18th December, 2010.
E-infinity communication No. 63
Introduction to the philosophy of E-infinity
Two years ago Mohamed El Naschie started writing a paper on the philosophy of E-infinity. The paper was too long and a great many unpleasant events took place which prevented him from completing this paper which in its present form is too long and only stands as a very rough draft which cannot be easily reproduced not even in summary form as an E-infinity communication. It was no doubt the intention of those well known internet thugs and parasites to distract us from science and derail us from our road. This was the brief given to them by you know who. Never the less we will attempt to give here what can only amount to a summary of the summary of what El Naschie considers to be the philosophical background to his theory.
The real and maybe sobering truth is that there is no one single deep philosophical reason which prompted E-infinity. Scientists are not motivated by deep seated philosophical conviction. They may write in a way suggesting epistemological reasons for their theories but the real, real reality is that scientists are motivated by curiosity and a wish to succeed where other famous scientists have failed. Scientists, like all human beings, also want to understand. El Naschie frequently used to quote Goethe’s Faust (to understand “was die Welt zusammenhält”, i.e. what keeps the universe in one piece). The rest is chains of accidents and the painstaking assembly of thousands of pieces of information to form a mosaic picture which can hopefully help to develop a mental picture and a feeling of understanding.
On the intellectual trip of any thinking man there are main stations and memorable events. According to his own writings, one of the main intellectual adventures of Mohamed El Naschie was reading J.P. Sartre’s monumental book “Being and Nothingness”. Arabic and German are the only two languages he has mastered to an extremely high degree although he speaks or has knowledge of some 10 languages. None the less he speaks all of them with the exception of Arabic and German with a relatively strong accent and his spelling in all languages is rivaled only by his bad hand writing which is the main reason for so many secretaries resigning! He first read Sartre in Arabic translated by Abulrahman Badawy, Egypt’s most famous existentialistic philosophers and the uncle of one of El Naschie’s best friends, Mohsen Badawi. Later on he mainly read Sartre in German but also occasionally in French. We dare to say that the second most important event was when as an engineer he came across the triadic Cantor set for the first time. He said in many of his writings in English, German and Arabic that a Cantor set was a Sartarian thing. It is not really there because it has no measure, i.e. no length and it was there because for a measure zero it has a very large non-zero dimension. The third station with respect to E-infinity was reading J.A. Wheeler’s Borel set proposal and even before that, reading the writing of Heisenberg, Weizsäcker and particularly D. Finkelstein. Deriving the dimensionality of spacetime from a primitive monadic assumption like we derive the concept of temperature in statistical mechanics became El Naschie’s program.
Meeting Otto Rössler, M. Feigenbaum, I. Prigogine, I. Procaccia and finally Binnig and ‘t Hooft brought Mohamed’s thinking to that of first Garnet Ord and then L. Nottale. El Naschie admits that without Ord and Nottale he would not have had the courage to continue his work alone. The late Prof. Werner Martienssen, Prof. Rössler, Prof. Ord, Sir H. Bondi, Sir J. Lighthill, Prof. Walter Greiner, Prof. G. ‘t Hooft as well as Prof. Ji-Huan He, L. Marek-Crnjac and E. Goldfain constantly encouraged Mohamed to go on in his quest for a spacetime theory for quantum mechanics which is similar to relativity as well as to the Feynman path integral. His relationship with his close friend Nobel Laureate G. ‘t Hooft is complex. In fact, too complex to consider here due to the tremendous difference in temperament, personality and attitude toward the science of the infinite and of course Mohamed is an extremely religious person although with no commitment to and a great distrust of organized religion, exactly like his father who was an army General from a noble Egyptian family. Never the less the work of ‘t Hooft is of great importance to El Naschie and they seem to have had a great influence on each other.
More general reasons to become a scientist and to move from applied engineering to fundamental science are probably connected to his interest in the scientific work of J.W. Goethe as well as meeting K.F. von Weizsäcker and getting acquainted with the philosophical views and personality of W. Heisenberg particularly the role of symmetry as well as determinism in nature and science. He put many of his memories about these subjects in several of his Forwards to special issues and general papers published in CS&F over the years the reader may go back to them on Elsevier’s Science Direct: www.sciencedirect.com.
In conclusion we must understand that philosophy is strengthened by the nature of reality. Therefore Mohamed El Naschie points out that the gamma distribution of the random Cantor sets which he used to model quantum spacetime (for r = 2) is effectively the same distribution of the intensity fluctuation of black body radiation but for r = 3. Thus E-infinity is physically real and consequently philosophically correct.
E-infinity Group
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