Wow! Great writing! This reminds me of a lot of my Dad's theories from his PhD thesis at Canterbury University (New Zealand) in 1988.
I've never read my Dad's thesis, because I've been unable to track it down since he died in 2018, but when he tried to explain it to me as a child it had a lot of these equations in it. I think he called his new theory GMS (Gravitational Mass System Theory), and he explained that it was about trying to harmonise Newtown's mathematics with Einstein's general relativity.
While he was developing his thesis, he spent quite a bit of time learning about computer modelling of weather patterns to get more data to run his equations on. Unfortunately, his theory was not congruent with String Theory, so he left the Academy and ended up working in Computer Science instead.
Hi, Stephen! I’m curious about what you wrote here. Was your dad discouraged because he felt that the scientific establishment was too focused on String Theory so they didn’t take him seriously? I have heard other stories about physicists with ‘exotic’ ideas about the fundamental nature of the universe who’ve found it difficult to challenge deeply entrenched attitudes and approaches in academia, and have then given up.
As I understand it, he had a lot more fun backpacking around the world and talking to cool people in other nations than he did knuckling down to work on his Thesis. He apparently barely published any work in the four years he spent developing the thesis, and had already turned down scholarships to do his PhD at Oxford and Cambridge so he could explore his research in his own way.
I think the University of Canterbury in New Zealand never really approved of his theories either... Their alumni list used to say he had a Doctorate of Philosophy in Physics, but right now it only says he has a Doctorate of Philosophy with no mention of his work in theoretical Physics?
When I was a kid, he just taught me about Physics in the context of computer systems, so I've got no idea what his findings were in the field of pure Physics.
As usual, I read this with causality in mind, in the Pearl/Reichenbach sense. For causality to work you need to split the universe into an inside and an outside. The outside is implicitly running experiments on the inside, which sees exogenous variables as noise. Thus the symmetry is broken (I can tell A causes B because the noise acting on A propagates to B but not viceversa) and causation and with it time emerges. If you prefer not to do this and rather want to describe the whole universe at once it is natural to have no causality and no time. Of course how to make all of this interact with quantum mechanics to extract a sufficiently quantitative account is beyond my pay grade, probably we need to move beyond the usual theory of DAGs towards non Markovian systems.
You're pointing at some really deep issues in understanding quantum gravity here. Causality is super confusing in the deep quantum gravity regime where spacetime likely breaks down. Even just have reliable identifications of clear subsystems A and B can get confusing.
If beauty is in the eye of the beholder then what eye is there to see all that is beautiful? Or is that the point of it all; a becoming in order to appreciate it all in growing awareness? Or is the awareness more fundamental and we simply a part of a growing awareness?
You guess is as good as mine. We will be there to behold some of it, but who knows who else will be there to take it all in. But at the very least there will be majestic things to behold
Beautiful! You can do all of Maxwell’s equations in one equation using geometric (Clifford) algebra. I am sure you could make the whole time dependent thing have an incredibly beautiful visual interpretation. Do that next 😀
Yes, good catch, I've been tinkering with it! It's hard to generalize the method I use for visualizing the vector fields to not flicker during time evolution :/ There are other methods, but not quite as beautiful. But yeah, I'm definitely going to work on it, but it's turning out to be quite the research project
Yes I am not sure how it would be done, it is clearly going to be a big step up. From what I can remember, the scalar part of the geometric product is the electric potential, and the bivector part is the magnetic vector potential? The bivector parts could be spinning discs of different sizes, and the electric part could maybe be represented with color (of the disc)? If you ever do that, I very much look forward to it. There is also the gauge freedom, I am not sure how that looks “visually”
"In fact, your most holy piece of music can be sculpted out of white noise." That's a much more succinct way of describing my graph convolution project! I think we might be on the same wavelength :)
As a non-practicing physicist, I appreciate the reverie of seeing beyond constrained limits. My apologies for any lapses in my physics language communication, but I have a technical question about the gaussian electron wormhole. I had assumed a wormhole was some sort of topological trick between two points in spacetime. Couldn't the symmetry of the charges work across a bound state or even (current 'hot-word') an entangled state? I assume the only issue is that reductive evidence indicates a natural antagonism between electrons and positrons as if they refuse to share the same space.
I’m not sure I’m getting the question, this gets at it though: I’m not meaning to say that a wormhole with electric flux is the only explanation for an electron-positron pair. Rather, it’s _a_ thing that almost works (although in the end it doesnt quite work)
I'm sure this is going to sound very random. I remember an interview with Sinead O'Connor once where she described her moments of poor mental health as though she was a bucket that was leaking. I've always believed that specific sensation corresponded to something real.
Wow! Great writing! This reminds me of a lot of my Dad's theories from his PhD thesis at Canterbury University (New Zealand) in 1988.
I've never read my Dad's thesis, because I've been unable to track it down since he died in 2018, but when he tried to explain it to me as a child it had a lot of these equations in it. I think he called his new theory GMS (Gravitational Mass System Theory), and he explained that it was about trying to harmonise Newtown's mathematics with Einstein's general relativity.
While he was developing his thesis, he spent quite a bit of time learning about computer modelling of weather patterns to get more data to run his equations on. Unfortunately, his theory was not congruent with String Theory, so he left the Academy and ended up working in Computer Science instead.
Hi, Stephen! I’m curious about what you wrote here. Was your dad discouraged because he felt that the scientific establishment was too focused on String Theory so they didn’t take him seriously? I have heard other stories about physicists with ‘exotic’ ideas about the fundamental nature of the universe who’ve found it difficult to challenge deeply entrenched attitudes and approaches in academia, and have then given up.
As I understand it, he had a lot more fun backpacking around the world and talking to cool people in other nations than he did knuckling down to work on his Thesis. He apparently barely published any work in the four years he spent developing the thesis, and had already turned down scholarships to do his PhD at Oxford and Cambridge so he could explore his research in his own way.
I think the University of Canterbury in New Zealand never really approved of his theories either... Their alumni list used to say he had a Doctorate of Philosophy in Physics, but right now it only says he has a Doctorate of Philosophy with no mention of his work in theoretical Physics?
When I was a kid, he just taught me about Physics in the context of computer systems, so I've got no idea what his findings were in the field of pure Physics.
As usual, I read this with causality in mind, in the Pearl/Reichenbach sense. For causality to work you need to split the universe into an inside and an outside. The outside is implicitly running experiments on the inside, which sees exogenous variables as noise. Thus the symmetry is broken (I can tell A causes B because the noise acting on A propagates to B but not viceversa) and causation and with it time emerges. If you prefer not to do this and rather want to describe the whole universe at once it is natural to have no causality and no time. Of course how to make all of this interact with quantum mechanics to extract a sufficiently quantitative account is beyond my pay grade, probably we need to move beyond the usual theory of DAGs towards non Markovian systems.
You're pointing at some really deep issues in understanding quantum gravity here. Causality is super confusing in the deep quantum gravity regime where spacetime likely breaks down. Even just have reliable identifications of clear subsystems A and B can get confusing.
If beauty is in the eye of the beholder then what eye is there to see all that is beautiful? Or is that the point of it all; a becoming in order to appreciate it all in growing awareness? Or is the awareness more fundamental and we simply a part of a growing awareness?
You guess is as good as mine. We will be there to behold some of it, but who knows who else will be there to take it all in. But at the very least there will be majestic things to behold
Beautiful! You can do all of Maxwell’s equations in one equation using geometric (Clifford) algebra. I am sure you could make the whole time dependent thing have an incredibly beautiful visual interpretation. Do that next 😀
Yes, good catch, I've been tinkering with it! It's hard to generalize the method I use for visualizing the vector fields to not flicker during time evolution :/ There are other methods, but not quite as beautiful. But yeah, I'm definitely going to work on it, but it's turning out to be quite the research project
Yes I am not sure how it would be done, it is clearly going to be a big step up. From what I can remember, the scalar part of the geometric product is the electric potential, and the bivector part is the magnetic vector potential? The bivector parts could be spinning discs of different sizes, and the electric part could maybe be represented with color (of the disc)? If you ever do that, I very much look forward to it. There is also the gauge freedom, I am not sure how that looks “visually”
"In fact, your most holy piece of music can be sculpted out of white noise." That's a much more succinct way of describing my graph convolution project! I think we might be on the same wavelength :)
As a non-practicing physicist, I appreciate the reverie of seeing beyond constrained limits. My apologies for any lapses in my physics language communication, but I have a technical question about the gaussian electron wormhole. I had assumed a wormhole was some sort of topological trick between two points in spacetime. Couldn't the symmetry of the charges work across a bound state or even (current 'hot-word') an entangled state? I assume the only issue is that reductive evidence indicates a natural antagonism between electrons and positrons as if they refuse to share the same space.
I’m not sure I’m getting the question, this gets at it though: I’m not meaning to say that a wormhole with electric flux is the only explanation for an electron-positron pair. Rather, it’s _a_ thing that almost works (although in the end it doesnt quite work)
Is it a math issue or an observational issue?
I'm sure this is going to sound very random. I remember an interview with Sinead O'Connor once where she described her moments of poor mental health as though she was a bucket that was leaking. I've always believed that specific sensation corresponded to something real.