CONTINUUM FROM DISCONTINUUM

Discontinuing The Continuum, Replacing It By Quantum Entanglement Of Granular Substrate:

Is the universe granular? Discontinuous? Is spacetime somehow emergent? I do have an integrated solution to these quandaries, using basic mass-energy physics, and quantum entanglement. (The two master ideas I use here are mine alone, and if I am right, will change physics radically in the fullness of time.)  

First let me point out that worrying about this is not just a pet lunacy of mine. Edward Witten is the only physicist to have got a top mathematics prize, and is viewed by many as the world’s top physicist (I have met with him). He gave a very interesting interview to Quanta Magazine: “A Physicist’s Physicist Ponders the Nature of Reality.

Edward Witten reflects on the meaning of dualities in physics and math, emergent space-time, and the pursuit of a complete description of nature.”

Witten ponders, I answer.

Quantum Entanglement enables to build existence over extended space with a wealth exponentially growing beyond granular space

Witten: “I tend to assume that space-time and everything in it are in some sense emergent. By the way, you’ll certainly find that that’s what Wheeler expected in his essay [Information, Physics, Quantum, Wheeler’s 1989 essay propounding the idea that the physical universe arises from information, which he dubbed “it from bit.” He should have called it: “It from Qubit”. But the word “Qubit” didn’t exist yet; nor really the concept, as physicists had not realized yet the importance of entanglement and nonlocality in building the universe: they viewed them more as “spooky” oddities on the verge of self-contradiction. ..]

Edward Witten: As you’ll read, he [Wheeler] thought the continuum was wrong in both physics and math. He did not think one’s microscopic description of space-time should use a continuum of any kind — neither a continuum of space nor a continuum of time, nor even a continuum of real numbers. On the space and time, I’m sympathetic to that. On the real numbers, I’ve got to plead ignorance or agnosticism. It is something I wonder about, but I’ve tried to imagine what it could mean to not use the continuum of real numbers, and the one logician I tried discussing it with didn’t help me.”

***

Well, I spent much more time studying logic than Witten, a forlorn, despised and alienating task. (Yet, when one is driven by knowledge, nothing beats an Internet connected cave in the desert, far from the distracting trivialities!) Studying fundamental logic, an exercise mathematicians, let alone physicists, tend to detest, brought me enlightenment. mostly because it shows how relative it is, and how it can take thousands of years to make simple, obvious steps. How to solve this lack of logical imagination affecting the tremendous mathematician cum physicist Witten? Simple. From energy considerations, there is an event horizon to how large an expression can be written. Thus, in particular there is a limit to the size of a number. Basically, a number can’t be larger than the universe.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2011/10/10/largest-number/

This also holds for the continuum: just as numbers can’t be arbitrarily large, neither can the digital expression of a given number be arbitrarily long. In other words, irrational numbers don’t exist (I will detail in the future what is wrong with the 24 century old proof, step by step).

As the world consists in sets of entangled quantum states (also known as “qubits”), the number of states can get much larger than the world of numbers. For example a set of 300 entangled up or down spins presents with 2^300 states (much larger than the number of atoms in the observable, 100 billion light years across universe). Such sets (“quantum simulators”) have been basically implemented in the lab.

Digital computers only work with finite expressions. Thus practical, effective logic uses already only finite mathematics, and finite logic. Thus there is no difficulty to use only finite mathematics. Physically, it presents the interest of removing many infinities (although not renormalization!)

Quantum entanglement creates a much richer spacetime than the granular subjacent space. Thus an apparently continuous spacetime is emergent from granular space. Let’s go back to the example above: 300 spins, in a small space, once quantum entangled, give a much richer spacetime quantum space of 2^300 states.

Consider again a set S of 300 particles (a practical case would be 300 atoms with spins up or down). If a set of “particles” are all entangled together I will call that a EQN (Entangled Quantum Network). Now consider an incoming wave W (typically a photonic or gravitational wave; but it could be a phonon, etc.). Classically, if the 300 particles were… classical, W has little probability to interact with S, because it has ONLY 300 “things”, 300 entities, to interact with. Quantum Mechanically, though, it has 2^300 “things”, all the states of the EQN, to interact with. Thus, a much higher probability of interacting. Certainly the wave W is more likely to interact wit2^300 entities than with 300, in the same space! (The classical computations can’t be made from scratch by me, or anybody else; but the classical computation, depending on “transparency” of a film of 300 particles would actually depend upon the Quantum computation nature makes discreetly, yet pervasely!

EQNs make (mathematically at least) an all pervasive “volume” occupying wave. I wrote “volume” with quote-unquote, because some smart asses, very long ago (nearly a century) pointed out that the Quantum Waves are in “PHASE” space, thus are NOT “real” waves. Whatever that means: Quantum volumes/spaces in which Quantum Waves compute can be very complicated, beyond electoral gerrymandering of congressional districts in the USA! In particular, they don’t have to be 3D “volumes”. That doesn’t make them less “real”. To allude to well-established mathematics: a segment is a one dimensional volume. A space filling curve is also a sort of volume, as is a fractal (and has a fractal dimension).

Now quantum entanglement has been demonstrated over thousands of kilometers, and mass (so to speak) quantum entanglement has been demonstrated over 500 nanometers (5,000 times the size of an atom). One has to understand that solids are held by quantum entanglement. So there is plenty enough entanglement to generate spaces of apparently continuous possibilities and even consciousness… from a fundamentally granular space.

Entanglement, or how to get continuum from discontinuum. (To sound like Wheeler.)

The preceding seems pretty obvious to me. Once those truths get around, everybody will say:’But of course, that’s so obvious! Didn’t Witten say that first?’

No, he didn’t.

You read it here first.

Granular space giving rise to practically continuous spacetime is an idea where deep philosophy proved vastly superior to the shortsightedness of vulgar mathematics.

Patrice Ayme’

Relativistic MASS FROM TIME Dilation

[Original research to make physics understandable to We The People.]

A reason for the stall of theoretical physics in the last 40 years? Physicists have not enough intuitive understanding of physics (in particular, of what is important in physics). The phenomenon affects both Relativity and Quantum Physics. Both Twentieth Century fields are more philosophically subtle than vulgar physicists think. One needs more context than the usual credo has it.

Here is my intuitive proof of the famous relativistic mass formula. It explains intuitively an observation made late in the Nineteenth Century (19C): when particles are accelerated, they augment in mass, rather than speed.

Buridan contemplated “impetus”, which we now call “momentum” = MV. When A Force Is Applied Indefinitely, V, The Speed, Stalls, While M Keeps On Augmenting.

I reveal that: The basic reason for the augmentation of “relativistic mass” is that FORCE GETS DILUTED BY LOCAL TIME… DILUTION. (This apparent play on words reflects exactly what’s going on!)

The fundamental fact of The Theory of Relativity is TIME DILATION. Time Dilation says that, when something moves fast, time there runs slows. Time Dilation is shocking to those who do not understand where it comes from (I will treat it in another essay). Time Dilation in a moving frame is not an axiom in physics, because it can be easily demonstrated theoretically, or experimentally. It comes from the constancy of the speed of light (locally, in any frame of reference).

Relativity compares physics in the frame at rest R, with physics in the moving frame, M. (So Relativity is relative, but not as relative that some physicists, in particular Einstein, have made it sound. See my future “Time Dilation”.) Say v is the speed of M relative to R (as usual, c denotes the speed of light).

Time in the moving M slows down relative to time in the resting R:

Time of M = (Time of R) [Square Root (1- vv/cc)]. This is Time Dilation.

Basics Theorems Of Relativity. Time Dilation (the middle one) Implies The Other Two. Time Dilation Is Itself A Theorem

The Local Time Equation (Middle) Implies Both the Local Length Contraction Equation, and the “Relativistic Mass: Equation

What is a force? Anything which changes momentum. Say the force F consists into a flow of particles (a bit like quanta, in a way). Let’s call it the STRAFING. The particles have all equal mass, and the same momentum, they arrive at equal intervals, and they travel perpendicularly to the trajectory of the mass m.

If m was standing still, at rest in R (the “rest reference frame”), F would progressively accelerate m (BURIDAN law). Now suppose m is moving at rest in M, that is at v, relative to R. Now in M, time runs slow. This means that m gets hit a lot more by the STRAFING.

Because visualize this: the STRAFFING (= the application of the force F) is launched inside R, the “rest frame”. But it is received in M. So the frequency of hits in M is lower by [Square Root (1- vv/cc)]. That means the force on m, in M, is lower by that amount. In other words, m in M, viewed from R, behaves exactly as if its inertial mass was not m, but m/[Square Root (1 – vv/cc)] .   Here is my little theory in a drawing (the text below will explain the details):

Force Can Be Viewed As Transfer Of Momentum (“Impetus”) By Quanta. Clearly Then It Is Received Slowly Because Time Dilation

The application of force in the moving frame Is DILUTED by Time Dilation. So Inertial Mass appears larger by as much as Local time is dilated.

In the drawing above, I depicted the force as applied transversally. But it could be applied from any direction: the transmission of momentum impulses would still be diluted by slow local time. Also the assumption that momentum would be quantified is no different from, say the Riemann Integral in mathematical analysis: from F = d(mv)/dt, the Buridan equation (a generalization of Newton’s Second Law), one can view the integral of the action of F as the sum of these little impulses (understanding fully may require a familiarity with integral calculus).

Questions are welcome, and let’s recap: time runs slow in the moving frame, so force applies slow. Thus mass appears huge. In the end, time dilation blocks completely the application of force F, so the particle never reaches the speed of light. The explanation is transparent, from first principles.

It could be presented in a cartoon for primary school children, and be understood, the way all fundamental physics should be.

Patrice Ayme’  

Quantum Fluctuates (Not That Much)

The Multiverse fanatics use “Quantum Fluctuations” to justify the existence of the… Universe. Their logic rests on the famous, and deep, inequality:

(Time Uncertainty) (Energy Uncertainty) > (Planck Constant).

I have an accompanying drawing of sorts which relates the preceding to the better known inequality called the “Uncertainty Principle”:

(Uncertainty Position) (Uncertainty Momentum) > (Planck Constant = h).

Uncertainty actually is not as much a “Principle” as a theorem (both inequalities are demonstrated below). The entire subject is very interesting philosophically, as we will see. The lessons are far-ranging, and all over. Yet recent physics textbooks have been eschewing the philosophical character of what is done, within the logic of physics, and stick to soulless formalism. The result has been an entire generation ill-equipped to handle philosophical questions (and yet, they are now forced to do so). Before I get into the philosophy, which appear later, let me roll out the basic physics.

Time And Energy Are Entangled, And This Is The Easiest Proof

OK, let’s give a few more details (hidden by implication arrows above). The Position-Momentum inequality is rather obvious, once one has got the basic quantum picture of the photon as a wave, and how it relates to energy.

1. To locate an object V, one needs to see it. That means ricochet a photon of it (we have nothing better than photons to see… Although some French guy got the Nobel for seeing photons with atomic phase changes, but that’s another story).
2. So throw photon P on V. To hit V, P needs a smaller wavelength W than L, the diameter of V. Otherwise, P being a wave when it moves, or, more exactly, explores space supraluminally, it will turn around V.
3. The momentum of the photon P is inverse to W. [This is Energy = h (Frequency)]
4. So the smaller L, the harder the photon P will hit the object V. That is, the smaller the localization of V, the greater the momentum of V.

So localizing a particle kicks it. How do we get to Energy-Time Uncertainty from there? The Standard Model (which is proven and consistent in its present very restricted domain: no gravity, etc.) has three classes of particles, one of them the class of force carriers. Force carriers go at the speed of light, c, and (thus) have zero mass (the Higgs gives them the appearance of mass as an afterthought).

So what do I do? Well momentum is basically energy (make c = 1), and time is space (thanks to c, measuring time is measuring space and reciprocally). Thus Position-Momentum becomes Time-Energy (the “real” proof as found in Messiah’s basic QM textbook involves functional analytic manipulations, but I doubt it really says more!)

[There are slick derivations of Time-Energy relationship using functional analysis. I am not so sure they make sense… As time is not really an observable in Quantum Physics. My primitive derivation found in the drawing is extremely basic, thus much more powerful. Their main advantage would be to mesmerize undergraduate.]

How Quantum Field Theory (QFT) Blossomed:

Philosophically, the rise of QFT is all about inventing new weird logics. Modern logic comprises Classical Logic, but has gone much further (multivalued logic, fuzzy logic, paradoxal logic, to quote just a few). Basically it has gone in realms where all the rules of classical logic fail. And physics has not come short, but made equally impressive contributions in weirdness.

Let me hasten to add that I find all this very valuable. De Broglie made reasonings I still do not understand. Dirac got the idea that the wave (equation) should be the primary axiom (getting spinor space, where electrons roam, from it, and then spin, anti-matter, etc.).

In QFT the Time-Energy Uncertainty plays a central role, and what is done is actually philosophically fascinating, and should inform the rest of philosophy:

1. Time-Energy Uncertainty prevents to know fundamental processes if the product of uncertainty in Time, multiplied by the uncertainty in Energy is less than a constant (h).
2. Thus, should such HIDDEN Fundamental Processes (HFP) occur, we won’t be able to detect them directly.
3. Hence let’s suppose such HFP happen. Then let’s compute. We discover renormalization, and find end results which are different from those without the HFP.
4. Check experimentally. What is found is that physics with HFP is correct, and physics without HFP is not.
5. Einstein tried, but gave up on all this, after his friend Ehrenfest tried to teach them to him for three weeks at Princeton.

Philosophical lesson? Something can be hidden, in principle, and still have indirect, observable effects. (Application in politics? Think of the plutocrats’ most vicious ways, unobservable, in principle, as the media they control make sure of it. Yet, indirectly they are poisoning the world, and the world is dying.)

Some of Today’s Physicists Are Easily Philosophically Confused:

But let’s go back to pataphysics, it’s lot of fun. In the so-called Big Boom, time is supposed to go to zero. Pataphysicists reason that, then, as the uncertainty in time goes down to zero, the uncertainty in energy has got to tend to infinity. First problem: it’s not because the uncertainty on something goes to infinity, that this thing goes to infinity.

But the main problem is the easy way in which the time-energy uncertainty was derived above. If only that reasoning makes sense, it applies to particles, and even virtual particles (although some fully active physicists consider those virtual particles do not exist, only fields do, and Feynman himself was not sure, private conversation). Thus the reasoning above justifies Quantum Fluctuations as they are used in Quantum Field Theory… and, indeed, they are clearly a safe and effective theory there. They work so well that, according to EFFECTIVE ONTOLOGY, those virtual particles ought to exist (I am aware of the arguments against them, more on that another time).

Thus that particles can flicker in and out of existence because of Quantum Fluctuations, I have not only demonstrated in my very primitive (and thus very safe and effective) way, but nobody in the know can deny it happens, since QFT works, and proves the concept . During their brief existence, those virtual particles (or field fluctuations represented by particles, some sophists will insist) affect charge, mass, etc. and these renormalizations have been observed.

Notice that I said: flicker in and OUT of existence. Why OUT of existence?  These particles flicker OUT of existence because of ENERGY CONSERVATION. Notice also that the universe does not flicker out of existence.

Pataphysicists Throw The Baby Out, And Drink The Dirty Water:

Physics is the search of basic axioms and the logic to bring them to life. One of these basic axioms is energy conservation.

This is what the pataphysicists propose to violate, as if they were Saudi paedophiles. Now violations can be justified in extraordinary circumstances (after all Aisha, who Muhammad married when she was six, came to love the Prophet more than any of his followers, and defended his work with her life, after His passing).

However the Big Boom theory of the creation of the universe is not such a great miracle, that it has to be preserved at all cost.

One should not throw the baby with the bath. Nor should one throw the baby out to preserve the dirty bath water. The precious baby is the principle of energy conservation. The dirty bath water is the Big Boom theory. That Big Bang already requires space to expand at zillion of times the speed of light. I have nothing against it, except it looks ad hoc. Pataphysicists have also smelled a rotten rat there, with that one and only, ad hoc  inflation, too, so they say:

“Look at a blade of grass. What do you see? A blade of grass. But look beyond: here is another one blade of grass, and another, and another. Zillions of blades of grass. Then look at planets: zillions, And at stars: zillions, and galaxies too: zillions. Thus universes? Zillions too!”

It reminds me of the fable of the frog who wanted to make itself bigger than an ox. It was doing well, inflating itself, until it exploded in a Big Bang. Pataphysicists can inflate their minds as much as they want, it’s still all wind inside. Time-Energy uncertainty applies to Quantum Fields, inasmuch as it respects energy conservation. Agreed, it is only natural that those who got reputations out of nothing, feel now confident that they can get a universe out of nothing. After all, it’s what their existence is all about.

And the weirdest thing? There is a simple, a simpler, alternative to all the madness: the 100 billion years universe. We will see who wins. This is going to be fun.

Patrice Ayme’

Is “Spacetime” Important?

Revolutions spawn from, and contributes to, the revolutionary mood. It is no coincidence that many revolutionary ideas in science: Chemistry (Lavoisier), Biological Evolution (Lamarck), Lagrangians, Black Holes,, Fourier Analysis, Thermodynamics (Carnot), Wave Optics, (Young, Poisson), Ampere’s Electrodynamics spawned roughly at the same time and place, around the French Revolution.

In the Encyclopedie, under the term dimension Jean le Rond d’Alembert speculated that time might be considered a fourth dimension… if the idea was not too novel. Joseph Louis Lagrange in his ), wrote that: “One may view mechanics as a geometry of four dimensions…” (Theory of Analytic Functions, 1797.) The idea of spacetime is to view reality as a four dimensional manifold, something measured by the “Real Line” going in four directions.

There is, it turns out a huge problem with this: R, the real line, has what is called a separated topology: points have distinct neighborhoods. However, the QUANTUM world is not like that, not at all. Countless experiments, and the most basic logic, show this:

Reality Does Not Care About Speed, & The Relativity It Brings

Manifolds were defined by Bernhard Riemann in 1866 (shortly before he died, still young, of tuberculosis). A manifold is made of chunks (technically: neighborhoods), each of them diffeomorphic to a neighborhood in R^n (thus a deformed piece of R^n, see tech annex).

Einstein admitted that there was a huge problem with the “now” in physics (even if one confines oneself to his own set-ups in Relativity theories). Worse: the Quantum changes completely the problem of the “now”… Let alone the “here”.

In 1905, Henri Poincaré showed that by taking time to be an imaginary fourth spacetime coordinate (√−1 c t), a Lorentz transformation can be regarded as a rotation of coordinates in a four-dimensional Euclidean space with three real coordinates representing space, and one imaginary coordinate, representing time, as the fourth dimension.

— Hermann Minkowski, 1907, Einstein’s professor in Zurich concluded: “The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.”

This remark rests on Lorentz’s work, how to go from coordinates (x, t) to (x’, t’). In the simplest case:

C is the speed of light. Lorentz found one needed such transformations to respect electrodynamics. If v/c is zero (as it is if one suppose the speed v to be negligible  relative to c, the speed of light infinite), one gets:

t = t’

x’ = x – vt

The first equation exhibits universal time: time does not depend upon the frame of reference. But notice that the second equation mixes space and time already. Thus, philosophically speaking, proclaiming “spacetime” could have been done before. Now, in so-called “General Relativity”, there are problems with “time-like” geodesics (but they would surface long after Minkowski’s death).

Another problem with conceptually equating time and space is that time is not space: space dimensions have a plus sign, time a minus sign (something Quantum Field Theory often ignores by putting pluses everywhere in computations)

In any case, I hope this makes clear that, philosophically, just looking at the equations, “spacetime” does not have to be an important concept.

And Quantum Physics seems to say that it is not: the QUANTUM INTERACTION (QI; my neologism) is (apparently, so far) INSTANTANEOUS (like old fashion time).

As we saw precedingly (“Can Space Be Faster Than Light“), the top cosmologists are arguing whether the speed of space can be viewed as faster than light. Call that the Cosmic Inflation Interaction (CII; it has its own hypothesized exchange particle, the “Inflaton”). We see that c, the speed of light is less than CII, and may, or may not be related to QI (standard Quantum Physics implicitly assumes that the speed of the Quantum Interaction QI is infinite).

One thing is sure: we are very far from TOE, the “Theory Of Everything”, which physicists anxious to appear as the world’s smartest organisms, with all the power and wealth to go with it, taunted for decades.

Patrice Ayme’

Tech Annex: R is the real line, RxR = R^2, the plane, RxRxR = R^3 the usual three dimensional space, etc. Spacetime was initially viewed as just RxRxRxR = R^4.]What does diffeomorphic mean? It means a copy which can be shrunk or dilated somewhat in all imaginable ways, perhaps (but without breaks, and so that all points can be tracked; a diffeomorphism does this, and so do all its derivatives).

Time for Cause & Effect?

Cause, effect, and time are all mysteries at this point. As far as Physics is concerned.

When I was a young chicken, learning physics, pecking around the way chicken do, I came upon “the Arrow of Time”. At the time, the question about the nature of time was all about “Entropy” and the “Second Law of Thermodynamics”. How quaint it seems now that I got much wiser!

Entropy is about “states”. The “Second Law” says that processes augment the number of states, as time goes by.

The most basic question is then: ”What is a state?”

People in thermodynamics thought they had an answer. And, in a way, they do, like a car mechanics is full of answers about the state of your car.

Mechanics Getting Weirder: Are There Wormholes?

[Yes, these distorted things are distant galaxies, viewed through the wormhole. The picture, from the excellent movie “Interstellar” depicts how a wormhole in spacetime would appear at close range; the little flower is the rotating spaceship. Interstellar represents an Earth where society has pursued its way down the abyss, thanks to the anti-science, anti-rationality movement in evidence nowadays. NASA went underground… Something not far removed from its present state, where tantalizing clues for life on Mars are left unexamined, because of the anti-nuclear movement… Long story, another time.]

However, nature is a Quantum car. And mechanics have nothing to say about it. Quantum Physics has its own notion of state. Moreover, in the meantime, the very notion of time and causality came under attack. From an unexpected corner.

It was simple enough when Lorentz and Poincaré introduced the notion of “local time”. Time was relative (Poincaré Relativity Principle, 1904): it depended upon one’s state of motion. In a local frame moving fast, time slows down (relative to the friend who did not get on that speedy rocket).

Einstein then observed that if a local time was accelerated, it would also slow down. Einstein somehow hoped to extract from this “General Theory of Relativity” a cause for inertia, but he failed (and could only fail, as GTR is local, not global). He ended up with just a Theory of Gravitation (Fock), a better and much improved version of the one of 1700, true… But still GTR is articulated basically the same equation arising from Ismael Bullialdus considerations in 1645 (and then Huygens, Borelli, Hooke, etc.)

Enter Quantum Physics. There time is absolute (oops). Locally absolute over an extent. Why? Because each Quantum processes are logically and mathematically analyzed in a particular space, relative to said process, and GLOBALLY therein (here is that global concept Einstein was desperately searching for, as he craved for inertia as a global phenomenon, following Newton and Mach).

That particular space relative to that particular process is not just two dimensional (as in the famed double slit experiment), it can be pretty much anything that can be depicted as a Hilbert space (consider Dirac Spinor space).

In the past, before 1904, one could consider that if something A preceded something else B, in time, A could have “caused” B. However local time already messes up with that situation (consider closed time loops in GTR; reference: just released movie Interstellar, a respected relativist, Thorne, made discoveries while consulting for the movie).

Quantum Physics makes causation a worse consideration than ever. As it stands, the Quantum is Non-Local. No need to get into Spin and Bell, to figure that one out: the analysis in Quantum Hilbert space uses time only as a one parameter transformation group, it’s intrinsically Non-Local (hence the famed “Collapse of the Wave Packet).

If a physicist changes a spin axis on Earth, does it do something to the second member of the entangled photon pair he sent to Beta Centauri? Instantaneously? Really? No one knows for sure (and I don’t believe the “instantaneous” part), but the present Quantum formalism (sort of) says it does.

Paradoxically, all of this debate about cause and effect has become very practical, in the most fundamental domain possible, Quantum Physics. As real physics moves away from the multiverse derangement syndrome, it ponders using, as nature and biology, and even evolution do, the Quantum.

Indeed, even biology uses the Quantum to compute, and find best solutions (as was demonstrated in the case of the chlorophyll molecule; much more examples are on the way, including that will demonstrate how a type of Lamarckian evolution works).

However “what causes what” has stood in the way of making Quantum Computers. Real physicists and engineers have been trying to get a handle on causation. One wants to isolate the process of computation, yet get it impacted by complicated inputs, and only these.

Time to spend some money on all this (that means re-direct the economy that way).

Patrice Ayme’

QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT: Nature’s Faster Than Light Architecture

A drastically back-to-basic reasoning shows that the universe is held together and ordered by a Faster Than Light Interaction, QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT. Nature is beautifully simple and clever.

(For those who spurn Physics, let me point out that Quantum Entanglement, being the Fundamental Process, occurs massively in the brain. Thus explaining the non-local nature of consciousness.)

***

The Universe is held together by an entangled, faster than light interaction. It is time to talk about it, instead of the (related) idiocy of the “multiverse”. OK, it is easier to talk idiotically than to talk smart.

Entanglement Propagates, Says the National Science Foundation (NSF)

I will present Entanglement in such a simple way, that nobody spoke of it that way before.

Suppose that out of an interaction, or system S, come two particles, and only two particles, X and Y. Suppose the energy of S is known, that position is the origin of the coordinates one is using, and that its momentum is zero.

By conservation of momentum, momentum of X is equal to minus momentum of Y.

In Classical Mechanics, knowing where X is tells us immediately where Y is.

One can say that the system made of X and Y is entangled. Call that CLASSICAL ENTANGLEMENT.

This is fully understood, and not surprising: even Newton would have understood it perfectly.

The same situation holds in Quantum Physics.

This is not surprising: Quantum Physics ought not to contradict Classical Mechanics, because the latter is fully demonstrated, at least for macroscopic objects X and Y. So why not for smaller ones?

So far, so good.

In Quantum Physics, Classical Entanglement gets a new name. It is called QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT. It shows up as a “paradox”, the EPR.

That paradox makes the greatest physicists freak out, starting with Einstein, who called QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT “spooky action at a distance”.

Why are physicists so shocked that what happens in Classical Mechanics would also be true in Quantum Physics?

Some say John Bell, chief theorist at CERN, “solved” the EPR Paradox, in 1964. Not so. Bell, who unfortunately died of a heart attack at 64, showed that the problem was real.

So what’s the problem? We have to go back to what is the fundamental axiom of Quantum Physics (Note 1). Here it is:

De Broglie decreed in 1924 that all and any particle X of energy-momentum (E,p) is associated to a wave W. That wave W s uniquely defined by E and p. So one can symbolize this by: W(E,p).

W(E,p) determines in turn the behavior of X. In particular all its interactions.

De Broglie’s obscure reasoning seems to have been understood by (nearly) no one to this day. However it was checked right away for electrons, and De Broglie got the Nobel all for himself within three years of his thesis.

Most of basics Quantum Mechanics is in De Broglie’s insight. Not just the “Schrodinger” equation, but the Uncertainty Principle.

Why?

Take a “particle X”. Let’s try to find out where it is. Well, that means we will have to interact with it. Wait, if we interact, it is a wave W. How does one find the position of a wave? Well the answer is that one cannot: when one tries to corner a wave, it becomes vicious, as everybody familiar with the sea will testify. Thus to try to find the position of a particle X makes its wave develop great momentum.

A few years after De Broglie’s seminal work, Heisenberg explained that in detail in the particular case of trying to find where an electron is, by throwing a photon on it.

This consequence of De Broglie’s Wave Principle was well understood in several ways, and got to be known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle:

(Uncertainty of Position)(Uncertainty of Momentum) > (Planck Constant)

[Roughly.]

The Quantum Wave, and thus the Uncertainty, applies to any “particle” (it could be a truck).

It is crucial to understand what the Uncertainty Principle says. In light of all particles being waves (so to speak), the Uncertainty Principle says that, AT NO MOMENT DOES A PARTICLE HAVE, EVER, A PERFECTLY DEFINED MOMENTUM and POSITION.

It would contradict the “particle’s” wavy nature. It’s always this question of putting a wave into a box: you cannot reduce the box to a point. There are NO POINTS in physics.

Now we are set to understand why Quantum Entanglement created great anxiety. Let’s go back to our two entangled particles, X and Y, sole, albeit not lonely, daughters of system S. Suppose X and Y are a light year apart.

Measure the momentum of X, at universal time t (Relativity allows to do this, thanks to a process of slow synchronization of clocks described by Poincare’ and certified later by Einstein). The momentum of Y is equal and opposite.

But, wait, at same time t, the position of Y could be determined.

Thus the Uncertainty Principle would be violated at time t at Y: one could retrospectively fully determine Y’s momentum and position, and Y would have revealed itself to be, at that particular time t, a vulgar point-particle… As in Classical Mechanics. But there are no point-particles in Quantum Physics:  that is, no point in Nature, that’s the whole point!).

Contradiction.

(This contradiction is conventionally called the “EPR Paradox”; it probably ought to be called the De Broglie-Einstein-Popper Paradox, or, simply, the Non-Locality Paradox.)

This is the essence of why Quantum Entanglement makes physicists with brains freak out. I myself have thought of this problem, very hard, for decades. However, very early on, I found none of the solutions by the great names presented to be satisfactory. And so I developed my own. The more time passes, the more I believe in it.

A difficulty I had is my theory created lots of cosmic garbage, if true (;-)).

At this point, Albert Einstein and his sidekicks (one of them was just used to translate from Einstein’s German) wrote:

“We are thus forced to conclude that the quantum-mechanical description of physical reality given by wave functions is not complete.” [Einstein, A; B Podolsky; N Rosen (1935-05-15). “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality be Considered Complete?”. Physical Review 47 (10): 777–780.]

The EPR paper ends by saying:

“While we have thus shown that the wave function does not provide a complete description of the physical reality, we left open the question of whether or not such a description exists. We believe, however, that such a theory is possible.”

This is high lawyerese: even as vicious a critic as your humble servant cannot find anything wrong with this craftily composed conceptology.

Einstein had corresponded on the subject with the excellent philosopher Karl Popper earlier (and Popper found his own version of the EPR). This is no doubt while he was more circumspect that he had been before.

Let’s recapitulate the problem, my way.

After interacting, according to the WAVE PRINCIPLE, both widely separating particles X and Y share the SAME WAVE.

I talk, I talk, but this is what the equations that all physicists write say: SAME WAVE. They can write all the equations they want, I think about them.

That wave is non-local, and yes, it could be a light year across. Einstein had a problem with that? I don’t.

Those who cling to the past, tried everything to explain away the Non-Locality Paradox.

Einstein was a particular man, and the beginning of the EPR paper clearly shows he wants to cling back to particles, what I view as his error of 1905. Namely that particles are particles during fundamental processes (he got the Physics Nobel for it in 1922; however, as I will not get the Nobel, I am not afraid to declare the Nobel Committee in error; Einstein deserved several Nobels, yet he made a grievous error in 1905, which has led most physicists astray, to this day… hence the striking madness of the so-called “multiverse”).

The Bell Inequality (which Richard Feynman stole for himself!) conclusively demonstrated that experiments could be made to check whether the Quantum Non-Local effects would show up.

The experiments were conducted, and the Non-Local effects were found.

That they would not have been found would have shattered Quantum Physics completely. Indeed, all the modern formalism of Quantum Physics is about Non-Locality, right from the start.

So what is my vision of what is going on? Simple: when one determines, through an interaction I, the momentum of particle X, the wave made of X and Y, W(X,Y), so to speak, “collapses”, and transmits the fact of I to particle Y at faster than light speed TAU. (I have computed that TAU is more than 10^10 the speed of light, c; Chinese scientists have given a minimum value for TAU, 10^4 c)

Then Y reacts as if it had been touched. Because, well, it has been touched: amoebae-like, it may have extended a light year, or more.

Quantum Entanglement will turn into Einstein’s worst nightmare. Informed, and all around, quasi-instantaneously. Tell me, Albert, how does it feel to have thought for a while one had figured out the universe, and then, now, clearly, not at all?

(Why not? I did not stay stuck, as Einstein did, making metaphors from moving trains, clocks, etc; a first problem with clocks is that Quantum Physics does not treat time and space equivalently. Actually the whole Quantum conceptology is an offense to hard core Relativity.)

Faster than light entanglement is a new way to look at Nature. It will have consequences all over. Indeed particles bump into each other all the time, so they get entangled. This immediately implies that topology is important to classify, and uncover hundreds of states of matter that we did not suspect existed. None of this is idle: Entanglement  is central to Quantum Computing.

Entanglement’s consequences, from philosophy to technology, are going to dwarf all prior science.

Can we make predictions, from this spectacular, faster than light, new way to look at Nature?

Yes.

Dark Matter. [2]

Patrice Ayme’

***

[1]: That the De Broglie Principle, the Wave Principle implies Planck’s work is my idea, it’s not conventional Quantum as found in textbooks.

[2]: Interaction density depends upon matter density. I propose that Dark Matter is the remnants of waves that were too spread-out to be fully brought back by Quantum Wave Collapse. In low matter density, thus, will Dark Matter be generated. As observed.

Time Flies For Flies

I am an intellectual. I believe we are all intellectuals. Even animals and plutocrats think. It’s Descartes, upside down: Animals Think, Therefore They Survive.

I developed my idea that “INSTINCT IS FAST LEARNING.”

Time perception can only reflect how rapidly an animal’s nervous system processes information. To test this, researchers show animals a flashing light. If the light flashes quickly enough, animals perceive it as a solid, unblinking light: this is the principle of the movies.

Beyond 60 frames per second humans see a continuous motion; yet, anyone who has tried to catch a fly or a lizard know they move, and decide to move, faster than humans.

Time Is Relative In More Ways Than One

This gives a window for a lot of learning to happen in a bee, that looks like instinct.

The animal’s behavior or its brain activity reveal the highest frequency at which each species perceives the light as flashing. Animals that detect blinking at higher frequencies perceive time in a more frequent manner. Movements, events, learning itself, unfold more slowly to them—think slow-motion bullet dodging as recent movies.

The smaller the animals, the easier it is to turn them into dinner. So the more reactive they have to be, to dodge the bullets. Thus one would expect that species perceiving time more slowly to be smaller and have faster metabolisms. This is (roughly) was is observed (although some of the results are dissonant, maybe an experimental artifact: rats may be slow visually, but fast olfactively, say).

“Ecology for an organism is all about finding a niche where you can succeed that no-one else can occupy,” Andrew Jackson, an author of the study in Animal Behavior said. “Our results suggest that time perception offers an as yet unstudied dimension along which animals can specialize and there is considerable scope to study this system in more detail. We are beginning to understand that there is a whole world of detail out there that only some animals can perceive and it’s fascinating to think of how they might perceive the world differently to us.”

Flies, or plutocrats, may not think deep, but they think fast. And they cannot think deep, because they think fast. The most exploitative philosophy is thus the fastest, and shallowest. That is no doubt why, in one of his variants, the Devil, Pluto, Belzebuth, was represented as Lord of the Flies.

Patrice Ayme’

(Connoisseurs of Nazi philosophy will appreciate the connection with Heidegger’s “Sein Und Zeit“. Time is, indeed, the Dasein. As with a computer clock: no clock, no computer.)

TIME DILATION

No subject is more important than time. Time rules the universe, thus wisdom. Just announced research breakthroughs in rejuvenation (at least in cells and mice) give hope to those who view aging as the disease it is. Eternal life, will, no doubt, make higher wisdom more precious.

About a century ago, the Theory of Relativity caused a huge ruckus, mostly because of its prediction of TIME DILATION. Now we got used to time extension from fast motion: it has been thoroughly checked experimentally, big time. Yet, it is important to understand that Time Dilation is NEARLY A TRIVIAL OBSERVATION, once the correct axiomatics is in.

Light Clock, Universal Clock

[The picture above, going back conceptually to the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 CE, also basically holds during acceleration: then the straight lines just become stretchy and curvaceous!]

Having the correct axiomatics is crucial, for further advances in philosophy and physics. Correct axiomatics allows to observe the true facts and the important theorems. Axiomatics is the metalogic: it is more important than the logic it gives rise to.

In both philosophy and physics, the understanding of time, even by supposedly top notch researchers, seems to be lagging.

When a train passes by at speed v, the time therein does not just appear slow, it is slow. It is easy to understand why. At least, so I claim, and I will demonstrate.

Suppose Alice and Sophia are on the ground (visualize a flat Earth of infinite extent, to simplify the context). They measure time, each with their personal light clock.

A light clock is an idealized clock consisting of two mirrors, between which light, a bunch of photons, is reflected. One simply counts the beat of reflecting photons, and call that time. The light clock is a time constructor. (See: Constructing Time, for the basics. Light Clocks are the conceptually simplest of the four known types of clocks.)

By letting some of the light leak, my style of light clock comes with a pulsating tail of light.

(It could be some sort of permanently pumped laser, at a fixed frequency, f. Then all can see the photon beats pulsate outside.)

Let Sophia take off for space. What does that mean? She accelerates (say with constant acceleration A). The light tail of her clock elongates, stretches. From Alice’s viewpoint, the beat of Sophia’s light clock goes down.

Why? Count the beats of Sophia’s clock: S0, S1, S2, S3, … Sn, S(n+1), … With S0 being take-off. The corresponding beats of Alice’s clock are every dt, with A0 = S0. When S1 occurs, Sophia’s clock is at distance (1/2) a(dt)^2. So the reception of the beat of Sophia’s clock is not instantaneous: it is delayed by the time light takes to cover that distance, namely:

(1/2c) a(dt)^2.

The situation is even worse with the next beat, at time 2(dt).

And so on and so forth. So, from Alice’s point of view, Sophia clock slows down ever more, as long as Sophia is accelerating away at acceleration A.

What happens when Alice looks within Sophia’s spaceship? The same situation exactly. As the photon bunch comes down to meet the on-rushing mirror, and it meets it early, the mirror it came from recesses, by as much (we assume everything in Sophia’s spaceship is hyper rigid). So when the photon bunch catches up with the starting mirror, to complete the beat, it has to cover double that, PLUS the supplementary distance covered by the initial mirror, due to the on-going acceleration.

So Sophia’s time, as observed by Alice, is slow and getting ever slower, as long as the acceleration A persists.

When the acceleration stops, Sophia’s time stops slowing down. It is now just slow. By as much as it slowed down during the acceleration (that’s why the usual approach of Relativity textbooks is dumb: they neglect the accelerative process, so students cannot understand how the slowing down arose).

Once Sophia has reached her cruise speed V, a precise computation (found in all serious relativity books) involving only the speed V, shows  that Sophia’s time is Alice’s time, multiplied by:

Square Root (1- VV/cc).

The effect has to do with the light in the moving frame having to cover a distance than is ever greater, the greater the speed V of the moving clock. The mathematics is Babylonian level (Pythagoras theorem was discovered earlier, in Egypt, and Babylon).

So when V approaches c, Sophia’s time slows down enormously.

The effect has been checked on elementary particles that decay after a set time. When they travel very fast, their lifespan augments by:

1/square root(1-VV/cc).

An arbitrarily large number as V approaches c.

***

Some may wonder: if Time Dilation is such a triviality, what the big noise about it, and where is the “Relativity” in all this?

“Relativity” is hidden below the surface in two ways:

1.In the fact that Henri Poincaré’ s law of the constancy of the speed of light was implicitly used during the computations… Which indeed had to do with relative speeds, or relative accelerations.

2.In identifying light clock time with time in general. Otherwise Sophia could tell, from within the spaceship, without looking outside, whether she is moving uniformly. That would violate the “Principle of Relativity” of Galileo according to which such a motion is not detectable (Henri Poincaré generalized to electromagnetism what he baptized at the time the “Principle of Relativity” in 1904, while he was lecturing among the savages of the New World; unsurprisingly, they don’t remember, and attribute the work to Einstein, ironically enough).

The direct approach above is primary school level. It also directly makes the so called “Twin Paradox” into an absurdity.  Instead, of just hand waving that said paradox is not valid, as Feynman does in his excellent Lectures on Physics, because one twin was accelerated, and the other not, I tackle that from the start, as it should be.

The simpler, the deeper.

Patrice Aymé