Quantum Non-Linearity: Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so.

Saturday, October 17, 2015

Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so.

Could MI6 have an interest in my little story? Probably not, because I try not to live in the real world.

I spotted the following material online over a year ago, but as I'm currently short of time for blogging I thought I would tell this odd little tale in lieu of my otherwise absence from the blogosphere......

This paper on solid state physics written by Chinese authors Xiang-Ying Ji and Xi-Qiao Feng is rather curious. Why so? .....because my book Gravity and Quantum Non-Linearity is referenced in it. Honours like this don't often come my way, so it's time to play it for all it's worth and bask in the glory. Here's where in the paper's text the reference occurs:

The reference 14 attached to their biased diffusion equation (4) appears in their reference list as follows:

I wonder if these guys know who I am and what I'm about because there is a bit of "but" in all this! The equation in my book Gravity and Quantum Non-Linearity that is nearest in form to equation (4) above is equation (3.13) below:

If you can read equations like this then you will understand that apart from a couple of differences my equation (3:13) is more or less of the same form as Xiang-Ying Ji and Xi-Qiao Feng's equation (4). Those differences are in the constants and also the appearance of the last term on the right hand side of (3.13).

But .. and here's that "but" I spoke of..... notice I have "i" ( that is, root minus one) in front of the diffusion constant. When you add this complex factor to the diffusion term it changes an ordinary biased diffusion equation into a wave equation. The other thing to notice is the appearance of the last term on the right hand side - this is to compensate for the fact that in the kind of diffusion represented by (3.13) the diffusion is a process where in the underlying random walk the stepping agent bifurcates and steps both left and right at the same time. To prevent such a system violating conservation laws the third compensating term on the right hand side must be subtracted. (This is not a point that appears in my book, but is something that has occurred to me more recently). It is this feature that gives my equation its relativistic character.

Xiang-Ying Ji and Xi-Qiao Fengstop stop short (wisely perhaps) of this "relativistic complexification" of biased diffusion - after all, their paper is really all about the ordinary diffusion of real particles in materials and not about a quantum equation or its extension into quantum gravity. It is perhaps a little strange that they should reference some weird and eccentric amateur theory of quantum gravity when the derivation of the non-imaginary form of their equation (4) is pretty standard fare! But I'm honoured that our esteemed Chinese friends have chosen to use this reference! I wonder if there are some security issues entailed here? I'll leave MI6 to decide on that one!

No comments:

THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified.

Quantum Non-Linearity

Saturday, October 17, 2015

Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so.

No comments:

My Other Blogs

Papers and Essays etc

About Me

Blog Archive

Labels

THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION