Yes, this is my theory that explains the origin of reality. I call my theory "Quantum statistical automata", hence QSA. But I must warn that the reader should be familiar with the basics of academic QM/QFT and not just a reader of popular science to get the full impact, otherwise it will be just a curiosity. Thanks for you attention. Tegmark, Wolfram and Conway are 100% correct( in principle) because my theory "quantum statistical automata" proves it. You can check the details in this website http://www.qsa.netne.net Reality exists hence we say it is true. But what is really true besides that more than anything else which we can really trust, it is mathematical facts. So, to my mind I connect both since both seem to be a statement of truth. So I took a guess that reality is something akin to a circle (truth). The relations between the points give you a mathematical structure whereby you get PI which defines the structure of the circle. the structure that leads to our reality is random numbers and certain unavoidable relations(and only possible ones) between them. that is all.It is the most generalized structure possible. The mass of the electron pops from the system among many other standard physics results. The system (I will not use the word model although you could with some caution) seems to mimic reality by exposing some of the very important essential features of Schrodinger equation, Dirac equation, QFT and Gravity! But only certain essential features of these theories, probably some heavy work and more elaborate simulations needed to map to the standard physics. On the other hand the system exposes features of reality that standard physics is simply in no position to do so. Particularly, the Lagrangian of the system falls out from the simulation and you get the values of charge, mass, c, h_bar and other values, even the Fine Structure Constant. Not to mention the beautiful unified picture of space (its points are the crossing of the lines-dynamic-), time(change of state-does not actually exist-), mass, charge, and energy. The other really big result which I obtain is the essence of Dirac equation included the notorious non-locality. When I try to simulate the 2D situation, I am forced to restrict my line throwing activity to only lines that can go between particles directly so as to keep the invariance of quantities calculated in case the frame is rotated. And Wala, I get two particles to interact through their width in the second axis and it does not matter if each is on the other side of the universe, they are both linked!!!! When I calculate spin (what I believe to be) one is up the other down. There are many other things in the system which I have not tried to do too much yet mainly due to lack of time including gravity which I have done in limited way and I do get the small attractive force but probably much more work is needed.
I just like to add some clarification. Basically, we are saying nature is just like mathematical object like circle or a triangle but more complicated. More complicated objects like fractals, which have been conjectured to be the basis of physics laws but no results were obtained. Or let’s say you start with two circles multiply their radius incrementally until they meet, and in a sense you get interaction. The problem with both of these mathematical systems (as examples) while dynamic they do not lead to our reality. A more natural and fundamental system is needed, and that is what I show. The above systems in some sense are a subset of the generalized and fundamental system which falls out naturally from trying to design a dynamic universe without making artificial rules( not too much anyway, only few constraints which should be explained away) for the system upfront. You could consider the system nice, bizarre or whatever because it is the ONLY system which can lead to a reality like ours. I repeat it is the ONLY one that is possible, all others lead to a lifeless reality, and i.e. no particles can form!!! So, what we are saying is that there are NO physical things; we perceive things as such because we are made up of this mathematical structure which produces the laws of physics.
Since it seems that the physicists on this forum might be too busy to wade through my website which is mostly simulation, I will present here one of the most significant result here. And that is the mass of the electron. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! This, I call the most beautiful graph ever; I simulate two particles interacting, with different Compton wavelengths for each run. They all converge on(around) the .00054858 the mass of the electron. The Compton wavelengths can be anything from small like 1 to near 2000. I use 5,20, 100,200,500,1000, as an example but could be anything like 22,34,234,666,999,1244,1677,1987, 1888 . Anything you like. I will help any programmer who likes to run the simulation to confirm the result. It is relatively easy. All you need is to download a Microsoft express edition (free) plus a 64 bit extension the SDK 7.1.
It could just be that they have looked and are taking the time to examine your work and reasoning before developing any sort of opinion. This is all over my head and I assume it isn't a hypothesis you developed all willy nilly. You most assuredly took time to do research and have some form of logic or reasoning that you followed in order to reach the conclusion that you have. You may just want to give them time to digest it before responding. As I said it is all over my head, but I am very curious about the premise of it and am waiting curiously waiting to see how anyone may respond.
Perhaps they are, but my website statistics seems to say otherwise. I don’t blame them because most physicists are used to standard way of doing business, but mine is a simulation which is hard if you are not very familiar with concepts. There are some simulation techniques in physics but usually done in conjunction with some formulas, mine is pure simulation. So I thought I will post piece meal hoping it will help. Actually, my method and the website talk are very simple and short, but it might look intimidating, and it is understandable that people do prefer the “wordy” ideas. Also, since physics covers a wide range of complicated subjects most people fall into two camps, either QM/QFT or GR with a bit of the other. And so, maybe not enough people will be motivated to look into my theory. Moreover, I have not tried to spice up my posts or the website for marketing (of my theory) purposes. I just said it in a straightforward manner as possibly as I could. But anyhow, are you familiar with DR TEGMARK’s MUH. What do you think of it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis
Well from what I understand, a couple of the best physics posters on this forum are moderators as well. So they have their hands full, especially these days. We recently had a software update that caused a lot of changes and somehow spam escalated exponentially since that happened and they are probably banning 100 new spam bot registrations daily as well as trying to delete all their spam posts before they are seen, and those posts can literally be in the hundreds. Which means they have to read every single post that comes from new sign ups. They haven't read your thread here yet but they do have their hands full and will get to it. If you don't hear something in the next few days contact prometheus, rpenner, James R, or Alphanumeric. Three of which are moderators. But these are the guys with the best reputations for being good at physics as far as I can tell. As far as me understanding anything you have written, it won't happen until it is put in laymen terms. I don't even know how to use sine, cos, or log on a calculator, let alone what the purpose of those functions are.
I admire that it's not snake oils salesmanship. I noted that you were cautiously excited. It's quite refreshing, considering the often seen arrogance of those that think they've proven their smarts. That said, the 'pure simulation' as you put it, did, indeed, make it difficult to follow what you were saying. You really need to show your math as you also show the simulation at work. For example, just saying sin[sup]2[/sup] without any explanation of what it's used with, 'random numbers' and then, viola! results... You were a little more direct this last post with "piecemeal" rather than saying, "complex or difficult to grasp"- it's not coherent, each page does not explain itself through and explain the other pages...
Yes I understand. When I first registered and wrote my intro post the system told me you are a spammer and you are banned forever. But I posted anyway and it went through! I am not sure if my complaining had anything to do with that. Maybe when some discussion is kept going you can pick up the main idea. Or I have to elaborate to a degree where a laymen can follow, at least partially.
Thanks. I could not reply to your PM as there is a system restriction. I agree my website is a bit cryptic and underdeveloped, but I wrote it with minimum time available so that at least those in the know can get the basic idea. But I hope I will do better as time permits. The simulations take a lot, I mean a lot of time, and to interpret the results and re-simulate really takes a lot of effort. Moreover, I am not a professional physicist so I have to learn to interpret as I go along. Just to be clear I am not that hot shot of a philosopher or a mathematician either, but I guess that is easy for anybody to figure out. I will just mention the history quickly to put things into perspective. I am 57 now I started early as an engineer interested in physics, reading just about every issue of Scientific American and then later many other popular science books. By the time I was in my thirties I was so frustrated I did not feel I really understood the issues that well, so I decided to hit the textbooks. I went through many books but my main book was this excellent old(1975 Harris) two volume book which I recommend to anybody who wants to take his theoretical physics seriously. It is comprehensive, lucid and compact. http://www.worldcat.org/title/Introduction%20to%20modern%20theoretical%20physics: After that I was satisfied for a long time that at least I understood the main issues and continued educating myself but with less intensity. Over the years the idea of mathematics having more than this casual relation with nature started developing only in my head as a philosophical musing. But one day (almost three years ago) chatting with friends, I articulated the concept, and I had the biggest laugh. While I was happy with my joke but it made so much sense when I uttered the word. So I decided to play around and see what I will get if I try to design a mathematical universe, the rest of the story is in my website. But really, I think I was just super lucky that I got the results so quickly, since later I found that other people like wolfram has already thought of it but his system did not give real results. I am a strong believer in science since it has served me well, and I never seen a lie in it, not even once. When I do experiments and designs the system ALWAYS came as the theory predicted. Using science in business made me relatively rich, so I have absolutely no quarrel with it. But I also learned that as you go up higher to the top of any human endeavor (I have been in some of them) you will see controversies, and that is normal and does not take anything away from our scientific methods and their main results. Only the issue becomes how to tackle these new tough issues of unchartered territories. My method is novel (but it is a close cousin of the random walk method) and it forced itself on me as I had described. Only time will tell if it’s of any use. My system has great results but also a lot is missing and even all the results I get are not very clear as to their exact meaning. And that could be good if new profound thing are interpreted from them, OR could be that they are coincidental and inconsequential. Of course, I do hope and believe in the former.
This the basic idea of my theory, I wonder if it makes any sense at least up to this point. If not, why not? 1. How I arrived at the idea. Reality exists hence we say it is true. But what is really true besides that more than anything else which we can really trust, it is mathematical facts. So, to my mind I connect both since both seem to be a statement of truth. So I took a guess that reality is something akin to a circle (truth). The relations between the points give you a mathematical structure whereby you get PI which defines the structure of the circle. So I was thinking the relation(s) between what entity(s) could give a rise to a universe (truth). To come up with a structure with some entities, the easiest way was to see if I could draw two entities and define some kind a rule for their interaction. At that time I was familiar with fractals and vaguely heard of Conway’s idea, but I did not know about either Dr. Tegmark or Wolfram’s- New Kind Of Science-. I said let me see maybe I will be smarter than Conway and get some really fancy rule between some triangle or circles or lines or whatever. But as soon as I put a blank sheet in front of me, for a short while I thought to myself this sounds very enigmatic, first by what criteria I am going to choose my entity, and which characteristic of that entity I was going to interrelate them and what expression. Choosing by trial and error was not very natural. My intuition was telling me I needed something more natural. Being an engineer and a programmer we learn to be efficient in our designs. So I opted first for the simplest configuration and that was point and to start simple and not to draw points all over the paper, I restricted myself to a line. Now, if I iterate on an artificial formula I will just get fractals which has already been tried which gives you beautiful suggestive pictures but that's all. Also the different formulas I could use were most unnatural. So I thought the only way out is to throw random numbers on the line and see what happens. Off course, after a bit more than few seconds it was obvious I am going to get a uniformly distributed points on the line, I don't have to tell you that I was sad at that point( although I should have been happy as hell, because that is the constant probability for photon in space). How I was to get out of this conundrum. The ONLY other thing to do was to throw random lines that did not exceed an original line of length L. One more choice was necessary is to choose where those lines started, the obvious choice was random position on that line L. After that thought analysis I went to my pc and downloaded a simple BASIC program and started coding the idea thinking I was going to get some fractal like universe or something useless. Creating the random length lines and their random positions was straightforward, but now I had to decide on what logic/constraint to use to eliminate the lines which were going outside of the original line. I tried few of them with not too complicated expressions and the output, the random positions, looked jittery but when approximated looked like some kind of a trigonometric function. So I superimposed a sine, cosine, sin^2, cos^2. Using the simplest expression for the constraint I was in a shock, it matched perfectly sin^2, and that was the solution for Schrödinger's equation for a particle in a 1D box, with the probability of the particle position directly (no complex wave). Just from that I knew at that time that I was onto something big. Reality was nothing but random numbers (representing lines and their positions) just like what I have suspected. The next natural thing to do is to generalize to 2D and 3D, I was in a shock again, it was so simple, just repeated the code for 1D and labeled appropriately, and plotted, a perfect probability wave for first energy level in 2D and 3D. The amplitude came out also perfectly once I normalized the probability positions to the number of throws, 2/L, L being the original line length. That was natural because probabilities had to add up to 1. And that led me to the next step, setting up a particle in a finite potential well. I could use a step function or just another particle in a smaller range within the original particle space. And the result was perfect. I got the exponential decay for the parts which were overlapping and the tunneling with continuity automatically satisfied. There was no turning back at that point.
The assertion in the thread title can not possibly be true. Simply put, we would have to revamp all of our language and knowledge to comport with this premise. That's impossible. I would start by noting that nature is real, and we need only set the scope of this idea to encompass all of nature in order to follow the reasoning to conclusion. This eliminates thrashing endlessly on hypotheticals. Suppose we limit this further to the scope of knowledge included in a typical high school level of education. That eliminates the deep diversions into esoterica. Now pick any element from that subset of reality that you want to show is "nothing but a mathematical structure". Suppose I choose one gram of liquid water. No one but the philosophy majors, the poets, the artists, the freethinkers and the cranks are going to deny that a gram of water sitting in a test tube constitutes a valid sample of reality. Now I ask: what is it? Depending on how far you want to go with that explanation, you could lay it out in a few words, or in volumes, and even in a journal that constitutes all of human knowledge, updated in real time, and which is never finished. For sake of practicality, let's start with one of the simplest of answers: water is H[sub]2[/sub]O. At least it has a number in it, so we ought to be able to agree that this is mathematical representation of water, regardless of how limited the information may be. Now I ask: is water H[sub]2[/sub]O or is it the explanation "H[sub]2[/sub]O"? That's where I see the premise hitting a brick wall. Unless you believe that we speak reality into existence, then it can't possibly be true. Math is no more than a language, one that represents treatments of reality, treatments that are usually idealizations, generalizations, or narrow details that help us examine and understand the real thing as well as we possibly can. Clearly the proposition that water is H[sub]2[/sub]O is correct. It's not the formula itself, and that's clearly not what is meant by the formula. All that's needed next is to apply inductive reasoning, and extend this to encompass all of reality and I think that answers the question in the thread title. You've raised a lot of different ideas that could branch into a lot of other threads. One that might be interesting to explore is the concept of transcendental numbers. You mention π, and the other prominent one is e. You could compile a short list of favorite constants, maybe a few from physics: c, h, Boltzmann's, the intrinsic impedance of free space, and so on. The fact that there are constants, intrinsic properties, laws and principles that define or explain phenomena is a good basis for entering into a conversation on science. I just wouldn't equate the thing to its property, particularly to its explanation. I don't think the premise--that reality is an automaton, or that we can collapse reality into a formulation, or that we can know anything beyond the limits of human perception and understanding--will ever fly.
Thank you for the reply, and the very good question. I have introduced my theory with these two little paragraphs “Because our understanding of nature has grown tremendously in the past hundred years or so, it was the scientists in the field who got to consider that nature looks like it has more than this casual relation with mathematics. It was not just the suggestion of that casual relation but also the deeper understanding of how nature seems to be constructed. While we don’t understand a lot of things about nature, it was this comprehendible thing about it that made many scientists make that connection. The quote of Wigner’s “Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” is very well known and pointed to as one of the first hints. Another hint you can see in the classic textbook by Wheeler , Misner and Thorne GRAVITATION where the first attempts were made to drive the law of physics by logic which they called pre-calculus. As our knowledge increased more people got to consider it like Wolfram in New Kind of Science, Conaway’s game of life, all kinds of automata ideas, Fractals and not the least as we got hints from how computers generate virtual realities. But the grand slam belonged to Dr. Tegmark with his MUH. So this idea did not happen in one go but in a continuous fashion.” So, we are very familiar with how mathematics connect to reality in the way of modeling, nothing new there, we have been doing it systematically for the past 300 years. It is the intensity of it in the past 100 years that we finally got the hint, especially with GR (just GEOMETRY) and QM (bizarre abstract wavefunction). Of course, there has been very big resistance to accept this paradigm using just philosophical arguments based on current known science. First attempts by Conway, Mandelbrot and Wolfram were to prove that the universe followed some simple rule, an automaton, to create such vast complexity. But unfortunately they only succeeded marginally. However, later, Dr. Tegmark gave more convincing arguments from a different point of view, not assuming the simple rules, but postulating that all mathematical structures exist (whatever the rules) and our reality is just one of them. He did manage to publish, but the idea just sounded too fantastic and crank like, only very few converts were obtained. The general idea was not new, but the way it was stated was shocking, but still the actual proof sounded like a thousand years away. So most scientists and philosophers thought they were safe from such an amusing concept. I did not know of any of the above good people at the time that I got my idea. Notice again, I was not the first to think about it; somehow I was most lucky to come up with a working system. It seems my stating point was the crucial first step. So, my hypothesis was not entirely new, only a variation that led directly to QM, with some great luck. And with insight from the work of the greatest people (IMO), the fathers of modern physics and their students, too numerous to mention. As you can see I am not just asserting or providing a philosophical argument, I am actually presenting a working model. But yes, the model might not eventually prove that the universe is a mathematical entity. But I think the probabilities are much higher for the mathematical universe. That is why I think it should be looked into it more in a serious way. Like I have state it before I am an engineer and science is bread and butter for me. While I am not a professional mathematician, but I think the Pi, e or irrationals are none issue (well defined) as far as I know. And I do start with saying reality is REAL, we are just investigating in what sense. And what does real mean, exactly. The answer is, as real as a circle is. Now I answer your most important question, I just wanted to present the above information as an introduction. I don’t know how much you know QM or physics in general in the academic sense, but I will assume that you do. Now when we describe the hydrogen atom using QM we describe it three equivalent ways, some ways are easier to describe particular problems. The three methods are Heisenberg (matrix theory), Schrodinger equation and path integral method. QM started as a deduced system from experiment (matrix theory and Bohr/Einstein), not unlike all the physics that had gone before. So people are very familiar in how to produce MODELS based on experiments were we use some measured values as a starting point. But Schrodinger’s hit on his equation was a real spectacle; it reproduced QM/matrix mechanics results but not directly derived from experiment. But it still had to use the experimental values. So that is the story of modeling Hydrogen atom, experiment on hydrogen breathed life into the equation so to speak. Now, with my hypothesis what happened is that the system itself breathed life into QM results/equation, so that the system became equivalent to the life Hydrogen experiment which breathed life into the equations. The hydrogen’s experimental values (constants) come with my system. Hence my system is as good as the life Hydrogen, i.e. they are equivalent. So, the mathematical structure that produced the QM results is the same as the life hydrogen atom. If you don’t understand the last sentence, please ponder it as much as you can and hopefully you will get the gist of it. The bolded above is very crucial to what has been said. If not, there will be plenty of chances.
I would like to add few points to my last post. First, there is no need to overhaul anything for the mathematical universe, because I show how the system is based on simple mathematics. Second, while it is true that at this stage I still have to make some very simple assumptions, like particle width and some constraints, but I think these are not fundamental obstacles. Eventually they should be explained away. Third, Notice that the interaction concept is automatic (line crossing), once the concept of random lines is initiated. And all constants and concepts like space, charge, energy and mass automatically appear as a manifestation of the original random lines. That tell us the system is self-contained at its birth, and just like any mathematical object; it does not need an outside agent, its element does not reduce to anything simpler, and no need for it to be held in a container which also creates a perpetual problem(like the “physical” concept).
