I agree, intuition is a feeble guide, at best. But my objection is based more on the idea of a “balance of evidence in similar cases” not intuition. Sound waves are not “intuitive”, but they are real and they propagate over the medium, air. And so on for any other kind of wave besides the waves of elementary particles.
I agree with Bohr’s allowed uses of “particle” and “wave” because that is what any elementary concept in physics really is, just a label for a concept that is accessible to my brain that is, overall, a “good fit” to the physical phenomena.
And note that I do not mean that it is not possible that the universe is, at root, some gigantic wave equation, such as Schodinger’s.
In my spare time, I’m working on a widly speculative theory based on digital physics. The idea of digital physics is this. A computer can compute any function. So, the problem of “modeling” the universe can be thought of as searching for the right computer with the right program on it that, when executed, causes all the state information of this actual Universe to be computed. OK, fair enough.
However, most DP theories strike me as horribly obtuse. For example, the Cellular Automata model is very popular and people think maybe they can construct a 3-dimensional or even 2-dimensional (?) lattice of cellular-automata and then think of the universe as being “made out of” a gigantic cellular automata lattice and all macroscopic phenomena as “arising” from this lattice. It’s not completely far-fetched when you realize that physics still has a lot of “room at the bottom” since our ability to resolve the physical world is about 20 or so orders of magnitude from the Planck length. In any case, I still don’t like the idea of assuming this a priori spatial structure from the outset. Yes, my brain perceives the Universe in three dimensions but why should space necessarily originate as a fundamentally 3-dimensional phenomenon? Why is the number three so special??
So, I asked myself how would you build a continuous computer, a wave computer? Quantum computation is a field that exists and is real and comes very close to answering this question. In fact, Seth Lloyd wrote a book called “Programming the Universe” about QC and he asserts that “the Universe is indistinguishable from a Quantum Computer.”
I don’t understand the mathematics of quantum computation and I suspect, in any case, that the mathematics of quantum systems are unintentionally obfuscatory. So, I’m working on my own purely mathematical approach and my current idea is to use the complex exponential function as the basis for a new numbering system (like the decimal numbering system) that treats complex values as properly basic entities which can be computed and operated on like any other. In other words, rather than a+bi, I would like to just have z, where z is encoded in such a way that both the a and the b can be recovered from it in the same way that the 3 and 0.14159… can be separately recovered from the decimal encoding of the real number pi.
If I ever succeed (not a high probability of this… :P), it will be possible to construct a “wave computer” from the complex numbers though I haven’t worked out how.
Clayton -