Disclaimer#1. I have not read all the posts here so if anyone has already made this point, I apologize for repeating).
Disclaimer#2. I left physics decades ago early in my career for many reasons, but I now conduct clinical work in inflammatory diseases and cancer, so I encounter similar problems in my field. Many people put out both testable and un-testable speculations, but in our case the regulatory environment limits us from going too far. Despite this, some really unlikely speculations are entertained and studies conducted, all due to the influence of a few well known and powerful people. They are bright and honest, yet end up producing what some would uncharitably call “bullshit.” I for one, see it in terms of human fallibility, nothing else.
The Popperian construct (at least these days) refers to actual experiment that can be conducted to prove or disprove something. In other words, it is not just about a mathematical abstraction like “probability”. Mathematics is a tool or a means to an end in the physical sciences, something you imply as well. If probability simply refers to the likelihood of an event from happening and nothing more, a Popperian analysis should not apply to the abstraction itself. Taking this a step further, anything goes as long as it has a non-zero probability. Could you imagine the number of crackpot contentions that will demand attention? I am not implying that String Theorists are cranks, just that they have badly oversold it. In that sense, both Woit and Horgan are right. Nonsensical theories can sometimes produce occasional predictions that come out true, but that is no reason to go after it. This where Truzzi and his band go off in their Zetetic discussions and end up entertaining ESP, Homoeopathy, paranormal, Velikoskian stuff etc., all in an attempt to be neutral or agnostic as he calls it. And the rest of us are called pseudo skeptics to boot. Some things have to be rejected outright, because they don’t fit in with elementary logic and reason i.e., what we call science. In that sense, I don’t see any fly in the ointment.

Lawrence B. Crowell

I am positive, that you do have such a theory. An observable object over a certain size simply is not effected by quantum physics, because a quantum field is weaker than gravity field. Where’s the link in that?

Qubit

http://blog.ted.com/2008/03/jill_bolte_tayl.php#more

Another example of the issue would be with the dichotomy of the Uncertainty Principle, that you can’t measure both position and momentum of quanta. I would say the notion of position is a fallacy, for if any such particle had an absolute position, its temperature would be absolute zero, so it would esstentially not exist, since measuring it requires some degree of motion. While I’m not an expert on the methods used, it would seem that measuring position actually means measuring force, since by actually stopping the particle, you measure the amount of resistance required to do so. While measuring momentum measures the direction of resistance.
So my argument is the reason reality is fuzzy is because there is no clear distinction between object and action and this applies at all scales. Describing time as a dimension, rather than a measurement, simply tries to make all action a series of objects.

Through all the details, it still seems as though the intention is to give form to function, to explain the network as extensions of the nodes.

So what has transpired is that there is now the 0-brane, which is a field at a point. This is a particle.

Two quarks in a meson are bound by QCD gauge fields termed gluons. Gluons carry the “charge” or color for the QCD force and thus attract each other. Hence two quarks in a meson are connected by this gluon-chromo-flux tube. At a distance this looks remarkably like a string. With the Regge trajectories there was this spin = 2 field with stringy properties. Thus the old hadron bootstrap theory was resurrected in string theory.

I still think it is a consequence of assuming the linear narrative of time is a physical dimension and any point on it is as subjective as any point in space. The result being higher dimensional strings of process as physical reality, rather than real change.

Strings have an interesting history. The started out as a model for hadrons, and they had a spectrum given by Regge poles. The competing idea was gauge field theory and QCD — it was California’s physics war between Cal Tech and UC Berkeley. Cal Tech generally won, but they did not smash the idea. Two quarks in a meson are bound by QCD gauge fields termed gluons. Gluons carry the “charge” or color for the QCD force and thus attract each other. Hence two quarks in a meson are connected by this gluon-chromo-flux tube. At a distance this looks remarkably like a string. With the Regge trajectories there was this spin = 2 field with stringy properties. Thus the old hadron bootstrap theory was resurrected in string theory.

So what is going on? It almost appears that the same thing is taking place. I also think that the 0-branes and their spinor field content define the spin networks of Smolin and the rest of the LQG mafia, where by the way some of their developments of late involve ribbons and stringy like things. So the 1960s armwrestling match between Cal Tech and Berkeley has in some recherche manner been resurrected and it will be curious to see how this ultimately transpires.

Lawrence B. Crowell

It is interesting that String Theory would reflect the relationships of musical chords, though my question is more basic; Are the vibrations a function of the strings, or the other way around? It’s obvious that any particular musical rendition is a consequence of the instrument(and its player) but the creation of that instrument is a consequence of the interest in playing the music and when it is worn out, it will be retired and replaced. So the instrument is equally a consequence of the music. My sense of string threory is that it’s an effort to get beyond the particular focus on particles as the basis of physics and emphasize their activity equally. That the noun is as much a function of the verb, as the verb is of the noun. That there is an institutional bias against this seems to be the elephant in the room. Obviously science is inherently reductionistic, so focusing on the hard parts, rather then the fuzzy stuff, poses a problem, since everything becomes fuzzy if you look hard enough, thus the tendency is to look harder at smaller parts, not accept that in the relationship between being and doing is fuzzy all the way down.

Question about string theory; Can strings essentially vibrate away and form at the intersection of vibrations? This would accord with the macrocosmic relationship of process and product, form and function, nodes and networks, nouns and verbs, etc.

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There is the M-theory due to Ed Witten, which accounts for various string types according to how they couple to higher dimensional vibrating objects called p-branes. We have vibrating strings, but we can put them on a sound board or instrument which has dimension = 2, such as a violin, piano or guitar. Then the modes of one type of string are compatible with the vibrations on the p-brane, and since these are compatible with vibrations of another string type these p-branes define S or T duality relationships between strings.

There is an interesting comparison between music and strings. A music theorist a couple of years ago found that cord progressions were mathematically isomorphic to orbifolds, which are the manifold of compactified strings. I’d have to dig the reference. I sat down at a piano and played through some of the constructions. Yes I am one of those ever rarer “birds” who has a piano at home.

Lawrence B. Crowell

Question about string theory; Can strings essentially vibrate away and form at the intersection of vibrations? This would accord with the macrocosmic relationship of process and product, form and function, nodes and networks, nouns and verbs, etc.

I suppose my point about two arrows of time, with energy and information going opposite directions, amounts to a duality, that, as you point out about dualities, seems whole from either perspective, but like a coin can be turned over and seen from the other side as equally whole. Such as why relativity treats it as a linear dimension, yet it functions as a quality of relative motion.

In #40 Lawrence sketched a picture of (if I understand it) one eigenstate dominating the others, which then cancel out and fade into the background.

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The decoherence is related to the unitary inequivalence of vacua. Hawking radiation from black holes and the related Unruh radiation result in thermal states due to this. Technically it is a Bogoliubov transformation. As a result there is a coarse grained thermalization of states and decoherence.

Lawrence B. Crowell

In #40 Lawrence sketched a picture of (if I understand it) one eigenstate dominating the others, which then cancel out and fade into the background. Now eigenvectors are basically symmetric or “stable” solutions, a classical example being the way a rotating rigid body evolves to rotate about a principle axis, and this symmetry is also a key aspect of my proposal.

A non-trivial duality of the kind I envisage is a generally a many-to-one transformation, something like a Fourier transform, which therefore “mixes” configuration values of one space to form discernable structures such as particles and fields in the dual space.

That means randomness in a space is transformed to dual randomness. In particular an empty space is dual to another empty one. Likewise a space containing randomly arranged structures also maps, for all practical intents, to an empty one because those structures are jumbled up throughout the dual space. Similar to Lawrence’s eigenstates that don’t make the grade, their dual images are simply lost in the background.

Now everyone agrees that black holes will one day be the only surviving structures in our intrinsic arena (i.e. the universe we percieve directly), aside from random radiation. So it follows that if an arena dual to it is to evolve to contain any interesting structures then the black holes in ours must be arranged symmetrically WRT the dual transform.

It’s true they are symmetric in time, by simply lasting so long, and their shape in space is also obviously pretty symmetric. But it seems to me that even more symmetry, collective symmetry if you like, may well be required to produce “compact” dual images, and that means it isn’t good enough for them to be scattered through their intrinsic space at random - They must somehow arrange themselves in symmetric chains almost like molecules.

As luck would have it, another benefit of black holes collecting and held in symmetric chains is that their degrees of freedom are thereby reduced. This I argue reduces the collective entropy of their dual structures, which is what I meant by “resetting the entropy clock” in the emergent dual arena.

Also, although the dual emergent structures may be intrinsically Planck-sized strings as conventionally understood, and behave as such, they are derived from vast macroscopic strings in the original arena. These latter beasts aren’t the exotic long strings one occasionally reads about in New Scientist, but are precisely the chains of black holes held in place by familiar forces (see my post #70), which cause these strings to “vibrate” over intrinsic eons and generally behave just like a conventional string - because in effect that is what they are!

Finally, the fine tuning I referred to is the condition that black holes in late evolution hang around long enough to form these supposed strings. If not
then no interesting dual arena emerges. But turning the argument round, one assumes in this rubric that our arena started out (and of course still is) dual to a later-stage arena, which in turn means that enough black holes *did* survive in that.

If we’re *really* lucky, and happen to live in one of stable sequence of duals, then that might (with a sound understanding of the dual transform) allow even more delicate fine tuning, which could one hopes be confirmed experimentally by the values of physical constants.

(I’m skeptical of the notion that fundamental constants can differ between dual arenas. But then until the nature of the dual transform is clarified, who can say which constants *are* fundamental?)

Anyway, I’ve rambled on quite long enough and will call it a day.

I definitely read all posts here. Understanding them is another matter.

My deeper ambivalence about the many worlds concept concerns one of the points I’ve made about time. The many worlds model says that nature doesn’t decide between potentials and at every fork in the road, all alternatives happen as different realities. This presumes that information, as well as the energy manifesting it, goes from past to future, so that at every current and past circumstance, the potential alternatives branch out to all possible subsequent events. My point about time is that while the energy goes from past to future events, the information that is these events goes from being in the future to being in the past, whether it’s the rotation of the earth forming specific days, or strings manifesting as specific vibrations. The information that is any particular day or vibration, is first in the future and then in the past. The result is the collapsing wave model, where all potentials come together and what prevails, as the energy input collides, is the actual. Consider Schrodinger’s cat: Rather than just view it from the perspective of the observer, where the cat is both dead and alive until it’s revealed, consider it also from the perspective of the wave of events. First the quantum event, then the poison, then the cat, then the opening of the box. As these events occur, the wave collapses, but the information doesn’t travel any faster then the wave collapses. It’s like a star exploding right now, about ten thousand lightyears away. We have no way of knowing until the wave of energy reaches us, because it is still ten thousand years in our future. The timeline for the information of this event is from our subjective future, to present to past, as the arrow of time goes from what comes first(events being in the future) to what comes next(these events being in the past).
So since time is not a fundamental dimension, where both energy and information go one direction, we don’t need to assume every potential must imply an actual.