Where did we come from and where are we going? Why existence?

John A. Wheeler opens the volume with Niels Bohr's idea of "daring conservatism" in doing physics. Better "daring conservatism" than "neo-conservatism" in doing pre-emptive "nation building" implementing the qabalistic thought of Leo Strauss? It may be too early to say? We live in interesting times. :-)

From "Hidden Variable: Through The Looking Glass Darkly" (Episode IV of Space-Time and Beyond - The Series)

Sarfatti's Commentaries on "Science and Ultimate Reality" starting with Freeman Dyson's ground-breaking essay in that volume from Cambridge University.

The handwriting may be on the wall for spin foam/weave and M theory attempts to quantize gravity? Dyson has "searched in vain" for a thought experiment to detect gravitons. Indeed, in my theory Einstein's metric field is not micro-quantum field, but is an emergent local macro-quantum vacuum field and it is wrong to re-quantize it. Dyson admits that all of this so far is a hypothesis not yet a statement of fact, but he warns that the assumption that "the gravitational field must be a quantum field" rests on very shaky ground indeed at Richter scale 10. ;-)

We interrupt this Epistle/Jeremiahed from the San Francisco North Beach Bohemians with an important bulletin just in:

On Jul 3, 2004, at 8:49 AM, d1494@copper.net wrote:

"Don't you remember what I sent you showing that the name "Sarfatti" actually came from the place name of Sareptha (sp) in Canaan? I was checking out C.Gordon's hypothesis of Bronze age voyages of some of the Israelite tribes (Dan, Asher, Gideon) along wth their cousins the sailors of King Hiram of Phoenecia, (known from the bible as friend and in law of King Solomon), at the time of Exodus (and Troy) and found that reference to the origin of the name "Sarfatti." These tribes left numerous linguistic markers and went to Argos in Greece and thence to Tarshis in Spain, Carthage and to the Rhone Valley in France and The British Isles where they mined tin. In another synchronicity, while I was working on this I came across an article on Hebrew etymology called "Back to the Future" (!) by one Gad Sarfatti of Bar Ilan University!!"

Dyson sees micro-quantum theory as unfinished and incomplete. Opposing attempts by Hawking and Susskind to apply it to cosmology may bring important insights but cannot be accepted as some kind of sacred dogma. At issue is the extent of the domain of validity of the linear Schrodinger equation with nonlocal entanglements in higher-dimensional 'many-particle" configuration space (and phase space if we use the Wigner density). In my theory, based on P.W. Anderson's "More is different" the micro-quantum linear Schrodinger equation in many-particle space is replaced by the macro-quantum nonlinear Landau-Ginzburg type equation in macro-occupied single-particle space at the boundary phase transition micro-quantum ---> macro-quantum. Indeed this includes the post-inflationary emergence of Einstein's smooth curved space-time along with dark energy and dark matter as two sides of the same zero point fluctuation exotic vacuum Face of Janus, but without any need for spin 2 gravitons in a non-perturbative sense.

Dyson gives several mind-boggling gedankenexperiments that continue the Bohr-Einstein Debate in the sense of "deep truths" in which the opposite is also true in the sense of "complementarity." This is definitely "dialectic" and "Qabala" in the sense of the late Carlo Suares who I met in Paris in 1973. The opposite of a trite truth is, of course, false.

"I hope this chapter has left you as confused as it leaves me." Dyson p. 88

How very Leo Straussian! :-) Did Leo Strauss ever mention Niels Bohr?

"One should not speak more clearly than one can think." Thus Sprach Bohr

This reminds me of Ludwig Wittgenstein extolling the virtue of silence whilst compulsively watching John Wayne Westerns.

There is a challenge for Bohmians to counter Dyson's suggestion that one cannot use pilot waves continuously. There is also Dyson's idea of the sharp break between past actual facts and future potentia that may contradict Shelly Goldstein's recent paper on "opposite arrows of time" http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~oldstein/ on how retro-causation allows a special relativistically covariant Bohm pilot-wave/extra variable theory along the lines of Costa de Beauregard's "Wheeler-Feynman Zig Zag" and Cramer's transactional hand-shake not to exclude Aharonov's "Destiny" and "History" waves.

to be continued

PS Einstein's Box reconsidered:

"arrange an optical system with f-number f that will focus the photon on to a fixed point at a distance l = f(Uncertainty in Position) from the window of the box, no matter where the box happens to be at the moment of emission ...

(Uncertainty in Energy of Photon)(Uncertainty in Time of Emission of Photon) = (f/cT)(Uncertainty in Position)^2(Uncertainty in Momentum)

T is time it takes to transfer momentum to the balance by the spring in Einstein's experimental design. One can easily, in principle, make the RHS of the above equation less than the Heisenberg limit hbar/2. Of course that is the domain of virtual zero point processes.

"After 70 years, Einstein is finally vindicated." Dyson p. 82

Copenhagen has produced two great spinners of Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Anderson and Niels Bohr. Of course we love them both. :-)