Entropic Dynamics (7)

One of the two original ideas I have presented in this series, is the marriage of Information Theory and String Theory, more precisely Theory of Computation and String Theory. When I propose these ideas two thoughts come to my mind: Nobody proposed them before, because nobody looked at the problem this way; and the one that has turned ot to be true most of the time: Nobody proposed it because it is wrong.

Which one is it this time?

I can think of several ways to obtain the consequences of this hypothesis. If strings encode information, maybe as Turing strings. Then the one-dimensional cellular automaton (1d-CA) is one way to go about this. My precise hypothesis will then be: The fundamental string is 1d-CA # 110.

Both Stephen Wolfram and Harold V. McIntosh, say that this simple rule, or program, can be used to perform all the operations of arithmetic. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division; i.e. it is a universal computer, or it has the property of universality. In layman terms, I am not a computer scientist; this means that if you are patient enough you will see surprising patterns appearing all the time. There are many pictures of this in Wolfram's book, A New Kind of Science, and some in McIntosh's webpage. There is even a Wilkipedia entry on this rule.

Then what? How does one connect that abstraction to the real objects we know?

I write an anecdote to motivate my guess. My friend Prof.Justiniano Lorenzo Díaz-Cruz told me that at the University of Michigan, where he got his Ph.D. under Prof. Gordon Kane, he had the opportunity to witness one of the most embarrassing situations he's seen. Our friend Dr. Martí Ruíz-Altaba was doing the rounds to get a position as it is styled: giving lectures. His talk was on some part of String Theory. As it happened Martí studied under Pierre Ramond, at the University of Florida, in Gainsville; so he was one of the first to study String Theory. Prof. Martinus Veltman, was in the audience. By now theoretical physicists were getting tired of a lot of mathematics and very little physics. Our poor friend, was between a rock and a hard place. Off the bat at the beginning of the talk, Veltman asked if he could calculate the mass of the electron. Martí really wanted that job, he didn't want to appear as a wimp, I guess, so he blithely said, yes. At the end of the talk there was no such thing. Neither him, nor anybody to this day has been able to accomplish this feat. The value of the electron mass is still a mystery. Prof. Martinus, who is a big man, left the room openly showing his displeasure to having wasted his time with this young Mexican apprentice.


So here I go. At least I am not facing these huge white men. I am placidly sitting at my desk, watching through my window this deluge that is soaking the whole country. Of course I am not stupid. Don't quote this site as the place to find a calculation of the electron mass. I will loose the little audience I have. I think I get like five readers a day.


I should add something. Some wimps, are saying that this value is a complete accident. Fate just gave us an electron with this mass. There are 10⁵⁰⁰ solutions. With so many, there is bound to be one just with the right value for our neck of the woods. This is The Goldilocks Principle, or Anthropic Principle. As René Descartes said many years ago, Cogito, ergo sum; that is, the fact that we are here at all, gives us A LOT of Information. If we just restrict our considerations to those that lead to Intelligent Life on Earth, we will be fine.

For the younger readers I should add. If you say the electron is a point, and you try to put electric charge on it, you will need an infinite amount of energy to do it. In classical physics, the infinity we are talking about is 1/r, when r goes to zero. In quantum physics is easier, we need ln(1/r). Still it blows up.

A final caveat; the falsity of this claim, does not kill the hypothesis that physical strings perform computations just like this computer on my desk.

1d-CA come in different kinds, actually four, like Wolfram proved many years ago. Rule 110 belongs to the most interesting kind, and is the only one, I know of, equivalent to a universal computer.

So let us assume that the electron is somehow related to this particular string. The electron is the only elementary particle, besides its neutrino, that is stable. So the properties of the electron (or its neutrino; you see theoretical physicists always give ourselves plenty of wiggle room), may follow from rule 110. The question now is: How?

All the rules are related to other types of strings, those basically join the noise, they cannot be separated from the din. This string must have some intersting sound that puts it apart from the rest. That is, we can discover the electron among the din, but we cannot separate the din, from the din. I don't literally mean acoustic noise, I mean noise in the more general sense of Shannon's Information Theory.

As time passes, this string makes a surface in spacetime that wiggles funny. So funny that we notice. Somehow (more wiggle room) the electron mass comes out!

You see, after my friend Martí's experience, I am not going to embarrass myself, by precisely telling people how this is done. There is another danger with that. If I exactly spell out how this is done, people will take from this humble blog site, maybe a Wolfram employee, and take away my fame and money.

Seriously, I am just setting up some kind of stage to understand Turing's String.

The Entropic Dynamics theory I am trying to set up; has to give us direction to navigate the huge amount of solutions, or String Theory Landscape, as Prof. Leonard Susskind calls it, that string theorists developed in the second half of last century.