Some comments on information theory

Due to the fact that recently the discussion has gained many colours, and today there is also the topic of the death of a loved one, epistemology, ontology, and a little earlier I mentioned life and entropy, today I would perhaps allow myself to slightly deviate from the main topic, but still be close to it . Hence, I would like to share with you some of my considerations regarding, among others, stars, ageing, time, eternity and consciousness. In the background, however, we will be accompanied by vaguely understood entropy, which seems to be only a kind of noise. However, it will be heard in the next longer post, which will also deal with negentropy and the arrow of time. This post is going to be a bit scientific, a bit philosophical and a bit poetic.

In Christian eschatology the notion of eternity is interpreted in two, seemingly different manners. The first of them can be identified with the endlessness in time. In this view the consciousness of eternity is at least equally frightening as the consciousness of extinguishment. The perspective of eternity is a tragedy for a human mind. The mind, despite the fact that it is fully dependent of time, does not understand the essence of timeliness. The mind lives in sequences of the past and the future, it cannot, however, experience the presence. The past is the possessed identity for the mind, whereas the future functions as an identity that will be acquired. Consequently, the eternity leads to a collection of countless elements of the past and the future. The limitless number of entities causes the world (mind) to extinguish as a result of splintering into elements, among which each one is bigger than the whole.

States of energy and matter are not that different from each other. The expanses are one expanse. The only difference is time. However, time can be known only in the context of the expanse and matter (energy). Matter is only a denser form of energy. The eternity perceived as time infinity cannot be realized due to the impossibility of its ending, in order to find out whether it is done. The infinity exists in regards of the faith but it does not exist against the logic. One of the problems with entropy, however, is that it could only be empirically proven in the face of eternity.

In a different view, the eternity is understood as a timeless “existence”, which “is realized” in a medium different than time and mutually ambiguous with time. According to that idea there is an alternative, independent manner of cognition that is not related to time.

A hypothetical, alternative Universe has no concept of time or process. It also does not contain notions bijective to the above. There are, however, bijective notions with relation and metarelation. Nonetheless, they do not possess the time element and they cannot be reduced to it. The presence of relation only allows for timeless existence of conscious beings in the timelessly describable Universe.

The timeless eternity rids the above Universe from all differences that make it completely homogeneous regarding its homogeneity (there are no different views as the differentiating category (time) is eliminated). Timelessness determines the notion of isomorphism of “strictly defined epistemology”, which cannot be comprehended by a time-space mind.

The mind sees life as a time striving towards death. It describes and classifies numerous processes leading to death such as evolution of a star or apoptosis of an organic cell. Death ascending to its own event horizon is not time. When a mind dies, time stops moving. There are thousands of theories about the existence after death of the dead entity essence. In the context of time there is the important question regarding the placement of the border, at which the death occurs as it is the border between time and a lack of it. A place where time becomes timelessness, space becomes spacelessness and logic becomes irrationality. Defining transitions requires the existence of a bond that holds the characteristics of the mind and the characteristics of the spirit together. The bond is a combination of elements from this world with the elements from the spiritual world, which cannot be comprehended by a logical analysis. Spirituality requires entering beyond the highest philosophy, which may be comprehended with the mind. In this view, death is enlightenment.

Timeless spacelessness that has no thoughts is viewed as the higher state of existence. It is what the girl from one of my dreams became when she splintered into elements, among which each one of them was bigger than herself. An element of the Universe becomes the whole Universes. The fog flows and remains again. All definitions are burnt. Cognition only happens beyond cognition.

In the context of biological and physical sciences, it is interesting to assume that there are beings that are ageing in a different way than this known to the human. The ageing process of the stars will be analyzed based on the time-varying effects of the Sun.

The Sun is a nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, with internal convective motion that generates a magnetic field via a dynamo process. This is by far the most important source of energy for life on Earth. It turns out that the Sun and other stars can provide a rational study for the analysis of single-cell organisms and cellular ageing. There is the assumption that stars exist in very similar laws as unicellular ones.

Hydrostatic equilibrium is a state of matter, when the enormous force of gravity is balanced by the pressure-gradient force, acting in the opposite direction. The energy of stars comes from nuclear reactions that are catalyzed by extremely high temperatures. Due to above phenomena, stars remain in their equilibrium state until a burning fuel leads to the collapse or to the different tragedy that is able to close the current stage of life of the celestial creation. To maintain the equilibrium there must be cycles that allow reactions to occur. When positively charged proton is approaching to the nucleus, it interacts with repulsive electrostatic force, but after travelling a proper distance, extremely strong forces stop it inside of the nucleus.

Proton-proton chain reaction allows the connection of four hydrogen nuclei into helium nucleus. This cycle is the main reservoir of energy for smaller stars like the Sun.

At the beginning, the pp chain reaction involves the fusion of two protons into deuterium, releasing a positron and an electron neutrino. Subsequently, the deuterium produced in the first stage fuses with another proton to produce isotope of helium 3He and gamma quanta. There also exist different possibilities. They lead to emergence of helium 4 in the second reaction (pp1), to two 4He (pp2) or even to obtaining two 4He from 8Be. If the length of the chain is expressed by pp1<pp2<pp3, then there is an increase of the importance of neutrinos in transport of energy from interior of the star to interplanetary space (from ~2% to ~25%). The mechanisms that are described above are not the only ways of living of the stars.

In 1938 Hans Bethe proposed the CNO cycle. As indicated its name, a special role is here played by carbon, oxygen and nitrogen. This cycle refers to quite massive stars (temperature of nucleus is equal about 20 million K), and uses carbon as a catalyzer. Therefore, by definition, carbon cannot be consumed.

The CNO cycle may be analyzed from anywhere, but the most convenient starting point is the place where the hydrogen combines with carbon 12, releasing gamma quanta and creates from it nitrogen 13, which further decays into a positron and an electron neutrino forming carbon 13. As a result of attachment of the next hydrogen, there arises gamma quanta and nitrogen 14. Subsequently, nitrogen 14 reacts with hydrogen and we obtain oxygen 15. The unstable isotope of oxygen falls apart into nitrogen 15, positron and electron neutrino. Then, nitrogen 15 is able to attachment the final hydrogen. Synthesis causes re-production of carbon 12, but this time the by-product is helium 4. After exclusion of catalyzing cycle, a totality could be considered as a simple synthesis of four hydrogens into helium and releasing of two positively charged particles endowed with a mass of electron.

In a star throughout its existence takes place a variety of other physical and chemical reactions. As a result, these creations change with the change of its properties ending its life as white dwarfs cooling down for a period that is longer than the current age of Universe, or as black holes. However, in this context it is worth recalling the biological reference.

As is commonly known, Calvin cycle is consisted of 13 reactions that are usually divided into three groups: downloading carbon monoxide IV, a reduction in the level of oxidation of carbon and regeneration of RuBP.

The reaction of six molecules of carbon monoxide IV of the phosphorylated compound of five carbon atoms in its structure is catalyzed by the enzyme RuBisCO (ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate). The last one is the predominant protein in the chloroplast stroma that is involved in treatment of received energy and substrates by forming compounds that support and develop life of the plant. Thanks to adenosine triphosphate ATP changing into the adenosine diphosphate ADP and NADPH changing into NADP + there occurs the reduction in the level of oxidation of carbon. These changes allow the formation of two molecules of aldehyde (compound of a lower oxidation than the corresponding acid), which turns into nutrients. Then, there occurs the regenerative phase, in which the molecules of glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate acceptor is restored to CO2 - ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate.

The whole cycle is dependent on the simpler form of assimilation of light energy inside the thylakoid that occurs due to water and light energy. Very unstable ATM immediately must be developed. However, what happens in the chloroplasts of the plant, which, due to drought and heat, needs to close the stomata to water does not evaporate? Many plants, especially living in a hot and dry climate adapted to the effective formation of carbon compounds. These processes precede the Calvin cycle, but do not replace it. In the cells of living organisms there occur miscellaneous cycles, such as for example urea cycle in animals or Krebs cycle.

Everything we call matter, including all heavy elements, had to be created in the spectacular tragedies of stars ending their lives. At the same time, the whole matter is born in a similar manner, governed by similar laws, organized in a similar way. Everything is created from one substance, which by creating different densities and different proportions is able to achieve so much. Unity and diversity.

The unity of micro and macro world is reflected by the Hertzsprung-Russel diagram, which after changing value on the vertical axis of the magnitude to deviation from the standard magnitude seems to remind the normal distribution. The probability of finding a big star with a small mass could be compared to the probability of finding a tall human with a low weight. These are so-called little scientific evidences.

A Hungarian biologist and biochemist, Tibor Gánti living at the turn of the 20th and 21st century decided to define the conditions necessary to regard an object as living. These have been universally recognized by modern science. Therefore, the organism considered living should satisfy the following conditions:

1. It is distinguished from the outside world.
2. It has metabolism.
3. It is internally, homeostatically stable.
4. It possesses a subsystem of collecting and processing data.
5. Processes inside the system are regulated.
6. An object must be capable to growth and reproduction.
7. There is a volatility in replication.
8. An object is mortal.

The last three conditions are so-called potential features and they are not necessary but they are usually satisfied by the living organisms.

Now there ought to be discussed whether and how the aforementioned points will be referenced to the stars.

Referring to the first point, a star is definitely distinguished from the outside world as this is known that the space vacuum is thinner than the best laboratory vacuum. Moreover, the distance that separated the celestial bodies many times exceed the size of the Earth, thus it could be assumed that on our planet there are no organisms separated from each other further than the Earth diameter.

Referring to the second point proton–proton chain reaction and CNO cycle are much more complex than the cycles in simple organisms considered as living.

A propos of hoemostatic stability, a condition for a star to exist is a homeostasis, a balance between the force of the “explosions in the core” and the gravity, moreover a star is much more stable than the organism with the longest lifespan on the Earth. Several million times.

With regard to the fifth point, if the processes inside the star, such as cycles, are not regulated by diverse conditions in the zones of the star, it would lose its stability and disintegrate; it is regulated by the factors that created and sustain the life on our planet.

When it comes to the sixth and seventh points, unquestionably, a star changes its size, and does it much more often than any living organism. It creates a new formation, sometimes several new formations, they are borne from clouds and to some extent, transform into them, becoming a substrate for creating new ones. It could be postulated that reproduction by budding or the cloning of plant by planting a portion of the stem in the ground could not compete with the phenomenon of creating stars. (And out of curiosity, I will ask a question. Do any of you know where the photo that is my avatar comes from?)

Referring to the eighth point, the stars are mortal, whatever that means, as for something to die, it first has to live, so if they can die, they live, and if they live, they can die. It is hard to determine whether something is mortal until we do not know if it is alive, but to determine that it is alive, it must be possible to die. From the logical point of view, this condition is fulfilled for all objects and for none. It could be considered as a sophistic nonsense.

But returning to the fourth point, it is worth asking whether the stars have a subsystem for collecting and processing data in the structure? If it exists, it is still not discovered by us. Perhaps some undetectable particles transfer such information beyond our boundaries of perception.

When a star with a quite low mass (e.g. the Sun) reaches the stage of a giant, its last, desperate attempt to extend its life occurs. As it is known, the metabolism is divided into anabolism and catabolism. A balance in sustaining life includes the occurrence of antagonistic processes conditioning the survival that are induced by the laws of physics and principles of chemistry (reaction to stimuli and set conditions). Efficient, living organism is able to adapt to the specific situation. Glucose consuming bacteria transferred to the galactose medium unlock in its annular genetic information physically blocked by a piece of organic part an element with the stored method of decomposing a new food in order to obtain the energy needed for life. The anabolic processes may be associated with combining simple compounds into complex ones, and katabolic processes with the reversed reactions. There is no doubt that nuclear transformation that results in obtaining helium (from that reaction an energy necessary to the life of a star is obtained) is a reaction of synthesis, hence the reversed reaction is analysis, which occurs when a star joins the group of white dwarfs. This reaction results in obtaining fuel from the disintegration of more complex (compared to hydrogen) elements. There is even a moment when the same reaction of combustion occurs in the core and outside of it.

During the main sequence (see: HR diagram), stars (that combust hydrogen) perform very similar movements, thus their metabolic behaviour is as uniform as in many animals. On the HR diagram they move on the horizontal plain to the right, slightly upwards, then to the left, and at the end to the right. The horizontal axis describes the spectral type, so it includes the star temperature that is responsible for colour of the light that it emits. The vertical axis describes the brightness, the higher place of the star, the brighter it is.

The diversity of the reactions in stars is, however, directed. Its role is to survive, use the available medium, and at the same time emit light just as us, people, emit the infrared light - heat. The above description is congruent with the simplest schema and definition of metabolism. A star has metabolism, simple one and not based on chain relationships.

Another argument supporting the metabolism theory is the occurrence of the same reaction in different environments, meaning degenerated and none-degenerated. Depending on the mass of the star, its fate is different, although there is an analogy and general tendency here.

This supplement discusses points 2, 3 and 5 of the previously mentioned conditions. However, point 4 is still lacking. From the philosophical point of view and so the scientific, a manner of storing information may be very divers and the fact that the arrangement, due to gravity, of the planetary nebula (and from its combination in the far future a new star may be borne) is very distant from the human deoxyribose is not a counterargument. Someone attempting to invalidate the living stars hypothesis may ask whether there is a difference in burning a piece of paper that is empty or the one that has something written on it. The answer is obvious, yes. The difference cannot be seen by us, which is not an argument for inanimateness of stars, but for the incompetency of our human taxonomic unit. Does everything processes information? There are hypothetical models in which the whole world is a stream of information as the world is purely material and it has no space for certain philosophical creations.

From the information theory point of view life is: a periodic ability (feature) of the individual system controlled by information and processing information, of using and transferring the semantic information contained within it.

To sum up, in the light of so many views on the issue of life, it is not easy to determine where the limit lies, but one may refer to organisms already considered alive. There is no doubt that a star surpasses the most primitive ones, but we subconsciously connect the discussed definition with our planet just as sunrises and sunsets were linked to the Earth being in the centre of the Universe and the apparent lack of movement of the stars with their steadiness.

The stars have lasted for billions of years, they are a source of energy and life, inspiration to artists, the objects of interest for the scholars, they exist and will exist long after the last man speaks the last word, but we are the ones who name them, describe them and explore them.

Do they know us if we are made of them? In a certain way, yes - but it is different from our way of perception.

This is a wonderful post. I can tell these topics are very dear to your heart. And a wonderful thread, too! Thank you for beginning it. My days have been filled with a sense of renewed curiosity since I began reading. It is a confirmation that I don't know anything. I'm always using words that I don't know much about - Reason, Faith, Soul. I feel like a kid with a set of wax crayons who is trying to mimic Van Gogh.

I studied complex systems theory in university, and suddenly I was seeing emergent properties and the dynamics of holons everywhere. I was pondering Unity and diversity. It was a very special time in my life. This thread is having a similar effect.

An example - I see a leaf. And then I think about what signals the leaf is sending. What information is there? I see the shape and colour, what type of tree, the chlorophyll in the cells, the process of photosynthesis that allow plants to 'eat sunlight', and a whole dynamo of sugar, oxygen, carbohydrates, roots in the soil, cycles of seasons, seed and flower, the tree's place on earth, its place in the solar system, etc. It's like the quote from John Muir:

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

On a second note, I thought it would be good to contribute the following about stars. The topic is information theory, so it makes sense that our examples also contain 'good information' (whatever that may be!).

There is some debate about the fusion hypothesis in stars, especially in light of the rise of plasma cosmology.

In an interesting twist, Gurdjieff has a chapter in which he also claims that the sun neither lights nor heats! From p. 135 of Beelzebub's tales. He says,
"In reality, the surface of their 'Source-of-Heat,' like that of all the ordinary suns of our Great Universe, is perhaps more covered with ice than the surface of what they call their 'North Pole'."

Perhaps Gurdjieff was referring to superionic ice:

Recently at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics in Brighton, New York, one of the world's most powerful lasers blasted a droplet of water, creating a shock wave that raised the water's pressure to millions of atmospheres and its temperature to thousands of degrees. X-rays that beamed through the droplet in the same fraction of a second offered humanity's first glimpse of water under those extreme conditions.

The X-rays revealed that the water inside the shock wave didn't become a superheated liquid or gas. Paradoxically - but just as physicists squinting at screens in an adjacent room had expected - the atoms froze solid, forming crystalline ice.

"You hear the shot," said Marius Millot of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and "right away you see that something interesting was happening." Millot co-led the experiment with Federica Coppari, also of Lawrence Livermore.

The findings, published today in Nature, confirm the existence of "superionic ice," a new phase of water with bizarre properties. Unlike the familiar ice found in your freezer or at the north pole, superionic ice is black and hot. A cube of it would weigh four times as much as a normal one. It was first theoretically predicted more than 30 years ago, and although it has never been seen until now, scientists think it might be among the most abundant forms of water in the universe.

Across the solar system, at least, more water probably exists as superionic ice - filling the interiors of Uranus and Neptune - than in any other phase, including the liquid form sloshing in oceans on Earth, Europa and Enceladus. The discovery of superionic ice potentially solves decades-old puzzles about the composition of these "ice giant" worlds.

It could be that superionic ice may also help solve the puzzle of our friend the sun, and what he is doing up there.

Mysteries abound.
 
The two major forces in our Universe, forces that are responsible for our everyday experiences, are electromagnetism and gravitation. Gravitation is the weakest one, after gravitation comes electromagnetism. There are also weak and strong nuclear forces, but they act only at a microscopic level. Gravitation has a special status being a “universal force”, meaning that there is no way for a piece of matter or a piece of energy to escape it. Every material object has a mass. Every mass is a source of gravitation, the bigger the mass the stronger gravitational attraction it produces. And every mass “feels” gravitation, the bigger the mass, the stronger it is attracted. This is encoded in the Newton's formula for the universal law of gravitation

F = G Mm/r2,

where G is the `gravitational constant”, M is the mass of the “source”, m is the mass of the body that “feels” the gravitation, r is the distance between the two bodies. Of course m, assumed to be a smaller of the two masses, is also responsible for the force acting on M.
After Newton Albert Einstein created “general theory of relativity”, where the gravitational force is interpreted as a curvature of space and time via, what we call Einstein field equations usually accompanied by the „geodesic principle”: geometrical curvature tells the mass how to move”.

The second force, also responsible for the phenomena on cosmic scales (for instance interstellar charged plasma) is electromagnetism. Electric and magnetic attraction are governed by a similar force law as gravitation: the force between two bodies is proportional to the inverse square of the distance 1/r2, and proportional to the values of electric (or magnetic) charges of the bodies. Positive and negative charges attract each other, charges of the same sign (both positive and both negative) repel each other. This is stated (for electricity) in Coulomb's law. The value of the Coulomb force is expressed by the formula:

F=k (|Q||q|)/r2 ,

where k is the electrostatic constant, Q is the charge of the “source”, q is the charge of the body that “feels” the electrostatic field, r is the distance between the two bodies endowed with the charge.

Similarly, for magnetism one can write:

F=(μqm1 qm2)/(4πr2),
where
F is force,
qm1 and qm2 are the magnitudes of magnetic poles,
μ is the permeability of the intervening medium,
r is the separation.

Gravitoelectromagnetism (GEM) refers to a set of formal analogies between the equations for electromagnetism and relativistic gravitation, specifically: between Maxwell's field equations and an approximation to the Einstein field equations for general relativity.
The analogies I mention appear in many different ways. Both gravitational and electromagnetic interactions can be presented in the form of equations known from field theory. In such an approach, mass is equivalent to an electromagnetic charge, the constant G, which appears in the common law of gravity, is an analogy for the constant k that appears in Coulomb's law, and much more.

These analogous mathematical formulas, however, raise some questions and problems. In general relativity, gravity is not seen as a force, but as a curvature of space-time. On the other hand, electromagnetism does not seem to have such properties.
Nevertheless, let us look at the light. To this day, we see the light of dead stars that shone in the past. We see the Sun as it was just over 8 minutes ago, we see the Proxima Centauri as it was 4.24 years ago. Light does not spread out timelessly. Looking at the stars, we see the past of the Universe. (yet for the light itself time stops completely!)

Light reaches us and is a kind of information about the past. It is unusual in that it is a kind of link between gravity and electromagnetism. Despite the fact that, for example in the standard model, light is a carrier of electromagnetic interactions, it is also extremely important in the context of general relativity. According to this theory, it is the speed of light that is the highest possible speed that cannot be exceeded. Hypothetically, if we could exceed the speed of light, we would go back in time.
You can read about the unusual characteristics of light in the attached article.

But what is the problem with GEM? What approach to this concept is most popular with most authors? Well, the attempt to describe gravity using Maxwell's equations does not seem to be entirely satisfactory. Symmetry is lost. At the same time, some analogies between gravity and electromagnetism are shown, but the analogies do not guarantee a unified theory. These are again two theories which are similar at some points, but in essence different.

We say, for example, that mass in the theory of gravity is analogous to charge in electromagnetism. Is it really so? Note that in the classical approach to gravity, if we understand it as a force, it can only be attractive. This is not the case with electric charges Equivalent charges (positive or negative only) repel each other, while dissimilar charges (positive and negative) attract each other.
Another point is that the electric charge, as opposed to mass, is quantized. One coulomb is the charge of approximately 6241509074460762607.776 elementary charges. This means that the electric charge cannot be less than 1,6∙10(-19) C, where C denotes coulomb. It can only be an integer multiple of the value of the elementary charges. The only exception here are quarks, whose charges are indeed smaller than the elementary charges, but the quarks do not exist separately. This issue is so interesting and noteworthy that quarks are associated with other fundamental interactions - the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. These facts could in the future be a good introduction to the addition of the theory of nuclear interactions to the GEM theory. And that would be a step towards the unified field theory (UFT) sometimes called the theory of everything.

But going back to GEM, it seems to me that attempts to construct models using Maxwell's equations or even general relativity can be deceptive. There is no need for a place to look at issues such as magnetic monopolies or anti-gravity. In some models, there is also the concept of a cogravitational field, which would be analogous to the magnetic field, but for gravity. So how can we connect electricity, magnetism, gravity, cogravity, magnetic monopoles and anti-gravity? How do we consider topics such as antimatter and parallel universes?

What about quantum entanglement? In general relativity, immediate interactions seem to be something reserved. After all, nothing can be faster than light. Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, seems to allow a kind of instantaneous communication over a distance. So where to start?

And all this dark matter, dark energy, cosmic homogeneity, accelerating the pace of inflation. There are so many problems here that neither general relativity nor quantum mechanics can explain. These are, among others:

1. The problem of the speed of rotation of galaxies. In the 1970s, it was observed that there was too little visible matter in galaxies to prevent them from decaying under the influence of centrifugal force. To solve this paradox, physicists postulate the existence of “dark matter”, which would have to constitute up to 80 percent of the mass in the Universe. Such particles would only have to interact with "normal" matter through gravity, and would therefore be very difficult to detect. So far, no traces of them have been found.

2. The cosmos on the largest scale seems to be homogeneous. It is unlikely if it arose out of a random and chaotic state - and physicists have no reason to believe otherwise. To explain this, they postulate the phenomenon of “cosmic inflation”, which in the beginning of the Universe's existence would inflate it so quickly that it would “iron out” any possible inhomogeneities.

3. At the end of the last century, it was discovered that the universe was not only expanding, but that the rate of expansion was also increasing. There is no apparent reason why it should be ever faster, so physicists postulate the existence of “dark energy” to explain this. It is not known what such energy could be.

4. As the technique of measurement improved, two different ways of measuring the expansion of the universe, or galaxy escapes, began to “diverge”. The method based on the analysis of the microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang gives results, on average, 10 percent lower than the method based on observing supernovae.

Something is clearly wrong here. Theoretical physics seems to be going through a kind of crisis.
So the question that needs to be asked: Does gravity actually work as described in general relativity? Could there be an additional effect on larger scales that has not yet been noticed by us? And how does all this relate to the strange behaviour of subatomic particles described by quantum mechanics?

Physical theories have a certain range of applicability. For example, Newton's mechanics works really well in everyday problems, but at much larger scales it turns out to break down more and more. General relativity also seems to work well on the scales of stellar systems or even galactic scales, but at these even larger (or much smaller - subatomic) scales some problems arise again.
Relativistic effects also take place in our Newtonian everyday life, but they are so slight that we do not notice them. Hence, Newtonian mechanics functioned for so long in an almost unchanged state. In this case, will we learn a lesson from history and dare to suppose that general relativity also collapses at scales much larger than the galactic ones?

These questions may be answered by a slightly different physical theory - teleparallelism. In teleparallelism, mass not only curves but also twists space-time. Concepts related to teleparallelism, however, require knowledge of appropriately sublime mathematical structures. But isn’t that the physics of the future?
 
I found this on Teleparallelism. It seems everyone is looking for a third element that interacts with EM (the concatenation) but insofar has not been identified.

Similarly, there was once a time when electricity and magnetism seemed to be as distinct as lightning and lodestones. However, between the efforts of mostly Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, not only was it shown that electricity and magnetism were only two facets of a more general concept – viz., the electromagnetic field – but that one could also account for optical phenomena in the process by attributing electromagnetic waves to light.Since there are many other examples of how progress in science has often been associated with reducing the complexity of first principles by unifying disparate natural phenomena, once Einstein had formulated his theory of gravitation as a manifestation of spacetime geometry, he became convinced that the story did not stop there. His final – albeit, unsuccessful − quest in theoretical physics was to unify his theory of gravitation with Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism by finding some more general – most likely, geometric – field on the spacetime manifold and a set of field equations for it that would subsume both the Einstein equations for gravitation and the Maxwell equations for electromagnetism in some limiting approximation. This problem is what we are calling the Einstein-Maxwell unification problem.Here, one must clearly distinguish between the unification of two field theories and their mere concatenation. In the latter case, all that one has really accomplished is to construct essentially a Cartesian product of the two theories, and in particular, the resulting field equations for the fields that are to be unified say nothing new about either. What one hopes for in a unification of field theories is a general set of field equations for the unified field that contains some sort of coupling between the two fields that was not present in the individual field theories. The best example of this situation is the fact that in Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism, in addition to containing the equations of electrostatics and magnetostatics as special cases, the full set of Maxwell equations contains the far-reaching coupling of the electric and magnetic fields by electromagnetic induction. Consequently, one hopes that if gravitation and electromagnetism are unified
in a similar manner then perhaps there might be some sort of induction process whereby electromagnetism (under some unspecified circumstances) might induce a gravitational field and vice versa. The fact that none of the attempts at solving the Einstein-Maxwell unification problem contained such a mechanism was always regarded as a symptom that the unification was still just a glorified concatenation.
Of course, one must objectively accept that there is nothing to say that a unification of two field theories exists, or at least in the form that one is expecting. Thus, one must treat the existence of unification as basically a conjecture that one is testing, and as such, a conjecture that might prove incorrect.
 
I found this on Teleparallelism. It seems everyone is looking for a third element that interacts with EM (the concatenation) but insofar has not been identified.

I mentioned teleparallelism in my recent paper


Here is the sentence::

... The only acceptable solution to these problems is by using the whole exterior algebra of differential forms, as in Ivanenko-Landau-Kähler equation on a curved spacetime manifold M, where gravitation is described via teleparalellism, along the lines outlined in Refs. [15]
 
Thank You Ark, I will endeavor to at least grok the overall concepts.

My possibly related experience has been in building construction and some basic Autocad drafting.
Would there be any isomorphic correspondence between Clifford algebras and isometric drawings?

What is an Isometric Drawing?
 An isometric drawing is a type of pictorial drawing in which three sides of an object can be seen in one view.
 It’s popular within the process piping industry because it can be laid out and drawn with ease and portrays the object in a realistic view.
 
Thank You Ark, I will endeavor to at least grok the overall concepts.

My possibly related experience has been in building construction and some basic Autocad drafting.
Would there be any isomorphic correspondence between Clifford algebras and isometric drawings?
I remember those isometric drawings though more from school than the giant CADCAM screens I used early in my job. The Wikipedia article for teleparallelism does have a projection analogy:

Think of Mp as the computer screen and the internal displacement as the position of the mouse pointer. Think of a curved mousepad as spacetime and the position of the mouse as the position. Keeping the orientation of the mouse fixed, if we move the mouse about the curved mousepad, the position of the mouse pointer (internal displacement) also changes and this change is path dependent; i.e., it doesn't only depend upon the initial and final position of the mouse. The change in the internal displacement as we move the mouse about a closed path on the mousepad is the torsion.

Torsion for this model gives you gravity; there are other ideas like Einstein-Cartan gravity where curvature comes from mass and torsion comes from spin. The Wiki article also mentions teleparallelism is also known by absolute parallelism (the term I'm familiar with) and distant parallelism. I think if they say autoparallelism derived from conformal geodesics (in a paper I know of) that's also the same thing since geodesics imply distance even though autoparallelism does not.
 
The two major forces in our Universe, forces that are responsible for our everyday experiences, are electromagnetism and gravitation. Gravitation is the weakest one, after gravitation comes electromagnetism. There are also weak and strong nuclear forces, but they act only at a microscopic level. Gravitation has a special status being a “universal force”, meaning that there is no way for a piece of matter or a piece of energy to escape it. Every material object has a mass. Every mass is a source of gravitation, the bigger the mass the stronger gravitational attraction it produces. And every mass “feels” gravitation, the bigger the mass, the stronger it is attracted. This is encoded in the Newton's formula for the universal law of gravitation

F = G Mm/r2,

where G is the `gravitational constant”, M is the mass of the “source”, m is the mass of the body that “feels” the gravitation, r is the distance between the two bodies. Of course m, assumed to be a smaller of the two masses, is also responsible for the force acting on M.
After Newton Albert Einstein created “general theory of relativity”, where the gravitational force is interpreted as a curvature of space and time via, what we call Einstein field equations usually accompanied by the „geodesic principle”: geometrical curvature tells the mass how to move”.

The second force, also responsible for the phenomena on cosmic scales (for instance interstellar charged plasma) is electromagnetism. Electric and magnetic attraction are governed by a similar force law as gravitation: the force between two bodies is proportional to the inverse square of the distance 1/r2, and proportional to the values of electric (or magnetic) charges of the bodies. Positive and negative charges attract each other, charges of the same sign (both positive and both negative) repel each other. This is stated (for electricity) in Coulomb's law. The value of the Coulomb force is expressed by the formula:

F=k (|Q||q|)/r2 ,

where k is the electrostatic constant, Q is the charge of the “source”, q is the charge of the body that “feels” the electrostatic field, r is the distance between the two bodies endowed with the charge.

Similarly, for magnetism one can write:

F=(μqm1 qm2)/(4πr2),
where
F is force,
qm1 and qm2 are the magnitudes of magnetic poles,
μ is the permeability of the intervening medium,
r is the separation.

Gravitoelectromagnetism (GEM) refers to a set of formal analogies between the equations for electromagnetism and relativistic gravitation, specifically: between Maxwell's field equations and an approximation to the Einstein field equations for general relativity.
The analogies I mention appear in many different ways. Both gravitational and electromagnetic interactions can be presented in the form of equations known from field theory. In such an approach, mass is equivalent to an electromagnetic charge, the constant G, which appears in the common law of gravity, is an analogy for the constant k that appears in Coulomb's law, and much more.

These analogous mathematical formulas, however, raise some questions and problems. In general relativity, gravity is not seen as a force, but as a curvature of space-time. On the other hand, electromagnetism does not seem to have such properties.
Nevertheless, let us look at the light. To this day, we see the light of dead stars that shone in the past. We see the Sun as it was just over 8 minutes ago, we see the Proxima Centauri as it was 4.24 years ago. Light does not spread out timelessly. Looking at the stars, we see the past of the Universe. (yet for the light itself time stops completely!)

Light reaches us and is a kind of information about the past. It is unusual in that it is a kind of link between gravity and electromagnetism. Despite the fact that, for example in the standard model, light is a carrier of electromagnetic interactions, it is also extremely important in the context of general relativity. According to this theory, it is the speed of light that is the highest possible speed that cannot be exceeded. Hypothetically, if we could exceed the speed of light, we would go back in time.
You can read about the unusual characteristics of light in the attached article.

But what is the problem with GEM? What approach to this concept is most popular with most authors? Well, the attempt to describe gravity using Maxwell's equations does not seem to be entirely satisfactory. Symmetry is lost. At the same time, some analogies between gravity and electromagnetism are shown, but the analogies do not guarantee a unified theory. These are again two theories which are similar at some points, but in essence different.

We say, for example, that mass in the theory of gravity is analogous to charge in electromagnetism. Is it really so? Note that in the classical approach to gravity, if we understand it as a force, it can only be attractive. This is not the case with electric charges Equivalent charges (positive or negative only) repel each other, while dissimilar charges (positive and negative) attract each other.
Another point is that the electric charge, as opposed to mass, is quantized. One coulomb is the charge of approximately 6241509074460762607.776 elementary charges. This means that the electric charge cannot be less than 1,6∙10(-19) C, where C denotes coulomb. It can only be an integer multiple of the value of the elementary charges. The only exception here are quarks, whose charges are indeed smaller than the elementary charges, but the quarks do not exist separately. This issue is so interesting and noteworthy that quarks are associated with other fundamental interactions - the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. These facts could in the future be a good introduction to the addition of the theory of nuclear interactions to the GEM theory. And that would be a step towards the unified field theory (UFT) sometimes called the theory of everything.

But going back to GEM, it seems to me that attempts to construct models using Maxwell's equations or even general relativity can be deceptive. There is no need for a place to look at issues such as magnetic monopolies or anti-gravity. In some models, there is also the concept of a cogravitational field, which would be analogous to the magnetic field, but for gravity. So how can we connect electricity, magnetism, gravity, cogravity, magnetic monopoles and anti-gravity? How do we consider topics such as antimatter and parallel universes?

What about quantum entanglement? In general relativity, immediate interactions seem to be something reserved. After all, nothing can be faster than light. Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, seems to allow a kind of instantaneous communication over a distance. So where to start?

And all this dark matter, dark energy, cosmic homogeneity, accelerating the pace of inflation. There are so many problems here that neither general relativity nor quantum mechanics can explain. These are, among others:

1. The problem of the speed of rotation of galaxies. In the 1970s, it was observed that there was too little visible matter in galaxies to prevent them from decaying under the influence of centrifugal force. To solve this paradox, physicists postulate the existence of “dark matter”, which would have to constitute up to 80 percent of the mass in the Universe. Such particles would only have to interact with "normal" matter through gravity, and would therefore be very difficult to detect. So far, no traces of them have been found.

2. The cosmos on the largest scale seems to be homogeneous. It is unlikely if it arose out of a random and chaotic state - and physicists have no reason to believe otherwise. To explain this, they postulate the phenomenon of “cosmic inflation”, which in the beginning of the Universe's existence would inflate it so quickly that it would “iron out” any possible inhomogeneities.

3. At the end of the last century, it was discovered that the universe was not only expanding, but that the rate of expansion was also increasing. There is no apparent reason why it should be ever faster, so physicists postulate the existence of “dark energy” to explain this. It is not known what such energy could be.

4. As the technique of measurement improved, two different ways of measuring the expansion of the universe, or galaxy escapes, began to “diverge”. The method based on the analysis of the microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang gives results, on average, 10 percent lower than the method based on observing supernovae.

Something is clearly wrong here. Theoretical physics seems to be going through a kind of crisis.
So the question that needs to be asked: Does gravity actually work as described in general relativity? Could there be an additional effect on larger scales that has not yet been noticed by us? And how does all this relate to the strange behaviour of subatomic particles described by quantum mechanics?

Physical theories have a certain range of applicability. For example, Newton's mechanics works really well in everyday problems, but at much larger scales it turns out to break down more and more. General relativity also seems to work well on the scales of stellar systems or even galactic scales, but at these even larger (or much smaller - subatomic) scales some problems arise again.
Relativistic effects also take place in our Newtonian everyday life, but they are so slight that we do not notice them. Hence, Newtonian mechanics functioned for so long in an almost unchanged state. In this case, will we learn a lesson from history and dare to suppose that general relativity also collapses at scales much larger than the galactic ones?

These questions may be answered by a slightly different physical theory - teleparallelism. In teleparallelism, mass not only curves but also twists space-time. Concepts related to teleparallelism, however, require knowledge of appropriately sublime mathematical structures. But isn’t that the physics of the future?

If possible, take a look at it: Engineer claims to have solved "the biggest problem in physics"
 
Thank you.
Recently we, Laura and I, talked about the flow of time. Laura came with idea that time may have a wave character, like sinusoidal wave, going forward and backwards, and somehow the end result of these oscillation is the effective movement forwads, according to the entropic time arrow. I was thinking about how that can be modeled mathematically? One idea is that our reality is like a sheet of a paper that can be printed two-sided. Both sides move in time in opposite direction. Our 3D matter oscillates between both sides, but stayiong mostly on one side. On the other side is mostly antimatter. Which reminds Jean-Pierre Petit idea of the Janus cosmology. Janus had two faces.
Jean Pierre Petit attributed this idea to Ummits:
But this comes automatically from conformal compactification of the Minkowski space, where our Minkowskian space-time is realized as a projective light cone in six dimensional space of signature (4,2), and when we identify two points on the null cone in this space if they are proportional with a positive constant rather than a (non-zero) real constant as it is usually assumed. We thenhave a double conformal compactification.
I know tall this sounds pretty abstract, but for me is a project for the future.
Coming back to the time flow: the point is to make time flow as objective as possible. Time flow in our personal consciousness is one thing, certainly interesting, but an objective time flow resulting from "observations" by something more objective, some information processing independent of our personal minds is the target here.
When we intensely observe time, time slows down. This is the Zeno effect: "the watched pot never boils". Now how to put it all together? That is the question.
 
Laura and I, talked about the flow of time. Laura came with idea that time may have a wave character, like sinusoidal wave, going forward and backwards, and somehow the end result of these oscillation is the effective movement forwads, according to the entropic time arrow.

I had read, seen a similar idea but talking about gravity, mass and inertia in the Mach effect.


The original work comes from Heidi Fearn and James F. Woodward (California State University). They looked at piezoelectric disks, which change in width depending on the voltage running through it. On one side of the disk is a reaction mass while the other side has the fluctuating mass. When a voltage is applied and the disk width increases, the fluctuating mass experiences a force that decreases its mass, causing a dip in inertia and thus makes it easier to push. Then when the voltage is released, the width of the disk decreases, the fluctuating mass returns to normal and so the reaction mass moves along with the center of gravity of the system as the whole system moves forward. This process can be repeated as needed, each time generating a net thrust courtesy of inertia (Scoles 61-2, Singh).

It is because of this inertia feature that the drive is named after Mach, a pioneer in that field. In the 1880s, he tried to develop a theory for inertia, because it’s inherently an odd phenomena. An object continues to move in the direction a net force was acting on, but what about forces that are not local? They still impact you, and so Mach developed his Principle in which inertia is the “result of all the gravity influences of all the matter in the Universe.” Mass impacts inertia, and so via this observation the MEGA drive was developed to exploit this feature as thrust. By changing our object’s relationship with all the matter in the Universe, I am creating an energy differential that becomes thrust! It’s wild and seemingly violates the Conservation of Momentum, and yet many are on board with this interpretation, especially considering the results. Woodward feels no violation is happening because the reaction mass would be the entire Universe, meaning its inertia would change. Yeah, it is a crazy though (Scoles 62, Singh).

 
But this comes automatically from conformal compactification of the Minkowski space, where our Minkowskian space-time is realized as a projective light cone in six dimensional space of signature (4,2), and when we identify two points on the null cone in this space if they are proportional with a positive constant rather than a (non-zero) real constant as it is usually assumed. We thenhave a double conformal compactification.
It sometimes seems like there's almost too many things that can be done with the conformal group. You kind of had that group identified as the matter/antimatter key back at the 3/1/97 session:

A: These are material. The missing link for all you folks is that gravity is as much antimatter as matter!!

Q: (A) I would like to ask, not now, but maybe later, about the, is this the concept that our space/time is the boundary of a domain? Is that correct picture?

A: Yes.

You relate the complex domain (Poincare disk) to the null cone (light cone) here:


Two parts of the light cone as two different places sounds interesting. That would kind of fit the "no space, no time" clue for the antimatter universe but normally you would have to be a photon to be there.
 

Time-Reversal Symmetry and Arrow of Time in Quantum Mechanics of Open Systems​

Abstract: It is one of the most important and long-standing issues of physics to derive the irreversibility out of a time-reversal symmetric equation of motion. The present paper considers the breaking of the time-reversal symmetry in open quantum systems and the emergence of an arrow of time. We claim that the time-reversal symmetric Schrödinger equation can have eigenstates that break the time-reversal symmetry if the system is open in the sense that it has at least a countably infinite number of states. Such eigenstates, namely the resonant and anti-resonant states, have complex eigenvalues. We show that, although these states are often called “unphysical”, they observe the probability conservation in a particular way. We also comment that the seemingly Hermitian Hamiltonian is non-Hermitian in the functional space of the resonant and anti-resonant states, and hence there is no contradiction in the fact that it has complex eigenvalues. We finally show how the existence of the states that break the time-reversal symmetry affects the quantum dynamics. The dynamics that starts from a time-reversal symmetric initial state is dominated by the resonant states for t>0 ; this explains the phenomenon of the arrow of time, in which the decay excels the growth. The time-reversal symmetry holds in that the dynamic ending at a time-reversal symmetric final state is dominated by the anti-resonant states for t<0 .

Maybe this paper holds some clues...
 
I was gone for a while. I can see a lot has happened. I've had quite an intense time at work lately. I work, among others, in the neurobiology laboratory. Since July, I have been working on researching the effect of the GABA receptor on brain cells.

There have been times when I thought this job was pointless. I was crying and I was really worried. The measurement approval went crazy. It was creating sine waves and other effects that shouldn't be there (in attachment).

Ultimately, however, I was able to construct a statistic for my measurements. It turned out that the confidence level was 99% (which means that we can trust these measurements so much). I was very happy. This is a new step in the grant that I am implementing. Now I will deal with mutations. This is a step towards quantum effects and consciousness.

As I thought about the sine waves, I thought I might relate to what Ark wrote about Laura's concept. The sine wave brought into my mind the concept of time as a wave moving in two different directions. It is also interesting that recently I dreamed about something similar myself.

In my dream it was more or less as if for a moment each one particle was creating for itself some kind of antiparticle/parallel particle/reflected particle, it's hard to say. But the second particle seemed to be identical to the first, but somewhat inverted in time. A bit like the Feynmann diagram, but such a description would not be enough.

The meetings of these old and new particles corresponding to them accelerated the passage of time between them, but for the first particles this time seemed to run towards the future, and for the latter, towards the past, so that the time interval between them increased, which was observable as a certain a kind of torsion. The dominant effect was the curvature of space-time, but this curvature was only an approximation of the entire process, cutting out these small, kind of fractal, fluctuations.

It's a bit like my sine waves in the lab. Imagine you had a graph of a function, let it be sin(x), but if you zoomed in tightly anywhere on the sine wave then you would see that that place is made up of small sine waves, when you zoom in on the next one, the same thing happens, and so on forever. Such a fractal structure.

Interestingly, on an extragalactic scale, the formation of these structures significantly contributed to the fact that the galaxies drifted apart. This effect, however, was much more subtle than the actual curvature of spacetime, and was only noticeable at large scales.

By the way, Laura's concept also reminded me of Husserl's philosophy, in particular of the concept of inner awareness of time, of time as a stream of consciousness. In this view, in fact, observation and time are inextricably linked, as Laura noted.

In the next longer post, perhaps I will expand the concepts of time and observation a bit, also in the context of information theory.
 

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In my dream it was more or less as if for a moment each one particle was creating for itself some kind of antiparticle/parallel particle/reflected particle, it's hard to say. But the second particle seemed to be identical to the first, but somewhat inverted in time. A bit like the Feynmann diagram, but such a description would not be enough.

The meetings of these old and new particles corresponding to them accelerated the passage of time between them, but for the first particles this time seemed to run towards the future, and for the latter, towards the past, so that the time interval between them increased, which was observable as a certain a kind of torsion. The dominant effect was the curvature of space-time, but this curvature was only an approximation of the entire process, cutting out these small, kind of fractal, fluctuations.

It's a bit like my sine waves in the lab. Imagine you had a graph of a function, let it be sin(x), but if you zoomed in tightly anywhere on the sine wave then you would see that that place is made up of small sine waves, when you zoom in on the next one, the same thing happens, and so on forever. Such a fractal structure.

Interestingly, on an extragalactic scale, the formation of these structures significantly contributed to the fact that the galaxies drifted apart. This effect, however, was much more subtle than the actual curvature of spacetime, and was only noticeable at large scales.
Sounds a bit like zitterbewegung of entangled particle-antiparticle pairs only perhaps via the spin angular momentum (related by some to torsion) having a time component, there's also a zitterbewegung in time. Galaxies drifting apart via the expanding universe and zitterbewegung both could be a conformal gravity (special conformal transformations) thing.
 
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