"Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito---Do not yield to the bad, but always oppose it with courage." --Virgil
On page 66 of the attached document, please find a list of the fifty or so "foundational questions" MDT both asks and answers.
Long ago, Galileo accounted for the pre-ordained awards papers on string theory, LQG, and timelessnes in describing the character of the groupthink religions which oft replace science and *physical* reality: "In the long run my observations have convinced me that some men, reasoning preposterously, first establish some conclusion in their minds which, either because of its being their own or because of their having received it from some person who has their entire confidence, impresses them so deeply that one finds it impossible ever to get it out of their heads. Such arguments in support of their fixed idea ... gain their instant acceptance and applause. On the other hand whatever is brought forward against it, however ingenious and conclusive, they receive with disdain or with hot rage - if indeed it does not make them ill. Beside themselves with passion, some of them would not be backward even about scheming to suppress and silence their adversaries. I have had some experience of this myself. ... No good can come of dealing with such people, especially to the extent that their company may be not only unpleasant but dangerous."--(Galileo Galilei)"
Yes Cristi,
It would be one thing if all the insider FQXI winners were the "next Einsteins" with novel postulates and equations based on logic and *physical* reality, celebrating hitherto unsung features of the universe such as dx4/dt=ic. But none of their papers advance physics. None of the winners' papers contain novel equations nor new postualtes, unlike the MDT paper. Rovelli defends this reappropriation of decades-old research which has lead nowhere with "physics needs wrong directions, wasted time, and wasted money." Yes--but should that be one's goal just because it pays better? For physics also needs simple postualtes and equations such as "The fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions, or dx4/dt=ic," which provides the bedrock principle that Einstein stated relativity yet needed, as well as a *physical* model for Schrodinger's entanglement, time and all its arrows, and entropy.
"A physical theory can be satisfactory only if its structures are composed of elementary foundations. The theory of relativity is ultimately as little satisfactory as, for example, classical thermodynamics was before Boltzmann had interpreted the entropy as probability. --Einstein in a letter to Arnold Sommerfield on January 14th, 1908. CPAE, Vol. 5, Doc. 73:"
"When two systems, of which we know the states by their respective representatives, enter into temporary physical interaction due to known forces between them, and when after a time of mutual influence the systems separate again, then they can no longer be described in the same way as before, viz. by endowing each of them with a representative of its own. I would not call that one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought. By the interaction the two representatives [the quantum states] have become entangled." ⁺Schrödinger Moving Dimensions Theory's simple postulate, physical model, and equation account for both "relativity's elementary foundations," which Einstein stated we yet needed, and Schrödinger's "characteristic trait" of quantum mechanics--entanglement.
MDT: The fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions at the rate of c, or dx4/dt=ic.
Now I know that all the fqxi cash empowers the antitheory insiders to surf Hawaii and ski Aspen, but in-between all the jet-setting, somebody, someday, will find a moment to comment on MDT; and if not, that is fine too, as "Yet it moves! dx4/dt=ic." And a new generation will come along whose truth cannot be trumped by cash, tenure, and titles.
Another interesting facet of the competition is that none of the pre-ordained insider fqxi winners ever ventured beyond their own forum to comment, nor discuss, nor share in the common journey, nor "community." The "community" was defined by a snarky caste system, where those who questioned the prevaling untestable religions of multiverses, parallel universes, tiny, vibrating strings, block universes, frozen time, and time's unreality, were placed into the lower caste, where their thoughts, ideas, and papers, postulating novel physical features of the universe fully supporting Einstein's relativity and Schrodenger's entanglement, were deemed "untouchable." For decades String Theorists have been ignoring the bending, warping, curving of dimensions; and as Moving Dimensions Theory embraced this reality, as well as time's reality and entanglement's reality--which neither ST, nor LQG, nor Platonia provide a *physical* model for; it was ignored.
It would be one thing if they were Feynmans or even Schwingers or Glashows. But again, it is not as if the insider fqxiers are Einstein, nor Galileo, nor Bohr, nor Fermi, nor Dirac, nor Pauli--who all made lasting contributions to physics, but rather, they are primarily antitheorists yet following well-worn paths that have lead absolutely nowhere for decades, justifying this with "well, physics needs wrong directions, wasted time, and wasted money. And thus you had better look like us and mimic us and serve us and kneel before our anti-greatness and never, never question it in a public forum--otherwise you will be a crackpot."
And that brings us to John Baez's state-funded crackpot index which is probably what he is most famous for. He seems like a nice "playful" guy here and there, but truth be told, serious physicists such as Einstein, Fermi, Wheeler, Dirac, Pauli, Feynman, Brillouin, Maxwell, Faraday, Galileo, Newton, Thompson, and Bohr never had crackpot indexes. This is because they did not hail from a day and age of massive funding was proudly justified by the aging groupthink antitheory regimes with "physics needs wrong directions, wasted time, and wasted money." Physics back then was not a sociological exercise in which the main point was to keep the funding in the family for untestable non-theories and antitheories, but rather it was an heroic act conducted in the spirit of apprehdning the *physical* truth.
A well-known physicist once said, "A man creates and maintains crackpot indexes in direct proportion to the degree he believes he just might be a crackpot." Ad-hominem attacks and behind-the-scenes politicing better suit their nature; as it is easier to gain funding by setting up groupthink regimes and kneeling before the false anti-physics/untestable gods of the multiverse, the anthropic principle, parallel universes, time travel, and space-time atoms, than it is to earn a living by advancing physics with novel equations which provide for quantum entanglement and entropy; from which all of relativity naturally emerges: dx4/dt=ic.
Contrast Galileo's spirit to the arrogant, dismissive, aloof actions of the insider-fqxi prize recipients:
"I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him." --Galileo Galilei
Of course fqxi hands out tiny, little awards to non-professionals and geometric mystics, but again, this is also performed as a calculated political maneuver so as to serve their greater goals of keeping the funding in the family, while simultaneously keeping serious physics from interfering with their decades-old untestable, postulateless, equationless, antitheory regimes based on tiny, vibrating strings, parallel universe, ever-receding quantum grvaity theories, multiverses, insider snarkiness, and timelessness.
Despite all this, the contest was a success; and again, I thank fqxi for the forum. For despite their best efforts, the stated intent of the contest yet prevailed. The true winners of the contest were all those who actually participated in it, and thus it was all us "crackpots" and "outsiders" who exalted the spirit of physics--it was we who ran away with that higher victory that cannot be counted down in dollars from the mint, but which is gained via honoarable, exalted dialogue and truthful, trusting, conscientious interaction. It was we who won the higehr battle here--it was we who exalted the *heroic* spirit and gave value and meaning to the fqxi contest--not those traditional antitheorists whose pre-ordained victories allowed them to submit thier essays and then go off and surf and ski while ignoring the greater community's contributions and rugged, exalting debates; but it was us--that merry band of brothers who read through the essays, asked questions, commented, and tried their best to elaborate on their ideas and explain their *novel* physical theories in *words*, in the spirit of James Clerk Maxwell, Einstein, Faraday, and Bohr--none of whom exalted in crackpot indexes, snarky, secretive-insider-awards, and antitheory groupthink regimes founded upon indecipherable, meaningless maths.
The true winners were those who walked in with honrable, nobel postualtes and equations reflecting hitherto unsung aspects of the universe; and after diligently explaining and defedning them, walked away with those very same postulates and equations further forged by the dialogue and bolstered by the words of the Greats:
"Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express. Let them make the effort to express these ideas in appropriate words without the aid of symbols, and if they succeed they will not only lay us laymen under a lasting obligation, but, we venture to say, they will find themselves very much enlightened during the process, and will even be doubtful whether the ideas as expressed in symbols had ever quite found their way out of the equations into their minds." -James Clerk Maxwell
"Books on physics are full of complicated mathematical formulae. But thought and ideas, not formulae, are the beginning of every physical theory." -Einstein/Infeld, The Evolution of Physics
"I don't believe in mathematics." -- Albert Einstein.
"Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics, I assure you that mine are greater." --Einstein
"Mathematics are well and good but nature keeps dragging us around by the nose."" --Einstein
"Geometry is not true, it is advantageous." --Jules H. Poincare
"Born described the weak point in Einstein's work in those final years: ". . . now he tried to do without any empirical facts, by pure thinking. He believed in the power of reason to guess the laws according to which God built the world." --Einstein's Mistakes, Hans C. Ohanian
Einstein, "But before mankind could be ripe for a science which takes in the whole of reality, a second fundamental truth was needed, which only became common property among philosophers with the advent of Kepler and Galileo. Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world; all knowledge of reality starts form experience and ends in it. Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality. Because Galileo saw this, and particularly because he drummed it into the scientific world, he is the father of modern physics -- indeed, of modern science altogether. (Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions)"
"Mathematics are well and good but nature keeps dragging us around by the nose." --Albert Einstein
In Disturbing the Universe, Freeman Dyson writes, "Dick [Richard Feynman] fought back against my skepticism, arguing that Einstein had failed because he stopped thinking in concrete physicalimages and became a manipulator of equations. I had to admit that was true. The great discoveries of Einstein's earlier years were all based on direct physical intuition. Einstein's later unified theories failed because they were only sets of equations without physical meaning. Dick's sumover-histories theory was in the spirit of the young Einstein, not of the old Einstein. It was solidly rooted in physical reality." --Freeman Dyson
Smolin writes in TTWP that Bohr was not a Feynman "shut up and calculate" physicist, and from the above Dyson quote, it appears that Feynman wasn't either:
"Mara Beller, a historian who has studied his [Bohr's] work in detail, points out that there was not a single calculation in his research notebooks, which were all verbal argument and pictures." --Smolin's The Trouble With Physics
"I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning."--Plato
Plato's quote is hanging in the Boston Museum of Science, and it seems to agree with Albert
Einstein, Galileo, and Max Born:
http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/2008/04/12/plato-mathematician-quote/
"I personally like to regard a probability wave as a real thing, certainly as more than a tool for mathematical calculations. ... how could we rely on probability predictions if we do not refer to something real and objective? (Max Born on Quantum Theory)"
Max Born wrote, "All great discoveries in experimental physics have been made due to the intuition of men who made free use of models which for them were not products of the imagination but representations of real things."
"Gradually the conviction gained recognition that all knowledge about things is exclusively a working-over of the raw material furnished by the senses. ... Galileo and Hume first upheld this principle with full clarity and decisiveness." --(Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions)
To reject *physical* intuition and replace it with the nonsensical block universe MDT does away with seems to go exactly against the spirit by which physics has ever advanced, according to Galileo, Einstein, and other noble physicists. It seems a preposterous conclusion that quantum mechanics, which works so very well, must be thrown out and reformulated for something which MDT shows there is no need for--the block universe.
"In the long run my observations have convinced me that some men, reasoning preposterously, first establish some conclusion in their minds which, either because of its being their own or because of their having received it from some person who has their entire confidence, impresses
them so deeply that one finds it impossible ever to get it out of their heads. Such arguments in support of their fixed idea ... gain their instant acceptance and applause. On the other hand whatever is brought forward against it, however ingenious and conclusive, they receive with disdain or with hot rage - if indeed it does not make them ill. Beside themselves with passion, some of them would not be backward even about scheming to suppress and silence their adversaries. I have had some experience of this myself. ... No good can come of dealing with such people, especially to the extent that their company may be not only unpleasant but dangerous."--(Galileo Galilei)
"my dear Kepler, what do you think of the foremost philosophers of this University? In spite of my oft-repeated efforts and invitations, they have refused, with the obstinacy of a glutted adder, to look at the planets or Moon or my telescope." --Galileo Galilei
We must forever keep physical reality in the front and center, along with logic and reason and *physical* intuition--otherwise progress in physics will grind to a halt, as it has for the past thirty years.
"But before mankind could be ripe for a science which takes in the whole of reality, a second fundamental truth was needed, which only became common property among philosophers with the advent of Kepler and Galileo. Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world; all knowledge of reality starts form experience and ends in it. Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality. Because Galileo saw this, and particularly because he drummed it into the scientific world, he is the father of modern physics -- indeed, of modern science altogether." --Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions
In Dark Matters, Dr. Percy Seymour writes, "Albert Einstein was a great admirer of Newton, Faraday, and Maxwell. In his office he had framed copies of portraits of these scientists. He had this to say about Faraday and Maxwell, in "Maxwell's Influence on the Development of the Concept of Physical Reality": "The greatest change in the axiomatic basis of physics--in other words, of our conception of the structure--since Newton laid the foundation of theoretical physics was brought about by Faraday's and Maxwell's work on electromagenetic phenomena" --p. 33-34, DARK MATTERS
In his book Einstein, Banesh Hoffman tells us: "Meanwhile, however, the English experimenter Michael Farady was making outstanding experimental discoveries in electricity and magnetism.
Being largely self-taught and lacking mathematical facility, he could not interpret his results in the manner of Ampere. And this was fortunate, since it led to a revolution in science. . . Ampere and others had concentrated their attention on the visible hardware--magnets, current-carrying wires, and the like--and on the numbers of centimeters separating the pieces of hardware. In so doing they were following the action-at-a-distance tradition that had developed from the enormous success of the Newtonian system of mechanics and law of gravitation. . .But Faraday regarded the hardware as secondary. For him the important physical events took place in the surrounding space--the filed. This, in his mind, he filled with tentacles that by their pulls and thrusts and motions gave rise to the electromagnetic effects observed. Although he could thus interpret his electromagnetic experiments with excellent precision and surprising simplicity, most physicists adept at mathematics thought his concepts mathematically naive."--BANESH
HOFFMAN, EINSTEIN
It is interesting that Einstein introduced relativity as a principle--as a primary law not deduced from anything else.
Well, I guess I was dumb enough to even ask, "why relativity?"
And I found the answer in a more fundamental invariance--the fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions, or dx4/dt = ic. Change is fundamentally embedded in space-time. And not only can all of relativity be derived from this, but suddenly we have a *physical* model for entropy, time and its arrows and asymmetries in all realms, free will, and quantum nonlocality and entanglement. MDT accounts for the constant speed of light c--both its independence of the source and its independence of the velocity of the observer, while establishing it as the fastest, slowest, and *only* velocity for all entities and objects moving through space-time, as well as the maximum velocity that anything is measured to move. And suddenly we see a *physical* basis for E=mc^2. Energy and mass are the same thing--it's just that energy is mass caught upon the fourth expanding dimension, and thus it surfs along at "c."
On page 37 of "Einstein's Mistakes, The Failings of Human Genius," by Hans Ochanian, we read,
"Einstein acknowledged hid debt to Newton and to Maxwell, but he was not fully aware of the extent of Galileo's fatherhood. In an introduction he wrote for Galileo's celebrated Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, he faults Galileo for failing to produce a general mathematical proof. Galileo regarded relativity as an empirical, observational fact, that is, a law of nature, and Einstein's own formulation of the Principle of Relativity three hundred years later imitated Galileo's in treating this principle as a law of nature and not as a mathematical deduction from anything else."
Well, MDT provides a more fundamental law with an equation: dx4/dt = ic, from which relativity is derived in my paper. And an added benefit are all the other entities dx4/dt=ic accounts for with a *physical* model, from entropy, to qm's entanglement and nonlocality, to time and all its arrows.
MDT accomplishes several things right off the bat:
1) unfreezes time & liberates us from the block universe, shwoing that we have free will
2) weaves change into the fundamental fabric of spacetime
3) derives relativity from a more fundamental universal invariant: dx4/dt=ic
4) provides a *physical* model for entropy
5) provides a *physical model for quantum entanglement
6) provides a *physical* mechanism for nonlocality--the fourth expanding dimension distributes nonlocality
7) provides a physical model unifying the dualities--space/time, energy/mass, wave/particle, E/B
8) provides a *physical* model for the invariance of c--both its independence of the source and its independence of the observer
9) provides a *physical* model for the spherically- symmetric expanding wavefront of probability that defines a photon's path
10) offers a resolution for both the EPR Paradox and Godel's problems with the block universe relativity implied
11) offers a physical model for why nothing can move faster than c.
12) offers an intuitive model for the length-contraction can accompanies all motion
13) accounts for both the agelessness (from relativity) and the nonlocality (from quantum mechanics) of the photon
14) accounts for the gravitational slowing of time and light, as well as the gravitational redshift
15) provides a unique physical model underlying wide ranging phenomena in quantum mechanics, relativity, statistical mechanics.
Surely MDT offers a brand new way and a new day! And when you factor in how little MDT has cost so far, compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars which have gone into quantum gravity/string theory religions/regimes and the creation of crackpot indexes to suppress the bold, new ideas by the corporate-state Matrix, surely MDT is worth pursuing!
Moving Dimensions Theory--which regards time as an emergent phenomena--was inspired in part by Einstein's words pertaining to the higher purpose of physical theories--words which ought be nailed above the door of every physics department, so as to liberate us from frozen time and frozen physics: "Before I enter upon a critique of mechanics as a foundation of physics, something of a broadly general nature will first have to be said concerning the points of view according to which it is possible to criticize physical theories at all. The first point of view is obvious: The theory must not contradict empirical facts. . . The second point of view is not concerned with the relation to the material of observation but with the premises of the theory itself, with what may briefly but vaguely be characterized as the "naturalness" or "logical simplicity" of the premises (of the basic concepts and of the relations between these which are taken as a basis). This point of view, an exact formulation of which meets with great difficulties, has played an important role in the selection and evaluation of theories since time immemorial."
And so we march. For honor, for glory, for truth.
For physics we march.
All the best!
Dr. E (The Real McCoy)
"E pur si muove!" "And yet it does move! dx4/dt=ic!"
"Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito---Do not yield to the bad, but always oppose it with courage." --Virgil (Ludwig von Mises' favorite quote)Attachment #1: 1_j.a._wheeler_recommendation_mcgucken_medium2.jpg