A Rant for Reality

Posted on April 3, 2013 by

Toward the resubstantiation of modern physics

(April 10, 2013: I have, through a curious set of circumstances, become aware that I am guilty of some unfortunate self plagiarism, in that I have incorporated without prior intention, some language from a prior post, the one titled “Serious Conversations” from about a year ago, in the following longer piece. I hope this does not either bore my readers or put them off, thinking, “he must have only one thing to say, he repeats himself so often.’ To some extent that may be true, but I hope you find it all somewhat interesting, even at that. On the other hand, there is sometimes value in repeating one’s self.)

I have, for the last two or three years, participated in online forums having to do with cosmology and modern theoretical physics, some with experts, Nobel laureates, and the like I came to those forums with curiosity and stayed in them with wonderment. Each discussant, even the rank amateurs like myself, seemed to bring a searching intellect and a desire to resolve reality, observations, experiments with theory, established mathematics and the language of quantum theories and relativity. In some instances, of course, the discussions wandered off into obscure details and what some would call crackpot theories, but typically they maintained serious intent and thought. Occasionally someone seems to have arrived at a new formulation that seems to make sense, but that on further study its cracks and crevices overwhelm its apparent rationality. The most recent of these  requires the existence of a new, too tiny to observe particle that makes up all magnetic fields. In spite of this, however, we should remember that not every idea that digresses from accepted dogma is necessarily labelable as crackpot.

But even in groups such as these it is difficult for many to step far enough away to see the whole and its contradictions as well as to grasp any new approach when our minds and hands are full of a hundred years of accepted theories and conclusions. Ether or no ether; particles or, as Einstein suggested, just condensations in the field; distortions in an electromagnetic field, or dark energy, dark matter; empty vacuum or some other kind of vacuum, and so on. I went back to Einstein and Infeld’s “The Evolution of Physics” (1938) to remind myself of what they had to say about a total field theory and found it convincing and consistent with my own intuitions. 
Unfortunately, much of modern physics retains conceptual fragments of ancient physics, in particular, those fragments that have to do with the idea that the only way to describe the smallest conceivable element of what we call matter is that of a tiny, irreducible thing called a “particle.”

Sometimes an elegant mathematical expression so grabs our hearts and minds that we exclaim, as Einstein did with General Relativity, “This is so elegant, it must be true!” And, while sometimes that mathematical model, that shorthand description, actually is correct, actually is consistent with observed reality, it may not be complete, not as all-inclusive as it first seemed. Sometimes it needs a new look to be sure its basic assumptions were correct or that it didn’t leave out some key question. And sometimes its full implications are not realized or the fact that it might be inconsistent with an observation in some other part of its discipline. We forget that the vision of divine perfection of Plato and his contemporaries is what kept a geocentric model of the solar system in place for nearly 2000 years, until better observations so illuminated its inconsistencies that a new model had to be designed. In ancient times, when observations didn’t quite match the ideal model we were wedded to, we filled in the chinks and gaps with little exceptions, like stuffing pebbles to fill the holes in a dry stone wall, like Ptolemy did by adding epicycles to his model of the solar system. In regard to GR and the various quantum theories, we have spent a hundred years or more doing just that to minimize or explain away the apparent contradictions and paradoxes that are not completely explained in the theory or seem to contradict its conclusions. We have invented “dualities” to explain contradictory behaviors, We have posited probabilities as a substitute for actualities to show that some things are impossible to really know. Physics has almost become a “faith-based” discipline in some minds. We even hear that quantum theory is “the most successful model ever invented” and we must accept it because it is  so “almost correct.” But then again, maybe it’s time for another Copernican revolution

Then sometimes, if we’re lucky, an elegant and universally accepted mathematical expression reinforces physical observations and results in a changed vision of reality. I have been looking for that, for expressions that we think we understand but that might or might not be so. Now it occurs to me that I may have found a way out of the wilderness of paradox and contradiction in a couple of ways. One is to look hard at the assumptions underlying the accepted theories and to assess the reality of their assertions, like “what are the actual substances Einstein bases his equations on?” and “what, exactly, is a quantum.” For instance, “What is this substance Einstein calls space and the other he calls time? Are they actually perceptible, measurable, manipulable? Are they “real”? And isn’t a quantum actually just a unit of measurement, not a thing in itself? Isn’t treating it as if it were something real just making it into one of Jean Beaudrillard’s simulacrae, a pretense of reality? If the answer is yes, the big question becomes, “Hasn’t modern physics left reality behind and become just a word game like, for example, Zeno’s Paradox?”

The other clue for me for finding a way out of paradox was reading a description in simple English of the implications of Maxwell’s equations numbers 3 and 4, expressed in this way: 
Maxwell 3: An electric field is created by a changing magnetic field. 
Maxwell 4: A magnetic field is created by a changing electric field. A recursive, self reinforcing system would seem to be the result. The only other requirement would seem to be a minimum level of energy to generate and maintain a self-sustaining system.

 Daniel Fleisch, In his book, A Student’s Guide to Maxwell’s Equations, (Cambridge University Press, 2008), puts it this way

 “—The key concept here is that a changing electric field produces a changing magnetic field even when no charges are present and no physical current flows. Through this mechanism electromagnetic waves may propagate through even a perfect vacuum, as changing magnetic fields produce electric fields and changing electric fields induce magnetic fields.”

Here then might be that substance, that all-pervasive medium we have been afraid to call an ether. Here, then, is a medium that, contrary to quantum field theory, does not require existence of a particle in order to exist. Here is a medium whose underlying frequency and structure might be shown to control the speed limit of light and all other electromagnetic radiation. Here is a medium whose structure could be shown to give us our observed constants like the speed of light (c), Planck’s Constant (h), and values for permeability and permittivity in wave mechanics. And here is the medium from which, through random reverberations, reinforcements and resonances could have arisen coherent, stable distortions of the field that have become all those “fundamentals” that we have, in the “matter-centric” mindset we have carried down from Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius, identified as  “particles.”

So, what if it is just a field and not something like a fine grained dust storm of particles? What if our not-so-fine-grained organs and tools of perception have, for all these centuries, aided and abetted by our 5th century BC mindset about matter, fooled us into thinking we were seeing particles when all we were actually seeing were tight little knots in the fine grain of the energy that surrounds and permeates us? Would this explain some of the apparent paradoxes and contradictions of our previously accepted models and theories? Would this be a way out of the Slough of Despond we have slowly been sinking into? It seems to me that it might.

So let’s take a leap and assume the existence of such an electromagnetic field, a field that we won’t call infinite, since that is just a mathematical expression, but one that is essentially limitless by our puny human standards of measurement. Let’s assume it has a high frequency of vibration, something like 1/h, but that it is not precisely uniform but like everything else in the real world, exhibits a measure of turbulence, that characteristic that we here in the zone of middle dimensions often find frighteningly fearsome. Here then, might be the medium out of which could arise, via phase transitions and other mechanisms, perhaps like those of cellular automata, by the application of a few simple laws or rules what we describe as atoms, molecules, on up to what we can see, feel taste, hear, and smell—and detect with our telescopes and other instruments. Here then is that mysterious substance we call dark energy, making up 74% of the substance within our finite universe and 100% of that outside of this and perhaps other universes. Here is the source of the high energy but still invisible distortions we call dark matter, distortions that surround the still higher energy distortions we see as galaxies, stars and planets. Here is the energy source that fuels the growth and expansion of the universe even as the balance of polarities that we detect as gravity maintains a measure of internal order within it. Here is a medium that pervades all of what exists.

This is the heart of the model I have explored and outlined in a very simple way in my book, “the picnic at the edge of the universe” and in the posts on my blog at enquiriesnw.com. It is a model that can replace the contradictions and paradoxes of all of the so-called “quantum” disciplines that take their name from what is simply a unit of measurement, with reality. It can lead us to see that General Relativity is a play on words like “spacetime” made  up of terms that are, again, just descriptors, not real substances that can be observed, described or measured. It can be a way to lead physics back to its roots as a discipline meant to explain reality, not to be a mathematical substitute for it, what Beaudrillard describes in “The Precession of Simulacrae”

What does this imply? Well first, if this is true, then nearly everything you have been taught and thought you knew about modern physics and the structure and origin of the universe is wrong.

1. The most well-known and generally accepted theory of modern physics, Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, is wrong, not because there is something wrong with the mathematics, but because it is based on two faulty premises, that “space” and “time” its principal components, are improperly assumed to have the attributes of real, physical, discernable,, manipulable substances, which neither of them can be shown to possess. It is interesting to note that even the putative fathers of General Relativity, Poincaré, Minkowski, even Einstein himself knew that these were just mathematical expressions, not reality per se, and that such a mathematical luminary as Kurt Gödel, had proven that time could not exist in Einstein’s relativistic universe.

2. Quantum theory, quantum electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, and their siblings, in fact all those entities with “quantum” in their given names, have nothing to do with the real world and hence are inherently false in their conception and application. A “quantum” is, by definition, a unit of measurement, a descriptor, two or three levels of abstraction beyond reality. You can intelligently say of something that it has so many quanta of some attribute or characteristic, but a “quantum” cannot be considered to be real in itself; reality of course, being the real basis of physics.

3. Mathematics is not reality. Mathematics is a man-made language, a shorthand of great power and flexibility and incredibly useful for describing actual entities, events, and phenomena. We should remember, however that it came about as a mechanism to enable an Arab trader to keep track of how many goats he had or had not sold in the marketplace that day. It is of great use as a quantifier and descriptor, but cannot be considered as reality itself. I commend to you George Lakoff’s book on this subject “Where Mathematics Comes From.”

4. The universe was not created as the result of a “big bang” generating everything we perceive from nothing. The arguments for it are increasingly unsupportable and the so-called” evidence, the cosmic microwave background radiation or CMBR, is better explained by numerous other models.

I have devoted the last several years to looking at the things and ideas, the theories and the concepts that we thought were true but which might or might not be so. These have ranged from the theories that seemed obviously paradoxical like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, wave-particle duality, the brain-mind controversies and others of their ilk. Ultimately it began to appear to me that many of these apparent contradictions, these Zen-like statements, even though broadly accepted might have more understandable  explications. I have for the past year or so participated sporadically in a discussion group ion the internet concerned with theoretical physics. The group contains some highly educated individuals, even Nobel laureates, but seems mostly to consist of interested amateur thinkers like myself. This particular group has recently taken up discussion of a famous experiment that seemed to prove that light was of a particular wave-like nature, the so-called double slit experiment. When theorists, namely Einstein himself, suggested the notion that light, sometimes behaved as if it were made up of individual particles, a paradox arose, that light sometimes behaved as if it were waves, and sometimes as if it were made up of particles, a notion that has persisted to this day.

The paradoxical nature of this idea became highlighted for me once again when one of the recent participants in an online discussion began his comment with these words, “If a single photon passes though two slits at the same time….?”, my brain made a horrible leap. I immediately thought of the Zen quote in regard to “the sound of one hand clapping,” and Dr. Seuss’s assertion in “Horton Hears a Who” that, “A person’s a person, no matter how small.” All three of these statements seem, on the surface, to be logical statements, but on a tiny bit of further thought reveal themselves to be wholly untenable as assertions of reality.

The issue of wave-particle duality can be easily disposed of except for one thing and that is that modern physicists for all their leaps of faith and acceptance of paradoxical and contradictory parts of their theories have been unable to abandon their matter-centric allegiance to the term particle, which is taken to mean a tiny irreducible unit of matter, like a miniscule billiard ball. It is OK that the Greeks, Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, thought that the universe could be reduced to something very small. It was a brilliant inference. But they were limited to seeing the smallest element of their world as a grain of sand, a dust mote perhaps, so we owe them a great scientific debt.

Science and physics in particular, has moved on from earlier explanations, from Ptolemy to Copernicus, from Newton to Einstein and Bohr. But the idea of the “particle” has persisted through it all. This in spite of the fact that many of these paradoxes and inconsistencies would simply melt away, disappear, if we were to accept a notion that it is all just waves (of energy, perhaps) and that in certain instances these can appear to us as if they were particles, and this appearance is directly the result of our inability to let go of the mental model we carry around in our heads. It seems long past time that we stepped back and looked at it in a different way. My favorite quote on this subject is from Janna Levin’s book “The Madman Dreams of Turing Machines”:

“There are faint stars in the night sky that you can see but only if you look to the side of where they shine. They burn too weakly or are too far to be seen directly, even if you stare. But you can see them out of the corner of your eye because the cells on the periphery of your retina are more sensitive to light. Maybe truth is just like that. You can see it, but only out of the corner of your eye.”

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Are there any truly dumb questions in physics?

Posted on December 11, 2012 by

I trade thoughts and correspond occasionally with other interested amateurs and some highly qualified professionals  on an internet forum on theoretical physics. While most of the topics raised there are serious, intelligent and thoughtful questions involving complex interpretations of concepts, math, and experiments, sometimes there are queries posed that your initial reaction to is “not this again!”  or, “didn’t we cover that subject the last time?” But if you take a few minutes to think about it, you realize that what might seem like a dumb question often turns out to be a smart question, because it leads you to think about an old issue in a new way, or to re-think old assumptions that you may have left unchallenged for too long. A couple of recent ones on our forum are like these.

My first response to one of these questions,  ”Does a photon have mass?” was dismay, and I posted a (too) quick response. In many ways this question is a nonsensical one. A photon has energy, else how could it displace another “particle” from a plate of another material per the photoelectric effect? And if you accept E=mc2, then energy = mass in that conceptual universe of thought, and of course a photon has mass. But if the question is about the classical notion of “rest mass”, then we’re in another quandary, because a photon is never at rest.

So, one thinks that this mass/energy duality might be akin to that other mysterious duality of modern physics, the “wave/particle duality”, except that in the case of mass and energy, at least both qualities can be measured.

In this thinker’s conceptual model, the answer to this question lies outside the quantum physics model of the universe. If what we designate as a photon carries energy but no “rest mass” then we must abandon the notion of it as a “particle” as it is considered in the QT universe. Instead we should see it as something more like a coherent wrinkle or distortion in the background fabric of the cosmos of which many of us are convinced that our universe is a part. If one sees the so-called “empty” cosmos as made up of an extremely high frequency electromagnetic field, our “photon” can be seen as simply a small but significant distortion of that field. Its apparent “velocity, c, then, is not seen as the passage of a particle “through” a medium but as a wave-like distortion of the medium itself, and its apparent velocity is a constant, constrained by the fine grain, the ultra high frequency of the medium, just as the apparent velocity of the passage of an ocean wave does not represent any forward movement of the medium itself, only the passage of a distortion. Think of cracking a whip.

A second “dumb” question is a little more complex. It goes like this: “Please explain to me the Quantum theory called “superposition.” Well, the answer is also complex. Superposition is often assumed to mean the presence of two entities such as electrons occupying the same space at the same time. This is a false assumption and we can all agree that two substantive things, two particles, say. cannot occupy the same space at the same time. (Note here for further reference however, that two (or more) wave conglomerations can, in fact, occupy the same space at the same time.)

The accepted definition of superposition is more of a mathematical construct and according to Wikipedia, it goes like this:

“Quantum superposition is a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics that holds that a physical system—such as an electron—exists partly in all its particular, theoretically possible states (or, configuration of its properties) simultaneously; but, when measured or observed, it gives a result corresponding to only one of the possible configurations (as described in interpretation of quantum mechanics).       Mathematically, it refers to a property of solutions to the Schrödinger equation; since the Schrödinger equation is linear, any linear combination of solutions to a particular equation will also be a solution of it. “

In simpler terms, what this means is this: that you cannot know or predict at any time, what state any given electron might be in. It’s an easy out for a theory that purports to explain how everything works in nature, but is strangely unsatisfying as an explanation of some observed behavior. Physicists seem to accept it though,  however much it sounds like religious dogma about the eternal mysteries.

A third question has come up more recently, about yet another mystery,  something called “quantum entanglement.” Quantum dogma has it, and this has supposedly actually been observed, that two quantum entities can become “entangled,” so that if they are then separated by any distance, even as much as at both sides of the universe, if the state of one of them changes, say from a left spin to a right spin, or from a positive to a negative value, the other entangled entity is automatically, instantaneously, changed as well. Now, Einstein challenged this idea, both as presuming instantaneous action at a distance, without any known force being involved, as well as violating the principal that no action in the universe can exceed the speed of light.

Here is a way out of having to deal with both of these quantum conundrums, these paradoxes and contradictions that are somehow easily supported in the language of mathematics but not in the domain of observable reality. It requires only a simple conceptual adjustment, that we accept the notion that what physicists since perhaps the time of Democritus have assumed to have the nature of a “particle” is, in fact simply a very small, coherent, organized, higher concentration of energy in the field of the cosmos. It is a distortion of the field, and because of its concentration of energy, it generates a companion field in its local region. Back to entanglement for instance, if, for example we postulate a tightly bound energy field as the cosmos one might infer behavior something like what happens when you pull at a corner of a bed sheet to eliminate a wrinkle only to have the same wrinkle miraculously appear in the opposite corner

If taken seriously, it can be seen that this model enormously simplifies our conceptual vision  from the microscopic world of physics out to the macro-macro model of the cosmologist. There is a place here to explain mystical phenomena from the “double slit experiment” out to the mysterious substance called “dark matter” which can then be seen as large, broad scale distortions in the cosmic field surrounding truly high energy concentrations such as stars, galaxies, and clusters. And “dark energy,” that other mysterious unseen substance can be seen as simply the substance of the field itself.

This doesn’t throw out all of the work of the last century. Much of the math will still apply as long as the mathematicians are willing to give their claim that “the math is the reality.” What the rest of us have to give up is something very tiny, and which no one has ever seen, anyway, that hypothetical little billiard ball that has hypnotized scientists and philosophers for a couple of thousand years.

The collection of assertions that make up what is collectively known as quantum theory has, for almost a hundred years, been considered the principal body of knowledge that underlies modern physics. Unfortunately, it remains after all that time a body full of contradictions, paradoxes, and uncertainties. It has frustrated all attempts at reconciliation with the dogma at the other end of its chain, the theory of general relativity, itself contradicted by the insubstantiality, the actual reality,  of its two principal elements, space and time. QT must be seen, not as a body of knowledge, but as a body of supposition, that would have been abandoned early had it not been called on to fill an intellectual vacuum, and had it not had such a corps of vociferous supporters speaking a language most could not understand, that of the highest and most impenetrable mathematics.

The challenge we are trying to meet here is to replace those troubled, damaged, incomplete, and ontologically challenged models with one that is more complete, more consistent, that explains conceptually more observable phenomena.

It is difficult, we know, to mentally conceive  a cosmos that is a 3-dimensional field of vibrating energy, with bundles of vibrations, perhaps the things we call photons, electrons, and the like, that are simply coherent distortions of the field itself, not foreign bodies moving through it; or the concept that everything that exists in the universe is made of those distortions, from the tiniest entities out to and including the stars—but it should not be more difficult than swallowing the thorny paradoxes and contradictions of quantum theory.

So, I’ll end with one more dumb question. “Is the Sun around which we annually circumnavigate a real tangible object , or is it perhaps just a truly bright spot out there in the sky?” As you might guess from my thoughts above, I’m leaning strongly toward the second notion.

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Words and Reality

Posted on July 25, 2012 by

Words and Reality

A Look at Milo Wolff’s “Schrödinger’s Universe” (2008)

 Four anti-definitions to ponder:

1. Space has no substance hence no reality in and of itself. What is called space is an absence of substance. If it is designated as having limits, it can be denoted as a container or enclosure of some other substance or activity, but it has in and of itself no physical attributes.

2. Time has no substance hence no reality in and of itself. What we call time is a system of measurement used to describe the persistence or duration of objects, events, or phenomena. It exists only in units of measurement such as seconds, days, eons, conveniently derived from our observations and parsing out of regular, predictable events and durations in our world.

3. A dimension has no substance hence no reality in and of itself. What we call a dimension is a quality, a description, a measurement, a characteristic of an object, an event, or a phenomenon that enables us to describe or quantify characteristics of those entities and to communicate those qualities to others in terms such as microns, meters, light-years.

4. A wave has no substance hence no reality in and of itself. A wave is a form, a characteristic, a quality, a description of some substance. Waves can be generated and detected in fluids, as in air or water; and in electromagnetic fields, but they cannot physically exist independent of a carrier medium.

Each of these four words are constructs we use in language to describe and communicate descriptions of real substantive objects, events, and phenomena. They are critical to our understanding of concepts used in physics, the science of real objects, events, and phenomena. But they are not in themselves the real, substantive objects, events or phenomena. They are merely the words we use to describe the qualities, characteristics, forms, of real entities.

So when Einstein describes a hypothetical entity he calls spacetime, a four-dimensional substance that can be bent, curved, distorted, to induce or influence real events, objects, or phenomena, his concept is nothing more than a word game, using descriptors as substitutes for real entities, giving hypothetical substance to what are only words, hence creating a fiction substituting for reality. When a modern physicist like Lawrence Krauss postulates “A Universe from Nothing“, the title of his 2011 book, he bases his conceptual model on hypothetical entities without substance outside of mathematical models. Other authors and theorists are equally guilty of conflating descriptions, second-  or third-order abstractions, substituted for  real point-events or objects. Of course, conceptual models have value, but they also carry a burden of having a direct relationship to the real world.

Physicists of today continue to use expressions such as “the vacuum”, :”the field”, “space”, freely, sometimes interchangeably, without qualification, to describe some entity they use in their conceptual models of the universe, or for submicroscopic physical entities like the profusion of “particles” in the various versions of what is called quantum theory.  When pressed for an explanation, they often qualify their assertions with expressions like, ‘well,  the vacuum is not really empty’, or ‘empty space is filled with something’, or ‘it’s a quantum vacuum’, intended to mean that it is actually filled with something called quanta, which is another word originally invented as a descriptor, but which has been miraculously converted to an entity. And they say that perhaps these entities do not really exist, they may be “virtual” or only “probabilities” that something might exist.

What has happened here is that we have invented systems of measurement and description so that we could accurately and consistently discuss, describe, and communicate those descriptions to each other, first in words of a language, then in mathematics, another language that became a useful shorthand for words.

This is all presented as prelude to my thoughts on the work of Milo Wolff, whose book “Schrödinger’s Universe,” was published in 2008 but has only now come to my attention. There is good science here and there is bad science here. I will try to explain.

Dr. Wolff’s book is a presentation of his theory of what he calls the Wave Structure of Matter, or WSM, that he bases on the work of William Clifford (1845-1879), Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961), Albert Einstein, (1879-1955) and Paul Dirac (1902-1984). The sum of his argument is that:

1. All of the universe consists , at the smallest scale, of spherical standing waves in space (example, the electron);

2. Energy is the substance of all matter in the universe; and

3. The origin of all of the natural laws of physics lies in the wave structure of matter.

 He asserts that there are no such things as a “particles”, that is, the tiny irreducible units we have clung to since the time of Democritus, out of which all larger units such as protons, neutrons, and the like, are supposedly formed. Rather, it is the standing waves of space, that is, fermions like electron that we confuse with “particles” and that that it is this confusion that leads to the paradoxical and seemingly contradictory assertions of quantum mechanics, such as “entanglement”, “superposition”, and the like.

Dr. Wolff is convinced that his theory, along with Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, constitutes a sufficient and complete unified theory on which to base modern physics. He bases his primary thesis on numerous supporting quotations from his predecessors, mentioned above, who waged a long opposition to quantum theory’s excesses

I have a few quibbles with Milo Wolff. I, like he, am prepared to deny the existence of anything resembling a “particle” as one of the building blocks of nature. In fact the concept of “building blocks” is a false and confusing analogy. We should rather be thinking of the rise and growth of the universe as a process of condensations in a medium, of a gradual, in part stepwise, process of the appearance and growth of our visible, tangible environment, culminating, to this point at least, in our own appearance on the scene. I, like he, am convinced that the origins of all that we perceive in the real world derives from a simple original source. In my own theory, that source is a primal electromagnetic field of very high frequency, out which by resonance, reinforcement and phase transitions has arisen all that we perceive , even to the formation of stars, galaxies, and their clusters; to the progeny of those stars, the planets, and ultimately life as we know it.

However, he, like other physicists, assumes that space has substance, without defining it as such. His space, is something he calls a quantum medium, in other places, a wave medium, of unspecified origin, form, substance or content. He tells us that the energy of this medium derives from the cumulative mass of all of the matter in the universe, which energy then enables new electron formation, and so on. This contradiction is, of course, a circular argument, that the mass of the matter of the universe provides the energy that enables the formation of mass in the universe. How this miraculous process began is left to speculation. He is free with the word quantum, while never telling what he means by this. (In Wikipedia, quantum is defined as a measure: “In physics, a quantum (plural: quanta) is the minimum amount of any physical entity involved in an interaction.”)

He proposes a spherical form for the wave structure of an electron without identifying the source or mechanics of the energy required for the in and out vibration pattern he postulates for its creation. He adopts the language and with it the conceptual errors of the quantum theorists. And he relies on General Relativity to explain gravity and molecular structure forces. General Relativity, of course, requires that time and the other three dimensions be substantive. His waves of no substance are of quantum space, a medium of no substance. While I can agree with some of Dr. Wolff’s general premises, his case is weakened by these linguistic and logical inconsistencies. One example will suffice. In Section III, Solving Enigmas with a Wave Structure of Matter, Wolff, in defining time, explains its nature in this way:

“In the WSM, the unit of time is the period of one oscillation of the electron space resonance. This period depends solely on the density of space. Thus everywhere(?) in the universe depends on space. Space determines time just as it does the measure of length. Later we will see that the density of space is determined by quantum waves from  all the matter of the universe. Accordingly, all matter is inter-connected!”

(Underlining by this writer. Some of the underlined terms are defined(described?) in the “Terminology” section but are unexplained in the text of the book.)

 Dr. Wolff is on the right side in his dismissal of the concept of “particles”, something that should have been abandoned a century or more ago. He is on the right side in postulating a universe and a physics based on a wave theory, but they must be waves of something. He is on the right side in his attribution of varying “energy densities” in space (my own “field distortions”) as the source of what Einstein  calls the curvature of space, as the actual cause of gravitational effects such as the bending of light paths. He is on the right side in questioning the quantum paradoxes and contradictions we have lived with since the 1920′s. And he is on the right side in questioning  other accepted but barely supportable concepts like “the big bang,” “black holes,” and the like, that all grew out of  first, unexplainable astronomical observations, then suppositions as to their possible causes, then supposed explanations from the equations of general relativity and quantum mechanics. But the answers he proposes to replace those doubtful concepts still carry too many of the fingerprints of the old models, their language, and their conclusions, to be convincing on their own.

Ultimately and unfortunately, the vagueness and insubstantiality of Dr. Wolff’s concept of the structure of the larger universe leads him into the realm of what we have seen too often, assertions that this means that we are all “connected,” that electrons (intelligently?) communicate with each other, that they “know” what nearby electrons are doing, and the like. In short, WSM depends too much on postulated relationships between non-real substances and non-real entities and leaves too much of what should be hard science to unsupportable speculation to meet any known reality test.

Posted in 2 Being and Nothingness | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Events and Observations: How we know what we know

Posted on July 14, 2012 by

It has long been fascinating to me to see the confusion that arises due to the conflation of two or more “logical types” (Russell) or “orders of abstraction” (Korzybski), particularly in the theories and literature of modern physics (and cosmology). We have all had the experience of listening to people “talking past each other” as a result  of confusing  one level of abstraction with another. In particular, we find almost everywhere in the literature of physics, relativity, and quantum mechanics a confusion between events or phenomena and their observation.

As I pointed out in a recent post in regard to Einstein’s famous thought experiment on simultaneity as observed from two differing frames of reference, this confusion often results in a conclusion that is easily refuted by distinguishing between the real events (two simultaneous lightning strikes) and the differences in their observations between a stationary reference frame and a moving one.

A similar confusion exists in explanations of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. It is easy to understand that there might be uncertainty in our observations of submicroscopic events but it takes a quantum leap of interpretation to then assert, as most do, that the uncertainty accrues to the actual events that are being observed. or that the act of observation itself actually changes or even creates the event. This is far from being proven.

So it was interesting to see, in a field where this kind of confusion would seem highly likely to occur, that it seems to finally have been recognized and taken into account, and that is in studies of the links between brain science and consciousness. This is where the so-called hard problem has arisen for hundreds of years, the famous question of what is mind and what is body. It is the question of where the physics and mechanics going on inside the head, in the jungle where chemical, electrical, mechanical forces run free, connects with its output, our fantastically rich thoughts, images, senses of the world outside of our heads. In Christof Koch’s new book, “Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist,” while mostly a history of his life’s work in this field, he does lay out the dimensions of a problem that is a classic case of how important logical rigor is in science. Not only is the physical question of the link between activity in the chemical/electrical soup of the brain with the almost impossible definition of the conscious output of the mind a problem, but even the identification of consciousness as a real, physical, observable entity is in question. Keeping a clear vision of such an issue throughout an entire book is a powerful challenge, but he accomplishes it well.

Late in the book, Dr. Koch describes recent work in this area that appears to have real promise of success. Giulio Tononi, a researcher now at the University of Wisconsin, has posed a theory based in part on Claude Shannon’s work in information theory. Called Integrated Information Theory, Tononi proposes a model of consciousness that is based on two important qualities of any powerful information system, one of a high degree of differentiation of each element of the system, along with a high degree of integration of the system as a whole. The human brain qualifies on both counts, in that each neuron is able to respond appropriately to wide range of sensory inputs, and each has a multitude of cross-connections across the brain’s entire range.

One of the important things we know about consciousness is that it is presented to us in each instance as a unique, complete whole. When I sat outside my local coffee shop this morning, I was presented with a visual scene of town, trees, and companions. My body received multiple inputs from the warm sun, a slight cool breeze, the taste of coffee,  the discomfort of the hard bench on which I sat, and the distortions of that field my own aging eyes delivered to me. But I could not consciously edit or modify any part of that scene. I could not leave out its left half; I could not see it in shades of gray rather than in full color; I could not remove any person from my consciousness of the scene. I had to take it as a whole experience. But If I had turned around, I would have been almost instantly conscious of an entirely different scene.

What happens here is that our receptive senses deliver to our brains a broad set of raw inputs, simple shapes to the visual cortex, aural vibrations through our ears physical sensations of temperature, texture and the like; our brain in its chemical/electrical operating system integrates those inputs, and then delivers them back to us as what we interpret and probably describe as a compete, integrated whole, our mental image. But that mental image is not outside in the world, it is there inside our brains, perhaps as a pattern of on and off neurons, (or partly on, partly off) in a real physical sense inside our head. An outside set of patterns,  from multiple sensory inputs, converted and delivered as a real, if transitory, set of patterns in the brain.

I’m always looking for analogies, something that might be similar to that process that I do understand. So I ask myself, Is there anywhere else in our modern experience that we can find an analogous to this process? A small personal experience then struck me. On one of the several computers around our house, the  screen saver is set up to serially display all of the photographs stored in a file of personal digital photographs, in a random sequence, each seamlessly it seems, appearing on the screen every few seconds, As each became part of my consciousness, I became aware that here perhaps is a simple analog for consciousness. A typical display screen on a computer has a resolution of from one to several million pixels, each of which is characterized by what is called a color depth of 64 bits. Each pixel, then has a relatively high degree of differentiation, though far less than the neurons in the brain. And, in this particular range of the visual display, these pixels’ responses are driven by an operating system that can modify their appearance in an integrated way, so that a succession of complex visual images can be shown one after another. The same process occurs when I operate my  portable video camera. When pointed at a scene in nature, its receptive sensors respond to the inputs of light and color as do our visual senses, processes them through its operating system and then presents them to my sight on the small attached video screen or in the digital eyepiece that I use to select and compose the image I want to record. This seems just like the process my brain must use to deliver scenes to my consciousness.

How is this accomplished in the head? We know that our direct sensory apparatus does not itself deliver completed information to memory, It rather delivers raw data that is then internally processed by rapid comparison to remembered, stored information, perhaps in many steps, before being delivered to consciousness. But we also know that these same processes, using in most cases the same capabilities, are used to bring remembered information to consciousness, so that tomorrow morning, if it is, say, pouring rain, confining me to the indoors, I can recall, in fairly great detail the scene, and even the conversations from today’s coffee shop experience. The same mechanisms that enabled my brain to process the primitive sensory inputs into the nearly simutaneous consciousness of the event, enables me to later recall it to consciousness from memory.

Now we know that everything that happens in the brain is not there to support consciousness. There is strong evidence that most of the activity that we engage in is neither observed nor monitored consciously. Some researchers feel that upwards of 90% of our mental activity is unconscious. Dr. Tononi’s studies with functional MRI scanners indicate that the processes that result in conscious thought and monitoring of behavior occur mostly in the thalamo-cortical area, that part of the brain with the highest concentration of reciprocal connections, supporting the information integration function. Other areas,  like the cerebellum, are structured with more parallel, one-to-one connections, and seem mostly involved in managing autonomic and unconscious body functions.

And we are not continuously conscious. Times of deep sleep, in particular, are basically unconscious, the reason you seldom remember them in the morning (particularly sometimes after a party).

So, where does this capacity come from? How did it evolve, how might it have come about, this rich source of experience and memory? Did something in our evolution favor its development? Here is Dr. Tononi’s take on that question:

“The theory predicts that consciousness depends exclusively on the ability of a system to integrate information, whether or not it has a strong sense of self, language, emotion, a body, or is immersed in an environment, contrary to some common intuitions. …… the ability of a system to integrate information grows as that system incorporates statistical regularities from its environment and learns. In this sense, the emergence of consciousness in biological systems is predicated on a long evolutionary history, on individual development, and on experience-dependent change in neural connectivity. Indeed, the theory also suggests that consciousness provides an adaptive advantage and may have evolved precisely because it is identical with the ability to integrate a lot of information in a short period of time. If such information is about the environment, the implication is that, the more an animal is conscious, the larger the number of variables it can take into account jointly to guide its behavior.”

Now, I am not imputing consciousness to my computer. It cannot, as Dr. Koch points out, connect my perception of the photographs on the screen with the rich associated memories of my children’s activities, emotions, and histories that those images evoke in my brain, so my human consciousness has an incalculably greater capacity than this succession of images.

And this kind of consciousness, this level of generating the images and impressions, the “knowledge,” of what we perceive outside of our heads, is not nearly what my book in progress, “A Place of Dreams and Delusions” is all about. What I am seeking there is where that more creative place in consciousness, the one that can generate new models and explanations, came from. What in our evolutionary history created this place where we do not just know “what is?”, but lets us imagine “what might be?” and to compare that image with what is? When and how did we become capable of thought experiments and conceptual models? More on that later.

Where does this leave us in our discussion of logical types? Well, I think what Dr. Koch and Dr. Tononi are showing us is that we can be rigorous in our investigations and better arrive at testable, repeatable results in science if we are clear about what is real and what are just our observations of what might or might not be real. Their work is showing not the link between what are clearly physical processes in perception and some mystical mind-substance, but that both the perceptual processes and the consciousness processes are physical, and that their link is real and no longer mysterious.

So, have we really cleared up the hard problem of what is mind and what is body? Perhaps not yet, but maybe we are on the way.

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Independence Day CERN-tainty?

Posted on July 5, 2012 by

Independence Day 2012

Of course we all understand that the scientists at CERN have not been flinging tiny billiard balls of stuff at each other in their ten-billion dollar merry-go-round, but have, in fact, been flinging tinier and tinier coherent entanglements of waves of energy at each other. And when you fling a complex of wrinkles in the field at another complex of wrinkles in the field the result is that when the (I hesitate to call it a collision) interaction occurs, it clearly disturbs the field in its immediate region, and generates more wrinkles in the field. Because this new set of wrinkles is so fine, and persists for such a short interval, it naturally seems to behave in some new ways, because we are getting down to or near the finest grain (or weave) of the underlying fabric, the fine grain limit, the frequency of the background electromagnetic field, the frequency of which seems to me must be at or near to 1/h (one over Planck’s Constant).

Whether the so-called Higgs boson is finally at that level we don’t know yet. But if we continue to deny reality and keep calling these units “particles”, even though we describe all of their characteristics (including mass) as electromagnetic, we’ll continue in our delusions of “wave-particle duality”, “quantum entanglement”, “superposition” and the like and will not be able to get down to the proper mathematical analysis of what we are actually observing.

Even the Washington Post allows itself to say, “One way to think of the Higgs field: It’s the water the entire universe swims in.” It’s what a few of us have been saying for a very long time. They (CERN) may be getting close, but it might help to use a more consistent logical terminology.

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Dark What?

Posted on June 24, 2012 by

In early 2007, the journal Nature published the results of a study by a team of astronomers led by Richard Massey of Caltech, detailing their efforts at mapping the extent and nature of “dark matter”, that mysterious and as yet invisible substance that is presumed to make up the greater part of the physical mass of the universe. The university released its own notification of the publication, a portion of that press release is shown below.

New 3-D Map of Dark Matter Reveals Cosmic Scaffolding

SEATTLE—An international team of astronomers has created a comprehensive three-dimensional map that offers a first look at the weblike large-scale distribution of dark matter in the universe. Dark matter is an invisible form of matter that accounts for most of the universe’s mass, but that so far has eluded direct detection, or even a definitive explanation for its makeup. The map is being unveiled today at the 209th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, and the results are being published simultaneously online by the journal Nature. According to Richard Massey, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology who led in the map’s creation, the map provides the best evidence yet that normal matter, largely in the form of galaxies, forms along the densest concentrations of dark matter. The map reveals a loose network of filaments that grew over time and which intersect in massive structures at the locations of clusters of galaxies.

Massey calls dark matter “the scaffolding inside of which stars and galaxies have been assembled over billions of years.“ Because the formation of the galaxies depicted stretches halfway to the beginning of the universe, the research also shows how dark matter has grown increasingly clumpy as it continues collapsing under gravity. The new maps of dark matter and galaxies will provide critical observational underpinnings to future theories for how structure formed in the evolving universe under the relentless pull of gravity.—–http://media.caltech.edu/press_releases/12939

The bolded text is a clue to the underlying assumptions held in general in the astronomy and physics communities in regard to the structure of the universe, that is, that it all arrived via a “big bang” and that the dark matter scaffolding existed at a time prior to the appearance of stars, galaxies, and clusters and, in fact, provided a major part of the basis for their development. In the tradition of modern physics, “dark matter” is assumed to be particulate, that is, of the same substantial nature as so-called ordinary matter, a term that covers all of the visible, to us humans, elements of the universe.

So, is there another possible interpretation of this impressive body of data than that proposed by Massey and his colleagues? I am convinced that there is. In the non-particulate universe of my own and others’ concepts, “dark matter” is not “particulate,” not at all mysterious, and may have little or nothing to do with expansion. It is more likely to have arisen along with the development of the large energy-dense masses of stars, galaxies, and clusters than to have been around first, to serve as “scaffolding.” Dark matter is more likely to be a manifestation of the natural distortions of the field that we see around the presence of magnets or powerful electric currents right here on earth in our local environment, less a “chicken or egg” manifestation than a more or less “chicken and egg” event. To explain this further, I have borrowed some of Massey’s exhibits as follows:

The image below is a “dark matter” contour map of a segment of a Hubble image. According to Richard Massey, the colored points in the image are ordinary matter, i.e. stars, galaxies and clusters in the Hubble image. The contours then show the gravitational lensing intensity surrounding each of them, Massey calls these areas “dark matter,”  scaffolding within whch new star formation is encouraged or supported. My alternative construction of this data is that the ordinary matter consists of high energy concentrations in the electromagnetic ether, concentrations we identify as stars, galaxies, and clusters, and what the contours actually indicate are  the intensity of field distortions these create in their vicinity, the otherwise invisible energy distortions that, it is true, do encourage the formation of what we will ultimately see as new stars, galaxies and clusters out of the energy of the field.

Richard Massey  — Nature

Richard Massey – Nature

In this computer simulation, one can visualize the location of field distortions surrounding the high energy concentrations we perceive as stars, galaxies and clusters. The apparent hard lines of the cloudlike forms are merely a representation of a selected threshold of perception. In actuality (if I may use that term) the intensity or energy level of these distortions probably follows a smooth curve, as other fields exhibit, i.e. falling off in intensity as the cube of the distance from the core. One can generalize from this conceptualization that we here in our galaxy, in fact, undoubtedly inhabit just such a region of “dark matter”, but we cannot detect it as Massey has been able to do by using Hubble images of regions at a distance from us. We can also see these regions as analogous to what we do perceive locally as magnetic, electric, and electromagnetic fields, which we also know are not particulate. This can also be seen as an explanation for the apparent “curvature of space” envisioned by Einstein. Light, itself, seen now as a visible range of frequencies carried on the background frequency of the electromagnetic ether, not through the vacuum of space, would naturally have its path distorted in traversing these regions, thus explaining Eddington’s 1919 observation of the curvature of light predicted by, and seen then as confirming Einstein’s relativistic model.

In a universe that is entirely made up of a wide range of distortions of the background field, (not of little billiard balls of “particles”), as described in the picnic at the edge of the universe, these so-called regions of “dark matter” do not consist of anything like a particulate ether forcing expansion of the universe as proposed by some authorities, but are simply distortions of the field arising from the presence of the high energy distortions they surround. Ernst Mach predicted this phenomenon when he stated, “… the ether not only conditions the behavior of inert masses but is also conditioned in its state by them.”

So here arises the need for a new vision of the precise notion of gravity if “dark matter” is not actually subject to its “relentless pull”, but is a totally different kind of manifestation of the structure of the field, and a new look at expansion, assuming it really exists, as probably the creation of new concentrations (stars, galaxies, clusters) arising with help from the universe’s absorption of energy from the surrounding (and permeating) field of the cosmos.

cs

Posted in 2 Being and Nothingness, 6 General | 1 Comment

A fresh look at a famous thought-experiment

Posted on June 18, 2012 by

In 1920, Albert Einstein published the now well-known book titled, “Relativity: The Special and the General Theory”. In Section IX of that document, The Relativity of Simultaneity, he relates the famous thought experiment that compares observations from two differing inertial frames. The first frame is a stationary one , on the embankment alongside a railroad line. In this instance, an observer, designated M, is located at a point on the embankment equidistant between the locations of two simultaneous lightning strikes alongside the embankment. By means of two mirrors, arranged at 90• to each other, the observer, M, is able to determine that the two strikes appear to be simultaneous, based on their equidistance and on the finite constancy of the velocity of light. Because of the distances involved of course, his observation of the lightning strikes occurs at a measurable interval of time after the actual occurrence of the events themselves, but since that we know that his observations were also simultaneous, that is of no importance to the outcome of the observation.

At the same time another observer, M1, was travelling past M’s point of observation on a speeding train, at a velocity that was a significant increment of the velocity of light, (let us say at about 1,000 kilometers/second, one three-hundredth of the velocity of light). Observer M1 is also equipped with an observing device similar to that of M. M1′s observation of the two lightning flashes is not the same as that of M. In the case of M1, the flashes do not appear to have occurred simultaneously, but the one from the direction of the train’s motion arrives earlier and that from the opposite direction arrives later, by a measurable interval. Hence , his observations would seem to indicate that the two events were not simultaneous.

Now, Professor Einstein’s conclusion from this set of circumstances is as follows, and I quote.

“Now, in reality (considered with reference to the railway embankment) he is hastening toward the beam of light coming from B, whilst he is riding on ahead of the beam of light coming from A. Hence the observer will see the beam of light emitted from B earlier than he will see that emitted from A. Observers who take the railway train as their reference-body must therefore come to the conclusion that the lightning flash B took place earlier than the lightning flash A. We thus arrive at the important result:

Events which are simultaneous with reference to the embankment are not simultaneous with respect to the train and vice versa (relativity of simultaneity). Every reference-body (co-ordinate system) has its own particular time: unless we are told the reference-body to which the time refers, there is no meaning to a statement of the time of an event.” (italics mine)

It is important to note that Einstein opens this statement with the words, “Now, in reality—”, because he then immediately reverts to a discussion of, not the reality of the simultaneous events, but to the observations of them by two observers in different reference-bodies.

There is a logical disconnect here. Bertrand Russell in the Principia and elsewhere points out the importance of understanding that an event is one logical type and observations of it are another. The observation of the event from the moving train did not change the event itself. It had its own independent reality. This can be illustrated by the following transcript of an exchange between the two observers, M and M1, at breakfast the following morning:

Observer M: It seems that you, too saw the remarkable lightning strikes last evening!

Observer M1: Yes, it was amazing. I had always heard that lightning never strikes twice in the same place, but I never thought that two bolts might strike at the same time. They were amazingly close.

Observer M: Actually they did occur simultaneously. They appeared to be so on my detector, but to be sure, I measured their distance from my observation point and found the distances exactly equal. Since we know that light travels at a constant velocity regardless of its direction, I was instantly convinced.

Observer M1: That is very interesting. Since, as you know, I was on the train passing by your post at that same instant, the flash from ahead of the train appeared to arrive earlier than that from behind the train. We were travelling at a high rate of speed but I was able to measure the interval between the two flashes with some precision.

Observer M: I have heard that, according to some theories, that clocks travelling at high speeds actually run slower than those at rest. Could that have been what you observed?

Observer M1: Oh, no. The clocks are set precisely the same. We arrived precisely on time at our destination. It is just that the train had moved closer to the one point and further from the other in the interval that it took the light to arrive at my detector.

Observer M: That is good to know. The clock speed question has bothered me.

Observer M1: Yes, this way, knowing the length of the interval between the flashes was important in helping me to calculate the exact velocity of the train as we passed you. Those who think that clock speed changes with physical velocity must not understand that an event and its observation are two distinct and different logical types, two different levels of abstraction.

xxxxxx

 What does this leave us with? Well, one thing is that there are now two apparent explanations for the difference between the two sets of observations. Einstein’s assertion that “Every reference-body (co-ordinate system) has its own particular time: unless we are told the reference-body to which the time refers, there is no meaning to a statement of the time of an event.” and, on the other hand the one described in the hypothetical breakfast-table conversation, which uses Newtonian logic and Newtonian mathematics to explain the discrepancy. Examining the details of Einstein’s description of his thought-experiment reveals a gap in his reasoning that is not explained anywhere in his overall account. The concept of “different time measurements or rates of occurrence” does not appear elsewhere in the narrative. The assertion about each different reference frame having its own particular time appears full-blown without precedent. Is this just an inadvertent jump in the experimenter’s narrative?

What may have happened here is a situation where the so-called thought experiment may have been intended only as an explanation of a result previously arrived at mathematically, in a narrative otherwise intentionally free of mathematics, or, it may be only a slightly incomplete narrative. At any rate this has been the accepted explanation for whatever reason, with almost  a hundred years of consequences in critical thought about relativity.

So, which explanation is correct? The common-sense Newtonian one, or the relativistic uncommon-sense one. We should perhaps look at the question of whether thought experiments are repeatable to confirm their initial results, as we would require with real-world experiments, or if they were and are actually just-so stories to explain a pre-conceived outcome. I leave it to the reader to decide.

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