Upcoming on January 2nd

I liked the video. 🙂

Christoph Hipp

Yes! Join the dark side!

That is a great video. I finished your book yesterday. Something physicists forget is that philosophers do not mind arguing for something they don’t believe is true. It is a way of sparking a debate to arrive at the truth. Besides from the Boltzmann brain paradox we know the steady state theory with small deviations away from maximum entropy is many times more likely than a low entropy Big Bang. Without a Big Bang singularity all the problems outlined in your book go away. There is no need for higher energies that generate more x-rays in collisions or even a quantum theory of gravity. The flatness and horizon problems go away in a much older universe ;)

From an epistemological perspective, my own consciousness and the corresponding presentist perspective withstand deep meditation. Even the self persists through most inspection, contrary to Buddhist lore. For me, an absolute time with a finite space and unique creatures preserves reality, free will, consciousness and presentism. I think someday this means we will have FTL communications across a solar-system wide civilization.

The quality of the video and audio was amazing and I enjoyed the video immensely.

I think you are right about Bohm. I recently read his biography and I think he's been much ahead of his time.

Great to see you here!

I had a brief chat with Brian ... about Pilot Wave theory ... was decent ... but unsatisfying ... I need a deeper take on the foundations of physics ..,.

I haven’t watch this new video ... I wanted to join your patroon first as I’m proud to be able to start to support your work.

I now think time and consciousness are most real and space is emergent, quantum physics is a relational ensemble phenomenon and there is a frame of reference where time is absolute ... the particles are real. The wave function is real, Bohm was onto something and I’m glad to have a front row seat as I think we can solve these puzzles in the next 50 years.

Hi! Just joined ... I just read Lee Smolin’s Time Reborn and he has converted me to a “time purist”. I had been a many world’s guy for a while ... and believed time was a presentist illusion created by our primitive minds.

To add the heat equation makes sense for the probability diffusing. But the problem is that specific equation has solutions with Fourier series and perturbations. It can ignore any underlying mechanism and still match the right numbers. You do not need to know how atoms jiggle and exchange heat you can just solve it with Fourier to get the right answer. It is likely the right equation but it has this property where the function in the equation that solves it can also be an arbitrary Fourier series solution. I have always wondered if that was what “shut up and calculate” was about.

I think the wavefunction does diffuse which makes the heat equation the right choice. The time evolution describes the spreading out of that probability distribution. Bell proved there can be no local hidden variables but he did not prove nonlocal hidden variables. I think that leaves the door open for pilot wave theory. But with nonlocal hidden variables causality is meaningless. The laws have no preferred direction in time. I see the measurement problem as putting that thermodynamic arrow on a simple system to get a macrostate which starts to diffuse once the measurement stops. This measurement forces it to be local. When it is nonlocal like in debroglie bohm there is no information exchanged faster than the speed of light. The group wave carries the energy which is local and the phase wave is nonlocal. I think of mass as just making the uncertainty in momentum larger and position uncertainty narrower, maybe Higgs does that. An electron is light so it is all over the nucleus of an atom and the proton is heavy with a well defined position. What I want to know is if F=dP/dt then does changing the uncertainty in an objects momentum to be better defined lead to uncertainty in position, in a preferred direction? If so then is that how the momentum and position observables and their change give us a force changing the velocity and direction of an object?

It's been a long time since I've delved into the equations, but my prior experience has been that adding time to physics was a big mistake. Certainly there is a structure to the fabric of the universe, but I personally don't believe time is part of it. All things travel at the same speed and their relative speed is just a degree of perturbation of the Higgs field. This also aligns closely with inertia and mass expression. For example photons rarely interact with the Higgs and therefore have near zero inertial frames and zero mass. I often wonder if there are not particles that interact even less and move faster than light. But that may be a pointless endeavor.

I am half way through your book “Lost in Math”. It is like therapy for me after studying physics. I always suspected that the Schrodinger equation was just a heat equation. The great thing about the heat equation is no one uses it in thermodynamics. Fourier series can solve everything which I suspected was the reason they never understood the foundations of physics. If anything can be written as a sum of Fourier coefficients then it is a math trick. Adding perturbations can make more accurate predictions but I always wanted a mechanism. They just kept doing more Fourier analysis then tossed in linear algebra to somehow approximate probability theory. By the time I got to the standard model I was done with taking inner products to get arbitrary numbers. I never saw those techniques as beautiful just ad hoc methods to obfuscate nature.

I know that pure imaginary numbers cannot be ordered. So if t is counted by -3i < -2i < -1 < 0 < 1i < 2i < 3i then that is wrong. Time has to be real :) Also just throwing this out there to stir up drama, but the block universe is wrong, their arguments are fallacies. Time is reversible on a microscopic level but it is emergent due to entropy and irreversible processes.