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Physicists War Over a Unified Theory
beggs writes: "I was looking through the New York Times and came across an article which talks about a new front in the war to find a unified theory, but this one does not come from the particle physicists, it comes from the solid state physicists. Here is a little quote for wet your appetite: 'some solid-state physicists are trying to show that the laws of relativity, long considered part of the very bedrock of the physical world, are not platonic truths that have existed since time began.'"
I haven't read the article yet, by knee jerks in that direction. I'll go read now.
Carl G. Jung
--
"With one breath, with one flow, You will know Synchronicity" -La Policia
General relativity didn't start until, like 1916 or something.
I think I'll stop here.
deconstructionist physics?
Well, darn, so much for transporters.
By the way, am I the only one that thinks Dr. Robert B. Laughlin looks like Clinton? Probably. oh well.
Ah! Don't you get it?
As the scale of that which we wish to discover becomes smaller the price tag increases and so the rate of actual discovery decreases.
Engineering and the quest to pave the entire surface of the earth is an investment that bears more immediate fruit and gets more immediate dollars.
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.
OT, but god I loved that game!
Kalabajoui - Thanks for the quote!
In contrast, I haven't been able to stand CivIII, which strikes me as tepid and shallow. Yeah, I know actually winning at CivIII is complex, but the depth of the surrounding story just isn't there. I think with Alpha Centauri, there was no actual history to leverage; you can't just "look it up" like you can with the (more or less) historically accurate civilizations in CivIII. Therefore, AC needed a lot more story and background development. In my book, they did a great job too! I've said this before, but one of AC's unique qualities was forcing the player to explore ideologies, not just unit strategy.
I think I'll go play AC sometime soon again. In retrospect, it might have been better if I'd never played the game. It's not only addictive, but it set the bar too high for subsequent games. I personally consider AC to be Sid's masterpiece. CivIII is probably everyone else's pick I know, but bah to that I say.
:)
Also - if anyone would comment on the "sweet spot" in CivIII, I'd love to hear it. What's the draw for you? I definitely haven't found the groove yet.
(Jeez, how much more OT can I get? My karma shall surely suffer.)
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
That should be:
Here is a little quote to whet your appetite.
For "for" is not "to" and to "wet" is to dampen while to "whet" is to sharpen.
The dictionary is your friend.
Where is this story coming from? Is it a reliable source? It hasn't appeared on any of the news wires or any of the other news sources available - as of five minutes ago. The story has all the earmarks of an urban legend - if the anal lacerations are said to be caused by a gerbil you've GOT to know that it's a hoax.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. - anon.
GNUniverse's Not (the) Universe
sigs are for suckers
If they do, then the quote from the following text will lead to 21st century science (that really should have been 20th century science but for some rather unfortunate concepts born of the Continental -- primarily German/Swiss -- physicists):
Thus we find that the concept of linking, which before led us immediately to the heart of quantum mechanics, has now led us immediately to the heart of relativity!
Out takes from Process System and Causality and "Reflections" on same.
Most discussions of the meaning of quantum mechanics these days seem to be about the problem of the "collapse of the wave function." In link theory this problem simply vanishes, since there is no wave function to collapse. Imagine if the Eighteenth Century caloric were still hanging around as the official theory of heat: we'd be chronically plagued by ever more complicated theories explaining the collapse of the "caloric field" when you measure an atom's energy. What a relief to get away from the spell of such nonsense!
This large-number explanation of quantum mechanics raises two basic questions: Large numbers of what? and Must we buy it?
The answer to the first question is implicit in the above discussion, but needs to be said simply: The things we count large numbers of are cases. Simple arithmetic reveals that the core quantum laws, in a generalized form, are features of any probabilistic system whatsoever. Von Neumann's formulation of the Born probability rule prob(P) = trace(PS) holds at every connection between the parts of such a system, and the dynamical rule S'T = TS governs every part that is connected at two places.
I brought up caloric to draw a parallel between our present situation and the situation in physics when it was discovered that the laws governing heat could be interpreted as statistical laws of atomic motion. However, there is a big difference. In the case of heat, the statistical theory sat on top of the Newtonian theory of motion, whereas in our case there is no underlying empirical theory at all. Probability theory is just the arithmetic of case counting, so the generalized quantum laws are like xy = yx in that their truth is assured, the only empirical issue being where and when they apply.
The answer to the second question is no, we don't have to. However, the same can be said about the arithmetical explanation of five fields with ten sheep each. It's logically possible that when true tranquillity reigns, the gods always make sure that every field contains ten sheep (presumably the age of true tranquillity is long since past). It's also logically possible that the non-local "guide wave" explanation of quantum phenomena is the right one. With both sheep and quantum, the arithmetical explanation makes so much more sense that it would be most malicious of the gods to reject it just to save our old habits of thought.
We'll see that there is another reason to prefer the arithmetical explanation, which is that, as our discussion of Markov processes suggests, it also applies to classical things like computers. This at last enables us to make sense of quantum measurement, which has always been a great mystery. Quantum and classical now stand revealed as two "shapes" made of the same stuff, so there is nothing more mysterious about their both being parts of the same process than there is about round wheels and square windows both being parts of the same car. The radical path also leads to a good Kantian solution of Hume's problem, which is that of finding causality in the order of succession, and we'll see that the choice between acausal and causal/classical thinking is to some extent a choice of analytical method, like the choice between polar and rectilinear coordinates.
Boost theorem. u = (v+v')/(1+vv'), i.e., taking the velocity of light be 1, the velocities of linked binary variables satisfy the relativistic addition law.
Proof: Let p and q be the probabilities of HEADS and TAILS for V, and similarly let p' and q' for V'. Then v = p-q and v' = p'-q', and from the definition of linking one can quickly verify that u = (pp'-qq')/ (pp'+qq'). Thus we must show that (pp'-qq')/(pp'+qq') = (p-q+p'-q')/ (1-(p-q)(p'-q'). Now in fact these two expressions are not identical as they stand, but only become identical when we bring in the additional fact that probabilities add up to one, i.e. p+q = p'+q' = 1. The easiest way to take these conditions into account is to note that v = (p-q)/(p+q) and v' = (p'-q')/(p'+q') and substitute these expressions for v and v' in (v+v')/(1+vv'); the resulting expression then reduces to (pp'-qq')/(pp'+qq'). QED.
Applied to observer and object, the boost law implies the Lorenz transformation.
Thus we find that the concept of linking, which before led us immediately to the heart of quantum mechanics, has now led us immediately to the heart of relativity!
There is still a lot of work to be done to relate the above theorem to the concept of "probability space" based on separability. One approach here may be to interpret "time lines" as binary Markov chains from which the LEFT-RIGHT variables are abstracted statistically. 1x1 space-time would then be the indefinite process that results from linking these velocity variables in an unspecified collection of such chains. Notice the formal resemblance here to our construction of complex amplitudes, which also resulted from linking an indefinite set of processes via a binary phase variable.
The question arises whether this resemblance is more than just an analogy. Could it be that at some fundamental level, the phase particle and the "velocity particle" are one and the same? Let's briefly consider where this would lead. Since in (complex) Minkowski space boosts are rotations of the complex plane, this identity would make the relativity of amplitude phase into a generalization of the relativity of motion.
Even more important for the science of the future is that the conjugation symmetry of the phase particle would become the symmetry of v and -v, which is the symmetry that results from reversing object and observer.
Given the importance of computer modeling in today's science, it's hardly an exaggeration to say that, for most scientists, to explain something means to describe it in a way that could in principle be turned into a real-time computer simulation. This belief, which I'll call computerism, usually does not rise to the level of an explicit statement; it's just one of those things that "goes without saying". It's a funny thing about things that go without saying, though, which is that when you actually say them carefully, and then take a close look at what you have said, they sometimes turn out to be wrong!
Is computerism wrong? That's not something I'll take sides on here. However, I have observed that many people hold onto computerism simply because they can't imagine any other possibility. Here is where a proper understanding of Markov processes makes a big difference. It turns out that computers are only a tiny island in the vast sea of formal possibilities encompassed by the general concept of a Markov process. The quantum is another tiny island.
As mentioned, there are also hybrid forms that belong to neither island. The important point is that by no stretch of imagination can the encompassing expanse of Markovian forms be located on Computer Island alone. Quantum structures can't be located there, even quantum computers can't be located there, and most of the remaining expanse isn't even in sight.
Which brings us to the future of science. Physical science grew up in close collaboration with engineering, and for the most part shares with engineering a view of the world as something to be taken apart into functional units. To this the engineer adds the art of reassembling functional units into useful functional wholes; this is called technology. The abstract skeleton of a functional part is a transition matrix, also sometimes called a transfer function, representing the functional dependence of a set of outputs on a set of inputs. In the deterministic or "causal" case, the actual values of the outputs are a function of the values of the inputs, while in the more general case it is only the probabilities of these values that are a function of the inputs. The generality of engineering consists in its being to able to use a small variety of functional parts and design principles to assemble a large variety of useful complex structures.
Here is where I see the broader significance of PSCQM. I believe its chief accomplishment was to mathematically extend the basic conception of lawful change that underlies current scientific practice. This extended lawfulness retains Markovian separability, but no longer requires that we separate things into functional parts. To put it another way, it no longer requires that the internal variables be inputs connected to outputs. The links between parts, and even between past and future, can now have a two-way information flow. This is easy to say, and it turns out to be rather easy to formulate mathematically, but it also turns out to be very hard to digest. Indeed, most of the work since PSCQM has involved trying to digest it. We have studied numerous examples, which provided numerous surprises, and a lot of work has 5 gone into grounding the mathematics at a more fundamental level - we'll come to this in the next section.
Major changes in science are foreshadowed by movements in the culture at large. A variety of cultural movements in modern times, ranging from the counterculture of Woodstock to the arcane isms of Continental philosophy, share a strong discontent with the technocratic narrowness of science as it stands. The broad message here is that nature, including human nature, has many ways of being besides using things. A world that is nothing but functionality is a world fit only to be used. The world of the engineer is an abstraction geared to a particular mode of activity, not the world we live in.
But the world of the engineer is also an enormous intellectual achievement, and there is the problem. It is romantic folly to think that throwing away this achievement would return us to some imagined idyllic state of nature. I would like to think that PSQM offers a hint of a less foolish path. It clearly describes radical alternatives to functional composition that are none-theless accessible to the engineer's mathematical tools. It also shows how these can simply explain some of the more puzzling laws of physics. This is certainly not The Answer, but it does offer hope that there may be ways to steer the intellectual power of science into a better partnership with our real human nature.
Seastead this.