Expanded Version of Essay
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As I have already mentioned in a comment to the last entry, I received a lot of comments on the draft of the essay that was just submitted to the FQXi essay contest, “Is Reality Digital or Analog?”
Horace and his friends, as well as others, including George, reviewed the draft and made some very helpful comments on it. The trouble is I didn’t realize that they were in the comment format of MS Word and I didn’t realize that I had to turn that feature on in order to see them. As a result, I wasn’t able to take advantage of them.
That is too bad, because those comments would have improved the essay considerably. Therefore, I decided to go ahead and incorporate them into the essay, expanding it a little bit, and publish the expanded version on this site.
Here is a link to essay, entitled “What is the Point of Reality?”
I wish I could swap it out for the one I sent to FQXi, but oh well. It wouldn’t matter, even if it were perfect. They just aren’t prepared for Larson’s advanced ideas, yet.
Doug
The great advantage of a theory based on discrete units of space and time is that these units can then be used to build everything in the physical universe, from photons and neutrinos to quarks and leptons, something we’ve managed to begin, although there is a long way to go in explaining the interactions of these entities.
But since the relationship of space to time is motion, we end up dealing with units of motion. These units are units of oscillation, but 3D oscillation. These motions are not 1D or 2D oscillations of objects, but 3D oscillations of space and time itself. This unusual approach makes it more difficult to work with in some ways, but easier in other ways.
The most difficult challenge for beginners is to grasp the concept of motion without reference to a background or an object to mark a change of space by virtue of its changing position in a background. However, why this should be is strange to understand, really, because we don’t seem to need a changing location in time to comprehend that it increases. It’s enough to know that one event follows another.
That is the same way we should think of changing space: It should be enough to know that one location follows another, as space increases. Once objects are brought into the picture, by combining these units of 3D oscillation, then we can speak about the distance between them and how that space, which is a result of different class of motion, can result from changing locations as a result of applied forces, which all comes from the beginning.
It’s a very simple and beautiful theory to work with, but hard for people to understand, at first, because of their preconceived notions.
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