Hard core Einstein realism through two eyes fused, mathematics and mysticism

A person on one of the quantum consciousness lists said: Wake up. That's what I have done. That reminds me of popular song I really liked, decades ago: "waking up is hard to do...." Deepak's post this morning is certainly more "alive" and on target than the bulk of our email exchanges have been lately. I apologize for not following up right now. I have at times wished for a thread on "brain-soul interface to neuroscience" ... but this morning, I have woken to some different realizations. Three subjects really attract my attention this morning -- the state of the world, a return to a kind of Einsteinian physics, and  the importance of doing justice to Christmas. Since this thread is called "interpretations of quantum mechanics," I suppose that the Einsteinian thoughts are speakable here, even though they are grounded in realism. Still, since spiritual connection is of interest to most of you, I should say a few words about context. I haven't seen any of you refer much to certain big but scary names, like de Chardin, Nietzsche or Marx. Even Hegel. It is sad that our world is so restrictive, ever more restrictive, in the depth of dialogue ands thought.  One of the great debates in meditation is what de Chardin discussed in his book on the Activation of Human Energy (qi? mana?). Is meditation about withdrawing from all the illusions and false connections of this world, or about reaching inside (as de Chardin and his follower JFK) to make stronger and better connections with the entire noosphere of earth? I have often leaned more towards the latter approach, and most of my recent quantum work is of that type, engaging with what physics needs next to take one REAL step forwards, a baby step, towards really assimilating what some call "retrocausality", NOT because it explains psi (it doesn't) but because humans need to master baby stuff before they are ready for heavier and more dangerous stuff. But between the withdrawal approach of ancient Hindu ascetics, an ancient thesis, and the immersion approach of de Chardin and JFK (a modern antithesis), Nietzsche had a nice little metaphor which is more of a synthesis: withdrawal and return. (Indeed, the neuroscientist Levitin has a popular book, The Organized Mind, which takes that a little further, if a bit more narrowly.) And yesterday, being tired of endlessly repeating and trying to explain baby stuff, not only here but elsewhere, I decided I should withdraw a bit and shift to longer-term, no-holds-barred no-planet-barred, efforts to look as deeply as I really can into foundations of physics. "To hell with limiting myself to what local media can understand. Reality itself deserves some attention, at the very deepest I am capable of."  Fockian realism is really the mainstream today, at its best, when it is coherent and capable of actually building devices that work, mathematical systems which are well-posed and self-consistent and do what they claim, and so on. The garden varieties of Fockian realism (the ρQED and MQED I have tried to expand people's minds to comprehend) basically portray our cosmos as a :"firehose of information," a hugely complex multiverse space squeezed into one simple time dimension, endlessly squirming and tending towards gross instability (exactly like the political and cultural systems of our world). But in the end, I doubt that could be true. As my wife once said: "Don't think of it as a firehose. Think of it as an ocean." I have found that extremely important and correct in my meditative practices as well. I COULD believe in a kind of 4D Fock space -- something which Streater and Wightman  (SERIOUS mathematical physicists) attempted but never quite got right. (The problems involved stuff like infinite norms, the kind of problem which von Neumann fixed for ordinary 1920's Hilbert space kinds of stuff, but are not the next baby step needed today.) Maybe. Very practical, good for meditation, but for physics I find myself wanting to focus instead on better fleshing out the ultraweird alternatives (NOT by empty ungrounded words) and, today, the alternative of Einsteinian realism. Einsteinian realism is what De Broglie and his part-time follower Bohm really wanted to revive. The new experimental data do at least give me renewed hope that the Einstein/deBroglie approach may work out in the end, at a deeper level, even though it WOULD require us to accept that we here are just "the shadows in Plato's cave,"  a TYPE of ontological shock I have tried to spare you since everyone here seems a bit sensitive in some ways. (Meow.) I mentioned before what de Broglie and I agreed on, in our very friendly correspondence, which I still have here in my house: it was actually the problem of explaining the spectrum of helium, NOT the EPR/Bell/CHSH experiment, which motivated the great Congress at Solvay (sp?) where they "voted out reality."  The great shock was when someone solved the Schrodinger equation over six dimensions, "two for each electron," and IT WORKED in accurate prediction, and when nothing in a mere 3+1 dimensions ever did. Einstein once said that the great success of (1920s!) QM in such predictions could be explained someday as a kind of emergent statistical relation. He, like Jack and Paul Z recently, said "Just look at that configuration space... isn't it obviously a space of possible configurations of something which is really in 3+1-D."  That was a nice conjecture, but where and how do exactly what statistics emerge? (Reminds me of a cartoon. Reporter asks a physicist: "You say your theory tells us how to build a starship. Just how do we build that starship, starting from your ideas?" Physicist: "Oh, I leave that little thing to my student as an exercise." Students beware whom you chose as your advisor if you ever want to graduate... though I did well with an ambitious advisor.) Wiener and Von Neumann tried, and failed. De Broglie also had a student who tried very hard, but failed in the end. I tried, and succeeded, but it was the hardest math I ever did. Before me, the closest were an Indian guy named Sudarshan, Wigner and Glauber. Later when I briefly met Glauber, I did have a chance to say that one of the worst mistakes I made in my life was NOT to take his course in quantum optics at Harvard; all the folks I talked to thought it was "mere engineering," not relevant to the real foundations. It was an important life lesson to learn not to take such beliefs too seroiusly. No, that was not just a digression. It is a low key introduction to one key resource: my papers at arxiv of extended glauber-sudarshan mathematics, which is the real key to making Einstein's program actually work. And this morning, thanks to "withdrawal" (to a larger world), I now see new ways to actually USE that mathematics. In a way, it begins with a "simple" question: "What is an electron?" Before Einstein, the mainstream approach, led by Lorentz (the guy with the "t", not Lorenz, who is also important), assumed that space is filled with just two kinds of "objects" -- fields, continuous functions over space, and "particles," exact perfect Grecian points. Einstein and Lorentz both agreed that Lagrangian mathematics (which already includes mathematical terms which some people INTERPRET as back action) is a proper tool for modeling such things. The Sutherland papers I have seen take the Lorentz approach, exactly. Einstein and deBroglie pushed hard for a change in visions beyond Lorentz; NOT point particles, but forces only. It is like the old Kybalion claim, that everything is vibration and energy, that particles are either "illusions" or, more precisely, vortices of force. Wheeler developed a Lorentzian electrodynamics long ago which, in my view, shows very vividly why Einstein's vision makes more sense than Lorentz's, in my view. Wheeler's (classical Lorentzian) electrodynamics works ONLY when you append a weird "renormalization" formalism as bad as its cousin in modern QED, a monstrous glob which those of us who wield Occam's Razo naturally itch to cut off. The problem is not with quantum field theory as such, but with the assumption that a charged particle like an electron is a perfect point. Once we know that E=mc**2, we know that such a charged point particle would have an infinite energy of self-repulsion. But let me say no more about the problem, but instead move on to the solution, which many of us have known IN THEORY for decades. HOW can we model the electron in a way which fits the empirical evidence, with a radius more than zero, as a stable, quantized vortex of force? There is a fairly large literature on "solitons" (physicists' fuzzy term for stable vortices of force) in physics. If you go to scholar.google.com (as any serious physicist often does), you will see thousands of citations of the terms "skyrmion" and "BPS," the two most popular soliton model in physics. (That compares with just a few dozen citations to the highest-rated physics papers either by Jack or by myself, but I do a bit better in mathematics and neural networks, and important papers often do not immediately "hit the Oprah hit parade.")   It is a huge literature, which I will not get too deep into right now.  Crudely, both types of soliton model HINT at a model of the electron as a "hedgehog" (porcupine), a little creature with "needles" (vectors) all pointing outwards from its center. Formally, that gives it a "winding number of one," crucial to its stability. But this morning I ask: do two hedgehogs on a row really add up to one big superhedgehog? I doubt it. I need to revisit things like Manton's classic book on Topological Solitons, but I really doubt that two hedgehogs, viewed at a distance, have a collective winding number of two. I need to strengthen my resolve to find a different way. What I have worried/wondered about for a long time: if there is stability WITHOUT their kind of topological charge, could boundary conditions be crucial in holding together electrons (as in holding together what passes for  civilization on this tiny planet)? But how could one ever find a mathematically tractable way to live without stability in free spac e, or even to find stability without the usual type of opological charge? Tow possible approaches. first, see what ENGINEERS like Roger Lake have done with more than one "skyrmion" in a less pure but more realistic model. Second... use my extended P map as a tool for analysis of discrete spectra in a thermodynamic cosmos. The math is all worked out only for continuous fields, but in the Einstein picture that's all that exists anyway. (Fermions and point particles are just for approximation. This is another point which Streater and Wightman got wrong, by ofllowing the crowd and not re-examining the fundamentals.) Discrete spectra of the bosonic operators gives quantization FOR THE EINSTEINIAN systems which the new P maps from.  And by heh way, it gives a bit more -- technologies far more dangerous than the baby time machines which MQED allows. But not so interedsting as the "gateway" options which Stanislaw Lem speculates about, which would be allowed under ultraweirdism.  Best of luck. May we all someday be capable of understanding, before we disintegrate into powder.  ReplyReply allForward