FQXi essay contest "Is reality digital or analog?"

The third edition of FQXi essay contest is already a success, because there is a growth of 140% in the number of competing essays. There are 161 essays dealing with the question "Is reality digital or analog?" that are waiting for your votes and comments. I have less time to participate in it as for the previous edition on "What's ultimately possible in Physics", but I found it an important question. Important enough to take my pen on vacation and advocate the fact that physical "Reality" must ultimately be accessible to everyone on earth. Reality can be defined in the way we reach universal agreement about it, whether it be analog or digital (I think it will ultimately always be expressed with both concepts of discreteness and continuity: digital and analog).

Some thoughts you'll find in my essay:

"I postulate Reality to be that on which all people can agree"

"Physical reality must be potentially and reproducibly accessible through experiment to any human inhabitant of earth. If it is not, the corresponding statement about reality is biased."

"Some aspects of physics haven’t reached the stadium of universal agreement yet. This is the case for processes at the cosmological scale or at the atomic and nuclear scale, because the rules governing their behavior are not directly part of our everyday experience. We haven’t yet managed to describe all their reality with concepts or words on which everybody can agree. It is the physicist’s job to enlarge the scope of universal agreement about physical reality."
"We will describe anything happening in the submicroscopic world with concepts derived from our macroscopic experience, analogically and digitally. Only then can we come to universal agreement about its reality."

There are 160 other essays. Some are from essay writers whom I already know a little from last year. Unfortunately I won't be able to read more than a few, but I love it to catch up with your ideas, even if I don't always agree with them, probably because I haven't yet got all the information needed to understand your reality. Universal agreement about reality can only be reached if we discuss our ideas openly.

More FQXi essay quotes

I participated in last FQXi essay contest "What is ultimately possible in physics?". I intended to participate seriously in the discussions and read a good part of the 114 essays. However, I think I made a good start, but bad ending, as I ran out of time with exams approaching for my studies. I found that working out and discussing essays that propose whole new insights on physics is extremely time consuming (imagine the time it takes for the panel judges!). I often needed to crawl through a lot of pre- and mis-conceptions before I managed to sympathize with the subject treated. Moreover, maybe because I started participating seriously, my own essay got on the forefront (it headed at the first place for community ratings for about two weeks), so I also had to manage feedback on that. That was of course very appreciable, but diminished my ability to read and discuss more of the others, which I sincerely regret, because there were so much interesting thoughts in all the essays.

On the whole, I really appreciated participating, because the spirit of the contest was positively oriented, with much more "Why's?" than "No's!" appearing in the discussions. That's sufficiently rare in online physics forums. Generally, in online forums one gets stuck into incomprehensions and orthodoxy warnings before one manages to expose the core ideas. Personally I've benefited from all your feedback. To those who have taken the time to read, to discuss or to vote on my essay, thanks! Like all other participants, I'm awaiting the thrill of the prize announcements which probably will come in the next few weeks.

Now, here's the follow-up for the essays I started to quote last time. Please feel free to suggest others which I missed.

From "Solving the mystery of wave/particle duality---the road to a unified theory of physics", by Dennis Crossley, presenting a creative model thoroughly thought over for the whole of particle physics.
"But what is the “thing” that electrons and light are made of?"

From "Unification and Emergence in Physics: the Problem of Articulation", by Ian Durham, advocating plain language explanation for physics.
"Physics likes to strip out all the extraneous baggage of a problem before reassembling it. Physics deals with the most fundamental aspects of the universe. Thus, in that sense, it is the science of simplication. The best physical theories are both simple and elegant and provide building blocks from which we may re-assemble nature. In contemplating the explanatory limits of physics, it makes sense to keep this in mind. But in the process we also must take special care in our use of the language within which we form our ideas."

From "On the applicability of quantum physics", by George F. R. Ellis, exposing original insight on how macroscopic behavior emerges from complex assembled systems.
"there are tantalizing hints that top-down action may play a significant role in quantum theory measurements"

From "Gravity From the Ground Up", by Don Limuti, a thought experiment about the underlying mechanisms of particles periodical motion.
"I start by saying "It seems reasonable to me"."

From "Galilei, Gold, Ren - votes for ultimate realism", by Eckard Blumschein, raising little known flaws in signal processing.
"Differential equations are not the primary relations in physics but they arose by stripping off the link to reality and hence they opened the door for ambiguity."

From "Perfect Symmetry", by Peter A. Jackson, proposing a methodology towards achieving the ultimately possible in physics.
"Complacency, and resistance to considering new insight, does itself, and perhaps even alone, create the real limit to what is ultimately possible in physics."
"The logic of claiming that all good theory will get noticed and rise to the fore is flawed in our present system. There is no proof the answer wasn't there 150 years ago and subdued."

From "Finally it is possible to understand our universe and its implications", by Gordon Kane, giving insights in how string theory has become testable.
"The physical universe is consistent. Physics does not prove its results as theorems, it tests them against the real world."

From "Ultimately, in Physics the Rational shall become Reasonable!", by Terry Padden, investigating how rationality and reasonability should articulate in an ultimate physics. This essay has the largest collection of quotable sentences I came across, so I recommend you read the whole essay.
"Experience is physically real. It actually happens to (our) bodies. We experience a dynamic universe with freedom to move in 3 spatial dimensions constrained in Time by a transient "Now". Reasonably, our Brains react to take immediate account of every experience. It is impossible to discard Naive Realism. It is the foundation of all of our communication. This includes self-communication, i.e. thought. Truth, the product of thinking, is mentally determined - when after conscious thought it is rationally acceptable to our Minds. Our conceptual models need to match our common experience. True science requires the rational becomes reasonable."

From "Towards A More Realistic Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics", by Terence Nelson, inquiring thoughts on quantum entanglement.
"Obviously, there must be some problem with Bell's assumptions."

From "Two steps back, three leaps forward", by Steven Oostdijk, pleading for a return to simple mechanical explanations in order to be able to answer what's ultimately possible in physics.
"The sort of math that physics requires is a math of rigorous definitions and transparent variables, with as little abstraction as possible."

FQXi essay contest statistics and quotes

I took profit of last week and weekend to acquaint myself with the other essays handling the question "What's ultimately possible in physics". I read a dozen of them extensively as well as all abstracts and began to organize my evaluations. I voted for two of them but will leave a definite rate for the others after having checked consistency with respect to a broader set of essays. The fact that strikes me, is how low community voters (mainly authors) score each other. The scale runs from 1 to 10, but presently the highest rating is 4.4. That's detrimental for a healthy rating system because we loose in gradation subtleties.

As for the statistics: 114 essays were submitted by 1 woman and 113 man. There is much to do in order to establish gender parity in physics! From the information I gathered, the great majority have US citizenship (43 authors), Germany (10) and India (9) are also strongly represented, as well as Canada (5), Romania (5), Italy (5) and the Netherlands (5, including mine). Russia and UK have each 4 submissions. The rest comes from Australia (2), New Zealand (2), Spain (2), Croatia (2), Slovenia (2), Austria (1), Belgium (1), Brasil (1), Chili (1), Greece (1), Iraq (1), Korea (1), Moldova (1), Mexico (1), South Africa (1), Sweden (1), Serbia (1) and 2 which I couldn't deduce from the information they gave. These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt because I assumed US citizenship for US residents if not mentioned otherwise. There are no submissions from my country of residence. What am I doing here in Paris if there is nobody to discuss foundational questions with ;-) !

Some authors gave me agreement for quoting them, so here are some interesting quotes:

From “Ultimately anything is possible” by Hrvoje Nikolic, the shortest essay (if you have little time, read it).
“we can never be sure that the laws of physics we know are the final ones, so we always must admit that anything is ultimately possible”.

From “Mechanics of a Self-Creating Universe” by Anton W. M. Biermans, a “cursory overview of the first insights to come out of an investigation into the question whether a universe can create itself out of nothing”.
“If an electron cannot express its charge if there is no other charge in the universe, then it couldn't be charged itself.”

From “ant among giants. . .a fable” by Richard P. Dolan, an enjoyable and entertaining essay, with the message that physicists should listen to people outside of their tribe.
“The ant found its chilly reception perfectly proper and understandable, but always experienced a feeling of frustration when some giant publicly expressed ignorance on a question to which the ant thought it had the answer.”
“the physicists were ensnared in a dense thicket of mathematics, desperately trying to get out by going deeper into the thicket. Only the string theorists thought they had hacked their way out of the thicket, but what they found was a vast landscape of universes that had no predictive power and couldn’t be tested—the end of science.”

From “Ignoramus et Ignorabimus” by Alfred Tang, making the point that physics and theology could benefit one from the other.
“Very often scientific discoveries are made when physics interacts with other disciplines (such as biology). In cross-discipline research, physicists are forced to think outside of the box.”
“precision is only possible if and only if we know exactly what we want to say in closed form. As we approach the limit of physics, we often do not even know what to think. Therefore the exactness of the mathematical language may easily lead to highly specialized rabbit trails down into theoretical blind alleys. When we do not know what we are talking about, it is helpful to take a step back to look at the forest instead of the leaves by thinking in more general terms with common language to develop the proper attitudes. Loquaciousness is perhaps the proper technique for developing attitudes. Proper attitudes constrain the theory space so that theoreticians do not waste time populating the theoretical landscape as in the case of superstring theory.”

From “To be or not to be strictly deterministic?” by Stefan Weckbach, stating that physical laws and consciousness belong to different realms.
“truths can evolve out of beliefs”
“there is no direct path from our abstract knowledge to ultimate reality”

From “On the Impossibility of Time Travel” by JCN Smith, demonstrating that a particular time is defined by the configuration of the universe.
“the changes we observe (as well as those we donʼt observe) are the flow of time. If the configuration of the universe did not change, there would be no flow of time.”

From “Quantum mechanics from a stochastic least action principle” by Joakim Munkhammar, giving a unified vision of classical and quantum least action principle.
“the ultimate possibilities in physics could more clearly be visualized with a better foundation for quantum mechanics.”

From “At the Frontier of Knowledge” by Sabine Hossenfelder, giving good reasons to say that it is impossible to say what's ultimately possible.
“Physicists have a love-hate relationship with no-go theorems”
“Despite long efforts, no progress has been made. This situation is one that seems to bother physicists today more than ever due to the lack of breakthroughs in fundamental physics that has lasted several decades now. This is even more frustrating since meanwhile the world around us seems to change in a faster pace every day.”
“proofs are only about the mathematical properties of certain objects in their assumptions. A physical theory that describes the real world necessarily also needs a connection between these mathematical objects and the corresponding objects of the real world.”
“What we can thus state with certainty at any time is merely “To our best current knowledge...””

What's ultimately possible in physics?

I recently applied for the FQXi essay contest on the topic “What is ultimately possible in physics?” FQXi stands for Foundational Questions Institute. It “catalyzes, supports, and disseminates research on questions at the foundations of physics and cosmology, particularly new frontiers and innovative ideas integral to a deep understanding of reality, but unlikely to be supported by conventional funding sources.” It is directed and advised by a wide of array of renown professors and scientists. In fact, like the Perimeter Institute, it is exactly the institution that is concerned about questions which I am involved with for almost twenty years: understanding reality in a deeper way. So, it was not difficult to engage myself in writing an essay. I almost have the topic in my bones. So here's the result: “Ordinary Analogues for Quantum Mechanics”.

There's an evaluation process detailed on the FQXI Essay contest introduction page. The good news is that you may take part in that process as public voters. If you also applied with an essay, you may vote with a different profile: “community voter”. The essays should be “topical”, “foundational”, “original and creative”, “technically correct and rigorously argued”, “well and clearly written” and “accessible to a diverse, highly-educated but non-specialist audience, aiming in the range between the level of Scientific American and a review article in Science or Nature.” So if you feel you can evaluate on these criteria, I encourage you to vote for the different essays and participate in the discussion. Don't let yourself be impressed by some current low ratings. As all authors may vote as community members, there may be some nonconstructive voting from author competitors. Many essays, were rated 1 or 2 on a scale of 10, only a few hours after being posted, while they met the above evaluation criteria (in my view). It is more important to support and discuss good and innovative ideas. So, in order to end up with correctly balanced votes, join us at the essays main page!

For myself, I thought a good way to contribute with balanced votes is to communicate on what I perceive to be the core ideas of each essay I'll read. I intend to read as much as I can. There are currently about 100 essays and there may add some that were posted on the last day October 2nd. I've already read 4 of them and selected some inspiring quotes which I'll post on my twitter profile with hashtag #fqxiquote and here on this blog, apart from the physics quotes of the day.