Bridge over Infinity (Quasifinite Principles in Search of the Next Big Idea)

Bridge over Infinity (Quasifinite Principles in Search of the Next Big Idea)

L. Edgar Otto   01 May, 2013

As Sabine Hossenfelder reports in her paper there is a long history of the ideas of a finite distance at some level in our description of physics including that gained from some standpoint lost in the grounding methods of another viewpoint.  What strikes me as an outsider, a poet or philosopher who starts that way with speculations is that this human approach has tugged at the reasoning of our earlier inquirers and that in thier formal methods and papers the language and notations they used, at the risk of not finding some new direction as is proper in objective science for even a disproof of results sufficient unto the climate of the day, these were of the highest order, as good as any in these times.

But if to me these issues seem in the way and a foregone conclusion as to how the world, the Omnium, works. It must mean something very subtle is lacking in the notations and language to which even logic seems not to be a power enough bridge to reconsider how well we understand the infinite.  Some finite steps I have used to build my own understanding that I intuitively feel corrects so apply thou running in the background as part of thought processes and experiments have gone a long way to sort out the subtle assumptions that limit the power of our current notations- but it is also true that certain principles even with the evidence they work enshrined by modern or novel theoreticians or that where they do not work at some extreme place that does not undermine the design in the scope of intelligible and practical conversation, still inelegantly free as hard numbers founded on recursion thru uncertain or indefinite vagueness of which we may not by infinite methods necessarily shore up our physics of the infinite.

As it was said it will take longer to comprehend the finite- well, it has been much too long and such principles although rational and seemingly intuitive - who can decide this?- are an ongoing bottleneck to the imagined needed breakthroughs such as understanding gravity, or quantum gravity grounding regimes and phenomenology in the possibly false distinction in that debate between the loopers and the stringers.  For me these ideas also forbid even higher generalizations and totally new big ideas at the present more than our wildest imaginations.  But some of us have a scale of what we consider the scope of science or the relevance of a particular method or principle and all feel from their own reality check that their intuitions are as sound.  About all that strikes me as truly new is the role we all are playing as part of such deep and important human and honest inquiry 

The future may well look back on bits of ideas, hidden in the explicit equations, where one theoretician dismissed part of another's efforts which shows that in the end they agreed with their opponent even if it only from a hint that the opponent may have a sound idea that comes only by a rare beginning as but a single instance of which we did not look deeply enough to show its strength and soundness from a higher intuitive view in the details and the general vision ahead of its time or way behind the growth of theory seen from times to come.

To quote Bob Dylan... "If you are not busy being born you  are dying."  This is from a poet and a tradition of thought of which some of the deepest issues may be raised as we deal with our pretensions of infinite power or our fragile insignificance in philosophy, and in science, physics, as we are coming to see now.  Who is the creative entity behind the you being born and to what extent is it transcendentally human?

I meant to write the details of such principles that apply especially with our ideas of minimum distance (duration) as Sabine points out some in the spirit of it if the concerns are only of the fundamental physical values and nothing metaphysical or more foundational as I and Rowlands point out- but those can be gleaned from my earlier posts where they endure in the drama of theory, particle physics, and cosmology in these new times.  As Lubos points out some of the principles (and theory or symmetries, conservation ideas, and so on) seem to be more of a fixed nature as are all our ideas that may be shared or arise in that ideological debate even where the genes and clouds are private and public property.  I am inspired by his link to Witten that thru my eyes speaks of the beginning of climbing on to the wider shore or diving into the sea before him Newton mentioned in a poetic moment, perhaps such principles but only a beginning is a key to raise the level of our comprehension and the needed next little idea of a new physics constrained only by the sanity where it exists in our great speculation.

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