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Hi Richard,
Since you have "all the degrees in mathematical physics, and [you] have read his work in detail", I would like to hear your opinion of my assessment of Dick's work.
I do not have all the degrees, but I have worked pretty hard at understanding what Dick did in Chapter 1 to derive his fundamental equation. I convinced myself that his math was correct almost up to the end. I lost my confidence when the Dirac Delta function appeared. That was new to me, and after some study attempting to understand it, I was fairly well convinced that he had applied it correctly. But, when he used matrices to combine all of his constraints into one equation, I got hopelessly lost, although I realize that was Heisenberg's approach, and I have no reason to suspect that it isn't legitimate.
In the remaining chapters, where he solves the equation and interprets the solutions, I got only a high level, fleeting, glimpse and since I don't understand physics at that level, I can't comment at all on the veracity of his conclusions.
But, I did form an opinion of what he accomplished in the derivation of his fundamental equation and I would like to know whether you think I am all wet or not.
Before I do, let me comment on something I have meant to bring up to Dick and to others but just haven't done so. Dick starts out by defining 'reality' to be a set of numbers. This has attracted a lot of attention from a lot of critics and has started volumes of controversy. I think it is a non-issue.
The reason I think that is because, once having defined it that way, neither the term 'reality' nor any concept of what 'reality' might mean appears in his discussion from that point on. He only talks about that set of numbers and draws inferences from it.
So,...what I think Dick has done, is to prove a theorem that says that any probability function, which describes what possible collections of subsets may be taken from a big set of numbers, must obey his fundamental differential equation.
I think this theorem falls squarely in the field of statistical analysis, or probability theory. I think that is obvious if, instead of Dick's controversial definitions (Reality is a set of numbers, and an observation is a subset of those numbers), you substituted the definitions: a population is a set of numbers, and a sample is a subset of that population. That would be consistent with the fundamental definitions of statistical analysis, and wouldn't change a single thing in Dick's development.
So, how does that strike you, Richard? I am eager to know.
Warm regards,
Paul |
