Re: Have a go a tearing this apart ...

Oh, I meant matrix as in "the matrix" the movie :)

Thankyou for taking the time to read my argument and state your
disagreement! I appreciate it, thus far I have only had one response
from a slighly bemused physicist and a long rant from some crank who
immediately assumed I am right and that it supports his crackpot
notions about gravity. I just spent two hours explaining how General
Relativity works and why Newtonian gravity is incorrect. He won't get
it, but making the argument was satisfying. Some people just do not
grasp non-euclidian geometry ... anyway, i digress ... thankyou,
thankyou :)

Before I start my counter argument (you just knew there was gonna be
one right?) I must ask you to perform a thought experiment, forget
everything you know about spacetime for a second, I am not claiming
literal truth here, this is a gedanken designed to break a particularly
entrenched preconception amongst physicists.

Pick a point 3 feet in front of you. Start zooming in on this point.
Eventually you can see individual dust particles, then molecules, then
atoms. Keep going until you get to quarks, and continue all the way
down to the planck length. Then keep going (just assume that the
structures keep on going for ever).Keep doubling the magnification
every three seconds for an infinite period of time, until you have
zoomed in ... infinitely, and have arrived at a point. Where are you ?

Right where you started. Try imagining a spacetime where every point
has this property :) Okay, now, back to the real world.

What preconception am I trying to break? Spacetime is NOT a box :)
Every theory of physics I know of treats spacetime like a "stage", the
players are the particles, and the script is written using partial
differential equations. I just think this is a simplistic way of
looking at things. Newtons box has three dimensions and is euclidian.
Einsteins has four dimensions and is noneuclidian. String theorists are
preoccupied with the notion that an eleven dimenional box that is
nonsensical will solve all their problems :) (apologies if you're a
string fan:)

Ask benoit mandelbrot, there are structures much more interesting than
a simple "box with stuff in it." Personally, I can't see why the
universe must have some nice whole number of "dimensions." It may
posess a fractal dimension of 3.5! What about the whackdaddy notion of
infinite dimensionality? There are possilities. I suspect the universe
is really much stranger, more subtle, and more beatiful that we can
ever imagine in our wildest dreams!

OK :) we're ready!

Paul E. Black wrote:
On Friday 01 September 2006 05:26, Denis.Sjostrom@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
I wish to propose a GUT of physics ...

Geeks don't mind imagining a matrix inside a matrix inside a matrix
inside a matrix etc

This is a tensor. I learned about them from the Physicists while
studying up for quantum computing.

*grin* I think i already explained this. I do not get tensors! (not
strictly true, I just have never employed one in a formal argument;)


http://au.geocities.com/themooproject

Your web page begins by saying a theory of everything "must expose
either QM or GR as 'incorrect'. ... an experiment ... will contradict
either GR or QM or possibly both."

This is conventional wisdom. I am stating that people are confused
about the nature of local and global theory ... the two things really
don't contradict ...


Everybody accepts they are both incorrect in their extremes. But both
work very well in their (vast) contexts. Everybody expects a theory
of everything (ToE) to have QM and GR as special cases. Just as the
Einstein field equations "reduce to Newton's law of gravity in the
limiting cases of a weak gravitational field and slow speed relative
to the speed of light" [1], they expect the ToE to reduce to QM and GR
is special cases.

There exists a one to one correspondence between the natural
numbers and every possible state of the universe.

Interestingly, Newtonian physics (and General Relativity) disagree
with this postulate. It is quantum mechanics and the Heisenberg
uncertainty principle that allow it.


I have to explain something here. I'm not talking about the equations
of physics. I'm talking about properties of equations describing any
universe defined by an isomorphism to the natural numbers. I am
proposing that the consequences exactly match our observations of the
real world. In any such universe you end up with at least two theories,
one local theory, and potentially multiple global theories that cannot
be shown in the local theory, (think algebraic complexity theory)

This is nothing new, It's just godel's second incompleteness theorem in
new clothes. The only radical thing I'm proposing is that
incompleteness really does apply to the real world (because every
possible state of the universe can be ordered) Which gives us an
explanation for why GR and QM may go on working for ever and never
provide contradictory experimental evidence. (This cannot obviously be
formally proven, which is the whole point of my thesis)

god i love algebraic complexity theory :)

Some of your ideas sound like those in Wolfram's "A New Kind of
Science".

I've never read it. I gather he's a big fan of cellular automata. I
dreamed up this crazy notion after considering an inifinitely large,
infinitely complex (consider an infinite number of recursions of
"layered" logic) infinitely fast ... cellular automata. :) It's a bit
hard to describe, but infinitely fast logic gates are a really
interesting thought experiment, I see where he's going (I have read
some of his writings on the web)


quantum logic is just classical logic viewed in an unintuitive
way. Formally, you can derive quantum logic from classical logic
by considering classical systems allowed to evolve for ever. The
probabilities that crop up are the probabilities of finding the
system in any given classical state.

Not so. Quantum mechanics admits of things that Newtonian physics
would never allow. Bell's Inequality proves that QM carries around
information that just isn't there in Newtonian physics. Conside a
simple experiment that you can do for a few dollars worth of
equipment. Begin with a beam of light passing through a polarizer,
like a lens from polarizing sunglasses. A typical beam, such as from
the sun or a flashlight, has its intensity reduced by half.

Suppose we add another polarizer after the first. As we rotate the
polarizer, the beam brightens and dims until it is gone.

Leaving the two polarizers at the minimum, add a third polarizer
between them. As we rotate it, we can get some light to pass through!
How can adding another filter increase the light getting through?
Although tortured classical explanations can be given, sophisticated
versions of this experiment show that Newtonian physics just can't
give the right answer.

Hmm, I must confess to not quite getting Bells inequality. I should
read more. I won't state emphatically that this argument does not apply
unless I can state why.

Consider this however : Even though the predictions that are being made
are counterintuitive and not something that you can't get from
newtonian mechanics. The predictive equations themselves are just
statements of first order logic right? ... There's an algorithm you can
run on a computer that will predict what will happen ...

Thankyou for your response!


-paul-
--
Paul E. Black (p.black@xxxxxxx)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity

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