QM formalist wanted
hi all. I am posting a want ad for a QM formalist who is very conversant in the mathematical formalism. here is the proposal: over the last few years I have developed an ad hoc theory that I believe comes very close to the QM formalism. this theory is classical local. it is very easily visualized the mathematics is quite elementary yet its deeper implications are compelling I believe, beyond the scope of existing conventional thought. it is not widely appreciated/understood/realized/known at all how close a classical theory can come to matching virtually ALL the formaliism of QM. an easy way to visualize it is as follows. it is similar to t'hoofts new theory about SHOs (see quant-ph archives) although I initially developed it independently. imagine a set of detectors and emitters for sound. the emitters are just speakers that vary perfectly sinusoidally. the detectors are simply DIGITIZERS. the theory arises completely naturally from considering the behavior dynamics of the most sensitive bit of the digitizers, the LSB. the emitters are analogous to particles in QM. much more elaboration on the specifics in the archives of my group, qm2 @ yahoogroups.com. Ive mostly focused on interpretation, not so much the formalism. the mission for the formalist mathematician, should you accept it: I have written scientific papers before alone but would prefer a collaboration. I would like to work with someone who has written a scientific paper. an online collaboration. I will outline the full contents of the paper very carefully, all the conceptual level details. we will work thru it together. you will get all the nitty gritty mathematics correct, and boil it down into something extremely elegant but missing most of the mind-numbing complexity of most existing QM papers-- something that can be readily understood by a gifted undergraduate. you will function as the scribe, compiler secretary outside of the cases where I will be depending on your specific talent for getting the formalism precisely right. the key requirement on your part is an excellent understanding of the wavefn as it operates uniquely in both classical and QM systems-- something that is (imho) surprisingly lacking in existing literature mass physicist consciousness. also needed, the desire to advance scientific knowledge to where no one has gone before solve the intensely perplexing problems that have defied a century's greatest minds. and, intense focus that can be carried over a long period of time. motivated by nothing else but curiosity shere intellectual/scientific conquest. finally, desire to communicate a critical discovery in the most efficient and lucid way possible. if you know anyone of this type, plz pass along this post have them contact me. (otherwise I will just have to do it all myself in a bit more time, wink) tx very much
t'hooft the digitizer theory of reality
hi all. re: t'hooft's paper. I have skimmed t'hoofts recent paper considering a local hidden variable theory for QM. I believe it is identical to a very simple model Ive been developing for years but only recently came up with a nice analogy. consider a set of speakers and a microphone. let the speakers vary sinusoidally. describing this system mathematically gives rise to a wave equation and a superposition of waves. also, a hilbert space of parameters controlling the speakers. (in t'hoofts paper, this is a set of simple harmonic oscillators) now imagine the microphone is actually a digitizer. now consider the LSB, least significant bit. that bit has a 50% chance of firing when a wave passes thru the speaker. but no matter what you do to the setup, you cannot increase this probability. it appears to me the firing LSB is analogous to the detection of a photon in quantum theory. now, this is classical physics LHV (local hidden variable) theory totally consistent with QM in a limited domain. why? bells thm supposedly rules out such a construction. the answer is very simple. the hidden variables determine detection probabilities, and may sometimes specify no event. if you study bells thm very carefully, you will find it cannot rule out this possibility. (note, this is not the same as the detector efficiency loophole noted in the literature.) Ive been promoting this theory on my mailing list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/qm2/ (am always looking for a good mathematician or qm theorist to collaborate with. would like to write a paper on the subject but havent been able to get the free time so far.)
algorithmic complexity theory
hi all. Ive been poking at computational complexity theory to various degrees for close to a decade. the recent comments on the subject are interesting its not surprising it has popped up on this list. I believe complexity theory is going to shed some deep new light on physics, and has already done so. one area of intense study is the satisfiability transition point which has many deep analogies to physics and thermodynamics under very active investigation. I can cite some refs if there is interest. one of the deepest analogies yet to be explored, I suspect, is that of entropy. in physics, entropy is a measure of disorder. I suspect in complexity theory, hardness of a problem is a measure/analog of entropy. the more disorder involved in the computational function, the more difficult. another thing to point out here. while there are no proofs that P!=NP, there are some good results in computational complexity theory separating some complexity classes. its a very active area of research. one of my most favorite results Ive been getting into lately is that it has been proven that some problems require an exponential # of AND,OR circuit families (by razborov in 1985, for which he won the nevinlanna prize). if it could be proven for an NP complete problem and AND,OR,NOT gates, then P!=NP. hans moravec (wow, welcome to the list!!) writes: By the way, it is known that factoring into primes is easier than the TSP. as HF pointed out, factoring has not been proven to be NP complete or easier than NP complete (it is conjectured to be easier than NP hard) in any sense as far as I know. this is definitely a very cutting edge area of research. shor's quantum-P-time factoring algorithm is definitely one of the very important breakthroughs in this area. let us note some of the other key open questions. it is not known if quantum computers can solve NP complete problems in P time in general. it is not known how to most efficiently convert an arbitrary algorithm to a quantum algorithm, although there are hints of this (disordered database lookup, shor's factoring algorithm, etc) re: qm computing, I highly recommend julian browns outstanding book quest for the quantum computer which I recently finished, much good food for thought for anyone on this list. many of these themes can be found in the revised theory-edge FAQ v2.0 (qm computers,satisfiability problem,complexity theory,etc) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/theory-edge/message/6585/
polynomial vs exponential time problems clarification
hi all. re: the exponential vs polynomial time thread. imho HFs comments could be interpreted as roughly correct but stated in a very confusing way I would say, hence the ensuing confusion. lets give this another shot. there are no problems for which it has been proven that there is a **lower bound** of exponential time except for those that also require exponential space (for which the exponential time lower bound is trivial). (space is the number of tape squares used by a TM, time is the number of steps). this of course is quite frustrating even embarrassing to researchers and a gaping open problem in the theory. the big P!=NP problem depends on showing that there is some P-space problem that has a lower bound of exponential time, i.e. it cannot be solved any faster than exponential time. literally, there are many problems for which it has been shown or even proven that they can be verified in P time and can be solved in exponential time. in fact every NP complete problem has this property. what has not been proven or is not known is that exponential time is also a **lower bound**. so it can be very confusing if someone says: there are no problems that are known to be checkable/verifiable in P time but take exponential time. the term take must be used very carefully, imho it should be avoided as just too ambiguous. sometimes people mean as a lower bound (as HF did below), or sometimes it just means a solution exists at that speed (as I write above). forget NP complete for a minute suppose I have a problem that is solvable in P time. does it take exponential time? in one sense, yes, there exists also algorithms that run in exponential time to solve it. but in another sense, no, that is not the lower bound, the lower bound is polynomial. also note that defining NP in terms of verification in P time is done in terms of a regular deterministic TM machine, not an nondeterministic one. the sense that NP can be defined in terms of nondeterministic TMs is: it is the set of problems that can be solved by nondeterministic TMs in P time. that straightens it all out, right??? there are many different ways to look at the P vs NP problem, in this way it is like godel's problem, and this can lead to knowledge in the sense that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.. HF writes On 31-Dec-02, Hal Finney wrote: One correction, there are no known problems which take exponential time but which can be checked in polynomial time. If such a problem could be found it would prove that P != NP, one of the greatest unsolved problems in computability theory. What about Hamiltonian circuits or factoring an integer or roots of a Diophantine equation? I don't believe any of those are known to take exponential time. For all we know a polynomial time solution may yet be found for all of these. HM writes Communications glitch here. The definition of NP is problems that can be solved in polynomial time on a nondeterministic machine, that is one that can test simultaneously all candidate solutions (effectively by creating exponentially many processes for testing all possible combinations of undetermined variables, each individual combination taking polynomial time to check)
Re: Algorithmic Revolution?
RS wrote on one level how the algorithmic revolution was epistemological. I objected to this partly. let me quote the dictionary defn of epistemology epistemology-- the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and theory of knowledge. now in newtons time, science was seen as a branch of philosophy. however in modern times, philosophy has become somewhat disconnected from science and followed its own course. so to me to label a genuine scientific paradigm shift epistemological seems to downplay its significance somewhat as a little too abstract. the scientific revolution is not merely about a different way of seeing the universe, but a different way of interacting with it. (experimental method, etc.) this is exactly the way in which I insist the algorithmic revolution be interpreted as I outlined.. not merely a shift in the way we view the world. (unfortunately paradigm shift terminology sometimes implies a merely conceptual, subjective shift in view, partly due to kuhns perspective, but a paradigm shift means much more than a mere psychological rearrangement.) next, RS defines the clockwork metaphor in terms of the newtonian revolution. this is very reasonable and there is a high correlation. however I would argue the clockwork paradigm is ongoing. the clockwork universe involved multiple new ways of seeing the world. one of them, indeed, was newtonian mathematical laws for physics, gravitation, etcetera. another was determinism, ala the famous laplacian quote re: atoms as billiard balls. however another was simply, universe as mechanistic. the clock is a machine. the clock metaphor proposes the universe runs like a kind of automated machine subject to mathematical/physical laws. lets be very careful to define clockwork universe metaphor in terms of the accurate history of its origination, not from our modern point of view. note that in the middle ages, prior to the newtonian revolution, the previous paradigm for the concept of force was something sometimes involving supernatural aspects. the world was presumed to be set in motion by god influenced by various spirits, entities, etcetera in ways not fully conceivable. this is what the clockwork metaphor replaced. the universe as mechanistic theme from the clockwork metaphor persists to this day. einsteins relativistic theory involved the consideration at clocks in moving frames. when physicists analyze particle dynamics, or even search for a TOE as we are here, I would say the clockwork metaphor is still alive. its still ticking, so to speak.. wink again, let me contrast the algorithmic metaphor for the universe with the clockwork one. even in newtons time, the idea was that the universe ran **like** a clock. it was a metaphor. but the zuse-fredkin-wolfram idea of the universe is that the universe evolves not merely **as** a computation, but that it **is** a computation. therefore, imho the algorithmic metaphor is actually more than a metaphor, more than the clockwork model was a metaphor. its not merely a paradigm shift I would say, its something more. its a new model, a new system, a new framework. its comparable to newtons discovery of the law of gravitation if the program can be successfully carried out. is the algorithmic idea incorrect? someday we will probably notice that it has its deficiencies just as the clockwork idea did, but we will not discard it entirely, just as we have not discarded the clockwork universe idea. so imho to say the clockwork metaphor for reality is wrong, is (uh) wrong. imho its a simplistic/facile rejection of a still-legitimate paradigm.
wolfram speaks at comdex
wolfram at comdex on the universe as software idea etc http://news.com.com/2100-1040-93.html
Re: Algorithmic Revolution?
hi all. re the term algorithmic revolution here are a few more ideas along this thread Id like to point out. TCM wrote My belief is that basic mathematics is much more important than computer use, in terms of understanding the cosmos and the nature of reality. ok, fair disclosure, I have a BS software engr, writing code since age ~10, and it affects my worldview bigtime. or, one could say, I really know how to pick a winning horse, haha.. seriously, I recognized planned my life around the algorithmic revolution from a young age. at an early point I realized that software is like animated mathematics. this is a very,very deep cosmic way of looking at algorithmics. it captures some of the revolutionary flavor. we can suggest that mathematics has previously attempted to grasp the concept of change, via calculus, differential eqns etc. but something is fundamentally new about simulation. it captures worlds that cannot be expressed via mathematical generalities. there are no equations we can write down that describe the outcome of, say, a climate simulation-- its all locally defined then globally simulated the outcome is emergent. what are the differential equations that describe the game of life?? imho algorithmics captures the extraordinary, currently very poorly understood property of emergence. just as in the game of life there are thousands of glider types, none of which one would expect/anticipate from the simple rules. we can argue that algorithmics is a fundamentally new way to look at mathematics. and one could argue, all mathematics up until now has been transformed. at this point, it seems much more correct to classify mathematics as a subbranch of algorithmics than vice versa. I believe much mathematics of the future will be taught from the algorithmic point of view instead. imho, the invention harnessing of the algorithm is roughly as significant in human intellectual development as pythagoras's original realization about how mathematics modelled nature. its easily on that order of magnitude as far as a milestone in human thought, possibly surpassing it. it seems to me, fundamentally, algorithmics entails and surpasses mathematics as a new simultaneously conceptual and physical tool for analyzing the universe and its variegated phenomena. so think. we've basically got several millenia of mathematical thought, dating all the way back to the babylonians (who played with perfect triangles, fractions etc), and quite well developed in greece 2000 years ago. reaching heights of sophistication with calculus, or the abstraction in the 20th century. Im saying to some degree, all that is childs play compared to the new universe of algorithmics. re: TCMs questions about some of my points. 1st, I believe that we will eventually get the math for a TOE that matches accelerator/particle physics so perfectly that it will be considered redundant or wasteful to do the expensive supercollider experiments, because the accelerators will never find anything that does not match the comprehensive theory. that is, after all, one of the big reasons to look for a TOE. but I agree, until that point, physicists are not going to give up the big science.. a crazy thought? perhaps. but lets look at atomic weaponry testing-- thats essentially whats happened. the US has been simulating atomic weapons testing for many years now with powerful supercomputers. and obviously the results are considered ***extremely*** accurate. it can indeed be done on some level. 2nd-- alas, I wish I could cite a reference. but software is used extremely heavily in particle physics experiments to automatically analyze particles and classify them find anomalous events. its basically AI-like software, extremely sophisticated. it can look at very complicated particle tracks collisions and name all the particle tracks based on analyzing the big picture. this used to be done by humans by hand, and (as I understand it) the discovery of many particles from the last decade or around that range could not have been done with this highly sophisticated sorting software that can run through millions of events very quickly. so there is a hidden story behind massive particle accelerators. the software infrastructure for them is all invisible and mostly unknown to the public, but its a vast edifice at the core of the analysis, and has gone through revolutionary changes in a short amount of time, mirroring the algorithmic revolution elsewhere. how much is that software worth?? I cant really estimate, but I wouldnt be surprised if a significant percent of supercollider budgets was spent on developing it. if anyone knows references on software used in particle physics analysis, I would really like to know myself. a nice reference on the culture behind accelerators is beamtimes lifetimes by sharon traweek.
KK wired article on TOE etc
as just noted by TCM, kevin kelly on a computational/algorithmic TOE, wolfram, wheeler, etcetera, from current issue of wired. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.12/holytech.html I would say we are all in the midst of some kind of algorithmic revolution that is sweeping across culture, industry, scientific fields etc. .. more on that theme here http://groups.yahoo.com/group/theory-edge/
oscillons as an outstanding but unknown TOE candidate
hi all. I dont recall I mentioned the oscillons phenomenon on this list before (the archive seems to be down as I write this). so, FYI. some months ago I was going thru an old file of paper physics clippings/leads and ran into one on oscillons from 1996 based on a new york times article (see below). at the time I found the article in the 1st place, despite the cautiously optimistic tone in it by the quoted scientists, I was sure that huge momentum would soon grow be built around it. here it is over a half decade later, I had forgotten entirely about it, and went back and looked into the literature. there are indeed a smattering of oscillon papers out there, including several in the arXiv. oscillons are very similar to solitons, and solitons are well appreciated as a very interesting mathematical model that involves emergent schroedinger eqn. like properties. there are several entire books written on solitons. (particle like phenomena emerging from fiendishly complex nonlinear differential eqns.) however it seems to me that the full implications of oscillons have not been pursued. so far nobody is seriously suggesting they may be a big picture theory of everything. but it seems obvious to propose them as a very viable/provisional candidate highly worthy of further research. I would certainly like to take credit for this hypothesis, but it would probably at least require me to write a real paper on the subject for anyone to cite/credit me (haha). this is my conceptual sketch of a TOE. I propose that some fairly simple CA rules on a 3D grid give rise to the same nonlinear oscillon equations. next, oscillons are a model for particles. oscillons can combine and separate into superparticles, that has already been demonstrated empirically in papers and experiments. (in fact a triad-like phenomenon is found already, and I immediately reminded of the quark model which come in 3's.) they have attraction and repulsion properties. I propose gravity is just a very subtle emergent attraction property arising from large collections of superparticles. perhaps one of the most striking aspects of oscillons that almost nobody has realized yet: the models give predictions for **fundamental masses** of (super)particles as an emergent property of the deeper simulation dynamics parameters, something that no other theories I know of can come close to, including (most conspicuously) the massive venerable Standard Model built from decades of massive and painstaking 20th century research. frankly, I just dont know why there is not much excitement about oscillons in the larger physics community esp among particle physicists at this point. Im hoping its just the relative obscurity of the subject that it will change in the near future. imho, they could very well be the fundamental framework for 21st century physics. its a natural conjecture/hypothesis. yet I cannot find a single paper proposing that yet so far. moreover, recently on sci.physics.research I proposed that some fraction of the vast billions spent on supercolliders be invested into large oscillon simulations investigations running on supercomputers or perhaps ongoing physical experiments, as a hedge in the [expensive] bet. seems only reasonable to me. (physicists are right now planning a $6-8Billion dollar international supercollider.) there is no doubt one can create oscillon like supercollider experiments based on existing theory (projecting one oscillon into others either via a simulation or physical experiment), but nobody has tried that obvious idea yet. imho, its a vast open frontier/terra incognita worth exploring ASAP. following is a set of odds ends, links, papers etcetera Ive collected/compiled on oscillons recently for your convenience. --- nice AMS article on solitons by Terng and Uhlenbeck with all the equations http://www.ams.org/notices/21/21-toc.html these are movies by Oleg Lioubashevski who is working with jay fineberg. clay oscillons notice a dipole tripole configurations. the tripole configuration reminds me of quarks which combine in triplets as I understand it!! http://chem.ch.huji.ac.il/~olegl/Localized_states.htm michael cross caltech java simulations pattern formation in nonequilibrium systems http://www.cmp.caltech.edu/~mcc/Patterns/index.html this paper by crawford riecke considers mathematical eqns for solitons and some of the attraction properties. I didnt notice if they observed repulsion. am still looking for a single paper observing attraction repulsion in general. http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/patt-sol/9804005/ imho the above pictures seem eerily reminscent of ***quark*** interactions, possibly. I cant believe particle physicists seem not to be studying oscillons at all!!! patt-sol/9801004 Title: A Continuum Description of Vibrated Sand Authors: Jens Eggers, Hermann Riecke patt-sol/9703009 Title: Localized and Cellular Patterns in a Vibrated Granular
wheeler walked away from MWI
hi all. I just read an amazing factoid in john gribbins search for sch.cat. it says that wheeler, in spite of his initial enthusiasm for MWI promoting it, and being the advisor to everett, eventually abandoned it, feeling it carried too much metaphysical baggage or something like that. I was not aware of that. is everyone else? I wonder if there are other refs on the subject. I will quote the gribbin section if ppl are interested.
Re: wheeler walked away from MWI
ok thanks HF for the clarification. I didnt realize all the recent threads on tegmark were also referring to a tegmark-wheeler article. fyi, here is the quote from gribbin. I havent noticed, but is everyone aware of this book? good stuff.. from 1984, a bit dated, but it keeps getting reprinted apparently because its so superb. gribbin is a big advocate of MWI in a later chapter cites a lot of early science fiction ideas relating to it. he's got a phd in astrophysics. very good on the conceptual history/foundations of QM. p246 perhaps it is only fair, at this point, to mention that wheeler himself has recently expressed doubts about the whole business. in response to a questioner at a symposium held to mark the centenary of einstein's birth, he said of the MWI, I confess that I have reluctantly had to give up my support of that POV in the end, much as I advocated it in the beginning--because I m afraid it carries too great a load of metaphysical baggage. this shouldnt be read as pulling out the rug from under the everett interpretation; the fact that einstein changed his mind about the statistical basis of QM didnt pull the rug from under that interpretation. as for your point in your post about wheeler attaching his name to the theory, I think its ok for proponents and not originators of a theory to be named along with it. for example lately Ive been referring to the fredkin-wolfram thesis. fredkin is far more the originator; wolfram is far more the proponent. seems to me the everett-wheeler theory can be fairly seen in the same way. btw, I recently finished deutschs fabric of reality which imho is really outlandish unfocused in places. after reading it I thought he earned the nickname mad scientist heh heh
noisy digitizer interpretation of QM
hi all. the dialogue here on everything-list is extremely interesting I know several subscribers/participants from long ago acquaintances. I was tipped off on this list by scerir, who posts regularly on qm2 whom I have a lot of admiration for!! he has some really outstanding credentials but will rarely ever mention them!! the address again http://groups.yahoo.com/group/qm2/ I am not so into the philosophical side of QM, and as soon as wigners friend is mentioned I know I am ready to leave, but let me write a little here for this great audience. by the way, how many subscribers are on this list?? I wrote a paper, quant-ph/9808008, that reveals my directions from 4 years ago. let me summarize my current directions as follows since it impinges on the current dialogue, which Ive hammered out after about a half decade. we have a purely **classical model** version of the double slit experiment for both photons electrons in the new theory, the noisy digitizer interpretation of QM, which stands in contradiction to some of the aspects of the copenhagen interpretation. noisy digitizer --- the atom is seen as a digitizer of incoming light wavefronts. each wavefront causes the atom to click or not to click (that is the question!!) a click is an energy transition. therefore, collapse of the wavefunction is the same as the way the LSB of a digitizer is in fact a strange combination of noise and signal. the interpretation holds that the click is precisely determined by the internal state of the atom, but that state is so far unmeasurable, although I believe there are experiments that reveal this connection but are not being interpreted correctly yet. (bunching and antibunching concepts in the literature). the atom has a dead time after a click such that it cannot click within a minimum window. possibly based on a formula relating to planks constant or heisenberg uncertainty eqn. I would be pleased to answer any questions on the noisy digitizer interpretation. the collapse of the wavefunction is in fact a mathematical abstraction that is only an approximation of what happens in reality. I will expand on this if others like, it would help if some people are familiar with the quantum formalism. digitizers are now ubiquitous in the cyberspace age I think a nice new metaphor for quantum mechanics and its future. Ive found a formula called noise equivalent power that gives a dark count/efficiency tradeoff for all photon detection apparatuses. it involves the plank constant. its actually a false positive/negative formula that shows an inherent physical tradeoff. I believe bell formula derivations are not properly taking it into account. I believe there may be a derivation that says there can be no violation of nonlocality based on taking into account the NEP of the detector. therefore apparently QM is in fact an approximation of reality where NEP=0, i.e. a detector with no noise. all detectors have noise, NEP0, and I believe right now this noise is enough to invalidate the existing theoretical/mathematical derivations of the bell inequality. interesting, eh? right now would really like to correspond to someone who understands NEP of detectors. maybe even the original derivation. apparently its very obscure. this is my latest writeup on the subject. http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1e0fd315.0209032055.48273d70%40posting.google.com
qm2 mailing list
hi all. Ive started a group dedicated to finding a sequel theory to quantum mechanics focusing on local hidden variables. now 1 year old, almost 3000 msgs already, 100 subscribers. several graduate students, one practicing QM physicist working in superconductors etc., hope to see you there. will be posting a compendium of links shortly. esp seeking people who can pull off the mathematics. extremely active high traffic right now. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/qm2/ we're not so into philosophical discussions such as on MWI, looking more for focus on the mathematics experiment that could prove aspects of reality not previously accepted or understood. for example, is there a bell-like test of MWI that could distinguish a MWI universe from a non MWI universe? I would consider that inquiry on charter.
