Wednesday 10 June 2015

A flatlanders view on Joy Christian's simulations


Flatlanders living in the plane below are witnessing something strange. Normally any object of any form that rotates in their world spans the surface of a perfect circle. But in the current experiment they measure something rotating in their world that spans an oval instead. So in their 2d system they try to simulate what they see to understand the process. But they don't succeed unless, for example, they use a loophole where they change the size of the object during rotation.
 
For us being privileged 3d persons it is easy to understand that the flatlanders are witnessing a projected effect from our world.

This example illustrates the discussions about Joy Christian's theory and simulations. In a nutshell Joy's theory postulates that an object has to undergo a 4pi rotation  to return to its original state (1) (and not 2pi). Currently all attempts to simulate this in an event by event Monte Carlo simulation have been done in an algebraic system that doesn't support this 4pi constraint. The simulations that have been carried out by Joy (2) and others are based on the analytic proof of the theory. But transferred our 'flat' 3d space algebra this means that results falling into the 'green area' should be rejected, because, like in the flatlander's case, these outcomes do not exist.




Joy might be right. But to completely support this by an event by event simulation, I think the total EPR process should be calculated using an algebra that naturally incorporates this 4pi feature. Quaternions? Multivectors? Or maybe yet something else?



  1. Macroscopic Observability of Spinorial Sign Changes under 2π Rotation, Joy Christian, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10773-014-2412-2 The arxiv text: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1211.0784.pdf     
  2. Joy about his latest simulation: http://www.sciphysicsforums.com/spfbb1/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=168&p=4172#p4172