Form Generates Form: Time as a Second Order Oscillation From Indecision Between Einstein Legality and Heisenberg Uncertainty

Scientific Paper
Title	Form Generates Form: Time as a Second Order Oscillation From Indecision Between Einstein Legality and Heisenberg Uncertainty
Read in full	Link to paper
Author(s)	Marvin Eli Kirsh
Keywords	Einstein, Heisenberg, Theory of Relativity, uncertainty, decision, path, concepts, experience, prediction, time, energy, space, form, vacuum
Published	2006
No. of pages	17

Read the full paper here

Abstract

Concerning time, relativity, the esoterics of time-space, the ordering of phenomenon into a proper orientation and superstructure with respect to unifying elements, one can employ a linear perspective that both delineates and affirms a perceived aparity to events. This resulting in a circular path shrouded with a lack of explanation founded on unresolvable question. In the creation of higher principles from the normal oscillations of daily cognition that are structured from experience, objective cognitive focus can fail from a lack of definition and perspective to perceived phenomenon and elements that formulate experienced time. This propensity, is a result of frustration to order the world from sensory input that is restricted to perceptions of size, shape, volume, i.e. distances and proximities into some degree of logical accord. In this presentation, the root of all inquiry, change, and time is addressed, though of majority consent that it is inherently unorderable, statistical in nature, that it has a second order that is divisible into elements of the appropriate, proximal and direct, verses the inappropriate, distal, and indirect: other than as victim of the linear and continuous, time is alternately explained as an evolved unperceived second order oscillation of the same identically perceived sensual factors of volume, shape size as functions of distance and angle of perspective.

Overview

The paper is a philosophical essay by Marvin Eli Kirsh arguing that the conceptual foundations shared by relativity and quantum mechanics are unsound in a particular way: both rest on a heterogeneous picture of space, in which regions with different topological character coexist, and both fill an inability to conceptualise with mathematics that then acquires the appearance of knowledge. (The PDF's own title reverses the last two clauses of the wiki page title, reading "Indecision Between Heisenberg Uncertainty and Einstein Legality"; it is the same paper.) In its place Kirsh proposes a single homogeneous space consisting of one self-avoiding, one-sided surface — a Möbius-like construction without mass or volume — from which volumes, forces and finally time itself are generated.

The thesis about time is the paper's title claim. Time is not a primitive dimension and not a continuum through which things pass. It is a second-order oscillation, invisible as such, arising from the difference between two kinds of light reaching an observer: "appropriate" light of proximal origin and "inappropriate" light of distal origin. The differential of the displacements these two impart is what is registered as duration. Because the oscillation is of second order relative to the line of sight, its period cannot be perceived directly; what is perceived instead are the ordinary sensory quantities — size, shape, volume — which are themselves functions of distance and viewing angle. The reader should be warned that the paper's prose is exceptionally difficult, with long sentences whose grammar does not always resolve; the summary below reconstructs the argument as far as the text supports, and flags where it does not.

The argument

Four stated principles

The prelude sets out four propositions the paper is built on. (1) The life sciences and the physical sciences describe no different phenomena — "form generating form", replication as self-generation, is common to both. (2) Neither has a tangible foundation in constants and absolutes; both are functions of the actions of uniquely named entities, "atom A, atom B". (3) "The world is a product-process of only comparisons" — comparisons yielding distances, shapes and volumes, and possibly a fundamental shape and set of ratios underlying all things. (4) The world "is nearly indistinguishable from self", which is why we know it and yet cannot encompass it.

From these Kirsh derives his central methodological move: all physical process is redescribed as a single process of "witness", taken as both verb and subject, so that every frame of reference is unique and no universal perspective or natural constant exists. Emission and reflection of light are the primordial instance — light performing work when it reflects is treated as a communication between two unique instances, not as a special phenomenon requiring a constant propagation speed.

Open and closed space

The most explicit piece of reasoning in the paper concerns topology. A surface is called closed if a focus point equidistant from all its points can be defined, open otherwise. Kirsh argues that closed and open two-dimensional surfaces cannot coexist in one space, because a change able to "heal a tear" would, if the tear-causing forces are uniform over the space, have to heal every tear at once — so a space containing any open surface must itself be open. He draws two consequences. First, within a space containing living things, motion and energy processes, there can be no forces older or younger than the oldest existing open surface, and no tear-healing forces at all: "A space was always open with the same set of forces, if it is open." Second, as a corollary, "a closed space cannot contain forces or energy processes at all, as they would cause tears". The conclusion is that closedness is a theoretical property only: "Topologically closed spaces cannot exist in real two dimensional space."

This is the lever used against relativity. The general/special division is read as a division between the closed, mathematically constructed regions of the theory and the open, empirically related ones — a heterogeneous composite that Kirsh holds cannot be a single "universe". His verdict is that relativity is "restricted, in its contribution, to a theory of light propagation and associated energy factors", not a unified account of nature.

Against mathematical fitting

A recurring charge is that excessive dependence on mathematics, applied to phenomena "beyond ordinary perception, experience and beyond witness", produces a "contrived fitting". Dichotomies generated by such fittings are then removed by further mathematics, giving a near-perfect fit that remains as conceptually heterogeneous as the ambiguities it was built to reconcile. The uncertainty principle receives the same treatment: "the realms of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle have been filled with pointed and tangible mathematics of the principle itself, creating the delusion of an endless unknowable." Kirsh's distinction here is his sharpest formulation — "Unknowable facts are not equal in description to failed conceptualizations." He predicts that if this is right, empirical testing should eventually diverge, though possibly without detection, because assumptions such as the existence and mass of the photon are treated as untestable and because theoretical concepts are needed to translate empirical results in the first place.

The witness model

In place of cause and effect Kirsh proposes "intent and action", and then a single-word replacement: witness as the source of all change. The resulting model is of a universe of pairs rather than triples — [A B] with light and distance, rather than cause, effect and the speed of light. The witness number in any process is always two. A distance [A B] may contain any number of intermediate elements, each of which must be knowable from at least one existing orientation and unknowable from at least one other. All perspectives are stipulated to lie in ordinary two-dimensional space, and no theoretical construction may refer to an element unknowable from all perspectives.

The proposed unity is "a self avoiding massless single surface for all of space", whose dimensions are describable by the laws of motion of Newton and Einstein, with a force of avoidance related to surface area and to the parameters of self-approach. This surface is the coordinate system for all points in space and "has no definable center of itself or of any subset of points". Kirsh looks for physical instances of self-avoidance: chromosomes contracting under a pulling force, and light confined and fluxing by diffraction and reflection in restricted spaces, both cited from 2006 Nature papers.

Time as second-order oscillation

The construction of time occupies the paper's later sections. Taking as given that behaviour can be inappropriate to its proximal environment (Nietzsche is cited) and that light can be slowed, stored and released in its initial form (Hau and co-workers, 2007), Kirsh presents time as "a fact of distance; of the differentials of displacements of the appropriate and the inappropriate; of a difference caused by the momentum imparted by light beams of appropriate (proximal origin) and that of environmentally inappropriate (distal origin)". Its occurrence is second order with respect to the line of sight, and oscillatory in the sense that the ordering of events within it — light-imparted momentum versus distance — carries no meaning beyond the existence of the oscillation itself. Figure 2 illustrates the scheme: displaced ("inappropriate") reflected light and non-displaced ("appropriate") reflected light together delineate a set of distances, and it is that set which constitutes time.

The E/m construction

One short section attempts a quantitative illustration. Kirsh writes E/m = 0.5v² + c², with tan θ = v/c, v/R = sin θ, c/R = cos θ, and forms F(x) = v + 2c, F(y) = 2cos θ, R = (F(x)² + F(y)²)^1/2. His point is that a relation of the form ax² + bC² with C constant admits a definable centre and so describes a closed surface, whereas ax² + by² with both variable describes an open one — so an open space "cannot be defined with c as a constant". Taking net changes from a starting value (v + c)², he finds for v(0) = 0 that E/m is conserved and "can be defined as a natural constant that defines a state of zero work accomplished". A footnote extends this: if light is the source of all momentum and has no mass, then at its source there is no motion, and hence "no net motion throughout regardless of the accounting of energy changes and distribution".

Assessment

There is a real philosophical intuition at the centre of this paper, and it is worth stating plainly because the paper's own prose obscures it. Kirsh is pressing the objection that a formalism can fill a conceptual vacancy so completely that the vacancy stops being visible — that mathematics applied to the unobservable can be mistaken for knowledge of it. His one-line version, "Unknowable facts are not equal in description to failed conceptualizations", is a genuinely useful distinction and one that deserves the attention it does not usually get. The demand that a theory be homogeneous — that it not quietly consist of an empirically anchored part and a mathematically constructed part treated as though they had the same standing — is a legitimate methodological criterion, and it is applied here consistently, including to the author's own model. The insistence that the observer must be inside the account rather than a vantage outside it aligns him with a respectable tradition, and the refusal of a privileged universal frame is at least of a piece with the relativity he rejects.

The difficulties, however, run through the whole. The most serious is that almost nothing in the paper is derived. The topological argument, which is the load-bearing one, uses "open" and "closed" in a sense of the author's own — a closed surface is one admitting a point equidistant from all its points, which is a statement about spheres, not the standard topological notion of a compact manifold without boundary. On that private definition the conclusion that closed spaces "cannot exist in real two dimensional space" follows trivially and tells us nothing about spacetime; on the standard definition the argument does not go through at all, since open and closed subsets coexist in every topological space. Because this equivocation is never resolved, the inference from it to the rejection of general relativity has no force.

The E/m section compounds this. E/m = 0.5v² + c² is not an equation the paper derives or attributes; it appears to be an addition of the specific kinetic energy to c², which are not quantities that add, and no argument is given for why they should. The subsequent expressions are dimensionally inconsistent — F(x) = v + 2c is a velocity while F(y) = 2cos θ is a pure number, yet the two are combined in quadrature to give R, which elsewhere is a length. The conclusion that c cannot be constant in an open space is drawn from the algebraic form of a quadratic rather than from any physical consideration, and it is asserted against a very large body of measurement: the constancy and isotropy of the speed of light is constrained by modern resonator experiments to parts in 10¹⁷, and the paper offers no account of how a variable c would evade them.

The account of time is the least testable part. Nothing is said about the period, amplitude or magnitude of the proposed second-order oscillation, so the model makes no prediction that could distinguish it from the ordinary account — nor does it engage with the phenomena the ordinary account is answerable to, such as the differential ageing of flown atomic clocks, the (1+z) stretching of Type Ia supernova light curves, or the gravitational frequency shift measured by Pound and Rebka. A theory that identifies duration with a set of distances between displaced and non-displaced reflections owes an explanation of why those measurements come out as they do, and none is attempted.

Finally, the writing itself is an obstacle that cannot be separated from the argument. Many sentences do not parse; key terms — "aparity", "legality", "appropriate" and "inappropriate" light, "witness" as a count noun — are used technically without ever being defined; and the paper's own figure references ("insert Fig 1") were left unresolved in the archived copy. A reader cannot check reasoning that cannot be reconstructed, and much of this paper cannot. Where Kirsh's underlying objection to mathematical over-fitting is one that deserves argument, this paper does not supply it in a form that can be argued with.

See also

• Marvin Eli Kirsh
• Uncertainty Principle
• Werner Heisenberg
• Albert Einstein
• General Relativity
• Special Relativity
• Time
• Speed of Light
• Photon