Dear
Dr Lehar,
We
have received the reports from our advisors on your manuscript, "Double
Conformal Mapping: A Finite Mathematics to Model an Infinite World.",
which you submitted to Advances in Applied Clifford Algebras.
Based
on the advice received, I have decided that your manuscript could be
reconsidered for publication should you be prepared to incorporate major
revisions. When preparing your revised manuscript, you are asked to
carefully consider the reviewer comments which can be found below, and
submit a list of responses to the comments. You are kindly requested to
also check the website for possible reviewer attachment(s).
COMMENTS TO THE AUTHOR:
Dear
Author,
Even
though both reviews, which have reached us about your revised version
are very negative (one previous reviewer refused to review the
manuscript again, therefore we referred the manuscript to a new
impartial reviewer #4), we still want to give you a final opportunity to
take the constructive criticism by the reviewers (especially that of #4)
into account and do a major revision/rewriting of your paper. But in the
current unaltered form the paper is not fit for publication in AACA.
Associate
Editor.
Reviewer
#2: The answers given by the author don't bring any new element that
can change my opinion. This paper which consists mostly of personal
reflections doesn't contain mathematical results of any kind that can
justify the publication in AACA and more generally a publication in a
mathematical journal.
Reviewer
#4: AACA-D-15-00168R1
The
editor has asked me to give my opinion since the two other reviewers'
opinions are hard to reconcile. Reading the documents in the case, I
am rather surprised at the author's reaction to the remarks of the
second reviewer.
An
author writes so that his/her ideas may be understood and perhaps
appreciated by others. The editor asks reviewers to check whether the
ideas are clearly presented, correct and suitable for the journal.
When
a reviewer has detailed questions, comments and remarks, the author
learns that his presentation can apparently be improved. Where the
reviewer has not understood what the author meant, very often the
writing may be to blame; or the author may not have realized the full
scope of his audience and can get more people on board by taking the
ourisde comments seriously; or the reviewer is a good representation
of the readership, but the paper was simply submitted to the wrong
journal. This is all part of getting a paper into publishable form, on
the right platform.
In
the current case, the author appears to take the view 'take it or
leave it'. That is not helpful; and neither is Reviewer 1s judgement
to 'take it' as a whole. For to my mind, there is a lot that could be
improved in this paper.
Let
me now start my review.
======
It
is not clear whether this paper is a mathematical model of
perception/cognition, or a perception/cognition model of mathematics.
The former would conceivably fit in the scope of AACA, if it uses
Clifford/geometric algebra. The latter is more suitable for some
journal on the philosophy of mathematics ( or the Mathematical
Intelligencer). So I read it as the former; I am an AACA reviewer.
The
author points out that infinities are hard to compute with in the
brain, and that therefore representations which can represent
infinities in a finite manner, but faithfully, are interesting. This
skips the question of why the brain would have to deal with
infinities: infinitely far things cannot be reached, grasped, etc., so
there is no evolutionary pressure to evolve the brain to cope with
them. Only when we make mathematical abstractions do we encounter
infinities. But let us assume this point; the resulting question is
worth exploring.
The
author then find inspiration in 'Hestenes' conformal model',
which is a stereographic projection in a well-chosen space. In the
purpose of making infinities finitely represented, this is not
Hestenes' idea, such representations are found in 19th century
mathematics. What is recently new in the work by Hestenes and around
the same time Anglès is that the stereographic projection takes
place in a space of 2 extra dimensions, and that this renders
conformal transformations in 3D to be orthogonal transformations of
this space, which by means of Clifford algebra can be represented as
spinors (versors, rotors), which are structure-preserving and
therefore very attractive for computational implementations.
The
author uses a very impoverished version of this chain of ideas, only
the original stereographic mapping, and then only qualitatively. So
calling it 'Hestenes conformal model' throughout is naive; that
applies to the full chain only. It may be where you first learned of
the stereographic trick, but no matter.
The
mapping is introduced in Fig 1 Fig 5b. These figures are NOT correct
(or at least misleading). The stereographic mapping employed therein
is in a space of only 1 more dimension. That is not the
Hestenes/Angles mapping. (I find Fig 4A, 5A and 5B very hard to read,
the 3D nature of these is not rendered very skillfully. Use Perwass'
software instead! But the figures are 3D, whereas they should be 4D to
do the Hestenes/Anglès mapping for 2D space). Since formulas
are never given, we as readers now no longer precisely understand what
is going on. But in Hestenes' model we still have points at infinity
as a sphere of directions (they are of the form n ^u); in your picture
they all become the north pole, a single point. The extra dimension is
very essential.
The
advantage of CGA is that these kinds of figures are so easily
converted into algebra. For the AACA audience, there is no objection
to doing this; in fact, it will help them understand better what is
happening. This really MUST be done to have this paper in AACA; it is
a journal on Clifford/geometric algebra, so use that tool.
Doing
so will also resolve some things that puzzle me in the pictorial
depiction. The chosen 2D renderings of something that is a 3D world
are rather clumsy for conveying the 3D nature of the Bubble, and the
CGA sphere. I first interpreted the pictures as representing the usual
'visual sphere' surrounding an observer (perhaps misled by the puzzle
of Fig 4C and its resolution). Perhaps it would have been
better to work out a 2D example in the drawings; but here, again,
formulas would help all AACA readers to understand what is really
going on. And even for 2D reality, you would need to draw the 4D space
in which the Hestenes stereographic projection lives, which will be a
challenge.
When
the mapping 'back out' again is done, we find some rare formulas, but
no explanation of how to read then. The inverse mapping of 1/x is the
mapping 1/x, since (1/(1/x)) =x; it is not the mapping x^2 of Figure
12. (The product of 1/x with x^2 equals x, but these are mappings and
should use mapping composition.) Then an atan is thrown in in Fig 13
for some desirable effect; but is the resulting mapping still
conformal? Is it actually important to have the mappings be conformal
(i.e. locally shape preserving)? For what externally desirable
properties? The demand that infinity becomes finitely tractable is not
sufficient to specify the mapping - conformal works, and rather
nicely, but so do other mappings.
By
the way, there is clear difference between 'reflection in a sphere'
and 'inversion in a sphere'. In CGA, one always does inversions, but
some authors have called them reflections (because of the analogy of
-sx/s with Euclidean reflection formulas). A reflection in a polished
sphere produces an image that depends on the location of the observer;
inversion does not. It is not clear which of the two Figure 7 depicts.
Again, a formula would help, and is easy to give in CGA.
So,
lots of questions, all would be resolvable in a more exact, precise,
and conventional description of this new model. Your chosen audience
would be able to follow and assess the paper better if you cast it in
that form, so why not do it?
On
the non-Euclidean section, I (like reviewer 2) do not understand why
you take the time to explain the history to an AACA audience.
Moreover, I do not see whether your space is truly non-Euclidean, or
merely a non-linear mapping of an essentially Euclidean geometry. It
all depends on the local metric, and the geodesics of the space (it
would be helpful to use the concept of 'geodesic' in the clumsy
explanation at the top of page 7; really, you do not need to explain
these things to this audience!). Anyway, the conformal conversions
between such spaces are well-known, and much better illustrated in the
book by Needham.
I
miss references, too. There has been work on possible mental
representations of space by Mach, on the brain as a geometry engine by
Koenderink, on the metric of perceptual space by Koenderink, on the
possibility of computing GA with neurons by Hestenes. All these appear
to me relevant to what the author is trying to do, and some can be
seen as prior art. It is customary in a scientific paper to discuss
that, and why it does not satisy the author, and what is going to be
better this time around. All we mainly find as references to the
perceptual modelling side are self-references (perhaps they contain
the references I mentioned, I did not check, but repeat some of the
background here).
Finally,
something about the general impression of the paper. There are a
lot of properties that set off the
'crackpot alarm' in
a reader: the nonstandard affiliation of the author; the heavy
self-referencing; the metamathematical drive; the Use of Capitals
in weird Places; the clumsy home-made
drawings; the lack of precision by formulas; the naive
attribution of historically well-known concepts to where one first
heard them. Some of those are characteristics shared with
Grassmanns work, so one should not always dismiss such papers
off-hand; but most readers will decide
that their time is better spent reading something else.
If you want to be read, present your ideas in a more acceptable
and precise form; especially for this AACA audience. This is not
an inspirational talk at a conference; this could be a scientific
publication - but not in this form on
this platform.
So,
what do I recommend based on this assessment? I think the remarks
above would require a
complete rewriting of the paper; this is beyond a major revision
which can be compared to its original. Put the
present form of the paper on your website, by all means (I see you
already have done so) -it has the hallmarks of a web page. Then start
anew and write down your ideas for an AACA audience in a form that
they can absorb; with a clear specification of the desiderata of you
mapping, why the CGA model satisfies those, and how to use it. See if
you still stand by the atan when you have done all that, and/or
whether it is still conformal, and whether than matters.
In
the present form, you will find few understanding readers, and receive
little feedback that might help you in your quest. That would be a
missed opportunity; there may be something here that is worth getting
precise.