We have well and truly left the world of material objects and are now talking about stacks of QFT fields — apokrisis

QFT describes particle fields. Shortly interacting. It doesn't describe bound states very well (unless very specific conditions are specified). So to find out about quarks and leptons you can do the same as for bound quark states. Bound systems like atoms and molecules are not modeled by QFT. Aggregates of particles that form life can best be described by non-equilibrium thermodynamics, but to say that even the appearing of a bacteria can be described is too much already. A population of bacteria, taking the bacteria as the units, can be described. Etcetera. All high level units with their own laws, fairly independent of the lower levels, but based on them.

At what point do we then give up talking like atomists when we are discussing hierarchical organisation — apokrisis

That depends where you draw the borderlines. On the deepest level individual preons, then quarks and leptons, then neutrons and protons, atoms, molecules, aggregates and condensates, cells, organs, organisms, and stop...

The charges are conserved. They act as generators for the interaction fields and as coupling strengths to the virtual glue.

So ... just symmetry. — apokrisis

Why just symmetry?

Geometry and charge. Without mass.

Long, long ago I thought of majoring in physics, but found the concepts of mathematics were clearer to me. — jgill

That could because one speaks of values only, without yet a content.

All particles interact by coupling (by their charge) with the virtual particle field between them. So the up/down superposition, two simultaneous paths in spin space, gets collapsed to up or down after this coupling. The virtual particles are not virtual in the sense that they don't exist but in the sense that their energy and moments (or times and positions) are independent, delivering the right values for the transition. Mathematically, the propagator for a virtual particle is the integral over all momenta and energies and in a larger diagram, with external legs representing real particles, deltas ensure the right momenta and energies are picked for the interacting real particles. :cool:

I think that to properly interact, real particles have to tap into the pool (by means of their charge) of potential changes in motion. Because the motions involved are infinite the virtual pool has to deliver infinite possibilities of momenta and energy (or positions and times). Virtual particles encompass all energies and momenta needed for the interaction at hand. :smile:

Well, if a number of massless particles form a bound state, you have concentrated energy, i.e. mass.

If a measurement of the spin of some particle is taken, it usually involves information (photon?) traveling from the state being measured to the measurer, not the other way around. — noAxioms

A state of superposition remains superimposed without interaction. A superposition of spin up and down won't collapse by emission of a photon carrying info to the observer. Measuring the spin means placing the superposition in an external field.

It's fundamentally different, as no decision has to be made by an electron re. its attraction to protons. — Olivier5

That makes it even easier to flee or fight!

I think the pre inflation era was an era of a kind of time that is characteristic for virtual particles. They don't move forward nor backwards in time but oscillate. That state, present on a 3D Planckian volume residing on a 4D bulk space (which with it can gravitationally interact, somewhat like the Randall-Sundrum model, explaining the weakness of gravity), is set in motion not by an internal breaking of symmetry (symmetry breaking has no place in this model) but by an external condition that exceeds a critical value: the negative curvature of the bulk space on which two 3D branes (universe and its mirror version) can
inflate into real existence.

Quarks can't be asymptotically free. Only when together they can move freely.

What's a cognitive leap whopper?

'The superposition' is not an object which a photon can hit. — noAxioms

Superposition is collapsed by a virtual photon. An interaction is involved.

I suppose pedophiles can and do learn to have nothing to do with children, but sexual urges being what they are, failures can occur — Bitter Crank

Or induced... I read about a group "pedophlle hunters" (most of whom probably unable to find a sex partner) luring alleged pedophiles with fake telephone calls of young ones. When they showed up at the "appointment" they got their ass kicked. And not only that. One man died. People in the neighborhood didn't know the reason first and burnt candles for the man, and laid flowers. A gentle man. When they heard about the killing reason the flowers were removed...

for instance reproduction, predation and parasitism, flee or fight, symbiosis or symbolism, are concepts which have no meaning whatsoever in chemistry — Olivier5

I think only symbolism has no meaning in chemistry. There is reproduction, predatism (even in physics where the W and Z bosons eat good Goldstone ghosts to becomecmassive...), parasitism, fleeing and fighting even at the chemical level. Fleeing and fighting in physics: black hole physics, electrical attraction and repulsion.

Maybe all particles are basically massless. Maybe them interacting renders mass. Massless virtual photons (a closed propagator line in a Feynman diagram, a "bubble") can have energy without momentum and momentum without energy, and in between. They can even have negative energies and momenta. Charged real fields interact by coupling to the virtual photon field (which can interact with virtual charged fields, which can couple to virtual photons, etc...), which adjusts its energies and momenta to the interaction.

Throw away the macroscopic objects in superpositions. In a superconductor, Bose-Einstein condensates, or other exotic states of matter, there are a lot of constituent particles in superposition, but a cat in a superposition of a live state and dead state is nonsense, as the 6 year old would testify to. The standard rules of QM assign such state to a cat because it inherits the superposition of the superimposed state which leads to poison or not, upon measurement. The wavefunction of the cat-up-down-superposition becomes is a superposition of a poison-deadcat and a nopoison-livecat state. That's the weird implication.

The better way to look at it is to consider only the spinup-spindown state in superposition. The cat is just alive and an act of measurement collapses the state to up (cat alive) or down (deadcat). In alignment with the expectation of the six year old.

An observer can measure, whether it's human or sensor, I think you are making an unimportant distinction here. — universeness

In the standard interpretation of QM, this distinction is made and together with the fundamental probability this gave rise to many worlds interpretation, decoherence, and other mechanisms.

I have never understood the "commotion" involved in Schrödinger's cat. As long as the state of superposition is undisturbed the cat is alive, so not in a superposition of dead and alive. If the cat will stay isolated in the cage though then the cat will slowly dilute into the whole universe. As will any system devoid of interaction with the world surrounding it. So systems own their localization to interaction, which makes them relational in a way.

I litterally had such a function (a special function used in physics, in my hands. Made of papier maché, over one century ago, a archeounigeological treasure!

And there are more of them special functions:

the spherical harmonics (of which the Legendre polynomials are a special case), the Tchebychev polynomials, the Hermite polynomials, the Jacobi polynomials, the Laguerre polynomials, the Whittaker functions, and the parabolic cylinder functions. As with the Bessel functions, one can study their infinite series, recursion formulas, generating functions, asymptotic series, integral representations, and other properties. Attempts have been made to unify this rich topic, but not one has been completely successful

Luckily, we could use a fat blue book during examination. The book had an appropriate title: Special Functions, as was the name of the study subject.

The distinctions made are quite artificial. Preons collect in quark and lepton structures, behaving according to laws we can find out by isolating them or premeditating them by using the preon laws.

Quarks collect in hadron and meson structures, behaving according to new laws that are still weakly connected to quark laws. These new laws can be discovered by isolating them and examining them. Or prmeditating them from the still weakly connected quark laws.

Hadrons , protons and neutrons particularly, collect into atomic nuclei structures, behaving according to laws that can be discovered by isolating them or premeditating them from the lower level quark laws.

In combination with electrons the nuclei form atoms or starry structures. Atoms behave according to new laws which can be analyzed by isolating them or premeditating them them from the lower level structures and laws. This is somewhat harder for star structures, but a short-lived piece of neutron star has been made.

Atoms collect in molecule structures, behaving according to new laws which can be analyzed by isolating them or premeditating them them from the lower level structures aqund laws. The shape of various proteins was computed by AI neural networks to 90% accuracy.

Atoms collect in solids, liquids, or gasses, behaving according to new laws which can be analyzed by isolating them or premeditating them them from the lower level structures and laws.

Molecules combine in structures that show first signs of life. The situations on planets that rotate around their axis are ideal. Planets forming around stars are mostly spinning in the same direction as the stars, so the surface has a day-and-night rythm.
These combined molecular structures behave according to new laws which can be analyzed by isolating them or premeditating them them from the lower level structures and laws.

So if we isolate people we can empirically find out about the high level laws they conform to, or premeditate these laws from the lower level structures and laws.

The social and cultural structures and the laws to which they conform can empirically be found by isolating societies. or premeditated these laws from the lower level structures and laws.

So computation is the basis for thoughts (and presumably consciousness)?
— RogueAI

As far as what is currently understood in modern cognitive neuroscience, and by that I mean every single piece of available data when analyzed together, beyond any question — Garrett Travers

There is nothing computed in the brain. This is a common misconception. The brain (be it that of an ant or that of people) resonates selectively with structures in the world. These structures leave traces, memories. And because of these structured traces, all structures in nature can resonate in the brain. But nothing is computed, as nothing is computed in nature. Only computers compute.

Why should you represent reality into the physics-chemistry-biology-cosmology division in the first place?

What do you make of theoretical physics, by and large an extension of math, math itself a very abstract (mental) subject/field? — Agent Smith

But one doesn't need math to see that there are quarks when looking at the variety of hadrons. One doesn't need math ti see the weak force is not fundamental. In fact, most interesting ideas in theoretical physics don't stem from math. That's because nature is not mathematical.

Why is math abstract? I think it's very concrete. I removed a Lebesque function once. From a university basement.

In standard QM, human observers play that special role, and together with the probabilistic interpretation, this leads to strange scenarios (like many worlds).

The bottle with poison breaks and kills the cat or not. If the superposition of, say, spin (thumb,) up and down interacts with a photon from outside, the photon can make it collapse to up (cat lives) or down (cat dies). Before the photon hits the superposition, the cat is just alive. So it's the spin that gets realized relationally. Likewise, all positions of particles make sense only because of interaction. Only relative to other positions they are meaningful.

but the universe was/had to be mathematical before we learned how to describe it, no? — Agent Smith

Fact is that most of the universe can't be mathematically described and a lot of math can't be found in the universe. Because it's non-mathematical.

There are lots of alternatives. But considering the current observations, this model fits the best as far as I know, and offers a dark energy mechanism (the 4D space).



What I meant is, why can't the Schrödinger cat actually collapse without someone looking, observing. Standard QM says this doesn't happen but there are theories with an objective collapse.

If so, why give one of them an un-real name? — Gnomon

Well, they have unreal properties. Or rather, non-intuitive properties. Like energy (not potential) without momentum and momentum without energy. Off-shell, that is. But beside that, they are as real as real particles (which are on-shell). Iif a virtual particle had fixed a momentum energy relation it would be a real particle. The vacuum is filled with these particles. Why should a field fluctuation be less real than an excitation? If one wants to call virtual particles unreal, then so are real particles.

I still don't get the mechanism that generates the constraint — T Clark

It's the collective that sets the constraints for the parts. The dynamics of the partial structures are constrained so they shape the whole. Like termites and their castle.

The absolute nothing is absolutely nothing. How can something come to be from absolutely nothing? It can't. So there had to be a physical universe always. But how can this have come into being on its own, by the laws describing it physical evolution? It can't be because of these laws. Even if they are eternal, they didn't and can't have caused themselves. Only a divine being could. It needs intelligence. Divine intelligence.

There remains one last thing I haven't figured out. Why isn't everything moving in opposite direction?

Thank you. At least someone else understands that math is just another language used to describe the universe. :100: — Sir2u

Indeed. And anyone claiming it to be a universal language is unconsciously adoring an absolute god. Which is present for everyone. The universal god.

Let me open the shutter and give you a bright shining vista. A belvedere. Spacetime is curved, and curvature can be quantified, by tensors. Ricci tensors, Einstein tensors, metric tensors, Riemann tensors, mass-energy tensors, or whatever tensors. The are collections, tuples of tuples, of number concerning positions and lengths, time and durations, a lot of (partial, directional, single or multiple) derivatives thereof, and a dual flat, Minkowskian, (co)tangent space is introduced locally, to facilitate calculations.

Then on this space particles fields couple with an eternal and all-pervading field of virtual particles by means of which they reach out to other particles (Haag's theorem says virtual particles are math constructs, but a similar argument can be constructed for real particles). If they get no interaction, they will get lost in space hopelessly.

These particles and their couplings to the virtual field (by charges, which are considered the generators of the force mediating fields, giving the misleading image of force being the result of particle exchange, which doesn't happen), these particles and their couplings to the to the virtual fields between them (the intermediary fields, like the field of intermediary vector bosons in the weak interaction, or the photons between charged particles), are described by quantum fields, as you certainly know.

The coupling to the virtual fields, and the couplings of these fields to other virtual fields, is represented by Feynman diagrams. There are an infinity of them, corresponding to increasing numbers of interactions with and of the virtual "glue". The charge of particles determines the glue strength, i.e. the coupling strength. If this coupling is strong, like is the case for the color force in the strong nuclear force holding quarks together, the
Feynman diagrams contribute more and more instead of less and less, as is the case in the electrons interacting. And because quarks can never be asymptotically free, the perturbation approach can't be used to describe quark interacting with other quarks, as the perturbation approach assumes the particles to be free before and after the interaction. If the quarks are close to each other, the effective coupling is small, letting them run fairly free while forming a proton, neutron, pion, or more generally, hadrons and mesons.

To describe the motion of these quarks the approach with Feynman diagrams (the perturbative approach) won't work. There are other non-perturbative approaches like those lattice calculations assuming a discrete structure of spacetime. Supercomputers are used to do calculations in this color charged realm.

So perturbative QFT is applicable in a very limited domain, and extending it to curved spacetime complicates the the app. QFT in curved spacetime was used by Hawking in his description of the eponymous radiation. But the calculation is approximate. It's rather well understood, but there is no connection involved between the information inside and the radiation. This connection has been established recently (by entanglement), but there is no consensus.
So the math never describes exactly and at most approximations can be made. Which simply means no exact structures exist. Which means they don't exist at all.

ultimately our descriptions of the brain and consciousness are just math — Apustimelogist

Descriptions differ from the subject described. Particles connected in the shape of a parabola are no parabole.

mind is math — Apustimelogist

Says you. I don't think math structures contain consciousness. That's reversed to living beings. Which are no mathematical structures.

then look at important findings in math like godel incompleteness amongst others all suggestions on limits to self reference. paradox is inherent in any (self)description of the mind. — Apustimelogist

This just says you can't have complete self-knowledge , as the knowing part is part of yourself. You can know half of you, at most. You can't have an exact image of your brain running around on your neural network.

Basically it says the beginning in time happens in series. After us a next beginning and thereafter again. And before us. Ad infinitum. On that, eternal and infinite 4D space the 3D branes expand in two pieces of infinite bulk connected by a thin wormhole. The branes emerging backfire to their source (the wormhole) and inform when the next two universes (branes) can be inflated into reality (from virtuality).

Why shouldn't a system be able to measure itself? If an observer measures Schrödinger's cat, it is said that the whole of the observer and cat is still in a superposition and that a second observer collapses that superimposed state. So the last observer will always remain in a superposition. Which means the whole universe stays in one. Weird. But it logically follows. So time for a change.



If the universe is eternal and as I described I can think of no other than "them up there".

Virtual particles are as real as real particles. They have space-pervading presence, and are not moving forward nor backward in time. They are just circulating, oscillating, fluctuating in time. They do this with a momentum and energy that are independent of one another, so they can have energy with zero momentum, momentum without energy, or, in short, any momentum value combined with any energy. Its mathematically described by a propagator propagating a combination of all possible free particles with all possible momenta and energies (or positions and times). It's this "glue", this "condensate" charged particles couple to when interacting. So an interaction is not by an the exchange, the emission and absorption of virtual particles, as often read in popular treatments (and causing a lot of confusion), but by coupling to them. The same popular writings say that the vacuum is filled with particle pairs popping in and out of existence. There are no pairs involved. Only single particles. :smile:

As usual, when you can see the functioning of something, you say "of course, how else?"

I felt puzzle pieces falling in place, after absorbing all kinds of theories. My subconsciousness helped me. The universe showed itself to me in it's great and amazingly simple true being.

The basic form is an open spatially 4D torus. A 4D Planck-sized (in width) wormhole connects two infinite 4D spaces on which two closed spherical 3D spheres, like two closed 3D branes, move away from the central wormhole, the singularity. Somewhat reminscent to pyrotechnical models and models that allow gravitons to travel in a 4th space dimension while matter is confined to 3D. The gravitons coming from virtual particle states, which are the only ones present in the initial 3D state around the wormhole, can induce negative curvature of the 4D space needed for that state to expand.

Quarks and leptons are made from two massless base fields and are almost pointlike. In reality they are Planck-sized torus shapes, ie, three large dimensions of a 6D space rolled up to circles, like a 2D space can be rolled up to a cilinder on which we can image a tiny circle for a particle. So 3D space is actually 6D and the 4D substrate actually 7D. The small torus shape in 6D is such that the 6D shape fits nicely on the thin 7D wormhole (which has an appearance of 4D).

For visibility, consider the inside part of a 2D torus. The mouth connects two spaces and has negative curvature. Consider the mouth Planck-sized. From this mouth, because of its negative curvature, can inflate two circles with matter into real existence. From the virtuality around the mouth the real particles are excited. BANG! Two mirrored universes.

The 3D branes, expanding on the 4 dimensional space, temporarily are decelerated. As observations have shown. Currently, the universe is expanding again and this will continue into the future, and when all stuff has turned to photons and has diluted into infinity, this will be a signal for a new pair of branes (3D universes), to get virtual particles inflated into reality again. A new time takes off, and again it accelerates all into oblivion again, only to signal for a new start at the source.

This is only a popular outline, but as Einstein said, if you can't explain it to a six year old, then you're on the wrong track. So let's see what's in store...

Of course not. No one on this forum has. — Joe Mello

Then you have overlooked me. If all the gaps are closed, the only thing we can logically conclude is gods who clapped in their hands or shouted out, which resulted in an eternal and infinite universe. Which resembled themselves in the sense that the universe is bestowed with the divine elements involved in their clapping, shouting, fighting, dancing, musing, painting, thinking, hunting, or whatever they were and are doing. I don't think they engaged further with their planned or accidental creation after it was created. Maybe they show themselves once in a while, or to those who need them. Could be. But in general the course of history will not be influenced by them, despite some people thinking they are their placeholders on Earth to structure reality in some god-given way, be it morally, politically, scientifically, socially, or in any other aspect.

Real particles are just as virtual as virtual particles. Virtual particles are potential in the sense that they can get promoted from fluctuation to excitation. The quantum field is not more basic than a particle though, as is understandably assumed by quantum field theoreticians.

If you understand what the fields stand for, it turns out that the particle shows up again. Quantum fields are
operator valued distributions. These operators operate on a product of Hilbert spaces, that is Fock space. They create or destroy particle wavefunctions (or wavefunctionals), which add up to represent all particle states with definite energy and momentum, meaning that free particles are not moving on one fixed path but many at once, or shifting between them rapidly.

The vision of a point particle moving in space is a popular image of such excitation, ad is the image of a particle pair appearing and disappearing, which in reality is one particle always being there.