StrictlyLogical

The pyramids of Egypt perhaps are a greater monument of sorts… a headstone clearly marking the price, the involuntary sacrifice of other lives with greater transparency, a testament to the glory to the vision of the few who wielded power, physical and mental, over the many. For all the promise of what America could and should one day be, the Apollo program is a grim illustration of how man’s development of technology (even perhaps if necessary with the backdrop of a cold war) has outpaced man’s progress in wisdom and morality, in politics and ethics. I for one would rather that technological advances only follow our social and political progress towards individualism … I am sure our voluntary funding of such ventures would have been all the more spiritually pure and clean even if delayed by the decades or perhaps centuries it would have taken us to deserve the pride proper to such an untainted achievement.

Now now...Don't get so cheeky you start to sound like your trolling. physics dark web... lol People like him have been around forever...and you know it.

He could be smart as all heck, but that won't do him any good if, when it comes to philosophy or mysticism, he's out to lunch. He'll just use his knowledge to rationalize his unprovable claims.... I'm not saying that he actually is doing that, only that being smart in Math or Theoretical physics, even VERY smart, is no defense against the kinds of rationalistic, idealism, and reification, type pitfalls can which assail many specialists in those fields. Escaping those pitfalls often requires much more broader vision and ability to make wider integrations than is associated with super specialist smartness... in fact sometimes being incredibly narrowly smart can be a hindrance... and with mathematicians ... they swim in it so much every day, everything can start to look like math.

As soon as he can come up with a prediction which is independently verifiable via experiment (assuming he understands the importance of such in science) which comes out of his theories and contradicts the present models… I will look into his theory of the universe. Until then, I cannot take him seriously.

Have you watched this? Is it worth my time or is he, like Pythagoras, just a Mathematician who has lost it and is claiming the universe IS... well Math?

Can you post a link? Sometimes a TOE (theory of everything) from certain quarters looks more like a TFA ... (Theory For ANYTHING). I can come up with one: Things don't have properties... things do not have location or occupy space, in fact there are no things, there is only space , and space has latent fluctuating properties which we see as things. Space can have density, color, electromagnetic fields, weight, etc. these, many more, and in fact all of the other properties and attributes we see in nature. We mistakenly associate them with entities. But, the fluctuations of these properties OF space, in the coincidental combinations which we associate with objects, is an illusion. There are NO things, just properties of space.... All is space whose aspects are simply turned on and off and at various amplitudes at various positions, and which interact and change over time... See? SOLVED it!

I think we all understood your smile that way. I do wonder to what level of anatomical detail, a classical statue of a woman bearing full frontal "nether regional" nudity (in a natural candid stance, sans any purposeful demure or modest crossing of the legs) would have to rise to in order to receive the same outrage, embarrassment, and/or the same level of praise and adulation... and whether that would indicate an equal standard (or unequal standards) being applied from various sides.

To all appearances our exchange, to the extent there was one, morphed into taking turns presenting new and separate quite personal and long held observations… when things get into a I show you mine … replied with you showing me yours… I have found that keeping a respectful distance between yours is yours and mine is mine… leads to fewer “difficulties”. I learned this from a woman (with whom I am no longer) who adamantly pushed back at attempts of mine to analyze “hers” as though it were “ours” … and so although I was a little disappointed in the indirectness or non-response to my (albeit poetic and rambling) post, I nonetheless saw no common speaking points and decided to retain a respectful distance from your personal observations … adding only a note to clarify/conclude my own, which up to now may have been overly sprinkled with metaphor for third parties to directly understand. Other readers no doubt will take what they may from our separate musings, and I bear no ill will towards your choosing to respond in the way you did… it just did not appear to be a conversational response.

Platonic idealism was truly my second religion, and it has taken a very long time for me to entirely step away from both and fully accept all that entails.

@Boydstun and as we no longer despair at the terrifyingly silent and sublimely blind universe... at the thought that there are no supernatural third parties, cosmic parents, approving or protective stellar clergy or teachers... to protect or guide or approve or in any way give us meaning... at the realization that life has no intrinsic meaning.. nor can be any value or cherished thing to an unimaginably infinite roaring silent unthinking universe... as we come to understand that meaning and value in life and existence are ours and ours alone, no matter how small we may seem, that we make these things in their entirety, in spite of their not being made for us, and indeed because they are not out there... we can find greater meaning in our meanings. We do so precisely because they are in us, for us, of us. so too, we no longer despair that the crashing, crushing, silent, blinding, bewildering and magnificent universe is not a perfect Platonic ideal creation of a supernatural perfect consciousness... awaiting discovery by remembrance... and is not of us, and is outside of our experiences, our values, our thoughts, our meanings.. it is not our possession or controlled by anything we can conceive... only our subject... we paint him or her with loving or despairing strokes, we find beauty and horror, perplexity and simplicity in our re-creations, and yes we make pattern and meaning, and sometimes we relate by seeing ourselves out there... even in the stars... the Great Bear, Draco,.... and Orion...and yes the abstractions, the operators, the probabilities, the differentials, the integrals, the sine functions, the vectors, ...we see them too. Yet, we can find greater love of ourselves in seeing that the beauty, the pattern, the simplicity and even the perplexity... all sublime and full of meaning... are all OF us, and OF our relating that great whirling vastness that IS, to ourselves.

Certainly there is a spectrum between pure "that" and a complete "what". I am reminded of Peikoff speaking of disembodied sensations (or attributes?) in the context of a cigarette or something... the light, the heat, and that they are not received or processed separately ... we could add motion and touch and sound and smell (not the best of senses for a human but)... In my own thinking, the number and nature of these correlated "Thats" can sometimes mean an impressively developed "What" is formed pre-cognitively as a kind of complex familiar "Those/That" kind of "Whatness".

Language, concept, number, these we are possessed of and are all part of our grasping of and our relating ourselves to entities. Entities themselves, however, are not in any way possessed of any of language, concept, or number. That we "find" them poetic or majestic, of a kind or a phenotype, or multitudinous or stochastic, although somethings of them, something about their identity, is touchable and accessible by our various abstraction apparatuses, those somethings of them are not themselves linguistic, conceptual, or mathematical. For those, are only us, as they only ever could and should be.

Given the specific formalization of QM as accepted I would suspect other kinds of numbers as operators or coefficients to the so-called “states” would be improper somehow. I played around with quaternions, more specifically a sort of Mandelbrot generalization to render fractals on a … believe it or not… Amiga computer back in the day. I believe there are multiple imaginary bases i j and k, each squared is -1 but the product of any two is the other (positive or negative depending on the order of multiplication)

Did you learn anything from this video?

Ah yes, this is the convention of using a complex refractive index in calculations to take into account absorption. Quite a convenient use of complex numbers, relating incident light to absorption of light in the material as a function of depth.

The point was not that real numbers cannot be used for relations... that is obvious and you know it. I'll restrain my snippiness to that comment. The point is that in reality you do not literally have "i" quantity of some entity, as such. "i" can be used to help calculate quantities or to represent/characterize (through its odd mathematical qualities) relationships between real things. Do not get me wrong, I am not guilty of reification of real numbers either, they are abstractions we use to directly quantify things in reality, but they are no more real than "i"... merely the directness of their application, and their function differs.

and that includes relationships between "portions" of the same thing, so to speak. From what I recall in QM probabilities there is never any "absolute" phase, but relative phase is ubiquitous and the foundation for determining interference, and plays much in what the results of the inner product look like (i.e. probabilities). So real numbers we use to quantifying things but "i" and the like are useful for relating things, in particular phase differences.

Real numbers characterize and are abstraction we find useful for quantifying things. Imaginary numbers, as directly as I can relate them to things, characterize and are abstractions we find useful for (some specific) relationships between things.

"Analysis" is a complicated formal construct. That which one builds to surround and is supported by real numbers is not the same as that which one builds to surround and is supported by complex numbers. So no, complex analysis is not "really equivalent" to real analysis. These are two different games played in two different arenas... we can and did make them so. Now the idea of analysis is like the idea of a mathematical expression, how it is used or what symbols are there may be different but what it represents or refers to, is not the same as the expression used. The identity operator helps us understand that although the expressions are not the same what they refer to are one in the same, an identity. So I do not discount the possibility that some form of complicated real number based formalism, using Euler relations etc. cannot create something like an answer, i.e. refer to some quantity, which complex analysis also refers to. When used as a coefficient, a real number can be interpreted as a kind of scaling or "quantity of" operator, so taking i, as operated on by 3 you have three of them, so no 3 times i does not remove the i. i however is like a 90 degree rotation operator in the 2d plane we use to arrange our complicated useful contrivances we call complex numbers. EDIT: The last paragraph seems very important to limit and understand the import of their findings.

No one is proposing that, indeed it would be unnecessary. The potential or purported import of the paper is its implication that *which particular kinds* of abstractions we can choose to use in the context, are somehow actually limited.

That understanding would be incorrect. Particularly that last sentence. Anything characterizable in complex numbers must be characterizable in real numbers, because every complex number is characterizable in real numbers. As for things, any complex attribute of a thing can be represented by two non-complex attributes associated with the thing. In fact the necessity of characterizing an attribute as (specifically) complex is nothing more and nothing less than having to use more than one (specifically two) real number to characterize that attribute. Every operator and mathematical calculation in the complex plane deals simultaneously with two real quantities, phase and magnitude or alternatively real and imaginary parts. A complex number IS two things, and of a necessity is b0th reducible analytically into those two things and cannot be constituted by less than those two things. It can never be a "simple" number, after all it is a complex number, and it has two absolutely independent components, and cannot be thought of as having any less than two components, and therefore it IS two things. So what is the error? Reification. The fact that an attribute (in a particular framework or theory of reality), to reflect reality has two things associated with it, and that the operators must take into account both, say phase and magnitude, means that a thing has a two-attribute attribute. The reification is an erroneous identification of this two attribute attribute WITH the abstractions we use to work with them... it comes from the way we understand and express and work with this two attribute attribute, namely with complex numbers. Moreover, the simplicity with which we deal with the calculations of the two attribute attribute as if it were one attribute (because they always go together)... every phase must have a magnitude... leads one to believe the formalism as expressed is the only way to express that formalism. That when you change the expressions one has changed the formalism... and that "QM based on real numbers" means somehow trying to use real numbers in a framework built for using complex numbers... The idea of a hypothetical "real quantum state" is nonsensical. Why? Because the referent of the modifier term "real" is purely mathematical or abstract, and the referent of the term "quantum state" is supposed to be an entity of reality. This should be a huge clue to how the authors are thinking...or how they are not being careful about what they are talking about, i.e. what refers to abstractions and what refers to reality. The foundation of QM on the idea of representing reality as states in a vector space, and whose inner product corresponds with probabilities of outcomes. We assign states in the same direction when probability is 1 and assign states as orthogonal vectors when probabilities are 0. We have operators to rotate those vectors modeled on causation and interaction. A nice little game no? It turns out that correspondence between these vectors we have concocted to real world outcomes, requires the use of complex coefficients and operators... but what has that done to the formalism? All that has cone is doubled the degrees of freedom. Sure one could not write QM in the standard formulation, the standard way with real numbers, the correspondence between it and reality requires complex numbers but that does not mean one could not rewrite the entire thing, vector spaces and all using real numbers.

How familiar are you with Objectivism as a philosophy? As a former academic of physics, I highly recommend it. Interpretations of physics and in particular of QM are interesting but until we have a complete understanding of the mechanics of measurement (rather than a formalism and assumptions) I think they will remain rather fanciful and mystical… I have found THAT is where the mind goes when it encounters something it does not understand… not merely an acknowledgement of the unsolved but a kind of ecstasy in the “mysterious”. I would suggest you hold onto as much of the solid foundations of thought as possible when you encounter the myriad flights of fancy of both your common and uncommon physicist. Be rigorous and disappointingly real about the distinctions between our abstractions and entities referenced by them. Good luck on your journey!

@Bill Hobba I note a great many physicists completely dispense with philosophy and philosophical theory and the rigours which may be attained therewith… do you bring any philosophical scrutiny to the physics you cite or do you simply take them and the interpretations therein, as true?

Please excuse me I am unfamiliar with the details of Noether’s theories re. fields. If the electric field of an electron has a separate energy which you imply has a mass, then when you expend energy to accelerate the mass of an electron do you need to expend energy to accelerate the electric field of the electron which you imply also has mass? In fact, when you accelerate an electron are you accelerating i.e. moving, its electric field as well? Are you moving two things are one thing... are there two things or one thing? As student of philosophy what is your understanding of an attribute or property of an entity as regards its nature and relationship to the entity? Some would say they certainly are real but are not independently real, they are only always “of” entity or entities.

A funny thing about how we tend to use language, and funnier when we are talking about physicists, “Quantum Mechanics” is sometimes interpreted as referring to what reality does, when it is far more accurate to say QM is something we do, which to the extent it corresponds with observables of what reality does do, is valid and useful. That paper is more about how we process what reality does, not what attributes and properties which are possessed by entities. The third person would point out that a complex number is nothing more than a complicated (not very) combination of real values. They are absolutely and always reducible to real values. We happen to call them phase and magnitude. But again this is mere characterization of the abstraction which is QM, merely interpretations of the abstractions as more or less complex … when in fact it is all the same and beside the point. The processing abstraction is not the referent to which its predictions are directed. Observe there is no absolute phase in the complex coefficients, and also observe that statistical in nature they are not strictly speaking possessed by any single entity, and of course are never observable properties possessed by any single entity. As such, any assumption about complex numbers, I put to you, is more of an assumption about our abstractions referring to physical reality than an assumption about physical reality itself.