are so-called “scientific” theories.

Scientific Theories Are Not Science, But, First, Theories:

Theory means: a point of view. Theories are not just facts anymore, but a way to organize them according to a perspective. That calls onto pieces of logic which are not proven. A “scientific” theory can be made of a mumbo-jumbo of facts, and completely unproven, even outrageous hypotheses.

Evolution is science. But scientific theories of how this evolution exactly happens are debatable, and debated. They are not sure. They are just theories. (Is evolution just from “natural selection”, haphazardly, or is there more, such that intelligent steering by Quantum epigenetics, as I believe?)

Most Quantum mechanics is science: it’s a set of rules, a logos, which has been checked, time and time again. However, as soon as one steps a bit away from it, it becomes uncertain (for example the Many Interacting World, MIW, a theory is handy, but it assumes that particles are points; that latter point is not a proven, certain fact).

String Theory, Supersymmetry, Multiverse, for example, are theories which include some “scientific” or “mathematical” facts. But they cannot even be checked, let alone capable of making predictions which are observed.

So those “scientific theories” are not “science”. They make a body of knowledge of some sort, like a game. But they are not allowing to make predictions observed in nature.

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Subtleties:

There are so-called “demarcation problems“, always. It happens within science: Newtonian Mechanics makes superbly exact predictions about where space probes go as engineers use planets as slings to launch them further. However, if one wants to find out about GPS drift, one has to use the more general version of gravitation of Einstein (the latter reduces exactly to Newtonian Mechanics inside the solar system; so the theory changes from Newton, for rockets, to General Relativity (GR), for GPS).

A more subtle demarcation is found, within the body of any given science. For example, part of Einstein theory of gravitation is science, as it predicts exactly what is exactly observed (say with the Geo Positioning System). However, the same set of ideas when applied to, say, Black Holes, comes short: it runs out of enough ideas to make exact predictions, runs out of experiments to be checked, and observed facts.

Thus the theory of gravitation, GR, is science (the closest one stays to Newton), and also a hoped-for scientific theory (but not as disconnected from reality as String Theory, Susy, Multiverse, etc.). However, GR, as a general scientific theory, has disappointed: the unified theory which Einstein tried to develop did not work. (Instead it morphed into something else the general fiber space theory with Ehresman connections, known as Gauge Theory, also know as Quantum Field Theory, etc.)

Thus:

Science is what we know for sure:

How do we know that a logic is true, for sure? By conducting experiments.

By that token, archery was a science (launched just right, an arrow goes where it’s supposed to). Archery later blossomed into gunnery, ballistics, Newtonian Mechanics. Nowadays we would not consider archery as a science, but it’s among the simplest cases of dynamics.

For millions of years, our ancestors have used plants to help with their health. (Ethology has shown many animals do this, not just upper primates.) At this point, around 60% of our medical drugs come from plants.

The European iceman was found carrying general purpose antibiotics. Not by accident. He died more than 5,000 years ago.

And so on. Science is what is sure. We have been sure for a long, a very long time. If we were not so sure, we could not do much.

An artisan making a work perfectly is a scientist, in the particular domain in which this artisan excels. A prehistoric man striking a stone, just so that the force would split a crystal perfectly along pre-determined planes, was a scientist. A rock scientist. He, or she, was engaging in an application of a science we now know as crystallography. (And also in the theory of the mechanical forces, vector calculus.)

Humanity has blossomed, because humanity has learned how to establish, for sure, certain truths which required artificially devised experiments, and the proclivity to push the last frontier of truth, ever more, by being ever more subtle.

We evolved to become an intentionally scientific, that is, prone to experiment, species.

SCIENCE IS US.

And philosophy and its philosophical method, in all that? It’s the category of all the wild guesses, absolutely indispensable to suggest the next experiments, to feed tomorrow’s truths.

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Science Is Starting To Address Ethics, And Theory Of Mind:

Long the rage smoldered between the so called “humanities” and science. How obsolete. Clearly science is making inroads in the humanities, and clearly the humanities can ask pointed questions to physics, biology, even engineering. Let’s consider the first point, how science is informing humanities.

There is a science called ethology. It comes from “ethos” which means character. Ethology is the logic of character. Ethos also gave the notion of ethics.

Ethology originally was the study of character of animals, from their objective behavior. A number of methods pertaining to the field were developed, Nobel Prizes in biology and medicine were awarded to ethologists.

Then, in the following decades, it dawned on ethologists that the methods of ethology could be extended to the study of the human character.

This is why I am surprised when I hear that one needs a metaphysics to have an ethics. Instead, ethics is something that is determined by the bottom up (instead of top down).

First, through trial, error, and natural selection, human ethology evolved in the last 500 million years. Nature played scientist to evolve us.

Second, human beings observe, and make theories, even social and ethical theories, and then they apply what is basically the scientific method to them.

The scientific method consists in establishing with reasonable certainty facts. As it becomes ever more subtle, it can address ever more sophisticated domains, which used to be exclusively philosophical.

An example? The Theory of Mind. That is a subject long exclusively philosophical. However, scientific research published in recent years showed that children exposed to a second language have, in the average, a better theory of mind. Here is a fresh example, published in 2015:

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21652258-children-exposed-several-languages-are-better-seeing-through-others-eyes-do

Here is an abstract of the research:

“HUMAN beings are not born with the knowledge that others possess minds with different contents. Children develop such a “theory of mind” gradually, and even adults have it only imperfectly. But a study by Samantha Fan and Zoe Liberman at the University of Chicago, published in Psychological Science, finds that bilingual children, and also those simply exposed to another language on a regular basis, have an edge at the business of getting inside others’ minds… Some objects were blocked from the experimenter’s sight, a fact the children could clearly see. With a large, a medium and a small car visible to the child, but the small car hidden from the adult, the adult would ask “I see a small car” and ask the child to move it. Both bilingual and those in the exposure group moved the medium-sized car (the smallest the experimenter could see) about 75% of the time, against 50% for the monolinguals. The successful children were less likely even to glance at the car the experimenter could not see.”

Why is this happening? Multilingual children observe that different languages provide with different perspectives, thus different theories (theory means literally, to “see” (horan) a “view” (thea)). So multilingual children are more apt to consider which view others see, when considering others.

Multilingual children have a theory of theories of behavior, and we can prove it scientifically. “Epistemics” is now a science. And it informs morality.

We are the scientific species. No science, no man. Now, more than ever. And at last smart enough to understand what it means. It means: “Plus Oultre!”, as emperor Charles Quint put it, five centuries ago. Wherever we arrived, in place, time, or understanding, we have to go beyond. It’s not just what ecology requires, it’s what we are.

Patrice Ayme’

EINSTEIN’S ERROR: The Multiverse

In 1905, his so-called Wonder Year, Albert Einstein presented a theory of the photoelectric effect. The new idea came in just two lines. However I boldly claim that Einstein’s theory of the photoelectric effect, although gloriously correct, was also, below the Nobel-winning surface, crucially wrong. A photoelectric truth covering a grievous localization lie. It was Einstein’s Greatest Error. Quantum Field Theory implicitly contradicts Einstein, by replacing particles with fields, that is, delocalizing them.

I claim that Einstein talked too much. His intuition was not careful enough, and too tied up with old fashion particles. Quantum Mechanics, one of the inventors Einstein was, questioned the very nature of elementary particles. Einstein imposed, at the outset, a solution, which, I claim, was erroneous.

What Einstein ought to have said is that electromagnetic energy was absorbed in packets of energy hf (h was Planck’s Constant, f the frequency of the light). That explained immediately the photoelectric effect. It was just enough to explain the photoelectric effect.

My Intuition Is More Informed Than Yours

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PHOTOELECTRIC EFFECT EXPLAINED SOLELY AS RECEPTION QUANTIZATION:

An electron receiving energy from light, receives a packet hf. If f is too small, the electron cannot be emitted: the electron needed some energy, say A, to escape the material. One needs hf > A.

Nor can an electron just pile up energy from light until the stored energy exceeded A. Why? Because energy is RECEIVED in such packets, and only these packets. It was hf, or nothing.

That explanation of the photoelectric effect was both necessary and SUFFICIENT. Such an explanation is exactly the symmetric statement of the one made by Planck in 1900.

(Planck did much more than that, he had to invent his constant, and it is astounding that he did not explain the photoelectric effect, as he had done 99% of the work).

Should Einstein have said what I said, he would have explained the photoelectric effect, instead of putting all of physics on an erroneous path.

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EINSTEIN LOCALIZATION, AN ERRONEOUS HYPOTHESIS:

However, Einstein instead said something prophetic he had no reason to proffer.

Here is Einstein statement from 1905, translated from German:

“Energy, during the propagation of a ray of light, is not continuously distributed over steadily increasing spaces, but it consists of a finite number of energy quanta LOCALIZED AT POINTS IN SPACE, MOVING WITHOUT DIVIDING and capable of being absorbed or generated only as entities.”

[I emphasized what I view as the grievously erroneous part.]

With Planck’s E = hf, this is what gave Einstein the Nobel Prize in 1921. So not only Einstein got it wrong, but so did the Nobel committee.

(Planck objected strenuously, because he never meant for the Electro-Magnetic field to be quantized outside the blackbody cavity. I agree about quantization upon reception, as that explanation works. My objection is that Einstein had no proof of what he advanced about LOCALIZATION.)

Einstein claimed that light is made of “quanta localized at points in space, moving without dividing”. Thus, Einstein invented elementary particles. Einstein had no reason for of this fabrication, whatsoever, and did not need it, as I said.

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THE POISONOUS WAVE-EIGENSTATE SALAD:

Fast forward thirty years. By then, thanks to the likes of Dirac (inventor of Quantum Electro Dynamics, who stumbled on Cartan’s Spinor Space and Antimatter) and Von Neumann (Functional Analysis maven), etc. the Quantum formalism had been sculpted like Mount Rushmore in the mountains of natural philosophy.

The formalism consisted in claiming that the elementary particles invented by Albert were vectors in a (Hilbert) space whose basis was made of the possible results of the experiment E.

The mathematics worked well.

However, IF Einstein’s initial invention was false, so was the picture of reality it conveyed.

And indeed, as we saw, Einstein had no reason to claim what he did: he violated Newton’s “Hypotheses Non Fingo” (“I do not FABRICATE hypotheses”… my translation).

Isaac Newton: …”I do not fabricate hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction.”

***

DEMOLISHING THE MULTIVERSE ERROR:

Galileo, to expose his ideas more pedagogically, set-up a trialogue, between “Simplicius” and two others (one being Galileo himself).

I pursue my exposition of what those who believe in the Multiverse cannot dare to articulate, as it would expose their utter confusion, and more:

Simplicius: So you say that Einstein fabricated localized Quanta, out of his fertile imagination, and that axiom wrecked all of physics?

Patrice Ayme: Exactly. I would prefer to call it not fertile, but obsolete, imagination. After Einstein had fabricated his seemingly innocuous hypothesis, the localized elementary particle, the next step was to identify it with the wave function.

Simplicius: Do you not insist that the world is mostly made of Quantum Waves?

PA: Yes but “Wave Functions” are just fist order approximations of “Quantum Waves”. “Wave Functions” cannot be real, they are mathematical artefacts.

Simplicius: How come?

PA: Wave functions are made of end states, the so-called eigenvectors, the end products of experiments. That makes wave functions intrinsically teleological, made up of the future. You may as well identify human beings to their tombstones, that’s how they end up.

Simplicius: What is the connection with the Multiverse?

PA: Wave functions are intrinsically multiversal, they are made by adding different outcomes, as if they all happened. But only one can ever happen, in the end. However, when in flight, we are been told that (Einstein’s) localized particle is made of as many pieces of universes as there are eigenstates.

Simplicius: So you conclude that Einstein’s localized quantum hypothesis plus the basic Quantum Formalism implies that the simplest elementary particle is made of pieces of different universes that will happen in the future?

PA: Exactly. Einstein, in conjunction with the Hilbert formalism, invented the Multiverse. This is what Everett observed, and, at the time, it made the inventors of Quantum Mechanics (minus Planck and Einstein) so uncomfortable that Everett was booted out of theoretical physics, an even his adviser Wheeler turned against him.

Simplicius: But did not Einstein demonstrate with the EPR thought experiment that “elements of reality” could not be localized?

PA: Exactly. With a little help from Karl Popper, maybe. Entanglement has been experimentally shown to not be localizable with the metric used in General Relativity. So light quanta themselves not only are not points, something that was obvious all along, sorry Einstein, but also, the speed of light is an emerging metric for the Universe.

It has been a conspiracy all along.

Simplicius: Conspiracy?

PA: Yes, there is a famous mistake in Dirac’s Principles of Quantum Mechanics. He insists that a photon interfere only with itself. That is demonstrably false (radio interference and independent lasers playing double slit). Dirac had to say that to NOT make the Quantum Waves themselves the main actors.

Simplicius: Why would physicists conspire to push false physics?

PA: Because, if they admit that their physics is false, and have nothing better to propose, they are losing status. (Whereas I improve mine by showing why they are wrong.)

Another point is that the “Multiverse” is suitably mysterious and absurd to impress common people. It is obviously the greatest miracle imaginable, so those who have penetrated this secrecy are very great men.

WHAT IS GOING ON?

We saw Einstein’s hypothesis of localization led to the Multiverse. As the Multiverse is unacceptable, so is the localization hypothesis.

But we already knew this in several ways (diffraction, 2-slit, and other non-local wave effects; plus EPR style experiments, let alone the QM formalism itself, which also predicts non-localization).

The intuition of the real sub-quantic theory depends, in part, on such facts.

Patrice Ayme’

P/S (2021); In one sentence: The multiverse theory comes from a nefarious cognitive interference between Einstein’s unproven theory of momentum-energy pointwise localism with the nonlocal nature of (quantum) dynamics.

In Defense of Metaphysics

Metaphysics Rises From Brainy Ground, Including What Dreams Are Made Of:

Nihilism is what happens when Metaphysics is yanked out. And nothing could be further from the Truth. Much of the trouble with the present planet can be directly tracked to inappropriate Metaphysics. Let me explain this a bit in this first part. Metaphysics is, indeed, about religion, what ties people up together again, but it’s also about Logic (with a capital L).

Metaphysics is everywhere. Everybody uses it, in everyday language. Some will say: ”Oh, that just language.” Yes, but language is ideas, and ideas get embodied as brain structure. So here we see that not only metaphysics exists, but it is physically embodied. Any victim of Jihadism can testify that metaphysics has real consequences.

Before defining Metaphysics, one has to define “physics”. That was what the Romans called nature. Physis is “nature,” from phyein “to bring forth, produce, make to grow” (related to phyton “growth, plant,” phyle “tribe, race,” phyma “a growth, tumor”). Physis is everywhere.

Imagine You Are Being Watched Maybe Help You Be Good

[Helix Nebula, an expanding shell from a dying star, 700 light years away, being transformed into a White Dwarf; ESO Southern Observatory Near IR on the left; visible light, on the right.]

Science is physical phenomena so well known that they can allow us to predict how things will grow.

But in the original sense all discourses about what exists and changes in nature is part of physics. Call this

Common Sense. Call it CS. Metaphysics is about telling a story beyond what we are sure all others will agree they also observed.

The brain is all connected inside: that’s how logic is embodied. Much of it is individualized, call it I. So we have: Metaphysics = I – CS.

CS depends upon one’s tribe. Metaphysics and I are, of course dependent upon the Individual.

And what is the Individual (brain) made of, and with? Experiences. Individualized experiences. All metamathematics is, clearly Metaphysics in some sense (arguably mathematics itself is, literally, metaphysics).

Set Theory is Metaphysics. That can be demonstrated easily: as all genuine Metaphysics, it is full of contradiction(s).

Badiou’s aphorism holds up pretty well: “Set theory is all the metaphysics you need, and physics all of the ontology.” Well, all the Metaphysics you needed to do some basic mathematics in the Twentieth Century… But not even all of it, hence the rise of Category Theory in the 1950s. This demonstrates that Metaphysics is not just beyond physics, it is eminently practical (because the mathematics invented by Grothendieck, PBUH, this advanced Algebraic Geometry is… practical).

Category Theory is very practical Metaphysics.

Carefully tailored Metaphysics can prove much. For example, I can devise Metaphysics where the circle can be squared (I just use my finite mathematics, end of proof).

According to the definition I gave above, the very definition of Metaphysics is that it is the set of all thought systems that harbor contradiction(s) to Common Sense (otherwise it would be Common Sense).

Could we do without Metaphysics?

Of course not. Metaphysics is beyond Common Sense. But we know something exists beyond Common Sense, say for example future or possible science, research projects, and, in general various guesses of all sorts, including artistic ones.

So it’s not all a question of “data”, in the restrictive sense, or, even more generally, “quanta”. Metaphysics is grounded beyond “data” in the restrictive sense. Guesses, intuitions, even desires and provocations, the feeling of what might be, or ought to be, are part of the “data” that grounds Metaphysics.

Our minds are not just grounded in hard facts, personal experiences and feelings, but even dreams, vague tendencies, feelings and emotions, let alone collective rages, and misunderstanding of history, much of it that we harbor in our inner spiritual recesses, as various infantile trauma.

In all this our very individualized Metaphysics are grounded. Lots of dream stuff. So people are invited not to deduce lethal consequences from it.

We need it.

But we also need to understand it. Especially when it animates our thermonuclear hands. Or those of others. Especially those of others. To understand, and fight, the Metaphysics of banksters, greedsters, archeo-imperialists, or Islamofascists, we need better, improved, and fully aware Metaphysics.

Patrice Ayme’

How Plutocrats Buy God, the Logos

HOW GOD, PLUTO, RULES FROM LOGOS: BUY THE INTELLECTUALS!

The idea is not new: consider the Gospel of John, quoted below: it starts with GOD IS THE LOGOS (logic!) Thus, the elite of the Roman empire saluted the Christian God, that Logos, and marched into decadence, as one, behind the emperors of imposed Christian vice.

Verily, God, the ultimate ruler of the world, Is the Logos. The greedy Establishment, that Elite of Rule, knows this all too well: it enforces the tranquility It profits from, by fostering Selected Thinking, rewarding those tame minds it likes.

Human beings are thought machines. Thinking is our divine principle. Controlling humanity, is controlling its discourse. That means, control the leading intellectuals. Either by buying them, or by fabricating them.

Obama had been president for nine months when he got the Nobel Peace Prize… Having done strictly nothing particularly peaceful. Cynical analysis: ‘here you are boy, here is a nice tip, just to get you started, remember this as you go on, serving us: we can do anything, foster any reward’.

Top mathematicians thrilled for the gold coin a modern emperor sent by Putin, gave them. Admire our costumes,and our gratefulness to wealth, criminally obtained! We Have Been Bought By Great Men, Internet criminals and their dark puppets, & You Ought To Love Them

[Mathematicians Beaming With Three Million Dollar Prizes, In Official, Appropriately Dark, Pluto Garb, Enforcing The Order of Money, & Correct Thinking, by Exchanging Aura With Celebrities & Tax Evading Wealth @ NASA. Yes, NASA! Where Space Telescope Used to be Made, Celebrities & Stolen Money Rule.]

Life on the plantation, also known as the banana republic: well treated boys are grateful to the masters. Grateful thinkers beats grating thoughts, any day, say the wealthiest, and they chuckle. Reward them, and they will be on their best behavior.

Michel Foucault said the power was in the discourse. The idea is not fresh, but is more important than ever.

The Evangel of John starts this way: ”In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

In the original Greek, the last four words of John 1:1 are: “θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος”. Literally “God was the Logos”.

(Notice my magnanimity: instead of bullying Christ and his little helpers, like Saint John, as I often do, I am ready to recognize, and celebrate, their good ideas. I would extend the same to Putin, or even Saint Louis or Hitler. For Putin, I am still searching… Yes, I know, the idea that God is Logos was put there to disarm the Neoplatonist intellectual elite of the Greco-Roman empire…)

So Christ is the Logos. Now the Greek: Λόγος, LOGOS, is usually (mis)translated as “word”. Whereas in truth it is “discourse” or “reason”. Does that mean that a philosopher who reasons a lot is divine? (The possibility is intriguing, and warrants a healthy, skepticism for atheism, on the ground of self-esteem.)

Where the early Christians really that smart? Well, let’s say they were thoroughly molded by Greek philosophy, which then ruled the Greco-Roman empire, and especially its “Pars Orientalis”.

Thomas Piketty was made a knight of the Legion of Honor. In his “Capital in the 21^st Century, he bemoaned the richest getting richer, thanks to (what I call, because it is what it is) the exponentiation of capital, and tax evasion by pro-wealth tax legislation.

Piketty was apparently not born yesterday. He could see what the scavenging, greedy elite was up to: buying his mitigation. Economist Piketty joined those rare French intellectuals who refused the Legion of Honor from the Legion of Horror.

Is it the Legion of Honor, or the Legion of Horror? That was the question. Now we know the answer.

Although close to the ruling Socialist Party, Piketty, to his horror, discovered, that, once feeding at the through of power, French “Socialists”, just as American “Democrats”, were just pigging out, having forgotten all the principles they had advocated, and asking to be honored, on top of that.

Here is the way it works: make thinkers into celebrities, give them money. Then, from sheer basic human decency, they owe those who brought the honor, the partaking in the church of elite, the implicit sharing of leadership, the power, and the promise, when not the actuality, of wealth, treasure when not outright gold coins. (See the beaming cone heads above.)

Human beings are most sensitive to power structures, conspiracies, peer pressure and groups: this is how baboons work. Even super-baboons.

No tribe, no power. However, tribes are affected with group-think. Great breakthroughs in thinking are never achieved through group-think.

In the case above, a few thinkers are made into celebrities, and lionized. In the ceremony depicted above, those mathematicians dressed fancy, were newly knighted into celebritism, so to speak. Indeed, they mingled with plutocrats, and Hollywood and Pop celebrities, whom the plutocrats had brought along, like one brings champagne, including a fleshy giant chested platinum blonde bellowing away, with plenty of Silicon in the right places (the ceremony happened in the assembly hall where NASA had prepared the Kepler mission, to find exo-planets; now there is no more money for Kepler, because “Zuck” and his ilk, perpetrators present in the audience, have sucked all the money from NASA; tellingly they celebrate their victory on the battlefield they devastated.)

Celebritism fosters tolerance for plutocracy. After all, plutocrats are the ultimate celebrities. That’s why those prone to the Dark Side handsomely finance it, if wealthy enough.

Recently revealed, 28,000 documents exposed massive tax evasion by the very corporations of these individuals who set-up these prizes. No wonder they can afford three million dollar prizes, as if they were morning buns. Through Luxembourg alone, more than 100 billion dollars of “legal” tax evasion, from American companies alone. Each year. That’s nearly 10% of the entire Federal budget of the USA.

The whistle blower, a computer specialist, was indicted. The tax evader in chief, J-C Junker, was made head of the European Commission. Meanwhile, basic science is getting squeezed.

Crumbs offered to a few thinkers do not replace the diminution of public financing for the most advanced research, and basic education. They are part of a cover-up hiding the fact that austerity is for everybody except for plutocrats and their extravagance. It is part of a magic show: as the plutocrats brandish their glittering prizes, they divert everybody’s attention from their massive tax evasion, and how they have captured the public discourse to foster their ever increasing power.

The ancient myth of Faust is all about rejecting the Demon when it comes with His irresistible gifts.

I do not know if souls exist, but minds sure do. A mind sold to money is lower quality. It’s not a problem for common folks: after all, they have to eat. However, to designate top minds, it sure is a problem.

Never were intellectuals as honored, by cities and Court, as in the Second Century of Imperial Rome (under the Antonine emperors). Yet all the thinking elaborated then was second rate. Just at a time when the Empire needed enormous breakthrough in the deepest thinking.

So what happened? Those honored thinkers sunk into greed: too anxious to please their masters, and to become billionaires, they produced only superficial thoughts.

If one wants deep thinking, one needs a deep field of thinking. It starts with financing public elementary school, though taxing of the hyper rich (1). Instead, here we are, and we have to celebrate the world’s top tax evaders, as they give crumbs to brainy pigeons.

Patrice Ayme’

1. Antonine emperors’ welfare and education called “alimenta” were financed by taxing wealth; not enough, as it turned out, when Rome imploded in immorality and corruption, immediately afterwards.

Logos, Neurology, Stoicism, Christianity, Higher Morality

My statement:

“THE LOGOS IS MADE OF ELEMENTS OF BRAIN SIMPLIFIED”

Brought the observation: ”I’m afraid I can’t imagine what this means.” (Massimo from Scientia Salon.) Others have asked for more details. Here they are.

The statement was admittedly abstruse. It is supposed to mean that the Logos as speech is a representation of the Logos as more complex brain processes. (Here the word “representation” is used in the mathematical sense, more general version: this is a new example of philosophy using fresh mathematics!)

How does this representative mechanism can be suspected to work? (I already wrote this, but this version has more definition).

Stars Inside. By Varying Myelin, Oligodendrocytes Act As Meta Controllers (2014)

Suppose we have brain “elements” X, Y, Z (to simplify, say X, Y, Z are neurons, but they could be organs in the brain, like the amygdala, or the geometric structure of some neighborhood in the brain, whatever… yes, here “neighborhood” is used as in General Topology, another mathematical field).

Yes, “brain elements” is an allusion to “elements of reality” as in the Einstein-Podolski-Rosen paper on non-separability in Quantum Mechanics.

Then suppose we have the situation X > Y, and Y > Z.

X>Y means that the brain element X acts on the brain element Y. In the simplest case, “>” are axons. But the first “>” does not have to be of the same nature as the second “>”, which could be, say, some neurohormone or transmitter, such as Nitrous Oxide, or even a burst of oxygen and sugar in an area of the brain, thanks to some gateway neuron.

This innocent sounding remark allows to incorporate all three forms of the Logos defined by Aristotle. Aristotle distinguished the Logos-as-reasoning, from the Logos as Pathos, and the Logos as Ethos.

Pathos implies emotion, sensation… Ethos judgment on these.

The Logos done in my most general way incorporates all these, logic, pathos and ethos, because it allows for emotions: a relation between Y and Z can be through, or about, neurohormones or neurotransmitters.

Logos in that most general X>Y way even includes some forms of interactions we can’t even imagine, such as Quantum Effects… which show up in magnetic field vision in birds, whose simplest explanation is something having to do with spintronics, a type of Quantum Mechanics scientifically elucidated, but not yet incorporated in technological devices.

Then X>Z. Now there will be some meta-structure attached to all these relations between brain elements: I feel that the brain is all about different levels of “meta” piled upon each other. The structure of axons allow for this.

Namely if an axon (say) is active between Y and Z, another neuron, higher up in the meta-structure, can know about it (axons have varying level of myelin along themselves, and could be none; this differentiated activity of oligodendrocytes was observed in 2014).

The “meta” simplification works this way: whereas we started initially with three objects (X, Y, Z) and two relations (X>Y and Y>Z), that can be reduced two just two signals (X>Y and Y>Z) going to say, just one meta neuron.

Thus, aware of all these activations, higher meta neurons can then communicate the whole thing to the Broca or Wernicke speech area will convert all this in a speech.

Then we get something like : x>y & y>z & then x>z, where now “>” is just the verb “implies”, in plain speech, or a hand gesture. Thus a potentially very complex and variegated Brain-Logos activity has been simplified into Speech-Logos as usually interpreted.

WHY & HOW A GOOD TALK CAN SAVE THE WORLD:

Speaking of my preceding essay, and my observation that Christianity had to make the Logos into god, Massimo observed that: “The Stoics were talking about Logos / Nature / God / Zeus well before Christianity.” Indeed, pretty much something the imperial cooks of Christianity had to do . Christianity is a vast salad, artfully mixed with plenty of goodies.

Massimo also said: “The rest of your [essay] is interesting … but I fail to see what it has to do with Stoicism.”

It has to do with the Logos, recognizing its centrality in Stoicism. The best path to stoicism may be to talk calmly about a situation until it goes away. Talk it to death, so to speak.

Any short Logos, say 500 words, will miss many perspectives. But a good new perspective can pick in depth, where no pick has gone before.

Massimo opined that: “there is more value in Zeno and his followers than in Jesus”:

Indeed. Basically Jesus’ teeny-tiny Logos goes only that far.

Jesus is in love with one man, his dad. He also loves love. Nice, but such a ridiculously short a Logos can’t fill an entire universe. We need a bigger boat to handle that enormous ocean, and its giant sharks.

By making the Logos into God, one can talk like Jesus, love mummy, and daddy, and love itself, but also say much, much more, thus become like Jesus’ own dad.

There is indeed more value in all-encompassing complexity… As long as one is not a person with feeble mental capabilities. Persons who are not smart at all are better served with just a few instructions, the way Jesus had it (if one just picks the crème de la crème of what Jesus said, and not the mud of his mud). People at large are also best served if those who are rather stupid love their dad, and love. And stick with this, not trying to go beyond.

Christianity is a religion for the herd (consult Nietzsche for more on this, including sexual interpretations of the cross). Masters used something more robust (Nietzsche again, following meekly the more exuberant Marquis de Sade). Roman generals, under the Republic, before the Greek Stoics became prominent, were masters of stoicism. Stoicism on the largest scale is pretty much how the Roman Republic grew.

The Republic went down when too many in the Roman elite quit Stoicism for Greed (thus bringing along Plutocracy). It was sadly pathetic. Without forbearance, no exuberance!

Patrice Ayme’