Class Project

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

“Do as well as Ein­stein?” Jeffreys­sai said, in­cre­d­u­lously. “Just as well as Ein­stein? Albert Ein­stein was a great sci­en­tist of his era, but that was his era, not this one! Ein­stein did not com­pre­hend the Bayesian meth­ods; he lived be­fore the cog­ni­tive bi­ases were dis­cov­ered; he had no sci­en­tific grasp of his own thought pro­cesses. Ein­stein spoke non­sense of an im­per­sonal God—which tells you how well he un­der­stood the rhythm of rea­son, to dis­card it out­side his own field! He was too caught up in the drama of re­ject­ing his era’s quan­tum me­chan­ics to ac­tu­ally fix it. And while I grant that Ein­stein rea­soned cleanly in the mat­ter of Gen­eral Rel­a­tivity—bar­ring that mat­ter of the cos­molog­i­cal con­stant—he took ten years to do it. Too slow!”

“Too slow?” re­peated Taji in­cre­d­u­lously.

“Too slow! If Ein­stein were in this class­room now, rather than Earth of the nega­tive first cen­tury, I would rap his knuck­les! You will not try to do as well as Ein­stein! You will as­pire to do BETTER than Ein­stein or you may as well not bother!”

Jeffreys­sai shook his head. “Well, I’ve given you enough hints. It is time to test your skills. Now, I know that the other beisut­sukai don’t think much of my class pro­jects...” Jeffreys­sai paused sig­nifi­cantly.

Bren­nan in­wardly sighed. He’d heard this line many times be­fore, in the Bardic Con­spir­acy, the Com­pet­i­tive Con­spir­acy: The other teach­ers think my as­sign­ments are too easy, you should be grate­ful, fol­lowed by some ridicu­lously difficult task—

“They say,” Jeffreys­sai said, “that my pro­jects are too hard; in­sanely hard; that they pass from the realm of mad­ness into the realm of Sparta; that Laplace him­self would catch on fire; they ac­cuse me of try­ing to tear apart my stu­dents’ souls—”

Oh, crap.

“But there is a rea­son,” Jeffreys­sai said, “why many of my stu­dents have achieved great things; and by that I do not mean high rank in the Bayesian Con­spir­acy. I ex­pected much of them, and they came to ex­pect much of them­selves. So...”

Jeffreys­sai took a mo­ment to look over his in­creas­ingly dis­turbed stu­dents, “Here is your as­sign­ment. Of quan­tum me­chan­ics, and Gen­eral Rel­a­tivity, you have been told. This is the limit of Eld sci­ence, and hence, the limit of pub­lic knowl­edge. The five of you, work­ing on your own, are to pro­duce the cor­rect the­ory of quan­tum grav­ity. Your time limit is one month.”

“What?” said Bren­nan, Taji, Styr­lyn, and Yin. Hiriwa gave them a puz­zled look.

“Should you suc­ceed,” Jeffreys­sai con­tinued, “you will be pro­moted to beisut­sukai of the sec­ond dan and sixth level. We will see if you have learned speed. Your clock starts—now.”

And Jeffreys­sai strode out of the room, slam­ming the door be­hind him.

“This is crazy!” Taji cried.

Hiriwa looked at Taji, be­mused. “The solu­tion is not known to us. How can you know it is so difficult?”

“Be­cause we knew about this prob­lem back in the Eld days! Eld sci­en­tists worked on this prob­lem for a lot longer than one month.”

Hiriwa shrugged. “They were still ar­gu­ing about many-wor­lds too, weren’t they?”

“Enough! There’s no time!”

The other four stu­dents looked to Styr­lyn, re­mem­ber­ing that he was said to rank high in the Co­op­er­a­tive Con­spir­acy. There was a brief mo­ment of weigh­ing, of as­sess­ing, and then Styr­lyn was their leader.

Styr­lyn took a great breath. “We need a list of ap­proaches. Write down all the an­gles you can think of. In­de­pen­dently—we need your in­di­vi­d­ual com­po­nents be­fore we start com­bin­ing. In five min­utes, I’ll ask each of you for your best idea first. No wasted thoughts! Go!”

Bren­nan grabbed a sheet and his tracer, set the tip to the sur­face, and then paused. He couldn’t think of any­thing clever to say about unify­ing gen­eral rel­a­tivity and quan­tum me­chan­ics...

The other stu­dents were already writ­ing.

Bren­nan tapped the tip, once, twice, thrice. Gen­eral rel­a­tivity and quan­tum me­chan­ics...

Taji put his first sheet aside, grabbed an­other.

Fi­nally, Bren­nan, for lack of any­thing clever to say, wrote down the ob­vi­ous.

Minutes later, when Styr­lyn called time, it was still all he had writ­ten.

“All right,” Styr­lyn said, “your best idea. Or the idea you most want the rest of us to take into ac­count in our sec­ond com­po­nents. Taji, go!”

Taji looked over his sheets. “Okay, I think we’ve got to as­sume that ev­ery av­enue that Eld sci­ence was try­ing is a blind alley, or they would have found it. And if this is pos­si­ble to do in one month, the an­swer must be, in some sense, el­e­gant. So no mul­ti­ple di­men­sions. If we start do­ing any­thing that looks like we should call it ‘string the­ory’, we’d bet­ter stop. Maybe be­gin by con­sid­er­ing how failure to un­der­stand de­co­her­ence could have led Eld sci­ence astray in quan­tiz­ing grav­ity.”

“The op­po­site of folly is folly,” Hiriwa said. “Let us pre­tend that Eld sci­ence never ex­isted.”

“No crit­i­cisms yet!” said Styr­lyn. “Hiriwa, your sug­ges­tion?”

“Get rid of the in­fini­ties,” said Hiriwa, “ex­tir­pate that which per­mits them. It should not be a mat­ter of clev­er­ness with in­te­grals. A rep­re­sen­ta­tion that al­lows in­finity must be false-to-fact.”

“Yin.”

“We know from com­mon sense,” Yin said, “that if we stepped out­side the uni­verse, we would see time laid out all at once, re­al­ity like a crys­tal. But I once en­coun­tered a hint that physics is time­less in a deeper sense than that.” Yin’s eyes were dis­tant, re­mem­ber­ing. “Years ago, I found an aban­doned city; it had been un­in­hab­ited for eras, I think. And be­hind a door whose locks were bro­ken, carved into one wall: quote .ua sai .ei mi vimcu ty bu le mekso un­quote.”

Bren­nan trans­lated: Eureka! Elimi­nate t from the equa­tions. And writ­ten in Lo­jban, the sa­cred lan­guage of sci­ence, which meant the un­known writer had thought it to be true.

“The ‘time­less physics’ of which we’ve all heard ru­mors,” Yin said, “may be time­less in a very literal sense.”

“My own con­tri­bu­tion,” Styr­lyn said. “The quan­tum physics we’ve learned is over joint po­si­tional con­figu­ra­tions. It seems like we should be able to take that apart into a spa­tially lo­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion, in terms of in­var­i­ant dis­tant en­tan­gle­ments. Find­ing that rep­re­sen­ta­tion might help us in­te­grate with gen­eral rel­a­tivity, whose cur­va­ture is lo­cal.”

“A strangely in­di­vi­d­u­al­ist per­spec­tive,” Taji mur­mured, “for one of the Co­op­er­a­tive Con­spir­acy.”

Styr­lyn shook his head. “You mi­s­un­der­stand us, then. The first les­son we learn is that groups are made of peo­ple… no, there is no time for poli­tics. Bren­nan!”

Bren­nan shrugged. “Not much, I’m afraid, only the ob­vi­ous. In­er­tial mass-en­ergy was always ob­served to equal grav­i­ta­tional mass-en­ergy, and Ein­stein showed that they were nec­es­sar­ily the same. So why is the ‘en­ergy’ that is an eigen­value of the quan­tum Hamil­to­nian, nec­es­sar­ily the same as the ‘en­ergy’ quan­tity that ap­pears in the equa­tions of Gen­eral Rel­a­tivity? Why should space­time curve at the same rate that the lit­tle ar­rows ro­tate?”

There was a brief pause.

Yin frowned. “That seems too ob­vi­ous. Wouldn’t Eld sci­ence have figured it out already?”

“For­get Eld sci­ence ex­isted,” Hiriwa said. “The ques­tion stands: we need the an­swer, whether it was known in an­cient times or not. It can­not pos­si­bly be co­in­ci­dence.”

Taji’s eyes were ab­stracted. “Per­haps it would be pos­si­ble to show that an ex­cep­tion to the equal­ity would vi­o­late some con­ser­va­tion law...”

“That is not where Bren­nan pointed,” Hiriwa in­ter­rupted. “He did not ask for a proof that they must be set equal, given some ap­peal­ing prin­ci­ple; he asked for a view in which the two are one and can­not be di­vided even con­cep­tu­ally, as was ac­com­plished for in­er­tial mass-en­ergy and grav­i­ta­tional mass-en­ergy. For we must as­sume that the beauty of the whole arises from the fun­da­men­tal laws, and not the other way around. Fair-rephras­ing?”

“Fair-rephras­ing,” Bren­nan replied.

Silence reigned for thirty-seven sec­onds, as the five pon­dered the five sug­ges­tions.

“I have an idea...”

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

Dis­claimer: I am not a physi­cist, but, hey, nei­ther is Bren­nan.

Thanks to Robin Lee Pow­ell for trans­lat­ing the in­scrip­tion that Yin found.

[Leah]

Speci­fi­cally, Bren­nan’s er­ror is as­sum­ing that you need a new the­ory to ac­count for this. In fact, there is only one pos­si­ble spin-2 par­ti­cle in quan­tum field the­ory and it is the grav­i­ton. Physi­cists ac­tu­ally ac­ci­den­tally re­dis­cov­ered GR in the 50′s be­cause of this.

[Peter3]

I love these quasi-fu­tur­is­tic ex­changes you’ve come up with. They’re re­ally helpful for putting your other posts into per­spec­tive—not just facts, but what facts mean for the way we should look at the world.

[steven]

This is the limit of Eld sci­ence, and hence, the limit of pub­lic knowl­edge.

Wait, so these peo­ple are do­ing this only for recre­ation?

So no mul­ti­ple di­men­sions.

You want to make physics heightless and depth­less? I sup­pose it would be a log­i­cal next step.

I don’t see what’s in­el­e­gant about more than three space di­men­sions. It’s not like three is a spe­cial num­ber (as far as I know).

[bogdanb]

I imag­ine what’s de­scribed as in­el­e­gant is hid­den di­men­sions.

Espe­cially if they need to be hid­den just so for the thing to work, and if they’re hid­den for no ob­vi­ous rea­son.

[Meta_and_Meta]

Make it zero di­men­sions and call it a “day.” All else is Maya.

[Robin_Z]

This is the limit of Eld sci­ence, and hence, the limit of pub­lic knowl­edge. Wait, so these peo­ple are do­ing this only for recre­ation?

No—this is Eliezer’s al­ter­nate uni­verse sto­ryline in which the sci­ence-equiv­a­lent is treated as a se­cret the same way the Pythagore­ans did. The ini­ti­ates—the peo­ple with ac­cess to the se­cret knowl­edge—use it for tech­nol­ogy, just as we do, ex­cept be­cause the gen­eral pub­lic doesn’t know the sci­ence, the tech looks amaz­ing.

The idea, I be­lieve, is to re­duce the at­trac­tion of bo­gus se­cret so­cieties. In Bren­nan’s world, any­one who made one would be challenged to ac­com­plish as great or greater feats than the Bayesi­ans—a task that a mere mys­tery cult would fail at.

[billswift]

There are ac­tu­ally mul­ti­ple rea­sons, some sto­ries stress differ­ent ones. The one I like is that by keep­ing the re­sults se­cret, they can train stu­dents in dis­cov­ery by en­courag­ing/​forc­ing them to re­dis­cover the laws as part of their train­ing.

[lessdazed]

The so­cieties I have been told about are limited in scope. Only a ra­tio­nal­is­tic con­spir­acy would be in di­rect com­pe­ti­tion with the Bayesi­ans. The Co­op­er­a­tive Con­spir­acy and Bayesian Con­spir­acy ap­par­ently al­low open mem­ber­ship in both, while the Co­op­er­a­tive Con­spir­acy would prob­a­bly be in com­pe­ti­tion with an In­di­vi­d­u­al­ist Con­spir­acy or Com­pet­i­tive Con­spir­acy.

Of course, even the Model Air­plane Con­spir­acy could re­strict mem­bers to only their con­spir­acy, pre­vent­ing them from be­ing Bayesian Con­spir­a­tors de­spite the con­spir­a­cies’ dis­similar sub­jects, par­tic­u­larly if the Bayesi­ans for­bade hid­ing one’s iden­tity.

In­so­far as one ought to speak and think cleanly, se­cret so­cieties would not be challenged to show re­sults—this is to talk as if un­der the sway of their mys­tery. They would be as­sumed to be worse than use­less un­til they demon­strated re­sults—use­less at first thought be­cause mys­tery has no value, less than that at sec­ond thought be­cause not show­ing value is ev­i­dence of not be­ing able to show it, which is ev­i­dence of not hav­ing it.

[Doug_S.]

Joke solu­tion:

We’re liv­ing in a simu­la­tion, and the rea­son GR and QM don’t mix is be­cause we’re liv­ing in a buggy simu­la­tion. ;)

[Polymeron]

Or rather, QM dis­plays the be­hav­ior of round­ing, be­cause “there’s no need to simu­late past that level of pre­ci­sion”, re­sult­ing in all the funky be­hav­iors of quan­tum tun­nel­ing and the likes. This car­ries into GR as round­ing er­rors.

I’m sure if I knew the sci­ence bet­ter I’d see the flaws in this hy­poth­e­sis, but for now I don’t even see why it would be par­tic­u­larly im­plau­si­ble. It’s ac­tu­ally some­thing of an el­e­gant an­swer...

[DanielLC]

Quan­tum physics is pre­cise, pretty, and hard to calcu­late. This is the ex­act op­po­site of what you’d ex­pect from a com­puter simu­la­tion.

For ex­am­ple, the un­cer­tainty prin­ci­ple is not due to the uni­verse keep­ing track of less than ex­pected and thus some of the po­si­tion and mo­men­tum be­ing lost in round­ing. It’s due to the uni­verse keep­ing track of much, much more than ex­pected, with an en­tire wave­form rather than just two vec­tors.

In other words, it’s not do­ing with six float­ing point num­bers what would clas­si­cally take six real num­bers. It’s do­ing with in­finity real num­bers what would clas­si­cally take six real num­bers.

I don’t see what about GR even re­sem­bles round­ing er­rors.

[Brandon_Reinhart]

Sorry if I’m get­ting my­self de­railed, but is there any par­tic­u­lar pur­pose to metaphor of the “Co­op­er­a­tive Con­spir­acy”? It seems to be smug­gling in some kind of cri­tique of group-think, al­though be­cause this par­tic­u­lar con­spir­acy isn’t fully defined the na­ture of the cri­tique isn’t clear. (Although the team claims he is “ru­mored” to be a mem­ber of this con­spir­acy, they do not seem to be largely alarmed, in­di­cat­ing some mea­sure of philo­soph­i­cal tol­er­ance.) Is the co­op­er­a­tive con­spir­acy a metaphor for some be­hav­ioral phe­nomenon well known or ap­par­ent among re­searchers?

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

This is a pre-ex­ist­ing world I built, where the Co­op­er­a­tive Con­spir­acy is one of many con­spir­a­cies strug­gling in the shad­ows for con­trol of hu­mankind’s des­tiny.

As for whether the Co­op­er­a­tive Con­spir­acy is a metaphor for any­thing, I don’t be­lieve the Bardic Con­spir­acy would want me to an­swer that ques­tion: they hold that peo­ple should be free to put their own in­ter­pre­ta­tions on sto­ries.

[VAuroch]

How many Con­spir­a­cies have you con­ceived of speci­fi­cally, in this world? We know of Com­pet­i­tive, Co­op­er­a­tive, Bardic, and Bayesian. Are there dozens more? Hun­dreds? Two?

[hyporational]

Most of them are se­cret.

[mitchell_porter2]

And on Day 26 they re­dis­cov­ered string the­ory, and saw that it was good.

[Robin_Brandt]

What is the ar­gu­ment be­hind the con­fi­dent nega­tive at­ti­tude to­wards string the­ory/​M-the­ory? I am not a physi­cist, but in lay­man’s eyes it seems el­e­gant. Is there any spe­cial ar­gu­ment or is it just gen­eral skep­ti­cism to­wards big un­proven the­o­ret­i­cal mod­els?

[Alsadius]

At risk of necro­mancy, I’ll re­ply.

It’s hideously in­el­e­gant, and it makes no testable pre­dic­tions. That means it gets low marks from both Bayes and Science. It might con­ceiv­ably be ex­cus­able to ar­gue that most of the struc­ture of the uni­verse is hid­den if you can ac­tu­ally pro­duce el­e­gant math or come up with some new pre­dic­tions from that ba­sis, but af­ter thirty years the string the­o­rists can’t even agree on how many di­men­sions to do the math in. A mas­sive in­vest­ment of effort has gone pre­cisely nowhere, and there’s no rea­son to be­lieve it’ll do bet­ter in fu­ture. I’ll pass.

[mitchell_porter2]

Robin B., I can’t speak for Eliezer’s char­ac­ters, but I be­lieve the fash­ion­abil­ity of skep­ti­cism about string the­ory has come from the lack of falsifi­able pre­dic­tions, af­ter so many years. No-one has been able to say “this is the ground state”. In­stead string the­o­rists have stud­ied a large num­ber of pos­si­ble ground states (dis­t­in­guished by back­ground ge­om­e­try), most of them look­ing noth­ing like what we see, as they try to get a grip on the the­ory. The hope used to be that all but one would prove on fur­ther study to be un­sta­ble. Now there’s an in­ter­est in an­thropic pre­dic­tions, though that’s just one school of thought.

I have read that no-one has ever ex­hibited a string-the­ory ground state ex­actly re­pro­duc­ing the Stan­dard Model, though you can get close. That has to be sig­nifi­cant. If such a place can be found in the space of ground states (“mod­uli space”), you could then try to rea­son out why it was dy­nam­i­cally fa­vored. And we’ll get more in­for­ma­tion within a few years from the Large Hadron Col­lider, which will es­tab­lish whether there’s a Higgs bo­son or some­thing else (I bet on some­thing else; the Higgs was just the sim­plest way to make a tractable the­ory and lingers by de­fault).

In string the­ory’s fa­vor is that it gener­i­cally has spin-1/​2 par­ti­cles (fermions), spin-1 par­ti­cles (gauge bosons), and spin-2 par­ti­cles (grav­i­tons). That’s a neat trick. So I tend to think ei­ther that it is the an­swer, or that it is just a beast of so many parts that any­thing you might look for is in there some­where. In the lat­ter case, it could be com­pared to the Mon­ster group, the “largest spo­radic sim­ple finite group”. There are in­finitely many finite sim­ple groups, just as there are in­finitely many pos­si­ble field the­o­ries, and most of those groups re­sem­ble some sub­group of the Mon­ster, just as string the­ory has spin-1/​2, spin-1, and spin-2 fields, just like the real world. It could be that string the­ory is just the “max­i­mally com­pli­cated field the­ory” (and in fact, math­e­mat­i­cally, it has a re­la­tion­ship to the Mon­ster) and that it de­rives this generic pseudo-pre­dic­tive­ness solely from that. It has a lit­tle bit of ev­ery­thing, so any­thing looks a lit­tle bit like it. It would cer­tainly be a mis­take to take some real ob­ject, like Ru­bik’s cube, dis­cover a few facts about its sym­me­try group, and then an­nounce that its sym­me­try group must be the Mon­ster, just be­cause the Mon­ster has sub­groups with those prop­er­ties. It could be that string the­o­rists are mak­ing a mis­take like that.

On the other hand, what’s the al­ter­na­tive? The phe­nomenolog­i­cal ap­proach to par­ti­cle physics is just to pos­tu­late enough fields with enough prop­er­ties to ex­plain what you see. You can treat grav­ity as just an­other field, con­tin­gently pre­sent, but then your the­ory be­comes math­e­mat­i­cally in­tractable. Part of string the­ory’s ap­peal is that you can calcu­late grav­i­ton-grav­i­ton scat­ter­ing, etc., un­like any pre­vi­ous the­ory of quan­tum grav­ity. But the price is that you buy into the unifi­ca­tion philos­o­phy. Re­cently, there have been claims that “con­tin­gent” the­o­ries of quan­tum grav­ity—ac­cord­ing to which re­al­ity is just a bunch of fields plus grav­ity, and there’s no deeper rea­son as to why it’s that com­bi­na­tion of fields—can be made to work; this is the “loop quan­tum grav­ity” re­search pro­gram. It’s my judge­ment that string the­ory is math­e­mat­i­cally much more solid. The loop quan­tum grav­ity re­searchers have had to back­track sev­eral times, af­ter mak­ing am­bi­tious claims about the con­struc­tion of con­sis­tent “grav­ity-plus-any­thing” quan­tum the­o­ries. Right now the ev­i­dence (in my semi-lay opinion) points in the other di­rec­tion, that grav­ity needs to be part of a larger en­sem­ble of fields with spe­cial prop­er­ties if it is to be quan­ti­z­able. Which sug­gests string the­ory.

[steven]

How would this Bardic Con­spir­acy have any real power? Clearly these are sto­ry­tel­ling hob­by­ists in some post-Sin­gu­lar­ity world, and the oth­ers are Bayes hob­by­ists, wis­dom-of-crowds hob­by­ists, and moral virtue hob­by­ists.

the two are one and can­not be di­vided even con­cep­tu­ally, as was ac­com­plished for in­er­tial mass-en­ergy and grav­i­ta­tional mass-energy

Only partly true; it’s still a mys­tery why re­sis­tance-to-ac­cel­er­a­tion-caused-by-elec­tro­mag­netic-forces has any­thing to do with propen­sity-to-curve-space­time. (You can dis­t­in­guish be­tween “ac­tive” and “pas­sive” grav­i­ta­tional mass.)

[Czynski]

How would this Bardic Con­spir­acy have any real power?

12 years later, Steven, I have an an­swer for you. Nar­ra­tives are very, very good at trans­lat­ing into mo­ti­va­tion. In some sense they are the na­tive lan­guage of mo­ti­va­tion. If you want to keep your mo­ti­va­tion fueled while you at­tack a prob­lem, hav­ing a story to tell about how it’s im­por­tant is in­cred­ibly valuable.

And un­skil­led nar­ra­tive­mancy is quite dan­ger­ous; the same things that make it valuable to have a prop­erly-aimed nar­ra­tive make it very harm­ful to have a mi­s­aimed nar­ra­tive. It will feel true and im­por­tant and point you off in the wrong di­rec­tion and it will take you a long while to re­cover from the er­ror (and in­deed you may never re­cover).

The ini­ti­a­tion cer­e­mony is an ex­am­ple of re­ally good Bardic tech­nique at work; they are pre­sent­ing the mes­sage of ‘speak the truth even if your voice trem­bles’ in a way that the ini­ti­ates will never, ever for­get. That is a story which will never leave them and per­ma­nently re­mind them of the dan­gers of suc­cumb­ing to so­cial pres­sure.

This is par­tic­u­larly im­por­tant when try­ing to har­ness the power of large groups; I sus­pect if Con­spir­a­cies were joined purely based on the stand­point of how best to op­ti­mize the world, the Co­op­er­a­tive and Bardic Con­spir­a­cies would have long-since merged.

But also,

Bayes hob­by­ists, wis­dom-of-crowds hob­by­ists, and moral virtue hob­by­ists.

Th­ese are bad char­ac­ter­i­za­tions of the con­spir­a­cies. Bayesian Con­spir­acy is ob­vi­ous, but is it Co­op­er­a­tive or Com­pet­i­tive which is sup­posed to be the wis­dom-of-crowds fac­tion? And how could ei­ther of those be con­strued as ‘moral virtue hob­by­ists’?

I’d char­ac­ter­ize the four as “Bayes’s The­o­rem, wielded cor­rectly, is ex­tremely pow­er­ful”, “Nar­ra­tive, wielded cor­rectly, is ex­tremely pow­er­ful”, “The hu­man urge to ex­cel, wielded cor­rectly, is ex­tremely pow­er­ful”, and “A large group of peo­ple work­ing to­gether, wielded cor­rectly, is ex­tremely pow­er­ful”. They are each offer­ing, to their ini­ti­ates, a “Big Se­cret” of “Learn to mas­ter this tool and you will be­come mas­ters of the world”. Bardic ac­tu­ally has the strongest ar­gu­ment, be­cause the sys­tem of Con­spir­a­cies is in fact a di­rect ap­pli­ca­tion of Bardic tech­niques to the world.

[Tom_McCabe2]

I re­ally, re­ally hope that you aren’t go­ing to try and pub­lish a the­ory of quan­tum grav­ity, for prac­ti­cal rea­sons; even if it’s more el­e­gant than ev­ery other the­ory yet pro­posed, the lack of ex­per­i­men­tal ev­i­dence and your lack of cre­den­tials will make you seem like a crack­pot.

[steven]

re­sis­tance-to-ac­cel­er­a­tion-caused-by-elec­tro­mag­netic-forces

Ac­tu­ally never mind that part, this ends up in the Hamil­to­nian you were talk­ing about via po­ten­tial en­ergy so you already men­tioned this mys­tery. Still, say­ing “pas­sive grav­i­ta­tional mass is con­cep­tu­ally the same thing as in­er­tial mass” is more ac­cu­rate than say­ing “grav­i­ta­tional mass is con­cep­tu­ally the same thing as in­er­tial mass”.

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

You as­sume too much about this world, steven.

[Richard_Hollerith2]

many con­spir­a­cies strug­gling in the shad­ows for con­trol of hu­mankind’s des­tiny.

It is Eliezer’s fic­tional world, but I would en­joy it more if one of the con­spir­a­cies—per­haps called the Non­hu­man­ist Con­spir­acy—did not par­tic­u­larly care about the des­tiny of hu­mankind ex­cept to the ex­tent that hu­mankind is in­stru­men­tal to the des­tiny of some­thing big­ger like the uni­verse or the all-there-is.

[stevo]

“Sa­cred lan­guage of sci­ence” is a con­tra­dic­tion. I like the story so far, and the in­clu­sion of Lo­jban.

stevo

[TGGP4]

Per­haps, Richard, such a group does ex­ist, but its mem­bers are not hu­mans.

[Psy-Kosh]

Hrm… I have sev­eral thoughts in re­la­tion to this… One per­haps be­ing that we need to per­haps look for a way to re­place the en­ergy term with a stress en­ergy ten­sor...

But, per­haps a more spe­cific in­ter­est­ing thought that I have here re­lates to al­most an “op­po­site” thought I once had:

Can the space in which the quan­tum am­pli­tude vec­tors (for­get that they can be de­com­posed as com­plex num­bers for a mo­ment) move around it­self be curved?

Well, this post got me think­ing of that again… What would it look like for the “com­plex plane” to be curved? Well, one form that could take would be to al­low an an­gle other than 2*Pi to be the an­gle which cor­re­sponds to the an­gle “spin­ning all the way around”

So, what’s that look like? Well, in some form of units, the ar­row’s state can be rep­re­sented as some­thing like this:

e^iAx

where x is some mea­sure of dis­tance in con­figu­ra­tion space and A is some co­effi­cient...

Wait… does not en­ergy it­self show up some­where in that A?

and if ini­tially x was pro­por­tional in some fixed way to an­gle, would not that A some­how cor­re­spond to then a cur­va­ture of the com­plex plane, a change in the an­gle needed to go all the way around?

So it does look like, at least from one per­spec­tive, what en­ergy is do­ing in QM di­rectly cor­re­sponds to some­thing sor­takinda like cur­va­ture.

Ex­cept… you can always lo­cally re­define your dis­tance-in-con­figu­ra­tion-space units to make A = 1 or what­ever, at least lo­cally… so maybe some­thing along the lines of the change in A, or what A “looks like” given differ­ent sub­spaces fac­tored out of the con­figu­ra­tion space.

I have one or two math­e­mat­i­cal “toy” ideas I want to play around with re­gards to that, but it’s late, and still I need to think about it a bit more, but, well.… That’s the ba­sic no­tions I’ve got from the above sug­gested ques­tion.

Any­one else want to go some­where with that, or smash it? :)

[Dihymo]

I am here to re­port that the rea­sons QM and GR don’t like each other are: Short an­swer: they are com­pet­ing with each other

Long an­swer: There is a term that ap­pears in per­haps differ­ent forms in both sets of equa­tions that is counted twice. This pos­si­bly in­volves a fac­tor that one of them is mul­ti­plied by. That fac­tor may be as Psy-Kosh said a ques­tion of flat space ver­sus curved space.

The ex­is­tence of that fac­tor pre­vents can­cel­la­tion or some other thing which gives us in­fini­ties.

First find that term and the fac­tor and elimi­nate them from the equa­tions. Re­calcu­late the con­stants so that it is no longer nec­es­sary. Next make sure the con­stants are the same over both the­o­ries. Com­bine the fi­nal shape of both the­o­ries. The next step is crit­i­cal:

If you still get in­fini­ties, make them go away. Re­late the way you made them go away to that term and fac­tor.

[Skatche]

You seem very con­fi­dent about this, so I as­sume you have some kind of ev­i­dence to back it up?

[Perplexed]

I as­sume you have some kind of ev­i­dence …

What do you base that as­sump­tion on? :)

Be­fore is­su­ing a challenge, it is some­times wise to check dates to see whether a poster is still ac­tive. Click on his name here, then to the up­per right, and get a list of his com­ments.

[Skatche]

Oh, wow, whoops! I some­times get lost in the maze of links here and for­get that I’m not on the front page any­more.

Any­way, my post was mostly sar­cas­tic. His post and Psy-Kosh’s are barely co­her­ent, let alone well-defended, or so they ap­pear to me. On the other hand, I figured I might as well ask, in case he was just ex­plain­ing some­thing le­gi­t­i­mate re­ally poorly.

[Czynski]

ex­tir­pate that which per­mits them

link is bro­ken, should point to http://​​cite­seer.ist.psu.edu/​​view­doc/​​sum­mary?doi=10.1.1.41.3367

[Raemon]

Fixed, thanks.