A Recent Exchange

Dear Mitchell,

I remember your name from my readings since some time ago! It's an honor that you've contacted me!

In re: chemistry -- I don't hope for anything that revolutionary (as far as reworking all of that goes)! I hope for more accurate descriptions of molecules beyond the Hydrogen atom (ha--maybe!) I appreciate your long letter! I am not Michael Nielsen's wife, although it delights me to be mistaken as such, I am just a very ambitious graduate student from Kansas who has been in dialogue with physicists around the country for some time (since I was an ambitious high schooler). I will take some time to read your comments and think deeply about each one -- I just want you to be sure that I do not think I am going to fix all of chemistry -- maybe model a few things more accurately beyond hydrogen if that has not been done yet (perhaps I am working off of outdated research; it was my understanding Schrodinger's modes of the atom only worked for hydrogen so far, but maybe that's just a matter of computational effectiveness). I'm also very very quick to revise ideas if I am wrong, so if you can point me to a better resource on this I am all ears!

The main thing I hoped to get across posting my paper up was that I think you can redo all of physics (and yes the Gauge fields and the particles including fermions etc!) this way, using fiber bundles (I hope for the Hopf fiber bundle, but definitely using fiber bundles in general). There has been some work done already with fiber bundles and the Gauge fields. I don't think I am *quite* so naive as you  think, but I realize I am very bright and bouncy and full of cheerful enthusiasm for the crazy and new (I could attach here a few amazing papers on Beltrami closure I have up my sleeve that I think are quite convincing that some of this is doable). For now, obviously I'm mostly playing with GR and QM and making those two compatible (I believe my methodology replicates nonlocality in QM and a kind of ER=EPR locality in GR) but I think that I can also pull the particles out of this thing as fluxes in the field; this is obviously the difficult part, but again, there is some premise; even Ellis and Hawking talk a small bit about bundles in "Large Scale Structure of Spacetime" and Penrose dips into it in Road to Reality, but it feels like this is a topic left semi-hanging.

For fun, you may look up the Wikipedia entry on Heinz Hopf -- he was a contemporary of Schrodinger and Einstein and cousin of another Hopf who also seems to have known the two of them. There has been some strange and simple work done in pure mathematics on Hopf fields and even on a Hopf-Schrodinger equation. I've actually been reading in detail on the Hopf fiber bundle since 2008, so while it seems like a strike in the dark, it's not quite super-naive, just from a fairly childish player in the glass bead game of physics who decided to make her first statement somewhat striking after determining after many years it was not quite silly!

Thank you so, so, so very much for contacting me and thinking to write to me! I would love to continue and dialogue if you have any use for someone so naive as me!  (As deep a thought as I have put in thus far, anyone claiming to put physics into a "new" mathematical framework for "Grand Unification" is quite naive!).

And yes -- I realize that my proposition may turn out surprisingly orthodox after I take all of this into account!!!

Thank you so very much!!!!!

Sincerely Yours,

"Jenny" Jennifer Nielsen

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"Jenny" Jennifer L. Nielsen, MS Physics

Graduate Student - University of Kansas Department of Philosophy, Quantum Information

JLNielsen@KU.edu

FROM: <Mitchell Porter>; email removed for privacy; formatting of italics, bold and underlines mine>

Tue 11/12/2019 1:41 AM

Hello Jennifer Nielsen. I am regular reader of vixra abstracts and so I have noticed your recent uploads. I also noticed you posting an old FQXI essay onto arxiv recently, and assumed you were Michael Nielsen's wife Jennifer Dodd (someone who I knew a long time ago, when he was based at this university), but it's apparent that this is not so.

In your latest research note, you have gone from seeking new measures of quantum information, to proposing a framework in terms of which you hope to redescribe the entirety of fundamental physics. As you are no doubt aware, you appear to be part of the tradition of Lord Kelvin, seeking to explain the atoms or (now) what's smaller than atoms, in terms of topologies of flow. It's a respectable tradition but I would like to point out a few ways in which you strike me as naïve. 

1) Fermions. Numerous classically-minded attempts to reformulate the foundations of physics, never even confront the nature of fermions, as seen in quantum field theory. If you look into path integrals, you will find that boson fields involve path integrals over real or complex numbers, but fermion fields require path integrals over anticommuting 'grassmann numbers'. This is something that is lacking in almost every alternative theory of everything, from Lisi on down, and it is a rather reliable sign of naivete if an author does not even tackle this issue. (It occurs to me that I should ask Gerard 't Hooft how he intends to address this issue with his cellular automata models, because he at least cannot be regarded as naïve in this matter.)

2) You need to get to know the standard model, its gauge fields, and the way its matter particles are representations of the gauge groups. Again, there's no sign in your note that this has crossed your mind - you speak only of unification of forces, and of unification of quantum mechanics with gravity. But particle physics contains a great deal of experimentally validated complexity, that you are going to have to account for, though perhaps just mimicking QED with a single Dirac fermion will already be enough to keep you occupied for a long time. 

3) You say that your new paradigm may provide new perspectives, not just on physics, but on *chemistry*. To me that's another sign of, sorry to say it, the optimism of ignorance. There's already a quantum description of chemistry, or rather several levels of description, the lowest of which is probably QED coupled to nuclei in a Born-Oppenheimer approximation, or something like that. The hydrodynamic interpretation of Bohmian mechanics has had a small renaissance in quantum chemistry, I suppose there is some prospect of a new perspective of that kind, but it sounds like you anticipate some kind of revolutionary rethink of how molecules are understood on a quantum level, coming basically from a single piece of math. This strikes me as extremely naïve. We know what's there - electrons and nuclei interacting electromagnetically. And the standard model already gives us the fundamental equations at a level deeper than that. [My note: helpful advice, I didn't mean to sound nearly this ambitious!!!]

So that's my feedback for you. And of those three points, I would say that the first - the need to grasp and respect the quantum behaviour of fermions, and the challenge it poses for any quasi-classical or quasi-Bohmian model - is the most important and the most fundamental. If you can grasp all that this entails, you will be way ahead of most people trying to rework the foundations; but you also might find yourself turning into more of an orthodox physicist. But the choice will be yours:)