Charles Sife is a news writer for AAAS' Science magazine.

In this month's issue AAAS offers a full three contiguous page article by Sife titled Physics Enters the Twilight Zone.

We are really tickled to see this article, for several arguable issues it evinces:

• Classical science is usually stodgy about what they call philosophy, metaphysics, and "phenomena,"
• Classical science almost never admits to any Kuhnian paradigm shifting — while it is happening (most do not accept any notions of paradigm shifts anyway),
• Classical science has been essentially a monistic (in some ways even monastic), disciplinary-matrixed 'cathedral' since what classical scientists call 'the French Enlightenment,' and this article exposes a huge shift from classical monism to post modern and perhaps quantum plural heterogeneity,
• Classical monisms almost necessarily must be closed while pluralisms may be closed but tend to beg openness, and openness massively breaks countless classical bastion 'laws,'
•  

As an overview we have chosen three categories of criticism for this article: what's 'good' about it, what appears to us to be 'missing' about it, and what we find 'bad' about it. We offer our opinions, based upon our beliefs. Finally, we plan to offer what we believe is quantum better.

Simply, Sife's article is about what scientists call "parallel universes." Historically this notion has been rejected due its implied heterogeneities. Most of classical science finds its bases in classical notions of 'one.' One time, one global context, one discernible 'truth,' one nascent Platonic form, one analytic Aristotelian stable-substantial-physical-material-objective reality, and so on... Sife's article simply blows away any remaining monistic bastions of classical science. We wonder how deeply Sife fathoms scope and depth of changes borne on this in-process paradigm shift he describes.

What's good about Sife's article?

• Acceptance of heterogeneity as real (vast scope and depth affects here)
• Acceptance of universal openness as real (vast...)
• Acceptance of unlimited multiverses as real
• and quantum potentia borne of these apparent paradigm shifters

What's missing from Sife's article?

• Quantum uncertainty (classical notions of 'identity' deny quantum uncertainty)
• Quantum flux is crux (Acceptance of absolute quantum animacy attending both heterogeneity and openness.)
• Quantum spatially arbitrary wave function likelihood omnistributions (AKA QLOs)
• Quantum included-middle (vis-à-vis Aristotelian 'excluded-middle')
• Quantum everywhere-associativity (via QLOs, included-middle, entanglement, coherence, superluminality, etc.)
• Planck rate spectral perspicacity and perspicuity
• Emergent asynchronous, polyasynchronous Planck flux spectral evolutionary quantum processings
• A philosophical acceptance of Nature as moral due He-r relentless pursuit of better (some classical scientists even call Nature "absurd," and "science's enemy;" Why? Nature is always breaking classical science's 'laws' JKL)
• and quantum potentia borne of these missing paradigm shifters

What's bad about Sife's article?

• A residual classical assumption of a massive classical vis-à-vis quantum dichotomy twixt classical interpretations and quantum hermeneutics of reality
• A residual classical assumption that reality is mechanical, and further and ineptly, that reality is quantum 'mechanical'
• A classical assumption of unitemporality; one classical time fits all multiversal heterogeneities, and that time is a space rate proxy (Stein, ~1993, recall-paraphrased, "...modern science currently has no coherent description, notion or definition of change...;" more strongly, classicists do not know what time is)
• A classical assumption of synchronous holographic universes borne of unitemporality and putative notions of classical 'identity'
• A classical assumption of synchronous 'identical' and 'parallel' universal ontologies
• and loss of quantum opportunities borne of failing to correct these putative classical mental anchors

Sife's article starts out reading just like some mind-blowing fiction of science. To find this in AAAS' Science magazine is beyond incredible! A sea change is...

Given that, Sife says, "The picture of parallel universes may seem like science fiction or a cosmologist's playful mind game. But multiple, independent lines of argument support it. Even among skeptics, most experts tend to accept two basic and uncontroversial premises about the nature of the universe—premises that, followed to their logical conclusion, imply the existence of infinite mirror worlds and infinite identical copies of you inhabiting many of those worlds. And there are other theoretical reasons to believe in parallel universes as well."

We like nearly every aspect of that quote except Sife's use of 'identical.' Sife uses a bogus classical notion of 'identity' repeatedly throughout this article. Our review here, focuses on that dented fender.

Can any two 'things' in reality ever be 'identical?' Should we feel professionally responsible to understand what classical 'identity' means? Is our ad hoc semantic and interpretation of 'identity' useful? Real? Is classical 'identity' real? Does quantum 'identity' exist?

What criteria may we use to hermeneutically assess 'identity?'

First, is it obvious to you that heterogeneity (to us, good) and 'identity' (to us, bad) mutually, taken semantically together, beg uncertainty interrelationships, especially when we assume animacy attends all heterogeneities? Doesn't 'identity' deny both emergence and novelty?

When is identical? Where is identical? When can we copy? Where can we copy? Is a 'duplicate' a duplicate? When? Where? Does 'identity' require 'perfect' spatial superposition? Does 'identity' require 'perfect' temporal superposition? When? Where? Is A = A? When? Where? How? Can A change? If A changes, how can we say it is an 'identity?' If A moves, how can we say it is an 'identtity?'

William James, in his Some Problems of Philosophy, Chapter IX, 'The Problem of Novelty,' puts it like this, "When perceptible amounts of new phenomenal being come to birth, must we hold them to be in all points predetermined and necessary outgrowths of the being already there, or shall we rather admit the possibility that originality may thus instil itself into reality?"

And, "Time keeps budding into new moments, every one of which presents a content which in its individuality never was before and will never be again. Of no concrete bit of experience was an exact duplicate ever framed."

Hans Christian von Baeyer and John Wheeler both say, paraphrased, "There are no doubles."

See von Baeyer's article in NYAS' The Sciences, Sep/Oct 1997 issue, 'Tiny Doubles,' by Hans Christian von Baeyer, pp. 11-13.

Bergson and Pirsig agree. There are no classical radically mechanical 'identities.' (Also see Dirac on radical determinism, a related co-concept. Radical mechanical determinism and classical identity both demand absence of change. However, quantum reality is not classically 'stoppable.' Quantum reality is change.)

Reality evolves. Nothing is even identical to itself longer than a few Planck moments. Food spoils, paint peels, atoms' electrons orbit (radical position and momentum uncertainty), and so on.

Sife, for us, ruins an otherwise great article emphasizing radical mechanical 'identity' among heterogeneous 'copies' of universes.

We agree, though, that there are many universes. Rather than calling them 'identical' we would call them "quantum nonmechanically and fractally, self-other-referently self-other-similar." But they can be, as James hints, radically novel too — not classically manufactured new/novel, rather emerscentured quantum n¤vel!

We agree that they appear to exhibit holographic phenomena. Depending on how one 'defines' holographic, multiverses are not just holographic.

See hologram. See stairs as holograms.

We also agree that there are unlimited quantum-similar versions of us in countless multiverses. They aren't just parallel, though. Given unlimited hetero-timings, genetic patterns can recur too. Odds are each of 'us' shall be genetic-pattern reborn countably infinite repetitions. But each occurrence will be in omnifferent quantum contexts with omniffering contextual conditionings.

In place of a classical notion of unchanging 'identity,' and synchronous unitemporal parallel universe ontologies, we would substitute, "Quantum flux is crux." Quantum reality always changes and changes all. Quantum reality is everywhere both quantum self-similar and quantum n¤vel.

Please assess, weigh and fathom
how our last sentence answers one of
Michael Talbot's most prescient questions:
"How can the future both exist and not exist?"

See The Holographic Universe, Talbot,
1991, Harper, p. 211 (paperback).
That page says what Sife's article tries
to say, only ~14 years earlier, and better!
Why is science so slow on uptake?
Why is science so inept at interpretation?
Read page 211 of Talbot's text!

Doug - 14Aug2004

Sife tells us that most scientists believe in J. C. Maxwell's second law of thermodynamics. Let's show Maxwell's three laws:

1. Universal energy/mass is constant and energy/mass conserve.
2. Disorder always increases (posentropy); thus a unilogical/classical arrow of homogeneous space-proxied time is imposed on reality. (3D and 1T; why not 3D and 3T? Leibniz did it. Einstein bought it.)
3. Thermalized, dissipative energy may not achieve a zeroentropy state, let alone a negentropy state.

These 'laws' deny any notions of an open inflationary multiverse!

In quantum reality, posentropy has (at least) two gradients, both positive and negative. Maxwell's second 'law' denies this.

Notice too that 'identities' are impossible in even Maxwell's second 'law,' since an increase in posentropy (a decrease in information; an increase in disorder) demands change.

Open multiverses do not conserve. Maxwell's 'laws' find their bases in a classical notion of radical mechanical conservation.

Let's leave it at that for now.

Doug - 30Jul2004.