Conversations On-Line
Ad Hoc List open forum
28
Subject: FYI on Prigogine
Date: 01/30/97
'Gravity IS an "acceleration field" .. TWO "time"
dimensions'
On Thur, 30 Jan 1997, Lawrence Crowell wrote:
>(LC) Here is the problem. No physicist I know uses this sort of language: Time
taken on itself to transit from one "per time" to another "per
time"? or askes what t time t means. This is a nonquestion!
[JR] OK, I'll play the foil: so there is no meaning in the phrase
"acceleration is relevant to the time-it-takes to go from 10 feet per second to 15
feet per second" ?
. . .
>>(JR)... It only "works" if space and time are allowed a zero-duration
*together*. And the most extreme form must be written as (d|t)~0. Zero dimension is *not*
dimensionLESS. It is a codified state that retains information content.
>(LC)This simply makes no sense in point set topology. A point is the basic unit of a
set; the fundamental unit if you will. It goes back to your high school days were the
point was indivisible and had no structure. A point only has meaning in its relationship
to other points in a set: spaces, curves, etc. From there you can talk about
open and closed sets, and Heine Borel covering and the like.
>If you wish to do computational geometry then you are going to have to talk about
points as vertices in a tesselation of a space. Only in this manner can you really talk
about an information content that is dimensionless, to use your language. Again this is
due to that points relationship to other structures: segments and faces of finite
simplices on a tesselated manifold. Then from this you can talk about information content
in the sense fof Shannon and Khinchin.
[JR] I assume you have heard of Paul Pietsch, the neuro-anatomist and Professor Emeritus
at Indiana University? He has developed some very interesting ideas on memory storage in
organic tissue. I was just reading his web-site (I thank Diane Haugen for informing me
about it) where he gives a rather detailed history of Holography. He discusses the
Nobelist Dennis Gabor, and I'd like to quote a paragraph for you:
"Gabor had tried to make his object act like a single light source. The encoded
message spread out over the medium. But each point in the scene illuminated by diffuse
light acts as though it is a source in itself, and the consequence of all points acting as
ligth sources is truly startling. Each point in the hologram plate ends up with the phase
and amplitude of every point in the scene, which is the same as saying that every part of
the exposed plate contains a complete recod of the entire object. This may sound
preposterous. Therefore, let me repeat: EACH POINT WITHIN A DIFFUSE HOLOGRAM BEARS A
*COMPLETE
CODE* FOR THE *ENTIRE* SCENE. If that seeems strange, consider something else Leith and
Upatniks found: "The plate can be broken down into small fragments, and each piece
will reconstruct the entire object.""
There is absolutely no avoiding that our current understanding of topology - as you described part of it above - *must* be re-thought and changed. Your version is a holdover of whole-light optics and photography ... there is a one-to-one mapping of the image information on the plate where the image is "captured" - the camera obscura. Standard Topology. The new Topology is more in line with String Theory ... and Holography; one-to-one mappings are a special restricted state of information transfer.
A "point" is capable of containing complex information. By the Leith/Upatniks quote <above>, just how do we quantitatively measure the "information content" of a holographic plate, when every miniscule section "contains" the original image? We're talking a whole re-write of topology and information theory, LC. I mean *everything*: from "entropy" to set theory to body language and economics ... and even the hallowed versions of Relativity and quantum mechanics.
These notions on mine, which you see as gibberish from your well formed perspective (and not unaffected by SAR's goadings), are just the beginnings of 21st century science. It will probably end up being put into a mathematical language that you'd feel more comfortable with, but the essential relationships and dynamics will be the ones I've outline and attempted to describe.
---snip---
>>(JR) Einstein wrote better than he knew. Gravity is not just "like" an acceleration field, it *is* an acceleration field, enacted by 2N of the 6N of the total phasespace of a mass.
>(LC) NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!: gravity is not an acceleration field! Any one who understands the general theory of relativity will tell you that the acceleration experienced by somebody in a gravity field is the result of some other nongravitational force that is causing the path of that person's reference frame to deviate from a geodesic!!!!! This is a basic concept of the general theory of relativity!!! It harkens back to Einstein's equivalence principle. This is the master stroke of Einstein in his work on spacetime. Everyone else was muddled in the sort of nonsense your are espousing.
[JR] YES! YES! YES! YES! YES!: gravity *is* an acceleration field. And the felt force is caused by deviations away from orthogonality of the six interdependent time field-vectors of any two masses (three for every "independent" mass in an assembly). Relativity can also be described as derivable from the stretching and/or compression of one vector (along the line of travel) vis a vis the other two orthogonals. It is a "variance-in-scaling of the separate vectors" situation.
The path scribed by a mass moving through the gravity well of a larger mass can *also*
be described as the path of least deformation of the several orthogonal vectors - in other
words, lowest vector strain, and therefore most dynamically
(temporally) stable.
Kip Thorn even commented on a similar situation in his book on Black Holes. He said
that sometimes there are two languages/theories/models which describe a certain
system-behavior exactly. Which one is "better"? Sometimes, he said, it
just doesn't matter. You say tomayto, I say tomahto. ;>
My notions are "nonsense" in your language. Well your (generic "your") language keeps coming up with anomalies and is too disjointed to accomplish the great-unification: blending atomic behaviors with organic behaviors.
Mine handles them very comfortably. Maybe not with all the details to satisfy some people, but a lot better than most, and at least on a functional (if not computational/mathematical) par with Chaos and Complexity.
>(LC)I don't know what you mean by your having reviewed papers, or what it is that
Stapp is having you do. Yet I sense that the terminology used in these papers is what
sticks in your mind, but the logical concepts that string them together is lost to you.
[JR] I trust that you'll specify what was "lost to me" someday!? *I* reviewed
the 14 Prigogine works for the notions used and how they were applied. Stapp
didn't have me do anything formal for him, other than to ask me "Does Prigogine's
work contain anything that resembles "sustainability"? ".
>(LC) Further, you should start out by asking a compelling question. I see no
motivation for what it is you are even trying to do. What is your question? What are you
trying to prove? I see a loose collection of terms that are strung together by ponderous
language and new terms you conjure up.
[JR] Yeh, well, that's the problem with getting overly-focussed on physics and current terminology. Sometimes, the relationship with the real world gets lost. Even so....
Here was my "compelling question" (circa 1965): How do physics behaviors generate complex organic behaviors? Show their primal similarities, and, show how one frame of existence - which is ostensibly entropic in nature, generates other frames of existence - which are predominantly neg-entropic.
Integrity Paradigm
(c)1973,1992,1995.
ps. For those of you on the frontiers of investigation, please add to the above. And, for the hell of it, see if such a model of existence can accomodate psi phenomena. (Not a "test" requirement; just good for extra credit if it can be done :>>> ) <god, I hate these smily's. rather put in a string of g's (though a g-string probably wouldn't pass the prurience test) - like (ggggg)>.