Quantum manifestation of the Holon:
Remnant from the cat

|dead cat> + |live cat> « CAT

| dead cat > + | live cat > « CAT

In 1967, the Hungarian author and philosopher Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) proposed the notion of Holon (A. Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine, Arkana Books, 1990, ISBN 0140191925). It is a combination from the Greek holos (whole) with the suffix 'on' which, as in proton or neutron, suggests a particle or part. See the parable of John's jackets and the Holon in particle physics. In our subjective world, the Holon facilitates the penetration of Platonic ideas, archetypes, and universals from the Popperian World III, which we perceive as some UNspeakable 'context'. In the world of living matter, the Holon produces the holistic organization of biosystems, as in the case of the human brain, and saves us from all brain catastrophes which must have happened, had the brain been ruled by the physical laws known in present-day theoretical physics. We have a deep puzzle here, right above our neck: we think about our brain, with our brain. There must be a stable, holistic state of the whole brain, which could qualify as the physical counterpart of the human self, and which could facilitate the amazing self-acting faculty of the brain. Otherwise we would be some mindless machines, but then it would be a total mystery how come a bunch of elementary particles could examine themselves and instruct other elementary particles how to conduct their research on themselves.

Can we find the blueprints from the Holon in today's Weltbild? For example, we know that in Einstein's General Relativity the metric field not only affects, but also is affected by, the other fields (John Baez), and that the gravitational field is "not only nonlinear in its own coupling, but also makes all matter fields self-interacting" (T. Padmanabhan). We can speculate extensively about some "translocal" way of communication between "points" (Manfred Requardt), but we are still far away from a rigorous mathematical description of these peculiar interactions which are both "local" and "non-local". We are still struggling with the seemingly "non-local" influences implied in the EPR paradox of 1935 and the rigid laws of special relativity theory (SRT), and have managed only to coin a nice expression, 'peaceful co-existence of QM and SRT'. The simple explanation that comes from the Holon is perhaps too difficult to digest: the tacit presumption that we're dealing with two (or more) constituents of a quantum system is wrong. We are dealing with ONE thing called 'quantum system', and it should not at all be surprising that its constituents behave as ONE, regardless of the distance between them, as measured in the 3-D space. The very contraposition "one vs. many" is strictly valid only for the macro-world of tables and chairs, while in the quantum realm things are both 'one' and 'many', because of the Holon. Hence we're flooded with all kinds of "quantum paradoxes", only because we're trying to see the quantum world through the distorted "filter" of our inanimate measuring devices employed in QM measurements. It's a bit like looking at a yellow flower through blue glasses (with inanimate measuring devices), only you can never take off your glasses and have no idea what is 'yellow'. Hence you believe that the pre-correlated measurements in EPR-like experiments suggest "some sort of" faster-than-light influences from some Gespensterfeld or ghost-field and the like. Take off your glasses, it's all from the Holon! Jung called these effects synchronicity, Leibnitz called  them pre-established harmony, and Aristotle wrapped up the whole story with his final cause.

Perhaps we need two modes of spacetime, one for the "non-local" quantum and gravitational waves (called global mode of spacetime), and another for the "local" interactions (local mode of spacetime). In the global mode of spacetime, the amplitudes of the quantum waves are "not yet" converted into probabilities, and we can still "move points around" -- all this on paper only, to calculate what we can observe, with certain probability, in the local mode of spacetime, post factum only. Hence the Holon lives only in the global mode of spacetime, as a quantum-gravitational empty wave. It is not only "empty" but "dark" as well: in the case of the galaxy cluster Abell 2029 [cf. Aaron D. Lewis et al., Astrophys. J. 586, 135-142 (2003); astro-ph/0209205], the amount of "cold dark matter" has been estimated to more than a hundred trillion Suns, with density increasing smoothly towards the central galaxy of the cluster. If Abell 2029 is a representative sample of the universe, the amount of "cold dark matter" might be 70 to 90 percent of the mass of the universe, not to mention the "dark energy". We're obviously missing something in our formulation of the theory of gravity, says Richard Fenman. We're definitely missing something in our understanding of the human brain as well, since it is utterly unclear what could possibly bootstrap 100 billion neurons into a holistic system. (See Robert Rosen's Essays on Life Itself; an outlook here.)

It is the Holon which produces the quantum waves. If we picture the Holon as the "living phase" of matter (borrowing a remote analogy from Nambu-Goldstone boson and phonon, after Giuseppe Vitiello; see also David J. Miller), it can be explained as a holistic state of the whole universe in which everything is ONE, only we can not, even in principle, pinpoint the absolute reference frame in which we could physically detect the Holon itself: anytime we look at the Holon, we see it projected into a "point" from the local mode of spacetime, in our past light cone only. Hence there are two "ages" of the universe: a finite one, measured in any reference frame, and an infinite (or rather indecisive) age "measured" in the absolute reference frame of the Holon (global mode of spacetime). Simply speaking, the spacetime is dual.

It is again the Holon that has been operating in the quantum world in the past 13.7 billion years, as inferred from the local mode of spacetime, only it can not be detected with inanimate measuring devices. Hence the problem of fixing a unique truth value of propositions depends on the measurement setup: the notion of 'quantum reality' can not be derived from present-day quantum theory. (Recall that quantum mechanics is in fact not as linear as it is advertised to be: the space of physical states is not the Hilbert space  H  but the space of rays in it, i.e., the projective Hilbert space P .  And  P  is a genuine non-linear manifold.) Hence the confusion with so-called 'mental certainty' about which one of the many possible alternatives for a physical existent occurs [P. Epstein, The reality problem in quantum mechanics, American Journal of Physics, 13, 127-136 (1945), p. 134]. The choice is made by the Holon itself, not by the observer [A. Shimony, Role of the Observer in Quantum Theory, American Journal of Physics, 31, 755-773 (1963)] nor by the hypothetical decoherence. Recall also that there is no time operator in Quantum Mechanics, and if we dare to take some quantum mechanical variable as a clock that measures the genuine quantum "time", we can never be certain that this quantum mechanical "clock" will always move forward in time. Briefly, we can not map the "duration" of the unitary "evolution" to any time variable measured with inanimate physical clock, regardless of how much money is poured into "quantum computing" research and how many academic and military institutions are supporting these dreams. The problem of reconciling Quantum Mechanics with Special Theory of Relativity is known since 1931. See also Hans Reichenbach, Philosophic Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Part III, Interpretations, pp. 111-178 (Dover Publishers, New York, 1998), originally published by the University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, in 1944.

When we say "the whole is more than the sum of its parts" (Schwartz and Russek, 1998), we mean a fundamental emergent phenomenon common to biology (e.g., Sheldrake's Morphic Field), psychology, and quantum physics. If you think of a forest made of two or more trees as a biosystem, then the whole (forest or Holon) would acquire some new property which will be distributed to all trees and will change their properties. A tree is what it is due to both its individual properties (before being included in the forest) and the properties of all trees in the forest. If you add a brand new tree to the forest, it will change the forest and all trees in it, included the new, just added tree. (Compare this to the motherboard of your PC: any element has the same properties both on the motherboard and before being installed on it.) Any linear decomposition of the forest into individual trees (no interference between the trees) will eliminate/erase their forest or 'common denominator'. If we want to describe the evolution of the forest, the Berry phase (Anastopoulos and Savvidou, 2000) will have to be somehow preserved. This emergent phenomenon causes also severe problems with the interpretation of probabilities in QM (Rothman and Sudarshan, 2000). Very spooky and elusive phenomenon known since the first days of QM (Schrödinger, 1935).

Despite its phenomenal success as calculating tool, QM is still flooded with paradoxes and artifacts. The Copenhagen "interpretation" of QM is applicable iff you can ignore the question of what is the quantum world 'out there' (read more from A. Ashtekar), hence any new ideas about the spacetime, particularly its topology, must be bound to the measurement (macro-objectification) paradox in QM. We cannot understand QM in the context of our metaphysical presupposition of 'realism' derived from the inanimate macro-world of tables and chairs around us. A quantum particle does not exist 'out there', like the Sun. How does it exist, then? Recall that QM is a theory of choices without a chooser. To describe a quantum particle as something that exist 'out there', and hence solve the fundamental problem of the transition from quantum to classical regime in quantum cosmology, we need a new chooser: the whole universe in its ONE state. It is the truly fundamental object or 'atom', as we know from Lucretius, and lives "between" any two points   from the local mode of spacetime, hence making a continuum. Each and every quantum particle communicates via its Holon with its "chooser" -- the rest of the universe. This is a brand new, to the best of my knowledge, road to quantum gravity. The very same "chooser" operates in the human brain, correlating 100 billion neurons. But because the correlation comes from the Holon, it does look like self-acting and non-local. And because the Holon of an inanimate macro-object at the scale of tables and chairs is vanishing small, we have to introduce ad hoc the projection postulate of von Neumann and calculate "probabilities" with the Born rule. The real chooser in the real quantum world does not need any projection postulate, nor is its behavior probabilistic. These two are artifacts. Also, Heisenberg's "uncertainty" relations refer to the flexibility of a quantum system to adapt to the changing environment: the more is restricted in its potential position-values or 'places to choose from', the wider is the spectrum of its potential momentum-values. Any time we "collapse" some quantum particle with inanimate measuring devices, we literally kill it, since the collapsed observable is as 'native' to the quantum particle as is its complementary, but not measured, observable stretched to infinity (more from L. Landau). If we trust QM, the notion of 'quantum world' would lack any sense, as advocated by Niels Bohr, but then John von Neumann would have never been able to use his brain: any macroscopic cat states of our neurons would be lethal. If you buy QM and measure a quantum system, the first thing that will happen is that your brain and the quantum system will be entangled, and none of you will have any definite state whatsoever. Hence your brain will break down and could never recall that there is such thing as 'projection postulate', not to mention the Born rule.

I do hope this could solace Albert Einstein: "I should not want to be forced into abandoning strict causality without defending it more strongly than I have so far. I find the idea quite intolerable that an electron exposed to radiation should choose of its own free will, not only its moment to jump off, but also its direction. In that case I would rather be a cobbler, or even an employee in a gaming-house, than a physicist" (A. Einstein, Born-Einstein Letters, 29 April 1924).

Look at a centipede. It's a very simple thing, compared to the human brain. It walks beautifully, and it does that with its body. Try, however, to build a machine exactly as a centipede, and you'll see that it won't walk. We definitely miss something very important, don't we?

Let's try a toy model, a centipede with four legs only. We model each leg with a dice, and require that all dice (plural) will be thrown but the sum must be in the interval [10, 20]. This requirement is kept in the 'forest' or Holon, and it will EPR-like correlate each leg (dice) throughout the whole walk. It will not disappear ("collapse"). Once created, it will never disappear. I call it 'quantum correlate of the Holon'. It is the only possible solution to the long-standing problem of reconciling Quantum Mechanics with Special Theory of Relativity, identified by Erwin Schrödinger back in 1931, and with General Relativity: "No prediction of spacetime, therefore no meaning for spacetime is the verdict of the Quantum Principle. That object which is central to all of Classical General Relativity, the four dimensional spacetime geometry, simply does not exist, except in a classical approximation." (C.W. Misner, K.S. Thorne and J.A. Wheeler, Gravitation, W.H. Freeman, San Francisco, 1973, p. 819.) We need brand new physics to reconcile the principle of superposition and the phenomenon of entanglement with the notion of locality in the equivalence principle of Einstein's GR. We need a new class of quasi-local trajectories that are both "non-local" and "local", as in the example of centipede's walk. We should not blame Mother Nature that the dynamics of the Holon is non-unitary.

Hence the state of any leg (dice) does not exist as 'reality out there' (no violation of Kochen-Specker theorem for that reason) but is being dynamically created for every next step of the centipede along the universal time arrow. All already-created states of the legs of the centipede (only cast dice are physical reality 'out there') provide time markers for its psychological/universal time arrow, and are just instantaneous snapshots (shadows on Plato's cave) from the propensity-states of the legs (dice). These snapshots have already normalized positive expectation values in the very instant now, and their initial propensity-states do not disappear or "collapse". The propensities kept in the Holon are potential reality, just in the middle between possibility and reality. This is the physics of life. It does require God [John 1:1] as the "source" of creatio ex nihilo. Hence the evolution of 'the only truly isolated system' along the cosmological time arrow is non-unitary, too. Ignore it at your peril.

Dead matter makes quantum jumps, the living-and-quantum matter is smarter.

Now, let's see what is the opinion of the hard-core scientists who publish in highly respected peer-reviewed journals, etc., and educate/uninform the general audience: 

"A microsecond after the Big Bang, when the exploding fireball of the newborn Universe was only a few kilometres across, all matter existed in a special state."

What could be the ruler with which one could measure the diameter of the universe, "only a few kilometres across"? Where would you place the ruler, inside the universe or outside it? And what is the clock that could read a time interval "after" the hypothetical Big Bang? How come the ruler and the clock which measured the universe just a microsecond "after" Time Zero could survive 13.7 billion years unchanged so that we can safely trace them back to a microsecond "after" Time Zero?

Is this a joke? Nope. See "Big Bang 'soup recipe' confirmed", by Rolf Haugaard Nielsen, New Scientist, 19:00 11 June 03,
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993821

Or better see Andrei Linde, one of the authors of inflationary cosmology: "Different parts of the universe could come to existence at different moments of time, and then grow up to the size much greater than the total size of the universe." The excerpt is from Sec. 2, "Chaotic inflation", of A. Linde's article "Inflation, Quantum Cosmology and the Anthropic Principle", which will be read by thousands of people. They will be deeply puzzled by the nature of that cosmological "time": what could possibly enwrap different parts of the universe that have come into existence at different moments of time, and how one could measure their size to compare with the total size of the universe? Where would you place an 'ultimate observer' to watch these bubbles of expanding universes, and what will be her/his wristwatch and ruler to measure the size of all bubbles? Is A. Linde the ultimate observer, and does he have a brain and consciousness?

Anyway. It's a free world. There are plenty of Barbies for everyone.
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Frequently Asked Questions

[This section is under development]

Q1: I must say that I can't follow the analogy you see between (a) the two interpretations of an ambiguous picture (is it two faces or a vase?) and (b) the two contributions |dead> and |alive> to the quantum state of Schrödinger's cat.

Q2: What do you mean by 'jacket'?

Q3: What do you suggest for solving the measurement problem?

Q4: I couldn't understand why you refer to negative probabilities.
A4: Right. See the full picture, mirror world included, in: Dietrich Leibfried, Tilman Pfau, and Christopher Monroe, Shadows and Mirrors: Reconstructing Quantum States of Atom Motion, Physics Today, April 1998, pp. 22-28. The cancellation of all but one explication, such as John Wheeler's 'cloud', requires cancellation of positive probabilities, which, I believe, can be achieved with negative probabilities. All this "takes place" in the global mode of spacetime, between any two successive points, and can be described as phase modulation. The choice of one possibility among infinitely many is made by the 'chooser' -- everything else in the whole universe. This is not a physical action, in the sense that tweaking the phase of empty waves, such as quantum and gravitational waves, requires zero energy. Psychologically, this is a totally effortless action governed by the Law of Reversed Effort: you don't push things to happen but allow them to unfold toward you. If you press them to happen along your free will, you will be doing parapsychology. Hence PHI and parapsychology are diametrically different, and completely incompatible, approaches toward enhancing human performance. Please choose one.
 

Q5: I'm wondering how you work with PHI.
A5: Thank you for this question. I use particular sensations, much like the so-called 'at the tip of the tongue effect': sometimes we can't recall a name of phone number, and we scan our memory with a distinct feeling of it, which is sort of 'at the tip of the tongue'. Once we recall it (aha, I got it), this feeling disappears. Regrettably, I cannot explain the new sensations in PHI. It would be as difficult as trying to explain the fragrance of Chanel 5 to an Eskimo. But if I hand her a sample of Chanel 5, she will certainly say (in English) -- 'WOW! That's cool, man!'. Please note that these new sensations come from the common source of mind and matter: the "trunk". All we need is quantum gravity and something that travels very fast. The rest is available: a human brain viewed as a 'black box', and modern MEG and neurofeedback training facilities. There is a tricky point, however, with focusing on the upcoming mental correlate of 'the trunk': the so-called 'white dancing bear effect'. There is a nice story about an alchemist selling philosopher's stone. The guy was selling it with a catch: drop a horse shoe in a pot of water, add some philosopher's stone, and stir it until it boils, and you'll get gold. Only you must never think of any 'white dancing bear' while stirring the water and waiting to boil, because if you think about a white dancing bear, even once, you'll kill the philosopher's stone and will end up with a hot horse shoe only. Hence "psi research" does not yield reproducible effects, as we know since the time of the Roman Empire. That's it. No further questions, please! All the rest has being classified MAGIC EYES ONLY and carries a security level 5 points above that of Top Secret!
 

Q6: In one section of your site, I found the quotation of a quite triggering linguistic problem:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.

I've already come across this very interesting 'transposed letters effect' problem on many occasions, but would very much appreciate your further elaboration.

A6: I think it boils down to the effect of what we call 'context'. It is a very interesting thing, because it is 'both one and many', and hence strongly resembles the superpositions of states in QM. The neurophysiological correlate of 'context' is the ubiquitous binding process, but we're still miles away from understanding its physical basis. It seems to me that theoretical physicists are still totally obsessed with the Western paradigm. For example, Lee Smolin wrote, in "Three Roads to Quantum Gravity", the following (p. 18): "If we take out all the words we are not left with an empty sentence, we are left with with nothing." True, but this does not imply that if we keep all the words in a sentence, there would be nothing 'outside' this sentence. This 'outside' is exactly its context, as in the example you quoted. On the same page from his book, Lee Smolin showed that today's theoretical physics is purely relational and has not incorporated the effect of context, being strictly confined "inside" 'the words of a sentence': "The geometry of a universe is very like the grammatical structure of a sentence. Just as a sentence has no structure and no existence apart from the relationships between the words, space has no existence apart from the relationships that hold between the things in the universe."

Hence 'empty space' and 'context' are considered non-existent. Would that life were so simple! I suspect that we could eliminate the effect of context  iff  we could prove that there exist at least one physical system that is fully and uniquely defined by the properties of its constituents, i.e., that the universal dictum 'the whole is more than the sum of its parts' does not hold. Example: take 1099 "atoms of volume" and you'll end up with exactly one cubic centimeter of 3-D space, says Lee Smolin. There is no context here, just a finite number of atoms, each with finite dimensions, which fill in one cubic centimeter of 3-D space completely, without any gaps of 'empty space' whatsoever. If that was the case chosen my Mother Nature, we would have lived in some perfectly flat spacetime, since the notion of spacetime curvature is being defined exactly by the 'context'. Hence 'no context' means 'perfectly flat spacetime'. What a boring world! All words in a sentence would be uniquely defined with a finite number of propositions, our brain would be some computing machine, we would never be able to understand any self-referential logical paradox, and you would have never sent me your very intriguing question. Thank you!
 

Q7: You do not know enough theoretical physics to help with any research in that area.

A7: This doesn't sound like a question, but I will reply anyway. I believe many physicists have made very valuable contributions to neuroscience and psychology, despite the fact that they didn't know enough "to help with any research in that area". Let me mention two such physicists, whose ideas are, in my view, nothing less than essential for brain science and psychology: Giuseppe Vitiello and the late Euan J. Squires. According to Euan J. Squires, consciousness is nonlocal and "must be thought of as being ONE thing" (quant-ph/9602006 v1, February 9, 1996). His unique book Conscious Mind in the Physical World (Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd, Bristol, 1990; ISBN: 0750300450) explored such crucial issues as the concept of time and memory, and the idea of truth. Regrettably, the vast majority of neuroscientists studying the binding phenomenon ignored the ideas of Euan Squires, and continue to search for some mechanisms of binding, relying on their knowledge in computer science and classical physics. Even more important issue is one crucial aspect of the binding process, which produce what we call 'truth'. We refer to it as 'human conscience', but ask any neuroscientist about the brain correlates of this omniscient statement evaluator. It can assign truth values to any proposition, but can we locate it in the brain? I don't think we can. It belongs to our consciousness, it is nonlocal, and "must be thought of as being ONE thing", as stressed by Euan J. Squires.

This is just one example of cross-scientific exchange of ideas, and I will be more than satisfied if my efforts to suggest a new road to quantum gravity resembles the efforts of my friend Euan Squires. Needless to say, neither Euan nor I knew enough "to help with any research" in the areas we chose to offer our ideas and speculations. Actually, Euan knew much more about brain neurophysiology and psychology than I know about quantum gravity. The similarity between us is that neither brain scientists nor theoretical physicists pay any attention to our efforts to find a common language. Recall Wolfgang Pauli: "It would be most satisfactory if physics and psyche could be seen as complementary aspects of the same reality" (C.G. Jung and W. Pauli, eds., Synchronicity, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series, 1973; Originally published as Naturerklärung und Psyche, Zurich: Rascher Verlag, 1952).

I hope this answers the question above. Well, it was not formulated as a question. But it seems to me that its logical and consistent continuation does lead to a question at the end, say, 'You do not know enough theoretical physics to help with any research in that area. Do you know how stupid you are?' Of course, the person who passed her/his judgment straight from her/his conscience did not verbalize the obvious question that follows from her/his opinion. Sometimes people are subtle. I'm trying, too.
 

Q8: Dear Dmitri, I assume you're Russian, ...
A8: No, I'm not Russian.
 
 

Please don't hesitate to submit your questions! If your English is poor (like mine or worse), please use the FREE Babel Fish Translation service here.
 
 

Read the latest papers by Prof. Angelo Loinger, my White Paper and feedback to Nature,

and email to Oscar Wallace Greenberg, Xiao Zhang, José Senovilla, Gerhard Heinzel, Xiaolei Zhang, Steven Weinstein, Jochem Häuser, Nicolas Gisin, Ted Ezra Newman, Larry Horwitz, Renate Loll, Laszlo Szabados, Robert Minchin, Sven Aerts, Golam Mortuza Hossain, Stefano Vitale, Peter L. Knight, Roland Omnes, Marc Kamionkowski, Mark Hogarth, Deepto Chakrabarty, Neil Turok, Charles Tresser, Etera Livine, Richard Price, Daniele Oriti, Tejinder P. Singh, Atamalek Ghorbanzadeh, Fred Cooperstock, Bianca Dittrich, Giovanni Giachetta, David Miller, Barbara Piechocinska, Thomas Roman, Maximilian Schlosshauer, Ulrich Kirchner, Rüdiger Vaas, Dean Rickles, Jerzy Kijowski, Tomohiro Harada, Joey Medved, Michael Turner, Clifford Will, Sergei Kopeikin,Graham Nerlich, Naresh Dadhich, Anton Koekemoer et al., Y. Jack Ng, Sheldon Goldstein, Hermann Nicolai, Guangjiong Ni, Giuseppe Vitiello, Chen Ning Yang, Eric Linder, Matt Visser, Alexander Poltorak, Vesselin Petkov and Anastas Anastassov, Piotr Chrusciel, James Hartle, Sanjay Wagh, Daniel Terno, Steve Carlip, Andrei Linde, Claus Kiefer, Subir Sarkar, Peter Ostermann, Jim McGuire, Martin Bojowald, Dick Bierman, Gary Horowitz, Brian Josephson, Mario Beauregard, PPARC, Roman Zapatrin, Merced Montesinos, Lajos Diósi, John Cramer, Asher Peres, Gerard 't Hooft, Alex Granik, Roger Penrose, Manfred Requardt, Peter Woit, Joao Magueijo, Fotini Markopoulou, Willem de Muynck, Henry Stapp, Boris Tsirelson, Max Tegmark, Ulrich Gerlach, Laurent Nottale, Michel Planat, Wojciech Hubert Zurek, Andrew Steane, Rainer Kühne, Adrian Kent, Bruce Margon, Jeeva Anandan, Angelo Bassi and GianCarlo Ghirardi, Chris Adami, Elio Conte, and Richard Lieu and Lloyd Hillman,

as well as some questions to Andrzej Trautman, David Garfinkle, Klaas Landsman, Anastasios Mallios, Mustapha Ishak, Kevin Brown, Jim Isenberg, Louis Kauffman, Daniel Sepunaru, Alan Rendall, Mikhail Gromov, Scott Aaronson, Ntina Savvidou, James W. York Jr., Ted Jacobson, Kevin Knuth, Jorge Pullin, Marian Kupczynski, Bryan Kelleher, John Moffat, Stan Brodsky, Elemer Elad Rosinger, Lane Hughston, Francisco Lobo, Carl Dolby, David L. Meier, Zhang Hongsheng, Charles W. Misner, Frederic Henry-Couannier, Peter Meszaros, Olaf Dreyer, Matthew Frank, Steven Savitt, Vladimir Mashkevich, Mark Azbel, William G. Unruh, John L. Bell, Vlatko Vedral, Günther Hasinger, Ilya Nemenman, Michiel Seevinck, Karel Kuchar, Thomas Thiemann, Jonathan Halliwell, Joy Christian, Lee Smolin, Carlos Castro and Matej Pavši?, Rod Tumulka, David Coule Paul Davies, John Baez, Giovanni Amelino-Camelia, Jean-Pierre Luminet, Lawrence Krauss, Sean Carroll, Christina Sormani and Steven Harris, Carlo Rovelli, Neil Cornish, Robert Klauber, Lee Samuel Finn, Tony Sudbery, Ivanhoe Pestov, Neil Russell, Masahiro Kawasaki, Basil Hiley, H. Dieter Zeh, Khalafalla Bushara, Andrei Khrennikov, Andrew DiRienzo, Larissa Borissova, Dominik Schwarz, N. David Mermin, John Ellis, Mark Rubin, Shinji Tsujikawa, Charles Bennett, Sofia Wechsler, Paolo Palazzi, Hartmann Römer, Mário Everaldo de Souza, Young Kim, Abhay Ashtekar, Kim Boström, Gustavo Romero, Marco Frasca, Philippe Grangier, Serguei Krasnikov, John Corbett and Thomas Durt, Lev Vaidman, Marek Czachor, Professor X, Vardarajan Suneeta, Robert Wald, Todd Brun, Nick Mavromatos, Seth Lloyd, Adam Helfer, Martin Lopez-Corredoira, Norbert Straumann, Dorje Brody, Raymond Chiao, Robert Brandenberger, Matthew Donald, Martin Tajmar, Italo Vecchi, Gerard Milburn, Jeremy Butterfield, Stephen Adler, Simon Kochen and James Ax, Don Page, Robin Booth, Reg Cahill, George Jaroszkiewicz, John Fearns, Elias Zafiris, Michel Dyakonov, Abner Shimony, John Stachel, Piotr Chrusciel, Caslav Brukner, Marco Matone, Gebhard Grübl, Ioannis Raptis, John Swain, Ian Thompson, Licia Verde, Gennady Berman, Saul Youseff, Larry Ford, and Bernard Baars, as well as my unsolicited, and perhaps biased, opinion on Gerard 't Hooft's ideas.

I have so far just one opinion, from Tito Vecchi (Sat, 22 Jun 2002 12:47:17 +0200, Message-ID: <[email protected]>): "actually I see now that you might have a point, sort of."

I believe the credit should go to Erwin Schrödinger (September 1926): "If all this damned quantum jumping (verdammte Quantenspringerei) were really to stay, I should be sorry I ever got involved with quantum theory."

Back in 1953, Wolfgang Pauli suggested that the concept of finality ("the end (telos), that for which a thing is done", Aristotle, Physics 194b33) should be considered as a complement to causality, and that there is a third kind of natural laws, apart from deterministic and statistical laws, which consists in "correcting the fluctuations of chance by meaningful or functional coincidences of causally non-connected events" (Die Vorlesung an die fremden Leute, in Der Pauli-Jung-Dialog und seine Bedeutung für die moderne Wissenschaft, ed. by H. Atmanspacher, H. Primas, and E. Wertenschlag, Berlin: Springer, 1995, pp. 317-330). Surely the effects of the Holon, such as Jungian Synchronicity or Reichenbach's Common Cause Principle, look "non-causal" in the framework of the theory of relativity. The Holon does not live on the spacetime hypersurface, however. Never been there, never will.

Is this new to the physicists reading these lines? Just recall the problem of relativistic "collapse" of the wave function: it is neither in the past nor in the future light cone. Hence we have two alternatives: it should either "collapse" covariantly, as stressed by John Bell, or not collapse at all. Can we observe a thing that has not been already fitted into SRT? Obviously not. The problem is known since 1931, thanks again to Erwin Schrödinger. Can't beat the Holon. Or can you?

Eight years ago, I tried to raise my voice with a brief posting of 16 July 1998 to Q-Mind, only to remind the work done by G. Leibnitz and W. Pauli. l think there could be a fourth road to quantum gravity, and have put my cards on the table here. Everyone can try to prove me wrong.

Please do not hesitate!
 

D. Chakalov
Sunday, 23 June 2002
Last update: Monday, March 10, 2008
 

--
There was a young man who said "God,
to you it must seem very odd
that a tree as a tree
simply ceases to be
when there's no one about in the quad."

"Young man, your astonishment's odd,
I'm always about in the quad
and that's why the tree
never ceases to be
as observed by, yours faithfully,
God."