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A new "provocative" book by Sir Roger Penrose has just surfaced on amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Fashion-Faith-Fan ... 691119791/:

What can fashionable ideas, blind faith, or pure fantasy possibly have to do with the scientific quest to understand the universe? Surely, theoretical physicists are immune to mere trends, dogmatic beliefs, or flights of fancy? In fact, acclaimed physicist and bestselling author Roger Penrose argues that researchers working at the extreme frontiers of physics are just as susceptible to these forces as anyone else.

Will the politically entrenched establishment listen to Penrose? If his plea falls on deaf ears of the fashion-mongers, then what chance do we have of making any dent?

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And WIMPS must lay near the top of the faith and fashion trend!

Quoting from the Amazon website:

Turning to cosmology, he argues that most of the current fantastical ideas about the origins of the universe cannot be true, but that an even wilder reality may lie behind them.

What is this "wilder reality?"
I can hardly wait for this book to appear in print!
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RArvay wrote:Quoting from the Amazon website:

Turning to cosmology, he argues that most of the current fantastical ideas about the origins of the universe cannot be true, but that an even wilder reality may lie behind them.

What is this "wilder reality?"
I can hardly wait for this book to appear in print!

I have no idea what is meant by "even wilder reality" in the summary of his book on the Amazon website. However, if I may venture to speculate, what Penrose may have in mind is something like his recent hypothesis of a cyclic model for the Universe (to my mind reminiscent of the ancient Hindu mythology), or his hypothesis of the gravity-induced collapse of the quantum mechanical wave-function, on which I myself have worked in the past --- see my two papers, here and here. I hasten to add that I am no longer sympathetic to the idea of a wave-function collapse, especially after my discovery of the flaw in Bell's reasoning, and my refutation of Bell's "theorem". In any case, regardless of what is meant by it on the Amazon website, I am pretty sure Penrose does not mean anything mystical by "even wilder reality."

PS: How can I be so sure about this? Because I have known Penrose's views pretty well for the past three decades, and I also happen to know him personally.

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A more contextual quote from the Amazon site is this:

Turning to cosmology, he argues that most of the current fantastical ideas about the origins of the universe cannot be true, but that an even wilder reality may lie behind them. Finally, Penrose describes how fashion, faith, and fantasy have ironically also shaped his own work, from twistor theory, a possible alternative to string theory that is beginning to acquire a fashionable status, to "conformal cyclic cosmology," an idea so fantastic that it could be called "conformal crazy cosmology.

How I envy your personal acquaintance with Sir Roger!
I was first attracted to his public statements when he showed the courage, in a video taped interview, to discuss what I consider the fulcrum of modern physics, the question of definition of our internal experience of consciousness. While he did not of course answer the exact question, he showed a willingness to consider the question, something that many eminent physicists avoid like the plague, which I find perplexing.

Penrose speculated that the physical nature of consciousness lies outside of both quantum and relativity theories, perhaps in what he called, the gap between them.

To be sure, he is not given to mystical theories, but neither is he afraid to venture into areas that some may disparagingly refer to as "wild" science.

If I find myself unable to understand his book, I am eager to hear it explained by minds greater than mine-- which is a large number of minds!
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Joy,

Jonathan Dickau on FQXi dug up a 1993 paper by H.D. Zeh
http://fqxi.org/data/forum-attachments/ ... -jumps.pdf
that almost got it right.

I replied,

Jonathan,

As a technical editor, it is hard not to admire the beauty of Dieter Zeh's abstract:

"Abstract: Quantum theory does not require the existence of discontinuities: neither in time (quantum jumps), nor in space (particles), nor in spacetime (quantum events). These apparent discontinuities are readily described objectively by the continuous process of decoherence occurring locally on a very short time scale according to the Schrödinger equation for interacting systems, while the observer’s ‘increase of information’ is appropriately represented by the resulting dynamical decoupling of the corresponding components of the global wave function."

I can agree that the process is objective, but I can't help but focus on the fly in the soup:

"This is not to deny the existence of several open problems. In particular, the fundamental ‘arena’ of wave mechanics, which may or may not correspond to a classical configuration space, can only be known once we possess a fundamental ‘Theory of Everything’."

And I think that Joy Christian has defined that space in a local and realistic way. For quantum configuration space to map completely to classical configuration space requires a smooth and continuous function -- Dieter Zeh got that right -- but in my opinion stopped short of providing the necessary dimensions which allow it."

I think we should keep pressing for a definition of measure space.

Hi Tom,

I actually saw your reply to Jonathan at FQXi and wanted to thank you and congratulate you for recognizing and appreciating that which some of the "geniuses" at FQXi are unable to recognize and appreciate. But I am so disappointed by how I was treated by the FQXi administration that I refrained from posting my comment. Also it is in Max Tegmark's thread and I did not want to cramp his style (I like the guy, but he and FQXi owe me serious apology, which I don't see is forthcoming any time soon).

In any case, I very much appreciated your reply to Jonathan.

Cheers,

Joy

Thanks, Joy. I understand. Time wounds all heels.

All best,

Tom

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This long awaited book by Sir Roger Penrose criticising fashion, faith, and fantasy in contemporary physics has now been officially published. I agree with much of what he argues for, except for his idea of adding a possible wave-function collapse to orthodox quantum mechanics. Once upon a time I did passionately work on his idea of wave-function collapse, but sorry Sir Roger, I have now lost faith in it (some of you can guess why): http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10 ... .95.160403.