Finkelstein's expansions

[Norman Albers]

THIS IS JUST MAILED TO MY FRIEND 'solidspin': In the photon stuff, Finkelstein says: "Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton were already certain that light was granular in the 17th

century but hardly anyone anticipated the radical conceptual

expansions in the physics of light that happened in the 20th century.

Now a simple extrapolation tells us to expect more such expansions.

These expansions have one basic thing in common: Each revealed that

the resultant of a sequence of certain processes depends unexpectedly

on their order. Processes are said to commute when their resultant

does not depend on their order, so what astounded us each time was a

non-commutativity. Each such discovery was made without connection to

the others, and the phenomenon of non-commutativity was called several

things, like non-integrability, inexactness, anholonomy, curvature, or

paradox (of two twins, or two slits). These aliases must not disguise

this underlying commonality. Moreover the prior commutative theories

are unstable relative to their non-commutative successors in the sense

that an arbitrarily small change in the commutative commutation

relations can change the theory drastically, but not in the

non-commutative relations. Each of these surprising

non-commutativities is proportional to its own small new fundamental

constant..." He goes on and it is brilliant. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

"...There is a deeper commonality to these expansions. Like

earthquakes and landslides they stabilize the region where they occur,

specifically against small changes in the expansion constant itself.

Each expansion also furthered the unity of physics in the sense that

it replaced a complicated kind of symmetry (or group) by a simple

one. " WOW, MAN, THIS IS FAR-SEEING.

[elas]

Finkelstein says: "Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton were already certain that light was granular in the 17th

According to an article I read years ago the actual statement by Newton was 'Perhaps the universe is granular in nature'. Its a great help in understanding how and why things behave in the manner in which they are observed to behave.

[Norman Albers]

Speech to the European Physical Society in 1977: Dirac: "The outline of Heisenberg's method was to set up a theory dealing with only observable quantities. These observable quantities fitted into matrices, so he was led to considering the matrix as a whole instead of just dealing with particular matrix elements. Dealing with matrices one is then directed to non-commutative algebra." Yes indeed, there is a very beautiful dance of mathematics with physical theory. Elas, thank you.

Edited September 12, 2008 by Norman Albers