From: Osher Doctorow osher.domain.name.hidden, Thurs. Sept. 5, 2002 5:07PM
Wei Dai,
Good! I will try to access the paper almost immediately. I have long
been partial to FTL as a conjecture. When Professor Nimtz of U.
Koln/Cologne came up with his results, or shortly thereafter, and
interpreted them favorably toward FTL, I emailed him, and he was kind enough
to send me copies of some of his papers by regular (*snail*) mail/post.
Some of the non-Analysis school have indicated here and on other forums that
the pendulum has swung too far away from algebra/arithmetic/number theory,
but the loop theorists like Smolin and Ashtekar and a number of people in
string/brane/duality theories who follow their leads, not to neglect the
MacLane/Lawvere Category theorists in mathematics and physics, actually
constitute an extremely large Mainstream today rather than a downtrodden
minority (although the Gauge Field Theorists still claim the *largest
Mainstream* title). My tendency is to follow the least popular path in
science and in several other fields. That was the way of life of Socrates,
and also of many of the greatest Creative Geniuses in history - including
Kurt Godel, who is still being berated by conformists shuddering at the
thought that there might be limitations as to what assumptions can lead to.
Osher Doctorow
----- Original Message -----
From: "Wei Dai" <weidai.domain.name.hidden>
To: "Russell Standish" <R.Standish.domain.name.hidden>
Cc: "Hal Finney" <hal.domain.name.hidden>; <everything-list.domain.name.hidden.com>
Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2002 4:50 PM
Subject: Schmidhuber II implies FTL communications
> On Mon, Sep 02, 2002 at 12:51:09PM +1000, Russell Standish wrote:
> > This set of all descriptions is the Schmidhuber approach, although he
> > later muddies the water a bit by postulating that this set is generated
> > by a machine with resource constraints (we could call this Schmidhuber
> > II :). This latter postulate has implications for the prior measure
> > over descriptions, that are potentially measurable, however I'm not
> > sure how one can separate these effects from the observer selection
> > efects due to resource constraints of the observer.
>
> I just found a paper which shows that if apparent quantum randomness has
> low algorithmic complexity (as Schmidhuber II predicts), then FTL
> communications is possible.
>
> http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9806059
>
> Quantum Mechanics and Algorithmic Randomness
> Authors: Ulvi Yurtsever
> Comments: plain LaTeX, 11 pages
> Report-no: MSTR-9801
>
> A long sequence of tosses of a classical coin produces an apparently
> random bit string, but classical randomness is an illusion: the
> algorithmic information content of a classically-generated bit string lies
> almost entirely in the description of initial conditions. This letter
> presents a simple argument that, by contrast, a sequence of bits produced
> by tossing a quantum coin is, almost certainly, genuinely
> (algorithmically) random. This result can be interpreted as a
> strengthening of Bell's no-hidden-variables theorem, and relies on
> causality and quantum entanglement in a manner similar to Bell's original
> argument.
>
Received on Thu Sep 05 2002 - 17:23:02 PDT