joigus

I suggest you try your luck on https://physics.stackexchange.com/ or https://math.stackexchange.com/ Or maybe try a professional publication; the likes of Foundations of Physics Letters, for example. FPL is concerned with fundamental questions like the ones you are proposing. The stack exchange platform is more for questions concerning mainstream science, with no room for speculation. In FPL they will give you what will feel like a fair hearing. It would be interesting to know how your idea has fared over there.

You missed the point. It's quite pointless to try to be specific about something that doesn't even start to make sense. You're not using the words "proof" or "theorem" in their usual sense. No, they don't. I've proved many theorems. I know what is like to prove a theorem, and the different techniques: direct proof, reductio ad absurdum, mathematical induction, etc. Yours is not one. No. Nein. нет. いえ. Your variables are neither local nor non-local as you have proposed no particular model. An interaction involving additional dimension in the simplest form involving functions and finite-order derivatives would be local. You would need specific non-local couplings involving infinite-order derivatives to be able to claim the interactions are non-local. You don't do any of that, so. Your claim is empty. I can ellaborate on that, but I will essentially tell you the same again, and again, ang again... You keep saying this, as if you were making sense. It doesn't magically start to make sense when you say it for the eleventh time.

The mother of crackpottery. The ancient Egyptians and Babylonians, Chinese, Indian, etc who started studying the mathematics of the real world, probably wouldn't know the difference. They wouldn't be able to say whether they're doing physics, or mathematics, or geometry, etc.

There was no proof. You can't find an error in it because it was a chain of fuzzy statements. If I say, "this person is a 27% flamboyant", there's no way to prove that wrong. It's neither true nor false. It's fuzzy. The terms are ill-defined. The "error", if you will, is in misusing the terms, skipping definitions, etc. There is no proof of this either. It's impossible to say anything about determinism or the lack of it if there is no rule of evolution or updating. Additional dimensions don't do anything to the deterministic character if the evolution equatioins are stochastic. I was thinking very much the same thing. Claiming that hidden dimensions make physical systems deterministic would have those play the role of hidden variables.

I meant "infinitely many different microscopic states..." The "different" bit is essential. I'm not sure what you mean by this. The conditions of a BH are not applied to the rest of the universe AFAIK. Black holes are very special systems. Although it's true that there are so many. They're not rare objects by any means. The problem with the BH is that while incoming particles carry distinctions, as Susskind likes to call them, and gives back always the same boring thermal state = one "distinction". A "distinction" is a particular choice of initial conditions (position and momentum). In the parlance of classical mechanics, different choices of initial conditions (so-called points in the phase space) always end up being sent to different points in this space of dynamical states (final conditions.) This, in classical mechanics, is called Liouville's theorem, and is understood to imply conservation of information. In quantum mechanics, the generalisation of this law is called unitarity. And the picture of particle-antiparticle pairs is basically right from what I know. Virtual particles are something of a mathematical artifact, but if given the right energy by the appropriate interaction, they "become real", which means the vacuum (virtual loops appearing and disappearing) gets promoted to the first excited state (actual particles that can be seen by a detector). I hope that was helpful. Quantum fields + gravitation are kind of a jerry-built machine, with no proper theory to be sure about anything.

The information paradox is not about our ability to trace back the microscopic history of a system. The microscopic history of a big-enough system can never be followed exactly. The initial state of the 1024 or so molecules in a sample of an ideal gas in equilibrium cannot be traced back, and it never will. This is a consquence of molecular chaos. The arguable loss of information from the information paradox is a more serious problem, if it responded to an actual phenomenon. It would imply that infinitely many microscopic states would evolve towards one and the same microscopic state. It would be, not a matter of us not having a clue, but of a clue not being there at all, so to speak.

That's a good way to put it, I thnk. The interesting point, at the risk of getting silly is, provided there is something (electrons, curry,...), why is it 3D? (Or 3+1, including time). Maybe 10 years in the future someone can think of a consistent way of looking at spacial dimension as an observable that can be assigned probabilities in the proper generalisation of quantum mechanics (with testable consequences). And for some reason, we are bound to live in an eigenstate of that observable with D=3.

There could be faint hopes of some day testing with gravitational waves and such. This is because GW can probe farther and earlier than any other signal. Maybe. But at this point I think the situation is better illustrated by a professor's famous words "think of this as..." In the same spirit, I tend to see space as a property of both curry and electrons, not so much as a thing of itself.

Dirac once suggested that the laws are essentially the same, but the category we understand to be "universal constants of physics" evolve with cosmological time. The idea of a multiverse suggests the different values for the constants of physics are a consquence of local phase transitions in wide ranges of the universe. Other people have suggested the existence of some (one would think unfathomable) meta-laws of physics for which the present laws are a transient phase. I know Smolin and collaborators have been working on some kind of analog of Darwinian evolution for the laws of physics. The very fact that there are so many ideas in that direction and apparently nobody has been able to formulate a precise way to propose an experiment to test them, to me speaks of a domain of undecidability or non-falsifiability.

Oh. OK. I understand. I wouldn't say those neutrons are not identical. I'd say they are in different quantum states. As to hidden variables for the neutron, according to Bell's theorem, you cannot assign hidden parameters that determine any objective internal structure to a neutron, as SU(2) is a subgroup of SU(3), which is an exact symmetry for neutrons. And SU(2) is exactly the group that Bell used to build a set of three observables that cannot have simultaneous elements of reality. Present physics could, of course, be wrong, but the present status of our understanding is that neutrons just decay when they decay. And it seems hard to attribute that to any "internal" mechanism, at least if we don't want to resort to superdeterminism. I do believe elements of reality can be ascribed to position variables through gauge particularisation, which would "protect" them from being known with certainty, but not to spin or any SU(n)-related variables = "internal variables" = "based on a compact group". But that's a different story, it's not mainstream, and just my thinking.

What is untrue? That neutrons decay time cannot be predicted? Of course there are many different situations for neutrons. Lifetimes of bound neutrons can be very long indeed. Slow neutrons can couple to a nucleus and prolong their life, etc. If and when they decay cannot be predicted though. Neutron decay time cannot be predicted.

This is obviously false, as indeterminism is not a consequence of superposition. Superpositions in quantum mechanics evolve in a perfectly deterministic way. They're more to do with non-realism than with indeterminsm. It is measurements that introduce indeterminism. But that's an independent postulate that has nothing to do with superpositions. It's quite ad hoc. The fact that it's ad hoc is bothersome, but it is what it is. And it works. As to the rest, I'm afraid it's just a heavily-worded expression of your hopes that has little or nothing to do with an actual theorem in mathematical physics, like the Coleman-Mandula theorem, and the like. You cannot tell when a neutron will decay. Even though neutrons are all the same. That's indeterminism for you.

I think physics has enough philosophy to go by. Neopositivism, operationalism, rationalism, inductivism, and so many other "isms"... But any philosophical approach needs more concrete assumptions and mathematical statements in order to permeate physics --as pointed out by most members. It's not that your ideas cannot be true. It's rather that nobody would know how to turn them into laboratory propositions.

It could have been "metamorphic" or "hypermorphic", and nobody would have been any the wiser.

Agreed.

This is an old myth. "Observing" is not a part of quantum mechanics. Interaction through entanglement is.

Probably a mammalian thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Economo_neuron#In_the_anterior_cingulate_cortex

Because you didn't use the quote function, I cannot be sure this was addressed to me... None of this even touches what I said. I said (or clearly implied) actions have consequences, that's why morality has everything to do with cause and effect. Morality came later? But of course! Animal metabolism came only much later than energy, although conservation of energy came first. But animal metabolism has everything to do with energy and its conservation. You seem to be inverting the arrows of implication here. And it was @Phi for All who mentioned samsara when arguing about religions general motivation and conceptual apparatus. I didn't mention samsara, although it's also a Sanskrit word. Nothing cause-and-effect about samsara, AFAIK. It's karma what I was talking about, IOW, cause and effect. I was surprised that you seem to think morality has nothing to do with cause and effect. I still am.

I think you do.

We're talking cause and effect here, not the laws of physics. Morality is all about cause and effect. You don't need physics to have cause and effect. Do show me.

Really? So are you arguing for a world in which there are no consequences to your actions? I don't think that's how the world of human actions operates, and I don't think one can cogently argue for that to be the case. But those are just your thoughts on the subject. There is no a priori reason to think there should be any message in the natural laws, or in the vastness of the universe, or in the sunset on the surface of Saturn. A message is to do with how information is organised in brains. In particular, the sequential nature of language clearly suggests so.

An example I can think of is: Numbers of states are "combinatorial" wrt numbers of "entities" (I hope the quoted terms are more or less clear). For any number of things/entities etc you can think of, say N, combinatorial numbers are built out of factorials of those. Entropies go like logs of these numbers, which "keeps hugeness at bay" in a manner of speaking, because logs grow very slowly, but phase space gets you back to the hugeness of the combinatorial number, as phase space is roughly \( \exp{S} \) with S= entropy Phase spaces are huge indeed. That's roughly why the chances of something happening again are zero to all intents and purposes.

Why would you think there is?

I don't think so. Karma for Buddhists (and in Indian tradition in general) is a fancy Sankcrit word for "cause and effect". Not the same. In Abrahamic religions God can break the law of cause and effect (think of the Book of Joshua, and the Sun standing still under God's command). Assuming there is a message...

I don't think this is totally fair. Most religions seriously intersect the proper domain of science. For one thing, they tend to start with a cosmogony and anthropogenesis. And for another thing, they appeal to the supernatural only too often. It's not like they are non-overlapping magisteria, as S. J. Gould would have it. Think about it. In these forums, every day and its eve we have a religious character of some kind or another deeply concerned with what science has to say about evolution, the origin of the universe, or whether the world is a simulation (a modern version of a deity) etc. That happens for a reason. Buddhism seems different though.