Quntum Metamechanics

 Reading  Christopher Langan: "Quantum Metamechanics (QMM)".

From Wikipedia:

Langan's IQ was estimated on ABC's 20/20 to be between 195 and 210,^[2] and in 1999 he was described by some journalists as "the smartest man in America" or "in the world" (...) 

He calls his proposal "a true 'Theory of Everything', a cross between John Archibald Wheeler's 'Participatory Universe' and Stephen Hawking's 'Imaginary Time' theory of cosmology"^[3] additionally contending that with CTMU he "can prove the existence of God , the soul and an afterlife, using mathematics."^[1][4] Even so, Langan does not belong to any religious denomination, explaining that he "can't afford to let logical approach to theology be prejudiced by religious dogma"

Let me start with this description of the present status of quantum mechanics, pp. 273-274:

 On the bare-bones algebraic mannequin of QM, layer upon layer of clothing has been draped and piled by designers who differ strongly in their opinions of what looks good on it. To put it mildly, their visions clash with even less appeal than the underlying skeleton, tending to cancel each other. Consequently, even after their disorganized attempts to bury it under a mound of conceptual raiment, its bones poke through as starkly as ever,  dangling  and  jutting  like  the  girders  and  cranes  of  an  unfinished skyscraper. Thus, while grudgingly praised for its spectacular empirical success, it  continues  to  be  roundly  panned  for  its  abominable  aesthetics,  prompting various efforts to “dress it up” in new interpretations that on close examination turn out to be equally counterintuitive and unappealing.  

p. 275:

 (...) Even  worse,  most  of  the  complex mathematical  apparatus  of  QM  has  nowhere  to  go;  the  empirical  universe contains nothing that obviously corresponds to it and thus has “nowhere to put it”.  There  appears  to  be  nothing  in  empirical  (observable)  reality  capable  of supporting  such  things  as  probability  waves  and  the  equations  that  govern them.  

Not to mention complex numbers and most operators (Hermitian or not) .

In the Summary Langan concludes:

 (...) All  that  remains  is  to  apply  QMM  to  the  beasts  of  the quantum  jungle,  namely,  the  often  strange  and  apparently  wildly  conflicting QM  interpretations  that  have  been  freely  proliferating  at  the  frontier  where physics meets metaphysics. It has just been demonstrated how this is done, with examples. 

Langan discussed the following examples

1. Copenhagen interpretaion (Bohr and Heisenberg)
2. Observer-Created Reality (John Wheeler)
3. Consciousness-Dependent Reality (von Neumann-Wigner-Stapp)
4. Bohmian Mechanics (early David Bohm)
5. The Implicate Order (late David Bohm)
6. Many Worlds (Everett)

Of these he has granted highest scores to 2 and 3. Other interpretations scored rather badly. Those that have scored high involved either "consciousness" or "observer". My own child, EEQT, would probably get the lowest score, because in EEQT we do need either consciousness or observer and, moreover, EEQT is "dualistic", and Langan repeatedly criticizes Bohmian Mechanics for being dualistic. 

Finally, close to the end of his paper Langan concludes:

The CTMU Metaformal System is an intrinsic language, the involutional coupling of a language with a manifold whose points are the elements  of  the  signature  of  the  language,  or  in  semiotic  terminology,  its “signs”.  This  manifold  is  dynamic,  with  dual  outward  and  inward  gradients accounting for gravity and the relative linear motions of physical objects (the curvature  of  spacetime  equates  to  the  inner  expansive  gradient  of  the conspansive manifold, which is dual to the timelike collapse gradients of T). Its evolution  can  be  described  in  terms  of  two  operations,  conspansion  and  telic recursion. By virtue of conspansion, the evolving manifold closely resembles the existing formalism of quantum mechanics; and by virtue of telic recursion, this formalism can be carried into the linguistic aspect of the manifold and the deep structure of the Metaformal System. (For now, we refrain from asserting that the Metaformal System is a “theory of quantum gravity”, but this will no doubt eventually emerge.)    

Being a (mathematical) physicist I have failed to understand most of the above paragraph, with the exception of those few terms that I have put in bold. Elsewhere in Langan's paper I have found some poetically (or channeling) sounded phrases which I think I have liked, though I am not able to make (yet) much sense of them. For instance:

The  generative  dynamic  of  the  conspansive  manifold  has  primary  and secondary stages. The primary stage consists of a self-dual n-ary (n-fold unary, n  ≥  2)  operation,  conspansion,  with  two  alternating  phases,  inner  expansion  and collapse.  Inner  expansion  potentializes  the  state  transitions  of  the  syntactors coupled  in  events  –  the  points  and  events  are  brought  into  intersection  by internal rescaling through the primary quantum (point) so that they “overlap” – while collapse re-actualizes the inner-expanded syntactors as compact objects in  new  interactions.  

....

The  conspansive  manifold  evolves  by  way  of  generative  information mappings that supersede standard physical causation occurring along timelike (or null) worldlines. Inner-expansive potentialization “opens” a tertiary identity or point of the manifold to N while collapsative actualization “closes” it in T; potentialization is null, while collapse is spacelike. Together, inner expansion and collapse comprise  conspansive  potentialization-actualization cycles which form self-dual information mappings, each of which initiates and actualizes a potential by restricting it to a specific outcome for a net gain of information. 

• See also: The Portable Chris Langan
  

But there is more that has attracted my attention in Langan's paper, something more basic that I am having troubles with understanding, and, since I would really like and need to understand more, I will discuss these more basic and easier problems in my next posts.

P.S.1. From the workbench:

Today, finally, after four years long struggle, got this:

Thank you for publishing with Springer Nature.

Your article
Corresponding author (you)
Arkadiusz Jadczyk
Title
On the Bundle of Clifford Algebras Over the Space of Quadratic Forms
DOI 10.1007/s00006-022-01251-x
Article type
T.C. : ICCA 12, Hefei, August 3-7, 2020
Journal
Advances in Applied Clifford Algebras

P.S.2. The struggle with another paper still continues. For those interested here is a copy of a reply to the referees' reply sent on October 10. The paper is still in reviews.... 

P.S.3 Yesterday I have discovered that that a brand new monograph by two mathematicians  Josef Janyška and  Marco Modugno "An Introduction to Covariant Quantum Mechanics", Springer 2022, quotes seven of  my papers ((mostly coauthored). Which for me is a nice encouragement to publish more original stuff. In principle I should not care whether my papers are being quoted or not, I should care that they satisfy my requirements of being good stuff. But somehow it feels good....